Vacuuming Ants Really is Ineffective

Once again, I have managed to elude the Super Bowl and its holiest of holies, the Super Bowl commercials. I'd like to say that it's because of my principles, but the real truth is that I just don't care. Yes, the allure of watching men paid to hit each other and the companies that have built a tradition of buying multi-million dollar minutes during the station breaks have failed to entice me. I would be interested to see if the current economic situation has affected the price tags of those commercials, but that's about as far as my curiosity goes.

I've thought about the dilemma of marketing as it relates to my band. I would really like to have as many people as possible listen to us, and becoming financially secure by playing music is something I could live with, but I hate the idea of actively trying to convince people that they need something they could easily live without. What else is marketing, really?

I had a good laugh recently due to bad marketing. This is the banner ad that showed up at the top of a, shall we say, popular social networking site.


They got me wrong on two of three counts; I'm admittedly a few pounds heavier than I was a few years ago, but I'm not gay and am not taking part in the whole dating scene. I'm not too sure I'd be too keen on striking up a relationship with someone over the Internet anyway--gay or straight, skinny or fat.

I should get up early and get to the gym tomorrow. I'm feeling chubby...

Vampires Are the New Black

At the moment, I'm procrastinating on writing a story, a story that I need to submit tomorrow morning. I have the basic premise, a strong start, and some notes from my last session to remind myself where my train of thought was going, but I just can't seem to feel motivated. I figured that if I wrote an entry here, I might get those ol' creative juices flowing. Considering I just spent five minutes staring at a black screen before even getting this down, I have a feeling this will take some effort--or maybe I can trick myself into falling prey to the muse. My first step will be to consciously create a playlist on iTunes; I have just short of sixty-five days worth of music, consisting of just about any genre you can name, and there's nothing worse than listening to a song or two that gets you slipping into that state of suspended reality only to be bashed over the head with a train wreck of a song. Meh, I'll do that as soon as I finish here. I don't need a soundtrack to rant, or at least today I don't.

I hope to be flooded with inspiration this semester. I'm a graduate assistant at the North American Review, and I have a feeling I'll be reading a lot of the fiction submissions as one of my duties. Now, in one of my rare allusions to the title of a post, I was extremely disappointed by a story that I read the other day. For purposes of privacy and professional ethics, I won't go into details, but this particular story started off beautifully; I was engaged completely. There was a dream-like quality that didn't seem over the top at all, in fact, I feel as if it enhanced the subject matter. All this is going great when, BLAM!, vampires. If you've ever read the NAR, then I'm sure you'll find that there's a marked absence of genre fiction. I blame a lack of the author's ability to research and the recent success of Twilight; a movie I haven't seen and never plan to. Man, I still want to read the story that could have been. Maybe I should write it myself. There we go; my muse can be spite.

Well, I guess I'll wrap this up and start compiling the music necessary to connect my fingers directly to my brain. Deadlines await.

A Local Amatuer

The semester is now halfway through its first week, or I am halfway through the first week of the semester if you don't care for passive statements. Due to some of last semester carrying over (my fault) and the massive helping my big eyes convinced me to scoop onto my plate this semester, I fear for my sanity once things get rolling. To help ease the pain as I spiral downward, or climb upward, assuming some may consider insanity to be an improvement on my current condition, I have decided to take a moment and once again offer a list of search terms that led a small handful of eccentric people here.


I really don't know what to say about a couple of the above items, except that my first reaction is that I don't think I ever, ever want to meet these people. After a second thought, I realize that some of them might be normal people being zany, but someone searching for a Klingon chandelier is just a little bit too specific for my tastes. Who knows, I may be wrong.

Well, I suppose I should head into the arctic conditions and get to class. I've got band practice tonight, and we're thinking about recording some of our newer songs for an updated demo. If we get some decent results, a couple of them may be posted somewhere; I'll be sure to put a link up here if and when that happens.

Ting-a-ling!

Two Thirds of a Masterpiece is More Than Enough

I've been back on the farm for six days now, and I can say with certainty that spending a considerable amount of time here is much more enjoyable when one can go outside and sit on the porch with a cup of coffee without the threat of frostbite looming. One positive side-effect is that I've covered at least two thirds of the required reading for one my classes next semester. With two weeks left before the first day of class, I think I can safely say that I'll finish with that and be able to get a head-start on a couple other classes.

I suppose I should change the strings on my bass as well; we had our first show--holy crap!--a little over two weeks ago already. I guess time flies. Anyway, despite my halfhearted attempts at maintenance, the strings are rusting, so they have to go. The gig went very well, perhaps better than we expected, and the turnout was also surprising, considering the forecast blizzard that began in the midst of our first set. It was a learning experience, and now I think we'll really be ready to blast the roof off a place. For anyone reading this that made it, thanks for braving the weather and checking us out. For those that didn't make it, no worries; there will be other opportunities. Oh, I also got a message from Ryan, our guitarist/vocalist, that he started up a new website. Check it out and see what you think. It appears he added "Some Rare Footage" at the bottom of the main page. My bandwidth is only slightly better than dialup out here, but I waited it out and discovered that he posted a clip from one of our practice sessions; a song that pretty much came to life as you hear it there. It seems that we need to go back through some of our recordings and dig out some of those gems for polishing.

I had some things to write here other than just what boils down to a glorified Dear Diary entry. Sitting here in my old stomping grounds, a place I admittedly love to hate, there has been a constant barrage of occurrences that drag me into bouts of sappy sentimentality one minute, and then throw me into fits of rage at my perception of the general stupidity of people. I say "my perception" because there is a sliver of reason as I type this, as well as the realization that throwing everyone into the same category is at the very most untrue, and at the very least unfair. It also makes me look like an elitist snob. This snapshot came from a dynamic banner ad the other day, and I think it hints at how I've been feeling lately: as if I'm being looked down upon in a manner that reveals just how ignorant that person is.



If I have to explain the irony of this ad, then it's time for you to brush up on you're grammar.

I think I'm going to blame it on what I've been reading lately--pure Vonnegut. Between his fiction and non-fiction, there's this air of sadness even in the cheeriest of subjects. For instance, Vonnegut writes often about the need for inclusion in large groups, whether that means family or people that you treat as family--and most people know that family doesn't always treat each other very well. As soon as he makes his point about inclusion, Vonnegut's next essay discusses the suicides of his mother and sister, his father's circumstantial fade into obscurity, his son's mental breakdown and institutionalization, and how much of his own life that has been spent in isolation due to his career. Like I was saying earlier, there's a pendulum swinging to extremes and I find myself yearning to be around people only to find myself turning on my heel and beating the door down as soon as it shuts behind me. Kurt Vonnegut (Jr.) is interesting as hell, but I think this immersion in his writing is definitely affecting me.

Or is that effecting? I'm kidding...

I am beautiful in the water.

So I was just thinking back on something that happened a while ago and thought I might share the story.

My friends, Pete & Jo, have a son named Sam. They've turned him into a Dr. Who fan at an early age, and it's fun watching him geek out. I mean, how surreal is it to watch a five-year old--the age he was at the time of this story--run around and spout off details about Daleks, sonic screwdrivers, and the TARDIS? Let me tell you, it ranks right up there; almost as high as watching him freak out in his crib wearing the pair of huge green Hulk hands I bought him before he could even walk. He didn't have arms anymore, only shoulders that sprouted foam fists which growled and made smashing noises, but that's really another story altogether.

Anyway, I stopped by one day for some reason or another, and Pete took me upstairs to show me the TARDIS console that he and Sam built out of cardboard boxes, duct tape (of course), and random sciency-looking gadgets from around the house. There's a large amount of custom fabrication in this particular household, and Sam is (was) a five-year old after all, so having something built from spare parts doesn't seem all that out of the ordinary. I think what did it for me was watching him pull levers like mad, screaming about time travel and saving Earth from Daleks, and otherwise displaying an eerie comprehension of themes gleaned from storylines that should be way too complex for someone who had only recently begun spelling his own name legibly.

As I ooo'ed and aahh'ed over his creation, I did what most adults would do to someone Sam's age; I talked down to him. Well, not really down to him--it was more like polite condescension. All I said, with the pure intention of making him feel good about his TARDIS console, was, "Man, Sam, I sure wish I had one of these."

Sam paused to regard me with a strange look on his face. "Whatever," he said.

After a split-second, Pete and I started laughing and turned to head back down the stairs. Pete proclaimed in a tone that rang with both fatherly pride and pity (for me) that I just got dissed by a five-year old.

"Yeah, and I didn't even have a comeback," I said between chuckles. That was the last time I talked down to Sam, come to think of it, but he still punishes me for it by pummeling me with plastic light-sabers.