we are. penn state.

this weekend i went to penn state to visit my brother and attend a football game with 109,864 other people. if you've never been there, you don't know. i left this morning feeling like i relived my entire college experience in the course of one weekend.

long story short: i screamed myself horse, drank myself retarded, and slept myself a sore-ass back. it was a great weekend. thanks, little bro.

so i got back to queens this evening after spending endless hours driving with the music as loud as i could stand it, and i've been re-mixing old shit by candlelight in my bathrobe. "if these walls could talk" is done now. it's not even different enough from what you can hear for me to repost it, but rest assured that when you buy the record next year (at an extremely reasonable price, of course) it'll sound a little different. hopefully better.

if you're keeping track, that makes the record 3/8 done. if you check the music section once in a while, i think i'll probably make an update there in a few days with a track listing for the record.

i hear people like lists

1. i get way madder looking at a picture of george bush than i do at a picture of sadaam hussein.
2. just because you can pick up the pieces don't think you'll be able to put them all back together.
3. sometimes i feel like a shell of my former self.
4. other times i just feel like a different person.
5. i don't care if nobody else is, i'm happy for the white sox.
6. fuck the red sox.
7. man, that grey hair really is sneaking up on me.
8. i still think radiohead's best record is the bends.
9. i can't write a song that isn't 4/4.
10. everything i see reminds me of her.
11. if watched pots ever goes platinum, you can say you knew before even the cool kids.
12. never.
13. ever.
14. i am addicted to this.
15. the old shit is always better than the new shit.
16. i know macs are better but i still like my pc.
17. don't be a dick about it.
18. not all ghosts are dead.
19. you gotta take the elevator to the mezzanine, chump.
    

we are the image of the invisible

so i survived the hockey game without incident. and survived a thrice concert the next night (which, in retrospect, was much more dangerous). but i chipped my tooth by chewing wrong on a bagel.

i haven't said this in a while so i figured i would: join the mailing list. tell your friends. listen to all my songs ten million times. if you see a centipede in your living space, take a good closeup picture of it before you kill it or catch it or run away from it, because i want a good picture of one for the album artwork.

btw thrice is so effing badass. seriously.

cadillac ranch

i realized today on the highway that i'll definitely drive a mid-life crisis car. because at the rate i'm going, i won't be able to afford a cool new car until i'm more than half dead. and you can bet your ass i'm not going to deny myself the thrill of owning a cool brand new car once in my life just because i'm too old.

so i decided to stop chortling at old guys in sunglasses and cool sports cars. because hey, they could be in the same boat i'm going to be in. and when i'm in that boat, i'm not going to want some young whippersnapper calling me a douchebag.

i'm sitting 2 rows behing the penalty box tonight for rangers/canadiens at madison square garden. so i'll talk to you tomorrow unless i take a 100 mph puck to the eye.

abort retry ignore

in case you're keeping track, all the recording i tried to do on saturday sounded really shitty when i came back to it a few hours later. but that's no big deal and i'm not sweating it. it'll get done when it's good and ready to.

i sat down here tonight to pontificate about goodbyes (the permanent kind) and how it feels to have to say goodbye to a person or a place or a thing, and whether given a choice i'd rather know if and when i'm doing something or seeing someone or going someplace for the last time. and if i must know, how to go about preparing? is it possible to prepare?

i wrote a lot about it, too. symbolism, sentimentality. but then i just erased it.

i guess i must've struck a nerve. on myself. can't remember the last time that's happened.

i've got the mighty ducks on vhs

i'm writing now to give my throat a break and to let the house warm back up. i'm at my parents' place in connecticut, trying to record 'triple deke' in the basement with one microphone in one take. it's proving more difficult than i'd hoped.

see the thing is, the basement is super quiet, except when the furnace comes on. so you have to turn the furnace off. but then if it's a day like today, it's kinda cold in the basement and having the furnace off doesn't help much. in fact, the whole house is pretty cold now becuase i've been down there hollering for an hour with the furnace turned off.

so my voice keeps cracking like a choirboy's towards the end of the song, so i'm drinking some tea (celestial seasonings peppermint) and letting the furnace warm up the house a bit while i take a break.

anyway. hopefully i'll finish this song this weekend and put myself one step closer to finishing this record. it'll be nice to have the opening track in the bank. may your weekend be as majestic as the snow-capped rockies on the morning after winter's first gentle kiss.

ps: i might go to a native american gambling establishment tonight.

i won't be sleeping well tonight

they're fighting again. the couple who live above me. 3rd night in a row. horrible nasty screaming matches. i can hear every word.

he hates her family. doesn't want them coming over every day. they have their own house. stay out of his (we live in an apartment building, he does not have a "house"). and i just lie in bed listening.

it happens in short bursts. then a door slams. someone tries to cool down. can't. open the door and start it again. eventually he'll go to sleep on the couch and i can finally fall asleep in my bed, about 10 feet below her while she's probably crying herself to sleep. i can't hear that part.

squeaky swings and tall grass

i am sitting here listening to npr stream on my computer right now. death cab for cutie is playing a show in washington, dc at the 930 club, and it's being broadcast all over the country.

i wonder if it's occurred to them how cool that is. if they huddled before the show tonight and said "guys, this is kinda big. i know our record is selling like crazy and everyone loves us and god bless the oc but we're playing live for the whole country right now like we're fucking springsteen. are we ready for this?"

thing is, they're not. they are a fucking great band. and sure a lot is lost from stage to mic to encoder to router to windows media player. but i've listened to my dad's old tapes from when they would broadcast an entire springsteen show on the radio. and this is not that.

they are playing "summer skin" right now. that's my favorite song on the new record. and it sounds good. just not as great as i wish it did.

i don't know what the point of this post is. i'm totally enjoying this show and i don't mean to rag on it. and god bless npr for doing shit like this.

yeah, i really don't know. but they say this whole thing will be archived after it airs. maybe you should check it out if you get some time.

i sure do talk about springsteen a lot.

oh megan, i wish it was that easy.

god damn. i have been trying to write a first sentence for this for like 45 minutes. i think i'm going to settle on "god damn."

my friend chris asked me the other day why i write music. because he writes it too and once in a while we ask each other and our answers usually are close to the same after we get through all the bullshit. but i don't want to put words directly into his mouth so i'll really only talk about myself here even though i already namedropped him.

so the first thing you usually say is you do it for girls. i don't know why, but basically everyone says this. like "i want a girl to hear my music someday and fall for me madly." but the truth is you want a girl who doesn't hate your music and is madly mad for the rest of you which is more important because your songs don't age and you do. and she does, too. yeah man. that's the girl you want.

so then you say you want to change the world, or that you have something inside you somewhere that you think the world might like to hear and you're trying to make music your voice or something, but that's bullshit too. because you know you're not going to change the world. bono isn't really changing the world (though he'd tell you differently i'm sure) and let's face it, you're not bono. and there is nothing you can say that hasn't been said before. all you can do is try to say it your own way and hope it resonates with someone.

and you get about that far and then you realize you just nailed it. you do it because you want to be for someone what someone else was for you. you want someone to hear a song and feel the way you felt when you first heard sic transit gloria...glory fades or the other megan or fucking thunder road. can you do that? probably not. but you only live once...might as well give it a shot, right? anyway, you imagine some real satisfaction in that kind of connection.

or you can just be a dick and say you do it because you like to. which is true, but i mean, come on. let's scratch the surface a bit, shall we?

i wasn't really going to write all this out because it's kinda crazy and i doubt many people care but i was reading a really long post by another great friend of mine named dave that really got me going. and this started out as a response to him but kinda got off track so i figured i'd just toss it up here with all of my other nonsense.

he called the shit poo

let's lighten the mood, shall we? this is a little more scatalogical than i usually like to get with the written word, but anyone who knows me personally knows i am capable of much worse. whatever. here goes.

i had this crazy dream the other night where i was a secret government interrogator and i needed information. and i had a special interrogation technique which i'm sure is majorly illegal in real life but at least i wasn't shooting anyone in the kneecaps like jack bauer. i would put a plate of dog poo in front of them on the table and douse it with rubbing alcohol*.

then i'd light the shit and say "you tell me what i need to know or i'll stomp this fire out with your face." and of course, if they didn't talk, i had to do what i had to do. eventually, they all talk.

what do you think that says about the kind of person i am?

* rubbing alcohol, in case you didn't know, is highly flammable. or inflammable. those words mean the same goddamn thing. why on earth?