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people have asked me…

… if I’ve abandoned the blog.

No; I want more than anything to write.  About Keaton’s first day of kindergarten; about how I’m working from 6am to 11pm on daily basis; about how we visited my brother and his wife for the first time since they moved to California.  So many things to write about but not a spare second.  Writing this in between answering email at 1035pm on a Monday.  Got home at 915pm.

I’ve not abandoned anything, I just need to re-fit this thing into my day and haven’t figured out just where to do that.  Maybe at lunch.  Maybe I need to do it early, before work.  Nights aren’t working.  Days are too busy and stifle thinking.  I just have to pick a new sweet-spot and get to work.

Aside from work, things have been rosy.  Having sex often enough, eating well, weather is nice, money in the bank.

Be back later.  Goodnight.

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winning the bread

A dismal week for writing.  The Thursday debut speaks for itself.

Been working late most nights, winning the bread.  Meetings have eclipsed most of the daytime working hours to evenings are email catch-up.

Within a week Keaton starts school and soccer and re-starts ballet.  I’ve told Sharaun that we’re going from a relatively “easy” schedule to one of those suburban first-world problem nightmarish kind.  The school, off to ballet, right from ballet to soccer practice and back for a late dinner kinda thing.  Maybe this is some new phase of parenting that we’re about to be broken in on.  Keaton… people ask me if she’s excited about starting school.  I tell them that she is, but, in reality, she has no idea what she’s excited about… so who really knows.  She’s excited to wear her new twirly “first day” dress and see what all the other girls are wearing; she’s excited because she and the next-door neighbor best-bud share a class; she’s excited because they have playground.

Yeah, one’s school-age now and one’s working on crawling (no appreciable progress yet, friends).  One’s a boy and one’s a girl and that’s about as “square” a family unit as I could ask for.  I guess that’s why I paid a visit to my general practitioner the other day for a physical.  See, they wouldn’t refer me directly to the urologist… maybe they wanted their insurance money or maybe that dude really likes squeezing my balls, but whatever the reason I had to go there first and get checked-out before they’d point me to the vasectomy doc.  Yup, sterilization.  Can you believe that, before they’ll do this to you of your own volition, you have to go to a “counseling” session and a class on the practical irreversibility of the whole thing?  After that they make you wait through a “cooling off” period before you can have the procedure.  California: where elective surgery is akin to buying a firearm.  It’s OK though, I’m not in any real rush or anything, I can wait.

This weekend is Disneyland for Sharaun’s birthday, courtesy of the travel miles, courtesy of the RV trip spending, courtesy of the bread won, courtesy of Monday through Wednesday night spent working instead of writing here.

Goodnight.

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best of 2011.5

Look; either I’m getting older, more irrelevant, more intolerant… unable to cotton to the “new sounds,” or there just wasn’t a whole lot to froth at the mouth about in the first half of 2011.

I was disappointed with Radiohead’s effort; first-time since well… since never.  It was a trial admitting that and leaving it off the list; felt like betrayal.  Much of the year’s hotly-anticipated or raved-up albums just didn’t work for me – Panda Bear, James Blake, The Weeknd; no thanks..  Even old stalwarts fell short, I’m looking at you Decemberists and Strokes.  It was just an off half, I guess.

Honestly, and I’m not making this up it’s backed with hard data from Last.fm, my most-listened-to record in the first six months of 2011 was Sufjan Stevens’ 2010 LP Age of Adz.  I don’t do that a lot, cling to a record for that long.  It’s a fabulous album, to be sure, but something in 2011 should’ve been able to unseat it from heavy rotation.  To be fair, the music below is really good too – but January through June just didn’t speak to me the way it has in past years.  I’d recommend all the stuff that follows for your listening pleasure, and let’s hope together that something spectacular comes from the back nine.

So then, to get on with it for those still with it… here’s my best-of so-far list for 2011.  Only a scant six records to speak of, but I think it’s a pretty decent crop of tunes in the end.  Check it:

06. Mogwai- Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will [listen]

Back around the year 2001 I “discovered” Mogwai.  At the time I simply could not get enough of their sound.  I liked them so much, in fact, that Sharaun surprised me with tickets to go see them live in the city around that time.  It was a Valentine’s Day gift, and she accompanied me.  It was an awful show, I recall.  Mogwai were too loud during their awesome loud parts and not loud enough during their well-crafted quiet parts.  As the years wore on Mogwai continued to make albums, and I continued listening to them, but with waning interest.  Maybe I was over “post rock,” maybe they just weren’t that good, maybe both. I don’t know if this is just Mogwai doing right again, or me meeting the album in the right mood… but if you like the soft/heavy-loud/quiet kind of thing and are into instrumentals this is for you.

05. Yuck – Yuck [listen]

And some of the records I do like this year sound like Dinosaur Jr. or Pavement or Archers of Loaf.  Yuck is from England, but these guys would be right at home with Mascis and Barlow in some seedy Chapel Hill bar. I kept bouncing this album higher in my list and then bubbling it back down, but that might be because of the six here it’s my most recent acquisition and I’m just not ready to have this new guy bump some of the more established stuff I’ve been digging so far this year.  I could see that changing though, as time goes on and I look back in December.  Yuck’s record is for you if you were a skater in middle school; you maybe snuck out late one night with a can of green spraypaint and tagged Mrs. Canty’s, the math teacher, van.  You listened to Green Mind and daydreamed about making out with chicks or maybe buying some firecrackers or maybe getting a rush from stealing Now & Laters from the Sunoco.  Some people call this “post-punk” or other such dumb taxonomy.  You’re gonna call it awesome and I’m maybe gonna call it “with a bullet” here on the old best-of.  Watch out top-four… watch out.

 04. Cut Copy- Zonoscope [listen]

Cut Copy is one of those bands where, sometimes when I listen to them, really listen to them, I’m surprised I like them as much as I do.  I’m sure, in a previous review, I’ve made the Utah Saints comparison – and perhaps even gone back to access the memory databank and pull up the good time associated with similar sounds of yore, but Zonoscope is more than just an homage or Shanghai-Gucci.  Generally poppy and beats-based, but with plenty of quirky arpeggio and oooh-kinda harmony, it’s just a fun album.  We listened to this a lot on the RV trip because it was something Sharaun didn’t detest (which says something in its own right).  Maybe the best compliment I can pay here is that the album makes me want to dance, and I detest dancing.  Get it and shake your body in time.

03. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart – Belong [listen]

Some of the records I do like this year sound like the Smashing Pumpkins or MBV.  Hey, maybe I was right in my exposition… I’m “stuck,” I can’t hear new sounds.  I like stuff that sounds like stuff I like.  Records that sounds like Siamese Dream or Daydream Nation.  No, that can’t be right.  I drank the Animal Collective Kool-Aid, admitted my penchant for Kanye… I have to be hip, must be with-it, right?  Well, whether I’m faking it or not, I liked this record immensely.  Yes, it does, at times, sound like the Smashing Pumpkins with Debbie Goode pedals – but, seriously, what’s wrong with that?  Maybe I’m becoming myopic in my old age, but I still know a good record and I urge you to seek this one out.  What?  You want to know a little about it?  OK: It sounds commercial, it’s well-produced, your roommate who loved “that one Killers CD” will probably like it.

02. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues [listen]

I so loved the Fleet Foxes’ first album, and I was a little surprised when I didn’t immediately cotton to Helplessness Blues.  It took a few listens, quiet listens in solitude where I could really sink into the thing, to catch-on here.  It’s one of those paradoxical albums – so seemingly sparse and reserved in instrumentation yet coming off so very lush and sonic-ally “full.”  (Is that a word, “sonic-ally?”)  There’s this rollicking kind of breakdown that gets repeated in “Bedouin Dress,” like something you might hear sung on a ship… and it’s these little bits and pieces that make the Fleet Foxes’ music almost an anachronism, crafted with eyes on the simple folks of the past.  With strings and banjo and simply gorgeous moments like the sea-change transition in “The Plains/Bitter Dancer.”   I wore the grooves off this thing.

 01. Smith Westerns – Dye It Blonde [listen]

I love it when bands “come out of nowhere.”  Of course they had a record before this and I’ve still never heard it.  Finding a band I’ve never heard of and being super-impressed with their album is like hunting treasure.  And Dye It Blonde is a treasure.  Ever heard of the “C86 sound?”  Well, honestly neither had I until I wanted to make a reference to Smith Westerns’ sometimes likeness to the Teenage Fanclub for this paragraph.  Wikipedia says the C86 sound is typified by “guitar-based musical genre characterised by ‘jangly’ guitars and fey melodies.”  I don’t know about “fey,” but there is some good jangling going on here, and I hear shades of Teenage Fanclub’s “The Concept” all over.  What are you going to hear?, you ask?  Beatles sounding melody!  Guitar!  Drums!  Sorta-feminine vocals!  Catchy hooks and happy rhythms.   I love this album too, and I bet you might.  Really, go into my head and then come back out and tell me I’m wrong.

 

You know what’s funny?  After writing all that I think I may have been wrong up above… there was some good stuff around to listen to this year.  Maybe I’m just not consuming as much anymore.  I’ll admit I listened to a lot of “new” old stuff, going on benders with new boxsets and live shows and reissues of purportedly great music I’d not yet digested.  Maybe this tomb-raiding took away a portion of the bandwidth I’d have devoted to pawing through the new release bins (the digital kind, that is).

Take a listen for me, OK?  Goodnight.

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three-hundred-thousand hour service

Hi everybody.  Went to the state fair tonight with the family.

It was kids get in free and everyone rides for a dollar night so the place was… crowded.  I ate a “western sausage” (whatever that is) which had to be two feet long.  It really wasn’t that good, but there’s something fun about fair-food.  And while I’m sort of sad that we didn’t really get to sample any of the fried novelties (Oreos, artichoke, pickles, etc.), I suppose my heart and waist and whatever else is better off for it.  Speaking of health in general, I cracked the User Manual my parents passed onto me when I turned eighteen for the first time in years today.  Since I have a milestone coming up I wanted to see what the accompanying recommended servicing included.  What I found:

At the 300,000 hour mark, the manufacturer recommends the following servicing:

Oral

  • Schedule “routine” dental cleaning (because you missed the last two and it’s been over a year).
  • Statistical note: One cavity (the first since the 150,000 hour mark) will likely be found.  If this should be the case, the tooth shall be filled next Tuesday.

Genital

  • Call primary physician to inquire about “permanent” birth control via vasectomy.
  • Schedule vasectomy and throw away the last of your prophylactics.
  • Statistical note: Primary physician will require a physical before referring you to a urologist.  They will claim this is because you have not been in for two plus years, really it is so they can collect a $10 co-pay and their insurance billings.

General

  • Restart the previously abandoned “Program Cardio.”  Mandated gym usage.
  • Eat nothing bigger than your first.  Do this no more than three times per day.
  • Statistical note: At 300,000 hours there is a 75% chance your first-size will disqualify the Double-Double animal style.

I guess it’s time to get on all that, then.  I’m not happy with the pounds I put on during (and prior to, really) the RV trip – so those’ll have to come off at some point.  But you know if I had some fried butter in front of me I just might have to try it.  Yeah, they really have fried butter.  No, for real.

Goodnight friends.

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puerile politics

Watched the president brief the country on the debt talks this evening, then watched the speaker’s “rebuttal.”

Man what a disgusting, childish, disappointing and disheartening bout of playground name-calling.  If the goal here was to further alienate the American people, to perhaps convince those remaining few optimists that the system really is broken, to appear petty and stubborn and pouty – mission accomplished.  I both love and hate politics, but lately I’ve stopped caring because it’s just a joke.  If you weren’t convinced yet that US politics has entered the era of reality TV, you likely are after tonight.  Puerile, simply shameful – embarrassing on a global scale.

In the space where you are now reading this sentence I have typed, then deleted, three separate paragraphs.  Most were about music, or about how I’m sitting here with the windows open at night waiting for my 10pm meeting to start, or about something silly that happened at work today – but all of them were boring.

Goodnight.

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word-wayward

If there is a stinking dance show on the television, Sharaun will find it.  If there’s not one, she’s got one recorded and will watch that.  Man I hate dancing shows.

So I grab the laptop and don some headphones and listen to music and surf the internet and write.  Newlyweds, take note: this part of a successful eleven-year marriage.  I can silently protest these despicable dance shows and their infestation of my living room while at the same time listening to some funky breaks and maybe watching an old episode of HBO’s Braingames on YouTube or searching Amazon for the best Led Zeppelin biography.  Later, we’ll reconvene, husband and wife, and it’ll be as if the dancing show never happened.

I might get a bowl of cereal here shortly.  I downloaded a ton of vintage Smurfs cartoons for Keaton a month or so ago, before I’d heard about their coming CGI resurrection, and she’s been really into them.  So much so that she begged Sharaun to buy some Smurfs cereal in the store the other day.  Turns out this stuff is just Fruity Pebbles, but with only blue and white crunchy things.  Since my favorite cereal on the face of the earth is Cocoa Pebbles, and Fruity Pebbles is close, I’m pretty dang fond of the Smurfs cereal.  And, hey, there’s not much like the 10pm bowl of cereal to cap a night.

I flew today.  The half-hour flight on the sawmill shuttle.  We zoom high above farmland and the Marin Hills.  In the morning the stewardess brought me a Nutragrain bar, the strawberry kind, and I’d already finished my coffee so I ate it with a dry mouth, laboring over each cement-mix piece.  In the afternoon flight, the flight back home, the stewardess (a different one) offered me a choice between a school-lunch size bag of pretzels or the same size bag of chocolate cookies.  I chose the chocolate cookies and discovered, upon opening them, that I had been deceived as they were simply some kind of “wafer thin” cracker thing with dryish chocolate things embedded in them.  Again dry and again I’d already tossed back the last of my (afternoon) coffee so it was like chewing ashes.  Tasty ashes.

Thinking about taking the family to Disneyland next weekend to celebrate Sharaun’s birthday.  We did it last year and really enjoyed it.  Disney is not cheap.  You can’t really get a weekend down there for a whole lot less than a grand.  That’s pretty insane for a weekend.  But man I love Disney.  I’ve looked into tent-camping near the park; there’s one RV place within walking distance which charges $30 a night for tent spots – a body could save $50-$70 a night doing this.  There are some nice state parks within driving distance, but then you’d have to park.  Hotel is likely the simplest option with a one year old.

‘Night.

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sawmill sprawl

I don’t know if it’s a temporary side-effect of seven weeks away from the sawmill, but I’ve been consciously less “over zealous” about all things bread-winning since returning.  I realize that sentence stretches the limit of structure and comprehension so I’ll re-phrase: It’s hard to see the return on working as hard as I was before I left.

I think this has always been the case, it’s just my natural tendency to “fill-up” on work.  I’m no workaholic, in fact I’m inherently quite lazy, but I do tend to take on work as it comes with very little selectivity.  Put simply, unless I determine a task has zero value, I’m apt to accept it and find a way to get it done.  At the sawmill this trait is received well, and has earned me both dollars and accolades.  In the grand scheme of things, however, I feel it’s both unnecessary and potentially unhealthy.

One can achieve workplace success in eight hours daily; it most certainly can be done.  Modern cubicle-bound jobs, however, have transcended the physical and geographical boundaries which governed our jobs of yore.  I don’t need to be anywhere in particular to do my job, nor do I have to work during any prescribed timeslot.  If I have an internet connection and a computer I could work in 23min bursts from midnight to 7am and no one would care if I was on the moon.  The unbounded nature of these jobs in the tele-presence age makes for easy “infection” into what, historically, has been non-working hours.

And that’s where you get burned.  It’s so easy to do mail on your phone, take one call at 11pm, work on that presentation after church on Sunday.  I don’t go to a steel factory, a refinery, a coal mine, or an assembly plant.  I don’t punch in at 8am and clock back out again when the dinosaur pulls that bird’s tailfeather.  Work happens on my terms, and as great as I believe that is for productivity and flexibility it can be lethal to the concept of real free-time.

Being away for seven weeks reminds you of this.  Truly severed time is precious and should be savored.  I vowed to myself that I’d be vigilant about this sawmill-sprawl.  Better guarding my 5pm and 8pm and Saturday mornings.  It may seem like this theme is one that dominates my writing, or that I devote a lot of time to it.  So maybe I do.  I suppose I started writing four paragraphs ago simply to comment on how I’m less-busy, and happily so, since returning.

Don’t worry, though, I’m sure work will fix that… it has a way of filling in the cracks and I have a way of letting it.  I’ll remain on alert for encroachment, though, you can bet on it.

Goodnight.