Curmudgeon Soup.

Alright. I tried to get on the writing thing and I need to admit something pretty embarrassing... I managed to fill a page. Good start. Go me. All right, but here's the embarrassing part... my hand is killing me!

Seriously! I always thought somewhere in the back of my mind, "you know, some day putting pen to paper could go the way of the dinosaur..." Well it truly has my friends. When writing out a single page with a pen gives you a cramp in your wrist that requires an Aleve, then you know shit is pretty much dead. I never thought I'd have to practice writing to actually keep my hands in strong physical condition. Doing it to keep your mind sharp is understandable, but as an actual physical exercise my mind is pretty much blown. I blame it partially on my new journal not having nearly enough margins. Yeah... that's it. But seriously, that is obnoxious when your hand has to keep readjusting to fit stuff on a page? You know!? Do yah?! Naw, I'm totally full of shit.

The whole hand cramp from writing is only half serious though. I also cranked out some new progressions for songs tonight that I'll probably either forget or decide are ridiculous later. One on piano and another on guitar that is half waltz and then suddenly in 4/4. Are you aloud to do that? It kind of doesn't work, I'll admit it up front, but I'm giving it a shot. The problem nowadays is that I get this far over and over and over again, and then vocal melodies and lyrics just never come. It's pretty damn frustrating. I've got nearly a dozen things I've been sitting on that are about a quarter done for a long time now and I want to punch them all in the face for mocking me and not being finishable.

In other news, old man winter is here in full force and I find myself with less and less desire to leave the house as we trudge deeper into the depths of the season. Today at work I was thinking of all the fun stuff I could be doing with my night and how much, but opted to sit around eating spaghetti and beating myself up over writing lyric-less songs. I also thought about how much easier I could get through the next day of being hungover if only it were warm out. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it's dark when I go to work and when I come home from work and for all I know, because I work in almost entirely windowless environments, the sun never actually comes up. At least in the summer if I go to work at 9:00 and come home at 7:00 the sun's already up on my way and I get a few hours after.

As I dwelled on this on the way home tonight I came up with a off the wall theory that perhaps the reason I'm such a grumpier bastard about winter than all of my friends is because as a year round swimmer growing up January and February were always the most miserable months of the year. Right about this time I'd be getting burnt out when you're expected to be "catching your stride" into the end of the season, and you'd start getting pissed off and annoyed at all the people on the team because you spend all day every day with them and you forget they're actually your best friends, and then I'd be all disappointed because I wasn't living up to my own expectations... not to mention the whole jumping into a swimming pool after coming inside from sub-freezing temperatures and then going back out with your hair still wet. What miserable days those were... but March was always the best. High school season was over and all that was left would be championship meets for the YMCA team which no one cared about. The practices were easy and mostly optional and there was no stress. Follow that up with no practice at all from April to the end of May and warmer temperatures. Spring's the best. Fuck all ya'll haters that like winter for some crazy reason.

I'm 'bout to go hate on some winter by rapping myself up in blankets and frowning while I play video games. And there will be pajama pants... and a bath robe. Oh how there will be a bath robe.

Death and Taxes ma'Boy. Death and Taxes.

Good evening, dear readers. How was your decade? Good I hope? Mine not so much. All these lists I've been reading and watching that reflect on the best worst, most memorable, tragic, sexy, what have you of the last decade have been giving me the Mortality Blues for the past couple weeks. Let me tell you, don't ever live through an entire decade that you're cognizant of. Watching people talk about events that happened in 2000 and 2001 and being that I was in high school and remember those things in detail scared the shit out of me and made me realize two things: I'm going to be dead some day and I'm already losing my hair. I am not young no matter how I act! Shit!

Y2K, 9/11, Bush stealing the election, the start of the Iraq War, Paris Hilton's sex tape... all of these things feel like they happened yesterday when people reflect on them all day and lump them into the same category as the time period that's just now ending. That means "tomorrow" I'll wake up and be in my 30's. Day after that in my 40's, and before you know it I'm dying of old age or in a Mad Max style war over what's left of the world's resources (I'm banking on the latter). It's pretty terrifying stuff, but in the meantime I'm sure this tablet everybody's raving about that Apple is supposed to release will make me decide life is awesome and worth living. Kind of sad huh? But I mean... this thing is supposed to be REALLY cool.

Moving on, let's look back for a quick second on the ways I was trying to improve my life in the past year to make all these days of paycheck earning drudgery worth it. My main "resolution" last year was to write more. I give my self a solid B- on that. This blog was supposed to be the main thing that'd get me writing and it's sitting at a measly 31 posts in 2009 as I'm writing this, so that definitely brought my grade way down. However, as mentioned in the last blog, I give myself extra credit for becoming a more active musician... One solo EP nearly completed, a few new Best Revenge songs, and nearly ready to record these two and a half year old songs. So this year I'm trying to stick with the same theme: Write more. I've got a fancy new journal from Jen sitting here ready to go and begging me to get back in to story, play, and lyric writing because all of my Moleskins have been converted mostly to work related notebooks full of lists of broken equipment, peoples phone numbers, times and dates, etc. that I rarely do anything creative in.

I also had what we call a "Pulse Check" at work the other day and the last question my manager asked was, "What do you personally hope to accomplish in 2010?" Wow! Good one Jimmy P! Way to catch me off guard with a twist on the old "resolutions" question. I told him I wanted to finish recording the Best Revenge EP/Full length since I've been sitting on these songs for years now and that was about it, but I've been rattling around some other things and some are totally tangible definites while others are a bit pie in the sky:

-Finish the formerly mentioned recordings

-Finish the Rotting Pizza EP (I'm on the last track by the way, which turned out being a dub track more-so that hip-hop)

-Ever since watching the film "We are Wizards" I've kind of wanted to do some Harry Potter related project because the "wizard rock" bands they follow in that movie really aren't very good song writers or performers and it made me want to take a crack at it. I also figure doing another nerd themed music project after finishing the Final Fantasy 7 one would help me to start to mold a new niche for solo music projects now that Best Revenge is starting to become a group project.

-That being said I'd need to read the chunks of HP books that I missed out as I read them throughout the span of all of the 2000-ought years to do something like that.

-Get back into fiction writing (finish a short story or play or something that I haven't done since my junior year of college)

That sounds like enough for now and it pretty much covers what I've had rolling around the past few days. Will I improve my grade from this year? Who knows!?

Stick around for the next 12 months to find out dear readers!

2009: A Review or Keep yer Govnin't hands of my Medicare

I'm sitting here waiting for my frozen dinner to cook for 40 minutes in my conventional oven when it would take three and a half if I had a damn microwave, but so it goes I guess. While waiting I'm sitting here reading about how fucked the health care reform thing got now that it's about to pass and listening to that Dillinger Four song about New Years (December drags on/it's thirty one days too long...) and I had that moment we all have at the beginning or end of the year where you go, "Gee wilikers this year sure did fly by!"

Usually that statement is just bullshit we spew to keep up small talk with people we don't really have much else to talk about with. And then you go, "It seems like just yesterday an illiterate war criminal was president/we were huddling around a space heater and drinking whiskey to keep warm/you were giving BJers at the train station for cash/etc." And again, usually that's a load of crap, but while reading about the same debate I've been reading about all year I realized this year really did fly by because nothing happened. The health care BS has been stagnant pretty much since the spring... Democrats are too chicken shit to pass something that actually fixes anything, Republicans yell loudly until the pants peeing Dems give in, and rednecks hold misspelled signs arguing against their own self interests. That's it. That was 2009. That's all that happened all year.

The past few days I was going through different publications' "Best Albums of 09" lists and checking out all these "hot artists" and found more and more of the same uninspired technically proficient and intricate, yet soulless, ambient mumblings of hipsters trying to be inspired to create the next "Pet Sounds" or "OK Computer". There's nothing going on out there. It's a wasteland! Even the things I saw promise in like the alternative folk/country movement that's been brewing for the past few years was pretty lackluster in 2009. Lucero and the Avett Brothers both hit the big time this year with their first major label releases and while I haven't heard all of the new Avett album they both seem underwhelming and have traded in quite a bit of the grit that made me love them. I tried to make my own "best of" list for the year and really couldn't come up with much I loved other than Bomb the Music Industry's "Scrambles" and the Dopamines "Soap and Lampshades". I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I'd like that I just never got around to, but seriously? I remember doing a best of 06 or 07 radio show back when Chris and I did Bearcast together and we had trouble narrowing it down to 25 or so. Am I just out of touch or is anybody with me here?

I'd also like to contribute my general living situation to the fast and lame year that was 2009. This was the first year of my life where nothing major changed. My first full year out of college working the same jobs with no major change. It's a strange feeling to know that I plan to wake up and do that same thing with no major change for another 365 days... there's no more grades or classes to move on to. Just tasks to be accomplished and checks to be cashed. Is this what I have to look forward to in the way of having a career? The years flying by with you sitting around waiting for frozen manicotti to heat up wondering how you wasted 365 days farting around harboring in paycheck after paycheck just to pay for the place where you sleep in between working for those checks? Okay... that's a bit more pessimistic than intended, but seriously, I'm not used to so much regiment in my life. I mean, I also love my job and am damn lucky to get paid to hang out and make music... the other one's usually okay too, but it's retail at Christmas time, so fuck off for a few weeks and get back to me on that.

On a brighter note I got pretty decent at the drums in 2009 and am about to finish one EP of new music. I can also actually can see the light at the end of the tunnel that is the first EP or full length of a new era of the Best Revenge and songs that were written nearly three years ago now.

Where am I going with this? Well I get a week's vacation to sit around finding new music, bitching about the government, and trying to write music in the quaint little town of Lima. It should be good. There will be whiskey and music released prior to 2009.

See you there nerds!

Why my Nails is Nubs Today

First off Empire State of Mind is a really good song. Now that that's taken care of, why can't I stop trying to figure out my god damned network at work?! This thing is driving me crazy!

A quick rundown... We have four iMacs that students produce (mostly) loop based GarageBand projects on. I had this bright idea that if they save their projects as an Archive, meaning that any loops used are self-contained within the project rather than referring back to that particular loop's original location, they could save their projects wirelessly to our Time Capsule storage device and pull them down no matter what computer they're on. Wow! Problem solved! Aren't I a genius!?

You're right! I'm really not. This worked fine when most of the kids weren't quite tech-savy enough to figure out how to use the Time Capsule to move back and forth between machines and only one computer was really using it at a time. Now however, most of the projects are pulled from it wirelessly and I've run into a SNAFU (that is an acronym right?) in which, what appears to happen is that the wireless bandwidth of the Time Capsule bottlenecks anytime files are moving or the internet is in use. This causes a 10 or so megabyte GarageBand project take 10 or so minutes to open or save.

This is not an ideal situation when you already have a legion of kids who are already frustrated with you because you only give them an hour in the studio at a time. From there it just gets better. I was under the impression that GarageBand, once loading a project that had been saved as an Archive, was done with it's source folder and was running the show strictly from the computer's resources. Well, I'm assuming now, this is not the case since several students' projects that were only running five or six tracks in total slowed to a halt and could not play back because, according to GarageBand's error message, they had "too many tracks".

So now it's solution time and the first thing to try is drag and drop files to the desktop temporarily while working with them and then save back to the Time Capsule. Well, I tried that and sure enough the time to pull the relatively small files down was about 1 MB per minute, which is something I'm not willing to work with.

Next in line are tinkering with and resetting the settings of the Time Capsule to ensure that the problem is indeed a bandwidth issue and not an issue with the device settings or software that just so happened to kick in right when our usage started going up. That seems too good to be the true fix so then we start hitting some more pie in the sky plans. That's my phrase of the week by the way: Pie in the sky. Delicious. First line of attack in the war on load time and latency is a wired Ethernet connection run through the ceiling. I'll give it a shot with the computer closest to the Time Capsule and see what we get. If that doesn't work I have this crazy idea about a FireWire network, also through the ceiling, all daisy chaining to one or two external drives in an office somewhere, but that seems unreliable and costly because apparently FireWire only carries about 15 feet at a time before you need some sort of repeater (you learn something new everyday!).

After that I'm pretty lost... Media Bridges has a pretty awesome set up where users have a hard drive that pops into a sled at the front of the building and is then somehow wired to whatever computer they're using in the building. Something like that would be awesome. Can I have that? Last is consulting with good old Bill at the Apple Store and seeing if the file sharing capabilities of a server machine that we can't afford is the answer to all of our problems.

Oh, and did I mention that the whole time I've been trying to fix this problem there are approximately twenty or so teenagers yelling for my attention to help them with about a thousand different things.

There's never a dull moment I tell's ya'!

Back in Business

Look, I moved, I got lazy, I got an iPhone, discovered twitter, and decided that I no longer need to communicate with people and convey my ideas in more than 140 characters at a time! What's a guy gonna do?

But I'm trying to get back in the saddle for the sake of introducing you all to my new project tentatively titled "The Rotting Pizza EP" by the Solution (oh I'm back baby!). It's pie in the sky man, I know, but there's a taste of it here. The goal is to have at least five songs inspired by and primarily featuring samples from the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack. I'm about half way through three songs and thought, "I'm sure this has been done before..." and well, it had. But go Google that trash. Nothing but over compressed garbage and the same old beat playing over one or two tracks of badly sampled crap. I only bring the sweetest of melodies to my beats... or something.

Anyway, I'm posting the first mix of the first song today just to get some of it's juicy flavor on ya'lls lips and to get some feedback. Tell me what you think kids because I honor and consider your criticism valid. Unless it's negative. Then keep your mouths shut. Just kiddin'. Not really.

No. I am.

The Bottom FREE DOWNLOAD!!

Also, holla' when you hear that 808 kick in on the hook.

Also, I'm going to try to stop booking Best Revenge shows for a few months so we can try to crack down and finally record and am trying to get this new band going where I just get to sit there and play drums while other people tell me what to do. Backyard Hooverville... or Pontius and the Pilots if I can talk Kyle into it. But they're both good. Keep yer' heads checked.

They Say it Takes More Certainty than Talent to be a Star... Look at John Stamos

I missed a lot of quality post worthy stuff over the past few weeks because I was busy moving and getting my life situated which takes forever. I've been here over two weeks now and am still unpacking and moving things.

I don't really have the energy to rap with you guys for long right now, though I do want to give everyone a quick rundown of references to Lima, Ohio that have shown up in the show "Glee" so far. Also, I should note, the show is pretty awesome... Albeit that I am a bit biased because it's about a guy who teaches music to a bunch of under privileged misfits and is based on the show choir I was in at my own high school.

Anywho...

Episode 1 - Not a whole lot going on here... The high school colors are the same. They established that it was a small town in Ohio and one of the kids speechifies about how he doesn't want to end up like all the other jerks in his school who don't go to college and become townies and notes that only half go to college and maybe two will do it out of state. I don't know if our numbers were quite that high...

Episode 2 - It's officially established that Washington McKinley high is supposed to be in Lima, Ohio! When the glee club does their routine of the song "Push It" in the school gym check out the right side of the screen. That's right, the official city of Lima, Ohio flag is hanging on the wall.

Episode 3 - At one point in the counselors office a few penants with college names on them are revealed hanging on the wall. They're all Ohio colleges, but one specifically is UNOH, or University of Northwestern Ohio right off Cable Rd in Lima. Others include Purdue, Kent State, and perhaps Bowling Green, which is also close to Lima.




This one is a tough call because I don't have HD TV and just watch it at 480p on my laptop, but later as Mr. Schuster is reading the review of Acafellas in the local paper for a brief moment the front of the page is shown which appears to say "The Lima News" on it in the top left. If anyone else is a nerd with better HD resolution than mine please verify or correct.



That's it for now. Later nerds!

All the people who have BBQs to feed their friends and family say SHUT UP THE PUNX!

So Facebook has been pretty entertaining today. At the top of the list was some guy who got extremely "butt hurt" (as so eloquently put by Wyatt) over a status update by a friend. For anyone who hasn't already experienced Leyla's massive comment thread of comedy from earlier today it transpired a bit like this:

"Oh. My. God. Who ARE these kids who are too indie to function??? Cincinnati has an underground spawn of pseudo-snobs running around. It's terrifying. Buy something at Wal-Mart. Eat at McDonald's. Go to Springdale Cinemas. Get a fucking grip."

Okay. So she says that, and there's a few hostile reactions; this being the first of many by one poster:

"Don't do any of those things. Those are fundamentally immoral institutions, all of which America would be a better country without. I won't deny there's a definite fashion in denying such things, but if the result is that a few less dollars contribute to the perpetual declination of quality goods and services in this country, than by all means. Your call for "getting a fucking grip" is the opposite of intelligent."

And on and on it goes as he continues to get more and more angry and tell people they're unintelligent for telling him to get over it and not taking him seriously on the internet in a forum that is limited to a hundred some characters in each conversation. So some dude is flipping his shit at anyone who's ever eaten a cheeseburger or worn pants that weren't hand sewn from hemp in their backyards or some bullshit like that. Although this guy consistently told people these were "just empty words" or some BS every time someone said it to him I'd like to once again re-iterate, "get over yourself".

So here's what's up... sure you eat and wear only things that grow in your backyard, but WHOOPS!! You accidentally rode in your friends car to the exclusive all night dance party at the bar the other night where you totally sweated it to ironic eighties pop songs with your friends. You're part of the problem maaaaan! Using gas!? Oil consumption!? What the fuck is wrong with you dudes!?!? Oh and remember when you smirked at the joke some guy made about racial stereotypes last week? Oh shit!? You're a racist!! Or when you drove by that homeless guy and didn't take him home and offer him a permanent home on your couch?? Or the fact that you have enough money in your bank account to travel to India and live in poverty and try to fix the world but you're not doing it?? What the fuck guys?! You're all pussies!

Okay, enough sarcasm. This is why the phrase "get over yourselves" is not a cluster of "empty words" they do have meaning when you're pissing all over people with the assumption that you're the perfect little lefty revolutionary who understands and tends to all the worlds problems. That's right. You're the one fucking guy who has it all figured out. You're the ONE fucking guy who's doing every little thing you can to fix the worlds problems. You're the ONE fucking guy who can do no wrong. Right? Wrong. Because guess what... you're not. So indeed, "get the fuck over yourselves".

I mean, fuck man. Life's hard enough. Let people pick their battles. There's no sense wasting time doing the same thing the people you say you're fighting are doing and looking down on people for not supporting or hating the same things to the same degree as you. If you're going to be so militant about things, simply staying in America and not packing up and shipping off to bring aid to people in Africa, India, China, what have you, makes you a hypocrite because no matter what, if you are in any way a part of American society you're nothing but a drain on resources. Even if you did go to those places, you're still just a drain on resources... a smaller one, but still a drain. Humans are parasites and if you have that big a problem with it then off yourselves because that's what we're here for... to leech off the planet. We're born, we consume, we die. Nothing more, nothing less.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to be less of a leech but like I said before, either put your money where your mouth is and go all the fuck out, or just let people pick their battles. For example, I teach kids how to play and write music after school to keep them off the street and try to provide a positive environment and role models so they'll stay off the street. That's my thing I'm trying to do because I believe in it and it's the right job for me to be doing. And sure, I also try to eat local when I have the time and money for it, I tried to ride my bike more before it got stolen, I wear the same clothes for years and years, etc. But at the same time, I'm pretty broke and I have to work a second job and that makes things hectic. In that time racing back and forth, yes, I have to drive a car and use that evil substance "oil", and yes, sometimes I buy shitty environmentally unfriendly cheeseburgers that I was conditioned to love since birth (even though the fast food ones are pretty gross) because I don't have the time, money, and energy to cook up something with your approved ingredients list. That's why I do the music education thing... it's something I can do to try and improve the world and it's what I'm good at. That's my attempt to improve the world and I'm not going to give you shit for not doing it too. In turn it also takes a lot of the energy I'd have to put into other "fights for justice". I'm not good at taking the time to shop around and learn how to, first enjoy, and then cook local vegan food or whatever else it is you people demand that we do to be accepted as intelligent equals. If your thing is supporting local business or whatever that's your thing and I don't expect you to moonlight as a mentor or any of the stuff I do for a living to consider you "intelligent" or my "equal". Not being a vegan local-voire in no way makes someone a lesser person, un-intelligent (yes, we all read Fast Food Nation... get over it), wrong, or evil.

There's a difference between being completely and willfully ignorant of problems in the world and simply picking your battles and being understanding and tolerant of others who have chosen theirs. To judge others like this makes you sound like an ignorant and idealistic 15 year old yourself. One person can change small pieces of the world, but that one person can't fix every god damn problem on the planet. It's too much and a lot of us are trying. So either get along with the people who are trying or get out of the way with your self-righteous "look at me I'm doing the right thing" fashion show so the rest of us can get back to work.

So once again, yep, "get over yourselves".