things to amuse yourself

1. attempt some mad skateboard jumps off of a good conditioned monitor that someone left on the sidewalk, hoping that a civilized person could find a use for.

2. alphabetize your crackers

3. look up photos of free cats on local classifieds ads























4. Swing a once good conditioned monitor by the tail like a civilized person. It will impress your friends and result in after school sharing of snacks.

5. Take a nap. Sleep loves you.

6. Collect stamps. Alphabetize them.

missing helmet. reward: 1 non-smashed in skull

Somebody stole my helmet.





















You may have seen it. It's red, fashionable, safe.

I mean come on, who steals a helmet? I keep asking myself that, as I attempt to get to work on only back roads for the rest of the summer. I figure "I can wait 'til next summer's helmet line comes out so that I'm up to date on fashion trends". No, really, I don't want the added expense. Plus every week of this sadly escaping summer just rolls by like a barreling train. I get my stuff together on Monday morning, open the front door, and realize that the helmet hasn't come back. No note was left. No answers.

Who steals a helmet?

woah! rehearsal gave me finger sores!

I need to take a moment here to tell you how much I love my band.

















We rehearsed last night for bed track day two. Devon was given this amazing vintage bass by someone who obviously adores him profusely. I mean who gives a bass? Just randomly?

hrmmm....Anyway, we settled into a room at Dan's music school, with awesome florescent lighting and like, pictures of Ted Nugent on the walls. I had this awesome mic with duct tape all over it. We started barreling through songs that we haven't played in a while, due to August being the month from hell in terms of scheduling.

Just to recap, the first day of bed track recording with Dan and Devon was great. The rehearsal we had last night made me want to go run around the yard. The songs take on this entirely new shape when handled by the band. I am only now trying to consider ever touring or performing solo shows. I was in bed last night for a good hour, wide eyed, thinking about how good it felt to play music. With people. In those moments you realize why you keep on, whirling around the four corners of the Scrambler that is the music business.

I took a song I was really hating before yesterday and completely rewrote the lyrics, dissected the lyrical phrasing, and simplified the piano's comping. It just seemed like a pile of mush that lead to the really catchy chorus. We slapped some four on the floor drumming, rumbling motown drums fills, and that sexy vintage bass and there you go, you got yourself a motown song. Some pansy girly song became a motown influenced dance number. I am happy, I don't know about you...

The thing I've most enjoyed about writing this stack of songs for the new record is I've had the ability to stand back and really critique them. The first record was written much like sitting down for a meal. Song after song was written within 30 minutes, and never really questioned, edited, or reconsidered. I therefore feel the first album was obviously confessional and honest, but not necessarily polished.

I guess those days were over when I went out and got myself an mbox (home recording device). Layer upon layer of arrangements started piling up. half cluttered files of half songs started looking like my laundry. Vocal arrangements attempting to sound like horns. Recording demo after demo of the same song in different ways. All this mess has really allowed me to organize my songs and their personalities.

Now I have to get through choosing which 11 songs will be on the record. I thought it could be an easy task, but that was before these caterpillar like songs became crazy colourful moths.

yeah, nice analogy. I know.

death bed

You had one hand in the air
moving fingers like a wooden doll
and the other hand in your hair

I'd keep the picture to myself
but I am tired of forgetting

Roti

Everybody loves roti!

Catherine the Great

Catherine the great
with windows that pushed out
like a fairy tale on the
second floor
Hell below
and a fake world of
plastic, in a small enough size
to hold between two hands,
to change with two hands

Bookshelves and letters
and fly away education
We ran in and out like laces
from near and far places
Rewound and skipped from
each other's presence

But born of magnets we were
The plus years of parental care
minus the faulty steps on rented lawns
A cavern under the world there
and I huddle like a sleeping bear

Fifteen minute bells went off
and we grew into our legs
and we grew into our mouths
Hand written letters the size
of wasps
Moving from one stage
to the amphitheatre of wrongs
and making it right back
to right

We will be
this way
until a great machine
fails

The one that keeps
Jesus in the
hearts of prisoners

stay summer

amsterdam

pedaling to feel real
amongst the cracks between bricks
and an ancient home feeling

fantasie stucke
between my ears
dirt and sand
between my nails and skin

around every corner
no stop sign
I recall now
my former was erased

as I caught wind of
what sprawled out
before me
no future to throw me

get back to the ship deck
crash on the mats
and feel lucky for the
whistlers, prostitutes and protestants

iqaluit friend

my olds

This weekend I ventured to my hometown for my emissions test. This is required every two years. My car is a 1988 Cutlass Supreme Oldsmobile (special edition). Its name reminds me of tuna supremes, which my dad made when I was a kid, and I couldn't stand them. warm tuna. blah. Something about the name is very cheesy, but she's a good car and has gotten me to a lot of places without problems.

But all my problems exist in this government emissions test. Oldy went in on Friday for the test and failed. They explained that I need a major tune up. So instead of getting them to do it for a lot of money, Joel, his dad and I gathered around the smelly hood and replaced wires, spark plugs, the PCV valve, and air filter. Oldy was bucking, sighing and stalling over town. Something was wrong! Stupid me, I took her in for a re-test in her ill condition, thinking she was just being temperamental. She failed again. We put her back under the knife and found a cracked spark plug.

Then we couldn't get the new spark plug screwed in. So we call this extremely-tight cut-offs-wearing, amazing car mechanic friend who's catch phrase is 'Hammer on'. He comes to the rescue, pulling up in this gigantic black monster truck, with license plates reading 'FORGED'.

We get the spark plug in with his mere words of encouragement (weird when that happens). He offers to give it a diagnostic test, so we venture into the back woods of my hometown to his garage. Oldy was looking better! This mechanic was the first ever to think I was worthy of insightful information about my car. He lined up a mouthful of analogies to help me better understand my car problems! He said I looked like a bartender at the race track that he calls Dudesky. Taking a picture of me under his garage lights, he explained he would compare our similar features.

I drove away feeling so loved by everyone around me! It's such a wonder when people do random acts of kindness, I can barely get over it!

So the Olds hasn't passed the re-test yet. We'll save it for another weekend. We had internalized enough grease and exhaust fumes for one week.

This will be the last e-test for the Supreme. After that, it's considered a 'Classic Car' and don't doubt I'll be putting good rims on her, installing the best stereo system, and steering her with only the best bling...


Shaking Fist Side Note: I watched the Corporation documentary before the weekend and then got stuck behind a Leon's delivery truck spewing black clouds in my face after my car failed. The situation pissed me off slightly. The government rags on people with twenty year old cars who can't afford to buy a new one and turns a blind eye to corporations and all the damage they're doing to our environment.

What more could they do?

How could Starbucks look more hypocritical?

A few points:
-I know I have a choice in buying their coffee when their enviro message packaging is a load of farfoozle. It's just the only coffee that gives me a kick in the morning.
-I know their non-recyclable coffee cups aren't the only thing clogging up the landfills and filling the landscape of our future doom.

But really, who thought of this marketing tactic? Asking consumers what THEY can do to help save endangered animals?

I think it would be a most excellent move if Starbucks did the following to support this new movie/enviro-conscious campaign:
1. Offered recyclable cups. They're out there! And for the $2 that we pay for their non-free trade coffee, I believe it's workable within their budget. Offer people a 10% discount for bringing in their own traveling mugs.
2. Offer recycling bins inside their shops so that things like plastic bottles of their juice can be recycled. That way the proudly recyclable cardboard sleeves they now cleverly glue to the cups (making it difficult TO recycle) could actually be recycled and not thrown out! Duh.
3. I don't buy them, but stop putting fancy drinks in plastic. Put them in the same recyclable cups that the coffee would come in.
4. Stop trying to pretend like you care about the environment. It's all about pushing the silly movie that's on the front! Oh the cross marketing!!

Kay, end of rant.

You can't judge a book in the dark

When these shelves are
illuminated
there are things to be learned

From the faces of men
50 years gone
that left great impressions
and
carved their way out

I had forgotten
fifteen years old
The pulse under my shirt
was at the pace of a pounding stereo

And now with the renewal
of old ambition
I can handle constructing any dated
Modern Furniture:
an end table
or sturdy shelf

Or collage our faces
onto a black background
cross-eyed laughter chasing the light

it all

I'm awake but feeling old
last week was my
middle age

the room hums with machines
this and that
running to the outside
past the metal shed and onto
city road

chords of electric and telephone
and tunneled cold air for me to
internalize and warm
yet my breath is
loud over it

coarse and trying
to make sense of it all

Album #2

Here's what we're gonna do. We're going to take a few instruments, strap them onto a bunch of lunatics, elastic band them in the middle of a room and turn on the metronome.

The second album will go something like this: 2 days of bed tracks (2 days is all we need when you're strapped together in the middle of the room), one day of piano tracking, one day of horn people (even more looney then lunatics) and one day of string people (they scare me the most...). After that it will be one day of guitar solos, a couple dark nights of recording vocals in a closet or something, and additional keytar and synth magic.

15 potential songs and I think I will try to cut it down to 11 for the record.

Throw a couple carrots, potatoes in there and you got yourself an album.

New blogs seem so permanant

From The Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction: It Must Give Pleasure

By Wallace Stevens

I

To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,

To be crested and wear the mane of a multitude

And so, as part, to exult with its great throat,

To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on

The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart

That is the common, the bravest fundament,

This is a facile exercise. Jerome

Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings,

The golden fingers picking dark-blue air:

For companies of voices moving there,

To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,

To find of light a music issuing

Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode.

But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,

On the image of what we see, to catch from that

Irrational moment its unreasoning,

As when the sun comes rising, when the sea

Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall

Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.

Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.

We reason about them with a later reason.