Love, Laughter & Truth

Love, Laughter & Truth

"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." - Gustav Flaubert


Ahhh, if only...

I actually got shit done today. Yesterday was my first full day of work in almost a week from my lovely employer, and today I got a whole hour in before being sent home.

Fuck 'em. I've got shit to do.

I tightened up some songs for tomorrow, and ran through all my gear. Most of the night will be on my Alvarez acoustic-electric, which I can plug right into the bar's PA along with their own mics.

But I also have a cheap acoustic tuned down a half step for a few tunes, and a Yamaha 12-string for a few others. Another mic for that.

Plus the setup for the improvs. I'll be running A's Squier Jazz bass (I still haven't replaced the stolen one) into a Crybaby Wah into an Electro-Harmonix Memory Man Delay, into a Digitech Whammy Pedal into a Morley Volume/Wah into a DOD Delay/Sampler. Hopefully a fuzz will come my way through the store up there, which is kind essential for the true brutal assault of my angry-ambient concept, but if not, I can just make disturbing unfuzzed noises and all will be well...

This setup (along with my electric on a few tunes, and the CD player - I'm about to compile that Hicks/Stanhope thing tonight) will go into my Carvin portable PA. A four-channel combo with amp and speaker in one unit that Sheryl bought me a few years ago but I haven't used yet. Finally it will see its debut tomorrow, and I'll run a line from that into the main PA.

I'm leaving my keyboard (complete with an octave's worth of broken keys) at home. The bar has a piano, and none of the tunes I'd planned on doing at the keyboard are worked up enough to play out, though I might bullshit my way through Tom Waits' The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) on the house piano. That might even be the closer. Seems appropriate somehow. If my band's keyboardist comes up for a tune (and it seems he will, we're going to do Werewolves Of London) he can take the house piano.

I am calm and confident tonight. Some edges still seem rough, but nothing I'm worried about. I've been waiting for this night for almost seven years, and I've never felt so sure of my ability to do it. The past year and a half with the band has given me confidence I've never had. Not only in my performance ability, but in being able to communicate with an audience. I've always felt lacking in that area. it's not something you think much about when you're sitting in your room playing guitar. But it's an essential part of performance, and I finally feel I have my onstage persona in place. Coming to grips with the importance/utter absurdity of what I do for a living has been the key. People LOVE what I've been doing onstage for this past couple years. It's also ridiculous. I'm not a great musician. I'm adequate at best. Most of what I do is bullshit. But it's FUN bullshit, and I've learned how to project that fun along with my own bemusement at the all-encompassing silliness of it. I try to find ways of inserting actual ideas and artistry into it, but the fact is, capital-A art is not a major part of what I do. That's OK for now. I want to find more ways of doing it, but I'm so far removed from it - just from being in a situation where I HAVE to consider other factors first - that finding my way back to feeling like an "artist" again (cough, hack, choke) is something I'm letting sit on the horizon a while longer.

What I do now musically is marginal at best, but fuck it. Beats the shit out of working in a goddamn warehouse for a living. And tomorrow might just end up being as close to the true goal as I've ever been allowed to get. This is a start.


Listening to Jean-Luc Ponty's Enigmatic Ocean as I type. Primo 70's fusion, Allan Holdsworth melting brain cells on top of Ponty's graceful creations. To be on the level of a Holdsworth.............probably never. Oh well...

The store I stopped at was out of my favorite cheap-ass beer. So tonight it's Colt 45. I feel so...well, white, actually.

I got all my shit packed for tomorrow (leaving early) and cleaned the apartment better than it's been for weeks. Meanwhile, I let a Chris Rock DVD run.

I LOVE Chris Rock. I love black comedy. The best of these guys cut right through and make me laugh my balls off.

But my favorite funny white man is in town next week. I'll sell shit if I have to (and given my present income, it looks likely) but I'm gonna see Stanhope at least twice next week, and since he was kind enough to tell me where he's drinking, I NEED to be there. If I have to sleep in my car behind a dumpster from being too fucked up to make it home, so be it. I'm gonna LIVE next week. I'm also going to ask him how I can help his campaign. I don't believe in our chances to make a true difference. I DO believe in the basic degenerate integrity of the cause - SOMEBODY has to stand up and defend the rights of the common man in this country, and you can't name me one cocksucking Republican or Democrat up for the job. This is important - religious and corporate interests have turned out nation into a whining bunch of terrified pussies afraid of our own shadows, afraid of life, afraid of FUN. Those of us without a strong interest in living forever and never having to suffer the consequences of actually ENJOYING ourselves need a voice too. Our country needs a LOT of voices. We need to break down this two-party system of shit and let some goddamn variety in. I don't expect to see it in my lifetime. But I'd rather piss in the wind than be pissed on. I no longer feel any special attachment to this society or our preconcieved notions. I want to drink and smoke and eat too much and say "fuck" a lot, because IT DOESN'T MATTER. If you think it does, you are a FOOL. We need to fix OTHER shit. War, poverty, stupidity, religious facism.

But it won't happen anytime soon, so I'll settle for a cold brew with like-minded assholes. We're not owned by the people who own our leaders, Republican and Democrat alike. The tyranny of the rat race is not yet final. The few of us who stand outside of this circus of shit (or at least stand as far outside of it as we are currently able) can still afford to drink and laugh, because we KNOW better. I've swung hard away from the right-wing in recent years, but I also lost all interest in the mainstream left immediately after the 2004 election when they decided to start "healing" and finding "our similarities other than our differences" and insisting that their values were ultimately the SAME as the right.

Well, fuck you. I DO NOT share these fuckers' values, and nor do I yours. I do not give a fuck about God and country and the sancity of whatever it is you hold sacred. I respect the INDIVIDUAL and his need to be as unhampered by his government as is possible. Anyone who thinks that EITHER of the major parties have this interest at heart (but especially the Republicans - so if you take my rant as somehow still less about YOUR ignorant shit than that of the left, who might suck but are still INFINITELY more tolerable than your Jesus-based hypocritical nonsense, then you can go elsewhere, because you are FAR worse) needs to open their third eye.

We are capable of more than this, people. I am not cynical about our potential. I'm cynical about how we've SQUANDERED it, and how - even in light of all the arguments to the contrary - we still hold on to outdated and useless systems of belief and governance that no longer serves any true purpose. We do not NEED religion. We do not NEED more than the basic bones of government. We do not NEED our desparate dependence on technology and our undying thirst for "safety" and "convinience."

We need to learn and live and grow and be human and make mistakes and learn from them and explore and dream and take chances and fall on our faces and drink and laugh and find the satisfaction that lives within ourselves, no "God"/middleman required.

But since so very few of you fuckers are willing to do so or even know what the fuck I'm talking about, I'll do it myself. Fuck you, anyway. I'm still building my bridge across troubled waters AWAY from your shit. I WILL find a way to operate on the outside. Or die trying.

And next week, I'm gonna sit and drink with someone who's done it already. Who's found a way to sit out on the edges and make a living pissing down your throats.

Vote Stanhope in '08,
Dougie