November 9, 2008 + "Catchin' Up, Eh?"
    Current Listening:  Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians - Element Of Light, Funeral For A Friend - Memory And Humanity and Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible Anniversary Edition
    Current Reading:  Rereading 1984 by George Orwell, Bumping Into Geniuses by Danny Goldberg and still slogging through My Life by Bill Clinton
    Actually, I guess I'm not slogging through Bill Clinton's memoir, as it is a good read, it's just that at points it delves into so many minute details that it throughs the context out of whack for me.  However, especially on his first term, dealing with trying to get health care reform and weapons bills through and passed into law and working both with and against Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, you really see in relief what politics has become.  It's not about making things better.  It's not about leading.  It's not about our children.  It's sophistry.  They're more concerned about "winning" an argument, or an election, than truth or good work.  I say that more in the direction of Republican leadership, eg William Krystol, than anyone, assuming that Bill Clinton's points are true, however accepting the bias of the book.
    And today.  I'm very glad that the Obama/Biden ticket won the election last week.  Truly.  I wore the pins and have the bumper sticker (Independents For Obama) still on the truck.  And yet the commentary I've heard, even from people I work with who I thought were more intelligent than to fall into these traps, frightens me.  A comment of "f*ckin' n***ers" with regard to an e-mail spread about incidents at the Obama rally at Grant Park in Chicago...and from someone that used to listen to hip-hop almost exclusively.  Hmmm, can't imagine any incidents, none at all, at McCain's rally, right?  The booing was bad enough, but his stance during his concession speech eased my mind with it.
    People don't really want to work together, do we?  We really are a nation of morons, aren't we?  Sophistry in Washington, cynicism in journalism (add every "conservative" pundit to my list of shame here - the on air commentary since Tuesday has been nothing short of a sham, lies and untruths) and weariness in the workplace.
    And speaking of sophistry, sort of, how about them there gas prices?  A couple weeks ago, I filled up for $3.89 a gallon.  Today?  $1.78 a gallon!!!  Really?  Really?  I've worked in retail, sales and service most of my working life, along with planning and financing production of books and CD's, so I know a bit about profit margins and pricing.  This, my friends (tip o' the cap to Mr. McCain for swiping his salutation there), is complete and utter bullshit.  But we, the mindless masses, accept it and say simply, "whoo-hoo!  Fill 'er up Margaret, we can get to Texarkana by nightfall now!!!"
    Great.
    Halloween...we had one, yes, one, trick or treater.  I live in the anti-Halloween zone and it truly perturbs me.  
    Thanksgiving & Christmas coming up...maybe we can change the world.  Maybe we can morph ourselves out of our cockroach like way of existing and begin to live.  It has to be one by one, family by family, but it can be done.  I still believe in music and the written word.  I still have faith.  It gets tested daily, but it's there.
    Musically, ah, well, things are in flux.  Since my accident (auto) of a few months ago, I've ceased operations with my recent collaborators/bandmates.  Nothing to do with anything but me, reevaluating my situation and such.  Found that I had begun to, really, hate music.  I'd lost the sense of wonder I used to have with writing songs, strumming chords, writing basslines, etc.  But I'm starting to regain that a little bit.  Set up my home studio again, both versions, analog four-track and digital eight-track, though I think the four-track actually delivers the best results.  Bought another acoustic, to just jot ideas down with.  I've found the acoustic and my two fretless basses to be very interesting sources of inspiration.  I've found my listening habits expanding a bit, again, too.  No real songs emerging yet, just pieces & tapestries to run words onto when the time comes.  It's sort of like seeing the pig prior to it becoming sausage.
    Yeah, that's the kind of image I wanted to leave you with...awesome....

August 18, 2008 + "Near To Nothing."
   Current Listening:  Mark Spencer - Prophets, Fools & Sages, The Elms - The Chess Hotel and Jesca Hoop - Kismet
    Current Reading:  nothing of importance, finishing up some books I'd left behind for a while
    I'm miserable.  Part of it, granted, is that I've gotten my yearly summer cold and am congested and barely able to talk.
    But other than that, I feel miserable too.
    I cling to a few things like life preservers, and in many ways they are.  My wife, our cats, my few friends, music.
    My job is a job, started as a day job, but the responsibility I currently have is far beyond me.  Most people who know me, and I know this because I occasionally confide this in them, tell me that I may not see my abilities to handle these things, but that they know they're there.
    I believe that what they see is a facade.  They see me surviving, not living.  They see me, who was trained on-the-run to handle being diabetic, having a survival instinct that sometimes transcends the boundaries of given situations, especially at work.  My problems are that a) I don't want to be responsible for anyone else's well-being or work, b) I'm tired of my job and c) I have no way out.  Actually, to further the points, I'm not so much tired of my job as I'm burnt out at my job.  And even with current changes going on, it won't change enough to work out these kinks.  And I really don't have a way out.  Being diabetic, I need the insurance, and ours is sufficient, and I've been at my job long enough, and proven myself to be a decent enough employee, that I'm making ok scratch.  I'm at that mid-life crisis level, the crisis being that the vines (insert Hamell On Trial song here - not this one, but I couldn't find a vid of The Vines) have closed in behind me and in the course of cutting a way through them, I've dulled my blade so much that I'm in danger of being swallowed.
    And I feel completely and utterly hopeless most days.  To the point of delirium when I consider my present station in life.  Painted into a corner.
    And my wife saves me, or we save each other.  The cats are sublime entertainment and touchstones, my family and friends are usually there.  Music, though, is such a fickle bitch.
    I've started to hate playing.  Not necessarily playing my instruments, but the necessity of playing with others.  Of course, it is not necessary, per se, but in the styles I enjoy and play, it is.  And it is not that I play with bad people.  The people I currently play with are great, for the most part.  It's all me, and I realize this.
    I'm tired of playing nicely.  I'm a bit burnt out on everything, really.  When it comes down to it, my viewpoint on life right now is that it is a bowl of tomato soup that's been 7/9's of the way eaten, with merely cold dregs and bits of cracker left in the bottom, unappetizing and pointless except to be washed away.

June 1, 2008 + "Pardon My Language, But...."
   Current Listening:  The National - Alligator & Tokyo Police Club - Elephant Shell
   Current Reading:  The Alligator Book by C.C. Lockwood, When Science Goes Wrong  by Simon LeVay and John F. Kennedy Handbook by Gareth Jenkins
    Pardon my language, but fuck Dodge and any other car manufacturer that thinks offering $2.99/gal. gas for three years helps in any way.  It may help you sell a few cars, but it only guarantees one thing below the surface:  gas prices will not go down, they will continue to rise and we are currently doomed to economic hell for the next decade.  Think about it.  Prior to 9/11, gas was reasonable.  Post-9/11, more due to how we've handled ourselves, mainly in attacking a nation in the Middle East that did not have weapons of mass destruction and did not pose a particular threat to us, we've guaranteed that oil moguls will be raking in the dough, converting it to whatever currency outweighs the dollar and filling their coffers to decades to come.  Whoo-hoo.  The 1% rules again, baby.
    Pardon my language, but fuck the government, the Dept. of Commerce (the what?) and their DTV boxes and related bull for conversion of analog television to a strictly digital signal.  We got our boxes today.  Guess what?  We went from reasonable reception of five analog channels to pixelated, miserable reception of one digital channel.  That's progress, baby.  Like I need my freakin' television anymore anyway.  There's one show worth watching, House, and I'd rather buy the DVD's later and watch sans commercials anyway.  Oh, sorry, forgot about football...but I have Sirius and can listen to the local team broadcasts, with announcers that know their teams, instead of overpaid hacks lilting the same tired cliches about week after week.  Yeah, television...don't need it, don't want it.
    Pardon my language, but fuck political parties of any kind, anywhere.  Any organization with more than four-to-ten people gets more and more open to corruption and negativity with each person added.  It is a thinly veiled control scheme and I'm sick of it.  Headlines wondering whether Barack Obama can beat John McCain make me sick.  Politics makes me sick today.  We don't get leaders, we get talking heads that take under-the-table, over-the-phone money to say what another groups wants and lean toward another group's desires.  Puppets.  Shadows.  Hacks.
    Sorry...just had to vent.  I turned 35 yesterday and I'm beginning my mid-life crisis and crotchety old man phase together.  Rock on.

May 22, 2008 + "The R Word."
   Current Listening:  The Dresden Dolls - No, Virginia and Frank Sinatra - Nothing But The Best
   Current Reading:  Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison
    Most of the folks I work with are fairly conservative.  Nothing wrong with that.  Liberal and conservative are terms thrown around so much that, really, they mean very little.  Much like Republican and Democrat.  Terms without parameters or meanings.  What I really mean by "conservative," though, is that their beliefs tend to lie more toward what the media might consider a typically conservative stance.
    In three separate conversations today, three of my coworkers mentioned the R word.
    A little bit hushed, questioning, perhaps, but truthful and honest.  A need for hope pushed to the extreme of a need for action.  Now.
    The conversations each started with the price of fuel and spiraled from there.  Obviously, there are issues here.  We pay per gallon based on speculation, not cost of production.  Why does our gasoline & diesel go up now when this fuel was refined some time ago?  The cost of what you buy today wasn't one-hundred and thirty some odd dollars per barrel - most likely more like ninety or so.  If we did this in the business I work in (material handling), we'd be out of business pretty quickly.  But fuel is a captive market.  Whatcha gonna do...get a solar car?  Right.
    But in these conversations, the R word came up.  It surprised me each time.  Two of the folks were former military.  Perspectives were all over the board, based on life experiences and such, and the average ages of these folks was across a decent sized spread too.
    By now you're wondering what the R word is, right?
    Revolution.
    Yes, revolution.
    I had lost faith in our country, but these men, who I considered and call friends along with coworkers, have given me hope.  Perhaps all is not lost.
    Perhaps we can still revolutionize our country.
    Perhaps we can still hope.
    Here is one idea that I really, really want to stick:  take all the money that PACs and big dollar favor buyers will give to the Repubs and Dems to "support their campaigns" and build better schools, pay teachers and police & firemen better, rebuild our infrastructure, maintain our military and make us proud again, make us able to get smart again.  We don't need a million yard signs that will end up in the garbage, not even recycled, after election day.  We don't need sniping, bullshit television commercials.  We don't need that anymore.
    The Presidential race?  Make it three separate debates, each on national television.  Give the networks a tax credit for showing them or something because they sure won't do it for free.  Let the candidates tell us, candidly and openly, what they're about.  No raising of tassles or shouting of slogans - I want bare bones stumping, by god.  And take those millions upon fucking millions of dollars and let's do something GOOD WITH THEM instead of WASTING THEM.
    We're a McDonaldland nation of throwaway culture and our political arena's waste canisters overflow with the detritus of the American spirit.
    Revolution.
    As the Manics said...
   Fuck the Brady Bill
    Fuck the Brady Bill
    If God made men the same
    Then Sam Colt made them equal
   The time is coming when we will have to make a stand.

April 6, 2008 + "Why Music Sucks."
  Current Listening:  The Enemy - We'll Live And Die In These Towns, Manic Street Preachers - Lipstick Traces and Adrian Belew - Side Three
  Current Reading:  (still) Homage To Catalonia - George Orwell
    After a long discussion with Tom (guitarist in The Silent Screen) last night, I have decided that, for me, music sucks.  Mainly, alas, because I am old.  I loved the days of working at Record Alley in high school and college, having new CD's come out, getting promo copies, putting promo posters up on the walls and all that.  I love (and loved) buying new CD's and actually reading the liner notes, reading the lyrics, looking at the cover art.  The music wasn't, and isn't, the only art.  The packaging is inherently, to me, part of the experience.
    And something you don't get with downloading music.
    A downloaded song is only part, albeit the greater part, of the experience.
    I feel very old.
    While I do have an mp3 player, it is not an iPod (I won't buy into Apple's business dealings), but an off-brand that, oddly enough, will play damn near anything regardless of where it comes from or where it is ripped from.  Nice, eh?
    And I don't, really, much longer feel for any major label.  They missed the boat.  They lost at Napster, though it may have seemed that they won.  The precendents set will haunt music for years.  I hate saying it, but steal from the majors - they've been stealing from their artists, and you, for years.  Be good to the independents.  If you like a CD, buy it, and buy merchandise directly from the band's website so that money goes to them, the artists.
    Stuck between two worlds.  I love and convenience of CD's, and mp3's, but loved LP artwork.  I started working at Record Alley at the very tail end of vinyl, so I know that world, and I saw the transition, vinyl and tape to disks.  I was there when the longbox died out (thankfully, though it helped with the artwork - there were a few longboxes that I kept just for that).  C'est la vie.  The world of music now sucks because it's sucking the art away with it.
    Again, I feel old.
    From Homage To Catalonia:
    "...I admit it was not pleasant, especially when one thought of some of the people responsible for it.  It is not a nice thing to see a Spanish boy of fifteen carried down the line on a stretcher, with a dazed white face looking out from among the blankets, and to think of the sleek persons in London and Paris who are writing pamphlets to prove that this boy is a Fascist in disguise.  One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting...It is the same in all the wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near the front line trench except on the briefest of propaganda tours...this war is a racket like all other wars."
    -  George Orwell, on the Spanish Civil War, in which he fought
 

March 18, 2008 + "Passing, Waiting, Standing, Thinking."
  Current Listening:  Dug Pinnick - Strum Some Up, Guns n' Roses  - Appetite For Destruction, Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible, Placebo - Without You I'm Nothing  and various pieces of John Williams and Iannis Xenakis compositions.
    Recently Read:  War Is A Racket - Brigadier General Smedly D. Butler, The Antichrist - Friedrich Nietzsche and finished Owls Of The World  - Dr. James R. Duncan
    Currently Reading:  Amerika - Franz Kafka, Homage To Catalonia - George Orwell, A Season In Hell - Arthur Rimbaud  and The Society Of The Spectacle (re-read) - Guy DeBord

  So I have to say that boredom is at the peak right now.  Football season is long over.  Baseball is just sort of getting started.  Hockey is in the low level stage pending the playoff pushes that are upcoming.  What else is there?  Basketball?  Yeah, sure.  I'm sorry, but I like defense.  I like hockey and soccer, where a couple hour's worth of guts and torture can come down to the one play that means a win or a loss.  I like football, where strategy and tactics (sometimes) mean more than talent alone.  And, yes, I hate basketball.  Actually, I abhor basketball.  Almost as much as auto racing, bowling on t.v. or golf on t.v.
    I'm intrigued by the fact that R.E.M has a new album coming out.  They're playing the snot out of the new single on some Sirius stations.  It's good, but as Dave and I talked about a few days ago, something's missing and that missing thing is Bill Berry.  Nothing against Bill Rieflin, who I think is currently R.E.M's skinsman of choice, but there was a chemistry between those four gents that far exceeded any of them on their own.  The best bands are usually like this.  Or the best teams of songwriters.  It's like relationships in general.  You can't deny chemistry.
    I'm feeling rather lost lately.  Mainly creatively.  As if I'm in a lull, gliding, sliding through some sick pit of soul-sucking cretinism that just won't let go.  Like that lady that was stuck on the john for two years.
    Okay, maybe not that bad.  Or violently stupid.
    That's the funny thing.  In our world today, things like that are entirely plausible.  That humanity is made of mostly of complete imbeciles and inept clods has made us all, even the ones that don't fit that mold of lowest common denominator dickhead, totally accepting of mediocrity and idiocy.  What happened to respect?  Earned respect, that is.  What happened to honor, most of all of oneself?
    Maybe I'm barking of the wrong tree here.  Maybe there is no tree.  Maybe I'm a dog howling in a desert, unaware that along with there being no trees, there is no water for miles, but there are many, many lost denizens of despair ready to latch a chain to my collar and drag me down with them.

February 2, 2008 + "Thoughts."
  Current Listening:  Gang Of Four - Entertainment!, Warren Zevon - Genius and Manic Street Preachers - Lifeblood
  Current Reading:  Free Lunch (how the wealthiest Americans enrish themselves at government expense and stick you withe the bill) by David Cay Johnston and The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzche
    On the State Of The Union Address:
    -  President Bush states that he will veto any tax increase to cross his desk...
    -  President Bush seeks billions upon billions not only for the "war on terror" but for other government spending, but wants to cut the pork barrel spending...
    -  Yet we're billions upon billions of dollars in debt, to countries that we consider beneath us (or our government does)...
    -  When this Administration came to power, our budget was balanced and the U.S.A. was out of debt, in the black...
    -  After seven years of "Republican conservatism" we are in the hole, in debt, indebted to nations that, were they to call in the marks, would bankrupt what was once the richest nation in the world (which came about through the hard work of middle America, not politicians)...
    -  I don't know that there is an answer in our upcoming election, but the fact that most of the above statements were given ovations in the Capital truly sickened me.

    After 9/11 we invaded Afghanistan to get al Quaeda who were, I suppose, to blame and at fault.  We did not succeed, but we did tear down the government in that country.  I don't doubt the Taliban's wrongdoings as they were and had been reported upon for years.  A plus that they were rent from power.  Our presence there remains and that war on the ground continues.
    We attacked Iraq and tore down their government due to a) supposed possession of WMD, b) ties to al Quaeda and c) President Bush's hatred of Hussein.  No WMD were found because there were none to find.  Hussein did not have ties to al Quaeda because he didn't trust bin Laden (or any Fundamentalist...and our President is a Fundamentalist, by the way).  Many deaths of both civilians and our soldiers for a "war on terror"...a war on a concept.
    CONCEPTS CAN BE MANIPULATED, FOLKS!  That's why they called it a "war on terror" and our Congress and our people have bought it hook, line and sinker.  And continue to do so.
    -  Our troops are brave and fighting to defend us...Yes, they are brave and deserve our respect and to be treated that way and to not be called upon to be an Imperial force unless we tell them  up front, which we haven't.  I've no issue with our troops, many in my family and among my friends have served and they have my utmost respect and love.
    -  We must ok this spending to give them what they need...hmmm, set up the argument so that, if you disagree, you're unpatriotic...nice one, manipulating our leaders.  Can I see the accounting for how much of that money went for equipment?

    If I seem disturbed, and possibly apoplectic with rage, you're right.

   We have the greatest nation on earth, the chance to prove that people, homo sapiens, are intelligent and can manage themselves, and we're a bunch of lemmings being lead to the cliff by shrews.
 

December 25, 2007 + "2007...Get Me Outta This Place!"
  So, I have to agree with Bunny that 2007 has been a disquieting, dismal year overall and I'm quite prepared to see it go.  This is, in most ways, due to the political landscape and our distorted sense of justice in the United States, along with our willingness to sit mostly idle while our rights are rescinded, our money wasted and our futures bartered for foreign change.  Case in point:  Exxon has still, 18 years after the fact, not paid restitution for the Exxon-Valdez disaster.  I thought we prided ourselves on doing the right thing in the U.S. - but apparently that does not count when big business is involved.  At that point it becomes "litigate till they give up."
    Or certain computer manufacturers that put on their boxes that certain products work with certain OS's but, lo and behold, when you install the software for said product it warns of potential operating deficiencies with your certain OS that the box said it would work with and, worse still, it infiltrates your computer and locks you out, mouse-less.  Joy.  I should be used to this though...my mouse luck has always been outstandingly bad, but the one I was gifted with is a very nice one and, once I speak with the manufacturers I hope to have a resolution.
    In good things though, I offer my Top Ten Musical Releases Of 2007 for your perusal:
    1.   Manic Street Preachers - Send Away The Tigers
    2.   Band Of Horses - Cease To Begin
    3.   Type O Negative - Dead Again
    4.   David Byrne - Live From Austin, TX
    5.   The Enemy - We'll Live And Die In These Towns
    6.   Stars - In Our Bedroom After The War
    7.   David Torn - Prezens
    8.   British Sea Power - Krankenhaus? e.p.
    9.   Porcupine Tree - Fear Of A Blank Planet
    10. The Afghan Whigs - Unbreakable: A Retrospective
    I would be interested in hearing yours, if anyone is still reading this journal due to the slowdown in entries.  I will be gearing up again in 2008, I think, moving on to Journal X and rolling out more stuff.  Till then, Happy New Year, kids!

October 28, 2007 + "Where Ya Been, Zippy?"
    Current Listening:  Stars - In Our Bedroom After The War, The New Pornographers - Challengers, John Fogerty - Revival, Band Of Horses - Cease To Begin and Maximo Park - Missing Songs
    Current Reading:  The Coming Of The Third Reich by Richard J. Evans and The Art Of Deception by Nicholas Capaldi and Miles Smit
    The books I'm reading, by the way, sort of necessitate each other.  They also tie in with current politics as the events outlined in The Coming Of The Third Reich, in many ways, mirror our current history we're living.  Also, deception is rampant.  Just as Hitler figured out that you give people a quick soundbite, act as if you mean it with every fiber of your being, hook 'em, reel 'em in and gut 'em before they realize they're shooting innocent people for you, so do our current politicians reward our trust with soundbites, vapid variances on tired themes as opposed to true issues and nice haircuts.
    For example, incumbant KY governor Ernie Fletcher believes the entire upcoming election comes down to his opponent, Steve Beshear, being open to casino gambling in KY while he is not.  Governor Fletcher, by the way, used his 5th Amendment rights to steer clear of testifying and was able to let his cronies off the hook in some major hiring issues a short time ago.
    The important thing is this:  if Fletcher is indeed correct and gambling will bring crime and distress to KY, then Louisville, Lexington and Florence should all be simmering beds of horror and filth (and, granted, each is in its own way, but not to the extent that Fletcher's t.v. campaign would have you believe).  You see, we gamble on horse racing here in KY.  We like horses a lot, enough to race them there critters and *gasp* gamble on the outcome.
    Indeed.
    Oh, and why over a month since my last update?  Mainly, work.  I work so much at a computer that the thought of coming to my home computer and doing an update was just ugly.  Among other things.
    And this is short.  So much I should've said, thought to say over the past weeks.  Needed the break though.
    I'll try not to be so long this time.

August 18, 2007 + "Preconceptions."
    Current Listening:  The Enemy - We'll Live And Die In These Towns, Interpol - Our Love To Admire and Ned's Atomic Dustbin - God Fodder
    Current Reading:  Noam Chomsky - Failed States and Philip Toshio Sudo - Zen Guitar
  I'm realizing with great malice and fervor lately that I need to more and more rail down my preconceptions and accept the reality of the moment over what I interpret as the truth simply because of history and rhetoric.  Moments change and feelings change and everything has to be allowed to flow and become, rather than just be.
    There is no being.  There is only becoming.  The movement.  The growth.
    Musically, I feel at an impasse.  Learning Stick is taking a determination that I've not mastered and I find myself becoming like a stone in the stream, being worn away, rather than allowing the stream to create something new of me.  It is not like bass, which came, slowly, to be sure, but came and grew on and with me.  Of course, I was much younger.
    I found learning Spanish in junior high school much, much easier than the Spanish I took in high school, which was very much easier than the Spanish I took in college.  You would think, wouldn't you, that it would get progressively easier?  It did not.  And I am loathe to admit that now, at this point in time, I barely remember how to conjugate any verbs and can barely utter a recognizable Spanish statement other than tengo un dolor de mi cabeza.  I have a headache.
    Music is much harder as you get older because your mind gets so full of yesterdays.  Like life.  Living is harder because we tend to not only go about our day, but to also pull along a cart full of yesterdays.  Some of this is necessary.  Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it (except for politicians, who seem ready, willing and able to continually repeat the idiocies of yesterdays).  The balance, the delicate balance of experience mixing with the now to create tomorrow.  Like a wonderful pie, or a perfect spaghetti sauce, it takes just the right combinations, the right pinches of all the necessary ingredients, otherwise it is inedible.  Or a troubled today and hazy tomorrow, as the case may be.
    Also, Scriptus Live, the radio show that I hosted for five years on WAIF in Cincinnati, may make a return soon via a podcast available for free online.  I've been listening to some of the tapes I have of shows, going back to 1997, and at the behest of Bunny am considering the options.  I'm open to any and all ideas.  I miss the radio time, I must admit.

July 25, 2007 + "Squattle."
  Current Listening:  D.A.D. - Soft Dogs, Jack Kerouac - Reads On The Road and The Afghan Whigs - Unbreakable
  Just Finished Reading:  J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows (brilliant ending to an epic series)
    Lately it occurred to me that suicide would, in some cases, be an apt alternative to dealing with medical insurance companies and their ilk.  Wading through an automated system, hanging on a phone for fifteen minutes to speak to a live person, being transferred to a different person, waiting on the line, being transferred again and so on and so forth.  Only to find that either their "tier" system of coverage for medicines changed without their telling you and your copay went up over 100% or that certain items just don't meet their criteria for the deductible.  Fuck them.  I'm diabetic, so I have to wrangle this crap monthly, with copays changing and other idiocy.  "Why not just change your medicine to the one they cover with the lowest copay?"  Ah, yes, well, changing insulins or changing other medications, it ain't that easy.  Certain things work well for me and I tend to stick to them...so it's my fault when my monthly payout to the vultures is higher.  Sure.
    The U.S. citizenry pays more for healthcare, yet is unhealthier, than any nation in the world.
    Hmmm...flaw(s) in the system, methinks?
    In any other venture, if your payout achieved these results, someone would get fired.  Or shot.  With a syringe.  Full of battery acid.  Just kidding, just kidding.
    In other news, The Silent Screen has a vocalist and we're working to get the band up to speed with both older material and to continue the writing that began prior to the assimilation.  Expect fall for shows and a new recording, I hope.
  Rendering The Impossible, the book that's been done for years, but not manufactured or distributed, may bite the big one and be a massive "never released gem" of the DKP catalog.  I'm thinking of just scrapping the project and starting over as a multimedia affair.  I've been handling and working with the 98% finished product for, let's be honest, years now, and if I've not plunged ahead and put it out, there must be some background psychological reason why aside from the dismal state of central Kentucky's writing scene that type of stuff.
    July is almost at an end...late summer comes, then fall...yahoo....

July 2, 2007 + "Lawn & Loathing In Georgetown."
  Current Listening:  Young Modern  - Silverchair (brilliant album; heard the tune Straight Lines on Sirius and was lucky enough to find an Australian import of the disk, utterly awesome.)
    We had to put our oldest cat, Percey, to sleep on Saturday.  A short time ago we'd noticed a lump on her cheek and it took a while but it was finally diagnosed as chondrosarcoma (bone cancer.)  She'd done well for a while, but finally succumbed to having issues eating and breathing and we knew her time had come.  Even knowing and being able to prepare, as much as anyone can prepare for such a thing, didn't help.
    Percey wasn't antisocial.  She just had catitude.  You would pet her when she pleased, not when you pleased.  She would play when she pleased, not when you pleased.  She would lie in the sun and watch birds and it was your job to not mess with her during this time.  And she was a brilliantly loving, personable cat too.  Her own little person.  And we will always miss her.
    Lest anyone not know this already, the very best show on television is House, M.D.  It has taken its rightful place in my television pantheon alongside Northern Exposure and M*A*S*H as being the top of a fairly miserable heap of mush.  House, M.D. is the best written show I've seen in years and I am utterly hooked on it.  And Hugh Laurie is god, as far as actors go.  The rest of the cast is fantastic.  For some reason I can't quit picturing the character Dr. Wilson in a Puck outfit doing A Midsummer Night's Dream though.  Strange.
    Cut the grass tonight after work.  Lots of it was weeds, actually.  But I cut it nonetheless.  I swore that if I got home and my neighbor to the left had cut, I would too.  The bastard (said affectionately - they're good folks) had cut and doomed me.  Doomed me, I say.  I did find that Pink's I'm Not Dead is a good CD to cut grass to.  Did the backyard to Piece Of Mind  by Iron Maiden.
    I hate cutting grass.  Utterly futile.  Waste of time.  You'd think I'd be happy that I hadn't had to cut in a month due to our drought conditions, but no.  I'm still bitter.  Angry.
    Not really.  I just feel like House....

June 26, 2007 + "Stick This."
  Current Reading:  Interventions by Noam Chomsky
    Current Listening:  Courage - Paula Cole, Chrome - Catherine Wheel and Deadwing - Porcupine Tree
    I have begun something new musically, that is, I'm attempting to learn a new instrument.  I have finally, after saving money for quite some time and getting extraordinarily lucky, gotten a Chapman Stick.  A teak Grand 12-string, to be exact.  And I can't play it a lick yet.  Well, I can.  I'm making wallops of noise.  It's just terribly odd to have a stringed instrument on me that isn't played like my other stringed instruments, even when I've been precocious and tapped a la Stu Hamm, Billy Sheehan or the gent from Lord Tracy, it's nothing like the finesse & control needed for the Stick.
    And I'm also learning, yet again, that the years of not learning more theory were bad, bad, bad.  I took bass lessons for two years and learned to play, sort of.  Most of my learning came in bands and by writing, learning things through attrition and experience.  Part of it, of course, was a lack of patience.  I just want(ed) to play!  And play I did.
    Which is not to say that it will prove to be an overall hindrance with the Stick, just that I'm having to change gears and adjust my line of thinking to fit a new regime of noise-making power.  It will take a while, but I'll get it.
    Question:  are we a  democracy, by definition, or are we merely puppets on proverbial strings, dancing in the winds of whim and mirth created by a 1% that controls the powers and our lives?  Are we who we think we are?  Dare we look in the mirror?
    Oh, and why does anyone bother with the United Nations anymore?  We've scoffed at it (the "we" here being our government, not me or, I assume, you, dear reader) for decades now.  I, personally, would side with the U.N. rather than the U.S. if only because I still harbor respect for other sovereign nations.  I'm in the minority, I know.
    Lately I feel like  a haze has been covering my input.  As if I'm seeing things, but my Kantian lenses are dirty, smudged by the muck of daily life.  But, then, daily life is life.  This isn't a game show.  No trial runs.  Do it or don't.
    I'm also feeling increasingly isolated as an artist.  Yeah, I know...woe is me, right?  I'm in another dead zone.  Inspiration seems to be lacking (I know it's all around), ideas are churning beneath the surface and not in view (I know it's just a matter of casting the net deeper) and everything is just terribly negative (um, yeah).
    And with that, we head into the second half of 2007.  Bon voyage....

June 16, 2007 + "Hot Zone."
    Current Listening:  Trey Gunn - Raw Power, the Amnesty International John Lennon covers album benefiting Darfur, Midnight Oil - Bird Noises and Porcupine Tree - In Absentia
  Currently Reading:  The Hot Zone by Richard Preston and The Beatles by Bob Spitz
    Recently Completed:  The Wit & Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln by James C. Hughes, Weird Cures by Sandra Salmans and Joel Fram and Playing President by Robert Scheer
    I didn't particularly like Robert Scheer's book, outlining various interviews and his thoughts on Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush, but the thing that struck me as true is something he said, that the road to the presidency forces men (soon to be women as well) to shut down their true feelings and forces an attempt to be all things to all people.  In that, their views are skewed and they end up as something completely different by the time they reach the White House.  In a parliamentary system, you're honed by your brothers & sisters in the leadership roles around you and are more, shall we say, prepared and able to be yourself and be true to your ideals and mores upon being sent into ultimate leadership.
    C'est la vie.  Were it not for our new interweb and information, some true and most not, things may not have become this way.
    The fact that humanity is split into so few groups is astounding.  Those who work.  Those who are poor based upon environment.  Those who are put on pedestals because of their birth.  Those who lead.  We have the wealth of this world and we squander it.  We invent ways to kill rather than to heal.  We fight over land.  Our greed has been and will continue to be our undoing.
    When people in this county can feel comfortable buying $800 pairs of shoes, or spending $200 on a meal for two, that is a problem.  Of course, am I a part of this?
    To a certain extent, sure.  I'm a product of my environment as well.  I've been saving for a couple years for a new musical instrument.  I recently purchased it and will have it in-hand this week.  It cost a lot of money.  Should I have instead given that money to a local shelter or to A.I.?
    Perhaps.
    I'm greedy just like everyone, just like you.
    I'm just another cockroach on the pile, another pig squealing in the barnyard, another vulture hovering above the dying animals below me.

June 3, 2007 + "What that there?"
  Current Listening:  Oxygene8 - Freak Of Chance, Manic Street Preachers - Send Away The Tigers, Mansun - Six and Allan Holdsworth - All Night Wrong - Live in Japan 2002
  Current Reading:  bits here, bits there...nothing's really caught on...writing more than reading right now
    So Tracy and I went out to breakfast at a local eating emporium with a breakfast bar/buffet.  Seated behind Tracy, in my direct sight, was a quartet of NASCAR fans.  The NASCAR part only matters in that the Dale Earnhardt Jr. shirts were the most visible attire.  Seemingly nice enough folks, but at one point the gent just opposite me called our waitress over and pointed to his plate and asked, "what that there?"
    Our waitress was a tad confused, as was I till I E.T.'ed my neck a bit and caught site of the LBT's (little black things) swimming in juice on his nearly empty plate.
    "Um...er...looks like bits of sausage...."
    "What I thought too...I dipped out the last sausages and them there came with 'em...I et ("eat" pronounced to make you believe it was a past tense of itself as opposed to the more commen "ate") a few.  They ain't bad, no sir, but I not sure, now.  Thought maybe I ask what is!"
    "Ok...um...."
    "Thank ya, now!"  At which time he got up and went back to the bar.
    At this point the waitress was confussed (read as confused, but more than confused, not quite dazed but still requiring a different word, thus the addition of an "s") but went about her business.
    Indeed.  What that there?

June 1, 2007 + "Yes."
    Current Listening:  Manic Street Preachers - Send Away The Tigers and King Crimson - Discipline
    Just Finished Reading:  I'll Sleep When I'm Dead - The Dirty Life And Times Of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon and Tales From The Reds Dugout by Tom Browning...currently reading: nothing
    Ha...yesterday was another birthday gone...whoo-hoo!  Have gotten some super nifty gifts thus far, however.  More to come on one of them in the near future.
    This entry is really more of a placeholder.  The political realm is nothing but a minefield.  Music is solace and release, but not cathartic at present (a minor difference.)  Work is work.  Home life is great except for Percey, who has cancer but is doing okay.
    I used the term "blech" in the last entry and was asked about pronunciation...picture yourself coughing up a hairball.  That'll do it.

May 20, 2007 + "Rock."
  Current Listening:  Funeral For A Friend - Tales Don't Tell Themselves, Maximo Park - Our Earthly Pleasures, The Afghan Whigs - 1965 and a variety of Manic Street Preachers stuff in preparation for the arrival of their newest, Send Away The Tigers which, I'm sure, I could've already flapped my wings, gone to London, picked up a copy and flapped my way home for how long it's taking to get here (import only, alas, at this time)
    Current Reading:  Apocalypse 2012  by Lawrence E. Joseph
    I had my own personal apocalypse at practice tonight...haven't changed the strings on the Spector in, well, months...many months...a long time...so long that, though they're coated strings, they're long past dead.  Should've taken the Tobias, I know, or the Yamaha, but by golly I wanted to play the Spector.
    After we were done, to force myself to change them, I took the strings off prior to putting it in the case.  What I forgot, however, is that the bridge saddles on the Spector are not "attached," as in they're held in place by the tension of the strings passing over them.  I set the bass down and, blech, they fell to the floor.  Nice.  So now I have a puzzle to do as I restring the bass.
    And I loathe stringing my instruments.  Almost as much as I loathe cutting grass.  Almost, but not quite.  I think it's the fear of screwing it up, since my sets generally cost into the $50 to $60 range each, that's an expensive screw up if I do.  Now, you may ask, have I ever screwed up?
    No.
    Not yet.
    Doesn't mean it won't happen tonight, though.
    I'm a week or so away from my birthday, for whatever that's worth.  Another year in the bag, man.  Passed.  Passing.  As soon as you're born, you're dying, it's just a matter of how you choose to spend that time.  And your bill could be laid on the table at any time.  Don't forget to tip the waitress.  She could trip you on your way out.
    Okay...I've put it off long enough.  I'm off to restring the Spector.  I have strings for all the others in-hand, too.  Maybe I'll skive off work tomorrow and have a string-a-thon!  What a hideous, awful thing to think about.  Ugliness.

May 6, 2007 + "Age."
    Current Listening:  Oxygene8, LaughingStock, Manic Street Preachers, Phil Cody & Cloud Cult - various for each
    Current Reading:  still The Tipping Point, but slowing down due to tacking up real world examples of my own for each chapter's points and making each section relevant to myself...'tis a very, very keen book
    I'm appointing a title for our current time...I am dubbing it the AGE OF POLLUTION .  A nice follow-up to the Industrial Age and/or the Techological Age, I think.
    I don't mean pollution simply in the industrial waste idea, either.  I mean the pollution of knowledge, the pollution of god, the pollution of our reasoning and the pollution of our future, along with the literal pollution we have thrown into our living world, our habitat.
    We are cats whose litter box has not been changed for a week.
    We are birds whose newspaper at the bottom of the cage is fetid and reeking.
    We are politicians whose press clippings are rife with the truth of our lies.
    We could change things.  We could clean the box, the cage, the world.
    But will we?
    Do we have the strength of character, of heart and mind?
    To be continued....

May 1, 2007 + "Spreading."
    Current Listening:  Oxygene8 - Poetica, Adrian Belew - Side Two and Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible
    Current Reading:  The Tipping Point  by Malcolm Gladwell
    We have three cats.
    Percey was chosen from a shelter by Tracy shortly after we started dating, so she's been around for a while.
    Anitya rode to where Tracy works in the engine compartment of a coworker's car and came to us from there.
    Roger showed up on our porch, became a friend, and was taken in after being injured in a fight.
    We just found out that Percey has cancer.  Chondrosarcoma, to be exact, in her right lower jaw.
    She seems okay right now.  After treating her for potential infections and having no results, the biopsy results came back yesterday and the news hit us pretty hard.  I think things like this are a (not so) gentle reminder to appreciate each day or, as Warren Zevon said, enjoy every sandwich.
    And the rest of life goes on.  The Silent Screen will begin recording some new material soon.  I'll begin a new year soon (aka have a birthday.)  We grow.  We move.
    We are products of our decisions, just as much as of the impact of our environment.

April 15, 2007 + "Variety Pack."
    General Anthony Zinni (retired), on Meet The Press this morning, spoke of Iraq in terms of needing to stay in the region, but build a coalition and gain support from allies and the others in the region for security and peace.
    I'm sorry, but wasn't that what the United Nations was sort of, maybe, created for?   Security and Peace?  Oh, I forgot, we blew them off and went into Iraq a few years ago anyway.  My bad.
    So, years later, we want what we had and dismissed.
    Great.
    Don Imus.  So his comments were indeed insensitive and, well, stupid.  For a guy who can do such terrific, insightful interviews, it is (and always has been) an enigma to me the way he'd shoot his mouth off.  He was a walking ad hominem statement factory, and it has finally sunk him.
    But don't think that Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton actually, directly, got him fired.  Radio is all about ratings and dollars.  Imus had and would continue to have ratings.  When sponsors, under pressure from various sides, pulled their big dollar advertising agreements, that's what got him fired.  Money.  Had those sponsors stayed on, he would have served a minor suspension and been back in action in May.
    See the movie, Pan's Labyrinth.
    The more I play fretless, the more I like it.
    Happy Birthday (today) to Tracy!
    Happy Birthday (tomorrow) to my Mom!
 

April 7, 2007 + "Snow."
    God, I love snow.  I love cold days.  Chillier, autumn days are great, too, but colder, winter days are the best.
    We had a mild snowstorm here last night.  Been cold since a front moved through, but last evening we actually got snow and there's a fine, sugary dusting on the ground right now, still.
    Today is a bit of a free day, nothing in particular planned.  Will sit down and work some on the book, more planning than anything.  Text is ready, recording of the accompaniment (which is still a hope, dream, a maybe) needs planning and work.  Such a long gestation period, it's been.
    Some friends stick with you, through just about anything.  Some come, fade, come again.  Some are there, then gone.  I have the same thing with bands.  I pick some up, digging a few things they do, and come and go from them.  Some, I pick up at the beginning and remain loyal to through different phases and things, regardless, because they speak to me.  I hope that The Silent Screen can be that for someone (many?) someday.  There are only a few like that for me, but I relish having them.  Sort of grew up with a few, like Manic Street Preachers and King's X.  There's something amazing about having touchpoints in your life that match a band's releases, sort of like a separate timeline to go by.
    Enough yapping...there's sunlight shining on the snow and it won't be here much longer....

March 29, 2007 + "The Race."
    In the course of watching a six-part BBC documentary on Auschwitz, I realized something disturbing.
    It really is true that the winners write the history.
    Let me precede this by saying that genocide is, obviously, wrong.  I am no anti-Semitic.  I'm not anti-anything except for ignorance and stupidity, hence my distaste for most of the human race...especially when most folks that are ignorant or stupid are that way of their own choosing.
    The way the Nazi SS soldiers recounted their days at Auschwitz (various parts/camps of it) was harrowing in that they freely bought into their government's build up of the feelings that Jews were evil, controllers of the world and ready to take over everything.  That they had endless funds and abilities and were just waiting to slit your throat.  Evil, no good.  Wrong.  Bad.
    Inculcated in them from birth, for some.  From the burning of the Reichstadt in 1933, the Nazi party had a goose-stepping boot fully on the throat of reason in Germany.  Building their own truth.  As the saying goes, Nationalism is a created product.
    Turn the mirror on how our government talks of those that are "against us" and "terrorists" and part of an "Axis of evil."
    No difference.
    So right and wrong will come down to the winners.
    Of course, I believe in the USA, freedom of choice and expression, freedom of religion (Christian or otherwise).  Even with my recent turn on capitalism, it's about the best choice out there until we reasoning folk are able to reason our way over the speedbump that is compassion and true freedom.
    But I wonder how much of what we hear is right.  The Nazis were wrong.  Brazen racism is wrong.  But are we right in what we're doing and how we're trying to handle the world?  Have things blurred to the point where no one is right, but we're all a little bit wrong?
    Just as Jews rose up at different points in Auschwitz, only to be stamped back down, others will rise up against oppressive forces or regimes.  The dictator's biggest fear is his own people.
    Genocide is wrong.
    Sometimes regicide is right.

March 25, 2007 + "Cut That Out."
  Current Listening:  Type O Negative - Dead Again, Rush - Hemispheres and Adrian Belew - Side Three
  Current Reading:  American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips (still) and Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
    As many of you longtime readers know, I'm not a fan of smokers or users of tobacco-based products.  Not due to the products themselves or some silly health issue...by God, your body is yours and if you choose to inhale noxious, toxic substances, more power to ye.  It's because, by far, most folks that use this crap are litterers of the highest (lowest?) order.  From dim-witted morons dropping their half-used cigarettes out the windows of their cars to that jackass that spit a "chaw" of tobacco out by the gas pump I patronized this morning, most of these folks are simply filthy.
    Not that I'm the cleanest person in the world.  I'm not.  But if I'm done with a piece of chewing gum, I either find a trash can or I spit it into the grass, not onto the concrete.  It's common courtesy.  I don't want your gum on my shoe any more than you want mine on yours.
    And while I'm on that, let me just say that I'm not the best driver in the world.  I admit this.  But having lived in Central Kentucky for a number of years now and being able to compare/contrast drivers between here and Cincinnati, drivers down here are, well, just bloody awful.  On any given day I get cut off at least twice, usually for no good reason, turn signals are simply not used and people have a tendency to vary from 40 mph to 65 mph from minute to minute in a zone clearly labeled with a speed limit of 55 mph.  It's like they forget they have to step on the gas, realize it and gun the engine to "catch up," then forget to stay on the accelerator.  Maybe they're actually goldfish.  I don't know.
    Anyway, the tobacco thing comes from my taking my lawn mowin' gas can to get filled up for the first mow of the season, pulling it from my vehicle and setting it down right in the aforementioned "chaw."  Ya-freakin'-hoo, boys & girls.  Animals.  All y'all.
    And the grass was then cut and the gods did smile upon my half-dead lawn, where the ivy that was unleashed in the front yard four years ago has finally grabbed a foot(root?)hold and where things are just picking up steam in the back.
    Scot, why do you hate summer?  Grass.  Cutting it.  If I could afford fence-to-fence Astroturf, I'd be there in a heartbeat.  Then I'd just have to vacuum it every so often, spray it down, maybe.
  The Silent Screen is working on mucho new material of a much different flair.  Tom's been writing a lot on the acoustic, which has led me to more fretless playing and all of us sort of expanding our palettes quite a bit.  A good thing.  We may not be anyone's favorite band (yet), but by golly we're going to be the most eclectic.  Don't like what you're hearing?  Wait three minutes.  And that is a good thing.  The best part of it?  I've heard bands that practice the theory of expansion, eclecticism and such, and a lot of the time they end up sounding schizophrenic.  Thus far, we're not, and I don't think we will.  Our personalities come through too much.  It's always going to be us, whether it's a blazing rock song in 11 or an acoustic, jazz-driven tune.
    I'm off to rest, relax, play some football (of the Madden variety) and write (later, after dark).
    As Jerry's French cousin used to say, "Touche, pussycat!"

March 3, 2007 + "Good Stuff."
  Current Listening:  John Cale - The Island Years, The Primitives - The Best Of  and Orson - Bright Idea
    Current Reading:  American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips
    Had a full day of shooting for Meet Cleaver Theater today and it went extremely well.  In the couple of years that we've been doing the B-Movie/Horror Hosting show, we've been constantly revising, revisiting and refining what we do and, as such, our characters and sketches have gotten increasingly better.  Bunny takes the bulk of the load, not only handling the main character, but the editing of the raw footage, but all of us (he, Jeanne, Tracy and I) work so well together that it's not work at all.  Just a great, fun time, brainstorming things and immediately setting them to tape sometimes.  Occasionally it's cold work, like today, running around in what I can only describe as a Druid's garb, menacing bird feeders and fir trees and having Butch attempt to thwart me with cheese slices, but it's all in a day's filming, you know?  Good stuff, indeed.
  The Silent Screen's recording that has been going on for a couple of weeks is at a bump in the road, but we're hopping over it with aplomb, as we typically do with obstacles.  We had worked out a deal with a new studio around town to be their recording guinnea pig to help them work out the kinks in their set up and building and, in turn, we'd lay down our tracks for free and help them get moving.  Well, the partners we were working with had a falling out, so things are halted right now, but just for a short time.  We had everything done except for final vocals on a couple of tracks and mixing and, luckily enough, they were using Cubase as their recording software and that's what I have on my home studio, so, voila, we can finish it on our own time.  Shame of it is, they had a nice room there (we got really good sounds in there.)
    Seems to me I had a new book finished a couple of years ago and never released it.  Did I?  Yes, indeed I did. Rendering The Impossible was and is it's name.  Bunny noted that, based on my live readings, an accompanying CD would be pretty nifty.  I agreed, especially after listening to a Viggo Mortensen disk that came with one of his books that I have called Recent Forgeries.  Again, good stuff.  Manufacturing is still an issue.  The culture of the area in which I live is still an issue.  But the work is there, along with additional, newer things to be added and amended into it.  It will be completed by the end of 2007 lest I become Peter Gabriel-like and begin a project one day and finish it a decade later.  No offense...I love Peter, but come on.
    All for now...life is good, love is good, our government is dismal but the peoples' light will shine on.

February 16, 2007 + "Bone."
    I've begun to make it a habit to pull out a CD that I know I haven't listened to in a good long while when I'm doing chores around the house, like dishes & such, and give it a spin.  I do have a lot of CD's.  I'm a bit of a music whore, I admit.
    Anyway, I'd totally forgotten how great Tim Booth's album, Bone, is.  He was the lead singer in the British band, James.  I don't know that he's done any other solo work after leaving James, but Bone is a terrific album and well worth the dough I plunked down for it a few years ago.
    I'd promised, sort of, a friend of mine at work a rant in this entry.  He had the same complaint a lot of folks have, that I don't update a whole lot anymore.  You're all right.  I see folks that "blog" every day, sometimes multiple times a day, and I just can't fathom that, though there was a time (see the links to my other journals above) when I did update much more often.
    I've just had more of a tendency to keep a lot of the things bottled up a bit more lately.  Rather than get on here and rant on specifics, I censor my output here and funnel it into poetry and songs and other things.  Perhaps I shouldn't, but I think it's much safer.
    Alas, due to impending snowy doom, filming for Meet Cleaver Theatre has been postponed for tomorrow.  I'm itching to get back to it.  Many scripts await and many characters to be hashed up, spindled and torn asunder.  Well.  Sock puppets too.
    Did you ever notice that, even when things are looking up and starting to go well, some people will still complain about the same old crap?  Some people just can't stand prosperity?  It's like they get off, become literally orgasmic, over having strife and idiocy in their lives.  I just don't understand.  And some folks think they know everything when they, in truth, only see one side of a many-sided object but think they have the full truth and flaunt it about.
    *sigh*
    I deal with it on a daily basis.  But I'm guessing you do too, right?  Of course you do.
    Recording on Sunday...overdubs & vocals.  Should be a gas, especially with my currently sore throat & sinus issues.  I used to love winter, adore it, as a matter of fact, but lately we're just not getting along.  I want much snow and 25 degree temperatures for an extended period.  An actual winter, you know?  Not sleet & slush and zero degrees for one day, then a full meltdown.  That, my friends, sucks.
    But you can't have everything.  I'll take what I can get because I know, soon enough, I'll be cutting grass again.  *shudder*  No need for thoughts of that right now.  Let's stick to cold & sneezy, eh?

February 10, 2007 + "Fabrication."
    Current Listening:  Cold War Kids - Robbers & Cowards, Damone - Out Here All Night and Lily Allen - Alright, Still...
   First off, whoo-hoo about the Colts winning the Super Bowl.  I'm happy for them, I'm happy for Tony Dungy and I'm happy that I ended the season picking the last game correctly.  The Pro Bowl, while mildly entertaining, is currently on tv and I must say, I couldn't care less who wins, but I'm glad Dave Moore of the Buccaneers was added to the team as the NFC's long snapper.
    Fabrication.  The U.S. is putting together reasons to attack Iran.  With a force that is already stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan and bunches of other places.  We're not the world police force, folks.  And attacking Iran won't solve anything.  I'm sick to death of this whole shoot-first-talk-diplomacy-later attitude.  For Vladimir Putin, Russia's President, to have said what he did is a stake in the heart of George Bush's administration.  For a Russian President to call out a U.S. President on foreign policy, and be utterly correct, is a stunner.
    The Silent Screen is recording tomorrow...should be fun.  I don't particularly like recording, but the four songs we're laying down are winners (I'm biased, though...I think all of our tunes are winners) and it'll be interesting to see how they come out sounding as we're playing the role of "guinea pigs" for a new studio in the area.
    Oh, and in the "current listening" area up there, let me just say that Damone's cover of Iron Maiden's Wasted Years is completely and utterly fantastic.

February 1, 2007 + "Down."
    "To desire to make a style is an apology for one's anxiety."  - Willem de Kooning
    Smart man, that Dane.
    Since I missed on the NFC game two weeks ago, let me change my Super Bowl pick.  Colts 24 - Bears 21 in Overtime amid the mud and rain of the weirdest weather to beat upon a Super Bowl in years.
    I feel utterly down.  Completely spent.  And, yet, for nothing, it seems.  I feel lost.  Hopeless.  Downtrodden.  No reason for it.  As Churchill used to say, the black dog is on my shoulder and he ain't wagging his tail, he's chewing upon my soul.
    Everything is in pieces.  Chaotic.  Restless.  It seems like (emphasis on the "seems" here) I can't get anything together anymore.  Even having trouble gathering my thoughts about me.
    Labs tomorrow morning, a couple hours of doing nothing, then a doctor appointment and maybe more labs.  Lovely.  Happy days.  Need to practice too, and work on pounding some new tunes into my thick skull.
  The Silent Screen has a gig this Saturday, the 3rd, at the Northside YMCA in Lexington.  Should be fun, but one of the opening bands called Dave and told him they only have about 1/2 hour's worth of material due to personnel changes and such.  My question would be whether it was worth it for them all to drive from NKY to Lexington for a 1/2 hour set?  Who knows.  Dave found a friend of his, Adrea LaRoche, to open along with Javelin Catch and we've expanded our set to include four more songs, so the time will be filled admirably I'm sure.  Oh, the original openers, Shivas Irons, pulled out for unknown reasons.
    Jesus, like it ain't hard enough to get gigs and people are pulling out?  Obviously, I don't know the circumstances, but  it seems strange to me.
    Go Colts and we'll talk again soon....

January 14, 2007 + "Football II."
    Yowza, those were some games, eh?
    I was a fairly average 2 for 4 in my picks.  I missed both AFC games, hit on both NFC games and really didn't come close on any of the scores.  So, without further ado, my Championship Game picks:
    AFC:
  New England 17 - Indianapolis 27.  It won't come down to Adam Vinatieri's kicking, but it will come down to Indy's suddenly ripping defense and Peyton Manning finding his way with the ball again.  The RCA Dome will rock as the Colts finally deliver a Championship.
    NFC:
  New Orleans 24 - Chicago 23.  It'll be close all the way.  Seattle showed some holes in that Chicago D that had been partially opened in the last few weeks of the regular season and Deuce & Reggie will find their own ways to dance through the holes like Shaun Alexander did.  In the end, John Carney takes the Saints to the Championship.
    And the Super Bowl?  Colts 38 - Saints 12.  Tony Dungy gets the monkey off his back and sends him to San Diego where Marty Schottenheimer just adds another one to his collection.

January 11, 2007 + "Football."
  Okay, so the Buccaneers and the Bengals are both sitting at home right now, thinking about the playoffs instead of preparing for games.  The Bengals, a completely above-average team that had a completely average (8 - 8) season, the Bucs, a completely enigmatic team that had a completely subpar...well...horrendous (4 - 12) season.  So where do I go from here with my football addiction?
    Well, I am a fan of the Colts due to their coach, Tony Dungy.  However, I think they're going to get their caps peeled back in Baltimore this weekend.
    That leaves the San Diego Chargers, mainly for Marty Schottenheimer, the best head coach in the game that's just gotten whipped when he's started sniffing a Super Bowl appearance.  He's sort of like Dan Reeves, except Dan got his whippings in the big game itself.  Both are strange examples - technically exceptional coaches that just haven't gotten there, or haven't won it.  If you were an NFL owner, you'd shoot someone to get either one of them to coach your team, even knowing that they're a bit, well, star-crossed.  Alas, Tony Dungy is very close to falling into this category with them.
    So, with that, here are my picks for this weekend's divisional contests, in case you care...which, if you've read this far, you probably do....
  AFC Games:
  Indianapolis Colts 17 - Baltimore Ravens 27 as the Irsays try to make a quick exit after the game.
  New England Patriots 13 - San Diego Chargers 31 as Marty-ball runs over the Pats' secondary;  Asante Samuel will pick Phillip Rivers off at least once, but it won't be nearly enough.
  NFC Games:
    Seattle Seahawks 0 - Chicago Bears 10 as defense does win this game - set your alarm for 2.5 hours after kickoff so you can quit snoring and do something else.
  Philadelphia Eagles 38 - New Orleans Saints 35 as it turns into a shootout that David Akers wins in the final seconds.

January 5, 2007 + "Randumbness."
  Welcome to my first journal entry of 2007, and it will truly be some dumb stuff.  Random stuff.  Yes, truthful stuff.  Important stuff, too.
  Meet Cleaver Theatre got some great P.R. in being mentioned in an article on horror hosts in Rue Morgue magazine, a digest on Horror in Culture & Entertainment.  See page 23 in the November 2006 issue where our mention is.  There's also a great pic of our buddy, Count Gore de Vol.
  The Silent Screen has finalized our first gig of 2007.  It'll be on Saturday, February 3rd in Lexington, KY.  Rather than being at a club or beer hall, we're doing an all ages show (awesome), booking a local YMCA hall.  It's all music, baby.  We're playing with Shivas Irons and Javelin Catch.
    It was nearly 60 degrees in our part of the world today.  Global warming not a truth, huh?  Things aren't changing, huh?  Can't tell anything about weather except for the last 80 or so years, huh?  News flash:  ice cores and such can give a ton of information on atmospheric gases going back thousands of years.  While the environment does shift and there have been ice ages and such, never in our planet's history have things shifted this drastically over a few decade's time.    The industrial revolution and our greed and arrogance are dooming future generations.  Moderation is, and always has been, a key to good, sustained life.
    I wish politicians would just cut the b.s. and say what they mean.  The one gentleman that swore his oath of service on the Q'uran a few days ago, well, why would anyone want him to swear his oath on a book (the Bible) that he does not place his faith and belief system in?  What is the point of that?  Contrary to one elected official's statement, and darn me for not writing his name down, the country is not based on the Bible, though I admit and admire its relevance, but rather the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  Sorry, folks, but that's the way it is.
    The Q'uran that he swore on, by the way, for those that didn't know, was one of many non-Christian theological texts owned by and donated to the Library of Congress by Thomas Jefferson.
    Music is a frustration and a love.  My playing saddens me lately.  The more I practice, the sloppier and less inspired I seem to be playing (and writing).  Sad.
    Yet, here's the conundrum:  feeling versus being.  I feel that way.  Is it true?  I'm far too close to the action to know for sure.  I am objective and, thus, biased.  I see, I hear, I feel and (I think) I know.

December 21, 2006 + "Found It!!!"
    About a year and a half ago I lost my wedding ring.
    Absolutely, beyond any reason or search, lost it.  Even rented a metal detector and scavenged the front yard in case it had slipped off or fallen from my pocket while I cut grass or some such thing.
    Tracy wasn't angry, but I was.  Obviously.  I was going to take some savings and replace it, but didn't, and we'd talked about it several times that, sure as anything, as soon as we replaced it, it would turn up.
    So, time passed.
    A couple of weeks ago, she gave in and told me that she was getting me a new ring for a Christmas present.  How could I say no, especially after so many fruitless searches and time passing.  We went and picked it out, an exact duplicate of my original.
    One of her Christmas presents this year is a new chaise lounge for her office, replacing the two chairs she'd had.  The chairs had seen some wear and the lounge is much nicer in there.  My folks, who are redoing their lower level (very, very nicely, I might add), wanted the chairs for their rec area down there.
    The chairs had been in our garage for a couple weeks and Tracy wanted to clean them thoroughly prior to me taking them up today.  I didn't think they needed it as we'd kept them up while they were in the house, but she knows best in cases like these.
    You can guess where this is headed by now, right?
    No?  Okay, here's the punchline.
    I was moving a few odds & ends into the garage for storage over the winter and, on a pass back to the house, Tracy stood there smiling at me.  She'd been using our small hand vacuum on the gold chair.
    "Guess what I found?" she asked.
    I knew before she told me.  I knew it because we'd just replaced it.
    "I was vacuuming and heard a kerplunk, popped open the vacuum and...."
    "I don't want to see it.  Don't wanna...."
   "Hold out your hand," she said, smiling.
    My ring.
    It had, somehow, found its way into the depths of the gold chair.  Now, in all fairness, though both chairs had been searched very well, it is an old chair and, as with many old things, holds many mysteries.  One of which it gave up prior to going to live with my parents.
    So, I now have two rings...a slightly beat up one to wear to work and a new, shiny one to wear the rest of the time.  Same size and everything.
    In other news, I'm turning into my paternal grandfather.  He had a habit, more like a ritual, of taking a handful of pills prior to lunch.  Vitamins.  He was on no maintenance medications.  As far as I know, he hadn't seen a doctor in years prior to his passing in 1995 at age 83.  But a handful of various colours and types of pills.  He could name 'em all off, dosages and what they were & did.
    I've taken to my ritual prior to bedtime, but it's so darned similar that its eerie.  Now, in all fairness, three of my pills are actually prescribed maintenance medications.  The others, though, are things I've picked up along the way, the newest being pycnogenol.  It just struck me tonight that somehow, some way, I've probably inherited this from Grandpa.
    I haven't seen my father's pill-taking lately...I wouldn't be surprised if he's doing it too, though.  We're all the same apple in a lot of ways.

December 18, 2006 + "Down & Dirty."
    Current Reading:  De Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens & Annalyn Swan
    Current Listening:  Warts And All  by The Silent Screen (live demos), The Secret Of Elena's Tomb by ...Trail Of Dead and a variety of songs & recordings from the sixties featuring my friend, John Reynolds
    So I left band practice last night feeling awful.  I'd played terribly, sung worse and just generally had a bad night.  We verge on art/noise rock sometimes, so in spots it wasn't obvious, but in others it was pretty blatant...head knows that the next note is a G, soul feels the G coming, fingers know they're supposed to go to G...alas, they decide to go all bebop & avant garde and go to C instead.  In some cases, not a huge deal.  Where it happened, though, ugliness.  Sheer ugliness.
    Better to happen in practice, though.  Our next gig is February 3rd in Lexington, a show that Dave's coordinating.  Not in a bar (thank god), but an all ages show.  Further details will be posted here and in various other places as they solidify.
    Had another visit to the coolest eye specialist around, Dr. R., on Thursday and came out smelling like a rose.  Third year in a row with no worsening or proliferation of my mild diabetic retinopathy <insert "whoo-hoo" here>.  Living right has its advantages.  My average HbA1c for 2006 is 6.1 <insert another "whoo-hoo" here>.  Cholesterol is better than, I would daresay, most of you reading this.  Not to brag on it, but my tendency is to be high there and I've been way, way under my marks for a good long while now.  All in all, my only issue is my weight, which is a constant source of amusement, frustration and enigmatisation.
    The book I'm reading right now is a biography of Willem de Kooning, one of my favorite artists, along with Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Georgia O'Keefe and H.R. Giger, among others.  Fascinating story, and I'm just to his mid-twenties, not even really into his heavy work stages.  It's artists like him, like Mark Strand (poet), like Tony Levin (bassist), like David Torn & Adrian Belew (guitarists) that fascinate and inspire me with their yearning and learning and experimentation.
    Speaking of experimentation, I had my identity horked.  Somehow, some schlub in Europe (I assume) snagged my credit card number and started doing tap dances with it in the Netherlands and Sweden, the no good bastard.  I've diverted all available police from Scotland Yard that weren't working on the Suffolk Murders to go in and take the dude (or dudette) out and handle it with extreme prejudice.  Accounts have been canceled and alarms raised...may the scumbag(s) rot in a cavernous tomb filled with the bile of a thousand horned demons while listening to Bette Midler sing The Rose to a backing track recorded by Menudo.
    And on that happy thought, in case I don't post again till after, Happy Holidaze!

December 4, 2006 + "Feeling Poorly, Medical Blues."
  So I awaken this morning at my usual time, test my blood glucose...200 mg/dl...not good.  Check my insulin pump infusion site and...hmmm...the tubing has come out of the quick disconnect fitting.  No signs of a struggle.  It's as if the glue or whatever holds the tubing in the plastic QD just let loose.  Again, not good.  Top that off with a sinus headache the likes of which are seldom seen in these parts and it felt like a day to burn my last vacation hours of the year, which is why I'm writing this now.
    So I put in a new infusion set and plan to call the manufacturer later today.  Things like this just can't happen.  I figure to just be 200, it must have just popped off within a couple hours of when I got up, but regardless, it can't happen.
  The Silent Screen had practice last night and we tightened up a new song, originally titled Long Walk Downtown but now changed to Crack The Mirror, I think.  I generally only recycle plastics, paper and aluminum, but the lyrics are recycled from a long, long time ago.  They were worthy of keeping and reworking and they've finally found a home with some music Tom started at last week's practice.  The hitch?  It's actually pretty much a pop song.  Not that Epilogue, another newer one isn't, but this one is pop & basic through and through.
    We all like it, but we all felt kind of dirty...like we weren't trying to stretch out enough on it and make it extraordinary.  But, then, sometimes simple is simply extraordinary.  Sometimes simplicity says what an odd time signature can't.  It's certainly far from lowest common denominator rock, that's for sure, and that's enough for me.
    Then, sort of to make myself feel better, I started playing a circular rhythm on bass...can't tell you a definite time signature because, well, it'll depend on how you choose to count it *smile*...and started working some of Dave's words into it...one extreme to the other, one of the very coolest things about this band is that we can run from one end of the playing field to the other in mere moments and still sound so good.
    Off to take another advil migraine and go back to bed.

December 1, 2006 + "Almost There."
  Current Reading:  Ghosthunting Ohio by John B. Kachuba
    Current Listening:  So Divided  by ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Empire by Kasabian and Commemoration And Amnesia by Patrick Jones
    The book listed above was a whim, sort of.  Tracy and I were at a local bookstore and I was browsing and saw the title, flipped through the book, was intrigued and decided to get it, then looked to see who'd written it.  Lo and behold, I know the guy!  Very strange.  John used to run the Artsapalooza festival in Loveland, OH, which a couple of my previous bands had played at and that I'd done some poetry readings at.  Super guy and a great author, as is his wife, Mary Newman.
    The new ...Trail Of Dead album is pretty darned cool, as is the Kasabian.  Patrick Jones is the brother of Nicky Wire (Jones) of Manic Street Preachers and a highly regarded author/poet in the UK.  Good luck finding the disc if you want a copy...it took me three months to finally get mine, but well worth the wait.
   Riddle me this, Batman:  so the new representative from Minneapolis, who is Muslim, wants to put his hand on the Q'uran during his swearing in as opposed to the Christian Bible.  People are raising a stink.
    To me, silliness.
    The point of the book is to have an object of faith that means something to you, not to promote or affirm A FAITH.  It's about you swearing to do your best, or to tell the truth, and swear or affirm it by something that means something to you.  In that sense, let the man use the Q'uran.  If it were me, I'd want Dark Harbor by Mark Strand.
    And that brings up something Tracy and I wondered...if you're Jewish and you have to testify, and they ask you to put your hand on the Bible, do you swear to tell only half the truth, since part of the book holds no weight to you, or do you ask for a copy with just the Old Testament?  I'm not joking, by the way...I really want to know an answer to this.
    December is upon us too.  Holidaze.  Gifts.  *sigh*
    But I'm tired and, since the weather went from 64 degrees upon my waking at 5:00 AM this morning to 34 degrees by 11:00 AM this morning, I feel an early night is called for.
 

November 20, 2006 + "Thanks...Yeah, Thanks."
    Current Reading:  nothing!  Magazines, while I await my new book.  TBC.
    Current Listening:  Manic Street Preachers - Everything Must Go 10th Anniversary Edition, Nicky Wire - I Killed The Zeitgeist and James Dean Bradfield - Great Western
    For those of you not familiar, Nicky Wire and James Dean Bradfield are the bassist/lyricist and guitarist/vocalist of Manic Street Preachers.  I'm finding both of their solo albums, recorded this during during a hiatus from MSP, to be very intriguing, mainly because, if you put them together in a blender, you'd get the Preachers.  They're very, very different albums.  Nicky's is very much a spoken word, avant garde thing and Bradfield's is very much a melodic, classic song-based dish.  Put them together with Sean Moore's percussion and you have MSP.  Very cool.
    Okay, for NFL fans, why is it that everyone pronounces Kevin Kaesviharn's name correctly, but it seems no one can pronounce my name, Kaeff, correctly.  Dig the first three letters...K - A - E...pronounce it as Kay...then add F - F to it and you have...RIGHT!  Kaeff!  Very good, everyone gets a gold star and a lollipop.  Kevin Kaesviharn, a safety for the Cincinnati Bengals, is pronounced the same way, just with a different ending.  And I've not heard anyone, even the potentially illiterate Dave Lapham (Bengals color announcer on their radio broadcasts), mispronounce his name as Kossviharn or Keesviharn.
    Bastards.
    One of the reasons I'm not reading anything right now is that I just finished reading Stalin by Edvard Radinsky.  Plowed by it.  Hit by it.  Disgusted by it.  Weirded out by it.  Struck by how often the doings of the tyrant Stalin seemed to hit close to home because of how our country, the USA, is run, or has been run for a while now.  Even going back beyond 2000.
    Breed fear.  Cultivate fear.  Kill.  Allow them to be killed.  Be the saviour.  But always have them fear.
    *sigh*
    Anyway...if I don't write again, Happy Turkey Day folks!

November 14, 2006 + "Jackie Coogan."
    Watching the DVD's of The Addams Family I can't help but be struck by how, if anyone had any sense, they should have cast Ed Hamell from Hamell On Trial as Uncle Fester in those movies.  And the movies sucked.  Badly.  If your name isn't Astin, you're not going to be playing Gomez.  Sorry.  And I really think the only person that could've played Fester is Ed.
    Anyway....
  The Silent Screen is moving right along, writing some very interesting and varied stuff.  We make the most of our time, that's for sure.  I can't wait to record again, actually, and coming from me that's certainly saying something.  I generally hate recording.  To the point that I'd rather not even demo stuff on my own, just keep notes and throw stuff out occasionally at practice.
    Work is going well.  Strange, eh?  All it takes is a positive presence in charge and things can turn themselves.  It's still up to the work, and hard work is good work because now it's progressive work, as opposed to work for work's sake.
   I need to rearrange my office.  There's barely room to walk, much less hook up my effects and gear and actually learn more about my new delay toy.  I hate that I accumulate so much stuff.  Not crap, mind you, but stuff.  I'd much rather live a very spartan existence.  A couple posters on the walls, books and instruments, my computer.  But it grows from there.  With a computer, you have discs & paper.  With instruments you have other gear.  With books you have more and more books.  Ugh.
    Ah, but the election, huh?  Democrats heading for power.  'Pubs trying to sneak some last lashes with the whips.  Bush going back on what he want back on what he went back on when he said x, y and z.  And all the political banter now is about how can the 'Pubs get power back as opposed to how can the Dems take power.
    You see the correlation there?  Power, babies, power.
    Ain't no right, only power.
    Ain't no truth, only power.
    Ain't no elections, only entertainment.
    It can change though.  It can.  I truly believe that.
    And even with a change in "power," I'm not changing the chorus to one of our new songs:
  There's nothing like a child for a president
        There's nothing like a congress full of miscreants
        There's nothing like ignoring all the warnings
        And there's nothing like a nuclear winter to cure global warming
  (c) 2006 The Silent Screen: Lyrics: Kaeff  Music: Kaeff/Baker/Chapman  Published by Diabolical Kitten Publishing (ASCAP)

  Because, you see, they're all still miscreants, just more of one colour than the other.  Sound like I'm untrusting?  No, no, I trust in our system.  If I see change, perhaps the words will change.  Doubtful.
    I feel like Kevin Carter.
 

October 27, 2006 + "Culture Of Fear."
    Nothing like some conservative talk radio to spark a riot, y'know?
    Actually, just some anger in me.  It happened by accident.  Scanning through Sirius on our way home from a nice dinner out, we came across the Michael Reagan Show.  Yes, Ronald's son.
   During the course of about five minutes of the show, wherein he touched on Michael J. Fox (Parkinson's Disease), Rush Limbaugh (reaction to Michael J. Fox) and Ronald Reagan (the media and his Dad), he referenced "the Left" more than a dozen times regarding what "the Left" wants us to believe, how "the Left" is using Michael J. Fox and how "the Left" is leading our country astray.
    Can someone tell me who in the hell "the Left" is?
    I'll tell you who it is.
    It is a fucking figment of some public relations firms' dreams, a ghost, a chimera meant to give people a carrot to chase as they round the track pulling the rich one percent of America behind them.
    Just like "the Terrorists."
    There are groups of terrorists, yes.  But a War On "Terror"?  A war on a nebulous, smoke-filled idea that has no empirical basis in reality?  How in the hell can we allow that to happen, much less to believe that such a war, such a fiction, can be won?  A war, my friends, must be specific.  Just like a shot from a gun.  If you're just firing willy nilly into a cloudy haze, you may hit something, but chances are you're simply going to stir the echoes of some type of idea of reality, not hitting anything tangible, while you instead bump your head into walls of your own creation.
    "The Left," the "War on Terror," "Family Values" and things of that nature are images, ideas and scenes from fiction.  There is no hard truth in any of them.  Even if you're liberal (Left?), chances are you're conservative on some thing, like your money, perhaps.  But the splintering caused by hacks on the radio and television has endangered this nation and our founding principles.  The only side we all need to be on is our side.
    Just as the Marxist ideals and Communist hope faded after Lenin's October Revolution due to the need for the Bolsheviks to retain power, our freedoms are fading with each new political generations' need to gain more power, money and self-image.  And each euphemism we give to things that do not exist as tangible, real groups is another nail in the coffin of liberty.
    Am I part of "the Left"?  Probably not.  More a middle-of-the road guy, myself.
    Am I a "Terrorist"?  Some might say so, after reading the above, but I don't think so.
    "Family Values"?  Brothers & Sisters, if you have family values, you're probably sick like I am right now.
    We need to get our shit together, cut through the lies, get an air gun and a big compressor, blow the clouds out of the way and take down the puppet masters that are running those two-bit theatrical smoke machines because our view needs to be clear, especially come November 7th.

October 14, 2006 + "Random Stuffins"
    Just some random thoughts and stuff....
    As for the baseball postseason, I am and have been supporting Detroit for a couple of reasons.  First, they had traded for Sean Casey (1B), a former Red, and one of my favorite players.  Second, Jim Leyland.  Third, what a turnaround the franchise has had.  It's good to see that old English "D" winning games.  And with Magglio Ordonez's walkoff homer tonight to win the American League Championship, well, it's all good.
    Football?  The Buccaneers' age on defense has caught up with them.  I think they can right the ship and end up 8 - 8 if they pull some things together, but I fully expect Cincinnati's Rudi Johnson to make like a freight train through gauze tomorrow against the Bucs' front seven.
    Music?  Ah, music.  The band toured a local studio last Wednesday and, yowza, what a facility it is.  It wouldn't surprise me to see them have more and more national & international artists come through for sessions.  Fantastic place.   We're in the process of writing and honing new material, looking for gigs and such.  Possibly with an eye toward recording again in early '07.  All good.
    And, alas, I have to say that I just don't like Wilco.  I've tried.  Really, I have.  I'm sorry Tom *smile*.  I do like the drummer's work and some of the other stuff on the live discs I've borrowed, but I just can't get into it for some reason.
    I do, however, like Mute Math.  I like some John Cale stuff that I missed early on - Paris 1919 is a great album.  James Dean Bradfield's solo album, The Great Western, is superb.  Radio 4 is cool.  I wasn't going to pick up R.E.M.'s latest collection of their IRS Records years (as I already have all those discs), but I found a copy with a bonus disc of some really nifty outtakes, live and demo stuff, so I did.  The new Muse album is fantastic.  I'm recently taken with The Call, another band I missed out on years ago.
    Enough for now...back to watching baseball, playing with a new pedal and other stuff around the house....

October 1, 2006 + "Who?"
    I wonder sometimes who I am, exactly.  And what my purpose is, exactly.
    Can I define myself without music?  No.
    Can I define myself without writing?  No.
    And yet, these omnipresent things in my life are barely noticable to most people that know me.
    Then there's the definition of "know" to deal with.
    And mortality in general.
    I love the autumn not only because of the chilled temperatures, but for the questions it raises.  As the season winds down into winter, so does life and these questions are begged.
    Who am I and where am I going?

September 19, 2006 + "Belief System."
  So, for the first time in a long time I see a light of hope where I work.  I shall not say more for it is not prudent, but let me just say that things are getting better and I'm thankful for it.
    And to our president and Iran's president, I have this indictment:  children.  You're both children.
    "I'm not going to his speech at the U.N. - he's a poopiehead!"
    "Well, I'm not going to his speech - he's a dork!"
    Of course, that's not what either said, but you know it's what they both meant to say.
  Points:
    - it's not any of our business if Iran has nuclear weapons...if I lived in the Middle East, with all the screwed up, power-hungry nut jobs over there, I'd want the biggest damned bombs I could get my hands on too.
    - we've got the bomb(s)...why shouldn't they?  Israel's got them, too.  If I were Iran, I'd want them just to attain the same thing that kept the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. on an even keel, that being mutually assured destruction, baby.  Oh, Mr. Oppenheimer, whatever your dream actually was, in reality it was simply mad, man!
    - it's all about oil, baby.  In the end, it's all about oil.
    - and money.  Black gold, Texas tea.
    Let's get back to some basics.  First, violent struggle leads to violent struggle.  Wars solve nothing except to a) make money for those in the correct industries (ie Dick Cheney), b) thin out the herd (because we're so overpopulated) and c) make for good television.
    To me, none of those three is a particularly good reason.
    Second, a war on terror.  I'm more and more stunned by this.  Generally, when one wages war, one attacks a defined, solid force.  Not a nebulous, potentially highly fictionalized entity.  And if it is actually a war on terror, are we and our "coalition" also targeting the IRA, Hezbollah, etc.?  Or is it just those terrorists we tend to think are in Afghanistan (an area necessary for potentially profitable oil pipelines and such) and Iraq (which has no WMD's and had no ties to al quaeda but, somehow, was a terrorist once they outlived their usefulness as a pawn to use against Iran)?  Oh, and Iraq has lots of oil.  Lots of oil.  And Halliburton (again, see Mr. Cheney) has the connections to feed our troops and rebuild oil equipment and, wow, they don't even have to win a bidding process.
    If I seem to be down on everything, I am.
    And the more I read, research and discover, the more futile it all seems to be.  I feel like I'm living in an ant farm.
    I'd give anything for another Thomas Jefferson or Che Guevera today.

September 6, 2006 + "A Few Days Away."
    It was on September 28th of 2005 that I officially left my last band, Season One.  Here I am just a bit less than a year from that anniversary, so I figured now might be a good time for some reflection.  When I left that band, amid musical differences and some personality conflicts, I set out a very specific goal of what I wanted my next project to be like.  I posted those ideas (ideals?) on a website for others to peruse.  Here is the thumbnail sketch, cut & pasted, from that site:

  The goal of  The Silent Screen is simple:  eclectic rock music, riff-oriented but with intelligence and soul, not funky or bluesy but with a more progressive bent (think Peter Gabriel meets King's X while John Fogerty & Adrian Belew riff in the background and Hunter Thompson & Christopher Walken discuss politics over coffee)...not a progressive band, per se, but striving to be extraordinary rather than ordinary.
* It should be a place of open-ended songwriting, a place to push the proverbial envelope and hopefully stumble upon some new territory.
* Lyrically heartfelt and poignant, but also with a political edge at times, substantive and diverse.
* Musically challenging, but never to a point of beating someone over the head rather than inviting them into the experience.
* High expectations within the group, but sans ego.

    So I hoped I would find a lot.  For those of you in bands, you realize how difficult it is to find bandmates with just something in common, much less a lot in common.  I was, and am, extraordinarily lucky in this case.  I set out what I wanted in the words above from that website and I got it with The Silent Screen.
    The funny thing is, shortly after I left the previous band, a former member of that band e-mailed and had some fairly harsh words for what I was looking for, essentially saying if these were the things I wanted then I should just do a solo project because I'd never find them.  I was, indirectly, called an egomaniacal, ham-fisted despot.
    C'est la vie.
    In the end, all that matters is that the band I left played a few more gigs and fell apart while I put together The Silent Screen with Tom & Dave and we're making the kind of music I'd dreamed of for a number of years.
    Tom, along with being an excellent songwriter, is easily the most diverse and imaginative guitarist I've had the pleasure of playing with, and that, trust me, takes a lot of different talented folks into account.  Dave, along with being a rock solid drummer, is also intensely creative and always on the hunt for new & better ways to weave the rhythms of our songs.  And that's a bit of a funny thing, because he'd played in that band I left last year (an early version of it, anyway) and we always had rhythmic issues...not so much he and I, but he and the guitarists.  Having played with Dave consistently and written with him for the better part of a year now I can make a firm statement that the issues were not his.
    Again, c'est la vie.
    Here's to new beginnings, creative ventures and good music, eh?
    I'm off to grab some coffee (well, diet mountain dew for me) with Chris and...well...Hunter will be there in spirit.  Maybe Jim Marrs will show up, too.
    Cheers!

August 23, 2006 + "Killers."
    In response to queries, let me just say that I do not care about the dude, Karr, or whatever his name is, that has confessed to killing the little girl in Colorado.  I couldn't care less.  Let the police do their work.  Let the system work.  Leave it alone.
    In response to the whole thing, I offer the following cutting of lyrics from one of my favorite songs of all time, Slash N' Burn by Manic Street Preachers (lyrics: Wire/Richards, music: Bradfield/Moore):
  You need your stars, even killers have prestige
    Access to a living you will not see
    Twenty-four hour boredom, I'm convicted instantly
    Gorgeous poverty of created needs
  (c) 1992 Wire/Richards/Bradfield/Moore

  Those are the printed words.  I always sing gorgeous poverty of reality though, because that's what it sounds like.
    Just think.  We're a culture that makes a pop star out of (self-confessed) murderers.  We make stars out of criminals.  Yet we revile the truly dirty of our kind.  We eat the media and assume that we're getting nutrients, but in reality it's only filler.  Decoration.  Empty faces hanging in hallways of destitution.

August 22, 2006 + "Untitled."
    Even the blind can wage war with their eyes
        stealing pennies from cookie jars and
        upending funeral pyres
        dancing along switchblades
        and balancing dancing dogs and ponies
        upon the next commercial sensation

        the emperor has no clothes
        but the finest linens of an age bestowed with grief
        agony and torture
        and he does revel, does he not?

    Incompetence
    Disregard
    Half-truths
    Alcohol
    Hungover and hoping to make the day
        something more than the subhuman
        waste of normalcy

    Sell, my friend, sell
    And try to convince yourself that you are good
        at what little you do
        while those under you look up
        not in admiration
        or respect
        but in utter loathing
        contempt
        with bile rising in their throats
        and ready to knife your already scarred back

    This is a warning
        not an op-ed piece

 You are the doom
    You are a portent of the end
    You are the epilogue
        to a play that was never acted
        never read
        only thought

    And your bloodshot eyes
        are a curse upon us all

August 20, 2006 + "2006 Politics 101."
    Greetings, class!  Welcome to 2006 Politics 101.  I'm your instructor, Reverend Scot Kaeff.  I'm not a doctor, but I am a recognized Reverend of the Universal Life Church, since 1998, and have a couple of degrees.  You may ask, what makes me qualified to teach an intro to politics class?  I can read and I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about such things.  So, grab your notebooks and travel along with me.  There will be a quiz in the near future.
    We begin with definitions.  It is always helpful to know what you're talking about when you speak.  Many of our politicians today neither know what they're talking about or decent definitions of what they've just uttered, thus the necessity of this.  It may seem mundane, but it shed some light on things to me as I looked these words up.  In alphabetical order and, if you'd like the full definitions instead of my abridged versions, all come from the Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary.  Comments in italics are my own insight on the word/phrase.

  Ad Hominem - 1. appealing to a person's feelings or prejudices rather than intellect.  2. marked by an attack on an opponent's character rather than by an answer to his contentions.
        You'll find a great deal of ad hominem work in political advertisements and grandstanding.  Keep in mind when you listen to a politician talk that the issues are what is important and all else is to be sloughed off.
  Communism - 1. theory advocating elimination of private property; system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed.
  To we in the West, this is anti-capitalism.  Were it not for humanity's inherent greed, Communism might work.  However, as shown in a great many arenas, not the least of which being the former USSR, greed and corruption overtake the grandest ideas.
  Fascism - 1. political philosophy, movement or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized, autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation and forcible suppression of opposition.
  Something not noted in the definition is that Fascism often goes hand-in-hand with the centralization of Government with Business wherein they are combined into the guiding force of all phases of life.  When President Bush calls certain groups in the Middle East "Islamo-fascists," he's taking great liberties with the definition.
  Fundamentalism - 2. a movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles.
  Keep in mind here that the term "fundamentalism," by it's definition, requires a qualifier, such as Christian, Islamic, etc. to guide the truth of the word.  To just say someone is a "fundamentalist" is absurd and begs too many questions, and can be considered an ad hominem attack in most cases.
  Liberal - 5. broad-minded, not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy or traditional forms.
  So, by definition, a fascist couldn't be a liberal.  Sort of.  There are many other ways & means for this word, but it is so often bandied about as an ad hominem attack without any qualification or note as to the actual issue-at-hand, that it is prescient to know the true background of the word itself.
  Lie - 1. an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with the intent to deceive.  2. something that misleads or deceives.
  So, when we were told that the war in Iraq was over and we'd won, it was a lie.  When we were told that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it was a lie.  When we were told that Saddam Hussein, not taking into account his own crimes against humanity in his country, was in bed with al Quaeda, it was (so far as we know) a lie.
  Nazism - the body of political an economic doctrines held and put into effect by the National Socialist German Workers' party in the Third German Reich including the totalitarian principle of government, state control of all industry, predominance of groups assumed to be racially superior and supremacy of the fuhrer.
  Hmmm...interesting, huh?  It seems, sometimes, that at the heart of it all, most forms of government are just minute bits of definitions away from each other.
  Republic - a government in which the supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officials and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law.
  By the definition, and we in the U.S. are a Republic, the power resides with us, the voters.  We elect our officials to govern "according to the law."  So when our officials lie to us, they fall outside the law, right?
  Socialism - 1. any of various political and economic theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.
  Social Security is a socialistic thing.  A good thing, as a nation that cannot take care of it's people is doomed.  And when we begin turning out back on our responsibility to our brethren, here and abroad, it is a slippery slope to evil.  As with Communism, and to Marx & Engels' theories, socialism is the middle ground between capitalism & communism, human greed will lay waste to it.
  Sophism- an argument apparently correct in form but actually invalid;  an argument used to deceive.
  Essentially, this gets back into the area of ad hominem attacks and logical fallacies.  There was a group of Greeks, the Sophists, to whom rhetoric was the key.  To be able to argue and outwit or out-clever your opponent, by whatever means necessary, was to be great.  In modern politics, the stage is stretched thin with Sophists.

    So, class, what have we learned?  I hope that we've learned some true definitions to some very useful words.  Keep the language in mind whenever you're watching the news and such.  Remember, when the Reichstag burnt down, Hitler blamed terrorists and bred fear which he grew into a tree that had little red & black swastikas all over it and it led to a World War.  Fear without question.  Language without question.  It leads to doom.

    To see the truth, one must question everything, for there are very few things that are good to eat right off the vine...most require preparation to be useful.

August 19, 2006 + "Damaged."
    Current Reading:  The Society Of The Spectacle by Guy DeBord
    Current Listening:  Enemies Like This  by Radio 4, Black Holes And Revelations  by Muse,  Pandemoniumfromamerica  by Viggo Mortensen & Buckethead (and many others, including the occasional hobbit) & Lifeblood  by Manic Street Preachers

    Those who have everything are thankful for nothing.
    Those who have nothing are thankful for everything.
        Those who have nothing are thankful for anything.
        - SNK 8/19/06

  Truth Out

August 13, 2006 + "Impulse Buy."
    Current Reading:  The Society Of The Spectacle by Guy DeBord & the newest Rolling Stone
    Current Listening:  Thom Yorke - The Eraser, The Fall - 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong, Nina Gordon - Bleeding Heart Graffiti and Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible
    So we were at a local music/book emporium last night and as I was making our purchase, I made an impulse buy.  I bought a copy of Rolling Stone magazine.
    For most folks, even those my age, an ancient 33, the impulse in that buy would have been Christina Aguilera's tits, which were pushed up and out in a heavily airbrushed photo on the cover.  I, however, barely noticed them.  I was caught by this teaser:  Kurt Vonnegut:  It's The End Of The World.
    Then I noticed Christina.
    So, I must give the RS editors their due in being able to appeal to many different mindsets, I suppose.  And Vonnegut is what/who Vonnegut is.  Contrary to his thoughts, I have always found him to be quite hopeful in his ability to humorously point out the obvious faults in human character and do it with a wry grin.  Is it the end of the world?
    Yes, obviously.  And for many of the reasons he points out in the short article.  But is there hope?  Sure, if there is a revolution, or several, against industry, against governments, against so many things.
    But I worry about myself now.  Am I getting old(er) and less able to grasp onto the ephemera that so makes like a fun roller coaster ride?  Probably not.  I'm chalking it up to having needed a nap....

August 6, 2006 + "Interesting Stories (linked up)."
    Not much on my end to say...just read this stuff and, if you want more of it, go to www.truthout.org.
    MILITARY WASTE IN OUR DRINKING WATER
    UNNECESSARY PAIN: THE MEDICARE DRUG BENEFIT
  WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION DISCOVERED HERE
    Just some interesting reading for you, dear readers.

August 5, 2006 + "The Masses Against The Classes."
  Current Listening:  Jesus H. Christ & The Four Hornsmen Of The Apocalypse - self-titled debut , Lethal - Poison Seed  and Editors - cover of Orange Crush by R.E.M. (heard on Sirius)
    Random Thoughts:
    - Cuba...there are lots of folks who've come from Cuba and settled in the US that hate Castro.  Fine.  But let's get a few things, I think, straight.  The political system instituted after the revolution that brought Castro to power is better than what was there before (unlike the US in Iraq, there was a plan in place, sort of).  Cuba has a higher literacy rate than the US.  Cuba has problems with poverty not because they're lazy (they're not), they have no commercial ability (they do) or anything like that, but mainly due to embargos levied against them by the US.  We, our government, is as much a part of the problem as anything in that country itself.  And you have to admit, for a guy who's survived hundreds of assassination attempts unscathed, Castro has done pretty darned well.
    - Iraq...John McCain...wack-a-mole...hilarious.
    - Working Together...I find myself often, in some situations during the week, wondering why some people would rather listen to themselves blather and not make things better than to listen, communicate, come to a joint, workable resolution and get things done.  Why some people choose to scream when listening and assessing makes more sense.  And why the one(s) who try to do these things generally get painted as the bad guy(s) (i.e. me).
    - The Silent Screen...debut e.p., A Wrong Made Right, is out on Tuesday, August 8th.  Pick it up here.
    - Singing...god, how I loathe my singing voice.  At least right now.
    More later...gonna go read the paper or something...or mail out more promo kits...or play a bit...or write...yahoo, baby, it's the weekend!

July 25, 2006 + "Customer Service."
  Current Listening:  James Dean Bradfield - That's No Way To Tell A Lie (single), New York Dolls - One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This  & The Twilight Singers - Twilight, As Played By The Twilight Singers
    Customer service is an odd thing, I think.  One's vision of customer service is generally tinged by both the task/commodity at hand and one's own expression of how they would perform a task in a given situation.
    To wit, when I stopped at Dairy Queen on Sunday after band practice to grab a quick bite while on my way home.  I'm not proud of it, but I was hungry (apologies to Bill Hicks...at least I didn't stop at Waffle House.)  I waited in an extraordinarily long line at the drive through...five minutes...ten minutes...slow moving...finally got up to the window to the one teen that was working the station.  My bill was $4.96.  I handed him a $5.00 bill.  It took two minutes...and, yes, I was keeping track at this point...to come back to the window and hand me a $1.00 bill back.
   Before I could say anything, he whipped around to the piles of bags & cups on his counter, apparently orders made by his comrades-in-arms to hand out at the window.  He opened a bag, saw my food, and handed it to me.  Again, no time for me to catch his attention about the change error.  He found my drink, after putting a lid on the wrong one and swapping it out, and handed that to me and turned to his counter again.
    Okay...typically, having worked in retail, I would have valued a customer to bring a $.96 error to my attention.  The young man just didn't give me a shot, though.  Fine.  I pulled away, unhappy, but okay with what happened.
    Low training + low pay + profit-over-quality = things like what happened above.
    Today, on my way home, I stopped to get fuel at a ridiculous $2.99 a gallon.
    I fueled up and went in to get a drink as I was, you may have guessed, a bit parched.
    The one side of the small restaurant/gas station had about seven people being lectured to by a manager or pseudo-customer-service representative about paying attention to the customers' needs, making sure you take care of people in line and so on and so forth.  Meanwhile, the lady behind the counter nearly botched my easy order by scanning my diet mt. dew twice, looking over at the lecturer the whole time, having to fix that and giving me a look like I was making her late to her wedding by asking for lottery tickets (at this point, I couldn't resist making her life a bit more hellish than it already was), and then nearly tossing my money back to me and wandering back over to the customer service god in the corner.
    Now, what I wanted to do was to go over and just sit down until the dude recognized me and then give him a piece o' the ol' noodle.  However, I don't think the issue was the woman who checked me out.  I think it was his problem, and the company's problem.  That woman's expectation was to pay attention to the lecture, not work.  Work was secondary, which is fine to some extent.
    However, when there are several other gas stations within a tenth of a mile, every customer counts.  Right?
    And as long as I get extra change back, why not go to DQ.  Right?
    Why do I do a lot of my shopping online?  Because most online retailers always send a confirmation e-mail that thanks me for my business.  There's no traffic.  The change is always (well, usually) right.  The change doesn't get thrown back at me.
    Customer service...the golden rule, amigos.

July 15, 2006 + "We Deserve What We Get."
    Current Listening:  Muse - Black Holes And Revelations, Berlin - The Best Of Berlin, Hamell On Trial - Songs For Parents Who Enjoy Drugs and The Twilight Singers - Powder Burns
    Since the U.S. never really declared "war" in Afghanistan or Iraq, let's just cut the crap and say that World War III is starting in Israel & Lebanon, okay?  Just get it out of the way right now.
    George Carlin had a good point:  we can't complain too awfully much about our politicians.  We voted for them.  Granted, sometimes in very close, sometimes very (il)legal election processes, but we voted for them.  They're the best we can, apparently, do.
    So Iraq, and I'm trying to get my head around this, was a preemptive strike against a country that we thought has weapons of mass destruction aimed at us or our allies and we found none of this to be true.  Now, preemptive strikes are illegal.  They are, folks.  Unless there is serious, for the record let's call it probable cause, that an attack is imminent.  For example, were Japan (and they can't as their standing army is defensive only) to attack North Korea after the recent missle launches, that could be, most likely, taken as a viable preemptive strike.  What we did?  No.
    And you know what?  You know who's caught in the middle?  Our soldiers.  Not us here at home.  We can support or protest all we want but we're not the ones getting shot at.  That's the shame in it.  And how many congressmen's sons or daughters are fighting over there?  Hmmm?
    I do support our soldiers and not our government.  And I can, contrary to popular (mislead) belief.  Know why?  Once a soldier is sent to do a job, they do it regardless of politics.  You can't play politics on a battlefield.  Your allegiance is to your comrades and your unit.  You have a job to do.  Simple.  Whether the job is wrong or illegal is not pertinent to the job being done.  It's your life on the line.
    Anyone have a line on how much money we've paid Halliburton for, well, pretty much nothing?  Kellogg, Brown & Root, too?  While we're at it, what was our budgetary status, as a nation, when Clinton left office compared to now?  Hell, compared to two years into the Bush administration?
    I just wish we could turn back the clock and change some things.
    The human race, with our egotistical views that we're superior to the world instead of a part of it, that our religion (insert yours here) is better than that other group's, that money is the only good...we've gone too far.  Maybe our insanity is a product of nature that will lead to our downfall so that some other species can come behind, clean up our mess and do a better job of evolution.

July 3/4, 2006 + "America The Gray."
    Okay, as Tracy said tonight, An Inconvenient Truth , the documentary on global warming by Al Gore, has a flaw and that flaw is that, unfortunately, it is preaching to the choir.  My response was that, well, for the most part, yes, but the fringe percentages that may have no had an opinion or care may be moved to rethink their fence-sitting, and a small number of people can create big change when moved by a righteous or moral cause, which this one is.
    I could go on a rant against mainstream media, or politicians, especially those currently in office in our nation's capitol.  I could, but what's the point?
    The point is this:  scientists agree, and this goes beyond the film and into articles from several noted sources doing independent interviews with scientists who, to a person, agree that the film has all of it's science right.  Scientists agree, so it matters not what a politician, who is bowing to lobbyists promoting an oil pipeline through their state, thinks.  The hard facts are there.  There is no gray area.  It is truth.
    And, by god, the truth hurts.  But not as much as it's gonna.
    I remember when I was a child, I loved spring until it got hot & muggy.  And I adored, absolutely adored, fall.  The leaves falling, the season change into a chilled air, starting to see your breath in the morning waiting for the bus.  But somewhere in there, the seasons quit coming.  Winter turns to summer pretty darned quickly.  Fall?  Ain't no fall.  Eighties to forties pretty darned quickly.  And we're the cause of it all.
    By-products of the Industrial Revolution:  global warming, greed, big industry, disloyalty to workers, death of the skilled tradesman, slave labor, profit-over-everything ideologies, drought, pollution, waste water, the theory that it is okay to shit where you eat (as in, treatment of sewage?  Ha!  Just flush it downstream to the poor section of town!), etc. and so on.
    Big oil.  Big companies.  Big corporations run by small men with people who believe them to be worthy of trust.
    I think it's like Moses parting the Red Sea, to speak in biblical terms.  Had he not believed that it was possible, had he not had faith that it could happen and was indeed happening, the waters would have flowed back upon him and those that followed him.  But that faith held the waters back.  If we quit believing that we need to drive cars like we do, that we need these plastic containers and sporks, that we need to put our lives on the line for causes we don't understand, perhaps they'll disappear, to borrow from Douglas Adams, in a puff of logic.
    Oh, and pardon me for using the puff of logic reference in the same paragraph as a biblical reference.  I shan't mix them ever again.
    Perhaps, as Mr. Gore states in the documentary, it is just a matter of small steps.  Baby steps.  But, as Tracy asked, have we reached the tipping point, as noted in a book of the same name that she just read and that I've begun?  Are we past the point of no return?
    I want beauty, not more cars.
    I want clean air, not stronger plastics.
   I want polar bears to have ice floes (spelling?) to rest upon.
    I want the truth to get out there so that the criminals that have caused the destruction of our planet have to pay.
    And if it means occasional brown-outs, more expensive (but cleaner) cars, hydroelectric, wind & solar power?  Fine by me.  Just no nuclear power...the tipping point there is so much closer to level that it's just scary...just as people around Chernobyl, or the ones that are left.
   I'm willing to pay the price to clean up the earth and  our, as humans, act.  I'm not, however, willing to bear the cost of political regimes that will not ratify the Kyoto Accord and whose goal in office seems to be this:  gain power - take more power - use power to create fear - use disaster & "terrorism" to cause more fear - take more power - use power to con people into supporting a war and utilize citizens who joined the armed forces to defend our country & freedom to go to foreign lands in illegal actions to take control of some of the last usable oil fields on earth so that the profit goes right here (with here being the pockets of big oil companies.)
    Or maybe I'm just paranoid.
    Like all Americans should be.  When freedom is your goal, a little paranoia isn't a bad thing.
    Happy Fourth Of July, folks.
    Use your freedom well.

July 1, 2006 + "Amateur Logician."
    "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."  -  Voltaire
    "A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."  -  Edward Abbey
    These are two of the thoughts/quotes that begin a book I'm reading called Patriots Act  by Bill Katovsky.  The premise is pretty simple and, strangely enough, covers ground with a show we watched last night on the polarization of the American political scene that was hosted by George Stephanapoulous.
    We, as a country, are so quick to judge.  So quick to take to task.  So quick to point a finger (or gun) and not listen.  Not communicate.  Not care.  And we're so very afraid to truly speak our minds.  We're so quick to throw out a few ad hominem attacks (attacking a person/group as opposed to their stance and/or argument) instead of communicating about the issue at hand.
    And it is a dangerous path that has brought us to where we are.
    I'd made a joke yesterday when talking with Tracy about "...now, I'm only an amateur logician, but...."  Essentially, going after someone that uses false logic, or no logic at all, but paints all they do as truth.  I think much of our problem(s) comes back more to education than human weakness & willingness to follow the leader.  If you know the true premises of an argument and can follow the reasoning that lead to the conclusion, you're much more willing, if necessary, to follow a leader or decision.  If you only know, for example, that you've been taught that the bible says X is bad, then you follow blindly and are not open to other ways of thinking, for example, other cultures' ways, and it leads to separation, anxiety and, ultimately, pain.
    Have you ever heard a man or woman scream about something "the bible says..." and just asked yourself where, exactly, in the bible it says what they're hollering about?  Have you ever heard a politician say something about "the danger here is..." and asked yourself where the danger really is?
    As my Dad taught me when I was fairly young, you can't just blindly believe.  You have to find the truth for yourself.  Faith in your god is necessary, don't get me wrong, but that is faith in god.  To blindly follow a church or icon or human leader...that takes some investigation & earned trust.  To blindly follow a politician or government is against what America's founding fathers had in mind, considering where they came from.
    As we head into our national holiday, remember that dissent is as American as apple pie.  For, as we all know, the first patriots were all traitors first.

June 29, 2006 + "First Shot."
    Current Listening:  Gomez - How We Operate, Manic Street Preachers - Lifeblood  & Warren Zevon - The Wind
  A question:  what is the difference between Iraq invading Kuwait and the U.S. invading Iraq about a decade later or, in a more important way right now, Israel setting about invading Gaza/Palestine?
    Why are we assuming we're the good guys, or that our "friends" are the good guys?
    Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm not being anti-U.S. because I truly believe in our country and the basic foundational principles of it.  But, alas, we are so far from those principles, it seems, today.  Not that our founding fathers really had "equality" in mind, but they left our foundational tenets open to new ideas that they knew would evolve.
    Not devolve.
    My concern is this:  when posed the question, "Do you think this is the start of World War III?" earlier today, my response was, "I think that by the time anyone realizes that it's World War III there will be no one left to realize that it's World War III."  Or, we'll use rocks on the other side, as a great man once intimated.
    My heart goes out to U.S. soldiers fighting rich, oil magnates' wars in foreign lands, to Palestinians whose houses are being bombarded because they live in a land that is ruled by Hamas at present, to Israelis that have dealt with suicide bombers for so long that they are as common as humidity in a Kentucky summer, to Iraqis that aren't quite sure what the hell's going on, to families torn asunder by the greed that rules the world.  But my venom goes out to the leaders of every nation and creed that is causing the world to teeter on the brink of oblivion...all the beauty in the world, unfortunately, cannot hold you back.  And I weep for our weakness as commoners.

June 20, 2006 + "Daze Off."
    Current Listening:  Keane - Under The Iron Sea, Gomez - How We Operate and Pink - I'm Not Dead
  I took a "personal day" from work today.  "Personal" days, where I work, are when you have "personal" things to do and call in, not sick, but for those reasons.  Not vacation, as vacation is scheduled ahead of time.  Anyway, I took one.  Took one for the team, team me, and got some unforeseen errands done.
    Alas, the Carolina Hurricanes took the Stanley Cup last night and again kept a Canadian team from bringing the hardware home.  Shame, it is.  But there's always next year.  I'm picking Ottawa to win it all.  Maybe.  Or, perhaps, my Florida Panthers (yes, I know, they're a U.S. team...pardon me for having my favorites).  *sigh*  Hockey.
    And for anyone who says hockey, or soccer, is boring, I defy you to not be on the edge of your seat for either any of the Stanley Cup final games or any of the World Cup soccer (football?) games.  A yellow card to you, if you said you weren't, or a two minute game misconduct.
    Off to listen to some tunes, have dinner and watch a film or something.

June 18, 2006 + "Good Things."
    There are some good things going on.
    First, Edmonton won game six of the Stanley Cup Finals, forcing game seven and giving me (and all of Canada, I assume) hope that the Cup will finally go back north of the border for once.  And to be won by an eight seed?  Awesome.  They outhit and simply outplayed the Hurricanes in game six.  Well done.
    The Silent Screen, along with being on the homestretch with our e.p., put together two new songs this week, which will be honed to razor edges over the coming weeks.  Epilogue, which is actually the epilogue to Feed My Tragedy, a song that will be released on our e.p., and Pripyat, whose lyrics were written around the time I was reading about Chernobyl.  Both came about very quickly...'twas quite exciting, I must say.
    Work is work, but homelife makes up for that.
    Work on the new book, I think, is going to take a dramatic turn thanks to Bunny's assistance.  Rather than just a book, more of a multimedia project, encompassing the book and audio and video productions to go along with it.  Much planning needs to be done, but it should be excellent when completed, if a bit late.  But, hell, it was due two years ago.  I feel like some bands that, before you know it, have five to eight years between albums.  Strange that in the seventies some bands put out two albums a year.  Ah, but the quality always suffered, I think.

June 4, 2006 + "Nuclear Reconciliation."
    Let me just say one thing:  If I were in charge of Iran, with the furor over their nuclear program, I would have just one thing to say to the "international community" over the whole thing.  It is this:  if you make Israel give up their nuclear weapons, then we won't make any.  Until then, sorry, but we're talking about the defense of our nation, the same thing that the U.S. talked about prior to invading Iraq.
    What's good for the goose is good for the gander.  Mutually Assured Destruction only works if everyone has a button and they're willing to potentially use it.
    And just so I don't seem unpatriotic, let me say this, too:  the fact that anyone in the world is still using nuclear power or is thinking about the proliferation of nuclear weapons (or some cockamamie "missile defense shield") makes me shudder in my sleep.
    Let's get past oil and start using decent energy...which, had we thought about it decades ago, could have already had its foundations in place.
    Let's get past forcing our hand on other counties...oh, wait...it's because the U.S. still believes in oil, like much of the rest of the world.
   Let's start thinking compassionately.  We're not all the same.
    And for our Secretary of State, could you give just one, just one, straight answer?  I thought Bob Schieffer was going to reach across the table and smack you on Face The Nation this morning and, to be truthful, you'd have deserved it.

June 1, 2006 + "33."
  Current Listening:  Matchbook Romance - Voices, Motorhead - Rock 'N' Roll and Rush - Signals
  Current Reading:  MASH: An Army Surgeon In Korea  by Otto F. Apel, Jr., MD & Pat Apel, Shades Of Glory: The Negro Leagues And The Story Of African-American Baseball and, of course, still finishing the Chernobyl book
    My birthday was yesterday and I am, alas, officially 33 years old.  I realized recently that I am the oldest member of my band, The Silent Screen.  This is a continuing trend, of sorts.  For many a moon, I was always the youngest in my bands.  Then in the middle.  Now I'm the eldest.  Am I just getting old or am & still playing a young person's game?
    As if it were a game *smile*.
    Been working on promotional pictures and a variety of other things, cover art and such, getting much invaluable help from the mad scientist, Bunny.  Tough stuff, this graphic-type work.  Far too frustrating for me, I daresay.
    Coolest birthday presents, thus far, were a couple of gift certificates to an online vendor that were spent within mere moments of the e-mails being opened.  The first two books in my "current reading" section were gifts from Tracy, along with a couple of other very nifty things.  One of the coolest was a new hat...for the Montgomery Biscuits!  They're a minor league baseball team and their logo on the hat is a very, very happy, dancing biscuit with a slab of butter for a tongue, orange sneakers and big ol' bulging eyes...utterly fantastic!  I can't wait for the exclamations of, "what the *%$& is that ?!?"
    Not much more to say at present.  Wrote two new sets of lyrics on Wednesday night, too.  One, entitled Pripyat, is an offshoot of my reading(s) about Chernobyl and radiation sickness and, really, what a sick world we are living in.  The other, entitled Swallow The Ocean, is about wanting so much, wanting everything, experience-wise, the goal being to swallow the ocean and eat the world...but coming to a realization at the end of the song.  No music yet, just words & melodic ideas.  And damn, there are a lot of words in Swallow The Ocean...either going to have to write crib notes on my bass or convince Tom to sing it *smile* if it works it's way into The Silent Screen's grimoire of good music.
    Until next time....

May 28, 2006 + "Photo-Grapple-Me."
   Current Listening:  Angels And Airwaves - We Don't Have To Whisper, The Secret Machines - Ten Silver Drops and The Dresden Dolls - Yes, Virginia
  Current Reading:  still the same...took a detour & read the novelization of the new X-Men film, which means I don't have to see the film now, because the film will invariably suffer in comparison to the book, which happens all the time.
    We're taking some more band pictures tomorrow, in preparation for the impending release of A Wrong Made Right , and there is very little trepidation.  We took some photos a few months ago and at least have some idea of who we are now, visually.  Three very different folks *smile*.  But that's part of the good of The Silent Screen.  We're copies of each other.  Part of the fun too.
    Tomorrow will go easily, I'm sure.  Not like past bands and the horror...the utter horror...of taking band pictures.  Generally these events are just gruesome.  The only fun one, I think, I ever had was a day with Feelin' Crystal back in, oh, 1994?  And it was fun because, well, image-wise, we were all pretty much on the same wavelength.  Of course, that was a band in which image was something of a matter what with the music we were playing.
    The Silent Screen is much more, well, eclectic and, to be blunt, uncaring for trends or styles.  Don't get me wrong, Feelin' Crystal was a trend unto itself, but we were attempting to fit into a sort of subculture too.  And failing, but making damned good music along the way, I think.  Retrospect...gotta love it.
    As Dave (drummer extraordinaire) said tonight, not meaning to give our band a tagline but doing so anyway, "It's not geek music...it's just music made by geeks."  Too right, mate.  And proud of our geekdom, by god.
    And when you think about it, anyway, band photos are always just advertisements, more than anything.  If you were to have looked at a promo photo of Hanoi Rocks, you'd have thought they were all transsexual miscreants that probably couldn't play a note in tune.  You'd have been only partially right...they did have the occasional tuning issue.  And damned good songs.  King Crimson?  You'd think they're all humorless, utterly serious musicians.  And be only partially right.  Adrian Belew & Trey Gunn were pretty jovial.  From what I hear, Mr. Fripp (I don't dare call him Robert) has a knife-edged sense of humor too.  And they are, indeed, serious musicians.  With some, what you see is what you get.  Marilyn Manson.  Britney Spears.  Madonna.
    Touche, pussycat.
    (Couldn't resist the Tom & Jerry reference.)
    Anyway.  Unsure what we'll get tomorrow, but you'll likely see it posted sooner rather than later...be afraid...or, well, not.

May 24, 2006 + "Justice & Tools."
    Current Reading:  Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexeivich & Welcome To The Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut
    Current Listening:  Band Of Horses - Everything All The Time, King's X - Ogre Tones & Bering Strait - Bering Strait
  Flipping through channels just a little bit ago, I came upon one of those news magazine investigation programs regarding online predators.  Now, don't get me wrong, what these folks are doing is utterly abhorrent, but what happened to the very basis of our legal system?  That is, innocent until proven guilty.
    Regardless of the fact that, of course, these people are guilty, I don't believe it right to broadcast their names, their jobs, what their families are like and their commentary nationwide.  As if they wouldn't be pariahs anyway, and deservedly so, this is nothing but criminal entertainment, a network giving idiot viewers a chance to say, "Look at him, Martha, dumn son of a bitch is gettin' what he deserves...where're the kids?" under the guise of a "public service."
    I have no defense, nor would I want to give one if I had it, for the schmucks that got suckered into these dragnets, but I also feel compelled to say that it is abominable in much the same way that a major network will create a show such as this and do it in this fashion.
    And I have come to the conclusion that I don't like Tool.  The band, that is.  Are they great musicians?  Absolutely.  Good music?  Yes, indeed.  I just can't dig the words, what I can decipher of them.  The only other band I know of that buries a lead vocalist's track(s) so far back in the mix is, maybe, Def Leppard.  I just can't take it.  Other than that, the production, even on Tool's newest, 10,000 Days, is good.  I just can't get behind (to quote William Shatner & Henry Rollins) the vocalist/vocals.  Blah.  Boring, man, boring.
    And, of course, the final test was while cutting grass this afternoon.  I tried, folks, I really tried.  Couldn't get through three songs before I had to take a break and change to something more...well...better?
 

May 17, 2006 + "Schlock & Maw."
  Current Reading:  Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexeivich (it's taking a while...hard to read much in one sitting.
    Current Listening:  Living With War by Neil Young, Yes, Virginia by The Dresden Dolls & Self-Destruction Blues by Hanoi Rocks
    So I voted on Tuesday, after work.  A couple things occurred that some distance has made make more sense.  I got there and the two older ladies, volunteers, asked what party affiliation I was so they could find me in their book & have me sign my name.
    The fact that I'm Independent blew their minds.
    It took them about three minutes to find the place in the book.  Then another couple minutes to figure out whether I could vote at all (there were a couple primaries, but also several actual, hardcore elections so, yes, Virginia, I had a right to vote.)  Then did I want to use the "old" machine or the "new" machine.  Different voting booths. Hell, I think Diebold made both, so who cares?  I made my first vote and asked for the old version.
    Then I spent several minutes while they figured out how to set it up for a "radical" Independent who has no use for political parties, action committees or, well, politicians, really.
    I finally did indeed get to vote.  Yahoo.  I feel so American, baby.
    But I had also noticed that both the older ladies and their younger (middle-aged) counterpart had looked at me oddly upon my entrance, and then it got weirder as the aforementioned chaos ensued.  I didn't realize until later that the hat I had chosen to wear on Tuesday was my Canada national hockey team hat.  Cool, eh?
    So here's what I think their thought process was:  "independent?  huh?  can he do that?  what's that hat say?  hockey...Canada...Canada hockey...but we're in Kentucky...oh, lord, myrtle I think we have a terrorist (tara-ist in Bushspeak) here...oh, what will the girls at the bingo hall say?  he's gonna throw hockey pucks at us!  or make us listen to Bryan Adams!  oh, lord, please save me...just shove his communist butt in the booth!"
    *sigh*
    So, anyway, there you have it.
    As my counterpart, Emergo, says, "...trust the gubberment, folks, trust 'em...they're only trying to take care of your money for you!"

May 15, 2006 + "Ground Zero."
    Current Reading:  Voices From Chernobyl  by Svetlana Alexeivich
    Current Listening:  Aqualung by Jethro Tull, Yes, Virginia by The Dresden Dolls & Baby Animals by Baby Animals
    The Silent Screen is nearing completion of a six song e.p. and, with that, is in full swing in the mixdown, acquiring cover art (currently in the capable hands of Mr. Bunny) and trying to figure out our photo thing, as in getting decent pics of us.  Lots to do and be done.
    And the band's taken so much time, well, the time I haven't wasted that is, that the new book, which seems to be an old book to me, by now, though it hasn't seen the light of day as yet, has been shelved for another little bit.  2006?  Maybe?  Here's to hoping, eh?
    Quick thoughts:
    - if George Bush were still a drunken frat boy, a lot of what he says and does would make sense...as he's (apparently) sober, I have a hard time with a lot of it.
    - workers' rights, citizens' rights...how about human rights?  So many battles to fight....
    - how about them Reds?
    - consciousness doesn't begin with breathing or knowledge, it begins with compassion.
    - music has a healing power beyond the physical.
    - cats are one of God's greatest creations.
    - so are basses *smile*.
    - and owls.
    - and women.
    - and bratwurst and/or hot dogs at Riverfront Stadium (R.I.P.)
    Contrary to my diatribe some weeks ago, I'm sort of back in baseball mode, though I must admit to being somewhat depressed overall about the game anymore.  But, then, all it'll take is one trip to the stadium and all the wrongs will be righted.
    Hmmm...a wrong made right...sounds like a good e.p. title, huh?  *hint, hint, nudge, nudge*

April 30, 2006 + "Critical Mass."
    Current Listening:  Yes, Virginia by The Dresden Dolls, Gimme Fiction by Spoon & Live After Death by Iron Maiden
    Current Reading:  Voices From Chernobyl  by Svetlana Alexeivich
    Many days since an update and, honestly, very little to carry on about.  Political things are running amok, as they have been for a number of years now.  Fuel prices are clipping the $3.00 mark so that, once they get back down to $2.75, everyone will be happy for that and not think about the fact that $2.50 was average just a short time ago.
    We're an easily pleased society, y'know?
    Tracy went to a retirement dinner for some professors from her college a few nights ago and told me that one of them had noted in his talk that we're one of the only places in the world where you can discuss how bad things are while eating a $20 steak dinner.
    Too true.
    I'm troubled by a lack of belief in much anymore.  It has infected my writing, too.  Most of the things I used to cling to have fallen, died or been driven away.  The few things I have left are treasures and I value them, perhaps, far too much.  Detachment, or at least some form of it, is necessary.  But where to draw that line?  When beliefs and reality hit, and the rubber hits the road, do you move on or do you sit there with your tires squealing, thinking that you've been duped?
    I'll bet George Bush wonders the same thing...the smell of burnt tires around him must be nauseating.

April 21, 2006 + "What Is It Worth?"
  Current Listening:  Yes, Virginia by The Dresden Dolls, John Reynolds by John Reynolds & Big Slow Mover by Phil Cody
    Current Reading:  ain't readin' nothin'
    There was a Skyline Chili restaurant just across the street and slightly down the road from our house and it has closed, for some reason.  We are somewhat heartbroken.  We don't eat there as often as we did when we moved here, but for me it was a little bit of home (Northern Kentucky) in the midst of cultural myopia (Central Kentucky).  And it is gone.
    Now, some may call me crazy, but about a year ago there was a movement, I believe by the Baptists around town, to get Skyline to quit serving beer and they threatened to boycott the restaurant, especially their after-church ventures there, if they didn't.  Skyline caved.  Skyline is now closed.
    I don't believe that the beer drinkers pulled enough cash flow from there to cause them to have to close.  I think their location, alas, was somewhat bad and, well, who knows what else.  It's just a shame.  Now the only thing close to us is a Popeye's and, well, I'm thankful for that even if I can't eat there very often (dieting, wonderfully, makes you want certain things less than you normally would if you do it right.)
    And another thing.  I have no more patience for middle-of-the-road bullshit.  I used to be able to handle some lowest common denominator stuff, but lately it actually makes me physically ill.  In music, literature, the evening "news" where a child missing for an hour is somehow a big story.  I've often stated that poetically I try to bring the reader up to a level rather than talk down, but also strive to not alienate someone with "poetic convention"...something of an oxymoron, right?  Up or down?  Highbrow or lowbrow?  Somewhere where everything makes sense, how about that?  Certainly above your average MTV fan, but not so high that only other poets would get it.
    The esoteric few can kiss my ass, essentially.  But so can those that aren't willing to put forth some effort of their own.
    Regular radio?  Can't stand it.  Regular music?  I'm slowly causing my CD collection to dwindle by giving away or selling things that, for various reasons, just don't move me, mentally, physically or soulfully.  Movies?  Give me a break.  Even the "latest cauldron stirrer" (see previous entry) just made me long for something else.
   Modern life, in an age where media is king and infotainment is the product, where everything is for sale, has come to a point where, alas, I don't want to buy much of anything.  Because so much of it is mundane and trying to find the cream requires drinking much too much curdling milk.

April 18, 2006 + "Good Stuff."
  Current Listening:  Yes, Virginia by The Dresden Dolls, Side Three by Adrian Belew & Resonator by Tony Levin
    Current Reading:  in the midst of War All The Time by Charles Bukowski while also taking detours through various books with characters such as Harry Potter, the Tao, Darth Vader and politicians just as vile (and they're real!)
    I urge anyone reading this to pick up one or all of the above listed musical disks.  All are astoundingly good, eclectic real listening.  What do I mean by real listening?  Not your formulaic, processed, gutted corporate crap records.  Not by any means.  Art.  Musical art.  Stuff of vision, talent and hard work.  And fun.
    I had more to say, but won't because I can't remember...oh, but I can.  I just did.
    Tracy and I, who have subscribed to Netflix (and do enjoy it), watched Brokeback Mountain last night.
    Not a bad film, by any means.  Well written.  Interesting.  Unlike so many people I know and work with, the homosexual aspects of the film had little-to-no effect on me.  It was an affair, plain and simple, and it just happened to be two dudes.  C'est la vie.  Who someone fucks has never meant much to me, really.
    But I had a problem by the end of the film.  These two characters' had an affair that, in most respects, had a very negative effect on everyone else they came into contact with, mainly their direct families.  Now, that is not to say they were wrong.  I don't believe that. However, how they went about their lives disturbed me (and, yes, it was just a story, but bear with me.)  If the characters had been a man & woman, my issue would have been the same.  They were liars and egotists.
    And, alas, in a lot of ways, these characters reaped what they sowed (pardon the quasi-biblical reference.)
   Anyway, good film, disturbing morality not due to the sexuality of the characters - that matters not to me - but to the way they went about their business.

April 15, 2006 + "Saving Time."
    Happy Birthday, Tracy!
    Current Reading:  War All The Time by Charles Bukowski
    Current Listening:  Resonator by Tony Levin and One More Time, With Feeling by Placebo
    Time is such a cruel, cruel thing.  Totally and utterly intangible, except when lost or needed.  Nothing to latch onto, except a clock.  A completely created, human concept.  The passage & change that time denotes is real, but our reaction and classification of it is not.
    And yet it is a controlling factor in everything we do.
    For instance, I think of the hour and forty minutes it just took me to cut the yard.  I could have been writing.  Playing bass.  Playing Madden football.  Reading.  Dreaming.  But I was cutting grass.  That, to me, is an hour and forty minutes of a very, very finite life that was quite wasted.  Now, if I were in the business of cutting grass, like for a lawn service or what I did from age 13 to 16, then it would have been time well spent.
    Time spent?  Sure.  We're whores, as I've alluded to in previous entries many moons ago.  You're paid for your time at work, the time you spend exerting effort for your boss(es).  Not whores in a gross or bad way.  Just whores.  Personally, I'd rather be a slut.  Doing the work for myself *smile* whether I get paid for it or not.  A more fun existence, I think, and you get to choose your subjects.
    But heat stroke beckons me to chill for a bit.  Until next time....

April 5, 2006 + "I Hate Grass.  I Truly Do."
  Current Reading:  Nope, not Crossing The Rubicon  by Michael Ruppert because I FINISHED IT!!!  And I must say, it has changed a whole, whole lot about my current worldview.  There are ugly strains of virus and disease milling about in our ivory towers, my friends and strenght & unity of the commoners is the only cure...alas, we have no strength and unity at present.  But now my actual to-be-current reading is Keep The Aspidistra Flying  by George Orwell, a book I started about six months or so ago and lost (you'd have to know our house).
    I would do a Current Listening post, but I've decided instead to do this.  Y'see, I cut the back grass for the first time this season (yes, Bill, the mower started on the first freakin' pull and I had no trouble with it *smile*), didn't do the front because, well, it wasn't nearly as bad and I need to work back into mowing shape, very slowly.  I loathe grass cutting.  However, between ages 13 and 16, it was how I earned money and, really, how I saved money to buy my first car (a '78 Pontiac Grand Prix...oh, to have that ride again).  But today, I loathe it.
    What makes it passable?  Music.  Yes, I generally have a CD player on my person as I cut.  Turned up ungodly loudly?  Yes.  Yes, I admit it.  So sue me.
    But the music.  The music must be perfect.  Must be an album that will not make you have to hit the "next song" key or have to mess with it at all.  In short, the albums to cut grass by must be good all the way through, no need to fret or have to change.  The flow of the music must be incredible.  The lyrical content must be vibrant and thought-provoking because grass cutting is terribly mundane.  Mix CD's are okay, but they do not count in this list.  Also, based upon your yard, your grass cutting CD's probably will have spots, as mine do, where if you hit a certain song and you have yet to complete, say, the front yard, you know you're slacking a bit.  And so on.
    So here, in no particular order, are my a) favorite grass cutting CD's and b) best CD's through-and-through start-to-finish:
  Everything Must Go  - Manic Street Preachers
  Desire Of The Rhino King  - Adrian Belew
  The Sons Of Intemperence Offering  - Phil Cody (today's pick...got to Scream At The Blackbirds  when I finished the
        backyard, so I'm behind, timing-wise.  And I missed Tighten Up, which sucked.)
  Live After Death  - Iron Maiden
  Cracker  - Cracker
  Billion Dollar Babies  - Alice Cooper
  Discipline  - King Crimson
  1916   - Motorhead
  any album  - Warren Zevon
  Edge Of Thorns   - Savatage
    etc. and so on...as the spring turns to summer turns to fall (not nearly soon enough for me), I may add some to the list.  I'd also be interested in hearing yours...if you have one that I have in my collection, I may give 'er a try.  Till next time...yeah.

April 2, 2006 + "Mr. & Mrs. Smith."
  So one of the stations on Sirius, 1st Wave, had a full weekend of The Smiths/Morrissey to, I guess, attempt in their own small way to get The Smiths to reform.  Obviously, it won't work.  And that's fine.  However, I must say that I'm much, much more fully in-tune with The Smiths than I ever truly wanted to be.  My previous assessment still rings true:  they had one song that stuck in my memory (How Soon Is Now?) and that remains, however it was Love Spit Love's version, which is nearly a note-perfect copy except with...darn...can't remember the vocalist's name, but him singing instead of Morrissey.  Nothing against The Smiths, as I recognize their talents, but I didn't particularly dig much of anything I heard.  And I was a bit upset...Sirius 1st Wave played all The Smiths stuff and a ton of Morrissey stuff, but I didn't hear any Johnny Marr and the Healers songs.  Granted, they've only put out one album, but come on!  Or any of Andy Rourke (was that his name?), the bassist's stuff.  He's done other stuff besides The Smiths.
    I think, upon further review, that Morrissey actually paid someone off to play the stuff as a promo to his new album coming out.
   Payola = crapola.
  The Silent Screen began, or continued, recording tonight.  Continued since we have one nearly done from weeks and weeks ago that came out of a jam that Tom and I had.  Tonight we worked on Scream  and got the basic tracks down.  Onward we go.  Plans are for a four-song e.p. introduction to the band.  ETA, well, depends on progress that is pending.  I'd say soon.  Vague, but still hinting at completion.  The great thing is that we've gotten really good sounds, great drum sounds on Dave's kit, Tom's guitar sound today was strong and my bass, well, it's my Tobias, but not straight into the board as has become the custom.  A few pedals in between now, though just the "vintage" Peavey Chorus in line tonight.
    My back is killing me though.  It started hurting about three weeks ago, just below my right-hand shoulder blade, about an inch out from my spine.  Just a nagging, wretched throbbing pain.  And stretching, pain killers, nothing fixes it.  Dulls it just a tad, but that's all.  Perhaps I should see a doctor.  Well, maybe, but not tonight anyway.
    Joy.  Work tomorrow.  Grind.  Dig.  Go.  Collect some dough.  Buy more gas.  Drive.  Consume, damn it, consume.
    Eeyore strikes again *smile*.

March 26, 2006 + "Blocked."
    Writer's block.  Anger.  Frustration.  The Dark Side, these lead to.  Open, you must be; feel the flow of the Force, you must.  Trust in skills, you must.  Do.  Or do not.  There is no try.
    Sorry.  Channeling Yoda in an attempt to clear my writer's block.
    I've always found writer's block to be absurd.  I never used to get blocked.  I used to fill notebook upon notebook.  Granted, much of it was not worthwhile as far as use in song or poem, but the exercise, the display of the synapses firing, of some creation taking place, it was worth it for that, if that alone.
    Or, maybe I've focused too much.  Tom came up with a super cool chord progression and I've been pummeling myself trying to come up with something for it.  I know how it makes me feel, what it conjures in my head, but it hasn't produced yet.  I did rework lyrics to a song from a few years ago that I adored then and still do, called Long Walk Downtown but I need to, if time permits, see how they fit overall at practice.  It works in my head, but that's happened before with disastrous results.  Ah, but the creation, that effort, is the key, right?
    Sure.
    Current Reading:  take a guess...I'm damn near finished though.  Mike Ruppert's book has so much freaking information in it that I end up reading a few pages or a chapter and then hopping online to confirm, research and dig in further.
    Current Listening:  I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning by Bright Eyes, Are You Thinking What I'm Thinking? by The Like and Fear Of Music by Talking Heads
    I think I'm sleeping in on Sunday.  I'm actually writing this at about 11:45 PM on Saturday and assumed it wouldn't be posted till after the day turned to morning, hence the date above.
    Can't focus anymore.  Can't concentrate.  I feel like a dry well.
    Watched Million Dollar Baby tonight too.  Good movie, very good.  Very depressing ending, but at the same time I liked that a lot because, really, the last thing it needed was a Rocky-like coda.  Many messages in the film.  That Clint Eastwood...Dirty Harry really was just the surface, wasn't he?  And Hilary Swank & Morgan Freeman?  Could've had the three of them read the phone book and given them an Oscar or two.  But that's just my opinion.  Add Christopher Walken and you've got the best film foursome I could pick.  It's a good thing I'm only in film in the background and as a skeleton, huh?

March 22, 2006 + "Catastrophe."
    So I was sitting at work today, typing away and lost amid the mundanity, when a thought occurred to me.  "Why," I asked myself, "do I care so much about this stuff?"
    A few possibilities:  an overwrought and obviously high-strung sense of responsibility?  That it is simply my job and what I getpaid to do?  That I care?  Alas, it is each of these and more.  Sometimes, I suppose, I simply give too much.  Care too much about the things that do not deserve such care, or that others don't care as much about.
    Either way, it is blatantly unfair and I need to turn the tide and reorganize my caring.
   Current Reading:  (still) Crossing The Rubicon by Michael C. Ruppert
    Current Listening:  Brandi Carlile, Rilo Kiley and the Butthole Surfers
  The UK government's chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, said the new data highlighted the importance of taking urgent action to limit carbon emissions.  "Today we're over 380 ppm," he said. "That's higher than we've been for over a million years, possibly 30 million years. Mankind is changing the climate."   courtesy of fromthewilderness.com
    We have a government where the Pentagon has admitted to more than $3 trillion missing from the Defense department. $59 billion (in one year) missing from HUD and that was 1999. Social Security has been tapped at least three times since 9/11. No one ever seems to follow up to see if the money is replaced. Pension funds have been looted from Enron to the Federal Government. As with oil, the game of catch up never seems to get paid. Still we spend and consume. Still we expand and grow. No one is accountable and the people just blithely accept the promises that the money will somehow come back.
    No matter how it is couched or who assures us that “it’s just a loan” this is just plain stupid and I haven’t yet figured out who will be ultimately more responsible. The liars who “borrowed” the money or the fools that lent it. A snake eating its own tail is not nutritious.  --- Michael C. Ruppert
    Those two quotes will give you an idea of the things I've been thinking about lately.
    And as much as I try to figure out a way to make it better, the more I figure that there isn't a way.  So I just try to write a song, and it depresses me.  So much frustration.
 

March 15, 2006 + "Shoot All The Clowns."
    Current Listening:  The Terror State by Anti-Flag and Palomar III  by Palomar
    Current Reading:  (still) Crossing The Rubicon  by Michael C. Ruppert
    Still in a bit of a mood.  Still pretty confused and disgusted with politics (lies).  It is one thing to be told something, or to read something, and another altogether to research it on your own and find it to be true.  To find that those you trust (government) have lied.  Outright lied.  For power.  For gain.  For personal protection.  The founding fathers gave us democracy...if we could keep it (was that Jefferson's or Franklin's quote?)
    We haven't kept it.
    We lost it around the time of the Industrial Revolution, which made it far to easy for far too few to attain far too much.
    Not that I'm advocating denouncing the use of microwaves, cars, electricity or nuclear weapons, but maybe just toning it down a notch or two?
    And another thing.  ABC News had a reort tonight about Saddam Hussein's trial and they made a comment about Hussein being less-than-cooperative.  Yeah, are you surprised?  Put yourself in his shoes.  Would you cooperate?  Knowing that you're one of the last oil-rich countries in the world and you've just been overtaken by big money.
    Oh, by the way, the dystopians were slightly wrong.  The Man's name ain't Big Brother.  It's Big Money.  Oil Money.  Texas Tea, baby.  Mmm, mmm.
    Good night, and good luck.

March 11, 2006 + "Okay, Maybe...."
  Okay, maybe I freaked out a little bit too much with my previous entry.  Admittedly, it was a rant, somewhat lacking in actual direction or control.  However, that's what losing faith will do to you.
    You see, regardless of one's own belief, people "in the camera eye" are indeed role models.  Whether they like it or not, whether we like it or not, it is true.  Perhaps even subconsciously, and especially for the less matured folks (read: children & the easily influenced), people like Barry Bonds, Pete Rose, George Bush, Bill Clinton...they're looked at as achievers, people that have done the right things and made it to the "top," as it were.
    So when we find that they're liars, theives, treasoners, it makes the fall all the more difficult.  And ugly.
    Civilization is headed toward haves and have nots.  And the have nots will suffer greatly at the hands of the haves.  And it didn't have to be this way.  It still doesn't, but enough people have believed in false heroes, lived in their cloud of idol worship, and never known any truth, that I think it may very well be too far along to pull out of our nosedive.
    I have faith in myself.  I have faith in my friends.  I have lost faith in our government.  I have lost faith in most of the governments of the world.  I have lost faith in companies that one day tell us there's plenty of oil for decades to come and then pull back their estimated reserve numbers by billions of barrels (ie Royal Dutch Shell a few years back.)  I have lost faith in those that have not directed the world toward cleaner, safer fuels simply because it was the right thing to do, as opposed to what was good for their pocketbooks.
    Humanity has been done in by its greed.  Not singly, not every single person, but as a whole.  We wanted "bigger, better, faster, more" here while others in the world were crying for "something, anything, soon, please."  And we've got it.  At about $2.25 a gallon today.  Remember a while back gas was holding at $1.70 or so a gallon, then with 9/11 and the aftermath, it climbed, fell, climbed, fell and, lo and behold, now we're pretty happy with $2.25 a gallon just so long as it doesn't hit $2.75 again, right?  We got suckered, and it happens every day.
    Me?  I'm writing, playing and living as best I can.  Sitting back, watching the show.

March 7, 2006 + "This Is Gonna Be Ugly."
    Let me just say, if you're offended by coarse language, please quit reading now and come back in a day or two for the next entry.
    Current Reading:  Crossing The Rubicon  by Michael C. Ruppert
    Current Listening:  Know Your Enemy  by Manic Street Preachers and With Love And Squalor by We Are Scientists
    Okay, here goes...unbridled fury, frustration and disgust.
    Barry Bonds can kiss my ass.  Ego-driven, megalomaniacal piece of shit motherfucker.  Juiced up neanderthal with a baseball bat.  You have disgraced a game I used to love.  I always feared that it was true and it appears that it was and is.  For shame.  Jackie Robinson would smack your face.
    Pete Rose, I've held off.  I always gave you benefit of the doubt.  You played the game the way it was meant to be played, but your personal life choices cannot, unfortunately, be ignored.  The game mirrors life, and vice versa.  You're a liar and you too disgraced a game I used to love.  Ty Cobb, truly no better than you but at least he, for the most part, respected the game if not his fellow man, would smack your face.
    Major League Baseball...you, all of you, disgraced what used to be a great game.  Greed, childishness, ego.  Granted, driven by Western Society's "bigger, better, faster, more" attitudes, but it was choice, not force, that caused the downfall.  You disgust me.  All of you.
    In short, fuck baseball.
    And the NFL?  You're not far behind.  Granted, your drug testing has been okay.  You've tried.  But again, greed taking control of an honorable game.  Mouths talking but saying nothing.  Children playing a game of dedication while dedicated only to their wallets (and that goes for owners just as much as players.)
    The NHL?  How did losing last year make you feel?  Good luck.
    The NBA?  Ah, who cares?  I hate basketball anyway.
    Our government?  Major oil companies?  Auto manufacturers?  Fuck 'em all.
    And, in truth, all of us...we've created this.  The world today is our Frankenstein.  Jews, Christians, Muslims?  This is our creation, all of us.  White, black, brown?  This is our creation, all of us.  Saint, sinner, apostle?  This is our creation, all of us.  Owner, player, manager?  This is our creation, all of us.  CEO, CFO, working drone?  This is our creation, all of us.
    Silence is complicity.
    Silence is complicity.
    Silence is complicity.
    And, therefore, I hereby scream to damn near all of you:  go fuck yourselves.
 

March 6, 2006 + "Still Chilled."
  Sometimes music makes the most sense.  When nothing else is making sense, when it is all confusing, just putting one of my basses on and thumping around puts things back in perspective.  It is a control thing, yet uncontrolled.  Sometimes it comes, sometimes there is no connection.  And it depends on the bass, too.  My Tobias and I have a special relationship.  When I play it, something very odd, yet beautiful, always pops up.  Something I hadn't expected.  My Spector is a workhorse.  Dependable, agile enough to handle whatever song I choose.  My Dean fretless is new(er) and we're still learning each other.  It speaks a different language, too, so I always tread carefully, but am not afraid to challenge.  My Yamaha has been at my friend, John's, for some time now.  Had some basic intonation work done, but then John's mother became ill and, unfortunately, passed away a few weeks ago.  And then there's my blue P-bass.
    I've had it the longest.  I've written a great many songs on it.  Though it is a four-string, it is still the one that is normally out in my office and that I normally choose to fiddle with and while away practice time with.  It is simple.  Basic.  And it is also a great sounding P-bass.  At one point in time, about ten years ago...well, actually more now, I guess...I had three P-basses and that was my arsenal.  I slowly grew to want (and need) more varieties of sound and branched out from there.    The blue stayed, for both sentimental and work-related reasons.  We understood, and understand, each other.
   I think that friendships, like my relationships with my basses, are the same.  Each comes with a multitude of facets, some on the surface that are easily read, some far below that you don't realize are there until something explosive happens.
    Not that this has happened recently.  I'm merely pondering aloud (in hypertext).
   And winter's chill is back, at least for another day or so, and I am happy about that.  Soon will come spring and grass cutting.  Oh, how I loathe grass cutting.  I'm not sure why, either.  I used to actually like it, the symmetry of it.  It's how I bought my first car, and many other things.  But for the last few years it has been a bane of my existence.  Hate it.  Utterly.  C'est la vie...as with so much of life, like it or not, it must be done.
    But back to music.  After an off week, practice last night was joyous.  Not that I played particularly well, but just playing was awesome.  Didn't sing badly, which is saying a lot.  We're working on some very, very cool new music.  Reworking some of the less-new material.  Striking into a groove.  Good stuff.  Positive stuff.
    Began work again in earnest on the book that has proven to be a strong foe.  Originally typeset and edited down over a year ago, now am adding some newer material and reworking bits of it.  It will be out soon, but I think in a strictly limited edition, probably 100 to 150 copies only and probably doing all of the manufacturing by hand, myself.
   Ah, the challenge of it all....

March 1, 2006 + "Tristellafidellis."
    So, along with the junk word title of this entry, I'm completely baffled by a great many things.  Yet again, focus is my word of the week, it seems.  Perhaps I'm trying too hard.  Can't get decent sounds when trying to rerecord my demo of Res Ipsa Loquitur so I'm thinking that I'll just play Tom & Dave the somewhat off-time, somewhat off-key demo from two weeks ago on Sunday and go from there.  As the theory goes, if it's a good song, it'll come through.  If not, back to the drawing board.  I like it, but I love what it might become in their hands.
    That is to say, I'm starting to see myself as a song starter instead of a song writer.  This is not a good thing.  However, though my bass playing is good, my guitar playing lags quite a bit behind.  I hear it in my head, but my hands, alas, won't cooperate the way I need them to.  And, also, I truly enjoy doing this.  I love planting a seed and seeing what grows.  There have been great oaks & mighty maples and there have been sand scrubs and cacti.  It's the creation, you know, and not necessarily the result...though if your result's no good, you probably don't want to play it live.
    And, at some point, the new book will be out too.  I'm awaiting one of my advance/test copies back so I can read through some notes from some trusted friends.  This new book has been in gestation so darned long...it's like a flower that just won't bloom.  I continually blame the area, but that's not fair, however true it is.  Central Kentucky is just not a poetry kind of place.  Or, perhaps, it is very much me.  I find very little about the area stimulating.  Cincinnati, on the other hand, and Northern Kentucky for some reason got me going.  Again, though, these are weak excuses.  Writers write.  Musicians play.  Singers sing.  Get busy living or get busy dying, as Red said.

February 24, 2006 + "We Do What We're Told."
  Current Listening:  Who Made Who by AC/DC, Mrs. O'Leary's Cow by Tom Baker & John Reynolds by John Reynolds
    Current Reading:  The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout, Ph.D.
    Peter Gabriel has a song on one of his albums called We Do What We're Told and it is subtiled Milgram's Thirty-Seven.  It is something of an ode to the work of one Stanley Milgram, whom I believe you should go ahead and Google right after you read Mr. Milgram's statement here:
    "A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority."
    Now, go Google Dr. Milgram & read about it after I finish my piece.
    I think he's right on.  How often do we, in the course of a workday or when listening to, say, a Presidential address, carry that furor into our lives?  Does your conscience guide you, or do the let the reins slip from your hands in the presence of someone that has "authority"?
    And, then, where does "authority" come from?  Do others take it?  Earn it by the clothes they wear (again, see notes on Dr. Milgram's experiments...appearance matters a great deal)?  Or do we, by our perceptions, assign authority to others above us?  This is not to say that others do not deserve it, mind you.  For instance, as the new band is recording, I freely assign authority on sound and production to Tom & Dave as they've much more experience, much better ears and much better knowledge of the equipment than I.  They are artists in recording, whereas, alas, I am a hack that can barely run a four-track, but is making inroads in computer recording.  As far as copyrights & publishing, I assume I will take the lead due to my experience in that venue.
    As such, assigning and realizing authority is not a bad thing.  No one can be a leader all of the time and we must respect the talents and abilities of others in the situations that require it.  At work, your boss may not know much about what you do, but if you do not offer him/her authority, at least to a certain extent, chances are you won't be working for him/her for very long, right?
    But, where does the moral imperative lay?  For instance, if you're an account and your boss tells you to change the numbers to reflect something other than the truth?  Do you accept that order or realize that, though you've assigned authority to this person, it is simply the wrong thing to do?
    Morality, really, is grey.  Whether your compass is made of religion, of the Categorical Imperative or some other stock, ultimately you must do right by your conscience and your truth.  My response to the above situation would be to say no and not do what was requested of me. Some, though, would go ahead and do it, as most in Milgram's study did, bowing to the authority and giving over to that old excuse of "I was just doing what I was told."
    The problem with that, though, is that no one ever got into heaven on someone else's ticket.

February 18, 2006 + "Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of <insert beverage here>."
    Current Listening:  October by U2, Absent Lovers by King Crimson and Translucent Soul  by Ellis Paul
    Current Reading:  Bagombo Snuff Box by Kurt Vonnegut
    Current Recording:  Res Ipsa Loquitur by me, demo for The Silent Screen
    So I'm slowly but surely working my way into this world of computerized recording and finding that, well, the phrase from The Young Ones was "techno-fear," I believe.  You do something.  You save it.  By god, when you boot the song up again, it should be the way you saved it.  Ah, that is, unless you forgot to hit a certain button.  Well, a virtual button.
    Y'know, I still have my four-track from high school in my closet and I was tempted, at various times today, to pull it out, record the demo and be done with it.  However, I sold some equipment, bought my computer set-up and I'm going to use it.  It's just for ideas and demos, anyway.  Couldn't do anything too in-depth on it unless I were a folk singer and, as Dave Lowery pointed out, the world needs another one of those like a hole in the head.
    Cracker rocks, by the way.
    Anyhow, I got the song recorded but am now faced with the task of mixing it down and setting it up as a .cda or at least a .wav or .mp3 so that it's easily listened to.  No luck thus far.  I know how, based on the help menu in my program that I'm recording with...it's just that it doesn't work.  Or there's another of those little buttons that needs to be activated before I try to do what I need to do.  And if the program will remember my mix automation this time.
    I feel like I'm living in Once In A Lifetime video sometimes when I'm doing things like this..."this is not my beautiful computer...this is not my beautiful guitar...my god, what have I done?"
    All I can really say is this:  thank god for the "undo" feature.

February 10, 2006 + "Mercenaries & Glasses."
  Oh, geez, what a week.  Just got home from a day of an eye doctor appointment (to get a new prescription, not a full exam) and then going to pick out a new pair of frames and get new lenses as well in one of my old pair of frames as a back up.  Travel.
    You see, I went to the eye doctor I've been seeing since, oh, um...well, years.  He's not covered under my insurance, but I have this thing about loyalty.  With doctors, with friends, with lots of things.  My doctors mainly because I'm diabetic, but also because they're great.  I could have picked some unknown from my insurance plan, gone in, gone through the entire exam, explained, in terrifying detail, my eye situation (which is currently excellent...my health is actually darned good right now) and so on.  Wasted time, to me.  So, I said, by god, I'm going to Dr. Shewmaker.  I was in, did the basics, sat down with him and did the "read the line, better or worse?" routine and had my new prescription in about fifteen minutes.  Tracy saw him too, mainly with questions about her light sensitivity and eyestrain from microscope work.
    The coolest stuff?  Tracy does have a very, very minor eye issue which is very easily dealt with.  Something her previous eye doctor visits completely misdiagnosed (or didn't know about), even to the point of prescribing glasses for her.  For the record?  She's got 20/20 vision.  And for me?  I didn't even get charged for my prescription.  Dr. Shewmaker, like Dr. Riemann (my eye specialist) and Dr. Boggess (my endocrinologist), is the greatest.
    Oh, and check this out...rhetorical question, but it stems from a former bandmate's live journal postings of the last couple days when someone took him to task for, well, essentially being an ass:  Why would someone try out for a band that they slagged off in their journal and just didn't like unless there was a bit of a mercenary attitude working?
    I mean, I didn't like the band-in-question when I saw them, but it wasn't that I disrespected them.  I knew they were good musicians, were working hard doing their thing, but that thing wasn't my thing.  And had they lost their bassist (which they did), I would not have tried out to join them (and I didn't).  Actually, that bassist was a large part of why I didn't like them then...dude was all over the place.
    But it brought this other thought to my mind:  We view ourselves in one way, which is reinforced by our peers/friends that support us (as artists/musicians/etc.), but how often is that view in-line with how others see us, the objective masses?  And, off of that, does it matter?  Or, moreso, if you're going to post your thoughts online, where is the line between good-natured criticism and an outright attack?
    Personally, I've been taken to task for things I've written here.  I don't use a "blog" thing because a) I don't like the word "blog" and, b) I don't like the openness of the response process.  People that disagree with, agree with or want to comment on my postings here can (and do) e-mail me.  More personal, better line to the source.
    If you open up your blog to people, you need to expect commentary back.  Signed or unsigned is totally and utterly irrelevant, but I think what stung this fellow the most is that maybe, just maybe, he got a glance of himself in the mirror when reading an "anonymous" response to his journal entry and it stung a little bit.  Which it should have, as it was, in my eyes, quite true.

February 6, 2006 + "Muse-ic."
  There are a few CD's that have made it into my driving hall of fame recently, meaning they've been in my car for months-on-end and don't seem likely to come out anytime soon.  They include The Dresden Dolls by The Dresden Dolls, Lifeblood  by Manic Street Preachers and Polytown  by David Torn/Mick Karn/Terry Bozzio.
    The ironic one there is Polytown.  Ironic in that I'd been listening to a lot of fretless bass (by Mick Karn) and not thinking about it. The Silent Screen recorded one of Tom's songs two weeks ago, The One That Got Away, which is a composition based around an acoustic guitar loop that consists of what seems like hundreds of parts (in reality, um, ten?), hand percussion (Dave) and fretless bass (me.)  Tom and I had talked about the fretless and the two songs I'd mentioned as far as influencing how I hear fretless were Tomorrow, Wendy by Concrete Blonde (with fretless by Gail Ann Dorsey, also famous for playing with David Bowie) and Mutineer by Warren Zevon (with fretless by Larry Klein.)  That didn't even take into account some of Tony Levin's work (another bassist I love.)  And then there's Mick Karn, uber-fretless man.  Strange that I hadn't even thought of him, but there he is.
    And then there's The Silent Screen itself.  I say "itself" somewhat pretentiously, I admit.  I love this band.  We experiment, we write, we deconstruct, we play.  We make mistakes into beauty and turn polyrhythms into dance tunes.  Or something of that nature. I've never been a fan of the "power trio" concept...we're not so much "power" as a trio of musicians with widely varied influences that converge in the most important areas.
    Our big project, or my big project, right now, along with three other news songs we're working in, is the deconstruction of a song I originally wrote in 1996 called Bread, The T.V. & Heaven.  If you go to our EPK, you can hear a version of the song recorded by my old band, Season One.  The song has had two different pieces of music, the original being very much a heavy metal song, the second being akin to what's on the EPK (and soon to be replaced as we record, so hear it while you can).  I have played this song with no less than, um, I think seven different bands.  With each band, it changes somewhat.  Sometimes for the good, sometimes for ill.  I'm a songwriter that loves to have my fellow musicians vest themselves into the songs I bring in.  A musical socialist?
    Anyway, we played through it yesterday and it was okay.  Rough, but okay.  And the music just didn't fit the words, to me, anymore.  The words (also on the EPK) are something of a harangue on organized religion, beliefs and television as a bridge between life and god.
    I think the thing is that, with The Silent Screen, Bread, The T.V. & Heaven doesn't have to be just a rock song anymore.  It doesn't have to be a mildly funky rock tune.  There's room and, I daresay, an expectation of musical depth to mirror the lyrics.  And that is what's so exciting to me.
    And even with that, another of my old (old, old, old) songs has resurfaced again, called The Only One.  Originally written as a pop/punk tune before anyone had heard of Green Day, The Offspring or any of that stuff, it has also transformed many times, but always around the same basic parts.  With The Silent Screen?  More free, much more noise (in a grand way, not just a noisy way) and more true to how I felt when I wrote the words about a girl a sort of dated/sort of didn't date in college and her utterly self-destructive relationship with both herself and her boyfriend (not me, by the way, though I held that position when he was doing things that got to her.)  Before anyone asks, no, I won't name her.  I got a song out of it and, really, what more can one ask for?
    But The Only One has occasionally been tortured too.  Like having had its guitar parts rewritten as some pseudo-ska junk.  Alas, I was outvoted in that band as to the viability of the ska stuff.  Was it ironic?  Were we making fun of it?  Were we making fun of the song?  What was the point of turning it into ska other than that it was easy?  Did it reflect the words?
    Um, no.  And I grew to hate it, which is why I was glad when it resurfaced with The Silent Screen and how we're playing it.
    And here's another thing...Bread, The T.V. & Heaven and The Only One?  Been playing them for nigh on a decade and I almost, almost remember all my words.  Which just means that new stuff like Drone/Defile, Feed My Tragedy and Res Ipsa Loquitur should be well entrenched in my brain by, oh, 2016.
    Oh, and for anyone that watched the Super Bowl halftime show and thought The Rolling Stones were good...get a grip.
    Next year's halftime show?  I vote for Motorhead doing Orgasmatron going into Fly By Night by Rush and ending with them getting together for a rousing rendition of Search And Destroy by Iggy & The Stooges.  Actually, I just want to hear Lemmy and Geddy Lee sing together...that would be worth the price of the Super Bowl ticket alone!  More fun for less money too!  You get two bands for the price of one...The Stones had six people and Motorhead plus Rush equals six people! It could be a freaking supergroup!  MotorRush, or RushHead, even!
    Damn...call the publicists...we're freakin' on to something here....

February 5, 2006 + "Super Bowl Thoughts."
  Some somewhat random thoughts on Super Bowl XL:
    -  If Jeremy Stevens had caught his passes (he was 2 for 5), Seattle would have had a better chance.
    -  If their kicker, Josh Brown, had hit his field goals (he was 1 for 3), Seattle would have had a better chance.
    -  If they had run the ball more consistently (first half - 21 passes, 11 runs), which is how they were successful for the entire season, really, Seattle would have had a better chance.
    -  If Matt Hasselbeck (QB-Seattle) and Mike Holmgren (Head Coach-Seattle) had had their heads on straight at the end of both the first half and the second half, Seattle would have had a better chance.  As it was, they made Herman Edwards (former NY Jets, current KC Chiefs Head Coach), a great coach but someone that is not known for his end-of-half togetherness, look like Bill Walsh.
    -  My man, Joe Jurevicius, had a good day.  Alas, he, like Mike Holmgren, is 1 - 2 in Super Bowls (lost with NY Giants, won with Tampa Bay, lost with Seattle).
   -  But, sadly, I do feel good for Jerome Bettis.  I loathe Pittsburgh, but Bettis always seemed like a good, genuine guy with a deep love for the game and the team concept and I'm happy for him.
    It's going to be a long offseason.

February 2, 2006 + "Cartooning."
    I love the fact that so many people in so many places over the last few days have apparently gotten irate over political cartoons attacking radical Islam and the U.S. military and Donald Rumsfeld and so on.
    Here's the great thing:  those cartoons have done what they intended, which is they have gotten people talking.  They're all little Guernica-like pieces of art.  It is beautiful.
    And I'm waiting for someone to take on Ford.  The Super Bowl's in Detroit, Ford is laying off thousands of employees and here's Bill Ford or Tim Ford or whatever the dude's name is pandering to us on a commercial about how up-to-date Ford's R & D is and how they're top-of-the-line.  Note to Ford Motor Company:  lay off the commercials, lay off the naming rights to arenas, lay off the silliness and get back to making a quality vehicle and maybe, just maybe, profits will get back up.  If you're Coke, make Coke, by god.  If you're White Castle, make White Castles, by god.
    Everything goes to hell when Ford buys arena rights, White Castle starts making fish sandwiches and rock bands make movies.
    Do what you do and do it well.  If you can do that, everything else should fall into place.
    Speaking of doing what you do, how about Donald Rumsfeld everyone?  Battle-tested.  Road-worn.  A model of military leadership, that guy is.  I'm sorry, but if I'm the president, I'd like my secretary of defense to have some ribbons on his chest.  Leave the politicking to the politicians.  In that office, you need someone that truly realizes what he's going to be getting his charges into.  A president is only as good as his cabinet.  'Nuff said.

January 31, 2006 + "State Of The Union."
  Okay, now I grant, I did take a shower in the middle of the State of the Union address tonight, so I can't comment on everything, but there are some things I would like to say.  If you're not up for socio-political manifestos, turn away now.
    Freedom is not something for everyone.  Liberty is not something for everyone.  Republics or democracies are not the best for everyone.  To attempt to push our way of life, our political way of life, that is, on other nations is cold, callous and cruel.  It is thoughtless.  It was not forced upon us in the 1700's.  It came about due to a need, a desire here.  Not in other countries, though some felt the pull.  If nations choose democracy, we should aid them.  If they do not, we should be open to working together.  If they can survive and prosper under other forms of government, barring genocidal notions and brazen cruelty, so be it.
    Hamas doesn't have to disarm.  They won the election.  They don't have to recognize Israel just because we say so.  I'd like them to.  I'd like them to denounce terrorism.  But I don't think they will.  And, in case anyone wants to bet, I would be willing to wager that perhaps a large part of Hamas winning that election was due to fear of the United States.  Smoke that one for a minute and see how it tastes.
    Why, and this is the hundreth time I've asked this, are we allowed to have nuclear weapons and no one else is?  It's called M.A.D. and it's worked for a good, long time.  Mutually Assured Destruction, folks.  Kept the Cold War from actually happening.  Now, granted, some fundamentalists (both Islamic and Christian) might just like to push the button to get closer to God, but I don't think most would.  My great fear is that, instead of reading On The Beach, I end up living it, but we cannot be so hypocritical about the ideas of nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
    Oh, and who on the Democratic side of the aisle thought Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia was a good idea to make the Democrats' response?  That person ought to be strung up.  Condescending, trite and just a poor presence on the television.
    Speaking of poor presence, I think what I truly dislike about President Bush is how smug he looks during the applause breaks.  You're talking about life & death, good sir...act like it.  There was very little in that speach to smile about.  Though I didn't (surprise, surprise) disagree with everything, most of it was disconcerting to me.
    I did notice this too, and it's something that Fox News wouldn't talk about, I'm sure.  Most of the audience members in uniform didn't give full applause.  It seemed much like most of the Democrats, clapping out of respect rather than agreement.  I know a few people whose sons are in the military presently or recently, I know folks who have served in various branches of the armed forces.  A lot of the people I work with have served.  I have the utmost respect for them and their work.  You can support and respect the person and not the job.  I respect all in our military and give them their due.
    However, we are on the offensive, folks.  We're not "defending freedom," we're fighting a war of nationalism and imperialism, trying to, as we were told tonight, spread freedom and liberty through the Middle East.  Get it right.  On 9/11, yes, we were attacked by a group due to our involvement in other nations' business, not because they hated us, but because they hated what our government had been doing and they ended up using the only methods they knew how, much like a bully on a playground, except in this case the playground was the world and a  lot of good, innocent people died.  It is a confusing issue.
    Iraq wasn't innocent.  Neither was Afghanistan.  Lots of atrocity in both.  But has our war been warranted and righteous?  Or smug and greedy.  Granted, we never know it all.  There are always stories behind the scenes.  Maybe if I knew it all, all the background, I'd be on the side of the war.  I do not know.  I just know that right now it seems like the war is about imperialism, ignorance and greed.  And it makes me feel badly, for our nation and for myself.
    I still believe in the United States.  I just don't believe in our leaders, and they are nothing without us.

January 29, 2006 + "Weary."
    I feel a bit ill, but not enough to be "sick."  That is to say, my sinuses are in a mild state of revolt but are being held at bay by various drugs.  My throat is sore, but I think this is more the result of having played Emergo for about an hour and a half last night while lying or crouching behind a bar while shooting for Meet Cleaver Theater.  Since Emergo is a skeleton, I have to be out-of-sight, but close enough to utilize a mechanism to move his mouth & head, hence the crouching and lying.  Emergo's voice can only be described as Redd Foxx meets Lemmy Kilmister (from Motorhead), so you can get some idea of where I'm coming from.
    However, even through the perils and pains, it was a terribly fun time yesterday.  Also, yesterday morning, got basic ideas for a new tune and e-mailed them to my bandmates.  Practice today (in, oh, about two hours) will actually be taken up by recording one of Tom's new tunes and working on other new material.  Some of that new material is, alas, what I wrote about on the 26th, but those feelings have been alleviated somewhat.  Ideas have formed but not gelled yet.  Much depends on the rhythmic strategies Dave employs and I'll slide in between he and Tom and find some place there.  The bass, the glue...ah, music.
    Of course, I'm still somewhat inspirationless.  Feeling more husk than human lately.  I don't typically get the "winter blues" but I think I'm suffering from the up and down of the weather here in the Midwest.  For crying out loud, it's the end of January, it shouldn't be freakin' 60 degress, damn it!  I want it thirty degress and snowy!  At least give my body something to recognize.
    Time to get my gear together.  Pedal case (tune, chorus, overdrive, loop station, etc.), the fretless and the Spector five-string and my other peripherals.  Going to have to make two trips to get my stuff into the practice space today.  Then home to sleep and work tomorrow.  Ah, work.  Yes.  Let's not think about that right now, huh?

January 26, 2006 + "Feeling Minnesota."
    I feel completely lost and bewildered.
    I'm inspirationless and rhythmless.
    I feel like a dry waterfall.
    I listen to some new music and come up with nothing, absolultely nothing, as far as lines.
    Or, actually, here's the real crux of the matter...I'm coming up with nothing worthy of the songs.  Lines?  Sure.  Roots are always there (except in one, which is making no sense at all...I know what I'm being told, but what I'm being told is escaping my ears as a reality of the situation.)  Simple things are there.  But the songs are crying out for more and I'm not answering the call.
    There are many forms of frustration in life.  My worst is having words, knowing what I want to say, but simply not being able to say it.

January 21, 2006 + "Brains & Goo."
    Current listening:  Muse - The Origin Of Symmetry, DeVotchKa - How It Ends and Warsaw - Warsaw (this is Joy Division before they were Joy Division)
    Current reading:  I'm in the midst of five different books, scattered throughout the house.  I think the cats are moving my bookmarks as well.  Strange times.
   So, my best friend works at a job wherein, occasionally, he gets brains and/or spinal fluid dripped/dropped upon his shoes.  It gives whole new meaning to soulful work.  He told me last night about the brains part.  The spinal fluid was a while back.  Ah, the wonders of mortuary work...I've not been into it (laws disallow "visitation" of such things), but my closest guess is the whole sausage scenario.  That is, if you got to tour a sausage factory, you'd probably not eat sausage again.  Or hot dogs (which I have seen made.)  Or music...if you got to visit your favorite band in the studio while recording, a lot of the "magic" would possibly disappear.
    But I have to say, I'd love to have a vial of spinal fluid.  Imagine the conversation piece that would be!
    We watched Super Size Me last night.  Now, I've never been a real fan of McDonald's, not because of the food but because of the cultural whiplash of quick & easy & disposable that seems to have overtaken Western society, muchly due to McDonald's.  However, having seen this documentary, I can see how the food end of it is horrid too.  But on the other, and stronger, side of the coin:  ain't nobody makin' nobody eat there.  It's our choice.  Just like, as an example in the film put it, it's our choice to smoke, drink, take illicit drugs, etc.  If you do the crime, don't get mad about doing the time.  I will be thinking twice before I pull into a McDonald's for more reasons than before, though, now.
    The funniest thing, though, was a deleted scene called The Smoking Fry.  The documentarian got several burgers from McDonald's and some fries and put them in glass jars for weeks on end (ten weeks being the final, I believe.)  Just put them in and left them to see how they'd degrade.  All the burgers, eventually, fell prey to spores & rot, as you'd imagine.  The fries?  They got a bit dry, but other than that, nothing.  So mold & spores of various types, things that will, largely, eat any damned thing, wouldn't touch McDonald's fries.
    Fucking frightening.
    The goo part of this entry has to do with my head, which feels like goo anymore.  I'm having trouble focusing, concentrating.  I seem to spend all of my ability to keep frayed ends together at work, so that when I get home I just fall apart.  I did, however, cook a nice dinner last night of steaks & saffron rice that we ate while watching Super Size Me, which assuaged our guilt at ever having eaten McDonald's.  That dinner is the best thing I've done at home all week.
    I haven't even really practiced this week, which is quite rare and odd.  I've played a bit, working out parts for new songs, but no actual hardcore work.  I wish that 80% of the things I own (disregarding computers, instruments & necessities), the "junk" that isn't actually "junk" but seldom gets touched or used, would disappear.  And I keep gathering more junk.  It's terrible.
    My needs:  computer & peripherals, books, CD's & stereo (w/ Sirius), basses/guitars/amps...and I'm hard-pressed to come up with other stuff beyond that.  And yet, I wallow in stuff.  I'm going to have to sell a few amps anyway...I'm drowning in equipment, through no fault of my own.  Some of it has been given to me, some of it people have abandoned...but some's gonna have to go.
    To end, a quote:  "Expectations are a cage that traps your potential."  - SK
 

January 15, 2006 + "Scot's Picks."
  Okay, so we're down to the final four in the NFL season.  Now's as good a time as any for me to give you my picks, or at least who I'm rooting for, seeing as how the three teams I had any connection to are out (Tampa Bay, Cincinnati and Indianapolis).
    NFC - Carolina Panthers at Seattle Seahawks
    Seeing as how the Panthers are NFC South rivals with my Buccaneers, I cannot in any way, shape or form root for them.  Seattle has a few things on their side:  1) they are the Buc's brothers, as both teams entered the NFL in 1976.  2) Joe Jurevicius, a former Buccaneer and a favorite player of mine, is a Seahawk.  3) you've got to love Shawn Alexander.  My pick is the Seahawks by a score of 24 - 17.
    AFC - Pittsburgh Steelers at Denver Broncos
    I actually don't like either team.  However, I dislike the Steelers more.  The Broncos have a former Buccaneer and the hardest hitting safety in the game, John Lynch.  The Steelers have Jerome Bettis who I like and who I feel is very unfortunate, having played for the Steelers for most of his career.  While I'd go with the idea of liking to see Bettis walk away from his career with a ring, I just can't give any cred to the Steelers.  My pick is the Broncos by a score of 33 - 20.
    That makes my Super Bowl matchup Denver at Seattle.  Because of the aforementioned reasons, I hate to have to pick it, but I'll give my support to Seattle.  Why?  'Cuz they haven't won a championship before.  Super Bowl final score:  Seattle wins 27 - 17.
    It just sucks to be watching playoff football without any real links to the teams involved.  I will, however, be wearing my Joe Jurevicius (Tampa # 83) jersey next weekend.

January 13, 2006 + "Banal Bastions Of Bureaucracy."
  Oddly enough, that phrase is in the chorus of a song of The Silent Screen's called Drone/Defile.  The entire chorus goes as such:
    Building empires of fortune and fame
    Losing your sight in mirrors of shame
    Banal bastions of bureaucracy
    Starving hegemonies and monopolies
    Just chew on that for a while.  I wrote the lyrics in a fit of righteous anger (but, then, most of my anger is righteous, baby) over something or other I'd seen on one of the Sunday morning news/interview shows on television.  For some reason, today, I had that line, "banal bastions of bureaucracy," running through my head.  In case you're not sure, here's the translation of that alliterative little bit of musical poetry:  "commonplace or trite strongholds of administrative policy-making groups adhering to fixed rules and a hierarchy of authority, usually non-elected."
    You can see how my line rolls off the tongue much more easily in conversation and, therefore, is also much, much easier to sing.
    And, well, it's just plain fun to say, even if it's a description of so much that I loathe.  And it sounds very much like the places where most people that I know work.
    Maybe if you're lucky, I'll tear into other songs and poems sometime in the future.  Wait...don't go, hang on....
    One of my friends raised an issue in his recent blog (note the minute differences between a weblog, "blog," and a journal...all I can tell you is that there are some and, by god, this is a journal) about putting up current listening and current reading stuff on blogs.  I felt compelled, due to this, to tell you why I do this occasionally here.  Mainly, because I miss being on the radio.
    "Huh?" you say.
    When I had Scriptus Live, one of the best parts of doing the show was playing music or giving attention to bands, writers and artists that just didn't get mainstream (or any) press.  Giving my current listening and reading notes in my journal is a way of possibly doing that...or showing you how slowly I'm getting through certain books or how certain CD's just grab and hold my attention for years on end.  Either way, I hope that some of you find it to be interesting.
    I just realized, mainly due to getting whipped in the face with it, how terribly strong Roger's tail is.  Roger, by the way, as most of you say, "Huh?" again, is one of our cats.  He was a small one when he came by and we took him in as a stray, but he's grown to quite the mammoth cat, very vocal and, well, occasionally just odd.  His nickname is Pica...because he'll eat anything.  He will, on occasion, walk into a room where you are, look you right in the eye, exclaim indignantly, "MEOW!" and turn and saunter off.
    Strange.  He's also the one that is still entranced by the laser pointer.  Anitya and Percey long ago figured out that a) the light came from the pen-like object in my hand, and that b) no matter how they tried, they'd never actually catch it.  Roger, however, is a tenacious little nut and still reacts with utter glee if I pick the thing up.
    Tracy will be home soon (she's been at a training class in Houston all week), so I'd best post this and try to clean up a little bit.  Until next time, let the rock roll on.  Oh, crap...almost forgot:
    Current listening:  Hope Of The States - The Lost Riots, Radiohead - Pablo Honey and Queensryche - Operation: Mindcrime
    Current reading:  same as last time, but I'm further along now....
 

January 8, 2006 + "Vomiting the Playoffs."
  Okay, make Sloppy Joe's in a cast iron skillet using ground turkey instead of ground beef.  Let it sit for a few hours after you clean & store the leftovers.  Run hot water in the sink and prepare to scrape the skillet clean.  Upon getting your scraper ready and leaning down to do the job, take a whiff.  That smell?  Smells like vomit.  Or, actually, it puts that acidic vomit taste in your mouth.  The turkey Sloppy Joes were good...the aftermath, the cleanup, was not.  Very strange, very strange indeed.
    Okay, so whoever the people were that said home field means anything in football were obviously nuts.  This weekend, only the Patriots won of the home teams.  Cincinnati, Tampa Bay and New York all bowed out less-than-gracefully.  I'll keep my thoughts on the Tampa loss to myself, except for this open note to Jon Gruden:  Chris Simms was awfully successful when he scrambled and move the pocket around as opposed to sitting back on a five or seven step drop and letting the D-linemen bat his passes around...maybe next time we could bootleg and play action a little more, huh?  And Cincinnati gave it a good go, but when Palmer got his ACL torn on the second play of the game, and though Jon Kitna did a good job in backup, that was it.
    The good thing?  Both Tampa and Cincinnati were rebuilds, Cincy a fifteen year rebuild, but a rebuild nonetheless.  Both have young quarterbacks and in the next two-to-three years will be good shots to go deep into the playoffs.  Tampa's turnaround from 5-11 to 11-5 this year was good, regardless of their loss to Washington on Saturday.
    And, oh, how I loathe Washington.  And Pittsburgh.  And Philadelphia.  There are just certain teams in the NFL that I will always root against, regardless.  Green Bay's another one.
    So, I have one  team left to root for.  Indianapolis (due to the Tony Dungy connection with my Bucs.)  Go Colts.  And Seattle.  For some reason, I like Seattle this year too, though I'm not a Mike Holmgren fan.
    The Silent Screen is getting more and more raucous (a good thing.)  Noses to the grindstone, working to hone arrangements at this point.  Going well and just the way the three of us are playing is an inspiration in and of itself.  It's nice to have such a self-perpetuating thing going.  Though I've not written anything worthy of taking in for a couple weeks, I'm writing a lot.
  Current listening:  Man On Fire - Habitat, The Dresden Dolls - The Dresden Dolls and Iron Maiden - Live After Death
  Current reading:  (still) Spook by Mary Roach and Dog Language by Chase Twichell
    I recently went through some old e-mails.  I keep a file and occasionally will print e-mails out that I may need a hard copy reference of and, of course, clean the file out sometimes.  I found one from a few months ago when I had left my last band, actually an online conversation I had with someone that was close to that action, though not directly involved.  Considering my present situation with The Silent Screen, it was very, very odd how much of a chasm there was in the e-mail between my viewpoints and the POV of my correspondent.  And, considering how things are going currently, how very wrong he was (and is) given my empirical evidence.  Not that I needed any evidence.  I'd always figured things were the way the are anyway.
    How's that for a sentence?  "I'd always figured things were the way the are anyway."  I need a vacation or something.
    Artist to look up:  Thornton Dial.
    Okay...off to bed, or at least off to bed soon.  Have to sign off on an estimate to have our roof replaced tomorrow.  Will be eating Ramen and beans for months now, but it needs to be done lest what's left of our shingles flies off and the wind takes the cats and I for a joyride.
    There's no place like home...there's no place like home...there's no place like home....
    Damn...still here.

January 3, 2006 + "The Emotion."
   Here's an interesting quote for you:  "I had very sophisticated tastes but my skills were very simple and the skills of the guys in the band were even more simple than mine."  That's from Iggy Pop (Mr. James Osterberg to you, chum) in reference to he and The Stooges.  It presents something I find interesting about music and intellectualism, something I've always had a hard time building a bridge between, largely due to people I played with.  Rest assured, this is not the case now, in The Silent Screen, nor was it in Secret 9 way back when, but in most other groups I've been in.  One guitarist in particular told me that no one would understand the lyrics I wrote and that no one paid attention anyway.
    And some of you might question why I began this entry with a quote from Iggy Pop.  Well, listen to Search And Destroy, the lead track from the Raw Power album.  Blazing, roaring, shit-kicking rock & roll...and lyrics to bounce right along with it.  Not your typical (or what became typical) punk silliness.  These were the words of dischord and mayhem, of alienation and frustration..."Look out, mama, 'cuz I'm using technology / Ain't got time to make no apology" - the '80's and '90's in a nutshell, from a song written in 1973.  "I'm a street walkin' cheetah with a heart full of napalm" - Vietnam, glam, punk.
    L'art brut...the raw art.  Fashionable amongst surrealists, dadaists and the like.  The work of children, patients, the insane, an art that foregoes the normalcy and dictum of "schooled" art and goes straight for the gut, punching and kicking and begging for truth.
    And then I love so many other types of music.  From the raw beauty of Iggy in his various incarnations (except for the Blah, Blah, Blah period...I never got that) to King Crimson's esoteric compositions, from the Manic Street Preachers' glam/punk beginnings to their latest modern, elegiac rock to Warren Zevon's straightforward meshing of cheerful music tinged against gothic themed lyrics.
  In short, it all comes down to the emotion.  Why do I really love Iggy?  Because he means it.  King Crimson?  They mean it.  MSP?  They mean it.  Zevon?  Because he meant it.  Regardless of place, time or what the recording industry thought or thinks of it, the art is there and it is soulful and elusive, and yet easily grasped if you've an open mind.
    I've met a great deal of musicians and writers in my life that are more concerned with style and grace than emotion.  It's generally obvious.  Or, perhaps I simply miss their other merits.  I'm not interested in being something I'm not.  I have my influences, sure, but I don't want to be them.  Couldn't.  I'm me.  That's what you get.  It's not been enough for some people.  It's been too much for quite a few.  I seldom pull punches, but I'm generally tactful.
    So, I suppose this is a contributing factor in why I'm happier than ever in the band I'm in, in working with Bunny, Jeanne & Tracy on Meet Cleaver Theatre and in the other ventures in my life.  I'm not defined by what I do, and yet it is (they are) me, to a large extent.  An artist is a mirror of his environment, and vice versa.
    I may miss notes when I sing, but even when I miss 'em, I mean 'em.

January 2, 2006 + "The New Stuff."
  Welcome to Journal IX.  It has taken me some time to jump from the realms of VIII to IX, mainly from laziness.  If you visit any of the above, previous journals, you'll see that I kept them to much shorter lengths before.  I do encourage you to read them, if only for the sheer entertainment value (and, really, that's why you're here, isn't it?)
   A new year has dawned, or it did yesterday, and I am now thoroughly convinced that global warming is true.  Why?  Because in the past week, including today, Central Kentucky has had thunderstorms.  Not snowstorms.  You read me correctly the first time.  Thunderstorms.  Beautiful displays of lightning, thunder and rain like, as some around here say, pouring piss out of a boot.
    That phrase, by the way, some along with other KY favorites such as "colder than a witch's tit" or "colder than a well-digger's ass."  I used to do readings with some "Appalachian" poets, all of whom had much, much more "Appalachia" in them than I did.  However, I can feel it soaking into me, just like the rain.  And that's not all bad on either count.
    Other quick news includes The Silent Screen (doing quite well, drummer in and working on the music), the new book (still titled Rendering The Impossible and still, honest-to-god this time, due this year) and other new stuff coming very soon.
   Current music:  Man On Fire - Habitat, Manic Street Preachers - Lipstick Traces and Howard Jones - The Best Of
    Current reading:  still Spook by Mary Roach
    That's all for now...new page is here, go back & read old journals for fun and I'll see ya on the flipside or something of that nature.