Pre-flight check

This was sitting in my inbox after I sent a short (and somewhat incoherent message to trav after finishing reading "Ham on Rye" at work this morning.  Something to the effect that C. Bukowski reminded me of Travis a little bit.  Reminded me of myself a little bit, too. He's an influence even if I'm unaware of it.  Just like Hamson.  In many ways it's a lot like music.  For example, the day I realized that there is a huge Clash influence on the Dead Milkmen.  (or there seems to be...) which in effect afforded me an appreciation of The Clash before I started listening to them (beyond the standard London Calling Rock the Cashba Combat Rock crap that everyone seems to think of as Clash.)

******************Trav Wrote******************

yeah...i read "post office" (loaned to me by joey v.) in one day...it was pretty entertaining. "time to write"...there's something to be said for setting the time aside per day to do it...a routine...but then one needs things to write about...

i guess i have those as well...

i need to do it. i know that i do. the world needs to know. about me. whatever.

do you depart this eve? have you already departed? i hope you enjoy your trip...i need to go to the treasure mart tomorrow for betsy's annual creepy gift...i wasn't even thinking about that the last time i was there...i'll affix your name to it as well. hopefully they'll be some girls in bikinis washing motorcycles again this time 'round...never a dull moment at "buck's"...remember joe falling under one of their "spells" last time? something about how she wanted to be a nurse and blah, blah, blah, she was a "good spirit" (like "casper", though per his title he was more "friendly"); and i said something to the effect of "you do realize that before you got here she was washing a motorcycle while wearing a bikini? that should tell you all you need to know..."

i'm so stuck-up.

trav

***************************************************

I had completely forgotten about the bike wash last summer and the girls in bikinis, etc... Too much cycles of consistent patterns make the aberrant events fade into the mundane.  I've been here before.  I've done this before, a million times.  The special events scattered throughout fade due to the layers of weeks piled on top of them... or something.  Whatever.

I'm feeling a bit nostalgic about the fact that I've got three days left at the copy shop.  I've been "working" there for close to four years now.  (yeah?  yeah.  time flies.)  It's a bit weird to think back to when I started working there and the progression from paranoia of being fired every day to slipping into a comfort zone of being "the 2nd shift" crew (since when did 2nd shift start at 8:30 AM and then run till 9 PM?) consisting entirely of myself and my thoughts.  I also proved my worth in the "hickory danger smoke pit" when I started diggin up my old adobe software knowledge.  Suddenly I was known as "the computer guy" as well.  (Yeah right.)

There's a part of me that wants to list that job as "Unskilled Labor".  It didn't take much to do it.  Just the patience to take a box of paper and turn it into two identical boxes of paper while you stare at the bulletin board of ideas and thoughts in the back of your mind and plan out the scant few hours in the evening to tackle a project or whatever.  (Watch TV.  Eat popcorn.  Skateboard.)

But as I sit here and write this, I really don't feel sadness at leaving.  It's more just a uncertainty of leaving the established rut for the untested track that leads somewhere else (probably just another dead end so what's the worry?  Not much really.)

Other than that, I've got a few more hours left and then I'm out of this dirty town for a few days to relax and kick it with my adopted niece (and her family).

(Ugh... '85 Metallica?  Terrible!)

Uh... I got stuff to do.

So watch this instead.



I started work on the first pass of Mt. Hindsight. Mixing is going to take me forever it seems. If I just went with the simple rule of one guitar track or one track per guitar part instead of layers and slicing of parts for panning and sustain overlaps and whatever else I think might sound cool but won't matter since not many people will listen to it anyway and the few who actually do won't even notice the subtle textures I've spent hours crafting.

St. Vincent refered to those hours as the invisible hours. I'm fading by the second.

Or if you're in MSP tomorrow evening at the airport and you see a dude with a laptop and a set of Sennheiser headphones, buy him some coffee and tell him that failure comes in a bowl now.

Word.

Where tha yawn....

I went to a bookstore yesterday and purchased a Bukowski book.  At the counter, making my purchase, the clerk said, "Tomah."  I was kinda confused.  Travis had taken off on Sunday to head up to Tomah/Sparta to kick it with his parents and I was wondering if this guy knew more about me than I knew about him.  I was buying a Bukowski book and Travis reads Bukowski and Travis was up in Tomah and that's why the guy said, "Tomah."  And then I realized I was wearing my where the i divides t-shirt.   It's like the time I was wearing my Milli Vanilli t-shirt and people kept saying smiling at me.  I had forgotten I was wearing it and couldn't figure out why they were smiling.  

Over the weekend I was able to get my midi capabilities set up and ready to record.  On top of that, I also went out to the studio and dumped all of the session tracks onto my external drive.    That took about an hour of sitting there while the drives chatted.  I started working on one song... spent four hours adjusting and tweaking and modifying.  I figured out the output/send confusion I was having so now I can set the drum mix to an Aux fader and then pull them down or boost them if I want.  I also did some of my studio tweaking that our engineer seemed to be unaware of... opening a duplicate track with the same file in it and giving it a nudge to take it slightly out of phase to expand the sound... thicken the mix, if you will.  And the biggest surprise was the fact that I may not have to use pitch correction on the vocal track on that one song... (I'm still going to use it.  Joe doesn't quite have the ear to cover that himself.)  If I keep hacking away at the project, I should have rough mixes done in a week or so.  Then I'll let the band listen to what I've done and make their (pathetic) suggestions and then do whatever the hell I want.  Yeah.  That'll show them.

And there was a big tornado that took out my Aunt and Uncle's house in IA on Sunday.  Frickin' crazy.  There was a lot of phone calls on Monday in re: people being okay.  If you watch this clip at about 0:44 you can see what's left of their house. 

 No one in the family was hurt or worse.  This, of course, happens the week before my cousin is getting married.

And my friend with cancer had surgery today.  I haven't heard what the news is yet...  but my thoughts are with her.  

Wings

Yesterday's post was born out a lot of apocalyptic thoughts.  I'm better now.  Sleep is a nice little thing I've not been getting enough of as of late.  Stupid vintage gaming consoles and their long playing games.

It's that time of year when the band has a long-assed meeting.  We're going to discuss stuff and stuff and then nothing major will come from that.  I will mention that I'm going out to the studio on Sunday to get the track files dumped onto my new drive.  Mixing... well.  I'm hoping that while I'm training in MSP in two weeks I'll have some time to sit in the hotel room and adjust faders, tweak EQs, set pans and listen to songs again and again and again.  Tis the dream of anyone with no soul.  Most likely, I'll be so tired and weary that I'll watch some boring regional cable and eat some fried chicken from the nearby 7-11 before passing out in a grease stained t-shirt and grimy workpants.  

Good times.

But seriously, we may just actually discuss the first video we'll shoot.  The ketchup one... I'm not looking forward to actually shooting that in the middle of summer.  Pores filled with tomato condiment product at 90 F with a swarm of flies and mosquitos... that's ABBA Gold right there baby.

Shoot.  

I'm gunna have to grow some damn wings next Tuesday.   I'm gunna have to hold myself to it as well.  Lots of big things going down next Tuesday.  Maybe this universe in chaos thing that seems to be hitting right now (and the last few weeks) will come to a head then.  Like a big ol' pimple ripe for plucking.  (Sexy (or not))

Ever feel like your being watched?

When I saw 28 Days Later, it scared the be-jebuz right out of my shortpants.  Zombie movies generally aren't all that scary.  They're more often that not a farce featuring dimwitted characters giving in to their baser instincts and failing to think things out.  28 Days Later changed that by giving the zombies the upper hand in that regard.  If you couldn't outrun them, you had to be smarter.

So every once in a while, I look at my basement window on the ground floor before I crawl into bed and wonder if there's a "Rage Zombie" out there waiting to bust through.  It's a lot like being on a camping excursion in bear country and thinking that you're safer if you put a thin layer of Nylon between yourself and the rest of the world.  (Well, you're generally protected from mosquitos and wet weather.)  Same as in the house scenario.  It's a matter or perceived security.

I get the feeling that there's something lurking off in the near future that's waiting... waiting for what, I don't know.  Conditions just haven't become prime.  The chaos of pattern hasn't hit just yet.

Bowie and Cobain?

I am kickin' at a nice little haunt on Willy Street where the hippies used to prowl, listening to a song off a CD I purchased in Boulder in 1996 with my sister and a friend.  Imperial Drag.  What the hell ever happend to them?  I don't really care.  They're not that good.  They're not that bad.  Before it I was listening to a Horde song called "the Day of Total Armageddon Holocaust" or as I would call it "Steel Snow Shovels Dragged Behind a Dump Truck, Take 13".  It's an musical tour through my past with me going through the collection of discs that have been sitting on blank CD spindles in a box.

I took some pictures of the pieces at the gallery.  This is one of them.  I don't know.  

I thought the cropping would make it clever and whatever... it sort of does.  Like I'm a David Bowie here... and then Mitch Hedberg kicks on.  He's great to listen to while you're stuck in traffic.  Before you know it, you're laughing at him and not even giving a damn about not getting where you need to go in a hurry.  

And this was just yeah, what can I say?  I'm a gen.exer.  The sunburn is going away thanks to the aloe.  It wasn't that bad.  And AG, It didn't occur to me to use protection but as soon as I sat down and the whole deal started, I looked at my pasty-white forearms and knew what I was in for.

Other than that, I finally started the airport flash cards and realized I knew more than I thought I did.  XNA = Fayetteville, AR because you'll need Xanax if you're headed there.  One day I'll scan some pictures of when I lived there.  But yeah... I'm distracted.  I'll post something else later. 

Comedy Wind in a Can, Chicago Style

I went to Chicago just like I said I was going to do.  Kristin graduated as planned and things were as they should be.  I found this neat art installation in Millennium park before the two hour ordeal.Unfortunately, the chains weren't velvet.

It was a great day to be outside.  The ceremony was dry at times but there were also moments that were enjoyable. A Mr. Jerry Saltz was the speaker and he managed to make me feel smug about my educational choices.  See, at one point in my life I thought I wanted to get a BFA or something like that until I actually had to interact with other art students and realized that I wasn't comfortable with the whole thing and stuff, like I didn't fit in and I shouldn't be in that department?  And of course I transferred to the most usefulest field ever!!!  

The smugness came on when Mr. Saltz told the kids that went to school to study art that they were artists and as artists they were different from the hoi-polloi seated behind them (their family and friends of assumedly non-art persuasion.)  I muttered under my breath, "You don't know me," in my best Jerry Springer guest impersonation and then made the argument in my head that since I was already an artist, I didn't need to go to art school to have someone show me how to do that, ergo my switch to Philosophy to understand the world and universe as where I was getting my ideas from.

I also got a sunburn.  (Not noticeable in the picture.  This is after commencement.  Hot, sweaty, grumpy.  Waiting for Kristin to finish her latest Installation.)

Afterwards we went to a reception at a gallery associated with the school and I milled around the grad student exhibit.  There were some nice pieces.  There were some great ideas, but overall I wasn't that impressed and when I informed Kristin how I felt about it she said that SAIC was more about the conceptual approach to art rather than the classical fundamentals of art.  They teach you how to focus your ideas and communicate them through your medium over teaching you to master you medium and then be able to deftly and superbly communicate your ideas.  Now that seems backward to me, but I'm like that with my music.  I'd rather not take the time to be able to play Eddie licks up and down the neck of my guitar as much as I would like to be able to communicate something through sound waves that don't involve the symbols of spoken language.  So I don't know where I was going with that but yeah...

We also had dinner with her family in Wilmette up in the north suburbs.  I had a blast trying to make my way back to i-94 since my planned route didn't include a west-bound on ramp.  I ended up driving around Wanettka (it was spelled something like that) being reminded of living in the further north (and not so affluent) suburbs in the mid-eighties.  All of the streets sort of look the same, matching what I remember from the superbowl shuffle days and that sort of bummed me out.  I don't want to explain why.  It just did.

I also bought a Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks disc at the Barnes & Noble and listened to that on the way home.   It wasn't quite what I was looking for when I went to the music section (originally, I was going to pick up some early Bob Marley but decided against that after looking at the stacks of CDs and knowing full well that none of them would contain music so mind-blowing-ly awesome that I would have to stop driving to give it my fullest attention.  I honestly wish there was such a thing these days.  Bjork's Volta may have come close at points.  Sigour Ros does at times as well, but they're still working in a realm of the familiar.)

And it rained for most of the drive home.

Is it Monday yet?

Nothing quite says it the same.  This weekend can only get worse... hell, the next few weeks are going to be very busy.  A trip to Chicago this weekend for Kristin's graduation.  (Finally.)  It's about damn time.  I thought I took my time getting my B.A. but spending the last 3.5 years after being a semester away from a MTA at Montana State at school is just crazy.  Or not.  In all honesty, I would love to be back in school again.  I just don't know what to study.  Philosophy ain't the bag of tea it used to be these days.  The work week next week promises to be more of the same.  Sane.  Back to the weekly schedule with only the addition of flash card review.  That's not going to be fun, but learning never is.  

With the new job on the horizon, the old jobs (both of them, including the one I'm keeping) seem like complete douche-baggery.  These tasks are the repetitions of my life and they have been for the last several years.  It didn't take me long to figure out the pattern.  I just had a lot of extra-curriculars, etc.  But that isn't what it used to be either, or rather it feels more like hope dried up.  Optimism scaffolded with hot air.

And speaking of optimism, the whole California Supreme Court dealie... spare me the political circumstance.  Just one more thwack to the hedge to rustle out more scared pheasants during this prime election year.  I'm really sick of politik.

And speaking of sick and politics, someone close to me has got teh cancer.  I'm not going to go into the details.  It did give me an opportunity to discuss modern medicine and the cry for universal health care.  If you check out Dean's post about the boomers  and the echos it brings to light so much of that general feeling of being utterly screwed over by society simply because everyone in this goddamn country thinks it's their God-given RIGHT to live for-fucking-ever.  Don't get me wrong.  I think it's great that my friend with teh cancer will be able to get super awesome medical treatment and possibly a long life after the next few months.  But the truth is that we are not entitled to these sort of contract extensions.  (And when I can finally see a doctor under a health plan provided by my employer, I'll have all of the things that worry me checked out.  Stupid pre-existing condition clauses and whatever... at least I finally kicked tobacco to the curb.)

"best summer ever"

What's up with "Sally"

First off, I did get the job.  I did take the job.  I start training on either June 2nd or June 9th.  I would prefer June 9th since that date wouldn't interfere with my trip to ABQ.

Speaking of which (airport codes that is.)  I now have to memorize a laundry list of airport codes in the next two weeks.  I really don't want to do this, but I'm going to just have to sit down with index cards and a couple of sharpies and start making me some of them flashy cards they used on me in that learnin' facility.

I'm pretty excited about it all at this point.  They flew me up to MSP for processing yesterday.  That was a fun little challenge in and of itself.  I was scheduled to be on a 6:50 flight out of MSN so I was up at 4:30 getting myself prepared (business casual and A SHAVE!!! along with some breakfast) and I didn't sleep much during the night mostly because of nerves.  So I was that feeling amphetamined-out tired buzz as I prepared to meet some of these people who(whom?) desired to hire me.   

At this point I would like to explain that I was feeling edgy about the whole trip because they were shipping me off to do some pretty basic post hiring, pre training paperwork/orientation stuff that could have been perhaps just as easily handled by the manager at MSN.  (Or so I was thinking.)   It felt as though they were sticking extra steps into a process that didn't need extra steps and said steps only added to the "risk of failure" that would mean I wouldn't be where I needed to be at the required time.   So I wasn't sleeping well.  Worrying that I would oversleep or something else would happen to make me late and miss my flight.

When I finally got through the line to check in (mental note - from now on, e-check in) I entered my reservation number twice and was told my reservation didn't exist.  The totally awesome clerk at the counter told me to enter my res. number and make sure I got the entry right (which I had done twice before he instructed me to do it again.)  So I complied with his instructions while muttering under my breath,  "It's not going to make any fucking difference the fourth time as the first.  It's still going to say the same fucking thing, ASS!"   I was told by the console to speak with a clerk so for the second time I told him it wasn't working.  He then looked up my reservation and said that it was canceled.  Of course!   Why wouldn't it be?  I was supposed to be flying to a meeting at hub and the airline that set up the meeting and the reservation was now telling me to sit and spin for getting up at 4:30  (that and taking a day off from work.) 

I managed to get a hold of my HR contact at seven when she rolled in to her office.  She didn't seem to know why I didn't have a seat on that plane but she was awesome enough to get me on a 9:15 flight.  So I had a few hours to contemplate if I even wanted to go through with the process since I had felt like I was being treated with disrespect (and after about fifteen minutes of indignation, I decided that it wasn't anything personal and that I shouldn't take it as such.)

So I left MSN at 9:15 or so and was back by 2:30.  And I'm still really tired.

In other news, I'm writing this post on my new laptop... the one that I'm going to be doing the mixing of the album on.  (We're also going to use it to track everything but the drums for the next one in the fall.  If nothing else, we're ambitious in that degenerate slacker sort of way.  More on that later.)

Tide ya over.

Well,

the news is in that I am probably going to be hired.  I'm flying up to the twin cities for an meeting on Tuesday.  After that it's a background check clearance away from training.  It's left me feeling unsettled.  I've been working this rut for the last few years and it's been comfortable, but change is good.  It never does pay to keep oneself in the same place and not be challenged in one way or another.   We'll see what happens on Tuesday.

As for the band, we played a show last night at a new venue.  It went well.  We managed to draw a crowd of friends to the place and make some money too.  We also promoted our show with our first "Busking" endeavor.  It went as well as could be expected.  We probably didn't draw anybody to the show, but we got some sort of exposure (UV Radiation?).

There are other things to talk about.  The new computer.  The mixing process.   Yeah... stuff... but I'm workin' a Sunday shift and trying to do too many things at once right now.

I hate interviews

I always thought that there was something sinister about 60 year old Catholics.

In other news, "where tha eye divides" is still puttering around like a motor boat in a lake with no fish. Everything moves twice as slow as I would like in that world. We'll get to the mixing someday.

Until then, we're rocking two shows in Madison. One tonight and one next Saturday. Our show tonight is our standard venue. We've been playing this place for the last year on a somewhat regular basis. Next Saturday is new territory. (Different brands of beer bottles hitting the chicken wire. Same chicken wire.)

I also had a job interview with a Twin Cities based transportation company this morning. I'll know by next Friday if they want me to work for them or not. And then I'll either have to decide to take the position or not OR I won't even have to make that decision.

Yay. Whatever.

I almost didn't bother to go to the interview, that's how disinterested I am in finding a new job. (sort of) But I felt that would be a pretty "Italian left-handed" thing to do. (sinestro)