Hey. If you're browsing this site the way you should be, via the main design, then you'll see I've made some changes to the site. First of all, it looks very slick, thanks to a Tumblr theme that I modified for my own purposes. Remember, please turn off Adblock, there are no advertisements on this site, but Adblock will block the album art and mess up the new design, just like how it messed up the last one.
Also, I will no longer be accepting submissions or publishing my email address on this site. Over a year of receiving submissions via email has shown me that almost nobody I like actually emails me content I truly enjoy. If I like your label or your bands, I'll contact you in order to be on your mailing list. I'm sorry, if you're a musician and you read this and you feel burned, but your music probably sucks. I don't want to hear it.
If you're a fan of a band you think I'll like, contact me via Twitter as usual.
This will be returning primarily to what it was before I got picked up by hype machine and started being flooded with emails: a site for me to talk about music I really, really like. Otherwise it's just not worth the effort. I don't make any money doing this, so I might as well make sure I enjoy it.
Being very rational and analytical has its downsides. People like me---and I mean people who often use perspective to try to understand the way other people can feel, and use projection to try to understand the motivation behind the actions of others, and who also try to turn to science and reason when determining how they feel about things---miss out on certain small joys other, less aware, people might get to enjoy.
For instance, the lottery. I can play a scratcher now and then because it's kind of like a video game (though one in which you're going to lose most of the time), but I'll never buy one every day just hoping I'll get lucky and when big.
Lottery tickets, I take no part in. I'm just too aware of the astronomical odds involved in winning. Sure, it'd be nice to believe that if I spend a dollar every day on a lottery ticket, I might eventually be a lucky winner. But that's a costly bet, and at the end of it there would be a lot of regret. I'd keep track of all those dollars and then beat myself up at the end of my life when it finally occurred to me, on my death bed, that I spent a kajillion dollars for nothing. "I could have bought a nicer car stereo when I was 30, if only..."
So I don't get to enjoy being blissfully ignorant of the fact that I will never Get Rich Quick. I also don't believe I'll ever be a rockstar or an astronaut or a fireman or The Situation, so I differ from the majority of people (in the US) right there I guess.
One of the warehouse guys told me about this thing "his people" do (Mexicans, and hey, he said "his people" and he's actually a legal immigrant from Mexico so he'd know). They get ten people together and each person pitches in $100. They cut up 10 pieces of paper with a number 1 thru 10 on it, mix them up, and everyone picks one. They then take this $1000 and give it to whoever got the first number. For the next 9 months, every one of them pitches in $100 and then the next person gets $1000. This is supposed to be some way to get a cash bonus for everyone.
He asked me if I wanted to be in on this and I immediately thought: man, seriously, if I got anywhere past #3 I'd be pissed off. If I got #10 then I'd just bow out and put $100 under my mattress every month and then pull it out after ten months and have $1000 and I wouldn't be forced to give my money to other people. And what if someone pussies out or loses their job after they get their little $1000 bonus? Do we all just take the hit and only get $900 after that? Jesus, I'd rather just give myself $100 every month, and fuck everyone else. Besides, don't these people know that they could actually be earning interest, even if just a tiny little bit, if they got a savings account?
So that's no fun for me either.
But it's not just retarded shit like that, where you feel like you're gaming the system or you're more special or luckier than other people, it can also be good feelings that we miss out on.
Like believing that our pets love us.
I want to believe, I so want to believe, that this dog that I've known for the last 15 years of my life or so actually feels love (or comradery) for me. She looks at me with her big sad eyes and I feel a companionship there: we two are the results of the same fucked up parents, and our eyes are perma-sad exactly the same way.
But maybe that's just how her face looks.
So much of a dog's enthusiasm is expended in the desire and hunt for food. "Food? Food? Food?" is what your dog is saying to you when it leaps all over you when you come home. "Is it food time now? IS IT!?" It's not going, "Oh god, I missed you!" Unless it's saying, "Oh god, I missed you, oh bearer of food and other food like substances which are yummy! Are you back because it is FOOD TIME?"
Of course, it's just that we like to think our animals are like us. When a dog protects us or our child, we don't like to think that it only protected us because we give it food more often than someone else does, or because our child is simply seen as part of the food providing pack the animal is indentured to.
Sometimes I look at my dog and I feel so confused. She can't actually understand anything about me. She's watched me age from 10 to 25, but does she recognize me as the same person? (Factually, it is likely she does simply by my scent, since dog's noses are so acute.) Even if she does, does she care? If I vanished one day, would she notice I was gone? I was gone for a couple years once... I wonder if she remembers.
On the other hand there's no way to know for sure that my dog doesn't love me separate from the love of food. I don't speak dog just the same as she doesn't speak human. If dogs communicate telepathically to each other via some unknown medium we've never discovered, perhaps they talk about us all the time. I swear there was a point in my teens where the dogs would start excitedly parking a solid three minute before my parents would come home---at which point they would still be driving up the street about half a mile away. What does that mean? Are their senses of smell just that good or are dogs psychic... and if they are...
How scary! I wonder what else they know...
What makes other people who don't seem to think of these things---or at least if they do, they disregard them whole-heartedly---different? Why can't I turn off the analytical part of my brain and just play the lottery and gleam enjoyment from it? Why can't I see the worth in getting $1000 now only to pay up $1000 later? Why can other people say things like, "I KNOW my dog loves me! I KNOWS it!" with so much conviction?
Cat Steven's Mona Bone Jakon was the first album I ever stole, I think. There was a used copy of it sitting on the shelf with the CD still in it, so I popped the CD out and slipped it into my back pocket. This was at a Blockbuster Music that used to exist over on Whittier Blvd; it's a Goodwill now. The woman I would later lose my virginity to was a manager there at the time.
I was listening to Cat Stevens before I even discovered The Beatles. I don't know how I had room for him in my musical pallet at the time since everything else I was listening to was industrial/psuedo-industrial. I would go from Nine Inch Nails, to Skinny Puppy, to some sort of EDM (Covenant, Project Pitchfork?), and then right into Cat Stevens.
I met a girl from OKCupid once who insisted that Phil Collins was a golden god and that Cat Steven's had a voice equivalent to nails on a chalkboard. I called her crazy. She had this funny habit of referring to the number of floors and bedrooms in the house of whoever she was talking about.
"My friend Steve," she'd say, "his house has 2 floors, 5 bedrooms, but he said that the movie was..."
"That guy Gary I was talking about, his parents house has 3 floors and 8 bedrooms and I'm like, omigawd, my house only has 2 floors you know?"
I drove her to a smoke shop (a Farmacy, which look pretty nice from the outside) in Santa Monica and she bought a bunch of ridiculously overpriced herb. I never hung out with her again. She kept talking about how she'd never been with a girl but was in love with this one girl but she had a boyfriend but she'd do the boyfriend too so who knows omigawd I am so scared you know but she's sooo hot. It's amazing how even a year or two out of high school, some people don't lose their high school mentality.
I should really start trolling OKCupid again just so that I have random fucked up girls to write about on the internet. I'll just try to meet people who I match exceptionally low with. "A 300lbs black girl who matches with me only 25% and has a bitchin' weave? Of course I'll meet you!" ... and then I'm never heard from again.
I didn't encounter April Fools yesterday until I got to a house full of kids under the age of 18. Prior to that moment, if it weren't for the internet, I wouldn't have realized it was the 1st at all.
"Brad, do you remember that thing we did last April Fools? That awesome prank we pulled?"
"No, I don't know, I don't think so, was I around?"
"Really man, you don't remember that ridiculous prank we did, man? It was fucking awesome!"