SuperSatellite ||

Well, a friend of mine pointed out last night she enjoyed reading my blogs because they were funny or entertaining or such.  I forget the actual word used, but being the thesaurus that I am, I was assured it implied  they were enjoyable, if nothing else.  But it got me thinking, that of recent, I’ve become somewhat dry.  At least I think so.  So, this is for you.  Enjoy.

So the concert last night wasn’t bad.  Without going into a full on show review (I don’t do that anymore, SuperSatellite never paid me enough, heh), I will comment briefly.  First, Razorwire Halo.  Well guys….I’ve never heard okay music come from seemingly such little effort.  I mean, if they were much more energetic, they might have fallen asleep on stage.  They weren’t bad, what they did, they did well, they just sounded lazy.  Really it sounded like late gen Manson.  Not that Manson is bad, I loved Antichrist Superstar.  But that’s the thing, I loved Antichrist Superstar.  That album is a decade old.  His new stuff….eh.  And thus Razorwire Halo…eh.  Find a unique sound guys (and gal.  To their credit they did have a hot, however married bass player), and try putting in some real effort and turning down the distortion a little, you’d be surprised.

Muddpuddle Dive wasn’t too bad.  Definately more lively, though that’s not saying much.  Fairly generic Godsmack/Staind type rock.  Worth four sentences at the moment.

The Lonely had a lot more going from them.  I won’t give them much credit in the singing department.  But what they lacked in melodious ramblings, they made up for with enthusiasm.  How this techno rock meshed with an audience that occasionaly let our little 12 year old schoolgirl squeals is beyond me, however.  You’d be listening, nodding to the phat beats yo, and all of the sudden a screeching noise would rise from the front rows like a Backstreet Boy had just snuck up on stage.  I don’t get it.  Then I am reminded that I fear even talking to a girl outside of The Fence without carding them first.  I think the average age outside The Fence is probably fifteen at the oldest.  I felt really bad for the mom in the pink sweater who was clearly only there because she brought a son or daughter to the show.  Kudos for the watching of the kid, but I’m not sure pink ever looked quite so out of place.  Except maybe that one thong I keep in my shelf for the occasional sniffing purposes.  Moving on…

Foxtown is great because they have this big fishpond thingy in the middle.  It’s the most disgusting looking thing in the world.  Camels would look at that water and say “Fuck you, I’d rather just use up my hump and die before drinking that,” then they would spit on your for suggesting such a thing.  Apparently recently they decided to fill it up with toilet bowl coloring, or some similar article, leaving the water blue-green and oily looking.  And the frightening part is that there are actually fish in the water.  Demon fish which have been known to eat spit, cigarettes, paper, severed toes, and anything else they can get into their mouths.  They will fight over these things like pirana, despite a lack of any apparent nutritional value..  Moving on, like any Foxtown regular, I found it to be my duty to find a moment to “feed” the fish.  I spit into the water, I saw them rise to the surface, but they didn’t eat the spit!  The implications are frightening at best.  It is obvious that the combination of nonedible articles, toxic blue water, and human spit has resulted in the fish becoming smarter.  They are making decisions, judging things….plotting.  I for one welcome our new fishy overlords.

The night concluded with dancing at Mooreman’s.  But that, my friends, is a story for another day…But I can say, at least this time, the dancing didn’t end with anyone falling on my penis.

So I’m trying to figure this out.  This requires an analogy of sorts.  Don’t worry, I’m good at these.  In fact, I’m like a shark.

Okay, so imagine a bathtub that won’t drain.  Or at least, it drains very very slowly.  It’s full of soap and hair and scum and you know, showery stuff.  That’s how my brain feels at the moment, like a bathtub full of water that won’t drain fast enough.  It impairs my judgement.  At least I really feel that way, like my decision making process is being muddled.  I need an information dump of some kind.  So here goes said dump.  Don’t worry, I flush.

So I started looking into PA equipment.  I also used it as a chance to play with the new Google Notebook.  Definately going to end up sinking some money into this I have a feeling.  But that’s alright.  Oh, and the Notebook works okay.  Could be better though.  I was hoping to catch Steve tonight to discuss some of it with him, but alas, he was not around.

Keeping on the trend of trying new Google things, I tried out Google Pages.  I built a page to sell my old car.  I need to toss some pictures on still, but I can see it’s handiness, even if it is a pretty basic page hosting solution.  Odds are I won’t worry about it once my server is back up.  Which will be soon (this week).

I just can’t shake this weird feeling I have though.  I don’t get it.  Like I’m forgetting something, but expectant and confused.  And I want a pickle.  Could I be pregnant?  I think it is a definate possibility.

Isis has allergies and in just the past couple days has managed to scratch some serious bald spots.  I’m gonna get her to the vet tomorrow, but I don’t know what they’ll be able to do.  One is under her chin, the other is right on her cheek.    It makes me very sad to see her that way.  I have to keep a close eye on her to keep her from scratching, otherwise it’ll never heal.

Okay, I’m gonna try to find something productive to occupy myself with.  Leave me some witty remarks, comments, or messages, because I know if you’ve read this far, you likely need something to do as bad as I do.

28.34.  The magic number for today.  I am pleased with it well enough.  Of course, I’m probably one of the only people who can find a way to make a trip out to Foxtown and back take almost thirty miles.  I am, of course, talking about biking.  Today just felt like a good day to get out and see what I had after all winter.  While the distance was good, the average speed, which we won’t speak of beyond this point, left much to be desired.  So for now I think I’ll be working on that.  Anyone can ride distance, but doing it at a pace that’s respectable is another matter.  I managed to get a bit of sun too.  Why I didn’t use sunscreen, not really something I can explain logically.  It’s not bad though, just some red arms.  It’ll be good for me.

Speaking of Foxtown, I’m going out for the second show in two weeks there.  The Lonely is playing tonight.  A friend of mine is their bassist.  I probably wouldn’t bother if it weren’t for that though.  I dunno, we’ll see if they’re any good.  Techno-rock isn’t the top of my genre favorites, but sometimes the mood is right.  If nothing else, I’m out of the house though, so regardless, could be worse.  Just hoping the rain holds off and blows past.  Naturally I washed my car last night.  Oh well.

Well, as of last night, Black Coffee has started working on recording what might be called music.  The guys came over and we hooked everything up and started fooling around.  Didn’t get real far, but that’s alright.  At least we did determine that we’ll be able to do the recording with what I have and do it with reasonably good quality as well.  Steve’s head unit is pretty good for running right into my board, quite handy.  I started working on a song too before I went to bed.  It isn’t much at the moment, just a couple riffs put together, but I think there’s room to make something out of it.  I might post part of it once I’ve fleshed it out a little more.

Steve also hooked me up on a neat webpage that was crammed full of happy, happy guitar scales.  Saw a rather interesting Hungarian scale I’m working on.  Hooray for getting better!  Now…if I would get my lazy ass up and rewire my guitar properly…

If you like music, go watch this and this.  This guy is nuts on the ukulele, it’s awesome.  Trust me on this.

Here’s another “thought piece” for my ever steady readers (I love you all!).  The inspiration came from watching this video at Break.com.  I’ll warn you, it’s not raunchy or anything, just very sad and disturbing.

Okay, did you watch it?  Well, if not, I think you’ll get the point regardless.  Let me start by saying that I am in no way trying to make excuses, or condone that behavior.  It’s a terrible, awful thing, and I have no doubt he will learn just how how it feels to play a 14 year old boy in the same position once he’s comfortably inside PMITA prision.  And that will come very likely well deserved.  My point though is this:  that as bad as that is, it only exemplifies a problem Americans, and increasingly everyone, have with responsibility and villification.

When I judged forensics the week before last, I heard a really great oration on personal responsibility.  I really felt like the kid had a good handle on some of the ideas that everyone else seems to have forgotten.  If you will pardon me, I’m going to briefly backtrack and play the other side of the ball for a moment though (don’t you love stream of consciousness writing?).  See, the first problem I have with that video lies not with him, though that is a major problem, but with us.  We have become a society so groomed into being victimized, that we are slowly taking what I think is the next step:  vilification.  Now not only are we the victim, but Cause X is the bad guy for allowing us to be the victim.  What the media was doing in that clip was actively helping create and showcase a villain for us.  It’s the video game publisher’s fault for creating a game marked mature that we bought for our child.  It’s a fast food chain’s fault that we got fat from lack of self control.  It’s the cigarette industry’s fault that we want to destroy our bodies with poison.  Get the idea?  It used to be just not our fault; now not only is that true, but it has to be someone else’s fault.  We have to have someone to blame.  We need that focal point to direct anger at, and naturally media is happy to do that.

So all this raises the question for the initial deal: is it entrapment?   Let’s take the example down just a notch, to something a little more palatable: prostitution.  Cops is a great example of this.  They set an undercover cop out, to entice and pressure someone into trading money for sex, then they arrest them.  The argument?  They could ignore the woman if they wanted to.  But really, what are they guilty of here?  It’s not like they are arresting them with their penis inside her.  So what are you going to charge them with?  Peer pressure?  Wouldn’t it be better to find a way to go after the source of that problem, rather than creating criminals out of people that might have otherwise driven right on by?  It’s a very gray line matter, the same as the first instance.  Granted, yes the guy is a pervert and really did cross the line in a number of ways, but I’d also lay money ten to one that the cops totally groomed and manipulated him online to get him to show up.  I’m no sociologist or psychologist or anything, but I’d love to disect the transcripts of the chats just to see what went down, because obviously if someone is out trolling for sexual predators, you’re going to open doors that normal people wouldn’t.  I’d go so far as to say that per capita, that kind of offense is no more common now than it ever has been.  But our mentality to place blame and accuse people forces us to showcase all this bad.  The internet isn’t creating a culture of sexual exploitation and crime, it just gives us a new vehicle to show it off.

And it’s made worse when you consider what most “rational” people would do to someone like that.  I think it’s fair to say that I would have no problem finding people who would agree with me making an analogy comparing us in many ways to the Roman Empire.  While we can’t make a bad guy and feed him to the lions, we can sure feed him to the media and a cell mate named Bubba.  We can discuss how much we’d like to see him castrated and beaten (as long as we don’t have to do it, that way we we aren’t the villian).  So in the long run violence begets violence.  So who’s fault is it?  Is it the person’s for being weak willed enough to be taken in by the “bait” (making them responsible) or ours for needing to create the villian (thereby absolving them of responsibility)?  It’s a very dangerous moral brightline to create regardless, I think.

You know, several years ago I made some choices that came into conflict with our society, legally.  I regret it, and admit fault, and I always have.  But that’s just the thing.  I did get into trouble for it, and when that happened, I was man enough to take it on the chin, pay for it as expected, and use it to see that it was a road that would lead to me becoming a person I didn’t want to be.  It was no one’s fault but my own.  But it always seems like people refuse to take that sort of stand.  We make mistakes!  It’s alright!  Sure, some worse than others, but for the love of Pete, people are terrified of saying the words “I screwed up.”  We’ve gone so far in vilifying, that people are terrified that if they admit fault, they too will be demonized.  Granted, sometimes there’s a justified reason for that, as seen in the video.  Damn right he’ll be demonized, but you know what, dude, you’re caught and you were doing something totally wrong.  Had it stayed all talk, it could have probably been forgotten, but once he entered that house, a good case is made for the real villain there.  What good do you really think playing dumb is going to do.  At least if you own up, maybe you’ll get a loving gay roommate in prison, instead of angry bodybuilder that just thinks you have a pretty mouth without teeth.

I know I didn’t actually go anywhere with all this and that I tended to back up and justify both sides of the argument.  The thing is that there are flaws all over with the logic at any one particular angle.  I guess the real moral here is that responsibility lies first with us.  We make the mistakes, and we should own up.  At some point yes, we can point the finger at others, but that should hardly be the first course of action.  And we should stop creating opportunities to breed criminals.  While I know none of the back story to the original video, for all we know, he might never have committed a crime in his life had that opportunity not been given to him.  He will get what he deserves for going too far, but the example underlying is that in lesser situations, a lot of people might get something they don’t deserve because of our constant need for villains, to see bad guys taken away.  We need to chill out, take responsibility, stop trying to make everyone else a bad guy, and focus on real criminals and real problems.