Do you realize?

I had the wonderful pleasure of seeing the Flaming Lips perform live a few Saturday's ago. It was an outdoor show. It was a beautiful day/evening. It was free. Holy cow was that the best five bucks for parking I've ever paid.

But that said. I got the news about Ol' Green. Alternator shot. Drive something something computer fried due to alternator shorting out. Total repair price, too much to justify fixing just to raise the price for sale.

My best option is to ask for enough to get a new set of tires for the new truck (which has yet to be named.)

So after burning out the transmission on the old Hyundai and selling that for $400, I didn't learn my lesson to get rid of the vehicle before it becomes worthless. I think it's going to sink in this time. Had the repairs not cost much, I could have tried to sell Ol' Green for enough to knock a year off my new auto loan. As is stands now, I'm just going to have to be content to continue to be the slave of my unhealty participation in american consumer culture. (Squeeze some more of my soul out while I still got some.)

Bugger.

In other news, the band, or what's left of the band, is still around. Doing stuff. What stuff? I don't know. It's been a busy month and a half. Fuck. It's been a busy as hell year so far. We have to keep postponing tracking the rest of the drums for one reason or another. I'm still waiting to get rough mixes of all the tracks to give a through listen to them and decide which ones need to be done just one more time. It really doesn't matter. At this rate, we'll be retracking these same damn songs again in a few months. Right? If history has anything to say about it. I've already laid down demos of these songs. We recorded them last spring. We're doing it again right now. It never ends. The worst part is that it gets in the way of working on new material. Better material. Songs that will blow your brain out the back of your head. (Subject to personal taste, of course.)

I've had some good ideas lately. Better turns on the same theme. Variations in song construction. Different approaches to this thing called music.

Travis said it best on Sunday when we were talking about the Donald Driver Show* on our way over to Dan and Amanda's to watch the Packer game. "Television is so boring because it's always trying to mimic reality. They can do anything they want, absolutely anything, and yet you end up watching fucking King of Queens or Two and a Half Men. That's five men." (That's not a direct quote but he said something similar to that.)

But he's right. We have these prescribed forumlae sitting within arms reach. The creative stuff, the truly creative stuff is sitting in boxes on shelves. Sure you can get at them, but you'd have to get off your ass to do it. And no one wants to work that hard, right? So I guess I'm going to end up writing some more Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Solo, Verse, Chorus x 2, Outro songs and call it a day.

* the Donald Driver Show is a real show. It's a boring talk show where people sit in some studio and talk with Donald Driver and his guests about the Green Bay Packers, the NFL, and not much else. Last season, Travis and I decided that the Donald Driver Show (which I've never watched, unfortunatly) would be better if it was a sit-com staring Donald Driver. His next door neighbor would be played Brett Farve. They wouldn't be foorball players. The highlight of the show each week would be some spectacular diving catch that Donald Driver makes. The Thanksgiving episode would feature him diving for the turkey as it for some wacky reason gets knocked off the table. There would be one where he catches a baby, an expensive vase, etc. And then there would be the Brett Farve joke where anything he tossed (be it keys, a basketball, a kid) would end up in Minnesota. What we were discussing on Sunday would be the off episode where for some reason Donald Driver would travel through time and end up as a football player (a la Quantum Leap) having to win a game. It's still in the developmental stages. Obviously.

Heel Draggin'

In an unprecidented move, I've taken a long 37 months to get rid of Ol' Green, my beloved '93 Dodge Dakota. I still own it, but I am picking up my new "ride" tomorrow. A seven year upgrage to a pollution machine that will only aid in creating more ecological misfortune.

Ol Green has decided to be a disgruntled little child and break down not three days before I get his replacement. Seems as though the alternator has been the target this time and the check engine light turned on (diagnotics yet to be run on that... seems to be running alright though, but that's never a good indicator.)

I finally got the financing lined up today and the title is ready for the exchange tomorrow. Hurray. No more 15 mpg. Just another car payment and the usual routine of living.

But I would rather be getting something like this.

A co-worker of mine has already put his name on the waiting list. But he's semi-retired and has the money to do that. Maybe in ten years, I'll be able to afford something like that... yeah right. Not with a worthless liberal arts degree and jobs that don't offer cost of living raises.

I did have a discussion with him about or continued reliance on lnag distance transportation. This is an idea that I started kicking around back in college. The notion that we as greedy, self-serving americans (or humans, perhaps) feel it's our RIGHT!!! to be able to live thirty, fourty, fifty miles away from a major population center yet still be able to go there when we feel like it, not just out of necessity for supplies.

Park county Montana has two main population centers. Gardner and Livingston. There is roughly fifty miles between the two town. And yet that drive will take you past large house after large house (some of them former ranches split up into subdivisions.) If you were to take all of that land and turn it into something more useful than a personal playground for rich folks and force those rich folks to live within a certain radius of the several population centers, you would make a lot of people unhappy that their personal freedom to consume, use, and hoard land would be gone, but you could do some things to affect environmental (and possibly economic) for the communities.

It is by no means a completely thought out idea. I just have some fanciful visions at this point and I don't see myself ever really making it into something to argue about, but it's there. Concentrate populations to aid in economy (not to be confused with "the economy"), force people to live near the supermarkets, barber shops, and watering holes. Keep the land in a more natural state, blah blah blah... enviromental ideaology. Truth is, people don't care. Don't give a damn. They're concerned about themselves. What they want, and how they can get it. Plain and simple.

People suck.

Twisting

It's already September but it seems like ages ago I was talking about how pre-season football was only a few weeks away.

Fortune says that it's a good thing August is gone. I'm in agreeance with fortune. But September and October are going to be just as chaotic.

Re-tracking all songs for the album. Finally started on that yesterday. Drums for three songs are supposedly done but we'll take a listen to them when we go back to the studio (whenever that is). Danny and Travis are not comfortable playing along to the click. I'm used to it so I have less patience for them. They should be at my level and what-have-you, etc.

I bought a plane ticket to take a vacation at the end of October. I'm going to head back to Montuckey for a week in the fairest of the seasons, "Huntin' Season!" and no, I'm not a hunter. It's as I like to refer to as "the Fairest of the Seasons." (I listened to Nico's Chelsea Girls a lot one fall when I lived there.) I want to be there when I remember it being most pleasant as if it ever isn't.

So trips to the gym. Working on new demos for the vocalist. Re-tracking everything at a snails pace. Watching the regular season of the NFL unfold from week to week. Writing more crap prose-poetry and staring at the stars. It doesn't seem like there's a lot in there but there is. Managing a band, being the principal song-writer and producer is going to suck up a lot of free time (not Madden '07 and my Dynasty NHL Team, the Milwaukee Butt Monkies)

I had some different things I was going to post about. News, entertainment, tra la la la la, etc., but I have lost interest in that stuff (from last week or two.)

Keeping it real? Good, I'm not either.