And don't say that I have changed, because man, of course I have

One of these days I will write something meaningful. Until then, here is the only listenable demo out of the new music I'm working on. It still needs a lot of work, and I will probably write some lyrics and try and record vocals for it, but it sounds okay for a rough demo at the moment. Download and let me know what you think.

Horses are Terrible People

I'm going to Colorado
To unload my head
I'm going to New York City
And that's in New York, friends
I'm going to Arizona
Sex on the rocks all warm and red
And we bled
And the writing in the stall said
"We write our maps in the stalls"
I'm going up to Alaska
I'm going to get off scot-fuckin-free
And we all did

I don't feel and it feels great
I sold my atlas by the freight stairs
I do lines and I crossed roads
I crossed the lines of all the great state roads
I'm going up
Going over to Montana
You got yourself a trucker's atlas
You knew you were all hot, well
Maybe you'll go and blow a gasket
Start at the northwest corner
Go down through California
Beeline, you might drive three days
And three nights to the tip of Florida
~"Trucker's Atlas" by Modest Mouse

I'll dig a hole in my room, from Birmingham and back again for you

I woke up a few days ago to find a message on my Facebook wall from... well, see for yourself. You'll find it after these lyrics.

Now the rainman gave me two cures,
Then he said, "Jump right in."
The one was Texas medicine,
The other was just railroad gin.
An' like a fool I mixed them
An' it strangled up my mind,
An' now people just get uglier
An' I have no sense of time.
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again.
~"Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again" by Bob Dylan


Dear Past Self,

This is yourself writing... FROM THE FUTURE! How can you be sure it's you (or... me?) from the future? SKRIB NEEWOH! Trust me, that will make sense when the time comes, and then you will know it's me. Anyway, I am writing with a message of utmost importance! Whatever you do, don't eat that cream cheese and flahargafish bagel for breakfast on June 25, 2012. It will save you from a few hours of the worst stomach discomfort you will ever feel, during which you won't be able to go out and buy your usual lottery ticket (you have developed a compulsive gambling habit at this point, even though you currently hate gambling) - the lottery ticket with the numbers you always use - three numbers of which will line up with the chosen numbers, winning you $100! So whatever you do, do not eat that bagel!

Anyway, take care.

With love,
Future you



Eternity is pressed against my eyelids
By brittle fists that I cannot avoid
And though each finger's grip has been relentless
The moments, they just keep on slipping by

And I am now aware that I
Haven't always had been at this moment
I've been sitting by the fire and blue, waiting for you
And though I've been expecting,
I have never quite accepted
That the fire will suddenly go out

The hands will fall away
The paint will peel
The trees will sadly sway
'Cause I'm scared that there's no answer
'cause I'm scared theres no dreamers
And in this life of mine, there is only time,
The illusion of which is gone
~"On the Threshold of Eternity" by The Snake The Cross The Crown

Tune the FM in to static and pretend that it's the sea...

Why do some people think that because the Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012, that that is when the world is going to end? Why do people think there needs to be any significance to that date at all? I mean, of course the calendar came to an end. Were the Mayans supposed to keep working on the calendar forever? Just keep plotting stuff far off into the future? My guess is they probably thought we'd be long gone before 2012 anyway. Humans are notoriously bad at predicting the future - according to 1973, I should have a jetpack and be living in a dome on the moon with robot women that love me unconditionally. But no. I'm sitting in my basement here on crummy earth, alone. But this isn't about my complete lack of a love life. This is about the Mayans.

Here's what I think: some guy was working on the calendar. Then... he stopped. Why? Pick your reason - he died, he got bored, he got promoted, he got demoted, he scammed the calendar company out of a bunch of money through shifty tax methods and got sacrificed to... Olmec, or whatever. I personally think that the guy's wife divorced him, and his alcoholism kicked in which meant he was forced to stop work on the calendar. And since he was the only one who knew what he was doing, no one else could pick up where he left off.

Everybody's restless and they've got no place to go
Someone's always trying to tell them
Something they already know
So their anger and resentment flow

But don't it make you want to rock and roll
All night long
Mohammed's Radio
I heard somebody singing sweet and soulful
On the radio, Mohammed's Radio

You know, the Sheriff's got his problems too
He will surely take them out on you
In walked the village idiot and his face was all aglow
He's been up all night listening to Mohammed's Radio

Don't it make you want to rock and roll
All night long
Mohammed's Radio
I heard somebody singing sweet and soulful
On the radio, Mohammed's Radio

Everybody's desperate trying to make ends meet
Work all day, still can't pay the price of gasoline and meat
Alas, their lives are incomplete

Don't it make you want to rock and roll
All night long Mohammed's Radio
I heard somebody singing sweet and soulful
On the radio, Mohammed's Radio
~"Mohammed's Radio" by Warren Zevon

Rubber Soul

In contrast to yesterday's post, this will just be a random thought I had while at work today. So here it is.

Before rubber was introduced in English-speaking countries (which was around 1770, according to Wikipedia), I wonder how people said something was "rubbery" (poorly cooked eggs, for example).

Beauty's just another word
I'm never certain how to spell
Go tell the nurse to turn the TV back on,
And throw away my misery
It never meant that much to me
It never sent a Get Well card

I broke, like a bad joke
Somebody's uncle told
At a wedding reception in 1972
Where a little boy under a table with cake in his hair
Stared at the grown-up feet as they danced and swayed
And his father laughed and talked on the long ride home
And his mother laughed and talked on the long ride home
And he thought about how everyone dies someday,
And when tomorrow gets here where will yesterday be
And fell asleep in his brand-new winter coat

Buy me a shiny new machine
That runs on lies and gasoline
And all those batteries we stole from smoke-alarms,
And disassembles my despair
It never took me anywhere
It never once bought me a drink.
~"Reconstruction Site" by The Weakerthans

And I Have Seen the World of Dreams

Wish I could remember
why it mattered to me.
It doesn’t matter to me.
It doesn’t matter to me
anymore.
~"It Ends With a Fall" by Okkervil River

I have been awake since 1:30 yesterday afternoon. It is currently just past 11 PM. That means I have been awake for about 34 and a half hours, which is definitely the longest I have ever stayed awake. I planned on coming home from work today and trying to force myself to stay awake until at least 9:00 so my sleep schedule wasn't totally broken. However, I rarely felt tired throughout the day. I still don't really feel tired. I feel... disconnected, really. Disconnected from basically everything. It's a strange feeling, one that bothers me a little bit. Or at least, would bother me if I could feel bothered by anything. I think if I laid down in bed right now and shut my eyes, I would be asleep within minutes. I'm having no trouble staying awake right now, though, nor am I having any trouble typing this or even figuring out what to type. The words just seem to be flowing out of me, with me thinking them almost after my fingers type them. It's as though my fingers are typing, and there is a slight delay as my eyes read what my fingers have typed and then relay that information to my brain so it can quickly process it. For a while tonight I was actually worried I wouldn't be able to get to sleep again tonight, that I would go through another day without having slept. Now that I feel like I could fall asleep whenever I choose, though, part of me is interested in just how long I could stay up. I sort of think I could make it through tomorrow without a problem if I didn't go to sleep tonight, but then I think about how distant waking up 34 and a half hours ago seems right now, how distant my drive to work this morning seems, how distant playing Wii just an hour ago seems, and I wonder if I could really do it. One of my goals in life is to stay up for a week straight, and I'm strongly tempted to give that a shot right now, though this would probably be a bad time to do it as I have responsibilities (work) to worry about. Another one of my goals is to get on the Uberman sleep schedule, which is basically sleeping for 20 minutes every six hours, leaving you with 22 hours every day in which to be awake. I can't decide if trying that right now would make it easier to slip into that sleep schedule or would end up with disastrous results. I sort of think it might be easier to slip into that sleep schedule in my sleep deprived state, especially if it were true that I could make it through another day or two with no sleep relatively easily. Meh. I'm going to give in and go to sleep now, I think, since any other decision would be pretty stupid at this point. It'll be interesting to come back and read these ramblings in a regular state of mind tomorrow. They make perfect sense to me at the moment, but I wonder if I'm in some sort of altered state that will make this seem weird or nonsensical to the normal mind. It's true that you go crazy after a week or so of not sleeping, right? But isn't it also true that after not sleeping for a week, you feel no desire whatsoever to go back to sleep? Or are both urban legends?

Little needles of sodium unstitch the seams of the sky
~"The Velocity of Saul at the Time of His Conversion" by Okkervil River
I have some kind of beautiful obsession with those words, and I'm not really sure why. It seems like something out of a peaceful nightmare.

Shut up brain, or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip!

I'm having one of those nights where I can't get to sleep because my brain won't shut up, most likely due to my considerable intake of caffeine a few hours ago after not consuming any for a while. I just had a random thought, which was this: I've always thought it would be cool if life had an undo button. This involves me doing something stupid, say, punching a cop in the face after getting pulled over for speeding, and then saying the magic words or doing the magic motions or whatever and basically going back in time a few seconds to right before I did that. On a side note, this power for some reason only affects the last thing I did - I never really planned it that way, or even thought about it till now, it just sort of happened. So I couldn't undo something that happened last week, only something that just happened. To use a Photoshop metaphor, it would be like hitting Ctrl+Z, but not being able to use the History at all. Anyway... so I was thinking about that for whatever reason, and then I thought, "What if once I undid something, I had no memory of what I undid?" Like, I knew I had the power, but beyond that I wouldn't even have any idea that I just undid something, much less what it was I undid. I have a feeling that, beyond the things I would do only because I had the power (like punching the cop in the face, stuff I would obviously never do normally), I would probably make one mistake, then undo it, then make the same mistake again because I didn't know I undid it, then undo it, then make the same mistake, then undo it, etc. And then my life wouldn't progress beyond that point at all. And then what? Like, tonight I thought, "What if I could go back in time and not drink all that Vault (oddly enough, this is the first time I've thought about using the power to go back more than a few seconds), but once I undid it, I wouldn't know that I had undone it - would I still drink all the Vault?" And I decided I probably would, and realized that without being able to retain the knowledge I learned from my mistakes, I would continue to make them over and over. And I wondered if this entirely hypothetical power would even be worth having. And then I decided to come on here and write about it because... why not? Also, while writing I decided a cool application of the power if I could remember everything and I could undo more than a few seconds would be using time to study or learn or whatever and then undoing that and playing Wii or watching a movie or something, all the while retaining the information I learned from the period of time I undid. Anyway, this got to be way longer than I planned. I'm sure tomorrow I'll wish I could undo all of this and spend the time trying to sleep instead. Oh well.

At twenty one you're on top of the scrapheap
At sixteen you were top of the class
All they taught you at school
Was how to be a good worker
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself

Just because you're better than me
Doesn't mean I'm lazy
Just because you're going forwards
Doesn't mean I'm going backwards
~"To Have and To Have Not" by Billy Bragg