Goebbels Lives in the Hearts of the US Government

If you aren't familiar with WWII history, take a look at this real quick.

AT&T was recently exposed as CENSORING POLITICAL CONTENT on the webcast of a recent Pearl Jam concert. Later it was found that it was apparently NOT an isolated incident.

Now look at this.

Anyone else feel that chill up their spine?

I hate to go on political rants online, usually you end up looking like a completely close-minded a-hole. But I'll keep it short.

Please help get the Bush clones and wannabes out of office this 2008 election season. And if you are interested in the concepts of net neutrality and free speech, please sign up here to get more information at Savetheinternet.com. Join the mailing list. Sign some petitions. Although it's a small thing, every little bit helps out. And helping out feels good.

Dead Mimes in the News

I ran across this article on CNN today, apparently famed mime Marcel Marceau has died at the ripe old age of 84.

Now he's trapped in a REAL box!

Long Time no Post!

Oi Oi Capn, it be a blustery day at sea. Well, it's been a long time since my last post but I've been busy so it will be a big one!

Saw a Flaming Lips concert for free a couple weeks ago (the 8th I believe) and it was awesome! Also it was FREE and sponsored by SoCo so it was alcohol-centric!

If you haven't seen or heard the Lips before, please bang your head into the nearest wall and then check out the link to the Flaming Lips official site. They are a fun fun time.

Also noted: Cold War Kids opened for the Lips at the same event.

Finished my finals and ROCKED them, I should be looking at a 3.5 or better GPA.

Started up a band, the Blind Rhyme Prophets. We do some hiphop/fusion stuff, real old skool but all live instrumentation--lineup is keys, dude spitting rhymes, and I get to play drums and sing. I'll get some tracks up on the blog once they are fleshed out more, but things are coming together fast and exciting.

My brother turned 22 last week and threw a party, I had a great time with the usual crowd of kooky art friends of his while all of us drank beer by the quantity.

Also, I'm doing some rock-style backup vocals on a gangsta rap track for a buddy of mine too, it's turning out pretty well so far.

BUSY TIMES. Tomorrow I sleep in, go shopping, maybe get a haircut or something, then get my drink on.

Kneecapped

Well, I went to a wedding reception Saturday night and saw a bunch of dudes from high school that I hadn't seen in years... One of em was getting married, of course.
It was a nice outdoor reception, not a total suit and tie affair but there was a DJ and an open bar with a more than serviceable selection. Plus a ton of cute bridesmaids.

All in all a really good time; we drank heavily, did some dancing, and a lot of bullshitting and catching up. While dancing, I was busting out some moves on the floor after about 7 or 8 drinks when I suddenly hit a soggy patch and did the involuntary splits, landing hard on my left knee. My mishap was followed by two other drunk dancing guys doing a faceplant, which was hilarious in retrospect. The pain was pretty bad at first, but I found I was able to still walk around on it and dance so it was quickly forgotten. Also I probably was filled to the brim with anesthetic at the time so I shrugged it off.

The DJ and bartenders cut out at midnight, leaving most of their bartending utensils unattended. SO! we decided to compensate in order to fill the vacuum they had left. After a few more free beers, some nice Chardonnay, and whatever else we could wrap our lips around, I had the brilliant idea of starting a drink fight.

It started kind of like this:

"Hey, that suit looks like a rental."

*SPLASH*


Retaliation ensued. Good thing that was all free beer, huh?

After a few minutes of this all of us in the bar tent were pretty much soaked in Bud Light and it had started to rain. We picked up and dragged the people that were too inebriated and headed out. My brother and my friend Tom and I went out to grab an Irish Car Bomb and a pizza, then we went home and passed out around 3.

I woke up to a horrible pain in my leg and groin around 10am this morning. My knee had swollen up pretty bad, and it was difficult to walk on. Apparently I had landed on my hands pretty hard too, since I had huge purple bruises on both palms as well. I put some ice on it, added a knee brace so I could hobble around better, and ate a bunch of Ibuprofen while I chilled on some RE4 and drank coffee.


I'll probably be limping around for the next few days, but it was definitely a blast to see all those guys again.

Owning my body

Finally got my tattoo work started yesterday, it's a large intricate tree pattern done over my left arm to cover up some scarification from when I was a stupid kid. It looks great so far, still some of the scars show below the main piece but I'm thinking up ideas to cover that too. I went back to throw my man Brian at Cap City a couple extra bills for the awesome job, and when he asked to check out how it was healing a couple people hanging out in the shop were blown away by the level of detail. I'm pretty impressed with it, and it was a pretty painless operation despite covering a large portion of my upper arm... all in all a good start for the cover up. I'll try to get some pics up here sometime soon.

As an aside, ran across this page while trying to come up with inspiration for the rest of the fill in. I like this guy's philosophy on tattoo work, although simple, and share in some of his sentiments.

Finally, Necropopolis is really starting to come together due to some awesome coding from Tom and art from Rollin. I sent out some sound contributions this week to be added in whenever Tom gets time-- spent several hours perfecting some engine noises for the carriage today as well as some cannonfire, and I sent out a menu title theme earlier this week. Hopefully I get that damn MIDI controller I ordered soon so I can really start to crank out the tunes for the game.

Drunken Posts 2007

Well time for a rant!

I'm fucking drunk.

Went to the Klinic tonight, as I have been making it a habit. Got to jam out a little bit with my hiphop buddy and his freestyling friend, that was plenty fun except for the fact that the Klinic should be ashamed of how shitty their drumset is. It was akin to playing pie pans instead of cymbals. FOR SHAME, KLINIC! I HAVE GIVEN YOU ENOUGH BEER REVENUE TO BUY REAL CYMBALS! FOOOOR SHAAAAME!

So I blew a few bucks on some beers, watched some other bands play. It was a pretty quiet night all in all, there were some pretty cool saxophone players all up innis with some guy rapping over them. That was OK to listen to for a while until I became horribly bored and meandered back here to post on my blog like one lonely motherfucker.

Good night all in all, it got my mind off my shitty test scores I received as of late. Better luck (and skill) next time, I guess... only means I have to apply myself more. I'm not the only one in the shitty test score boat, so midterms must have taken people by surprise all in all. Gotta do pretty well to get that 4.0 I so desire! Hopefully there will be some extra credit. But enough about my school bullshit, no one wants to read that anyways.

I'm learning some songs on guitar for some acoustic jam outs at the Klinic, starting with some simple ones. The first one I picked was Pennyroyal Teaby Nirvana. Nirvana stuff is mostly barre and power chords, so I figured this would be a good launch pad for me. Plus I don't even have to be a good singer!

The next one I picked was a Morphine song called You Look Like Rain, which I think is one sexy fucking song. I picked this one in particular as the focal point was the vox, not the instrumentation. Plus, it's a bass tab so it's easy to play and sing. If you haven't heard Morphine I suggest you boys and girls give er a go, it is some awesome shit-- their lineup is 2 string bass (!), 2 saxophones, drummer, and vocals. SWEET as hell and also super sexy/jazzy/lounge stuff.

Once again props to my man Aaron (The Verbal Architect), his friend Dustin (Sky) and their dope rhymes: it was fun as hell to back them up tonight. PEACE!

Lamebus

Agh, I really have nothing that significant to post.

Working on some more lyrics, if I could just get the words to come out right. Came down with some kinda virus this weekend, woohoo, so I'm pushing that out of my system as fast as I can... lots of OJ and soup.

Also answered a Craigslist ad for some dudes looking for a drummer for a prog rock band along the lines of APC/Tool/Queens of the Stone Age. Hopefully I'll get an answer back, I am bored of not being in a band. It's been way too long.

Other than that I'm trying to get some more musical exposure, a friend of mine turned me on to an open mic at the Klinic over on Park street in Madtown that happens every Tuesday. The Verbal Architect, a dude I go to school with, brought this to my attention. The link goes to his Myspace if you wanna check it out (I like Write This the best), it's some laid back beats... gonna try to get better and tear it up a bit on the drums tomorrow nite!

Back in the Blogosphere

Hm, looks like my last update was 25 days ago. Well, let's see if I can find anything cool to regurgitate onto the bathroom floor of the eenternetz.




Here's something!A new movie starring Ben Kingsley as an alcoholic hitman.

Going to check out Wolfmother at Summerfest on the 28th... I'll post a review when I get back, provided I don't get too hammered to remember it.

By the way, that isn't puke. It's a cookie!

Edit: Wolfmother was way kickass, despite $4 Summerfest beers. Every song turned into an extended jam. Best picks were the songs Colossal, Joker and the Thief, and Woman. The showmanship was great, instrumentation was fantastic, and the guitarist played a different guitar every song, even one of those two-necks monstrosities.

And after that, I caught the tail end of a Violent Femmes show on a different stage. All in all a good time.

Tales from the meat market

Went to the Inferno Saturday nite to score some drinks with my friend and her dude. This is a goth club, and apparently it was "Leather and Lace" theme night. Apparently this means "show up wearing electrical tape and drop the cover charge by 5 bucks".


Sporting the most gothy thing I had in my closet-- a sleek lightning blue buttondown and gray fedora (?), I sauntered forth. A pleasant surprise: part of my entourage knew the cute club girl working the door and I got in free of charge. Nice perk, that.


The floorshow was entertaining. It consisted mostly of semi-to-fully naked girls being tied up by some sweaty chump that looked like he might be a banker or computer technician, were it not for the goggles, shaved head, and sleeveless biohazard t-shirt. (I lean toward the latter). There were also a lot of trannies. I mean, some of these trannies towered over me, and I'm about 6' tall--no short dude. Probably the pinnacle of strangeness was the cherubic old guy with glasses placidly wearing a tutu and leotard; however the highlight (for me) was the plentiful supply of eye candy. Gotta say, I can definitely see the attraction of a hogtied and helpless girl wearing nothing but tape and body paint. :D

Found a pick!

I found a pick! It's the good kind. It was stuck between my bed and the wall.

NOW I CAN ROCK ON!

I bring proof of the demonic pact.

I had hoped to bring you proof of Les Claypool's demonic pact, but instead I can only act as a witness to this event.

To make it up to you, I have located a video of Les in his true form.


The solo act preceedings of Gabby La La were extremely grating (think ukelele strumming with a grown woman screeching in a baby-voice falsetto), but other than that the concert was well worth the price of admission. This is the point where I returned to the bar and used my drink ticket on a ten dollar thimbleful of rum and coke.

Most of the show was 2 hours of world-class musicians soloing their brains out. It was great fun to watch and listen to, the highlight being the introduction of the upright bass followed by a twenty minute drumoff between two top-notch percussionists and topped off with Les playing the Whamola.

Basically the Whamola is an electric variant of the washtub bass. After doing some digging on the interwebs, I found a couple places with info on how to build one. Check out the bottom of this thread for a few hints.

Whamola info in general is surprisingly sparse, but here's a paper written by a guy that built one for a class in college.

FINALLY: CHECK OUT THIS TRAILER.
In the upcoming movie Electric Apricot: Quest for Festeroo, Les plays the drummer in the fictional jam band Electric Apricot. Coolies.

Les Claypool has a deal with the devil

Les Claypool has a deal with the devil. I am totally convinced he is going to hell when he dies to repent for being such an awesome goddamn bass player. I'm checking out his progress to damnation on the 27th of May at the Rave in Milwaukee.

Only $20 to see a man's path to his own eventual destruction? What a deal. Hopefully it will look like this:




AWESOME.

**Philosophic Crap Alert**

While I'm waiting for all this paint to dry, I figured I might as well channel some thoughts thru the ePen and onto the ePaper... hopefully without getting my keyboard all pink. Already spilled some pink primer on the rug by the door. Way to go, Chandon!

I've been going thru a period of change lately. Such is life. Makes me wonder what the point is though...

What is the meaning of life?

This of course is an age old question. But! I'm sick of the answers like "Life is what you make it" or similar fortune cookie crap.

As I open the second Newcastle Brown on an empty stomach, I ponder the life of a human:

We are born.

We eat, shit, and scream. These are things we never really stop doing.

We fuck. Ok, so that's necessary to propagate the species. Instinctual. Also very enjoyable: Bonus!

(Sidebar: it's entertaining how two of the filthiest words in the English language are for natural processes. Big ups to fucking and shitting!)

We die. Hell yeah we do. In an entertaining variety of ways, to boot. There are so many ways to kill a human it's ridiculous. Watching the news definately won't help anyone who's scared of thier own mortality already.

So, one might say "point a, to point b, the point of life is death."

A simple answer at that, but effective!

(Better that what I came up with: Two hookers and an eight ball.)

What about everything else that we as homosapiens experience in life? Things we think that matter, be they real or imagined. Love. Justice. Compassion. Revenge. Money. Power. Fame. I'm sure there's a valid and compelling argument for any of these things to be the meaning of life, but not for everyone. Which leads to another fortune cookie, "The meaning of life is in the eye of the beholder." Man I love Chinese food.

The earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Our species has been on it for a scant 200-400 thousand of those years. I think it's pretty safe to say that the chunk of rock we are standing on is still going to be there long after the expiration of mankind (which--if you believe the media-- is going to be any day now).

My point is this: nothing we do now, or will ever do in the future, will really --REALLY-- matter. At all. At least, to the course and fate of the universe... and this is true despite how self-important you might be. Even if humans survive, eventually the sun will burn out and become a supernova, thrusting the world into a deep freeze.

The way I see it, our lives have an expiration date. Might as well enjoy yourself while it lasts. Indulge those animal instincts. Take in some music. Get a hobby. Myself, for example: I'm going to try my hand at being a rock musician (again).

Fearing death is lost on me. And while I'm sure I'd mess my pants if I knew it was imminent, I still know it is a transitory state. One of the most widespread human fears is that of mortality, which basically translates to fear of the unknown. And you know you're gonna die. So quit being scared, get the fuck off that treadmill, order a cheeseburger and hit on that coworker you've been eyeing up for the past month.

I am pink

Not just me, my apartment is pink also. I'm repainting a couple walls in my apartment today. Supposed to be red eventually, but the pigmented primer color is pink. Big ups to the people at Home Depot for the tips, by the way.

SO: for the next couple days I will have two hot pink walls in my living room. Badass. If anyone comes to visit I will just tell them I am having transgender surgery and want my apartment to match.

Anyways--

You might have noticed, if reading this at all (which I very much doubt anyone is) that this is a place for me to throw my lyrics ideas. Feel free to leave comments, since I am basically throwing my crap on the wall to see what sticks and what sinks. Without the music it is basically structured rhyme poetry. Guess we all need a little structure in our lives.

Speaking of which, I'm adding a little structure to this blog. You might see big parts of posts that say ** Personal BS Alert** or **I am gushing about random thing**. These can be skipped if you don't care about said thing, so go ahead and scroll on past if you like.

Click the "lyrics" tag to just see lyrics. There's a little text sidebar with updates, but it is conveniently annoying to read because I don't know any HTML. Cool.

** Personal BS Alert **

I think it's pretty cool that I've started writing again. The breakup with a girl I was with for about 4 years is what set it off, I think. If getting rid of emotional dead weight is the only way I'll be creative, so be it.

** End Personal BS Alert**

Gunshot Wound

Her face is pale and painful
Her eyes circled and fierce
There's not a part on her body that she would not dare to pierce
Her hair is a gunshot wound
Her mouth always a frown
But I can't keep my hands off her whenever she's around

I like the girls
That pretend they are dead
I like the girls
That want to put a bullet in my head

She hasn't seen the sunlight
In over 13 years
She dwells constantly in misery and the shapes of all her tears
In the daytime she's a silhouette
In the nighttime she's a ghost
But the nights are always times that I seem to enjoy the most

Cuz I like the girls
That bite me when they kiss
I like the girls
That carry a deathwish

Late friday night
We wait in the dark
Locking the door to tear each other apart.

Journey to Sagittarius A

In the middle of the void where it's dark and deep

His eyes are bloodshot from the lack of sleep

His fingers are bitten down past the nail

He screams thru space in his cosmic jail

Home feels like it was long ago
He hears the voice of God on the radio
As he's dragging, dragging, further and further away...

He says:
"I'm laying catatonic and I'm on the floor
Haven't seen the earth for days
I think the devil's inside me and he won't let go
I just wanna leave this place"

**

Laying catatonic and I'm on the floor
Haven't seen the earth for days
The devil's inside me and he won't let go
I just wanna leave this place

Over the radio the order comes:
Head straight for the sun.

**

As he stares straight into that blazing eye

He no longer feels afraid to die

The only way that he's gonna be free

Is to fly to the center of the galaxy
Fly to the center of the galaxy!

He closes his eyes and imagines the seas
With the gentle touch of a summer breeze
As he's dragging, dragging, further and further away...

He says: "I'm laying catatonic and I'm on the floor
Haven't seen the earth for days
I think the devil's inside me and he won't let go
I just wanna leave this place"
Yeah

Laying catatonic and I'm on the floor
Haven't seen the earth for days
The devil's inside me and he won't let go
I just wanna leave this place

Purgatory's Pusher

Listen to the wind as we walk on by
Leave a twenty dollar bill and we'll all get high
In heaven
We'll all get high
In heaven
We'll all get high

We are the shadow masters at the top of the hill
With our fingers of smoke slowly exerting our will
Burning the incense from beyond the world's edge.

When the clouds are gray and hang low in the sky
You will see a flicker in the blink of an eye
Almost invisible
Unbelievable
Inconceivable
But you know you saw--

Listen to the wind as we walk on by
Leave a twenty dollar bill and we'll all get high
In heaven
We'll all get high
In heaven
We'll all get high
**
A simple service we provide, but not for free
Erasing all your lifetime memory
Replacing all the sorrows with euphoric afterglow
At the price of twenty dollars and your soul.

When the Valkyries take me Home

The words don't matter any more, the alcohol is what's in store
I rest my head against the wall and drown my cares in alcohol.

Firewater's fury flushes through my veins--
Summoning the elements laying comatose
In the recesses of my brain

My thoughts are the screams of the valkyries
Can't see through the haze to the pain
They refuse to leave my mind at ease
Until I poison them again

I rest my head against the wall and drown my cares in alcohol
I rest my head against the wall and drown my fears in alcohol.

I raise my glass and tilt one back
It all becomes a lucid dream
Drinking the ambrosia of the sun god
While the world splits apart at the seams

***

So come on, take me home
Tuck me in until the dawn has come
You got a little piece of my life
You got a little piece of my life now, baby

Come on, and take me home
Keep me safe until the morning sun
You got a little piece of my life
You got a little piece of my life now, baby.

Blogs are pretentious

Blogging! The most vain application of the diary format available to humanity thus far! Now you can regurgitate all your meaningless and inane thoughts into an easy to use format and make it visible for the entire world to see, taking for granted that this tripe is somehow important to other people! Or you can report news that may or may not be factual! I'd better get some screenies of all my World of Warcraft characters up here.