Shutter Island was no Houseguest

People that have license plates that make reference to the car they are driving (i.e. someone driving a Mercedes whose plate says "MY BENZ 7") are assholes.

because tuna is gross.

Yesterday at work I helped myself to an enormous tuna sandwich. It was a sloppy mess that got all over my fingers and was falling all over the place and for the first time I thought about something: tuna sandwiches are gross.

I don't think there is anyone that doesn't agree with this statement. Whether you like tuna sandwiches or not (we'll get to this) you agree that when you think about it, it's a weird thing to eat. It looks nasty. It's sloppy. Think about it. Tuna mixed with mayonnaise and sometimes celery. I don't like mayonnaise and I rarely like celery. But I eat tuna sandwiches despite this fact.

Why? Well, I think it's because I ate it when I was younger. My mom made tuna fish sandwiches for me all the time and I knew that it was gross then, but the fact that my mom made it for me was enough assurance for me to think it was alright to eat. And I enjoyed it. If no one was making you tuna sandwiches growing up, you're probably not going to eat tuna when you're older. And you're not gonna give your kids tuna sandwiches and they're not gonna eat tuna when they're older.

Just so you know, Scott, Timmy Scott's will be serving tuna sandwiches. They'll be endorsed by Charlie Sheen. Or Charles Barkley.

But you talk like your mother

Hot damn I feel good. Today I got out of bed at about 6:30 to go to my place of employment. Notice that I didn't say I went "to work" because I went there to record some music. The bathroom at work has a natural reverb that I adore and could never recreate, so I've recorded several songs before the store opens.

I started playing shows by myself about a year ago and I've recorded two EPs under the name The Swingin' Party and I've been working on a third recording the past couple of months and I've never been this consistently excited about writing music and recording. I have 4 (maybe 5 songs) that I consider done at this point and they're all those songs that I've been wanting to write for a while but never really felt satisfied in any attempts. There's a 7 minute song about my hometown (among other things) that sounds like a more spastic Greetings From Asbury Park. A catchy little pop song about long winters that uses a couple vocal melodies I've been sitting on and some Spoon/Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-type layering (which is what I recorded today). There's more, but this seems a bit boring. Just know that I'm excited to record these songs and for the first time I'm also excited about the process of recording them and seeing how I can tailor them and make them a little more interesting.

These occasional early morning days are always exciting, I highly recommend them for those of us who rarely get up early. You feel alive. You feel like finally going to Meier to get toilet paper because you've been out since Thursday and have had to go next door every time you need to poop.

Humainty Is Fucked: A Boiling Over Tribute Post

When you spend an hour reading The Golem by Gustav Meyrink while listening to Another Green World by Brian Eno (on vinyl) it's hard to argue that you're anything other than a lame white person.

Oh wait...my coffee is done.

Intransit

Sometimes I feel like I’m playing a part in my life—like I’m a spectator watching things pass me by. I think about the future with nothing but a strong sense of hope. I feel like one day I will reach a point where everything I do will make sense. And that state of mind, that point of consciousness, is what I look forward to.

But in the mean time, I’m stuck where I am and where I am is unbearably numb at times.

I feel like I watch the days pass and I watch the mechanics of day to day work and I understand the implications of time as they weigh on me, but I’m helpless in changing them. I watch them pass and I hate how I’ve acted and want to go back and change them, but I’m stuck so far in the past and dealing with regrets that when these things happen again, I simply let them pass and once again I’m disappointing myself and the people I care about.

I think about yesterday and it’s hard to picture how it happened and what the characters looked like.

I worry that this feeling will continue. I think about tomorrow daily. And it’s strange because for the first time in my life I look at tomorrow with very little fear. I always worried that I would end up broke, hungry, and alone. Today I don’t think that’s how it will turn out. But I worry that I will be stuck in this state of numb forever, that I won’t be able to fully enjoy this blessing that I’ve been given [without warrant].

I will always worry that I’m not good enough. That I’m not doing enough. But that fear is slowly starting to give way to something different. After being told repeatedly that I am, in fact, good enough, and that I do enough, what’s holding me back is not coming to terms with the concept that she is not lying to me, it’s fully being able to accept this as fact. My mind always holds me back from accepting that she is not only telling me the truth, but telling herself the truth.

I guess I’ll have to trust her on that.

If I don’t than I’m eventually going to convince her otherwise. Then where do I end up?

My leg is pins

I've developed this unfortunate habit of not being able to fall back asleep after a night of heavy drinking. I find this to be a more damaging habit than the actual habit of drinking.

But last night was entirely silly. Made some new friends which is something I don't do very often anymore. Played an unbelievably sloppy Blink 182 cover set with two of my favorite people in the world (our stage banter was the most impressive part). And my wiener made an unexpected public appearance.

Today I have the finishing touches to put on one of the all time greatest Valentine's Day presents (or at least a present that was fun to make) and I probably should clean the house. All the garbage that was neatly stacked at the top of the stairs is now strewn all over the house.

But for now I have a hangover to kick before my lady's parents get into town.

Photosynthesis at night

I keep waking up in the middle of the night excited to be alive. Excited to wake up next to my lady. Excited to brush my teeth and wash my face. Excited to hear music. It’s a strange, new feeling. Sorry to sound repetitive, but exciting is really the best adjective I could use to describe it (I believe synonyms are overrated sometimes—take that for what it’s worth).

While it’s a nice feeling to have I wish it would wait a few hours so I could sleep through for a decent period of time. These type of nights make it difficult to get through days and I can’t keep spending money on pickmeups during my breaks at work. I think that the worst part about being irresponsible with finances is when you are actually in the position of needing to save money. I toss around money I don’t have at shit I don’t need and now when I actually need to save a few hundred bucks for something I do need I realize that I don’t have groceries or gas in my car. Shit.

But I’m awake at this hour of the night with very good reason. It’s funny how sometimes the best nights are the ones that you don’t expect to turn out. My lady came home from work and I was watching the end of Eraser, a movie which became the victim of unfortunate timing a few days ago when I had to go to work 15 minutes before it was over. I was so mad. That movie kicks ass, a much underappreciated piece in the Schwarzenegger canon. I’d like to point out very quickly that Schwarzenegger is in spell check.

When she came home I wasn’t in a very good mood and [this is a rare occurrence] with good reason. My guitar got stolen this weekend. I’ve had that guitar since I was 17, I’ve written nearly every song of my life on that guitar. I’ve grown with that guitar and somehow somebody walked out with it during a show I played. I’m really bummed, it feels like I got my heart broken. In fact I wrote a break-up song today [on a shitty old guitar that I have—this guitar is like the girl you knew you could have sex with for years, but were in a relationship with a much hotter, cooler girl and when that relationship ended you went out and had sex with this chick and it didn’t really feel like anything at all but you were glad to find out that you were right about knowing you could’ve had sex with her whenever you wanted]. My conclusion is that I will love again, but my intentions are not to replace that guitar. I have a lot of memories with that guitar and I will have new memories (probably even better ones) with whichever I get next, but I’m still bummed that my guitar is gone. Either way that thing gave me a lot of songs that I will always be proud to have written and proud to sing and I know I’ll write new songs on a new guitar that I will like even better someday soon. That’s just how it goes.

But I was telling a story here…so my lady comes in and I’m moping a little, watching Eraser, and she’s talking about her day and says “Rakisha [a woman she works with] made a pass at me,” and I responded with a very flat “that’s nice.”

I got the blank, “are you seriously gonna shoot this down like that? You and I both know that this is, at the very least, pretty funny” look which is probably the worst look you can get from someone. I don’t care how stuck you are in being pissed off at anything, if you get this look from a person than you’re probably acting like a dick. That’s a look that never gets thrown around without justification.

So I smacked myself out of feeling like a mope and we drove to Meijer and bought bloody mary mix and came back here and had some really really good talking about shit we actually care about. Not school or sandwich delivery or living situations or my broken heart, just straight talk about what we believe in. The type of conversation that feels good from beginning to end.

We fell asleep early and shit it felt good. I woke up not too long ago and I don’t think I’m going back to sleep, but I feel as if I’m up for all the right reasons.

My lady makes this funny little moaning sound in response to everything I do in the middle of the night. I can’t describe it well, thus you will never come close to understanding but it’s one of the most adorable things I’ve heard.

I think Saved By The Bell is on now, I’ma go watch that if my neighbors kept their front door open.

When we're told that sports matter

So I work every Sunday from 4-9 meaning that while you were enjoying the Super Bowl I was bringing sandwiches to people's houses. It's alright though today was the sort of day where you notice the colors around you. A good day, as they tend to say.

But the Saints won and while I did not watch this happen, I know what was constantly discussed: how the Saints were playing for New Orleans, a city that is still far off of recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Far from recovery.

Everyone was pulling for the Saints tonight. If you aren't actually a Colts fan (or you put money on the Colts), you were pulling for the Saints to win because of the fact that we want to believe a Saints win is a win for New Orleans, a city that hasn't been on the winning end of anything for the past 5 years. This was a time when sports became intermingled with the outside world and was able to write a feel good story. The Saints winning tonight was a way for us to feel like good triumphed, that a disaster like Hurricane Katrina (which was so devastating that you wonder how and why it could have happened, how does something like this happen to so many innocent people), can't keep people down. Everyone from New Orleans won tonight.

This happens all the time in sports broadcasting. All the time. It's like that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer tells that sick kid that Paul O'Neill will hit two home runs for him. Sick kids, natural disasters, third world countries will always be linked to stories about sports. Those little segments they run at half-time about how Warrick Dunn builds houses for single moms or how that 8 year old with leukemia spent an hour with David Wright, you've seen the story a hundred times. And it feels good. It always feels good. You get this distinct feelgood sense that only these type of stories can provide.

The Saints winning the Super Bowl is massive. Someone is going to publish a book about this and it's going to sell millions.

But sports don't matter. There have been so many people who have protested that they do (W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, which became Field of Dreams, is the best example. One of the best parts in that story is when J.D. Salinger, or James Earl Jones, gives that monologue about how baseball binds this country. It's beautiful.) But I don't really agree. I still contend that sports really don't matter the way we're told they do. Sports matter to us personally. I'm tied to the New York Rangers like they're a member of my family. I consider Adam Graves to be one of my heroes. But sports are in our lives to free us of reality. Sometimes it works, but there are situations where they don't mean dick. And I don't think that people point that part of the story out enough. The Saints winning the Super Bowl does not fix New Orleans. I wish it did, but I think that fact shouldn't be ignored. Maybe we can feel a little bit better for some time but nothing has changed.

This isn't a post about what needs to be done about New Orleans or why people should scoff at these feel good stories. Really I'm in awe at how they function as narratives. These stories about how professional sports transcend from being "just a game" to something that effects our lives can be told over and over again with different people and different situations and it will always have an affect. But I think everyone should remember that the story isn't over. And while we feel good now, there's a lot of time left in the game.

A Briefing

Okay, so I'm back to the blogging world. Let's not discuss what happened before because the thing about reading anything you've written over six months ago is that it's usually painful. I have fond memories about many things that I've written. Some of them I've looked over again later on and (without fail) I thought it all sucked. Other things I have never looked back on, I just continue to think that it was awesome. Thinking that it's awesome is always better.

But I digress...

There's no real theme here. Sometimes I'll write about music I like, sometimes I'll write about sports, sometimes I'll write about how delivering sandwiches sucks, and sometime I'll give a detailed analysis as to why, against all odds, Terminator 2 is way better than The Terminator. Really I just miss sharing my thoughts about the things I enjoy. Cool.