the shower scene

a few days ago my friend chris sent me a link to another youtube video of a giant centipede in action. write one song about centipedes and you're branded for life as the centipede guy. too bad i didn't write a song about hot fudge sundaes. anyway. this one wasn't as awful as the last one because it spared the gore, but it still was enough to give me nightmares. in this one, the thing just pulls a son-of-a-bitch fruit bat out of the goddamn sky. a flying creature! is there nothing grosser in the world.

this morning i pulled back the shower curtain after a nice shower. and i grabbed my towel and i started working on my flowing locks. and i felt something on my leg. could just be a water drip. but it was moving up. water drops don't move up. so instinctively, before i even looked down, i jerked my leg to jaunce whatever evil-incarnate was traversing my limb. and then i saw him, flying from my leg, out of the tub, and onto the bathroom floor. he hit the ground running and was gone in a flash. but it was unmistakable. that was a centipede. boy howdy. straight out of the nightmares i've been having since i watched the video. only smaller.

we meet again, old friend. not if i see you first.

in other news, i'm dropping the axe on "doctor, these headaches." it will not be on the record. because i haven't even started it yet and i'm still not sure how it's going to go and because thematically it'll fit better with the newer stuff i've been writing anyway. so it's not disappearing, it's just going back into the incubator. that leaves one song to finish before i can say this record is done and just wash my hands of it. and it's close, friends. oh so very close. and it's about time, since i just realized i started talking about it over a year ago.

music music everywhere

tonight i encoded and tonight i coded and now you can download almost all the songs from the record and a couple old demos right from the music section on this here site. just click the song titles as if you wanted to read the lyrics (i know you do) and if it says "download mp3" there then guess what, you can download it. right click and save as... you know the drill.

please feel free to give these to anyone and everyone. share them on your illegal filesharing software (you criminal). seriously though. do whatever you want with them.

oh what a site

as promised, i dropped some fat stacks of paper today and purchased some hosting services from godaddy.com (sex sells, man) and spent a bunch of time updating some page names and moving this whole site over to its new home. it's my hope that you won't notice anything different on your end, but in the event you notice a link that's broken or something, please let me know.

what i'm able to do now is put up files for you to download right off this site instead of sending you all over god's green intarweb to get songs. so keep your eye on the music section over the next couple days as i update that.

and now that there's no domain forwarding and masking, in the unlikely event that you're compelled to link your friends here, you can send them exactly where you think they should go without needing a computer science degree.

oh and holy crap. custom 404 page ftw. totally worth every penny.

**update: that search bar won't work for a while until google re-indexes my ass.**

i custom made your suit

so my little brother sean moved in with me this weekend. it's a tradeoff of privacy for company, but so far it's going really well. of course, i'm the one who sleeps on a bed every night and he gets something only slightly better than a dungeon floor. so maybe he'll tell you sometime how it's going from his perspective.

we played a lot of guitar together the other night. and he dropped my deodorant in the toilet and then cleaned it off and didn't tell me so this morning when i took the cap off it i spilled deodorant scented blue potty water all over my just-showered self. which i think we all can agree is pretty funny.

also, my first ever monetary compensation for this music should be en route to my apartment as i type to ye. details to follow if you're interested, but i've already earmarked the modest sum to improve this site. so hopefully soon i'll be able to host all the mp3's right here instead of having to rotate them on murdochspace and purevolume.

rob the jewelry store and tell them to make me a grill

strange how out of place it feels to me now to talk about my music on here. i hope you'll indulge.

i've been doing a lot of thinking and not a lot of doing on the record lately, but i've decided that "the loudest man on the laugh track" is fine how it is for what it was, and instead of redoing it all and putting it on the record, i'm just going to make it available permanently in its demo form and if you like that song you can download it from purevolume shortly. along with the "ladies and gentlemen of the jury..." demo, which has been available forever.

and then there were seven. sometimes i think i'll never finish this thing. other times i know it. but i am determined.

a lot in my life, musically and otherwise, is changing soon.

is not chicago

a funny thing that i still haven't gotten used to about business trips is the way that even though you're staying in the same hotel as everyone you work with and you're spending all day with them at the convention center when the bell rings and yabbadabbadoo and all that you're on your own, buddy. you find your own way back to the hotel and you find someone to go have dinner with because we're with clients. there's absolutely no malice in it. it's just what we do. we, for the most part, are not friends. we are colleagues and we work well together and then we go our separate ways until when early in the morning the factory whistle blows.

so you sit on the shuttle bus and you see things out the window that look nice and you wish you were in this town for enough time to see anything besides your sweet hotel and the totally unsweetened conference center. like restaurants and theaters and bars and parks and commuter trains. i like life. i want to see what life is like here. but i bet i never will. and i definitely won't on this trip. because tomorrow i get on a plane all alone. everyone else left today. for some reason they left me here tonight to fend for myself so i went to dinner with someone from another company who also was leftover. friend for a night. this was lovely. my pork chop was amazing. thanks for letting me taste your chicken. we'll be in touch. right?

business trips are funny things.

is chicago

so i'm in chicago now. it seems like i'm never home anymore. although i guess after this trip i have no more scheduled for a decently long time. i can't remember the last weekend i've had to just spend in new york. i'm really looking forward to doing that soon. holiday cocktail lounge here i come.

i wanted to write about airplanes and airports and the people that you hear talking to other people and the ridiculous kinda shit they say like bragging about being a republican to a total stranger and saying that global warming is hogwash and you're lucky i didn't pour my cranberry juice on you you loudmouthed ignoramus i don't care what you read in your book club. but i won't because i just did, i suppose.

chicago is a really nice city. even when it's hot as hell out, it's cold by the lake. i don't know if i could ever see myself living here, but i can't think of a good reason why not. the people seem nice. the airport, however, is not my favorite.

you know what's funny (to move in a totally different direction)? it's funny how predictable i've become to myself. and to everyone else. it seems like almost every day someone gets to say they told me so. everyone is a nostradamus. everyone sees everything coming. mikey is going to do this and then that will happen and then he'll react thusly. and even though i see it too i can't seem to make it any different. like watching a movie and hoping that this time the good guy won't die even though you've seen it before and you know he's going to and you know how.

i watch movies i've already seen all the time.

and try one, and try two

i guess you could say i did it because i had to and not because i wanted to, which may or may not be true. the bottom line is that i did it i guess. and i saw what i needed to see, and i turned around and i drove to a street where i could find a parking spot and i slept behind the back seat of my car. covered in laundry so no one could see me.

there are things that need to be done when you return to places you used to have been. things you need to see, places you need to drive, food you need to eat and things you need to remember that sometimes you wish you could forget. i wrote some days ago about providence. but i don't think that at the time i wanted to come out and say it felt like home.

this weekend i did a lot of things in providence. i ate my favorite foods and i walked the old paths and i saw the old friends and some things never change even though most things eventually do. and when a city can make you feel like you just lost a fight and like you just won the lotto in the same weekend, then i guess you can say it feels like home.

there's a lot more to say that i'll leave unsaid. and there was more to do that i left undid. but it was a great weekend. and here are my congratulations to all who deserve them. and here's a handshake and here's a nod and here's a raised glass and here's one more look back over my shoulder. and here's one foot after the other. day by day by day.

heinz 57

i've been busy. let's catch up, shall we?

• congratulations to michelle and gil, who were married last weekend. gil is the kind of man legends are made of. he played softball the morning of his wedding and yanked his hamstring and then had it wrapped so tight so that he could dance that he claimed not to be able to feel his toes. bad ass. and michelle is one of the greatest people i know. so...cheers.
• i still haven't caught up on my sleep and i still walk around every day like a zombie. and i still really want to go back to stockholm.
• i've been playing a fair amount of video games and i'm not proud of it.
• people in providence (the wedding was there) always ask me why i don't come "home" more often. i won't say providence never felt like home, and i won't say i don't miss it often, but it's always strange to hear other people refer to it as my home. it's something about the people that live there. or the city itself. if you live in providence, it owns you. where i grew up in connecticut, it seemed like everybody couldn't wait to leave. and in new york everybody seems to be sticking it out for a while but nobody thinks they'll be here forever, even though they might want to. providence is the kind of place people go to be home.
• i'm going there again tomorrow.
  
• tonight i have tickets for a midnight showing of x3. things like this are the reason i'm always tired.
• i'm mostly pretty happy these days.
• which means i'm not writing much music. but we've been over this. it's still nice to wake up in a good mood sometimes.
• i don't really know when this blog evolved into a this-is-what-i-ate-for-breakfast diary. i didn't ever mean for that to happen.
• i haven't had a haircut in a really long time. i'm starting to look like frodo. when it gets this long it's hard to decide to get it cut simply because it took so long to get this way. you know? like how when your favorite pair of jeans is finally worn out and it's time to buy a new one. i can put off things like that for weeks.
• here's a joke i just heard: mailman walks up to a door to deliver a package and rings the doorbell. a little kid answers in a diaper, holding a lit cigarrette and a martini. mailman goes "whoa kid. are your parents home?" the kids says "what the fuck do you think?"
• shut up. it made me laugh.
  

as you were

ruby left a pretty insightful comment the other day about how life just picks up right where you left off when you get back from a long trip, and how discomforting that can sometimes be. i guess because so many things can happen to you when you're far away (and how...) and then you get back and your friends are the same and you do the same sort of dumb things with them.

today it was really nice out in new york. we wanted to have a beer on a porch. but neither of us have a porch.

my friend, however, does live in a building that has a roof. a roof that's strictly off-limits to tenants, but a roof nonetheless. so, ignoring the sign that said the roof was off-limits except in emergency situations, he began to climb the rickety ladder with a plastic bag full of 2 large asahi cans. i mean these cans are big.

so he's about 15 feet off the ground on this ladder when the bag somehow breaks just enough to drop one but not both of them. i'm lucky it didn't break my head, i guess. i pick up the severely dented can, and carry it up with me as i follow him to the rooftop.

it's some serious shit up there. i guess the reason it's restricted is because the tenants of the top floor have staircases that go up to it and it's basically divided into two private porches for those two apartments. so there's one that's all fenced in with a hot tub and a garden and signs warning about trespassing and security cameras and lasers and guard werewolves.

the other one appears to be under construction. there's some 2x4's nailed together in what will eventually be a really nice deck, and some bricks in patio formation as well. and a bunch of ladders and supplies everywhere. so we're standing on this unfinished deck and just as my friend opens the beer he just dropped 15 feet (he was decent enough to volunteer to take that one) and tries to catch the firehose-volume spray in his mouth only to soak his entire face and head, the owner of the apartment comes up the stairs with this crazy-man look on his face like "what the fuck are you doing on my roof."

so he says "what the fuck are you doing on my roof," and my friend apologizes profusely and begins to clean up the huge amount of spilled beer from the outdoor wooden porch with his shirt (i think that was an unneccesary gesture, but to each his own). then the guy goes back downstairs and we decide to cut our losses and leave before he calls the cops or something. so back down we went, and instead of enjoying a beer in the sun on a new york city rooftop, we enjoyed a beer in his apartment and played video games.

usually i don't bother with stories like this because there's no way they could be as funny to you as they were at the time, but this time it just seemed indicative of the way life so quickly goes back to "normal" (hah!) when you return from a long trip.

everything is different, but still a lot is the same.