Author: Dave

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on the eve of travel


Sunday night and I’m supposed to be headed downtown to see a sweet concert we’d all been looking forward too. But, alas, the sweet concert got canceled. Needless to say, we were all (those of us who’d scored tickets to the sold out show) quite bummed. However, I can’t help but think this is an example of divine intervention. See, I leave for Germany on Tuesday. Flying out for a breakneck four-day trip where two of the days will be spent traveling. Back into the heart of Bavaria for handcrafted beers and wonderful sausages.

But, as fun as it sounds – I am going for a reason: work. And, this time, that means I’ll need to give a presentation to a customer while there. Being that I’m presenting a world away in just a few days, you’d think I’d have some content written, reviewed, and practiced. Truth is, I haven’t done slide-one. I knew this coming off Friday, and kept telling myself I’d have to knuckle-down and do some work over the weekend, but I very knowingly ate up all my weekend time doing all things not-work instead. So, when the show was canceled, it was like God giving me my work time. Now, I can solve my problem of having to have 90% material sent out before my 7am PST meeting tomorrow. Thanks Lord, now I can work ’til midnight.

It’s OK though, because I’ve already decided that work owes me tomorrow. Not just me, but my family too. Yep, work owes me some time with them, since work’s taking it away with travel quite a bit lately. So, I’m calling in my debt, and work’s gonna make good. More specifically, I’m taking the day “off” tomorrow. Sure, I don’t really mean taking a vacation day – but I do mean a nice “phoning it in” day spent working from the couch with a bluetooth headset. It’ll be good for me before I go, spend a day with Sharaun and Keaton – even though I’ll likely be distracted – should be worth it.

I did some things today, so it was OK. First, I shaved off my beard. Completely shaved off my beard, gone. I saw two people who I’d just seen the other day (when I was still bearded), and they didn’t even notice. Not that I did it (or didn’t do it) to get a reaction, just that it obviously meant more to me than it did anyone else. When it was gone, I actually regretted it – my face looked young and fat and the faux-chinline the hair give me was gone. Now though, I’m already used to it. So much for my fantasy of having a bushy beard at the Arcade Fire show (which, come to think of it, was a pretty odd fantasy). Also today, I planted some fruit trees. It’s something I’ve wanted to do, and I ended up putting in a plum, apricot, and orange. With the dirt like it is here, just digging the holes to plant trees is a workout – pummeling rocks with the breaker-bar and whatnot. I also watered the garden, which is doing quite well. Here, some pictures:

Before I go, I’ll drop a link to Keaton’s gallery, which I’ve updated for the first time in a while Enjoy some new images here.

Goodnight.

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i crush your heart


Hey, long-dark-hair girl, I know you were here. I found some of you on my carpet today, while I was down there playing with my daughter. I don’t know what you’re trying to do, leaving pieces of you around like that. Maybe you think you can tempt me away from my idyllic family-man lifestyle, perhaps into some fiery tryst with you. You may have visions of my face, framed in your lilting dark tresses, lips locked to yours. Yes, long-dark-hair girl, you may think that your devious body-part scavenger hunt has tantalized me, aroused my curiosity. But, I’m sorry to say, I’m pretty firmly rooted here where I am. I already have a girl, she has blonde hair (at least, to the eyes). So, let me be clear when I say: Your siren song may lead weaker men to dash themselves against your supple shoals, but not I. While I must admit, the brute in me wondered of you – what used to be hooked to the end of your hair: the shape of it, the feel, the smell. A well-placed gambit, I’ll allow, but I’m immovable. I crush your heart. Live with it.

Hey peoples, it’s the blog intro, one paragraph into the blog (because I can do that). It’s Thursday night, coming up on a Friday that happened faaast. The week, feeling somewhat abbreviated by the trip to Oregon, seems to be ending so soon. Today was warm, and I swear I’m not kidding when I say that all those piping hot gamma rays and that UV whatsitcalled made my fledgling garden double in size. Every night when I get home from work I go out there, Keaton on my shoulders, to inspect the day’s progress. I slowly show her each plant, naming it and pointing to it, then tell her what food we’ll eventually get from it. “This is a tomato plant,” I say, “it gives us ketchup and spaghetti sauce.” Sometimes we touch the tomato leaves and smell our fingers, the pungent smell seems to interest her.

Yeah, Keaton and I, we love that garden. It’s too bad though, that so do the ants. That’s right, I knew when I cleared the space for my planter that I had hit “ant city.” I didn’t really think much of it at the time, although it was easily the biggest congregation of the critters I’ve seen since moving out of fireant-infested Florida. I did my best to wash them away as I was installing the box, but it seems they’ve rebuilt and are now located somewhere in the depths of the earth directly below my garden. This is bad, for numerous reasons. Number one, they are already damaging plants. They’ve chewed up the fresh bean leaves. Number two, the internet says the tunnels and catacombs that are the ants’ houses below my plants can damage roots and whatnot. I gotta kill some ants, y’all! The internet says some pure clove oil mixed into a sprayer will get ’em for good without having to resort to harsh pesticides. So, to the local apothecary I’ll go. These ants must not jeopardize our harvest!

For about two days now, I’ve been listening to nothing but Yes’s Close to the Edge. An album which, until two weeks ago, I’d never heard in my life. I love it when I find albums like this; those which escaped my original rampage of discovery back in the day. Sometimes I get a little shocked, actually. How could such an incredibly radical album have flown under my radar for so long? I mean, I didn’t even really know the story of the album’s role as the cornerstone of the prog-rock movement – I was completely in the dark. It hurts a music snob’s pride, you know, to come upon albums like this. But, it also makes me glad to have found it. I tell you what, this album is amazing… even if you’re no fan of “prog,” you gotta give it up.

Anybody listening?

Goodnight.

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death becomes me


Hey blog. Long time no write. First, Monday was claimed by a grandparent-funded date-night in Oregon. Then, Tuesday fell victim to the senseless timesink of travel back home to sunny California. So, another two nights with nothing new to say and no time to not write it anyway. I won’t say it’s not a trend – it’s totally a trend. But, things move on.

Like for instance, Anthony came over tonight. We were putting together the early versions of our late-summer plans for hiking the John Muir Trail. Fifteen days. The kickoff to my two-month paid-vacation, which my workplace allots its employees every seven years. Yes, the hike to end all hikes – the hike that will most certainly kill me if I can’t stick to the training Anthony and I have planned. But, as “getting fit” is among the top things which I am self-conscious about – I shall say nothing more about it. So, let’s move on to today’s music-centric blog.

Every once in a while while listening to the iPod on shuffle, a track from one of my old favorites will come up. More specifically, a track off the a compilation called DJ’s Delite Volume 1: DJ Vibes.

Seems like a simply statement right? But wait, there’s a massive story lurking here.

Back in highschool I got into “techno” music (and by this generic classification I don’t mean 4/4 “house” music, but more the wild ’92 breakbeat scene). From there, I naturally branched into the jungle scene – which, for a year or so, I ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But, as jungle turned darker with the Chicago scene, I went looking for more of the jangly piano-and-sample stuff that first attracted me to early breakbeats. I ended up at happy hardcore… which some may laugh at now, as the present has cast it as probably the most universally hated genre of music in the history of music. But, that didn’t matter to me then. And, for those who understand, let me clarify that I was not into the pointedly-crafted brand of saccharine happy hardcore which later came to typify the genre, I think of myself as being more into the “happier” side of jungle and breakbeat – not that syrupy fake stuff that most people think of as happy hardcore now. Annnyway… back to DJ’s Delite.

Back then, in my head, I was always looking for the next “best mix.” I’ve written about this before, so I’ll let you read that for more backstory. Now, I’m a litle fuzzy on the specifics, but back in the day I somehow ended up with a mixtape from the once-awesome Chicago junglist mecca that was Dubshack. This tape was a recording of a “rave” over in the UK where the music was bouncy, happy, choppy and fun. The DJs spinning were the likes of Ellis Dee, DJ Vibes, DJ SS, DJ Brisk – names I’d never heard of before. The records they played were even less familiar though: stuff by Naughty Naughty, SMD, Omni Trio, Vibes & Wishdokta – nothing like most of the names I’d seen thrown around on mixtapes I had from local DJs. I loved that mixtape. The only drawback, as I thought back then, was the practice of including the MC’s ranting and raving over the entire thing (a common practice in mixtapes from that era of UK shows, but less popular in the US, I think). Perusing the Xerox’d Dubshack catalog, I located and ordered more tapes with simliar DJs and records (but without the MC babbling). One of those tapes ended up being the tape. That tape was DJ’s Delite Volume 1: DJ Vibes.

I wore that tape out. Wore. It. Out. It was awesome to me. It was the best tape I’d heard in a loooong time. Nearly eighty minutes of almost-all good material: fast, choppy, bouncy, sometimes overly sweet… I ate it up. Looking back on it now, it does indeed seem somewhat “too happy,” but I still love it as a mix – aways will. And that’ll bring us back to the beginning of this whole thing: when one of those tracks comes up on my iPod. And, when one does, I get instantly nostalgic for those highschool days. In fact, several times, the single track sounds so good to me that I’ll flip the iPod over to the whole mix and start from the beginning – only to realize, around three tracks in, that it just can’t hold my attention for 76min like it once could. Seriously though, sometimes nothing sounds better than a track off that compilation… all beatsy and sped-up-broken vocally… great stuff.

After writing the above, I realized I have a chance here for an interesting side-story. Some years after getting the DJ’s Delite tape from Dubshack, and after making multiple “backup” copies (as I often used to do with cassettes I cherished), I decided I needed to find a CD copy for archival and longevity purposes. So, I hit the internet (on my Packard Bell with my Prodigy account) to look for some more of this new sound. In my effort to track down a CD copy I ended up blindly sending a mail to the catchall e-mail address of the label that released the original compilation on vinyl: a semi-established UK jungle/happy hardcore label called Rogue Trooper. Rogue Trooper records was an offshoot the longer-established and more well-known Death Becomes Me label, which had pressed several important pieces of wax in that era of electronic music. Or maybe it was the other way ’round, I can’t remember. I eventually got a reply from a nice gentleman in the PR department of DBM Records, and he happily scored me a CD copy of the mix (which I also cherished). The CD was indexed as a single, 76min long, track – all running together, but I didn’t care – I could finally stop worrying about my tape copies breaking or melting. I couldn’t have been happier.

Anyway, in a similar way that my whole Beligan Benefactor story went down, I soon found myself trading more and more casual e-mails with the label’s PR guy. Turns out that Death Becomes Me, until that point mostly a vinyl-format release outfit, was starting to dabble in CD-R-based releases as opposed to factory-pressed CDs, and they were curious about how these new-fangled recordable CDs would hold up to shipping around the world. Somehow, it became my “job” to “beta test” their new CD-R format releases. They would cut CD-Rs of all their new releases and mail them to me, whereupon I would receive and play them for a week or two before reporting back on sound quality, shipping damage, etc.

It was a lot less formal than I make it sound – but what it amounted to was me: some random kid from Florida, getting pre-release jungle and happy hardcore mixes from the then-hottest UK scenesters. I think of it now, and I think how I could’ve used is as my “in” to “the scene.” Between that and my job at the record store, where I was awash in pre-release promos, I could’ve staked a pretty decent claim. But, that’s neither here nor there. Some of the CDs I got were good, some bad, some not-bad-but-boring. Somewhere today at home, I still have a stack of hand-labeled CD-R releases from Death Becomes Me and Rogue Trooper…

Neat huh? Years later still, I’d decide that I wanted to convert that CD into MP3. I took on the onerous task of ripping it, splitting up the long 76min single-track into individual records as best I could by ear, and storing it digitally. And that, dear friends, is the long story of just one album on my iPod – from a random cassette I ordered from a random Chicago mail-order music joint in the mid-nineties to a CD I got direct from the UK to bits and bytes on an iPod. Cooool…

Goodnight.

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leaving the blog to rot


Oregon. We took wing and arrived in the dreary rainy state on Friday evening, deciding to come up and spend the weekend with my family – as I had to work at the local office here today and tomorrow. And it is good. My folks get to hang out with Keaton – which is good for her (plus I think the enjoy it too). Anyway, we’re here and I’m writing on a weekend after a solid week of leaving the blog to rot.

It was work. I’ll say that up front: it was work. Work made the blog go untouched, work stole my brain during the day, monopolized my thoughts. It was another week trudging around in circles along my little depressed path, round and round around the millstone, behind the guy in front of me and in front of the guy behind me. I wanted to write, did write, but never finished or didn’t have my heart in it so… it rots.

Before I left, as part of my “doin’ stuff I have to do before I go” stuff, I mowed the lawn. I love mowing the lawn, and I hate mowing the lawn. The part of me which is incredibly lazy (which I figure is a about a 230lbs part) dreads it. The part of me which enjoys hard work and likes exercise (which I figure is about 15lbs of me, consisting entirely of my wang and babybeans) enjoys it. But, I did it anyway, and got to listen to some good stuff on the iPod while I did. Plus, I’ll be please as punch when we roll up Tuesday night and the headlights cast their beams over the neatly shorn grass. Yeah, the fruits of my labor.

Speaking of fruits – and vegetables, but I’ll get to them later – I’m planning on digging some holes in my backyard and putting in some fruit trees this next week. I’m thinking some kinda citrus, likely tangerine, apple, and maybe a plum (I think I like plums). I told Sharaun that, if we ever got stranded at our house – for instance, if all the earth surrounding our horse dropped into a sea of molten lava, and we were to live alone on our little island of land amidst the burning sea of liquid rock – I want us to be able to survive by eating the bounty of our small .24 acre lot. So, with the veggies I’m already trying to grow, and the fruit trees I plan on trying to grow – we should be close. Now I only have to cordon of some yard for livestock… and dig a well… and, and… eh… whatever. Oh, and, speaking of vegetables – everything I planted, aside from the peppers, is now growing. Maybe peppers take longer to sprout or something… which I find odd, as they are buried the shallowest (the least deep?).

Before I go, I thought I’d share some comments from Stephen King on the last blog I bothered to write. Mr. Horror talks about violent writing and the link to real-life violence. See, even Stephen King says I’m probably not going to kill anyone.

Goodnight.

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green pushes through

Learning.
Tuesday night and I had Keaton again – Sharaun’s volleyball game. Although it may sounds like Sharaun is a deadbeat mom (you know, for how often I’m left alone to tend to Keaton and all), I rather like our alone-time. We play trivia games while we listen to music (I quiz her on bassists and drummers and rock ‘n’ roll genealogy), we wrestle, we read books – we do all sorts of stuff. Besides, before Sharaun left, she cooked us a fine meal and fed Keaton – I can’t ask for much more than that. Oh, and while she was cooking, I headed out to do my 2nd daily check of my garden (I go out once in the morning, and once at night) and I was pleased to find that 90% of the corn seeds I planted have sprouted, as well as the okra. I’m happy to see the green push through, as it looks like the whole thing won’t be a miserable failure after all.

All this talk of the “violent” writings of the Virginia Tech shooter in the news lately brought back some memories for me. Back in middle school, I was pretty into the macabre, y’know, horror movies and Stephen King novels and specifically – into gore. Now, I have never been, and still am not, much for real-life blood – I’m pretty wimpy when it come to that – but I had then, and still have now, a penchant for writing. And, back then, I used to write all kinds of things. For a while there, and this is where this paragraph starts to close in on its topic-sentence, I swear, I started writing little ultra-violent “serials” that I would give to my buddy Joey every day. I would use typing class to do this, as we often had periods of just “free typing,” where you could do whatever you wanted as long as your hands banged the keys for forty minutes. So, I’d type all sorts of things: funny stories, song lyrics and poems I’d pass off as my own work, solid pages of random words for the patterns and shapes it generated, and, for a while, gore. It was that gore that got me thinking, as the news chatters on about the “disturbing” nature of Mr. Shooter’s writing. Well, for what it’s worth, what I’ve read seems rather tame compared to the twisted crap my 7th grade brain turned out:

After I had stabbed him about seven or eight times he stumbled off into the darkness, wandering, hoping a car might come down the road and save him. Blood was gushing out between his fingers and his eyes were turning pink. He begged me, “Please, no more, I’ll give you anything! Just don’t kill me please, leave me alone!” So I picked up my knife and proceeded to cut open his chest with the precision of a master surgeon. I couldn’t see anything but blood, all over my hands and drenching my body, dripping from my hair, and running down my legs.

After I had made a pretty big incision, he started to sit on the ground and twitch while sort of gurgling a little. I then felt the urge to plunge my hands into his open wound and pull out his pulsating heart. When I did this I found that is was not easy to discern if you are holding a man’s heart in your hand or just grasping at loose organs that were floating around inside. So I just grabbed the biggest handful of slop I could grab with my own two hands. I pulled it out and looked at it: some parts looked looked like little strands of spaghetti, but others looked like what you would see if you put a tomato in the blender and watched it whirl.

I brought the steaming pile of organs to my lips and pressed them against my face, the warm flow of blood trickling down my arms onto my chest, and the soft gurgling coming from this man I has just destroyed. All in all, I felt like it was a good kill, but I needed more to satisfy my sudden urge to watch death.

So I pulled a child about three or four years old off the street after school and into my car. He was asking me what I was going to do with him. I inconspicuously pushed the radio on, but also turned on the cigar lighter with it. In about ten minutes I pulled over to the side of the road and told the boy to take off his shirt. He wouldn’t do it though, so I hit him first and told hi I would kill him if he didn’t do what I wanted him to do. So he complied with my demands and removed his shirt. I pulled out the read-hot lighter and pressed it firmly against his soft back. His cries and screams of agony only fueled me to do even more gruesome feats to him.

After about three minutes with a cigar lighter pushed into his back the boy began to get tired of crying, so I took it off to reveal the scar that he would have to remember me by for years never to come. The boy then started to plead with me, but I would not break. I think picked up a huge rock off the ground and proceeded to hit him over the head with it until his face was covered with blood. Then I positioned him behind the rear left wheel of my car and got in the driver’s seat. I slowly backed up listening to every bone in his head pop and snap. I felt great. I stepped out of the car and looked at the damage I had done: the boy lay lifeless, his head splattered all over the ground and pieces of brain on my car wheel. I then cut his body up into nine small pieces and buried them in various places around me.

I drove home, went into the garage, got out my shotgun, put its loaded barrel between my lips and pulled the trigger. I felt a tingling sensation and that was it. I was dead.

Ouch. Several times while transcribing that, I hesitated. It’s worse than even I remember it being. But yeah, I saved the stuff, just like nearly every scrap of “writing” I’ve ever done (and I have no OCR-scanner here, I typed it all in by hand, old-school style). There’s more of it, but it’s all as bad as that and this is pretty much representative enough to give you the idea.

I bet – in today’s paranoid school environment – it’d be enough to get a kid kicked out of school for good, or arrested, or placed in counseling. I wonder what might have happened back then had we been caught passing these things around, because we surely did. I mean, even re-reading it now, I know I was going for shock value – but putting myself in the shoes of a modern day shcoolteacher or administrator, it’d sure sound the warning sirens loud and clear.

(I showed Sharaun this entry, to see what she thought, saying to her, “I wanted to show some of the stuff I wrote when I was kid, but it’s freaking me out even a bit. But, I never killed anyone, so I guess I turned out OK.” She replied, “You haven’t killed anyone yet, but you will eventually – and then they’ll go back and read that stuff and be like, ‘Well, duh.'” Thanks babe.)

I wrote a while back about how the newish Zodiac killer movie had unearthed some newfound “clues” which were causing quite the amateur-sleuth stir over at zodiackiller.com. Apparently, all this Encyclopedia Brown blodhounding has led the little online community, and the site’s owner and moderator, to identify a new “suspect.” They’ve apparently got this guy’s name and complete bio/profile. To be honest, I haven’t been following closely enough to know what connected the dots from the new evidence to this new POI, but I of course have ultimate faith the infallible collaborative force of the internet.

Goodnight.

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the cost of her butt

Sweaty but comfy.
It’s too bad sweatpants have such a bad reputation, because those suckers are about as comfortable as it gets. I know, I spent the first half of this past Saturday lounging around in a pair. Yup, brown sweats and a too-big t-shirt, both of which have seen better days (which makes them even better, in this man’s mind). Seems like most men would agree that sweatpants are #1 for comfort, and most women would agree that they are objects of derision. Either way, I’m down with ’em. Let’s get back to the single-father thing.

Rewinding to the evening before my sweatpant-rocking, Friday – Sharaun left me alone with Keaton to go play with some friends. She wasn’t in the best of moods, a little snotty and fussy – I think she’s cutting some more teeth (about time). But, we had a good time. I put her on my shoulders and we danced around the living room to the iPod like we were trying out for the ubiquitous chick-flick dance-around-the-kitchen-and-sing-into-wooden-spoons scene. Man, I hate that scene… what about that scene appeals so much to the ladies? You hate sweatpants and love that? The only movie I’ll permit it in is Mermaids, and that’s only because I love Winona. Anyway, I put her down around 7:30pm and proceeded to kick around the house until around midnight. Then, because she’s been overflowing her diapers nearly every night for the past week, I decided I’d change her before I retired. Turns out, after getting her in my arms, I just couldn’t bear to put her down again. I took her to bed with me and she slept on my chest for about an hour until Sharaun came home and woke us both up.

I’ve come to realize I care for my yard a lot more in my head than I do with my back and hands. In other words, I could stand to spend a lot more time weeding and pruning and keeping up with things – and I don’t. When I take a look around the neighborhood, I’d have to say I have one of the least “looker” yards of the bunch. I’ve still got a vast unplanted pile of mulch off to the left of my house, the walkway up to our front door is flanked by wisps of tall weedgrass, and what plants I do have seem dull and placed oddly. Even my backyard, which I toiled so long and hard to complete, leaves a lot to be desired: the plants I chose to plant on the slope of my retaining wall are stupid and ugly, and the brown mulch that once looked so good now looks like a pile of gray ashes. Sharaun hates the mulch because it’s so dead-looking, and I have to agree. If rubber mulch wasn’t so expensive and I could feel better about spreading ground up tires over the planet – I’d jump on it. I think it’d be awesome to just give a high-dollar landscaper a blank check and have ’em do a number on our “grounds.” But in the grand scheme of things, my weeds take a back-seat to things like world hunger, so why worry?

Poor Keaton has had a pretty bad diaper rash the past few days. Though it’s on the mend now, it was probably the worst she’s had yet. It’s an end result of a domino-like progression of baby-ills though, all starting with teething. Teething, in addition to rashes on the face, a runny nose, low grade fevers, and irritability, can cause diarrhea. Friday, she had ten diarrhea-diapers in one day. Even though Sharaun and I didn’t let her sit in them long, wet poo can wreak havoc on a little baby’s fair booty-skin. So, Keaton’s erupting teeth gave her a diaper rash – a cascade of baby dramas. On the plus side, I think she may finally be getting some friends for her lonely pair of teeth… too bad it’s at the cost of her butt.

Goodnight.

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video makes up for word


I don’t have much today, work was brutal like it hasn’t been for a while now and kept my brain pretty much consumed all day – no time to think about things to write about. It was non-stop and frustrating, but I did manage to get some long-overdue work done. In the end though, I split at five and didn’t look back. I stopped at the local warehouse place on the way home to get some final touches for the garden (some tomato cages, some bell pepper seeds, and some drip equipment). It rained today in sunny California, and the temperature was downright un-Summer… but I didn’t let it stop me from getting a few minutes outside finishing up my sowing and whatnot. I swear, if this garden works I’m gonna be pumped.

Anyway, the point of that paragraph was to say, “I’m tired.” So, I figured that, tonight, in lieu of writing, I could just post a link to the video we took of Keaton 2nd day walking. She’s getting better, and this afternoon was trying to walk more than crawl right near bedtime. She gets really happy when she’s doing it, I think she knows we enjoy watching it (she should, the way we cheer her on). Anyway, you can watch the incredibly cute video over at Keaton’s gallery – all edited and scored and annotated by moi. Enjoy!

Goodnight.