it's cold

raise your hand if you fell asleep and missed your subway stop tonight and then decided to walk home through a pretty shifty neighborhood up a really steep hill in the blistering-tits cold rather than wait for another train going back your way.

oh! me! oh oh oh! pick me pick me!

f.

glass half empty glass half full glass shatters.

bedtime stories

just a few things i thought of in the shower that i've been meaning to tell you. first. i found this on my old roommate's site (where i am always finding awesome crazy things) and it's too good not to share with you. this is easily the weirdest thing i have seen in at least a week. watch the whole thing. it's worth it.

also. i know i told you before to buy the moves' record and i know you didn't. that's ok, i never do shit when people tell me to either. especially when it involves money. but i would be remiss if i didn't tell you one more time to check them out. at least listen to this one song. it's pretty awesome. tell 'em mikey sent ya.

ok g'night.

i can't get behind that

so i spent a few hours tonight recording some vocals. i don't want to alarm you and i don't want to get super specific at this time...but based on how tonight went there may or may not be a song on the record with vocals that are more shatner-spoken than sung. i am just going to have to sleep on it for a while.

hot lava

hey. long time no talk. it's because i fell into some hot lava. i'm all better now though.

no really i didn't. that would kill you for sure. you'd be hurtin' for certain.

i've just been sitting here listening to what i think is the final mix for "if these walls could talk" over and over again on different sets of speakers and headphones to see if i hear anything that pisses me off. this is the process i go through for every song. that's why it takes so goddamn long. i recorded this in about 6 hours, and have been mixing it for about 6 months.

it's sounding pretty ok.

story time. one night me and my friend john drank a whole case of pabst blue ribbon and then climbed a pretty tall rock wall to get to the athletic fields at our beloved alma mater. then we stumbled around firing some pretty f'ing awesome roman candles into the air and laughing real belly-laughs after pretty much every shot went off. you ever have one of those nights where it just works right? that was one of them.

then we went to some kid's house that he knew and the kid had bottle rockets sitting on his nightstand (it must've been around the 4th of july) and we stole a bunch and i still have them in my sock drawer. don't be mad, he had like a ton.

oh my god oh my god

so i found it. it was in my briefcase, which is something i got at a yard sale when i was a little kid and treasured above most other things because it locked with a combination (which i still remembered, miraculously) and it's where i kept shit that either i wanted to keep safe or i didn't want anyone else to see or usually both. the contents of that briefcase could be a whole other post...but we'll see about that later.

we called ourselves "the undercover beat" and we recorded 5 songs. i had totally forgotten that my younger brother also participated, so in addition to the two 10 year old voices i described earlier, there is an even younger sounding 7 year old. at the end of every song we screamed in non-unison "yo, we outta heeeere."

our tape was called the undercover beat - go through tough times. here's the tracklisting:

• "playin' hookey" (not sure why we neglected the exclamation point on this one) was a bit of a point/counterpoint argument about the merits of a good education. really creative stuff. if you didn't want to get sent to the "fat, ugly" principal's office and end up working at mcdonalds with all the other "idiots" you'd better learn your maths.
  
• "darn those drugs!" contains repeated assertions that drug dealers would hold guns to your head to make you try marijuana, but if you sped away fast enough on your bike, you'd be safe once you reached your front yard. this is even funnier if you've ever been to monroe, connecticut, circa 1990.
• "traffic jam!" is a prime example of overreaching. not only had none of us ever driven a car, but i doubt any of us had even been in real traffic in any car, period. again, you'd know if you'd been around when this was made. also, we must've been trying to sound really pissed and exasperated about the exhaust fumes but in reality we just sounded really squeaky and this is the least listenable song in a collection of entirely unlistenable songs.
  
• "we did it!" was an extremely make-you-squirm patriotic celebration of the usa's victory in operation desert storm. complete with someone audibly pausing the nintendo in the middle for an a cappella rendition of "america the beautiful" that goes on waaay too long. if i wasn't so bent on keeping this under wraps, i bet the cia could use it to interrogate bad guys instead of torturing them like dick cheney likes to do. actually maybe this would still be considered torture.
  
• "smog - so what else is new?" probably would be the best song (it's got some really big words in it which i surely did not write) but it's interrupted a few times by another friend who taped over our sweet beats with some insinuations about our sexual orientations.
  

all in all, i'm not sure i'm glad that i found it and i'm probably not tough enough to post any audio for you to hear because it's way worse than even my worst nightmares. but i haven't made my final decision yet.

this was on my wall for a very long time

i was pretty active at my church when i was in high school. never so much on the real religion side, but definitely on the just-showing-up-must-count-for-something side. some of my best friendships to this day were forged at our youth group.

we would meet in the same building that they held church school in. one day there was a line of contstruction paper on the wall, some of the kids had done one of those things where you put down every letter a-z and write something starting with each letter about something. this one was about god. duh. judging by the handwriting difference, it looked like each kid in the class got 3 letters for one sheet.

i really liked the last sheet (they x,y,z one) so i took it down, xeroxed it, and put it back up. i think i liked it because man, that must've sucked to get those last letters. those are tough ones. and also, they were scrawled in really sloppy handwriting, which reminded me of myself. anyway, that paper went with me for years on my wall everywhere i lived. it was finally lost in the shuffle when i moved from providence to queens, which i never paid much thought to, but tonight i was just thinking of it at 3:45am because that's just how i am. it said:

xample to all of us
you are truthful to us
zap us with your love.

maybe it's better taken totally out of context like it would have been if you just ambled into my room back then and saw it on my wall with masking tape. that's why i liked it, anyway. but i can't sleep so i figured i'd give you the background, too.

happy thanksgiving to you and all of yours.

like a polaroid picture

when i was a kid i had a lot of nervous energy. i was always shaking my leg, or pacing, or tapping, or doing that thing where you roll a pen back and forth over your knuckles (when i got older and finally learned how to do it in chemistry class).

they* like to say nervous habits are the product of sexual frustration. for the record, whether or not the well has been dry, i've always peeled the labels off my beer. off topic.

it isn't the kind of thing people remember details about, so i don't know when i stopped, but let's say at some point between ages 17 and 19, i just cut it out. i've no inkling why. i just know i gradually came to realize in college that i didn't really do those things anymore and didn't really have the urge to.

i also don't know when it started again and i don't know why. but i shake like the dickens these days. and i'm constantly reminded of it because of a little coin bank on my desk here that jingles every time i shake my right leg. it drives me absolutely crazy.

* for the most part, i've found that the kind of people who'll cheerfully remind you of such hogwash tend to be more sexually frustrated on average than the people who won't. and strangely, they all like to say it as if it's deadly serious (and recently proven) scientific fact, as if you've never heard it before and you're supposed to be impressed and thank them for their insight into your psyche. seriously. hurt yourself.

here are some things.

1. sorry.
   
2. there is a disconnect between how you see yourself and how others see you.
   
3. who's right?
4. nights in shining amor.
5. i'm not ready to go...i just got here.
6. a band-aid on your hairy arm.
7. someone remembers the worst thing you've ever done and they'll never forget it.
8. the absolute worst idea ever is to give lingerie as a gift.
9. 
   
10. someone else knows something else and they think it's the worst thing but they're wrong and you're sure not going to correct them.
11. pyrrhic victory.
    
12. there's no way that stain is coming out.
13. my brother turned 21 yesterday. i sent him an e-card with a pic from www.ratemypoo.com. but only because for my birthday he trolled the internet for the grossest picture of a fat naked bald lady he could find.
    
14. do not go there.
15. you are so totally fucking predictable.
    
16. you don't know. you don't know you don't know you don't know you don't know you don't know. you don't know.
17. i hate this game but at least i'm winning.
18. nonsense. all of this is.
    

waste one.

(if you're pitching and you're ahead of the batter in the count, waste one. see if you can make him swing at something unhittable. it's going to be a long winter.)

i spend a lot of time thinking about things i've done and said. and the things i might have done differently. i am the woulda-coulda-shoulda-buddha. which is where most of these songs come from, and i suppose where much of this blog finds its inspiration.

funny thing about this blog is, it wasn't originally intended to be one. i built a simple site so people could check out my music. and i built a really simple news section so that i could give important updates like (shh...i know none of this is really important). but then it became a pain in the rear to update the html and format it correctly and ftp it to the server every time i wanted to let people know anything, so i figured i'd just let the friendly folks* at blogger do that work for me.

and that's when it happened. i got hooked on this. for probably similar reasons to why i started writing songs in the first place. connection. (i realize right now that this post has veered away from its original intent and i am not strong enough to steer it back on course. oh well.)

i am shy to a debilitating extent. i can't talk to girls in bars (or anywhere else where other people are around). fuck, i even have a hard time talking to bank tellers. and just forget about calling some customer service line to complain about something.

but if you can write a song (or, i guess, a blog) and people can relate to what you're trying to say, then all of the sudden you've got that connection, and you didn't need to talk to anyone to do it. hell, you never needed to leave your living room.

and so here we are. i have a blog. it's nothing, really. but it's less nothing than it used to be. it's instant. it's easy. it takes me months to produce a song. it takes about 20 seconds to post this bad boy once i've written it.

i didn't mean to write about this today. it just happened. i was going to tell you all about my weekend and speak vaguely about ghosts from my past. but i guess i can always do that some other time.

is this a distraction?

*they are good people, really. i know one.

incentivizationalism

yo whatup. join the mailing list. because if you do i have a special treat for you.

it's easy (wo)man...just put your email in the box over there on the right (or go to the contacts section at the top). the mailing list is a yahoo group that only i can post to. and even i do it less than once a month because i put all the day-to-day nonsense up right here. but as important music related stuff starts happening, i'm going to be using it once in a while to let you know things.

anyway. the thing about the special treat. way way back when i first started doing this stuff i had a microphone and a 4 track recorder and no idea how to use either one but for practice i recorded "cool ethan's song" from the movie slackers (best movie ever). jason schwartzman wrote it for the movie. it's pretty muddy sounding but it was my first time and nobody's very good their first time, so give me a break. i'm still not very good.

if you want to download that song, you can do so by clicking on "files" in the yahoo group once you've joined. (if you're already on the mailing list you obviously also can download it the same way.)

there are lots of parentheses in this email. i overuse the (shit) out of those.