These ladies are hysterical.

New Feelings that Aren't Your Own

Masculine Manlog pt. 2

After weeks of holidays and shows and very fast times, I've taken a few off in the cave. A series of seven hour sleeps in a CO free home pays off. Today I was up at 7 AM ready to punch the face off the world!

My friend Megan and I are in a new band together, so last night was slouched down trying to muscle through the cadences of some of these songs. I never realized what a challenge it is writing lyrics for someone else, because someone else is always so picky.

It's the first project I've really run in Kansas City, writing a style that I've never attempted. I'm surprising myself. What's sticking hard is conjouring a name that doesn't make everyone at practice frown. I believe in the power of band names, although most of my favorite bands have the dumbest. I now accept it's one of those things that can be good enough.

And now, pictures of pretty ladies:

Sorts in the streets

Thrill seekers

Home coming, Home going

This xmas trip to STL was one of the most romantic I've had in a long time. I don't mean that I touched a girl, I mean betwixt me and the city. Some questionably warm days and nice sit downs with friends. Not one moment spent in bullshit. There was much idle chatter but it was the real kind, and a couple of once-in-a-decade talks with all of my parents.

This year has been trying, probably the hardest of my life. I feel tested. I've had to face down crucial shit that most men go all their lives without confronting. My survival has been dependent on a number of very loving friends, friends whom I owe a long debt of gratitude. I also survived because I'm fucking tough as nails.

I'm like an eXtreme sPorts guy, but instead of basejumping, I'm into eXtreme tRagedy. I'm going to get a cat just so I can look forward to the day when it's found lifeless under the basement stairs! EYYYEAH!

Oh cheese, I forgot to tell the blog that I've been increasingly poisoned by my home for the past 2 years. The doctor says it's been slowly constricting my perception of reality that entire time, to the point of near suffocation. It'll work it's way out of my nervous system in the next 5 weeks. So, call me then when my third eye has reopened. We'll go get a slice of pie, and have our own chat.

Aptitude

Dehnadi and Bornat's thesis is that the single biggest predictor of likely aptitude for programming is a deep comfort with meaninglessness:

To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it.

Dehnadi and Bornat's programming aptitude research

I like it: Il Conformiste

The past few mondays, before the radio show, I'll make myself a fancy dinner and watch something sophisticated. This week Jesse and I watched Il Conformiste, a movie about a secret-policeman within Mussolini's crumbling government. He has no stomach for his job, his friends, his wife. It's funny and grim. It may be the most carefully composed film I've ever seen.

Grown Grump: my Papa

It's weird being an adult and having to spend thanksgiving yelling at your father. I thought that was a trick I got done with 10 years ago. No I wasn't yelling at Cancer Dad (who's doing fine, thx). It's my boyhood dad who caught it last Thursday, during an otherwise spectacular trip home. 

My father's got troubles. Every 3 years, right around the holidays, he loses his shit. It's right on schedule. 

Most times he makes sure that every bridge gets burned. Usually it's of the I'll Buy-a-Jeep with KC-Lights, Start-Selling-Drugs, and Fight-3-Cops in a Golf-Course-Parking-Lot variety. This time it's spookier, but not as threatening, I hope.

The frustration and fear of dealing with these episodes is part of the reason I left STL. My dad is now 60. There's this irking pang that I can't write this certified nutjob off forever. So I get turned up between my sweet-n-tender side that wants to somehow help the poor jerk, and the righteous side that knows everyone you love deserves to fuck up all on their own. 

It's hard to stop people with bombs strapped to their chests. 

Masculine Manlog pt. 1

I'm getting a lot of crushes.

Last night I watched the french film The King of Hearts. I fell in love with Coquelicot, played by the actress Genevieve Bujold. Having a crush is easier when the girl is whimsical fiction, not living just on the other side of town.

This weekend's other crush: the Baader Brains' LP

http://www.mediafire.com/?3hy7mkjhtmg

Yes I am 29

RUNDOWN:

Justin got me La Piovra's "Disastro Sonoro" 7 inch. I smashed his gokart into a wall.

My dad, with half his throat missing and breathing through a tracheotemy, tells me:

"You've been taking life too seriously for too long."

So, read that again, but imagine a robot talking with a mouthful of mud.

I love my family, not to slight any STL crew who read this(IMISSU), but they're the thing I miss the most about the fatherland. I was afraid I'd have to move back about a month ago, but that was just THE PANIC easing in. My dad is deep in the throws of chemo treatment now, my mom asked if I could get her a connection if the Marinol doesn't do the trick. That lady's gonna learn to simmer weed butter. What a country.

The job has been capital shitter this week. Every computer I touch turns to dust.

I'm sure the internet is wondering: the ladies? Sure, I'm known to charm. Bah, I am pleased being single, and they talk to me, and we make acquaintance, but for now I mostly keep my distance. There's fish to fry before I get all tangled up again.

Beasley's here now, shirtless and hairy on my couch each morning. He's taken to this town beautifully, most nights of the week I hardly see him. He's already got a job busting heads down at The Record Bar, and he may have landed a job as a tax man at the IRS. We ran around on election night and he's befriending every friendful face. I took him to The Ship last night, this vrrry nice speakeasy in the west bottoms, a fine imbibing.

Ben is Turning on the People: Pt 1

But don't get me wrong, it is a new and palpable joy in my life,  this radio show. It takes a lot of too-detailed planning, atleast one and 2/3rd extra nights of my week. Nevermind all the wasted professional hours when I should be Normalizing Cubes or deciphering a sales manager's hamfisted email. Fuck that, I'm spending 10-11:30 scraping the internet for Negazione.

The show allows me to dweeb excessively with Justin and also forces me to engage alternately weird and isolating segments of punk music. A lot of the "hey we gotta play this new" songs make me nodshrug, but on occasion I'll find some really inspiring gold.

The trips back to STL don't help my time crunch, for example this weekend I'm going to Chicago for birthday partying.  These are the weeks where we pick an easy topic and phone it in. I've started marking the passage of time in weeks now. It's always how many days until monday.

I'm half way through a new project with a few people I've never worked with before, and one person who's never been in any band before, but has all the right ideas. I am tickled. Atop this I've been squinting at playing in 2 cover bands for this years PUNK ROCK HALLOWEEN, which has thankfully been postponed to the end of November.

And I have new recording commitments, which I really love but without clear definition up front, can be a black hole from which light and time find no escape.

This all comes down to a bit of talk I had with the sage Brooke Hunt this weekend, I was yakking about all of this and she punctuated our conversation with "You're really a project person aren't you?"

"Yeah, and it makes me a zombie."

Nothing left to chance. I feel very strange having 3 hours alone, unplanned. Even if I'm sitting around listening to records, that's LISTENING TIME (7-9). Or just down at the studio fucking around, that's STUDIO TIME (8-10:30). This manner of thinking leaves no reserves for when the very real and frightening happens.

Curiously, the only time that hyper-schedule isn't in play, is when I'm with friends. Then, it's always fuck it. That timetable-o-death only happens when I'm alone.

This is why people eat peyote or become Promise Keepers, to shock the system from a long failed pattern. It's not that I'm doing things I don't love, it's that I'm completely impatient with myself. It's hard to catch that slip, when I get overextended and itchy. Some motherfuckers go their whole life like this, tiny intrepid geniuses who do great things and become isolated from thems they's doing for.

Nope. No thanks.