Monthly Archives: March 2019

Yep…mess around with the clocks and everything goes to hell.  I was walking through a park this afternoon when suddenly everything stank.  It was inescapable…the entire park reeked.  After a while, I thought maybe I’d stepped in dog shit, A quick check revealed that that wasn’t it.  I briefly suspected one of the humans just stinking to high hell, but there’s no way one person, no matter how repugnant, could stink up the entirety of a huge park.  Then I figured out the source: cherry blossoms.  The fucking cherry trees decided, what, a good 10 days before the start of spring, to blossom all over the place.  It’s quite disgusting.

It’s 6:17 and that stupid star is still in the sky.  Such solar silliness.

N.P.: “The Good Soldier” – Nine Inch Nails

Goddammit, dear reader.  They changed the fucking clocks again.  Delusional bastards.  And everybody just goes along with it.  Who cares if we just lost hundreds of millions of dollars in productivity.  So what if thousands of people have heart attacks who wouldn’t have (or at least they wouldn’t have today) if the government and the slavish unwashed rabble masses hadn’t gone fucking around with the clock again.

This is so stupid.

Now I have to walk around for 236 days with the gnawing and awful existential sensation that most of the otherwise educated world are walking around not knowing what time it actually is for no good reason at all.

This really is the silliest planet I’ve ever inhabited.

N.P.: “I Walk the Line” – Alien Sex Fiend

After the revolution, on my first day in office as President, or Sexy and Benevolent Leader, or Illustrious Potentate, or whatever of the United States, I will outlaw the observance of Daylight Saving Time.
A recent poll of random adults at the bar waiting for a table at Red Lobster in northern California revealed that 90% of all Americans think daylight saving time is an outdated and pointless exercise in arbitrary adherence to tradition.  The other 10% are idiotic twats.
I have never understood how so many allegedly intelligent, free-thinking people could be so-easily convinced to do something so fundamentally silly.  For four decades now, I’ve been listening to people embarrass themselves trying to explain their adherence to this absurdity, patiently enduring their assaults on logic and reason as they slowly reveal that they themselves don’t really understand this nonsense either.
There seem to be three basic arguments these pedants of chronology employ.  to wit:
  1. Benjamin Goddamit Franklin, may God rest his sweet, patriotic soul, invented daylight saving time just like he invented electricity and he was obviously a genius and how dare you or any other non-genius fuck with Uncle Ben’s ideas.   They didn’t put your ugly ass on the hundred dollar bill now, did they?  Alright, look…you need to remember a couple of things.  Absolutely, Ben Franklin was a genius.  A great many of his inventions propelled America and mankind into the future that we enjoy today.  However, Ben Franklin lived in a world without electric light and climate control.  His nights were lit solely by candles and oil lamps, and even though his idea of shifting the clock around was pretty clearly meant as a joke, and he had likely been into his cups when he wrote this letter, it did make some bit of sense then to suggest that opening business an hour earlier during certain months of the year would reduce candle usage. American businesses haven’t relied on candlelight or oil lamps in more than a century.  Even candle shops now use electric light and computers.  The position of the sun no longer has anything to do with when we can and cannot work, play, cook, read, et cetera.   If B.F. were alive today, I suspect he would want to pimp-slap all those who have mindlessly remained allegiant to daylight saving time.  He invented his stove to more efficiently heat houses: he would certainly acknowledge that central heating and air is a vastly more safe and effective method of climate control, and would likely insist on having it in his house.
  2. It will save energy and money.  Poppycock.  Patently untrue.  In fact, the exact opposite holds true: hundreds of millions of dollars are lost every year due to employees arriving late for work, conference calls and meeting missed, and overall productivity lost.  Doctors tell us that dicking around with the clock and one’s sleep schedule increases the chances of heart attack significantly, leading to hundreds of millions of more dollars lost in medical expenses.  Sleep loss, the disruption of the Circadian rhythm, greater susceptibility to illness…all of things lead to lost productivity, lost money, and ultimately increased energy resources. And having citizens in the work force arrive home at the hottest part of the day ends up using significantly more energy than would be used otherwise.  Just ask Arizona.  They ignore DST (as does Hawaii) and they do just fine.  In fact, neither of those states have nearly the same number of rolling blackouts during the summer as California does.  We have them regularly throughout the summer, during DSL.  There has never been a rolling blackout during Standard Time.
  3. The farmers need daylight saving time to order to harvest their crops and get all their work done during the summer.  I can’t even begin to understand this one.  And I think that’s because this one falls in to the very strange category of many of the other lines of rationale I’ve heard to justify the menace of DST: people seem to actually think that DST adds an hour of time to the day.  Like we ACTUALLY get an extra hour of daylight or the days are ACTUALLY an hour longer than they would be during Standard Time.  To these poor souls I can say only that I will include you in my nightly prayers and hope that you aren’t a registered voter.  Farmers go to work when the sun comes up, and they don’t spend the day watching the clock, waiting for 5 o’clock so they can knock off.  Hell no.  They quit work when it’s so dark they can’t see what they’re doing.  They don’t give the slightest of damns if you insist it’s 5:00pm or midnight: just stay out of their way.
The practice of hourly timekeeping only began in the United States once train travel began: people needed to know when the hell they needed to be at the station to catch their train.  Fair enough.  And today’s world is governed by the clock.  Fine.  But let’s just settle on what time it is and then leave it that way.

Lawd.  I am so tired.  How long can this go on?

You know what’s kind of cool, discerning reader?  You know how last week I wrote about Leo Moracchioli at Frogleap Studios in Norway who is recording songs, playing all the instruments, singing all the vocals, engineering, mixing and  mastering the audio, and then shooting and syncing an accompanying music video every week?!  Yeah.  And then remember when I had to write about how great Keith Flint was and his work with The Prodigy had been?  So today, as he does every Friday, Leo released a song and video.  This week’s offering:  a metal cover of “Firestarter.”  A song originally done exclusively on keyboards now exclusively done on guitars, which is impressive.  And it’s a fitting, moving tribute.  Well done, Leo.

Dude is brilliant.

What’s the craic, attractive reader?  I don’t think last night quite reached the level of what I’d consider a “breakthrough,” but it was a pretty good night.  I started writing something cool for the book pretty late, and I was messing around with speech-to-text, and ended up getting a lot of words down very quickly.  The thing I was working on would be a preface, which is a big step.  I have a lot of material, but it’s just kind of floating nebulous.  I think that once I have a solid opening and beginning, the rest of it will more or less fall into place.
N.P.: “The Number of the Beast” – Iron Maiden

Hotel California was struck by lightning this afternoon during a slightly massive thunderstorm that showed up over Anhedonia today and seemed to just gain strength as it came south to Fecal Creek.  At least that;’s the reason that goddamn charwoman gave me for all of my electronic appliances suddenly having clocks that blink 12:00 when I got home this afternoon.  She might not be lying.  I’ll have to review the security cam footage.

I am being exposed to someone who can’t seem to shut up about the idiotic “time change” coming up this weekend.  I am contemplating setting her on fire.  I mean, I won’t…the legal implications are far too severe to be acceptable.  But the thought crosses.

Okay, back to work.

N.P.: “Bad Things” – Jace Everett

Ain’t nothing going on here except the weather, dear reader, which is quite nice: dark and stormy.  I’m in pretty dark states of piss off about the oncoming return for stupid insipid and pathetic daylight saving time.  Stupidest thing.  I’m actually embarrassed that I’m forced to be a part of it.

Through a weird confluence of events, I ended up hanging out with a couple writers last night and had only whiskey for dinner.  It was like I was in Motley Crue.  Except I’m pretty sure Motley Crue did not have to wake up and dawn this morning and write a bunch of funny shit.  I doubt they even could.  But I can.  And I did.  Because I’m awesome.  Yeah.  Fuck Motley Crue.  They suck.  Buncha assholes.

N.P.: “Are Friends Electric?” – The Dead Weather

Image result for keith flint

Okay, so today Luke Perry died.  I don’t think I ever saw him in anything.  By the early ’90s i had decided that TV was bullshit, so I managed to not see a single episode of Beverly Hills 90210, Friends Seinfeld, or Twin Peaks.  I watched Twin Peaks and Seinfeld several years after they concluded.  But yeah, I don’t think I ever saw him in anything, but he apparently was a talented actor, a nice guy, and rather young at 52 to be dying.  So that sucks.

But then I saw that Keith Flint died.  At 49.  By suicide.  Shit.  I have a very clear memory of having just moved to San Francisco, like just moved there, and going out to drinks with my new roommates, which was a bit of a thing since we were all pierced all over and there were dreadlocks and tattoos and all manner of shit and when we went into an Irish pub, there were eye rolls about today’s youth, but then on the screens in the bar was premiering the video for Firestarter and holy shit, who’s this obviously psychotic git in garish eyeliner looking rather menacing in a sewer?  That was Keith.

Prodigy figured prominently in my San Francisco days in a variety of significant ways (the song that was playing when I jumped on stage at the Trocadero when I went from getting thrown out of the club to being an employee inside of 20 seconds was the one I’m listening to now (see below)..  I’m pretty careful not to be too judgmental of suicides, but i do wish Mr. Flint had made a different choice.

There’s a lot more I’d like to say here, but I’ve been awake entirely too long, and I have to wake up again soon, so I’ll stop.  But today was kind of a bummer.

N.P.: “Firestarter (Empirion Mix)” – The Prodigy, Empirion

Today’s high point and low point were the same moment, and that happened when  got ghost pepper powder on my goddamn uvula.  I was getting ready to take a first bite of a ghost pepper chip, and right when I got the thing in my mouth but before I had a chance to chew, somebody made me laugh, which somehow caused me to inhale rapidly right before I closed my lips and crunched down on the chip.  So a bunch of ghost pepper powder flew from the chip onto my pleasantly moist uvula, where it of course stuck and was activated.  It was not a comfortable sensation at all, yet I kept my composure, because I am, if nothing else, a gentleman.
Because it was my uvula, it seemed like swallowing water normally wasn’t getting it.  I felt I had to try to sort of throw water down my throat in order to hit that weird little punching bag that was quickly going into full rebellion over this pepper powder bullshit.  For a while, it felt like I was breathing fire, both inhaling and exhaling.  But I wasn’t breathing fire.  I was told It looked like I was trying to discreetly cough up a hair ball made of razor wire.
Anyway, how was your day?
N.P.: “Revolution” – Uppermost

So there’s this guy I follow on YouTube named Leo Moracchioli.  Despite having what at least to this writer appeared to be an aggressively Italian name, Leo is very much a Norwegian metal artist.  He has an incredible studio (Frogleap Studios) where he works and lives with his wife and daughter.  Leo’s got a band (appropriately enough, the Frogleap Band) and his wife plays bass in her own band.  So Leo’s ultimate goal is, as near as I can tell, to be a producer.  So he’s got this amazing studio and an immense amount of talent and drive.  What I admire/what inspires me the most about Leo is that every single week, on Friday, he releases a metal cover version of a song he has selected for that week.  He plays all the instruments (occasionally, he’ll feature guest musicians) and does all the vocals (again, with an occasional guest vocalist (typically for a female part)).   So every week, he’s playing, recording, and producing at least one complete cover song, fully produced, released for sale/digital download.  Which is quite impressive.  But he also films and edits a video for each of his songs.  Not sure if you’ve ever recorded a song, or even one instrument of a song, or filmed a music video, but each of these processes is time- and energy consuming, stressful and frustrating, and generally just difficult to pull off ever, let alone every single week.  This guy is married and has a young daughter, so I’ll assume his weekends are spent doing family shit.  Which means that Monday morning, he trudges into his studio, kicking of his crocs outside the front door, I assume having already decided what song he’s going to take on this week.  So if he hasn’t already arranged the song in his head, then he has to figure that out (dude isn’t replicating the tracks of the songs, which would be challenging in its own way, but actually doing original and evocative metal arrangements that pull certain elements out of the song and in many cases, are remarkable improvements on the original (his recent cover of House of Pain’s “Jump Around” comes to mind).  Then he has to record and simultaneously engineer all of the instrumental and vocal tracks, complete those, all the while dealing with the endless technical difficulties one is constantly encountering in a recording studio.  So that’s gotta take three days…so MTW.  Final mix (if it’s not done) Thursday morning, then shooting, editing, and syncing the video, finishing that night in time to upload everything (song files to iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play, video file to YouTube) by Friday morning.  Amazing.  Leo’s productivity and prolificity have been a huge inspiration to me and the way I approach my work, while also being very entertaining, musically.
Check him out here: https://www.youtube.com/user/leolego.

N.P.: “Bells & Circles” – Underworld, Iggy Pop