samplehead vs halloweenhead; 1st of 3 falls

I go off on a tear being anti-corporate like I'm George Carlin's long lost grandkid or something, sometimes. And then bang-o...something from my formative years comes busting out.

I woke up the other day after failing to sleep off a headache that consumed most of the daylight hours. I further medicated, caffeinated, and eventually conquered it.

Not before an old network bumper from the old viacom/emptyvee proto-kids network Nickelodeon got stuck in my head. Nicknick nicknick na nicknicknick... Haw de lo hup hivvel hup nick...etc.

Those bits of harmonized babble are writ down at root level with machine-language file protection deep in the firmware of my brainmeats. I bet they'd be glad, if anyone who developed these old bumpers still worked there.

I'm not even gonna link to the video. You can find it by searching 'nick doo wop' o'er at teh goo-tubez.

I realize I may rail against some things that capitalism has given to, taken from, or forced upon the world. But I can appreciate just as many truly creative side-effects. Call it the American two-step of protest-then-facepalm.

I also wonder if any rappers, of any nationality or racial stripe, have sampled these sounds. I found myself immediately wondering if I could edit their doo wop syllables into a nursery rhyme like 'Knick Knack Paddy Whack.'

And that was before I remembered the Mr. Bungle song with 'knick-knack-paddywhack' as a refrain. *evil grin*

wherever u go, there u r

I gotta admit I'd begun to be a news junkie again. Blame Rachel Maddow.

I dialed into Air America on the job back in the day. After being banished from ipod listening at work while I typed. Suddenly data entry had to be performed only accompanied by the stale breath of MPR.

Not only that classical sleep soundtrack, but this starvation rations thin and staticky from across the room via a stentorian co worker with a rod for a spine who wouldn't know a good time if it bit him on the neck.

So I had taken to the barely audible no-headphones approach and tuned in the brain freeing influence of Chuck D, Lizz Winstead and Rachel. It helped keep me awake when MPR threatened coma.

Of course paying attention to the news is equal parts shooting yourself in the foot and daring ennui or insanity.

Being up to date on the news of the health care reform "debate" isn't supposed to give me a damned ulcer.

Mom chastised me for being too political about a month ago. I comment on what I experience. Sometimes the news got a big portion of my day. That seems to be passing, as it did after my Air America phase on the job.

Soon enough they cut off any autonomous listening privileges. I could bring in a radio if I had to, but using it was never actually possible. If I tried, cubicle nemesis suddenly had to turn MPR up for some reason.

I was being outmaneuvered, and persistently never addressing the issue to my face rapidly lost them respect in my eyes. Patience frayed on both sides, and I was offered the opportunity to quit, or be sacked.

In the end, I took the unemployment. I never gave up working my skills for them. They began to selectively accept how I performed best, and whittled my effectiveness in their sandbox down to a toothpick's worth of where and how I'd began in their employ. Clueless capitalists abound.

I have no regrets about that tired scene. I can't believe I've rambled about it years later.

But NaNoWriMo is chugging along. Coaxing out my muse and letting it ramble must be affecting my blogging.

There is no day thirteen. I'm keeping rough chapters divided by the progress made each day. Not exactly dividing scenes. Sometimes they branch from day to day right in the midst of a scene.

I've sketched out a scene later on that I'll either cut and revise in, embellishing as needed when I come to it, or abandon entirely at any number of forks in the path before it. Lovely nihilism, that.

I'm not actually moving forward on the plot today, at least yet. I've got a sketch of the coming chapters that exploded somewhere inside my forehead last evening. A brief satori of plottage and witty snaps of characters that haven't been written yet.

Oh Eris, Loki, oh Jupiter. Oh Goddess, Jah, Abraham, Mary, Mohammed, Allah...

I don't mean to profane. I thank them all, and only my family members complain.

Sometimes I imagine sitting at the table where they all share the multiverse.

I keep scribbling my words in wobbly-legged stacks, inspired but solitary, for now.

writing and rewards

I've been hammering out words for this year's NaNoWriMo. I don't know what's kept me from trying it in previous years, other than those in which I had a paying day jobb of werk.

I'm coming around the bend between 17k and 20k words. It's amusing, like using a long since dormant muscle that never actually atrophied.

In parallel lines of communication, it seems from smelling the dust at the Soul Asylum message board that the band's kicking around the idea of doing another album. They did nicely back in May in Mound, Mn.

I have been pleasantly amused by Ryan Adams selling digital singles in recent weeks. I've bought each one. Imagine my chagrin after being a regular at a Weezer board lately, I went and missed Ryan's new pink 7-inch single. It was cheap, but I missed it.

Not to fear, though. I reached out to a RA junkie I used to live near, and she threw me a link to the songs, which being an exhaustive completist for the artists I follow, let me absorb the content. I thanked her three times.

I don't think three hours passed before a friend of hers was offering to send me a spare 7 inch she had been sent by mistake. Again I thank Goddess and the skies and try not to dwell much on what I could've done to be blessed thusly. Despite my human failing of endless wonderment, I let it go with a threefold thanks.

I scuttled up a handful of old Weezer bootlegs from a fellow forum user, and found about every version of the pre-Green Album era song 'Superstar' that could've been 3-5x bigger for the band than 'Hash Pipe' ever was.

Another place in which I lurk, a random collection of audiophiles sharing enthusiasm about the music they love, shot me a link to a "bonus" ep a favorite artist of mine had sold only at iTms. So I have what everyone else who paid the same as I did got, but without having to lose another Lincoln.

It has been a good Samhain and despite a nappy streak this weekend, I hope to pass 30k words before next weekend. With coffee, my Ryan Adams writing playlist going, and a wee nip of the herb if medically indicated...I'd hesitate to say so, but this feels pretty good.

interesting, perhaps fruitful, times

So some old college friends have mostly convinced me, through their nonchalant nature when tackling the task themselves, to attempt NaNoWriMo this year.

The wife is getting a week of well-deserved down time, and we're gonna head out of town, meet up with some other anarcho-punk hippie freak types, and see if we can't recreate for a couple days.

I made the trek into Santa Cruz yesterday to sell off a box of poetry and literature books from my college days. I've been hauling them around from basement to apartment to house and this last time halfway across the country.

I think it might spur me to evolve, grow, change, etc - the having molted myself out and away from that old skin, baggage, stuff.

I consider approaching the next gen game consoles now that they've been out long enough to pick up used. It probably won't happen for another year, but I've been reading about the ways the hackers and freaks have fixed the corporate broken-by-design hardware.

I remain constantly amused by brothers, family and friends who buy the newest shit when it's most expensive. I rely on the easily duped to wear off the hard edges and vet out the bugs before I leap onto any newish tech.

I just got my first webcam. It's a piece of shit that's at least 5 years old, with the expected bad resolution and framerate. But I got it in a plastic baggie from the pegboard of miscellaneous outdated gear at Savers for a very reasonable sum.

There isn't a mac os x driver from the manufacturer, but there's an open-source USB driver available from sourceforge that lets me use it, take pics and low fps videos with it.

So I get to play in the sandbox of webcammitude without having to shell out seventy bucks for the bullshit. And bonus! It's not always on and unable to be disconnected like the ones in every damn laptop lately.

If I don't want a webcam connected, I can yank it out and throw it in a drawer.

I find the old fiction muscles flexing under the surface. I've begun to keep a half-assed story blog dark until I decide to share the link with anybody. But NaNoWriMo might draw me away from that. We'll see.

Either way, with a roadtrip ahead, new albums from favorite bands on the immediate horizon, and fixing to write and finish a novel no matter how ugly it gets...interesting times!

a bit of my morning reading list today

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10781.shtml

I am very pro-Palestine.
I shun the faulty logic equating this with anti-semitism, as any rational mind would.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/blogs/bizfeed/172290/fcc_to_take_a_stand_on_net_neutrality.html

Thank you, Mr. President, for taking steps to keep another campaign promise. Thank you.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/sep/18/children-philosophy-childless

Backed my way into a thusfar childless life, and no, it doesn't suck. It might even be keeping us from going further into debt. *rolls eyes*

This is probably rebutting more disgusting Christian propaganda (gotta get more white people to pump out the babies, dontchaknow?) and the anti-women's rights agenda masquerading as pro-lifers today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/opinion/18brooks.html?_r=2&em

Hey, I don't really agree with him. But he makes his point without pandering to the lowest common denominator, as so many right-wingers are doing lately.

I've been around the world. Not even close to all of it, but enough to know that YES, racism and bigotry come in as many sundry forms as colors in the rainbow.

You see black people saying that cannabis is okay for white people to smoke, but not for black people because it makes them crazy? I've heard that in Africa with my own ears in this millenia.

You hear white-on-white racism in Australia, aimed at those who associate with Aborigines, derogatorily referring to them as "derros" and un-subtle class stratification in the neighborhoods outside Perth? I have witnessed it myself firsthand.

I honestly believe there may very well be racism burbling just under the surface of a highly unstable gun-toting sliver of these teabaggers.

I take umbrage, am personally insulted down to my marrow by their rhetoric, their guns, their anger and their fear.

And I stand up proudly and say that if they take aim at Our President, they are aiming at me,
if they try to tear him down, they are going to have to go through me...

seethe / breathe / seethe

I've been having a little schoolyard scuffle with my conservative cousins. Naturally I'm defending the President, who hasn't had time to do anything worthy of the scorn the last administration deserved.

I can't get my head around it completely. It's like the right-wingers have been paying close scrutinous attention to how exasperated the left has been for the last 8 years. And now they're twisting up the most deservedly-inflammatory rhetoric aimed at Bu$h - but aiming instead at Obama.

Obama hasn't done anything remotely deserving of such bigoted racist sour grapes. But that doesn't stop the right, the fox limbaugh medved hannity beck noise patrol, from starting out their criticisms of Obama as loud or even louder than the left shouted when Bu$h was at his worst.

And will someone please shove a big black dick down Michelle Malkin's throat already?

awghost as the summer lamp is burning

I finally put up a timely post at my music blog. Included a link to a freely-available live recording shared off-site.

Now the inner pessimist is waiting till my wp blog disappears b/c of the link, completely indifferent to the content around it.

My new books still haven't showed up from amazon, dangit. Altho I am inchworming along in the paperback I'm reading now...it's frustrating to go to the mailbox and find it empty.

I've developed a poor person's game. I go to amazon (or half or addall or wherever) and find the cheapest book I actually want to read, and then find another cheap-as-I-can book that I want from the same seller, to split the postage up and make it a little less like a bite in the ass.

Things is tight, dollars is scarce. It's like thrift-store shopping online. And I love thrifting...

I've found that most of the thrift stores in any given town have web affiliates or equivalents that unload remainders and old library books for cents on the dollar. Usually by hustling them at amazon or half.

So don't bite the big box bookstores and their obscene cover prices unless you can't help it. Find more to read at the library, the library sale rack, trading sites like paperbackswap or bookmooch, garage sales, thrift shops, and whatever's necessary to make your money go further.

another day's mental sandbox

There comes a time when in the course of daily events, I decide that whatever words I can shove together at the end of a pitchfork get thrust forward as the subject line so that I can start the damn post.

One can only blog so often with a clear and precise intent. Sometimes, despite the fact that it's near impossible to erase something from the internet, we just need to skribble, even in digital.

When we moved here, a couple of boxes I couldn't bring myself to part with, burn, shred, or leave behind stored with the in-laws, contain the sum total of what I've written, etched, scrawled, or otherwise achieved in the realm of words during this lifetime.

Otherwise I exist mainly as thimblefuls of diatribe here or there...myspace, facebook, no longer myopera, *sigh*, here at blogger and over at wordpress. I post sometimes at livejournal, but haven't been overly central to them for my braindumps in a while.

Whether or not the Goddess, the Lady and the Lord, wanted us to have crotchfruit/children in this world, I find that somewhere between 25-35 I'm assessing my life, its meaning, purpose, and whatever will be left of it once I'm unable or unwilling to continue in this body and soul.

I've read about such mid-life assessment coinciding with assuming the responsibility of a baby into our lives. And of course the artists, writers, musicians I pay attention to are unfettered in the ways of fertility. Even superfly gay-or-just-bi? icon Ani DiFranco succumbed to the urge and positively *lights up* when talking about her baby girl.

An old friend, someone I was nearly involved with back in the emotional-trainwreck portion of my post-teenaged years, asked if my wife and I had kids yet. I had to answer 'no' despite considerable thought both ways...

I used to read the heart-rending statements of couples in fertility treatments, desperate for a baby, and wonder what was wrong with adopting fer chrissakes? Now it would appear at least that life has proven to me that there can be a deep emotional quality to these questions in our lives.

I bet I sound detached, blurry, and repetitive. Thus that last word in the subject/title line.

Still getting my AM coffee down...Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Amy Goodman in the bullpen, waiting to inform, entertain, and explain all the muck that's fit to read aloud. Wife successfully at work for the day...short list of job apps to drop not growing fast enough.

Groceries yesterday, plenty of bagels for the toasting, a few basic options for lunch, I might take out the trash and recycling later, after the morning sun burns the haze off and I can see the mountains in the distance again.

Remarked upon dropping her off today "it never fails to amaze me that the mountains disappear at night." Oh, Salinas...its like a microcosm of three seasons in every day. Brisk but not cold at night, hazy - almost foggy, dewy early mornings, sunny midday, warm afternoons, cool evenings.

Despite brotherman telling me that Minnesota is once again doing its best Jamaica impression this August, and that his central A/C has been running around the clock, I know that in another six weeks there, they have the distinct possibility - if not actual probability, of actually accumulating snow.

While I know the Gods have infinitely odd senses of humor, I'm pretty confident it's not gonna snow where I am this time through the season's cycle...