Ambivilant Feelings

I find myself, more often than not, gushing a torrential outpouring of words. My thought process exists in complete sentences, so much so, that when I dream, I can not only read, but write as well. For me to admit that a topic is hard to talk about, is to say a lot.

Recently, I have been giving up hope on the written word. On communicating at all, really. I used to store so much on my communication abilities, of being able to explain anything, to persuade any view point, to talk to any person, that I naively thought only time would heal all wounds.

This isn’t really a blog to say that I’ve completely returned to the land of optimism. No, not when so many people pervert language and meaning. This is more of a check in blog, a blog to say that I’m still here, still having a good life, even if I don’t communicate as much.

My wife is the most important person in my life. She, more than anyone else, has taught me the importance of the quiet moment — the moments we share without talking, without interacting, sharing the same space, the same activity, the same energy.

Inside of this quietness, I’ve actually found a little bit more understand. I’ve found out that I’m an arrogant, pig-head asshole, but I’m working to change that. Maybe that’s why I haven’t written lately. The internet, more so than a regular journal, captures all of my indolence and arrogance. My post from over a year ago strike me as childish: the rants of a person I remember, but maybe not so well anymore. No so eagerly do I fight for causes. Not so blindly do I stick to viewpoints. I still have them, but I’m more likely to ridicule them than push them on others.

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Recently, the band has been doing some really incredible stuff. My impatience makes me think I’m running in place, when those around me are amazed at how fast it is going. In my own personal mythology, I was supposed to have been famous by 18, to have been dead by 26. At the age of 26 now, I am famous to my friends and family and that’s good enough. What I realized that I actually wanted, was to entertain. That’s what all the push for fame was about, to ensure a crowd every time I ascend the stage.

I claim that I want to pay rent by playing music, or writing, or whatever, but that’s because the stresses and dangers of the road, the starvation of the artist, the cravings for the spotlight, the breaking of my humility, the moment of illumination in the crowd’s collective face as we finally recognize the humanity in each other.

Walking Corpse Syndrome, the band I’m currently in, is turning a corner. We are having our CD release party this Sat. One in Deer Lodge and one in Missoula. I’ve contacted the papers and think that they might be doing a story on the band. More than anything, without even knowing what they’ll write, I feel gratitude. Metal is definitely a hard sell, and for them to return my pesterings, well, I feel very very grateful.

I’m no longer that kid that expected fame to be handed to me on a platter. I’m grateful for that, too. He was sort of a puke.

Random stuff and what not

I’ve been meaning to write a lot of posts lately, but I just haven’t gotten around to it.

I’ve been meaning to write about homeless people–specifically the scavengers of society. A couple weeks ago my wife and I saw a dude really sorting out the garbage, looking for stuff to recycle. Now, I know this a white person thing to think, but I couldn’t help feel proud that i was doing something. Here was this person making choices to support himself by digging through trash for recyclables. Not only was he weening trash from hitting the landfill, he was working for a living. Much better than drunkenly asking for change on the street. He was self sufficient (or at least to my deluded mind). We did, however, decide to shred every piece of paper before tossing it.

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I’ve also been meaning to write a post about the band. I feel I can write here, rather than on the website, since the website should be reserved for more official matters. We’re looking at booking for the studio for mid-March. We have the final round of the battle-of-the-bands on March 6th. Apparently, the winner gets $1000 cash, recording time, fliers, and a clothes certificate.

As all the other bands have observed either in their websites or in person: the metal/heavy bands made it to the finals more than likely on the sole strength of having the same set of metalheads voting our scene in. While this is awesome, as we will actually get paid for playing a show, our group of metalheads are not big enough to vote one band to win.

The competitive part of me really wants to win this shin-dig, just like I’ve wanted to win every game or contest I’ve entered. The other part of me realizes that if one metal band wins, the potential for scene jealously and fracture is an all-too-real possibility.

I suppose the best way to look at this would be that the metal scene is getting strong enough to vote our own into the finals of the contest. We’ll use this platform to try to expand the scene, maybe hook some people in that wouldn’t have ordinarily seen us.

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My mom’s kidney’s are failing/have failed. Basically they don’t work well enough anymore. Though I’ve known about this for a while, I have yet to write a permanent post about it. My mom, who reads this blog, wonders why. I guess I don’t know. It’s sort of a hard thing to write about. Writing is a means by which I can organize and elucidate my thoughts. My thoughts on this are relatively blank, as if the reality hasn’t sunk in or perhaps sunk in a while ago.

My mother, more than most people in my life, has always taught me to be self-sufficient. I learned how to cook and prepare food at about ages 6 or 7, to do laundry at 10, to get myself to school starting in the 1st grade. Her fear was that she wouldn’t be around forever.

I don’t believe in such a thing as an idealized childhood. To try to insulate a child from the hardships in this world delays any mechanisms to cope with hardships later on. My parents raised me how they thought best, and since I’m not a complete fuck up, I think they did a pretty good job.

They don’t know why her kidneys are failing. I’ve had lots of armchair doctors tell me to tell her what to do, whether it’s change her diet, exercise more, blah blah blah. They usually quit asking me about after I snap at them and ask how many years of med school they went through to diagnose a patient without even examining her.

I guess that I have fear too. Since they don’t know what caused it, the thing could genetic. Her siblings haven’t gotten it yet, but that doesn’t mean much since she’s the oldest. Maybe I could get it. I guess that’s what all fear comes down to, right? This could happen to me.

Me and the wife will be heading down to Denver when she gets her transplant to help take care of her and make sure she gets her medicine.

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I guess that’s really all for now.

War of the Warts, Finale

As referenced in War of the Warts, Pt. III, I shrunk the wart on my right index finger. Within three weeks, it started to return. Plus, the monstrosity on my left middle finger was getting bigger.

I decided on an all out Battle of the Bulge. I froze my warts twice a day for two days (basically until I forgot to do it) and coated them with salcylic acid constantly. At the end, I guess I just grew tired of the treatment, the hassle, the whatnots.

I started mind zapping the warts, instructing my body to know the warts and to kill them. Within three weeks the wart on my right index finger disappeared, but so did the one on my left middle finger!!

Weeks later, both warts are still gone. I have a scar on my middle finger from the abuse it went through. Well worth it, in my opinion.

Hairs!

Ok. So to continue with my self-deprecating, or else to celebrate the fact I’m getting old, I will write a blog about my hairs, or lack there-of.

Last week I went to my friend’s bachelor’s party. We played paint ball in the woods and when we ran out of CO2 we did what any testosterone loving guys would do: threw the paint as hard as we could at each other. My wife got my turn caught on video. I bend over, two guys chuck paint at me, and I proceed to cuss about how much it hurts. When I watched the video, all I could focus on was the straight view to my scalp when I bent over.

I have known now for a while that I was thinning and tried my best to convince people of it. “I’m getting old,” I would say. To which older people would say, “You’re not that old.” Which is about as annoying as admitting that I’m getting out of shape and then obese people saying, “You’re as skinny as a rail!”

What? Just because I’m not obese doesn’t mean that I can watch my weight? Likewise, time, no matter how illusionary, does march forward and I am getting older.

I think that most people confuse my “I’m getting old” with “I don’t want to get old.” Getting old in this culture has such a negative connotation to it. Maybe I just don’t buy into it. I like getting older–not because my body is starting to fail, but because I have always pretty much existed in my mind. I thrive on intellectual activities. As such, getting old allows me to experience more of life and in more perspectives than I ever thought possible when I was younger.

Granted, I’m pushing the limits of attention span and memory capacity. I find that I can’t juggle as many things as I could when I was younger, but here’s the clincher: the projects I did when I was younger weren’t as nuanced nor complex as now. Rather than doing Mathcounts, acting, music, writing, boy scouts, school, family, pets, and recreational reading, I now only do a few things, mainly family, music, and especially writing.

During high school and before, my writing was shallow, written quickly and then put away before given much thought (much like these blogs). I even published three books of unrevised writing and got my friends to buy them. I still have the master copy, but can’t read it any more. I rushed through it and though I gave it my best shot, I know I can do better. So some day I might take some of those story ideas and breathe new life into them but for now, I’m content to focus on my novel, which by the way, I just started Chapter 29 of 36!

So, back to my hairs. After seeing that video, I realized that no amount of persuasion could convince me that I wasn’t going bald. I had conclusive proof. The next day, I best a hair cutting kit and shaved my head into a buzz cut. It only barely hides the evidence, but rather than attempting the one hair comb over that my wife thought I should try, I accepted my genetics with open arms.

A Little Weird

My blogs hits just jumped the past couple o’ days, due to the fact that in one of my posts I mentioned a certain “J o h n n y C a s h”. Seems people are desperate for any kind of information on the old man, even if it comes from my pointless diatribes.

My advice to any would-be bloggers who want to boost their readership, is just to sprinkle celebrity names within their blogs.

Me? I’m flipping a coin to see if I should go back and remove the name. Don’t care to have all these Cash seekers on my posts.

Hrumph!

Why Didn’t They have Hypothetical Hindsight?

Please forgive me if I come across as crass or unfeeling towards this most recent school shooting. I’ve found that I am more concerned with trends rather than incidents. Was the shooter motivated by the same things that motivate many more people? If so, what are those things and are they interdependent on other things? Is this the start or the continuation of a trend? More importantly, is there anything we can do to prevent this from happening again?

I don’t know. It is sad, but it’s also part of the price that we pay for freedom: the freedom to own guns, the freedom to move without checkpoints, the freedom to intermingle with all races and classes. I have read stories about Nazi Germany and other totalitarian regimes where movement is restricted within the city. One cannot leave one’s neighborhood without permits. I would hate for that to happen here, no matter how “dangerous” it gets. I also remember hearing stories about the University way back in the day. Female students were not allowed out of the dorms past curfew. Sure that restricted their rights as adults, but they were safer.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is in response to a co-worker’s statement yesterday. She rhetorically asked, “if the first two shootings happened two hours before the rest of the shootings, why didn’t they shut down the campus?” At first, this seems like an appropriate action. After all, if this happened at a high school, they would surely shut down the campus. But this happened at a university with some 30,000 students. If transplanted into Montana, this campus would be, give or take, the fourth largest city in Montana, comparable in size to Bozeman. That’s a lot of infrastructure to close down for two murders. I’m not discounting the initial two murders as not being tragic, but the cops made a judgment call. They saw no indication that these first two murders were anything other than an isolated incident. If two murders happened in any town, would the whole town be shut down to look for the killer? How would one even look for a killer in such a large population? The cops decided not to close down campus. Ninety Nine point Nine (99.9%) per cent of the time, this was the correct decision to make. Who could have forseen that this one time they made the wrong decision?

The Sickness Part II

Well, I got the results back from the doctor. I do not have a virus. So I was starting to think that my asthma was coming back until I talked to a co-worker about it. It seems that a certain type of acid-reflux will actually creep into vocal chords, itching the throat and even affecting the sinuses! This matches every symptom that I’ve displayed and my past history.

So, I’m guessing I just got to hit the antacids again and hope that works. Otherwise, if it hasn’t cleared up soon, I’ll pay the doctor another visit.

Feeling All Viral

It started on Monday. I called in sick Wednesday, tried to go to work Thursday, and left early to see the doctor. It’s really nice having insurance (even if it’s only for another couple of weeks) because I wasn’t treated like a criminal for once. I saw the doc who said that my excessive coughing and runny nose was probably not allergies but rather a nasty virus that’s circulating town.

I suppose each kind of sickness is unique in its own way. This one brought me phlegm with my coughing. I have never ever coughed up phlegm before.

So, the doc prescribed some meds, took some blood and said he’d call with the results. In the meantime, I might continue to take a few more days off so that way I don’t infect everyone else.

See, my head thinks ok, it’s just my body that’s revolting against me.

Where Did You Go?

And who really cares, eh? I’m still trying to figure out this blog thing-a-ma-doober. I started up the blog last October so I could make snide political remarks. Though the more I traverse teh internets, the more I realize that I know jack about politics. I like learning and I like “discussing”, but sometimes it just seems fruitless to do all this on teh internets. I miss discussing with my dad and am afeard to discuss with my brother. I’m a “liberal-libertarian” whereas my brother is a “neo-conservative.” In the few times we’ve discussed politics we’re (or at least I have) realized that 1) we should never discuss politics; 2) if we discuss politics we should keep it to vague references about vague topics and not jump on any bait that the other offers; and 3) we actually believe a lot of the same things, though we have different names for it.

Then I was thinking I wanted to try to make my blog a “lifestyle” blog. You know, give a peek into how I live. But the details of my life are quite inconsequential. Really, my days invariably include: wake up, eat, complain about getting fat, then either go to work and sit all day in front of a computer or stay at home trying to write in front of a computer, twice a week I go swimming sometime during my days off, eat dinner, watch a movie or play a board game, and then sleep. On the weekends I try to have band practice and if the band cancels practice, I practice by myself. I sneak as much reading as I possibly can in all my off time. I wrestle with my compulsion to play games. Not that game playing is bad, but most anything done obsessively can be detrimental.

Sometimes I think of great blog topics and then forget them before I can get to the keyboard. Other times I just want to rant and rave, but fear of being labeled a “wacko” or “immature” or whatever strawman titles that denote my class (whatever that is). Truth is, that I like being weird. I like to think it comes from having a nearly unfettered imagination while being securely grounded in what’s real and what’s not. By acknowledging that reality at times sucks, I can take more delight in my imagination. I love people who can “go with the flow” as far as creativity goes. I hate it when people are confronted with difference and make some sort of assanine remark like “Someone forgot their pills today,” of “Can I have what you’re having.” Yes, you can have what I’m having. Let me crack open my skull, scoop out my brains and force feed them down your throat. That aside, I understand that not everyone has the same sense of humor, nor would I want it that way. How fun would it be to listen to one genre of music your whole life and never discover anything new? Likewise, as I grow and change I find things previously dull and tedious to be hilarious.

So back to the question, “Where Did I Go?” (The “you” refers to “me.”) I find that I blog more when I write or make music less. This site has become sort of an outlet for me: a way to give my work instant air. It gets sooo frustrating at times working on a novel that is 160,000+ words (I haven’t counted in a couple of months) since August of 2005. Only my wife has read it. I used to keep my writing secret until it was all done, but I am a performer and I need feedback, so I broke my self-imposed rule with my wife. Plus the music will have a couple surprises in the next few months. If I kept all my life completely segregated, I wouldn’t have to worry about letting the cat out of the bag, but as I was dunder-headed enough to mix and match and then delete and reformated and lah dee dah! and Abracadabra!

Well, anyway. I’m at work again. Things are busy because we’re doing a move of some kind. I have to work the phones while everyone else gets to chat. So, my blog is getting punchy. I’m going to check out now.

Vegan Nation

I am not a vegan. However, my wife is a vegan. No, she’s not one of those fly by night vegans, who will snack on Cheetos every third Tuesday or eat Hershey bars every eighth hour but only during the winter solstice. She not only does not knowledgeably consume animal products (you can’t help all those weird ingredients) she does not wear leather, or for the most part wool. It’s still a process for her, but she is not daunted and will continue down this path towards “pure vegan-hood.” (My term, not hers).

I am, at best, a “hedgetarian.” I love them shrubs. But seriously, home-vegetarian. We don’t have meat in the house, but I still have my cheese. Mmmm…cheese. Anyways, the reactions against vegan-ism/vegetarianism (even my own reactions) have always astounded me. Sure, there are those lucky souls who harbor no judgement towards most anything and let lay what may, but the overwhelming majority of people in our snowy state express open contempt when confronted with a vegan. The reasons they give range from gut reaction (“That can’t be healthy” — as if they were nutritional experts) to absurd (“That’s un-American” or better yet “It’s against God!” — sheesh).

I’ll say it again. Sheesh. It makes me wonder if these people (I’ll try not to construct a straw man, but then again I don’t want to name names) really go around and think such horrible thoughts but never give voice to them. I mean, do you berate a Jew or Muslim for not eating pork? How about a Catholic for fasting during lent? As for the health issue, you could probably do the same research I did and come to much the same conclusions, or vastly different ones, depending on which websites you choose to believe. The fact is most vegans become vegans for much the same reason people become whatever: because they ultimately decided that it was the right course for them. Most vegans I have ever met (I could name a few exceptions) are non-violent.

Perhaps most people have a secret revulsion for weakness and they see vegans for the ultimate sissy-pants rabbit foo-foo heads that they are. Does our species really depend on everyone eating the same thing? Yes, I know that at one point our ancestors decided eating meat was really chill and helped out more than hurt, but then didn’t have the privilege of improved agricultural techniques that we have. Plus, they had to hunt or scavenge their own meat and didn’t have such luxuries has chicken deep fried in partially hydrogenated soybean oil. Yum. They also didn’t have Rolaids to spell relief or a meat and dairy industry that maximizes profits while minimizing nutrition.

I noticed these anti-vegans also tend to believe that God mints his own catchphrases on our currency, that Gays are another way to say baby-eater, and Bush has his own secret handshake with God and Jesus. Enough of these straw-men though. I would argue (especially after living with one for a few years) that vegan-ism should constitute its own “religion”. Though loosely defined, it would have enough adherents. It has a hierarchy (have you ever heard a vegan bitch about the veganness of other vegans? Whew!) and also a sort of “Path” or “Code.” The hold day is whatever shopping day they choose, and/or the Mysore practice at their local yoga fitness center. They already have their saints (e.g. Einstein). What they don’t have is tax-exempt status. That’s unfortunate.

My wife agrees that it does constitute more a religion. Maybe it’ll even get those patronizing eh-holes to leave her alone if she asserts that veganism is. That’s why next census she’s going to claim Vegan as her religion. Me? I’ll either claim hedgetarian or at the very least Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.