Greeting from Fecal Creek and the new studio.  Feels like the studio should have a name, but I haven’t thought of anything cool enough to call it.  The new computer is a monster though.  I’m inclined to call it Abulafia.

I have found it almost impossible to get good Chinese food not only in The Creek, but in the entirety of Anhedonia County (which, in case you didn’t know, dear reader, is fucking huge).  But I may have found a solution.  It’s from this place called “Chinese Food.”  See, Fecal Creek is similar to the rest of suburban California is that is composed largely of often massive single-story strip malls, and the stores in these malls, at least the signage of these stores are often not actual proper business names but typically simply more cost-effective descriptions, e.g., “Liquor,” or, in this case, “Chinese Food.”  I called for delivery last night, and ended up talking to the owner of “Chinese Food,” a man named Bong whom I am not entirely convinced is actually Chinese, and with whom I got into an incredibly deep philosophic discussion with truly astounding speed as I was simply trying to order dinner.  Anyway, I got some garlic noodles and Mongolian beef, and it was fucking delicious. And Bong gave me a ton of each for about $7, which, if you’re trying to stretch your pandemic dollar, is helpful.

The weather here is still ridiculous.  The dead of winter and it’s clear as a bell and in the 60s.  It’s going to be yet another year where I waste the winter waiting for it to show up and then it’s just spring.

N.P.: “Type” – Living Colour

The sun came up exactly at dawn today, and I was awake to see it because some jackass forgot that the time on one side of the planet is no even close to the time on the other side of the planet.  It’s no even the same day, dickhead.  If you want something done right, dear reader, hire good people to do it.

I can’t watch TV anymore in this country.
The problem is apparently I’m one of the few people left around who hears the music in the language. I hear the music of words and sentences. Words are music to me.  There is rhythm, melody, intonation and dynamics, right notes and wrong notes…a well formed sentence is a song to me. Unfortunately for those of us still cursed with a decent ear, that music has gotten unacceptably wretched in the last 10 to 15 years. Listening to commercials on TV is like listening to a monkey banging a pot against the skull of a baby seal. It’s a grotesque series of guttural grunts grunted in a utterly artless manner.  The people who watch these commercials then thoughtlessly learn to repeat these moronic grunts because the people on the TV do it so that’s just what everybody does.  The result is that everybody is walking around saying the exact same thing the exact same way.  The same wrong song using the same wrong notes sung by all the wrong people.  And it is absolutely soul killing to have to listen to this bland cacophony day after day.

Everything is up and running in the new studio.  Today has been a lot of clean-up and watching tutorials for new software.  It is going well, dear reader.

N.P.: “Way Back When” – Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Greetings from the new studio, dear reader!  It’ll probably be a late night finishing up installations, but we’re in and online.

N.P.: “Desire – Remastered 2005” – Yello

Completely exhausted, dear reader.  On every level.  The good news is tomorrow I should be coming to you from the brand new fully functioning studio.  It’s gon’ be so cool.
Aight den.  G’night.

N.P.: “In Dulce Decorum” – The Damned

The new studio is so close to completion.  It’s so close I can smell it.  I am almost gagging on the overpowering stench of completion.  I think Friday’s the big day.  Finally.

N.P.: “I.L.B.T.’s” – Joe Walsh

“The weather will continue to be bad…There will be more calamities, more deaths, more despair,  Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere.  The cancer of time is eating us away.  Our heroes have killed themselves or are killing themselves.  The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness.  We must get in step, a lock step toward the prison of death.  There is no escape.  The weather will not change.”
~ Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 1934

N.P.: “I Tune In” – Cryo

“When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – You may know that your society is doomed.”
~ Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957

N.P.: “7 O’Clock” – The Quireboys

After innumerable delays and excessive weirdness, I am just about ready to install the final piece of hardware in the Death Star new studio.  I’m hopeful that will be completed this week.  And then things might get rather intense.  And move rather quickly.

N.P.: “Justify My Love – Radio Edit” – Ingrid Chavez

Happy New Year from Anhedonia, California.  Pthththththththt.
I figured out what’s bothering me so much about the The Herd getting so giddy about the new year: they’re just setting themselves up for crushing disappointment as far as things suddenly getting better with the arrival of a new year.
Here’s what’s confirming for me that we don’t know shit about Covid: right now, California is the sort of epicenter of Covid, but with the exception of our elected leaders, people have been following protocol, masking and distancing and generally avoiding each other like we have the plague (because apparently we fucking do).  We’ve been living under some of the most restrictive lock-downs in the country.  Yet despite all of the above, hospitalizations and ICU cases are soaring.  But then there’s this: there is basically no flu this year.  In the United States, the flu is statistically relatively non-existent this season due to masking and distancing and hand-washing and the rest of it.  That is in every state in the country, including California.  It seems that masking is extremely effective for dealing with the flu, but seems to have either little or totally unpredictable effect on the spread of Covid.
It’s always struck me as odd how complacent Americans have been about typically losing 80,000 people a year to the flu.  But now, having successfully eliminated it, proving that we can save 80K lives if we choose, do you think people will continue to wear masks after Covid is no longer a threat?  Considering the present level of bitching and whining, I’d find it highly unlikely.  But they should.  Because as bad as Covid has been, it’s a big pink titty compared to what is coming.  A real Black Death Judgement of God Plague will not be in any way as patient and forgiving as Covid has been.  It will be the sort of thing that decimates humanity before we even understand what it is.  The sort of thing where people go to bed perfectly healthy and wake up dead.  Covid has shown us quite clearly what a disease-infested Petri dish our previous way of life was.  We ignore this warning at our own peril.

N.P.: “Killing Grounds” – Front Line Assembly

Happy New Year, dear reader.

N.P.: “I’m a Believer” – GIANT