Ceci n'est pas une cybercarnet.

What's the proper etiquette on skipping weddings?

Can one, say, skip a friend's wedding to go to a rock'n'roll festival?

What if said festival involved Wilco, the Flaming Lips, the FUCKING Pixies, Air, Radiohead, Kraftwerk, the Cure, Prefuse 73, Trail of Dead, the Thrills, Electric Six and countless others?


What if said wedding was in the middle of nowhere, Texass?


I fucking hate Texas.


Also, if you ever have an opportunity to go see a band called the Fiery Furnaces, don't.
They suck worse than Texas.
Which is pretty fucking bad.

I wish I was the verb 'to trust' and never let you down

you know, I was going to put the lyrics to Where the Streets Have No Name up here, because when I heard it driving down the freeway this afternoon, it was a bit overwhelming, a bit like the feeling that you're in the presence of something divine. I've heard the song probably 2000+ times, and it still makes me feel that way. And I used to think it was Bono, or the lyrics he sings, but really, I think it's the Edge's guitar.
The "dun-dun-dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun" coda to the song that begins around the 5 minute 38 second mark.

I struggle with words, trying to make them do what I want.
I've read some fantastic words from others.
But for all that, some fucking Irish dude who shares his name with a fucking shaving gel can express the ineffable by going "plink, plink, plink."


Lucky fucking bastard.

"yo te quiero infinito
yo te quiero, o mi corazon"

"I don't do drugs, I am drugs"
-Dali

engine shed west

So, I was talking to tony a couple days ago, and we lamented the fact that we only came out with one record last year (the fabulous 100% BEEF / 100% LEMONS by Beef and Lemons). And we may only do one this year. This year is gonna be a slow one over at the shed, cause I'm in school with tons of loans, and tony is starting up his own studio. So neither of us has tons of cash to throw around.

I love releasing records. It has to be love, cause we don't exactly make money doing it. But hey, if you're in music for money, you're doing the wrong thing.
But I had a thought. I was thinking, if anybody knows of/is in any good bands that already have a finished recording, and would want to do a small time release, I could go to the bars a few less times over the course of the semester, and afford to a small (like 100-200) run of their album.
I think that'd be fun. Now, I'd need to really like the music, and be working with a band/person that understood that we weren't gonna make any money off of this, and was pretty laid back, but if I could find a cool little LA band to release, I think that'd be awesome.

No primadonnas, no sketchies, no wanna-be creeds, and no people who want more than a couple hundred copies and a guy to drop some off at KCRW, KXLU and play them on KSCR, and maybe try to schlep them to Amoeba need apply.

Oh, yeah, and I need to like the music.

I said, my, my slow descent into Babbage-ism, it went...

AKA: What's the difference?

I think I've slept about 10 hours in the last three days.
No great feat, you say?
Neither do I.
More with less and whatnot.
But, there's no reason I should have slept so little.
Never has me owed so little sleep to so many.
Or something.
I did have to come up with an idea for my novel (a Mad Cow/Bill Gates/Wal-Mart/Goldfinger/Manchurian Candidate mash-up. I shiteth thee not, good sirs and ladies.)
And an idea for my play (about an NBA player and a talking dog are commanded by God to protect the second coming of the Messiah. OK, I kid, but I did have a dream about that.), and write 5 pages of it.
But to be honest, after procrastinating by:
Drinking, seeing bands, reading league of extraordinary gentlemen dos, going over to the smiths' place to watch Adult Swim (yeah, if this is your first time here at the spig, I don't have a TV, and I enjoy both feeling smugly superior and lamenting my magic-picture-box-less-ness. Also, if this is your first time here at the spig, you have to fight. And comment.)
It wasn't really that hard.
Oh, and freaking the fuck out cause I couldn't think of anything. But after that, it wasn't that hard.
But yeah, I got all that "school" "work" "done" (hey, when you're searching on google or something, and you use quotes, do you ever feel like Lloyd Dobler would chastise you for being like that Sheila girl?), I still can't sleep.
I spent all night re-aligning all the NCAA D-I Basketball schools into geographically coherent, historically sound, program cohesive conferences. Yep. Not kidding. Til 7am.
That and researching the tarot deck, the berlin airports, and ShowBiz Pizza (The Rock-afire Explosion Band fucking DE-STROYS!).
Man. I kinda sound like I'm coming unhinged.
I mean, when you take it out of context like that. It's all a perfectly logical progression, I assure you.

I'm scared. My amount of debt is now greater than my gross income has ever been for one calendar year. And growing.

To quote General Custer:
"I'm so fucked."

I'm used to being a wanderer, a vagabond, not having debt, not owning much, just kinda traveling and observing.
I guess what this all boils down to is the recurrent fear of failure.
What if I'm not a good writer?
What if I come out of this and end up bartending again?
What if this takes me 20 years to pay off, at $300 a month?
How do I drop everything and go to Mexico for 6 months?

My mom comes to town Friday.
My place is a mess.
And not like the "you've got 3+ days to clean it up, so quit your whinging"-type of mess. (AND STOP USING THE FUCKING AIR QUOTES, "SHEILA"!!!!)
More like the "have-about-5-times-as-many-books-as-have-bookshelf-space-for"-type of mess.

The "old-man-who-lives-alone-with-his-cats-and-reads-his-vast-library-
of-books-that-fill-the-walls-floor-to-ceiling-even-in-the-bathroom-and-kitchen"-type of way.

Steve weighs in

Issue 1: BSE
Steve's Quick-Fix Guide to stopping BSE
Stop feeding cows, sheep, and other animals to cows.
Cows are herbivores. BSE is spread by eating other animals infected with BSE, Scrapie, and other TSEs (transmissible spongiform encephalopathies).
Soooo... stop using animal proteins in cow feed. And then maybe sheep feed, as well.
Or, hey, stop feeding animals to herbivores, period.
Damn, that was easy.

Let's see what's up next...

Issue #2: Putting spinners on your crappy Astro mini-van
Um, no.
Just NO.
That was easy, too.


Issue #3: Are zombies taking over the earth?
Yes.
Don't believe me? Read this.

hmm. well, that's enough for a friday.
Have a good weekend.

Oh, and special thanks to Bazima for linking H2BH. She's got a freakin' cool blog. It's way better than this. BUT, I did solve the BSE problem.


AND, good ol' pip_52 has mined the missed connections at Craigslist, and come up with some real winners. My fav? "You gave me the finger. Coffee?"

Go check 'em out.

"...because nobody could possibly confuse a large shapeless object stuffed with impact-deadening material with a pillow."

The Night (too much morphine while looking at your picture)

You're a bed-time story, the one that keeps the curtains closed
And I hope you're waitin' for me, cause I can't make it on my own.

Earlier, I wrote a big long post about a picture given to me today, but MT ate it.
OK, ok, MT didn't eat it, I idiotically closed the window containing it.
All to decide if the fantasies I had should be described as having diffuse lighting or diffused lighting. I'm still not sure.
I hardly ever attempt to re-write things that get lost here.
They're never as good as the lost versions, because the lost versions have the benefit of being, well, lost.
But this seemed important. So I shall attempt to recapture:

I spent an inordinate amount of time tonight looking at a picture I was given today.

An 7 and a half year-old picture.
A picture given upon my request, after being shown with the accompanying question "how could you stop loving the girl in that picture?"
Said in jest.
But I think said in less jest than she wanted me to believe.

I sat, looking at this picture, thinking how looking at her face now, I could see differences, differences that hadn't occured to me before.

Babyfat has been replaced with something more angular.
Cuteness with beauty.
And there is an innocence, a hope, a boundless love for everything that has been replaced with wisdom and experience.

This is not to say she is no longer cute. Or that she is tarnished, hopeless, or hateful. These are merely subtle transitions all go through. She is still the most hopeful and loving person I know.

It is the difference between 19 and 26.
And yet, I cannot help but feel personally responsible for some of this change.

How could I stop loving that girl?

I'm not sure.
But the fact remains that I broke her heart.
That I (and I'm probably egotistically overstating the severity of this) caused her pain. I took a little bit of that boundless love, that innocence, that hope, and dashed it.

This makes me feel horrible.

I did think of her often. More often than she knows, more often than she will believe.

I would imagine I hadn't gone to Edinburgh, I had finished my film major, and I lived with her, in a small apartment near the ocean.

The scene was always very specific. Diffuse white light, a small bedroom with white sheets, a white duvet, and me, much trimmer than I actually am/have been (this is a fantasy, so what of it?), wearing blue pyjama pants, her, with a bit more of the babyfat and innocence than she has now, wearing the shirt to the pyjamas, so big it comes down almost to her kneecaps.

We read the Sunday New York Times. In bed. For hours. (Sorry to disappoint those of you hoping for a steamy love scene)

This image came to me for years, even when I didn't want it to.

But it wasn't what happened.

None of you will probably understand this, least of all her, but having thought about this most of the night, while looking at this amazing, sweet, girl who was completely in love with a big dumb idiot me, I can honestly say that I would change nothing.

I would still break her heart.

I couldn't even tell you why I did it. Something about long distance relationships not working. Which is why I tried so desperately to make every long distance relationship after that one work. It was a stupid reason. So I didn't want to make that mistake again.
What I failed to see is that it wasn't trying to make long distance relationships work that would make the difference, it was the girl that would make the difference, and that girl was always her.

But, I would still break her heart because of this:

I know right now that I love her so much that I want to melt into her, leave my body behind, inhabit her. Even if I were to start making up words, I could not create one that expresses the depth of my emotion for her.

The me that came from this path feels this way about the her that came from this path.

I know that no matter how bad things were in the interim for either of us, I have someone who makes me feel more whole than I ever have in my life.

I have no guarantee that had one single thing been done differently we would be this way now.

So I wouldn't change a thing.

Because I love her so much.

I love and loved the cute, innocent girl in the picture. And I'm sorry I hurt her.

But I love the beautiful, wise woman I have now even more.
And yes, part of me will always wish that I could have had those intervening 7 and a half years to spend with you. But I wouldn't bet what we have now against anything.

You're the night, darling

he
is
not even
a dichotomy
but light sent through
a prism
a guitar
held
too close to the amp
a chorus
of thousands
singing different tunes
something too
com
plicated
for you to understand

It LIVES!

*Ahem*
Can I just have a word with all the bands out there? Are you listening?
Ok, good.
Now, I'm only going to say this once.
FLASH INTROS SUCK!
I guarantee you that they look nowhere near as cool as you think they do. I do not care that your buddy Gary knows Flash and you think the lame little thing he did for Insert-Your-Band-Name-Here is ART.
It's not. It's just plain annoying.
Maybe the first thousand bands to do it on their pages were sort of cool, but not now.
Thank you.

Now go look at h2bh's top ten of 2003.

penis enlargement pills & the new black

the new black seems to be quitting blogging.
or at least talking about quitting blogging.
I have yet to see anyone who was a serious blogger for over a month acutally quit.
It's like the mob.
It pulls you back in.
Even if you stop writing on it for weeks or months, inevitably, something will come up that you will think "man, I should blog about this."
Why?
Because it's a diary with an audience.
It's a soapbox in the middle of a giant digital park.
It's a cable access show that looks better, and reaches a wider audience.
It's a way to find a community of people from around the world that you identify with.
That's why, a simple thing like blogger or MT is so big.
It seems almost idiotic.
An easy, non html, non dreamweaver way to periodically update and archive a website.
Duh.
I mean, seriously.
Duh.
But then you start typing. Some people start typing things that are better, more focused, more topical than others, but once you start, you realize it gives you this window to scream out into the darkness.
To prove you exist.
To do something.
I think lots of bloggers lack focus, myself included.
But most people lack focus, so that's nothing to be ashamed of.
Blogging seems to be a spectacular way to find a focus.
To kick things around.
Someday someone will do something truly great with a blog, something that will make the world realize that blogging is the equivalent of the gutenberg press.
Not the internet.
The internet is paper, which is also an amazing invention.
But blogging engines are what open up that paper to the masses, what will allow for the creation of art.
Not that there's not already art on the internet, but soon, someone will do something that's not a political blog, not a blog-journal, not a sports blog, not anything you can think of, and it will be so undeniably brilliant that your moms will know about it.
TIME will cover it.

I stay up at night trying to figure out what will be done.
Not even trying to figure out how to do it, or what I could do to try it, but just what the breakthru will be.

It scares and excites me.

In other news, does anyone else get these junk comments for paxil, penis enlargement, viagra and the like?
Or is that just me?

tommy can you hear me?

first radio show, tonight/tomorrow morning (depending on how you look at things and where you live) from 4-6AM PST. Go here to listen. I'm the one who may or may not be calling himself Curt.

Word.

(That's 7-9AM EST, peeps on the old coast)

piracy = cool. plagiarism = drool.

What's up.

Ok, my homie, sour bob, alerted me to some foul ass shit going down in webville.

Now, you may or may not remember when sarah bizzie bee was plagiarised a while back. And she's been plagiarised again, twice this week (breaking news from the spig!!!).

Apparently, this plagiarism thing is more prevalent that I realized. tequila has also recently been plagiarised, as has Greg.

Tequila is taking legal action, and more power to her.

The whole concept of blog-plagiarism bloggles my mind.
Plagiarism for school or monetary gain, while reprehensible, is at least justifiable in some way (it has rewards), but to plagiarise on a blog?

Would these people plagiarise in their diaries?

Utterly ridiculous and incomprehensible to me.

So stop.

Idiots.

a better song for k

The Luckiest

I don't get many things right the first time
in fact, I am told that a lot
now I know all the wrong turns, the stumbles and falls
brought me here

where was I before the day
that I first saw your lovely face?
now I see it everyday
and I know

that I am
I am
I am
the luckiest

what if I'd been born fifty years before you
in a house on a street where you lived
maybe I'd be outside as you passed on your bike
would I know

and in a white sea of eyes
I see one pair that I recognize
and I know

that I am
I am
I am
the luckiest

I love you more than I have ever found a way to say to you

next door there's an old man who lived to his nineties
and one day passed away in his sleep
and his wife, she stayed for a couple of days
and passed away

I'm sorry, I know that's a strange way to tell you that I know we belong

that I know

that I am
I am
I am
the luckiest

- ben folds

a song for k

The Curse of Great Beauty

your tooth ache an ivory tower
so let down your long perfect legs
I'll untie the knots with my lips and my tongue
and rub Ambisol into your hair

'cause those paper cuts kept you from writing
a poem so epic and true
about how you are cursed
with a beauty so great
I'm sure that it's hard being you

so put down that book it's too serious
I'll undress you as I make a joke
but please try not to laugh
as I swim in your flesh
just hold your breath 'til I finish

so explain it again to me slowly
about the physical world you transcend
I'll just watch your lips
and your perfect white teeth
and the cigarette that doesn't belong there
and the cigarette that doesn't belong there

clem snide

new year's resolutions

1. do something spectacular.
2. let her know exactly how wonderful she is
3. take (and post) more pictures.
4. write more (including blog entries)
5. drink more tea
6. send out mix CDs and t-shirts I make for people.
7. stop saying 'word.' all the time.
8. ravenously seach out new music.
9. resurrect h2bh.
10. be a better friend.

oh, yeah, and something about seeing U2 as many times as possible if they go on tour, and helping bring about world peace.

WORD.

Now They'll Sleep

Now I've lost the plot
I'm not the hero I could be
But not the dog I was

Kind of common cry
Kind of common living lie

Color my fast fading heart
People laugh at anything
And things just fall apart

Kind of common cry
Kind of common living lie

You know the shape my breath will take before I let it out
Stand like you did when I was beauty-marked in your eyes
Now they'll sleep tonight
Mmmm

Now eyes burn circles in the dark
And when the mirror talks to me
I listen with my heart

Kind of common cry
Kind of common living lie

You know the shape my breath will take before I let it out
Stand like you did when I was beauty-marked in your eyes
You know the shape my breath will take before I let it out
Stand like you did when I was beauty-marked in your eyes
Now they'll sleep alright
Hmm

- Belly