her daze and her nights

i've been reading a pretty good book this weekend called miss misery. it's not the greatest book i've ever read, but it's got a great soundtrack (can books have soundtracks?) and it takes place in new york city and namedrops a ton of places i frequently find myself. and as far as lines go, it's got a few real winners sprinkled about, which is where i got the title for this post. it's about blogging, kinda. but also it's about music and new york and being young and an idiot. basically it's really emo and i am eating it up.

it's come to my attention that the songs available for download on myspace are working kinda funny sometimes (downloading without file extensions?! wtf). this can be solved by just editing the filename or whatever and adding ".mp3" to the end of it.

i had an absolutely lovely weekend. but i'm very sleepy now because of it.

ow my ear.

i can pinpoint the exact time and place that i realized i'm not a good dancer. it wasn't the first time i'd thought it might be true, but it was the first time i really believed it. may 26, 2000. it was raining that night, a little. and colder than i'd hoped it would be. it's funny, but i think once i really accepted it, that's when it became finally, irreversibly true. every time i try to dance i can't help but to think back to that moment. and it fucks up my groove, man.

###

i wrote something today. something pretty good. but it's really personal. maybe if i can change some things around but keep it pretty good it'll become a song you can hear sometime. i'm not trying to be a dick or anything. i just figured i'd mention it since i was complaining about writer's block yesterday. maybe it's getting better.

###

when i was 18 i got my ear pierced. this was, like everything else it seems, made into a much bigger deal than it really was. or maybe it was really a big deal. i could go either way on that one. the guy who did it was really scary looking but really nice. i didn't bleed much at all. my girlfriend basically hemmoraged. but i remember telling my brother via instant message and saying something like "don't tell mom and dad" and him saying "they're right here and dad is pissed."

they didn't make much of a big deal of it though, my parents. whether or not they were really pissed. so you know, i've got that going for me.

anyway, this morning my towel got caught on it and ripped it right off. the ball fell out months ago and so it's just been an incomplete (and bent) loop for a pretty long time, i guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. it didn't tear skin (or cartilage) or anything, but it still hurt pretty bad*. and i was late for work so i decided to take the workday to think about whether i still wanted to keep it.

i guess i did. so when i got back home i stood in the mirror and somehow managed to get it back on. it was really hard. it took me like 15 minutes and it hurt almost as much as pulling it out. i guess it comes down to this: i just didn't like the thought of letting a towel decide for me when i was going to finally grow up and get rid of it. i'll do that in my own time.

*when i was a kid one time two girls beat the crap out of each other in the halls at school and an earring was ripped. i didn't even see it for myself but that image gives me the willies. the worst willies ever.

big empty

i did a lot of driving this weekend. and sometimes i find that when it's just me and my noisy car and my thoughts and the dull urge to pull over and pee somewhere, i'm happy. there are all these cliches about a man's home being his castle and even superman had his fortress of solitude. as much as i dig having an apartment to call my own, i gotta say that my little cherokee with no air conditioning is where i enjoy some of my best me-time.

i'm always having great ideas in there too but i've yet to develop a system to record them without endangering myself and others. sometimes i leave myself voicemails.

ok. so i'm having this problem. and since this is going nowhere i might as well just bring it up now. if you've been reading for a long time maybe you've noticed, too. i'm suffering from this major writer's block. there was a time when i could just plop down and type and something i was proud of would come out and now it seems that even when i do manage to post something on here it's pretty sub-par.

i don't know why and i don't know how much longer it'll be and maybe i just need some really bad shit to go down or something and i'll be right back on track. who knows. it hasn't just been on here, either. it's omnicious. lately i've just felt...dull. it worries me, and then it worries me more that i can't write well about what worries me. this is all very complicated. like spaghetti.

anyway. the reason i did all that driving was to visit my little brother at penn state. this is something i saw there:
this kid seriously wore that all day.

i want you to have these.

there are some things that i knew in high school that i don't know anymore. in high school i knew that eventually, all things would find a way of working themselves out. i used to tell people so all the time. i guess that's the kind of thing you think before you've had your ass kicked by the world a few times, or before you've spent much time riding the new york city subway. what me worry?

also i knew how do to delta/epsilon proofs pretty well and i had a real knack for standardized tests. and i was a much better bowler.

###

i just scratched my face and found a tiny spot that i missed shaving this morning. that's going to drive me f-ing crazy all day.

it's 9am and i'm at work, even though the office doesn't really open until 10. when i am king, the first thing to go will be alternate side street parking laws. the second thing will be tom cruise.

i can think of at least one person who will cringe when they read this, but lately i've been listening a lot to powderfinger's odyssey number 5. and bloc party. still love bloc party. and all the wolf music.

there are 4 songs available for download now at the watched pots myspace page. most of them have been up there streaming for a while, but you can download them now if you want. you are invited and welcome to send them around to anyone you think will like them. you know, not that i think you'd hesitate without my permission. you intarweb folks are an impulsive, lawless bunch. j/k, lolz!!!!!!111one srsly.

...all those songs will eventually appear on the record, which will be given away for free online as well, although they might still see a change or two before they're officially finalized. lyrics and other song info are available in the music section.

oh and one more thing. this happened in lil rhody this week. i've been meaning to show you.

swedish blood irish heart

1. wait, are you asking what i want or what i'll get?
2. i have a small spent a small fortune on musical equipment but my favorite guitar is still the first one i ever bought.
   
3. some of my favorite clothes were my favorite clothes in high school.
4. i hope you had a nice holiday weekend.
5. mine was pretty awesome. i went to maryland.
6. i found out i've got some swedish blood in me. i guess my great great grandfather was swedish and an athiest and a communist and he used to send propaganda to the rest of the family all the time.
   
7. and i saw a baseball game. a guy took his shoes off there.

8. my hands shake a lot because i drink a lot of coffee a lot.
9. also, these days i get really nervous smiling for pictures because i've had a couple major duds lately.
10. there's nothing worse than ruining a picture in which the other person looks awesome.
11. because then they might just cut you out of it.
    
12. and there's also nothing worse than that.
13. this is an ordered list which is hardly ordered and not really much of a list.
14. in case you're going crazy wondering, my dishwasher didn't actually break anything.
    
15. i'm going to give away all my songs for free. once they're finally done.
16. and once i have a place to host them.
    
17. and once i'm really really sure they're done.
    
18. because bob lefsetz told me to.
19. that guy is a curmudgeon.
    
20. when i got back into nyc from maryland i finally plugged in my camera. so here's the only picture i tried to take of jaymay that night. i didn't want to use a flash, so it's basically useless. but i think some people actually pay photographers to take shitty photos like this on purpose.
    

can't sleep dishwasher will eat me

my dishwasher just made a fearful noise unto the heavens. i am going to sleep while it's still running. assuming it doesn't walk across the apartment and kill me in my sleep, i expect to find in the morning that it at least claimed some of my dishes as victims.

i bought a new router today and spent 2 hours configuring it only to be convinced it wasn't working right. then to be told by my friend online once i plugged in my old one again* that the model i got has been plagued with problems and he wished i would've asked him for advice first. so i guess i'll be returning that. i know this is harsh but i'm just going to say it: i have never ever had a good experience with a linksys router ever. they suck balls.

a qualifying remark: while i consider myself to be pretty good with this sort of thing, i really don't expect you to take my advice seriously when making your home networking purchasing decisions. that's personal and you can do what you like, kinda like voting.

it's been a while since i mentioned this and he's suddenly back on track, so you should head on over to the ex-girlfriend project and get caught up.

today a melody came to me while i was on the street and i sang a voice memo into my phone. i have never done that before.

i was all set to write a really self-incriminating entry today about something i'm not proud of, but then i got distracted. i think i'll probably still do it eventually, so i won't give anything away just yet.

* that's right. there was nothing wrong with the old one. in fact it's been running smoothly for years now. it just doesn't have wireless and i need that now. for dorky stuff.

don't breathe. that's impossible.

some people have it and some people don't and lately i'm becoming more and more convinced that there's really nothing more to it than that.

i went to see jaymay last night (since i can't say enough good things about her i'll keep it short). but she introduced one song as one of the first songs she wrote on the piano she learned to play on and it was really quite beautiful.

the first songs i've written, for the most part, are not so great. which is why you'll never hear them.

now maybe she meant that it was just one of the first songs she wrote that she thought was good, or maybe she's just got more talent in her little finger than i do in all mine. i lean towards the latter.

not that it matters really. she's amazing and she'll go places and people will talk about her.

as for me, all i've really ever wanted was to have a few people clap for me in a bar for something other than being intermittently good at darts. i'm gonna do that sometime soon.

the title of this post is just something my friend chris said to me today after he gave me some good advice that i'm sure we both know i won't take. if you read it like "breathing is impossible" (which is what i did at first) then maybe you can walk around all day feeling like you're a miracle or something.

if you don't ask me out to dinner i don't eat.

in the artwork for the airbag / how am i driving? ep radiohead has a whole bunch of neat stuff. it's one of my all time favorite album artworks. it's formatted like a product questionnaire, i guess, only next to each checkbox are these sentences. my favorite is the one that says "if you don't ask me out to dinner i don't eat."

i've been told more than once (and sometimes incredulously) that my songs are all about girls. well, i guess mostly that's true. it's not on purpose though. it's just that i can't really help it. i'm not a great songwriter. i can't write a song about a party or a weeklong bender or a baseball game or a turtle crossing a highway. i do seem to be able to put thoughts down about girls once in a while though. i don't know why i beat myself up over it. lots of people can only write well about one thing. you have to be a real genius like springsteen or wesley willis (rip) to write songs about whatever you want.

but nothing i've ever written really sums it up as nicely as that one sentence.

it's a big city, new york. you can go out and you can meet new people every single night, if you want. and you can make small talk and you can buy drinks and you can get phone numbers and dance until 5am, if you want. this sea is full of fish with spikey heels and designer jeans and haircuts that cost more than my first guitar. fish are cold blooded.

last night i stayed up late screaming into a microphone to try to finish "a viking's funeral" and i did finish it but then my computer crashed before i saved. that song has gotten too big. too many tracks, too many layers. my computer really can't handle it. but i'm not willing to compromise. i might be buying a really fast computer soon.

i don't predict it'll be anyone's favorite song. it sure as hell isn't mine. but i've got a sound in my head and i'm not stopping until i've made it happen. an excercise in excercise.

some cool things have happened for me lately that i haven't really mentioned on here.

when you sit down to write but you don't know what to write about, i guess it comes out looking something like this.

a long while back i mentioned developing some old rolls of film i still have lying around. well, i finally did the first couple. taken circa 2002.


it's not super easy to tell, but this is a picture of how someone (we never did find out who) puked behind my friend victor's door all over his jeans. it's funny how you can forget all about something until you see a picture to remind you. that was so gross.

everything and nothing is in the space between all things

yesterday i had to get my oil changed on my lunchbreak. it took forever so i was late on the way back, and there's a taco bell kinda close to the jiffy lube. and let's be honest, it doesn't take much to coax me in the door at taco bell. it was kinda packed. they must have been short staffed, because the line for the drivethru was super long (not that i do drivethru, it's just a personal thing) and the line inside was all the way to the door.

there was this one guy who caught my eye almost immediately, probably because he didn't seem annoyed at the wait and he stuck out amongst the shirt-and-tie lunchtime crowd. when there's a backup it's everywhere; he had already ordered and was just waiting for his food, looking at his reciept once in a while to make sure he was still repeating the right number to himself in his head.

his sweater looked old, but he wasn't an old guy. i'm going to guess 28. and his jeans were a little tight and not quite long enough. and his hair was a mess and his teeth were a mess and his lips never really closed to cover them and his eyes were sad and he had a goatee that made him look older (and sadder somehow). but he wasn't annoyed, he waited patiently near the counter where they call the numbers, and kept his eyes on his reciept or the counter or the floor as people bumped into him getting their food.

after i ordered and joined the group waiting for the food, his finally came and he walked briskly, purposefully out the door. and mine came soon enough after that. i don't know what it was about the guy. one time driving around my hometown i saw a portly guy smiling to himself in sweatpants walking down the road and i almost lost it. some people seem way more human than others. does that make sense?

like when you see a guy eating alone in a restaurant. there have been studies on this. most people will sit as close to the corner as they can and face the room, looking around after each bite. google it. it's one of the few things i remember from all those psychology courses i took (just kidding mom and dad i remember everything). but some people do it almost aggressively, like they're on the lookout for someone who's going to come and try to take their food. it's real evolutionary hunter/gatherer shit. like how premature babies know how to swim when they're born but soon forget. google that too. this is a free-for-all of facts. (they can also hold their entire body weights up with their fingers and toes on a clothesline. who does this kind of stuff to premature babies i don't know, but i would probably like to have a beer with them.)

but some other people eat alone sheepishly. you have seen someone eat like this in a restaurant. i guess what i'm getting at is that's how this guy waited for his food. and i never heard him talk, but i bet he had a very soft voice. someone was probably mean to him in high school.

anyway. it was raining out yesterday. not very hard, but hard enough that you didn't really want to stand around outside. as i'm pulling out of taco bell i see him riding back in on a ten-speed bicycle. the look on his face said they got his order wrong and he was probably going to wait in line again to get it right. god, it just fucking killed me. and i haven't been able to stop thinking about it for over 24 hours.

hamburgers

when i moved into this place going on 2 years ago it was a pretty stressful time in my life. i had just quit a job that i hated but that i could've stuck with and made good money at forever to move to a city where i knew almost nobody to take a job that i had no idea if i could succeed at and even if i could i would probably be poor forever because of how much it costs to live here. there was this thing with a girl too but i really don't want to go into it.

my parents helped me move in that day. see, in new york when you get a place they have to inspect it and make sure there's no lead paint and all kinds of other stuff. it takes time. more than i had anticipated. so i ended up moving all my shit into my parents garage in connecticut between providence and queens.

so i loaded up my car with what i could, and my dad rented a van to fit all the rest. and they met me here and we loaded boxes and boxes and garbage bags into this little home of mine and then my dad left to return the van and my mom stuck around to do some things that honestly would still not be done if she hadn't done them. like shelf liners in my cabinets. thanks mom.

it was so fucking hot that day. and i didn't (still don't) have air conditioning. but we were starving and we did some grocery shopping to get me started so one of the first things we unpacked was the ol' george foreman grill and made some hamburgers with pickles and ketchup. and even though the actual beef patties were totally gross (i'll never buy "big mike's" burgers again) that was one of the best hamburgers i ever had. me and my mom sweating it out in my brand new apartment.

anyway. today was the first day of this year where it was warm enough for me to open all my windows and walk around in a t-shirt and run some errands in the neighborhood and i guess something reminded me of move-in day. so i went to the store and bought myself some hamburgers and i made myself one of the biggest cheeseburgers ever.

and it was good.

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i've been listening a lot to what i've recorded recently, and i think it's safe to say that although it needs a ton of remixing, it's all keeper-material. so i need to sing some more backup vocals, but it's very very close to one more song in the bag. you're going to like it.

pants on fire

there probably are things in the world that make me happier than a 60¢ bag of doritos from the 24 hour deli right when i get off the subway in queens in the middle of the night. i just can't think of any right at this moment.

the whole thing about rivers cuomo was an april fools gag. sorry if i got you. i shan't make a habit of it.

to be honest i was pretty touched by the people who emailed excited to congratulate me on the whole thing. people were actually exuberantly happy for me and i had to tell them it was just a dirty lie. it made me feel like a dick. i guess i just don't have what it takes to be an april fools day prankster. i'm not hard enough.

if i ever make a music video, the first one will probably be some standard boy-meets-girl narrative type story, but that'll be secondary to the fact that the whole video starts out totally white and out of focus and by the end it's in focus but fades to total black. well, maybe. i just thought of that in the subway. in the morning it might sound as dumb to me as it does to you right now.

i was really pulling for george mason tonight.

you win some, you lose some.

always carry a demo

so last night on the subway i saw someone i certainly wasn't expecting to see. but everyone knows he's a total weirdo so i guess no matter where you see him or what he's doing you shouldn't be surprised to be surprised. rivers fucking cuomo. sitting on the f train like he's been doing it his whole life.

so i gave him a cd. (always, always have your demo on you. that's rule #1.)

my phone rang this morning but it was still on vibrate so i didn't even hear it, but he called me to say he liked it. he said he was about to get on a plane but he liked a few of the songs and wanted to talk to me more about them in a few weeks when he gets back home. i can't even try to call him back because it was a blocked number.

i am absolutely freaking out. what could he want to talk about? does he want to take me under his wing? maybe he wants me to support weezer on a tour. or maybe he wants to tell me i'm a retard. i have no idea. i guess i just have to wait it out.

i love new york.