Today I noticed that my cell phone and wristwatch are not chronologically in sync. My watch is, in fact, three full minutes behind my phone. Consequently, when I receive a text message which displays when the message was sent, it occasionally arrives a full one to two minutes ahead of the time on my watch. This means that these messages are not simply from another person thumbing away on their phone, they are actually transmissions from the future.
When David lived in Georgia, he and I would occasionally email one another. Because he lived in a different time zone (1 hour ahead of my residence), I joked that he too was living in the future.

The future, you see, is not all that different from the now. In fact, its more like a somewhat garbled version of the present (if my text messages are any indication). I quite like that; the Future = a more garbled version of now.

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Have I mentioned that I truly dislike cold weather. Seriously, does anyone living in S. LA like the weather we’re having right now? All you winter lovers, is this what you wait for all year-round? Grey, ugly, cold, wet, depressingness?

I’ll take summer and the merciless heat of our wonderful yellow sun any day over this stuff.

Really, life is better when its warm. Exhibit A:

Here I am in mid-August with my dad at a local road race. Look how happy I am. Smiling. Bronzed by the summer sun. Relaxed with family, bathed by the soft late-summer light.

I think I’m going to celebrate spring with much rejoicing this year.

while passing through the little town of St. Gabriel on my way to and from work, i noticed that their town motto appears to be, “Wherever you’re going, you can get there from St. Gabriel.”

They have apparently admitted that St. Gabriel is, in and of itself, useless as anything else but another dot on the map to wherever you were actually meaning to go.

I mean, they could’ve picked some better spirit-rallying cries, like “St. Gabriel: just meters from the power plant!” or “Think of your loved ones in Hunt Correctional Institute. Think of St. Gabriel.”

Instead, they had to settle for nearly denying that St. Gabriel exists. Technically, you can get anywhere from anywhere else, so at least they weren’t lying. You could launch a rocket out of St. Gabriel and fly straight into a Black Hole, to be either destroyed under the intense gravitational pull or trapped for eternity. Only then might you appreciate the fact that in St. Gabriel, you could have at least driven back to Gonzales down highway 30, where they had the outlet mall.

Sometimes I read other people’s blogs and think, “Wow, what an insightful mind this person has.” Other times, I read different blogs and wonder why on earth anyone would bother writing or reading what is on the screen in front of me. The wonderful thing about the internet, though, is that I can abandon reading inane, boring, pointless blogs the second I realize how vapid they really are.

Ahem…glad I got that off my chest.

In other news, Dave had a nice response to the little bundle of links I posted the other day. Check his comment for some well-reasoned points concerning the new/old ‘ubiquity of music’.

I’d like to write a little more about that subject as well, but I’ll have to put it off until tomorrow.

Since all the regular blawgs that I usually read are having serious content issues (everybody’s still on vacation!?), I’ve had to do some branching out with my internet reading in the past two weeks. However, my quest has not been fruitless; here are some articles and journal entries well-worth checking out.

First a whole crop of interesting stuff from the artist/musician Momus:

Momus on the year in Music “If music didn’t exactly die in 2006, it certainly felt sidelined, jilted, demoted, decentred, dethroned as the exemplary creative activity, the most vibrant subculture… visual culture now occupies the central position music once did.”
Thought provoking stuff here – I tend to agree with his line of reasoning, especially about Youtube.

Ubiquity is the Abyss “It’s the triumph of music! Or is it? Maybe ubiquity signals quite the opposite; music’s defeat. For music, ubiquity is the abyss.” Also, the more polished piece in the Wire Magazine
I sympathize with his sentiments here, even if they are a bit extreme in some cases – I’ve been feeling a similar way for quite some time.

Finally, some interesting thoughts on Roomtone. “Roomtone, as I’m using it here, means “the raw, natural sound of a place”. It means indigenous sound.”

Famous ambient musician and theorist Brian Eno prophesying problems with the CD format and the ubiquity of music Ten years ago!. “So what I find exciting now is discovering music that hasn’t obediently designed itself to slot within the constraints of this arbitrary medium – recorded music – and which is somehow bigger than it, overflowing at its edges, extending beyond its horizons. ” This is great, especially the final paragraph.

The extremely interesting and somewhat creepy Mydeathspace A site which notes people who have died while maintaining a myspace profile.

Finally, writer and academic Steven Shaviro found some good things to say about the last novel I finished reading No Country for Old Men. Shaviro is quickly becoming one of my favorite culture critic reads on the net – smart, sensitive, and critically incisive.

I’d love to hear others reactions to this, especially the somewhat controversial ‘music ubiquity’ pieces.

i spent most of today getting safety training for my job at the explosive chemical plant, i mean, fertilizer plant. no, it’s not that bad, though the training materials really stress the dangers of e-v-e-r-ything, and i wouldn’t have wanted to start working there without that training either. I’ll be spending lots of time (read: AutoCAD) in the office anyways.

i need more pants. that is no joke. it is true. David needs pants.

So for music? Yeah if you didn’t hear, the love of my life gave me tickets to see John Mayer in concert on Jan. 30. On top of that, i got his new album for christmas, and it is so freaking good, i could not have picked a better time to see JM in concert. Des is awesome.

On top of that, me and jon played music over the break for several straight days. We discovered the perfect guitar tones, including a deafening monster overdriven lead. We struggled with our own drumming shortcomings in trying to re-record a drum track, but then realized that it’s about 10 times easier to record everything over again, from the beginning. Fix it in Tracking. That’s my method forever and ever, amen. And it sounds toetally amayzing. I must extend my condolences to the Breaux household for the unnecessary sonic assault that they had to endure the entire time… They are apparently seasoned veterans of way too loud music, or they are insane, or they are deaf. One of those 3. Because i did not hear one single complaint. My family would have been throwing kitchen knives at us.

Seriously, Mrs. Beverly is one of the sweetest women there ever was, quickly approaching mother teresa and the virgin mary.

Here’s where i promise to post some audio clips. Here’s where you, the reader, stop and ask yourself, when was the last time he actually followed through? You have a point, folks. I should stop promising things.

Boy, yesterday I was in an awful mood and my wonderfully bleak post reflected that. Oh well.

Part of the reason I write on this site is to help myself understand things – writing does that for me, helps me to understand. No doubt much of the things I plaster up here make little sense to people who don’t already know me well, but everyone gets to read about it anyway. Maybe it will be useful to someone, sometime, somewhere.

At any rate, today was much better, and in other news I noticed that Rick Bishop has showed up on Jason Kottke’s ‘current music list’. That’s a wow. I guess I should expect Derek Bailey to start appearing in top 100 guitarist polls as well pretty soon. Amazing how quick the underground music scene is turning over these days.

Just returned to the apartment today to check up on things and to have a few days of vacation from vacation.

Today is the first day of 2007. I did not make any ‘Resolutions’ because I haven’t ever made any in the past and I doubt I’ll start now. January 1 is supposed to feel like a new start, but I find it hard to get enthusiastic about much during these short, dark winter days. I’m already looking forward to spring, for the weather at least.

Of course, spring is going to bring a lot more than just good weather – I’m going to graduate, D & D are going to get married, peoples’ lives are going to change.

Recently, I find myself thinking about these inevitable changes often. And the more I think about it, the more I find myself feeling like I’m moving very quickly away from what is familiar, from what I’m used to. I may not necessarily physically move far away this year, but in my mind I already often feel so distant from even some of my closest friends.
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