found!

Cool neato. Someone I wanted to talk to found ME on myspace.

Song I was most stoked to play today on the show

dethklok

the fact that something like this "band" exists gives me joy beyond bounds.

Thank god for thrash metal drummers.

rough

More musician friends in the hospital with ugly prognoses. :(

Shutcher bonehole

Sharon Stone's comment about China's earthquake being karma for how it treats Tibet is at least as brainless as Pat Robertson prattling on about Hurricane Katrina being comeuppance from god.

Way to go.

and thanks

Ian, Paul, Johnny, Rod, Sam, Jeff, John, Jimmy, Kat, Jerry, Uncle Steve, Uncle John, Uncle Bill, Aunt Bill, Fred, Granpa John, Granpa Bernard, Cousins Nick, Denny and Johnny.

memorial day

I remember you, Lance Corporal Steven Stacey.

the fixx

over the years i've taken a lot of crap for being a fan of The Fixx. I just love their stuff, ok? Always have. Cy Curnin has an unusual and interesting voice, the music was angles and lines, with the vocal rhythms wandering away from the instrumental ones. So I had to go change my pants when i found this page-

Fixx Sound File Archive

-while trying, again, to find the right chords for "Two Different Views". I have a wonderful acoustic version of that song but I haven't been able to nail it yet.

There's a ton of oddball Fixx recordings there. So, if you like them too, go check it out.

PS will somebody PLEASE tell me what key that damn song is in before I go crazy? It has an F in it of some kind... that's all i have been able to figure out.

lolspeak outside of lolcats

Toki and Skwisgar speak lol.

New Metalocalypse tonight!!

annoying

so bored this weekend. I was supposed to go to the McCloud Arts Festival and did not. If I filled my tank to go yesterday, the money wouldn't be there to fill it when I have to work down there on Wednesday. I have to get out to visit on the coast, next weekend or the weekend after. A friend needs me there.

So I occupy myself by looking over this stack of shit I wrote back when I wrote constantly, in the 90s. The stuff didn't make it into my Shit from Brains book for whatever reason, so I'm reworking a lot of it into songs. Reading a lot of it is hard. I managed to literally and figuratively cram a lot of that period in to a box and keep it there. It's masochistic of me to be reading it again. I got through it by writing about it and maybe it is time to revisit it and close a lot of it up.

At least there is the jam at Topper's today. Unless it rains. ugh. So bored. heh.

I figured out Dancing Barefoot last night. I'd heard it done on a country station (which kind of blew my mind, actually) on Friday so I kept it in my head til yesterday afternoon and worked it out. Easy-peasy.

But the boredom, it begets restlessness, which begets me doing really stupid things to entertain myself, so I have to keep my thumb on that because it's now been two years since I've had any dealings with police and I am determined to keep it that way. This is not the time to buy a bottle of booze.

I miss my friends. I miss some people from a long time ago (they are dead. No contacting them on MySpace).

Hafta give the pewhead his shot.

o and about py

turns out we do indeed have a diabetic cat. For the last week, I've been giving him an insulin shot every morning. It's not as hard as I thought it would be. And he's back to his normal shithead self.

Except he has poodle paws in front from where they shaved his legs (rofl).

With any luck he will be one of those cats that, at some point, has spontaneous remission from diabetes. That would be great.

so desperately want to play this with a band

Ok. I don't know why. The song just kills me.

when you were mine

the screaming girlies... hehe no.. love this song, though

i don't think i've ever seen such horrible lipsynching though. Is it possible to be that horrible unintentionally? Or is it the synching on the video that's bad?

ok well that's pretty funny

It appears that the local paper let its domain lapse.

blown away

well damn it is windy today. There's a dirt storm south of town. It was starting around Worden about 4 pm, but now, from the hills, you can see it's all in Butte Valley, too.

They're weird. At first glance, they look like smoke. That dark gray color. But as you watch them, you notice they don't billow like a plume of smoke. The dirt rises up into the air and disperses in whichever direction the wind is blowing. Eventually, what you have is just a brown haze that sucks to drive through or otherwise be in the middle of.

I kind of hope the wind dies down a bit overnight and maybe we get a little rain again to keep it on the ground. I have to work in Tulelake and don't really want to be there in the middle of one of these.

almost free fill up

apparently the smart half stopped for gas this morning and asked for $20 worth. About a quarter tank in the Fo. The attendant got it started and walked away, forgetting to set the amount. When she came back, the total was up to $54. The station ended up eating the extra $35.

Well, it was the tweeker attendant. She's always just wired for sound at work. Maybe they'll finally give her the walkin papers.

desperate need

i really have to figure out how to wangle a drum set for myself. I'd like to be able to practice, to play more than an hour once a week.

i may have listened to this 100 times since yesterday morning

found another one

I found one of my old great friends the other day. I didn't go to school with him, he was about five years younger than me, but we hung out a lot and I always like hanging out with him. The last time I saw him was in winter of 1995, and I was visiting CA for a week from AZ. He had just gotten his car, a '71 Buick Skylark. I had just gotten my Toyota truck. We hung out at someone's house, smoked a little weed, and watched part of a Beavis and Butthead marathon, laughing and giggling. Then I had to go back to where I was staying, we gave each other hugs and that was the last we saw of each other until now. He's a Navy guy (go navy!), is married and has five kids. Which kind of blew my mind, but he always did say he wanted a bunch of kids. And his kids are cute as heck, too. Waiting to hear back from him, because he knows a couple of other people's addresses that I have not been able to find.

fantastic conversation

yesterday the guy who gave me Puddin called me up to see if I needed an amp, but I already have one I really enjoy. But we had a much longer conversation, about roots music and the two trunks that formed modern American music, and my show, and musicology, and delta blues and RL Burnside and T-Bone Ford (both the subject of the documentary "You See Me Laughin", which is chock full of great music and blues history).

He said he had caught part of my show yesterday morning and liked it. He wasn't much into the music itself, but enjoyed that I play a wide range of stuff and good selection of oddball music.

And then he gave me a humongous compliment: "Your show kind of reminds me of Dr Demento".

I'm not out to copy the good doctor, but I do hope some of the music I play makes people laugh. We all need to laugh, especially when the world looks like its coming apart at the seams.

stuck

someone had to go and mention Blind Willie McTell's "Statesboro Blues" on the phone with me and now it's squirming around in my head.

Very catchy little ditty. Dammit.

of note. or maybe not

I am so angry at someone. And I'm so angry about the fact that I can't be angry at them to them. It's just never ending bullshit with this person and I can't escape it because I am entangled with them through the Smart Half's job. If someone found her in a ditch somewhere, it would be a shame, and it wouldn't be me that put her there, but it would sure make life easier.

More Noise Please

I dug up some Steven "Jesse" Bernstein to play on the show today. Been a long time since I listened to "Prison". I've missed it.

His work can be annoying with his grating, nasal voice. To listen to it for long periods of time can send you to the worst places. That's the job, though, of good poetry. Put you where it is. His stuff is the experience of the worst places, the worst people, the worst feelings, with little tiny sparkles of beauty.

I still love it.

scorcher

well, duh. If it's hot in other more western parts of the state, it's FUCKIN HOT here. Just a peek at summertime. Got rain coming later in the week, so at least I don't have to water the yard yet. Gods forbid I let even a speck of grass go brown here or the jackass neighbors are on the phone with code enforcement or bitching at me when I go outside.

stay safe, little bro

This season is the first season that my friend will be a squad boss on a wildland firefighting crew. Today I guess he went to go pick up all his gear. Can't help thinking that giving him a chainsaw is a bad idea, but whatever.

Rude, it's been too long since we've hung out! You better be here September 13! Unscorched!

hokiest star trek ever

is on.. "The Way to Eden".

But I swear some of the female vocal singing is Mimi Farina. Can't find anything, though. And the male singing is familiar, too. Grrrr.

(few minutes later) If it is Mimi, it's probably Richard Farina singing with her, although it doesn't quite sound like him on the recordings of them that I have.

sometimes i dig it here a lot

like, when I'm heading down Washburn to Joe Wright Rd and see five cows (er... five head of cattle) strolling down the sidewalk.

report to home

Thrilled to say that I am ranked 4th in my class with a current grade of 102.8%

Yeah that's never happened before.

My advisor is great and showed me how to set up the rest of my two years to make it easy on myself. Put math with the art classes, put the writing classes with geology or history. Do all the math needed in the first three semesters- i'll be done with my math by spring of '09. The design classes will be adding CGI next year, right when I start taking them. My writing score on my placement drops me right into WRI121. I don't have to mess with WRI95 at all. She said if we stay in KF, the best school for me to get my bachelor's in is SOU. Nearby and all, although i will probably not go in the winter time just because the roads down there suck in the winter.

Ok so off to bask in the shadow of Mt Shasta for the day again.

some peoples is just like that

Keep running into the odd one here and there whose main (and possibly only) joy in life comes from tearing other people down and dehumanizing the people they don't like (which appears to be anyone who breathes).

How easy it is to be miserable, angry, bitter and negative.

They're at least semi-amusing sometimes, once you start pressing their buttons. Then you can just laugh for hours.

The World Don't Owe Me Nothin

Honeyboy Edwards is going to be 93 next month. And he's still touring.

Would have been awesome to have gotten him for the festival.

Py comes home tomorrow!

Very cool. I'll have my fuzzy guy back.

awesomeness post #15

The Savage Lobster out of Coos Bay wrote the words and music for a CCFPA (Coos County Foster Parents Association) PSA that was performed by Bobby Lindstrom (also of Coos Bay) and is thinking of taking in foster kids.

Awesome.

awesomeness post #15

I am still looking for music by regular folks to play on my radio show.

Awesome.

(So far, I have played these people-)
Rosemary's Billygoat (one of my friends in high school)
Blarney Bros (Great Irish drinking music out of Coos Bay)
Rollins Jenni (Rudy in Ontario)
Strong Medicine (my old drummers most recent project, out of Junction City)
Manifest List (my old band)
List of Forbidden Books (local KF band)

That's awesome too.

Trying to get PersePhone3 to send me some stuff. She's out of Long Beach CA and I have missed her very much since 1992.

Beeb says a CD is coming.

Silverhawk (originally of Coos Bay, now in Olympia) is on deck whenever I find their CD among the ones in the garage.

All of that is awesome.

awesomeness post #14

My advisor is going to advise me on my academic plan today in an hour. Gotta go.

Awesome.

awesomeness post #13

I know the difference between capitol and capital.

Awesome.

awesomeness post #12

My cousin's gallery just celebrated 5 years of being open.

Awesome.

awesomeness post #11

One of my cousins just graduated from Northwestern University in Illinois, and SHE also has a radio show.

Awesome.

awesomeness post #10

I just got the final bit of that giant splinter out.

Awesome.

awesomeness post #9

Bebe is out of the hospital after having a stroke last week and they are treating him for having too many white blood cells. He's doing well and will be performing at the Rhody Fest in Florence.

Awesome.

awesomeness post #8

I filled a 2 x 2 x 2 box with things I own that I know Tam loves and will send it to her for her birthday in a couple of days.

Awesome.

awesomeness post #7

I am not as self-confident as I appear. Just good at fakin it.

Awesome.

awesomeness post #6

I leaned on our back porch the other day and a splinter the size of Baltimore lodged itself into my hand.

Spectacular. Awesome.

awesomeness post #5

We have tulips growing all around our house. Pink, orange, red, yellow, purple and some variegated ones.

Awesome.

awesomeness post #4

I am back in college to do something after 20 years away from school. (doesn't count the music theory class that I failed or the semester of bass lessons)

Awesome.

awesomeness post #3

I have spent the last year helping to plan a blues festival featuring Back Door Slam, Tommy Castro, and Doc Mongo and Harry Harpoon.

Awesome.

awesomeness post #2

I have a bunch of guitars. None of them cost more than $100. They are all wonderful.

Awesome

and don't forget it

Just because I'm awesomeness personified, I'm going to spend a few posts spreading my glow.

My friend Tam is going to have another baby. Her other baby is 15 now. Tam is getting married in June.

Awesome.

awesomeness personified

yeah that's me. Learn it. Know it. Call me up and we can laugh about it.

Py update

We walked up to the vet so Smart Half could get the skinny on the little guy in a more coherent way than I had been able to convey it. His condition had not improved too much except that his dehydration is improving. The vet brought him into the room so we could see him and he was happy to see us, was doing his rumbly low purr that he does, bumping his head on us (i think I left with a quarter inch of fur covering my sweatshirt). The vet was happy to see him perk up, and said he hadn't moved that much while he had been there. So we cuddled him and pet him and let him leave fur all over us and she explained his situation and the possible treatment options. Then I went to my class and came home and brought a dirty t-shirt (not filthy. just a worn one!) over, just something that smelled like me, for them to put in the boarding cage with him. Vet said that he had actually eaten a wee bit of food when they put him back in his cubby, and then they gave him a little kitty dose of valium and he ate a couple more bites and sipped some water and then crashed out. So that was great to hear. And she said that after he ate, they checked his sugars again and they only spiked a little bit, by about 20 points, so that was encouraging. She will call me again in the morning and update again, and I will probably stop into the office again and see him since it seemed to do some good today. They are giving him IV fluids and electrolytes in as well as antibiotics for his UTI and at least THAT is responding.

Py is my cat, always has been. You know how they are. Or maybe I'm his person. I don't know. He responds best to me and only grudgingly pays attention to Dale, which is why I thought the shirt that smelled like me might be comforting for him to have in his cubby.

I decided, and I think Dale too, that when these four guys are gone we're going to take a pet break for a few months, and the go to Jody (Strayer of the Cat Eyes blog) in Albany for another kitty or maybe two.

Bill Clinton at KCC tomorrow

aaargh. Well, at least he'll be there AFTER my class. I wonder what kind of mob i'll be facing when I arrive in the morning though. Better leave the weed at home. (lol j/k. or am i).

Clinton at KCC

Pril won't eat it, and she'll eat just about anything

One of the guys around here that I have jammed with told me about a project he's trying to put together. He really kind of danced around with it and when he finally got to his point i understood why he danced around with it.

He wants to start a band that plays top 40 country (right about now i ran off to the parking lot and barfed. No joke). He wants me to be in the band on the bass (already barfed once. Nothing left to barf). Everyone he talked to said, and he quoted "There's no fucking way you are ever going to get Pril to play that". Sho 'nuff. I considered it for a few minutes. He said "I want a bass player that isn't older than dirt and has their teeth still". Yah, ok.. I'm that. I mulled some more.

"Ok, my friend. I'm thinkin about it. But! BUT!! You gotta be willing to sneak in some altish-country-ish stuff that I like" because here's the deal- I'm willing to play music I hate, i mean I already do it and I have been doing it since I started playing the bass, but when the person who asks me to play with them totally discounts my opinion and my own musical history, and then expects me to cheerily play crap that makes my eyes bleed, they can cram it as far as I'm concerned. They can find another bass player.

The main reason I'm actually contemplating this is that this guy is a great singer, good musician, and writes pretty good songs. He's very talented in that regard, I have always enjoyed jamming with him. I really only know him sort of superficially. I have been told he can be an asshole, but it seems like its the kind of asshole I can deal with. The fact that he agreed to sneak in some altish-country-ish stuff if I decided to join his project is encouraging.

And once we got going with it I could really finally dump the job. Which I don't actually hate, just find unchallenging and tedious. I did try to quit it a couple of weeks ago but they talked me in to staying on.

Plus, if I could find a rodeo queen outfit, i'd have a place to wear it, and that's a big plus. Totally.

pie charts

with some trepidation i registered for my summer math class today. On my placement test it was suggested I take math 10 or math 20. Ok. So i looked at both of them. math 10 i already got in my head, the whole number math. I don't have issues with that stuff. math 20 it is. I did better on decimals than fractions. Always had a hard time visualizing numbers as pieces of something, and recall very clearly having to make a pie graph to do every stinking fraction problem I ever came across. You know, you draw a circle, and draw a line to symbolize 1/2. Then other lines to cut it down further. Then, adding fractions, two stupid pies and I just was never able to quite get this stuff into my head. I can find the lowest common denominators and work out things like 4/5 + 7/16, it takes a while but I can do it, but yeah.. sigh... math.

Anyway, I'm gonna get a freakin A in my math class. I already decided that. Math over the summer- my own worst nightmare come true.

py and the vet. again.

Had to run Py up to our wonderful vet (no, really, she is a wonderful vet. I'm happy her office is two blocks away) because he was acting strangely on Saturday. Walking loopy, whizzing where he should not, not very social, not eating much, just generally looking ill. I noticed the odd behavior on Friday evening and got him in as soon as I could, and it was *sudden* strangeness. Not something that came over the course of a couple of days. Just one day normal, the next day not normal at all.

Py is 11. He has been at the vet since Saturday morning. They had not been able to ferret out exactly what is wrong with him. I just talked to the vet and they were finally able to get a urine sample from him, which showed evidence of a UTI, so they are treating that. But he also showed, when she called me back Saturday afternoon, that his blood sugar levels were sky high (350. Cats have a similar levels to humans, with average being around 150), his potassium was low, and a couple of other things that now I can't remember. Blood cells doing things they should not, things like that.

She thinks he may be diabetic. :( Which brings me and the Smart Half to the question of when do we stop treatment? And when we do, should we let him go naturally, which could be so awful, or have him euthanized before it gets to that point?

So we will be going up there today to see him and talk to the vet and look at options and all that stuff. I would hate to lose him, and we have never hesitated to care for our little four-legged guys, but this could easily and quickly balloon beyond what we can afford. And I would have to wonder about the quality of life for a cat already old and then having to give him insulin daily, which affects some other things apparently. Not that I wouldn't do it, of course, but I wouldn't want him to not feel good or be in pain. I want our guys to be happy and comfy and live to a ripe old age, of course.

We also have two other old cats (one 14 and one 15) and one who is just not very bright and caring for them is also something we have to consider when we're paying for Py's problem.

What to do.
What to do.

I guess I'll start by reading about caring for a diabetic cat and then go on from there.

I'm so sad, though. It's been a rough year for our guys so far.

gathering them up

Spent about an hour last night having a semi-drunken conversation with the publisher of a local newspaper. Not our big one, but the one all the snooty people call a rag. Well, you know.. as it goes... he's runnin a newspaper (with a distribution of about 30,000) and what the hell are you doing?

He was drunk, me not so much. Anyway, I think I will be having him come on the show, if he remembers what the scrunched up paper in his pocket is all about.

anyway it was nice to run into another person- and I run into these people a lot in KF, actually- who agrees its best to get outside your echo chamber once in a while and observe that people who don't necessarily agree with you aren't the enemy. That the true enemy is the people who tell us it's US vs THEM in our country. US being whatever label you stick on yourself and THEM being the ones who don't share the label.

I don't have an echo chamber anymore. Having a small attention span, the yammering and hollering and airs or superiority got old real fast. I actually enjoy talking to people who don't agree with me 100% on everything.

surrounded!

over the past couple of years i've gotten to find and correspond with a handful of people i knew in high school and immediately after it. Out of probably 15 women who I had as friends, I've talked to about 8. And six of them are lesbians. The friends I most enjoyed hanging out with.

I just thought that was interesting, and their stories of their coming out were fascinating. And I'm glad I was friends with them.

How Puddin is doing or "Ever Fallen In Love"

Wednesday I was playing Puddin with some friends and we were all laughing about pistachio pudding.

Yesterday at the store, I ran into one of those friends at the store. She was buying a mat to sleep on for camping. She got in line next to me and we were giggling about something, when the woman in front of us triumphantly held up a box of pistachio pudding for the cashier, saying "I almost gave up looking for this when I found it" (a funny enough turn of phrase in itself), and my friend and I about died right there in line laughing.

I go five years without seeing, tasting, mentioning or hearing about pistachio pudding, then suddenly get a guitar that looks and plays like the stuff, and then come across someone who was desperately searching for it.

But this guitar, I tell you, it's like being in love. I leave places early so I can "go home and play my guitar". I take it out of its case, look at it, inspect it for the millionth time, play a song on it and put it away, only to do it all over again a couple of hours later. I pine for it when I'm away from it. I would send it stalker-like text messages if I could. Love letters. Dirty messages on its voice mail. I played it at the jam last night and someone said "You and that guitar were made for each other". I can't keep my hands off it if it's out of its case and within sight. I get PISSED OFF if I want to get home and play it and something gets in my way. I daydream about it in my classes and at work.

well i never

I can't believe it.

I broke the Ibanez!

Oh nothin serious. Went to tune it last night, I haven't played it in a couple of days, and lo and behold if the E string tuner wasn't just spinning in its enclosure.

So yeah at some point today I will have to remind myself to deal with that. They're sealed tuners. That probably means I will have to buy another one. Worse yet, a whole new set for just one.

Well. Not bad for a bass made in the 90s that takes as much abuse as this one does.

caught up in all the excitement

a newspaper makes a boo-boo

I read the original article yesterday, which they've taken down, unfortunately, but may still be out there by way of google or something.

The comments are killin me.

It's almost like a big, late April Fool's Day joke.