Sounds Like Someone Has A Case Of The Mondays

Well, today was my last day at the Clairemont senior center job. It lasted 15 months. Today was odd. Ending on a Monday is odd. It was the last day of the month, so that explains it, but it was just odd waking up to work on Monday then being plunged into the neverending weekend right afterwards. There was no fanfare to speak of. True to form, I slipped in this morning at the caterer's kitchen in Kearny Mesa, without even a word. I've been going there for a year and still know the names of only two people there, and one of them I learned only last week! At most, I think I knew only about three of their names in a year. I went about my route but in a less organized manner than usual. People got a little chatty and wanted to get some last words in, so I fell behind by a bit in the start. I went to my congregate lunch site in Linda Vista where I stay about an hour. Today they were going to have cake and ice cream initially to mark the closing of the site, but when it ended up remaining open, the ice cream and cake were supposed to be for my going away. Well, I forgot about all that, and in the process of trying to instruct a lady who would be taking my place doing the minor paperwork and money collection, there was this other lady who came in and made an ass of herself and even got me a little tense because she was going on asking for something we couldn't provide and turning down that which we could provide. All the while I was thinking, 'lady, shutup and let me have my last few minutes here in peace, and you'll never have to endure me again.' I totally missed out on the cake and ice cream. Grrrr. I went on my way after saying farewell to everyone at the lunch site, and headed back to my route, where a few more well wishers awaited my last delivery. I took the truck home to give it a bath and freshen it up after months of not doing so. Lucky for me it was a decent day to get into shorts and go spraying the garden hose around. Then it was back to trade trucks and make my way back to the office for the last time. No real fanfare there. Really, the extent of unusual happenings was limited to a hug from Joyce who had been the one to give me the warm welcome on the first day in October 2003. Ordinarily, I don't get such welcomes, and ordinarily, I don't part ways with jobs so gracefully.

It was on the way home that it sunk in that things are different. I've been doing this line of work now for two and a half years. That isn't a long time in itself, but it's the work that I took to liking and the one that was there for me through some hard times while working at the first job (Poway), and some good times while at the second (Clairemont), like deciding to get married—it's been a good underpinning for me. The money was solid, there were some benefits, I liked it for the purpose it served. My overwhelming outlook on the state of the world now is a drag, but lately it's been worse. When you subscribe to the idea that the growth economy and industrial civilization is on it's way out, the prospects of job hunting seem dim and useless. I'd rather be a full time student; at least there is satisfaction in learning and working solely to improve my own standing. I do nothing but fall into despair when looking at job leads, feeling really insecure at how I measure up to the qualifications listed. Today was dim when I got home. My two week grace period came and went and all I did was make music with Glenn instead of doing much of anything to look for a job, even while Kelli was adamant about my needing to get a job. Making music isn't the problem. That is much needed after years of frustrating non starts and throwing away nearly everything ever recorded in that time. I just totally hate the job search. I'd rather practice bleeding. I can think of nothing that is more demeaning than trying to sell myself to people who really could take or leave me. It's not that I can't do anything. Surely someone needs what I can do. I just find it unbearable to go through the exercise of telling them they need me. I hate competition like that. I am uncompetitive. So today, I took a nap—the only logical thing to do, especially given that even my email program decided to argue with me, giving me a total fit of rage for the few minutes I let it (only to work perfectly fine after my nap). Fortunately Kelli got home early and offered to help take me to school tonight since traffic is a nightmare on the first day of class.

I had a respite from the despair of my uncertain future when I went to school to start another semester at Mesa. Tonight's class was my Jazz history class, which looks to be a breeze for me. My Wednesday class will be a basic humanities intro. I like going to school. I find it has put an end to my depression on the times that I have returned to school. Something about it satisfies me in a way I need to be satisfied. It gives me form in my schedule, and learning something is always nice, but then it's also a way to achieve something for wholly altruistic reasons. I don't question my motive when I succeed in school, and actually now my GPA is higher than it was earlier in college, and that was higher than it was in high school, which was higher than before, etc. My last three classes have been all A grades for me, and before that I was a 3.5 as it was. In HS, I graduated with a 3.33. You don't want to know what I had in middle school. Kelli came back and picked me up from school and brought the dog with her who apparently was totally bewildered earlier when Kelli returned from dropping me off and coming home alone. Aww. Sweet.

And then today was also the day when my roommate confirmed that he was leaving in a few weeks. Great. Just fucking great. Like I need that. It was hard enough to get him and the other roommate in the fall. I never liked roommate turnover, but this last cycle was absurdly prolonged and cost some money in downtime.

Tomorrow Glenn and I are going to play starting around noon and will take the rest of the work day to make some music. It has been a long time since I have done that. I say it's time. Soon I'll have some stuff to play. We have a track we are working on and it's leaving me excited both as guitarist and bassist, but just as a creative person that has been like a compressed spring ready to spring out when the time and circumstances were right.

Worthless Upon Worthless

I wrote last year about the worthlessness of the present day automobile accessory: the spinning spoke wheel that is supposed to spin as you come to a stop, and keep spinning. Basically, it is a way to look good as you are going nowhere. I mean, you are at a stoplight, and that is the only time when anyone can "appreciate" the full effect! I think this is a metaphor for modern American life: look good going nowhere.

Absurd if you ask me. Even stupid, given the cost involved in these things. I've heard these things are $500 and more per piece and they only matter when you are sitting still, and not even for the duration of the stoplight cycle! Some wind down to a stop a lot sooner.

But there is even more absurdity. Today, I was driving my route and I spotted one car with these spinner wheels that had spokes that didn't even spin right! They just remained in one place, even as the wheels were turning! It would be hard to imagine something more useless than this expensive, silly gimmick that doesn't even work right in the few seconds it is supposed to.

Well, there is the missile defense system that Bush wants. It doesn't even work right in tests!

Supersized, Yet Downsized

I just watched Supersize Me tonight. I had been meaning to see it for a while now. For those who are under a rock, it's about a guy who charts his progress through a month of eating nothing but McDonald's food in a cruel and unusual (well, not very unusual) form of masochism. Checking in with his doctors before this whole experiment showed him to be in good health, trim and fit. His vegan chef girlfriend watched in horror as he turned himself into a fattening, more depressed, lethargic repository of cholesterol, fat, and sugar. Oh, and his peepee didn't work well by the end of this whole ordeal, according to his girlfriend. This Morgan Spurlock dude kept a good deal of humor in the film, despite some downright scary statistics about obesity and heart disease and all the other great things that go along with the American diet. In fact, this was one of the funnier movies on the topic of how to reverse decades-long climbs in life expectancy for the most prosperous nation on earth.

Several months ago, almost a year now I guess, in my English 205 class at Mesa, we were given an in class exercise centered on an article by Robert Samuelson in Newseek that proclaimed we were not the victims of poverty in this nation, but rather we were victims of prosperity. Quite the opposite of what any of us are conditioned to expect, and worthy of a raised eyebrow or two. Samuelson was citing the quality of life issues we have from all the leisure time and conveniences that are all around us. Basically, it was that we are increasingly afforded a lifestyle of laziness and over a couple of generations, have had all sorts of issues related to that. The obvious ones are obesity and other physical health issues due to the extremes of inactivity or hyperactivity, but I seem to remember reading about the damage to family life when everyone has options and leisure time aplenty that ends up undoing family connections due to disparate interests and the ablilty to actually live out these activities as individuals. We've evolved into a sick and dying population. Wow. Impressive.

Depressive is more like it.

In a lot of ways, the US is culturally shallower than a kiddie pool in summer. For a good long part of our history, I understand that we needed to build our physical environment. Before the 1500s, the stuff just wasn't here. But after the middle of the 20th century, we really could have stopped building stuff. I don't think our work now adds much if anything to real human life. In fact, a lot of it doesn't even relate to human living. That's not to say we don't consume things, but I am talking about more than consumption. I mean, the stuff that makes life worth living is sidelined. We work now more than so many other places in the world. We work, I think, to forget what miserable lives we lead. Of course, work itself is too often a direct injection of said misery. So if we are working to avoid misery but get misery in turn, why the useless exercise?

I guess it's a good solid conditioning backed by hundreds of years of nation building on our parts. But now that we have all the conveniences of modern life, and don't need to work, what do we do? WE WORK! Hey, it doesn't make sense to me either. Supposedly the idea of advancing civilization is to enjoy life more, maybe developing as artists, thinkers, poets, writers, musicians. But no, we charge ahead with an insistence that we are no one if not being "productive." The added irony is that we put people out of work because they aren't as productive as their fellow worker, or certainly as measured against a computer or robot. So then we get a population that is slowly becoming more out of work, and contributing less than ever to the all-precious economy. That is, they aren't actually adding to it by making things of worth. Apparently being low income or otherwise disadvantaged doesn't slow people from pigging out. So in that regard, the economy is kept afloat. But down the line, we are getting into a terrific health crisis of epidemic proportions, and I just know that has to run into some serious money loss as people have to get medical attention to address their obesity and diabetes well after the damage was done. I don't know that people that bad off are much help to the all-precious economy, but they can buy some waytoofuckingoverpriced prescription drugs, so maybe it levels out once again for someone in the economy.

Eric Schlosser was in the DVD release of Supersize Me, and he summed up a wide variety of things I love to talk about. I read his book Fast Food Nation in 2002. It was one of the books that got me started on a lot of these issues which I write about. It was good to see an extended interview with him. He is youngish (40 or so), relaxed in blue jeans and casual shirt, shaven. He looked like a million graduate students and activists. He wasn't stuffy in the least. He said he still ate some fast food, but was not letting his kids eat the stuff. He said there were good alternatives to the corporate food chain, and that not all fast food needs to be bad. He was enlightened about things but not radical. But he rattled off one instance after another that says why fast food is killing us. Well, it's all these things.

The big change between when America was "less prosperous" and now is that we don't make our own food now, but had no choice until the age of mechanized farming, chemical and biological tampering made it possible to separate ourselves from our actual livelihood in food production, and then manage to overeat at the same time. So we've abandoned time honored professions that actually sustain life in favor of a range of jobs that are simply window dressing as we let others do the work for us. And, to hear some tell it (albeit romanticized), the old work was not so bad. I think people derive actual satisfaction from meeting their needs and working with family and friends, and I think that our "civilization" has removed a lot of that from our lives, and replaced it with a poor substitute. I mean, I often think that maybe I need to relinquish my modern life and go for something else that harkens back to my great grandfather's existence on a farm or in a small town or something. Maybe I am just being romantic about it. But then I think, well, that would mean more than getting some animals and planting some carrots in my yard. The cows and goats are illegal in town, and maybe the carrots will die. The yard probably has too much poison in it from the things that go on here. I couldn't really dig up the street to plant more crops, even if I was confident, and even if I did dig up the street, would it have too much petroleum residue from years of cars dripping oil? I don't know. I'm a product of a society that has given up on living like we were meant to live. Close to the land. I have to work a job that gives me things I can't wear, eat, or put over my head. My wife and family and friends are in the same boat. Ah, prosperity.

McDonald's is not a replacement for a farm. A suburb is neither a city nor is it place in the country. An economy of Wal Marts and Home Depots and car dealers is not an economy of need. I'd gladly make no money if there was a way I could eat and be clothed and sheltered, and could indulge myself in meaningful activity. For me, some of that would be music, or writing or some sort of visual art, or just talking to people. It is hardly a productive lifestyle according to people now. But at what cost, productivity? Before oil allowed us the privelege (or the right or whatever we call it) to become fat and lazy, we used to have to work to feed our bodies and our minds. But now we are spared the inconvenience of working for either. It all goes hand in hand. Some work is very hard. It alone can stand in the way of obesity. Civic engagement and cultural pursuits give the soul a workout. That can be better for us than all the TV and movies and video games we now fill our time with. Suburban design encourages and even demands the use of cars and other means of mechanized transportation, instead of walking.

I think everything about the average suburban lifestyle has sucked the soul out of a lot of us, while simultaneously injecting fat into us. And yet, it's not like a nightmare we can just wake up from. We spent a good century building up the system in which we now find ourselves. My hero Jim Kunstler calls it all the American Drive-In Utopia. Well, utopia is an optimistic word (he does us the term with a heavy dose of sarcasm). I think it's hell on earth. I think six decades of the easy life has ruined us. I really do. And then it doesn't help to realize how perilous a place we occupy in the world now, losing our dollar to the Euro, and all the trust that goes with it. And then there is the peak oil thing around the bend. I think this nation is really a has-been. I think that if the dollar plummets, it will come at a time when we have already lost our factories, our farming culture, our oil, our forests, our ability to make decisions that revolve around anything but the quarterly profit statement. We'll be fatter than ever, more diseased than ever, more divided than ever. A plummeting dollar will make it impossible to dodge the full effect of peak oil—we'll never have the manufacturing might we once had to address such problems as failure of interstate trucking and international shipping. Or of all the jobs that will cease to be of consequence due to high fuel costs. But then we'll also be stranded in cities. Suburbs are already slums in the older developments, and they won't mean much to a population that needs to get on with the business of finding and growing food the old fashioned way.

While I was watching the DVD, I heard about the rise in deaths attributed to diet. Hmmm? An epidemic of deaths due to overeating? That might be today's dilemma, but try to fathom a nation with its agricultural fabric torn asunder, and hundreds of millions left to figure out how to eat without the "help" of McDogfood's and KFC and Kroger or Wal Mart, while learning to adjust to reduced energy usage, conflicts over the energy that is available, and an economy that is in crisis once the debt bubble bursts. All this will be faced when any transportation will become more expensive, the most detrimental being the food distribution networks that service us in all corners of the country. I don't think that overeating will ultimately kill most Americans. I'm bracing for starvation being the real killer, at least until America makes a critical reversion to locally grown and traded food. Places that can't grow food will be worthless. The $500,000 house I live in might be a termite ridden shack, gutted of its metals and other recyclable items, once I find that food is too hard to grow or buy or trade for here.

It takes a few leaps in reasoning, but I think America could face a terrific irony: starvation deaths as a result of prosperity.

Roadrunner? My ASS!

My cable performance sucks. I don't know why. What the hell is going on with my speed here? In September, I had a modem just die on me, and Time Warner Cable came out and replaced it, and traced the line. There was an unneeded splitter in the line that did affect the speed a good deal, and when it was removed, I had some super fast service like I had never had for the three years before that. And now, I have the same system with the modem they gave me to replace the dead one, and a router that was here for months before all this went down, and two Macs of my own, and whatever my roommates use. I have one wired Mac and a wireless one (mine). I have tested and retested performance after rebooting everything, bypassing the router altogether and hard wiring either of the Macs. No dice. Most of my bandwidth speed tests are at about 5% to about less than 50% of the spec that I should be getting. I had a tech come out and see about all this on Sunday, and he was useless. He gave me yet another modem to replace the replacement, just in case. But no dice. If it was a router issue, bypassing it would be a solution. If it were a Mac issue, my roommate on a PC would be doing fine. I don't think I have spyware. I have my settings right in the network panels. I downloaded new versions of Firefox and Safari, and that didn't help. In fact, Firefox is running insanely slow—like half of dialup speed. Yeah—that bad.

I've smashed printers when I have gotten this pissed off at inanimate objects that frustrate me.

Holy Scheisse!

Holy shit. It bears repeating. Holy Fucking Shit, in fact. Can it be? Is the TAPKAE™ brand musical ice age coming to an end? Did it only take ONE whole George Bush presidency to recover from the ice age that followed my pants-on-fire musical creative spell that went from 1995-2000? Man, with only a few exceptions, for the most part, I did in fact record the last music that I deemed worth keeping (my Hog Heaven Holiday Theme Music of 2000) just as Bush stole the first election—about mid December 2000 was when I was doing that HHHTM project. And here we are, four years later and I finally seem to be getting some ideas again, and some sense that maybe I can get some work done. Hah. I guess I can't wait another four years for Bush to be out of office before I make some music.

Man, I just got out of the studio after twiddling with my new Music Man 4 string bass. I am digging that bass to no end. It has been a few years since I had a 4 string fretted bass (have had the fretless almost as long, but don't use it much), so after years of using the Fender 5 string with its fat landscape to navigate, the 4 string is all nice and fast, and easy to play. And it has the god-tone I've been looking for. So far it has been a delight to record with. I use my Ampeg SVT3 Pro to shape my sound on the way to disk, and fuck me it is godlike. The notes just gurgle out of it and have that delightful midrange punch that I love. No gimmicky EQ—just a two band cutting passive EQ. Full out, it sounds like a Chapman Stick (actually, I think the Stick tailored its tone so sound like the Music Man bass), and anything less, it's always fat and punchy. Yay. The harmonics ring nice and bold too, and I like to employ harmonics from time to time. I'm so glad I bought this bass—the second time.

But then there is this dude named Glenn who contacted me a week ago and offered up his drumming, guitaring, and singing. Finally a week ago, we got together and jammed some themes that have been batting around for me for the last four years or some part thereof. Most of them have been recorded and played by the various combos I've tried to form around my ideas, and some are just too familiar to have played differently, but for whatever reason, that first day with Glenn here, I just tossed aside a lot of the preconceived notions of what had to be in these tunes—they obviously haven't been done as well as they could be, so WTF? I may as well try to mix them up some. I just had a total musical hard on getting the chance to play one on one and explore ideas of alternate arrangements. Then we did this loose jam on new ideas that I had never used with anyone, and we went out of here with a good sense that something could happen, and all we needed to do was show up and try—which is all any of my other band cohorts ever had to do! Grrrrr!. Glenn and I reconvened and took another swipe at that same new track, with me on guitar, and he on drums. It took only a few short attempts to get something that really left us excited. I think we both latched onto it for its serendipitous quality, but the thing has some very cool rocking passages. Since I was playing guitar initially, I'd jump over to bass and lay down a first take wonder that kicked the whole thing up another notch. Man, it was exciting. Then we'd sit there and bask as we played it at waytooloud and thought of all the fun ahead. And, even better, his wife comes by and listens and cheers us on! Damn. She even likes King Crimson. I can't fucking believe it. Glenn and I got together again today and put on some favorite and new King Crimson and bonded. It was cool. Then we took another stab at this piece we were working on, this time with my guitar rig set up and ready to record in isolation mode (to keep it from bleeding like mad into the drum overheads as we play together). I was even happy with the separation I was able to get, so that frees us up to do drum/guitar jams and even hope to keep parts and be able to actually use them. Glenn also brought by a drum machine/groove box and we were fiddling with it. It's been a while since I used any electronics, so it may take a bit of experimenting, but if we carry on as a duo, we might be pretty self contained. Today we even played two guitar parts to the new track, trying to take it up a notch and do some serious Frippoff work.

And, even more insane, this week I've had (get ready for it) lyrical ideas for the first time in God knows how long. I want to write a hit song. It will be a leftist radical Republican bashing country song. I want to beat those fuckers at their own game. I don't really think KSON will play it, but it might be a rousing theme for the next 4 years.

January 20 Disease

If ever a nation needed a leader of the caliber of Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, or Gandhi, this is that nation and now is the time. Instead, we have a pampered and not-too-bright opportunist with fascist tendencies who can't even claim to have been elected fairly. The omens are not favorable.

These are the words of a man who is fast becoming my hero. Richard Heinberg is a college professor and critic of the industrial/capitalist/corporate machine, and an outspoken voice on the matter of peak oil. His words above are particularly poignant today, on the day when Dubya takes the oath for the second time. The problem is, Heinberg wrote these words FOUR YEARS AGO.

Four years ago! His website doesn't yet have anything about today.

Today, even before I woke up, as Kelli left for work, she made a comment like "if you want to stay sane, leave the TV and news off today." Something to that effect. When I went to work, I turned on the radio to my trusty NPR and listened to a couple minutes of Talk of the Nation. There was one guy who called in who was soooooo damned over the top and excited, spouting the usual Republican drivel like he had a gun to his head. He had this urgency like there was a terrorist incident and he was the town cryer. He not only took the party line hook, line, and sinker, he really put some of himself in. He was saying the usual shit like, 'if those liberals would just put down the hate and get some moral values, then we could talk.' He cited Zell Miller as an outstanding example of his notion of what a good cooperative Democrat should be. Pathetic. There were some liberals who called and had some delightfully pointed remarks that didn't mince words, and that was good to hear.

About as soon as I heard that stuff on air, I entered my Linda Vista lunch center a little late, and it happened to be the day that my immediate supervisor for that job was there to announce the end of that site's service a week from now. She was talking to people to see how they were taking it, see how things were for them with the program. I sat down to do the little money counting thing I do there, and she came to me and said something about there being complaints that I never talk to the clients, oh, and the same thing has been said about my time at the main office (which usually is a 15 minute period most days—hardly the stuff of deep friendships). Oh? I don't talk to anyone? I don't know who told her that, but the way it came to me put me on edge in a hurry, and I wasn't even prepared for it, so I just locked up. I think it's BS. I talk to a number of clients, and sometimes sit with them for lunch. There are some that I never connected with, but to be told that I don't talk to anyone is offensive. I tend to talk to some of the more progressive ones (but these are mostly old New Deal era democrats anyway), but I'm cordial to them all. So my supervisor was there to look over the place some, and I tried to confront her about this business. The guy before me used to be a lot more gregarious, but he also had only that job to do. I was not particularly expected to match his enthusiasm or the little things he did (threw parties for people, had some other things like that). No one told me that I wasn't talking enough. I did have a review in maybe July or so that cited me for sounding too pushy a few weeks before when I talked up Fahrenheit 9/11 to some of the coworkers. Their response and my review was cause for me to stop talking to most of them about such things. I work out of the office, but even for the few minutes I am there, I tread carefully most of the time. There are a few lefties in there, and we've had some talk, but around anyone that doesn't know the secret handshake, I just shut up and do my thing, smile and get the hell out when I'm done. It is one of the few things I don't like about my job. But at the Linda Vista center, I am a lot more chatty because these are clients and we don't have office politics to get in the way. I've had some really great times talking to some of these people, so to be a week before the graceful end of my time there and be accused of not talking to them is pretty upsetting. It took me an hour to decompress.

Then I eventually got home. Checked my favorite discussion board and read the usual partisan shit being bandied about. Boring. There are only so many times you can tell the same story to a bunch of dimwit Republicans. Tonight I had a loose audition with a couple girls who answered my ads, or however we found each other. I played drums. It was brief—maybe an hour. I'll have to try them again to see how I like the stuff they're doing. I've always felt very awkward auditioning on drums. This was no exception. Something about wanting to come off as competent enough to show a little imagination, but not so clever as to lose the basis of the song in cute fills. So I play real conservatively (boring) until things gel. Tonight, I really only played about four songs, so I didn't get any real feel for it. Drumming for rock bands tends to be brainless stuff, but my technique isn't much more developed than that anyway. That's why I wanted to play bass more; you can still play a mindless rhythm but have some real power within a band context by what note is played against what chord. But on drums, for more rock bands than I can recall, the parts are usually pretty easy to establish in a rehearsal situation. Coming up with a more permanent part is the challenge, and thats why I liked recording. The girls were nice, very enthusiastic for their own work, and delighted at being able to walk in and play, bringing nothing but their instruments, so we talked up another meeting to see better what I could do, possibly a few steps beyond drumming.

Going back a little, just as they were tuning up, Kelli opened the studio door to ask a question that had an easy answer. I had called her to tell her that when she got home, I'd be busy. I didn't mind the initial question, but one of the girls asked innocently enough if Kelli played music, and Kelli just floored me when she recalled a time about a week ago when I didn't "let" her play guitar after weeks of making little comments about how she and I could jumpstart some latent creative urges (she is a poet and likes to sing to her favorite songs, and also played guitar at one point, but is as much into that as I am into plastic models now). She had turned me down for that offer for most of the time, even being sharply opposed to it. But a week ago, Paul Horn came over and the three of us chatted and had wine, then I invited Paul in for a little musical interlude, just to see if things had changed from the days when we only ever made cacophonous noise. Kelli had some spur of the moment idea to come in and play guitar. The whole idea of Kelli playing guitar was just jarring, and I thought it would just be a matter of her joking, sort of like me offering to go up on stage and do poetry with her all female troupe—but instead of actually doing poetry, it would be me reading a cereal box in pig latin! The last I saw of Kelli playing guitar, she was trying to remember some G C and D chords—hardly the stuff of a jam, and even more out of place in a jam with Paul, with whom I often feel frustrated as hell because in two years and more of our acquaintance and playing together, I have only five minutes worth of stuff that was ever worth keeping. I didn't know Kelli was going to take it so personally. So tonight, after the two girls left, I told Kelli that her little comment about my not letting her play was pretty unwelcome in the context of my audition with people I just met ten minutes before. For me it was really embarassing, given that I was there trying to carry on in a professional manner. We've had these sorts of things happen before, when I have unfamiliar people over, somehow she has just put me in a really wierd spot when I am trying to use my studio in some sort of quasi-professional way. I don't know how it happens. Then we had to get into some argument about it.

So now my night has been as bad as my day, and the most joy to come of the day was playing unfamiliar songs on drums with people I don't know. With my brain off. Oh, and I also decided to defrag all my drives. Nothing but a good time over here today. Man. Happy fucking Inauguration Day.

A Little Honesty Ne'er Hurt Anyone

I was just watching the ABC television network run its hour (or two?) long commercial for Sears, Extreme Home Makeover. Kelli sometimes turns it on and gets drawn into it. Anyhow, there was a commercial for The Lending Tree dot com that made me laugh out loud. It had a man speaking of his four bedroom house in the suburbs, his membership at the country club, his shiny new car, and a few other trappings of modern suburban life. He had a matter-of-fact voice, and he appeared content beyond all normality. Then the rhetorical question he asked was, 'how do I do it? I'm up to my EYEBALLS in DEBT!"

I just had to laugh out loud for a minute. That was as honest and unpretentious as it was going to get tonight. So I got up and left the room. Too bad the commercial was for a company that wants to get its cut out of America's already overwhelming debt load. Ah, capitalism at its finest. What happens when the economy reverses itself because it can't grow anymore on account of no more energy to fuel it? We'll be more fucked than a Thai whore.

Now, THAT would be honesty in advertising.

Bummer

Well, it's not often I get called to the boss' office at work, but it happened this Tuesday. I was told there was a problem with the entire company's numbers of people being served, and that as a result, there would be one lunch site cut out, and one home delivered meal route merged with the others, and the drivers reduced to three. I was the fourth, hired a year and a couple months ago. The boss did have a little bit of wrangling to do with the county agency that ordered the cost cutting, but she wasn't holding out a lot of hope. Sure enough, two days later there was an envelope with my name on it awaiting me at the office, confirming it all. I still have two weeks there.

As a job, and as a source of income, it didn't amount to much in quantifiable terms. The money was a little under $10 an hour, but there were some basic benefits that I could get, and for the first time, a share of PTO, holiday pay, and even vacation time. So it was a better job than other ones I've had, and way more solid in terms of hours—30 every week, regardless. Sometimes, there was a lot less work than that, but they still paid for 30 a week, for which I am grateful, because it meant that as there was less work, I didn't need to do this part time. They have a desire to keep people who want to be there, and until now, they did just that. I didn't have to do other stuff to make ends meet, so I was pretty relaxed and enjoyed doing the work.

It doesn't take a uniquely qualified person to do my job. I drive a truck and deliver meals to people, and talk to them. Minimal paperwork, lots of time out and about, dealing directly with my clients, some of whom have become friends, and in some cases, almost like surrogate grandparents. I've said it before, but it bears repeating—this job took on a meaning to me greater than just the money I got, and that's the real loss I feel. I never really chose this line of work, per se. Actually, I got a short lived driving gig at Poway Senior Center in September 2002 that I spent a year at, initially doing a two week fill in for one of the drivers there. Kelli got me that job, and I had no reason to believe it would last longer than the two weeks. At the time, I was doing a lot less music tech work than a year before, when 9/11 happened. I was barely holding stuff together at that point in 2002, so a $600 gig was nice. But then they asked me to stay on as a driver for the meals (instead of the shuttle driver), but the pay would be a quarter less, and there would be fewer hours. Well, that sucked less than nothing at all, and it kept Kelli and I working in the same office, which was nice. I did that for a year and a month, with a few weeks off in March 2003 and later in September. When that office totally cut out the single paid meal delivery driver spot, I got a transfer to Clairemont where the program was much bigger, and about 20 miles closer to home. That alone was a raise for me. So was a fixed schedule, and the benefits offered once I got past my probationary period. I easily got more than twice the compensation, let me say. Poway was pathetic, but I lived with it, and augmented it with some other stuff—usually music work of one sort of another.

I got the Clairemont gig the day after I left Poway, which gave me a couple weeks notice that that gig was over. And even that notice came within about two weeks of my desperate September episode of 2003. I was pretty scared about not working after getting past that stuff, but I got lucky and Clairemont had me down to meet and I got the job. Disaster averted. Maybe it was disaster delayed. I don't know what I'll do now. I never really applied to Clairemont. My resume and application were mainly just formalities, but I've never really done the honest job hunt thing with resumes and three interviews and stuff. It scares me. I hate selling myself that way. As a result, I'm pretty sure I'm not getting the best jobs I could be getting.

But that depends on what "best" is.

I worked for piss at Poway. Did better at Clairemont, and probably topped out anyway. But to me, the real charm of the job was that I didn't get up every morning and curse it, or curse my fate that I would be at such a place working for such wages. To me, they were fine for the way I live. The feeling that I operated under was that I was doing something useful and intrinsically satisfying. Sure, I made more money doing gigs and being crude like a sailor, but I was typically pretty depressed and angry in that scene. The value to me in this job was in how I could go in and talk to someone and maybe make them smile, or listen to them and just be witness to their lives. Maybe I got a deeper understanding of history from hearing how these people lived. Talking to people was in itself a liberal education. Witnessing how people lived helped give a face to some of the things I have read and learned in the time since starting this work. Feeling like a useful person (I don't say "productive" because there is nothing to produce, but I can be useful despite that) was good for recovering from depression. I don't remember many times when I woke up and hated my way through the day since taking this job. If I did, it was hardly ever to do with work or the people I encountered. I could enjoy the job because it didn't suck my energy or my soul from me. It was a good platform for developing my relationship, going to school, doing my church related stuff, and doing all the studying and activism that has defined the last year and a quarter for me.

Seeing it go, I can just hope that I can get into something that gives me some comparable feeling of accomplishment, while not robbing my life so much I can't do what I want to do to develop. I don't envy the people who work 40 hours, or even 80 hours. I just don't think that that is the road to happiness. It's more of a desperation, I think.

Spinning A New Web

I got bored one night and made the basis of this website as it appears here now. I was bored two subsequent nights and managed to finish the thing for the most part, and decided I liked it so much, that I put it up right away. This is TAPKAE.com mark IV. So far, there is the original one that I did almost three years ago. It was the purple and sandy colored one that really held things together but got really overblown. Then there was the somewhat short lived one that took over about April or so last year. It was a framed page, and I like it. I had stripped it down really lean, partially because I was tired of maintaining such a complex plain HTML site. I was also bored with talking about myself and going into such minutia about stuff that no one (myself included) cared about. The mark II site was the first with a real meat and potatoes approach. Then, I wanted to feature an inline frame site, so I made the mark III site which is what was here till last week. I don't think I will keep a copy of it here, mainly because all the info on that site has been brought to this new version, and some added. It was plain black overall with a tidy window within which worked as long as the content fit within the window, but sometimes it didn't and things got cut off, and even though it was scrollable, it looked lame, so I was off to the drawing board. Little by little, I am getting more and more control over CSS and what I want to do with it. I have been wanting to escape my generally boxy layout, and at least take out the obvious boxes. This was the first time I ever put a non-tiling image into the background (I'm a little slow). And, now that this is the second black version of this site, I guess its true what they say... once you go black, you never go back!

Band-aid

Well, I've been excited about playing lately. I put out a whole host of emails to various artists, advertising my bass playing. As you can read in earlier entries, some are curiously miscast for me, but have been interesting experiences, if only to be cast into the deep end playing unfamiliar stuff and trying to sound like I belong. I've been doing better than anticipated. All that musical osmosis is finally paying off.

Some of the bands and artists I've contacted or who have contacted me from my ads have been folky, prog, emo, something sort of a alt-countryish sound, and some that I don't know what they do, only that it's similar in nature to the way I used to get people to come by and play, and I would do all the editing and make works of art out of anything.

There was one dude who sent me an mp3 of his guitar and uke parts with vocals, and I put drums and bass down, with some small percussion. This was the most unique sort of audition I have done. Actually, the music itself was really outside of my comfort zone, but such is my challenge to myself now, so it doesn't matter. I did get a nice basic drum set groove going, with a lazy but propulsive 16th note shuffle thing using brushes on the snare, and a bass line that bounced some, and walked the rest of the time. I only spent a while on it one evening, but it did help get my ear into coming up with new parts, and my hands a chance to touch those "other" notes on the bass.