State of Shock

Again, no time for blog, but I’ll take a moment to rant in a caffeine induced frenzy. My job has bent me over, thrusting rapidly, and unfortunately there is no “safe” word that will bail me out. I’m just gonna have to take it until the job gets off, or becomes raw and sore. Not the most pleasing imagery, but it’s also not the most comforting situation, and I felt the need to use the “everyday man’s poetry” to describe my anguish. I’ve somehow become a pawn in a battle of employers and employees; people are acting extremely vague to lead me like a lemming into “traps” which will either justify or prevent the flowage of money from/to the aforementioned parties. I fear that I will be to blame regardless of the outcome (by the group that fails to benefit) and I have the desire to hide under my desk in fetal position, like it’s an earthquake drill. In true American fashion, instead of making a steadfast decision, I’ve just been pretending that the situation does not exist.

I'm putting up one of my alltime favorite Zappa songs (check the guitar solos: fucking EPIC), and make sure to check the bassline on Forgotten Town. If anyone has a dub or instrumental version of that track, lemme know.
Frank Zappa - Uncle Remus
The Christians - Forgotten Town

Baño Con Carne

The bathroom at work smells like freshly grilled carne-asada again. Public bathrooms should not smell like delicious food: they should smell pine-fresh if at all possible, but unfortunately, they usually smell of excrement, urine, hobo, or that odd humid shower smell (or a combo of all). I should not get hungry upon entering, and then start ducking under the stalls to see if someone left their lunch around (no pun intended). Quickie post, as I got more important things to do on g-chat. Sorry blog.
Nate Dogg - Puppy Love
The System - Sweat
The System - It's Passion

Destroyer of Evil

I don't have much time for a post today, since I have my office holiday party (which they are doing at work, and during lunchtime this year, instead of at a restaurant or club or someplace that normal work places go to. I guess the T.E.T.s [tough economic times] strike again) to attend in a couple minutes. I'm expecting it to be a tad weird, as they will be serving us booze this year, for lunch, and then an hour later, we are expected to return to our desks, and actually do real work. I wouldn't say that I am planning on getting slammed at lunch today, but based on my past experience with open bars and awkward situations, I wouldn't be surprised when I'm on my third drink in twenty minutes (and I'm probably not the only one). Based on an office rumor I overheard, last year's holiday party was alcohol-free, due to the fact that someone threw up and embarassed themselves two years prior. Apparently the guard has changed, and this year, the fun committee or whomever plans these things, decided that it is again fine for us to drink liquor amongst other co-workers, but lets just limit it to lunch time, and then we can schedule legitimate business meetings directly following.

The tracks for today are from 80s Bronx electro producer Hashim, which in Arabic means "destroyer of evil" or "one who attracts women". In later forms of Arabic I can also be translated into the equivalent of the English word "sexy".
Hashim - Chateau Vie Remix (Castle Life)
Hashim - Al-Naafiysh Remix (The Soul)

Productive Waste of Time

It’s the pre-holiday week, and work has reached the grandeur of all-time fucking pointlessness. I’ve shown up on time, and I’m now alone in my cubicle staring at my calendar for today, which only lists one meeting of the Green Committee, now marked as cancelled. I did bust my ass to accomplish a couple things and meet some deadlines (which ended up being irrelevant in the long run) and now I am here trapped in purgatory, waiting desperately for the holiday break to begin. On days like this I seriously have no need to show up. I could just paste my cell phone number on my computer screen, and have two boxes for people to put paperwork, one which says “Done”, and another which says “You need me to actually do something with this, right?” The fact that I’ve trekked an hour in the rain to get to work today, solely to get paid to bitch about that aformentioned process on my blog (while listening to Italo and Eric Burdon jams on my Juster Hi-Fi Speaker System), and then write about taking cold showers, borders on the ridiculous.

So, what’s the deal with taking cold showers in the morning (cue Seinfeld bass line)? Seriously though, this is my topic for the day and I’m gonna take it there and back with some ferocious intensity. I think that something is fucked up with my hand (which is the water temperature tester for the shower) where it is incapable of helping my brain make the right decision not to enter. There have been a shitload of instances lately (and it’s much more apparent since it’s been colder out) where I’ve been entering the shower prematurely, and then have to linger shivering and anticipating the point at which the water will shift from cold to scalding (which can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes +). The worst part of the whole ordeal is that moment when you’ve entered and gotten half of your body or any part of your hair wet. At that point you are not allowed to turn back; you are officially the shower’s bitch, and it’s up to him to decide how much torture you are going to have to deal with before your flesh starts to bake from the radical temperature change. I mean I guess, you could technically, get out of the shower all dripping and stand there like a wet dog awaiting a more accessible atmosphere. Fuck that. That might even be a more miserable situation, and if you grab a towel to dry yourself off before re-entering the water, you are a pussy, plain and simple. One technique, which you can impart while trapped in the shower awaiting resolute temperatures (which doesn’t completely work), is to pee on your legs. Your pee will be lukewarm to warm at best, and may improve your situation around this area for 15 to 30 seconds (If you are a man, I wouldn’t suggest peeing up for the heat benefits, as there is something about taking your own pee in the chest or face area that just comes off as incorrect, even when its rinsed directly by water). Some people would consider that gross, but I think it’s safe to assume that all of you have peed in the shower at some point. If you get out of the shower to pee and then get back in, your priorities are seriously out of wack; it all goes to the same fucking place, and the process that applies to water washing your pee out of the toilet, works here as well. It would only get really gross if you use your shower as both a toilet and a shower regularly (as opposed to using a toilet at all), or if you have a large build up of hair in the drain, which is constantly getting filtered by the butt end of your human waste. Anyways, eventually the water does change temperature, and for about 10-20 seconds, it’s great. Then it passes the point of perfection, and within a split second jumps into the danger zone, where you have to either get out of the water stream (which is also cold) or adjust the temperature knob. My adjustments are usually jerked and unrefined, which accounts for the overcompensation in temperature, and suddenly I’m back where I started, with cold or lukewarm. At this point I am usually pretty fucking fed up, which allots me the mental/physical capacity to really take control of my situation; by concentrating on the exact degree specifications on the temp knob, I can pinpoint the precise spot for epic showering over the next couple minutes. Since we are on the topic of showering, wouldn’t it be nice if they streamlined the shower process across the board, so it’s more intuitive and constant. There have been multiple times where I have been at a hotel or a friend’s house, and spent 5 to 10 minutes just figuring how to get the thing not be at either extreme: piping or frosty. It’s almost an embarrassing experience, where you feel so fucking dumb that you can’t figure out an appliance that has only two knobs tops (and sometimes the bath/shower flip switch thing) which you’ve used almost every day for the entirety of your life.

I’m posting up some Italo business from Electric Mind for today. The B side of the 12”, is really the Dub Version of the A side, even though they name the B side something completely different, which I don’t get. Like, is it cool to be misled for 5 seconds, thinking you got a dub copy of an alternate track, but then you put the record on and it’s totally obvious that it’s the same?
Electric Mind – Pick Me Up (Can We Go)
Electric Mind – ZWEI (Dub Version) aka Pick Me Up (Dub Version)

Huntsville

No sleep. Dark circles. Coffee. Work. Suck. Blues. I’m feeling real country today, because I’m wearing a denim shirt with pearl buttons and listening to Jim Ford. I’m just connecting on that mental plain, which is odd, as I have little country experience, outside of going to summer camp in Maine for 3 months when I was 9 and being involved in the Boy Scouts during my adolescence (not that being in a Boy Scout troop in Studio City is country, but we did go on a lot of trips to country type places, which will no doubt be blogged about at some point). Country is stereotypically floods, farms, animal shit, Wallmart, sheriffs, church, whiskey, beans, sagebrush, snus, wranglers, fires, smells, and a bunch of other shit that I really have no real experience with. Nowadays, country is IPods, online purchases, Nickelback, meth, and mini-malls.

More coffee. More Suck. Based on what I’ve already wrote, I should probably put up some country shit to draw a parallel between the content and the medium. But One Mans Problem is sometimes deliberately a letdown in multiple departments, and my denim shirt is just not enough incentive for me to tie things together. Screw it. I’ll do the obvious, and in doing so I will actually blow everyone’s mind with my self-proclaimed and pointless reverse-reverse logic. I’m having problems keeping my eyes open at the moment, and in re-reading what I have written up to this point, I realize that it’s time to stop writing and close this moment in blog history, so as to avoid falling asleep with my face on the keyboard with the zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz key depressed. So here is the obvious: two dollar bin jams from Christopher Cross. Whether or not this qualifies as country or yacht rock is up to you to decide (fuck it, this is denim shirt music).
Christopher Cross – Ride Like the Wind
Christopher Cross - Sailing

Open Letter To Blog

Dearest Blog,
I am very sorry that lately I have not had sufficient time to contribute to you. My schedule at work has shifted so that I am actually busy, instead of just desperately seeking out ways to kill time while appearing assiduous. The odd thing is that I actually resent my superiors for putting a few large projects on my table with firm deadlines, as if my job is supposed to be comprised solely of me surfing the net and aimlessly wandering the building with a couple papers in hand as if I have "something to do". I understand that you have seen little sunshine and are not eating as regularly as you would prefer. I just wanted to let you know that this is not deliberate, and I still love you.

Faithfully Yours,

Hobo

P.S. I know that I could potentially feed, bathe, and play with you after work, but that would cut into my schedule of booze and skateboarding, and additionally go against the very nature of your conception (i.e. killing time while trapped at work). So hang in there, make sure to eat the stale corn nuts I'll occasionally toss down (and it'd be tactful not to forget to ration those), and please sweep all of your excrement into the corner of your coop.
Tha Dogg Pound - I Don't Like To Dream About Getting Paid
Tha Dogg Pound - One By One

Prog Fusion

There is this older dude at work (who is a jazz fusion bass player in a pretty heavy group in the bay area), that I’ve been trading music with. The guy has a story about the spiritual/cultural relevance of every band/artist he “turns me on to”, which usually starts with “This guy’s a heavy doper, but…” or “He put the rest of his talent into his arm if you know what I mean”. Dude holds the torch to Bitches Brew Era Miles Davis, Tony Williams, and John McLaughlin/Mahavishnu Orchestra; that’s his shit right there, and I’ve probably heard the same four stories about the three aforementioned guys ten times each. All of these stories last between 15 – 20 minutes, and while initially interesting, it’s a long time to spend in a hallway en-route to the copy machine, especially when you know all the details already. I’ve always thought it was somewhat rude to point out to an elder (like dad or grandpa) that I’ve already heard a story multiple times. Even at my relatively young age, my memory is already very fleeting, and I often make the mistake of recounting tales I find interesting or humorous multiple times to the same person, occasionally in the period of a week. I am likely destined to become an old shit with four stories locked and loaded that I can and will recount at any moment. Whether or not they relate to previous conversation will be completely irrelevant, and additionally I’ll likely pepper them up with lies to make my relatively mundane existence, and the events/culture of my generation, seem breathtaking and electric (like how the 60s and 70s seems to those of us born in the 80s). Of course it will be quite obvious that my tales are faulty upon the third or fourth listening, when I’m no longer the awkward guy that took a piss next to Ice T in an alley behind the Roosevelt Hotel (a very significant moment in my life), but now I’m telling children that I played bass on a West Coast tour for Body Count. To ensure a boring and awkward time for everyone in my company, the diarrhea mouth will likely flow, and while everyone else tactfully searches for outs, I’ll probably be fantasizing mid-thought about how enthralled everyone is with my Shakespearian fabrications.

This post goes out the dudes with intense music knowledge about shit that most people could care less about, and the long (although sometimes tangent and arduous) stories that accompany that knowledge.
Stanley Clarke - Concherto For Jazz/Rock Orchestra (Short Version)
Neil Larson - Futurama
Larry Young -The Moontrane

Music Isn't Free

No time for a legitimately frantic post today, I'm getting my balls torched by the demons at work. (Ups to Loose Shus for the last two tracks)
Information Society - Running (Dub)
Aphrodite's Child - Hic and Nunc
Aphrodite's Child - Altamont
Art Of Noise - Moments In Love (45 rpm)
Brian Auger & The Trinity - Pavane

Hiatus

Every single day of my life at work, this one guy says "Good Morning, Ryan" to me in a very pompous and proud manner, as if to suggest that he is the only cool, older, distinguished gentleman that graciously greets the surfs of the workplace (to set himself aside from the others, who could care less about us peons). Unfortunately that is not my name, and I know that I've missed the window to correct him, however I had no idea that he was even talking to me in the first place for a full two weeks. Once someone has made that particular mistake that many times, the fault falls into your lap if you decide to correct them that late in the game. Anyways, right above my desk, my name is displayed in at least a 72 pt. font size, so he is either oblivious or has a vision impairment of some sort. I must look like a furry ball of colors to him, which prompted me to thinking about how odd and psychedelic it must be to live in a world surrounded solely by tinted fuzzy spheres that talk.
Skying High - Getting Off On Your Loving
Musique - In The Bush (Remix)
CAM Stati d'Animo - Indian Feeling
CAM Stati d'Animo - Psycho Feeling
SPEED - Tremplin
Distortions Pop - Microchaos

Low Brow

When you use a shared bathroom with the same people 5 days a week (and a large group of people), you start to understand the high traffic times for restroom usage, and whom to avoid in a restroom tete-a-tete if at all possible. I know not to use the bathroom between 12:30 and 2, as it’ll likely be crowded and/or smelly, with few or no stalls available. All the shit I'm about to talk about relates directly to experiences in the Men's bathroom, as I have very little experience in the Women's arena, except when I'm drunk at a bar, the Men's room is full, and I really have to go. I’m of the disposition to prefer a certain extent of restroom solitude (this does not necessarily mean that I have to be alone), especially in the case of the dreaded Number 2. I don’t want to share that type of anguish/embarrassment with another in the same situation in close proximity, and I don’t find the restroom a good place to bond for any reason imaginable.

There are certain people that I’ve learned to avoid in the restroom, based solely on their interior etiquette. These are all people that I have no problems dealing with outside of the lavatory, but once inside they change drastically into vulgar, insensitive, classless weirdos who have no regard for the fact that others are also relieving themselves. I’ll provide a few situations and examples. A small wiry man, who resembles actor Wallace Shawn from The Princess Bride (the one that was in cohoots with Andre the Giant, see pic), does this thing where he goes to pee (and this guy probably pees about once every 45 minutes so you kind of have to time your pee around his, since he’s always in there), and performs this odd ritual. He always uses the urinal against the wall, and then while peeing, puts his arm up on the little wall that divides the urinals and stares down the line at the other three urinals, which breaks every rule in the fictional urinal etiquette handbook (I think there was a Curb your Enthusiasm episode that got into this territory once). You are not allowed to make eye contact and stare at anyone else’s dick or face while you are peeing. Additionally, you can’t enter another man’s stall/personal space, and the arm over the divider breaks that contract. Plus, if you are looking at me, that means you are not looking at your dick and monitoring where your pee is going. So you could potentially be peeing on the wall, your pants, or your shoes.

Another couple of guys like to have conversations with me and others in the bathroom. I find this to be a very grey territory, and I’ll try to illustrate what is okay and what is not. Two friends or acquaintances enter the bathroom talking, pull up at the urinal (still talking), and they both piss and continue their conversation. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that this is okay, and I don’t really know why. It just feels okay, and why let piss get in the way of your stream of consciousness or flow. Piss is flow; just let it combine with the overall flow of the convo (rhymes!). New example: one guy is pissing, the other friend or acquaintance enters during the guys’ piss and starts talking to him and starts pissing as well, in an adjacent urinal. Whether or not this situation is valid depends on the depth of their friendship. You have to be pretty close with someone to talk to them mid-piss (literally as well; you cannot pull up to a urinal and talk to someone over the head of someone else pissing in between); exemptions being a bizarre event just occurring, an emergency, or maybe you are strangers both drunk at a baseball game (and even that is iffy). What is completely off limits, is talking to someone mid-piss that you know but have not achieved a friendship-type of relation with. Not Fucking Allowed! Even worse, giving out work assignments or even talking about work in a manner where one has to pay attention mid-piss, is un-fucking-warranted. What do you want me to do, write it down with my dick in cursive? This has happened to me multiple times in the bathroom and by the same two offenders that just don’t seem to get that this kinda shit should not go down ever, for any reason. One guy even pulled up to piss, farted, and then instructed me to put something together for him. Because of people like this, I need to be spry and alert when I enter the bathroom, and use all of my faculties (literally, waka waka waka) to be quick and avoid any awkward relation.

I don’t think that people really talk to each other in a public restroom while shitting. I haven’t witnessed it recently, and I don’t even want to get into it. It’s always rude and wrong, but it has the potential to be way funnier in certain contexts (the last one I can remember is two drunk idiots in an airport restroom yelling at each other, with some poor unrelated guy was trapped in the middle of their two stalls). On the contrary, if you have to use a urinal trough, all rules are null and void and guerilla tactics can be applied. You can talk, yell, eat, text someone, talk on the phone, stare at someone’s dick, pee on others, and even take a shit into it if you please. The trough is the one of the lowest of the civilized male human bathroom experiences (other than being the janitor that cleans and maintains it, and at least he/she gets paid), so it can therefore be treated with the most low brow behavior possible: either to enact revenge on the bastards that cheaped out and installed a trough in the first place, or as a haven for all the creeps that already break all the aforementioned public restroom rules.
Omni feat. Conni Draper - Out of my Hands
Kebekelektrik - War Dance (Greg Wilson Edit)

Torture your Co-Workers

I work in a cubicle, and I listen to music at work on speakers, which means that everyone around me has to listen to it as well. They are cheapo computer speakers, which look like they are from the mid 90s (the brand is JUSTer, and they claim to be a HI – FI Speaker System), and they definitely aren’t anything great, but they get the job done considering that I can’t exactly bump. I don’t use headphones at work as they are much too restrictive: I can’t hear people walking down the halls, which is essential to me minimizing incriminating windows hastily. Plus they start to hurt my ears after an hour of pumping up the jams. Lately I’ve been listening to either disco/boogie/italo, stoner metal, or Wu – Tang, which means that all 3 people that work directly in my cubicle, and the 4 others in the adjacent one are listening to the same shit. Every other day, this one girl tells me to turn it down, but I am so nice and polite to her that it’s not really an issue; she asks me to turn it down simply because it annoys the shit out of her at that moment, and she tolerates it the rest of the time, so I really can’t complain.

I’ve been pondering how the music that I listen to in my cubicle, while I write these posts and sometimes do actual work, reflects what people think of me; specifically my sexual orientation, my habits, my lifestyle, how I spend my money etc. If I was Joseph or Gina Normal, and I heard a majority of disco coming from a specific office space, I’d probably assume gay without much hesitation. The Wu – Tang stuff, which is probably not appropriate for work, equals stoner with low ambition, and the stoner metal stuff obviously fits in a similar category. Which poses the question of which is more high brow? Who gets the promotion: the white guy at his desk, dressed in appropriate casual work gear listening to Wu, or a similar fellow listening to Electric Wizard? This may be rhetorical (but probably neither).
Pierre Henry - Psyche Rock
Dusty Springfield - Thats The Kind Of Love I Have For You (Disco 3000 Edit)
Dinosaur - Kiss Me Again (Original Edit)

Also, the pics in the post don't correspond to any of the content, and maybe I could have held off, untill I could relate something to car surfing, but I am very impulsive and have very little patience. I guess car surfing is kind of like ghostriding the whip for white people. Its both dangerous and entertaining, and if you have ever seen a ghostriding accident live (which I have, in the Fillmore on Fulton and Webster, and nobody died or got seriously injured, so it was officially hillarious) you'd know what I'm talking about. I know there are a ton on youtube.

Really Slow Day At Work

Today, I’m gonna post a couple pics that I have no reason to post other than because I wanna write about them. They’ve been sitting in the My Pictures Folder of my work comp for a while now, marinating, and rather than force them into the context of some other idea, they’ll just be the idea, which will also be forced.

I like this photo more than any photo I’ve snatched off the net in recent times. When you are about 8 years old, it’s cool to imagine that you are actually a super hero that fights crime, and run around your house body-slamming your dog, who against his will personifies your imaginary nemesis. I guess this is what happens when you are an only-child, and you obsess and idolize Calvin and Hobbes. But growing up in NYC, you can actually take it to the streets and at least attempt to realize your full potential. What I absolutely love about this photo is the fly-on-the-wall nature of it, which is very true to the Spiderman persona. Additionally it makes more sense for Spiderman to be small in stature; spiders are small creatures, and the resultant hybrid of man and spider would likely be closer in the size range of the kid in the picture, than Tobey Maguire. So technically he is that much more authentic.

With Halloween upon us, I’ve been considering a few costumes and nothing has really hit me like a ton of bricks. This happens every year…I tool around with a few ideas, and I’m usually too cheap to actually put in the money, and too lazy to actually put in the time. I pull something out of my ass at the last minute, and ultimately feel diminished and small by my procrastination. When I go out to Halloween parties, I cower in the company of great, thought-out costumes. Usually a day or two after Halloween I have that great costume epiphany, get mad that I wasn't able to put it together earlier, and swear to remember my idea for the succeeding year. About two months later it's totally forgotten. The following picture is not a great costume. This musician from the future of the 80s (see checkered guitar strap, power glove, color-blocked TV) is at a major loss, as his costume is not fucking believable. In what type of future do you have to plug all your shit in to normal outlets (I guess we still use the same type of outlets that were used in the 50s, but come on). I call bullshit. The future is at least cordless (as is the present; I saw a great blue-toothed couple the other day: he was rocking it in the right ear on her right, and she was rocking the left ear to his left. They had great symmetry!), and there is no way that you are triggering MIDI with that Playstation joystick.

This pic is the back cover of the self titled LP by the group Disco Circus. When I saw this album at the record store a couple months ago I really wanted to buy it based solely on the artwork, which represents one of those great Disney fantasies, where during the day all the animals are totally normal, and then under the cover of night, their true alter-human personas are revealed; in this case they are racy, alcoholic, party “animals”. On the front cover, there is a slutty female elephant wearing a super revealing dress dancing next to “Saturday Night” Cheetah. Unfortunately I was unable to find a working pic of that, since the only working version is tagged/ruined by discomusic.com [fucking cock-blockers], but here is the back cover with a leisure suited Gorilla getting down with a hoochie giraffe wearing “fuck-me” boots and a tube-top. Just look up “Disco Circus” in Google images and you’ll find the other pic; it’s worth doing just so you can view the detail they put into illustrating the elephant’s nipples. I fucked up pretty hard not buying it, as I was too cheap to shell out $7 for the LP (since I didn't really dig any of the tunes). Later I realized my mistake, and went back to claim it for my wall, but it was already gone (sob). I guess the message that can be derived from this tale is that if you are gonna have great artwork for your album, you might as well make the music good too: then it's a sure sale. In doing research about this album I realized that on the Discogs website, you can make a virtual record collection, by finding and adding the records you claim to own to your “collection” (you can also make a want list, which is actually a handy tool, as it seems like a pretty convenient way to remember all of the records you randomly look up, and Discogs is a pretty thorough site). Is having a large virtual record collection cool? Fuck, is having a virtual content site (blog) cool? No. Ahhhhhh, soooooo embarrassing.
Carrere - Discotheque (Disco Special)
Ronnie Laws - All For You
Rainbow Brown - Let's Go Another Round (Tom Moulton Mix)