Recap

Top Album Releases of 2008
1. Lydia - Illuminate
2. Sigur Ros - með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
3. Copeland - You Are My Sunshine
4. Pompeii - Nothing Happens For A Reason
5. Whitley - The Submarine

Top Movies of 2008
1. Milk
2. The Dark Knight
3. Religulous
4. Choke
5. Synecdoche, New York

Top Shows of 2008
1. Sigur Ros / Parachutes
2. Copeland / Lydia / Lights

Most memorable events:
1. Riding the train from Portland to Philadelphia through thousands of miles of snow; freezing cold temperatures; 4-hour pit stop to re-visit Chicago; walking around and getting lost in a new city; going completely numb on the boardwalk in Atlantic City.

2. Turning 21 and gambling for the first time (legally) in Las Vegas!

Five Albums I Could Not Live Without

NYC

Fuck me, fuck you, fuck this whole city and everyone in it. Fuck the panhandlers, grubbing for money, and smiling at me behind my back. Fuck the squeegee men dirtying up the clean windshield of my car. Get a fucking job! Fuck the Sikhs and the Pakistanis bombing down the avenues in decrepit cabs, curry steaming out their pores, stinking up my day. Terrorists in fucking training. SLOW THE FUCK DOWN! Fuck the Chelsea boys with their waxed chests and pumped up biceps. Going down on each other in my parks and on my piers, jingling their dicks on my Channel 35. Fuck the Korean grocers with their pyramids of overpriced fruit and their tulips and roses wrapped in plastic. Ten years in the country, still no speaky English? Fuck the Russians in Brighton Beach. Mobster thugs sitting in cafés, sipping tea in little glasses, sugar cubes between their teeth. Wheelin' and dealin' and schemin'. Go back where you fucking came from! Fuck the black-hatted Chassidim, strolling up and down 47th street in their dirty gabardine with their dandruff. Selling South African apartheid diamonds! Fuck the Wall Street brokers. Self-styled masters of the universe. Michael Douglas, Gordon Gekko wannabe mother fuckers, figuring out new ways to rob hard working people blind. Send those Enron assholes to jail for FUCKING LIFE! You think Bush and Cheney didn't know about that shit? Give me a fucking break! Fuck the Puerto Ricans. 20 to a car, swelling up the welfare rolls, worst fuckin' parade in the city. And don't even get me started on the Dom-in-i-cans, 'cause they make the Puerto Ricans look good. Fuck the Bensonhurst Italians with their pomaded hair, their nylon warm-up suits, their St. Anthony medallions, swinging their Jason Giambi, Louisville slugger baseball bats, trying to audition for the Sopranos. Fuck the Upper East Side wives with their Hermes scarves and their fifty-dollar Balducci artichokes. Overfed faces getting pulled and lifted and stretched, all taut and shiny. You're not fooling anybody, sweetheart! Fuck the uptown brothers. They never pass the ball, they don't want to play defense, they take five steps on every lay-up to the hoop. And then they want to turn around and blame everything on the white man. Slavery ended one hundred and thirty seven years ago. Move the fuck on! Fuck the corrupt cops with their anus-violating plungers and their 41 shots, standing behind a blue wall of silence. You betray our trust! Fuck the priests who put their hands down some innocent child's pants. Fuck the church that protects them, delivering us into evil. And while you're at it, fuck JC! He got off easy! A day on the cross, a weekend in hell, and all the hallelujahs of the legioned angels for eternity! Try seven years in fuckin' Otisville, J! Fuck Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and backward-ass, cave-dwelling, fundamentalist assholes everywhere. On the names of innocent thousands murdered, I pray you spend the rest of eternity with your seventy-two whores roasting in a jet-fuel fire in hell. You towel headed camel jockeys can kiss my royal Irish ass! Fuck this whole city and everyone in it. From the row-houses of Astoria to the penthouses on Park Avenue, from the projects in the Bronx to the lofts in Soho. From the tenements in Alphabet City to the brownstones in Park slope to the split-levels in Staten Island. Let an earthquake crumble it. Let the fires rage. Let it burn to fucking ash and then let the waters rise and submerge this whole rat-infested place.

For the believers!

Definitely worth watching!

Goals and Changes and Bullshit

If only I could finally find a new (full time/decent paying) job;
I could do and have everything I have wanted for a long time.
I'm in dire need of a change.
And a major one.

Twenty One

Well, as of 56 minutes ago, I am 21.
It feels pretty strange. My whole life, it seemed so far away.
But it's always semi depressing on my birthday. It's like another year has gone by even quicker than the last. It seems like I just turned 18. I can't believe it's already been a year since I was on tour with the Inked in Blood guys. Exactly a year ago, on my birthday, I was in Detroit. Weird...

On a lighter note:
Drinks and dinner at the Melting Pot tomorrow night!

Waiting too long for a ship to come

Let's sail away; find our own country. Let's get away, let's push our lives aside. Under the stars, I'll be your lover. With no distractions I'm going to treat you right. When it seems like things are only getting better; when it seems like we can never catch a break... Just keep a hold on me, don't let go if you float away.

Northeast

If you don't go at night, you won't go. Because to see these places by daylight is to see the bottom line of our flimsy contract with life.

Every major city has a section like this one. If a piebald dwarf with advanced leprosy wants to have sex with a kangaroo and a teenage choir, he'll find his way here and get a room. When he's done, he might take the whole gang next door for a cup of Cuban coffee and a sandwich. Nobody would care, as long as he tipped.

Reverse Pioneering

In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.

Friends

It was a couple days after everything that I got the plane ticket to New York from my dad. I was excited to be back in the city. Around Mrs. Calderon, too. But as soon as I saw her I could tell something was different. She was divorced. It turns out Mr. Calderon cheated on her for almost the whole time they were married. That night I told her what happened back home. She said, "It happens at different times for different people, but it happens to everybody. It's the worst part about growing up - heartbreak. But it's a part of life." I told her it seems like a pretty big part. Through her tears she smiled and said,

"That's why you have to believe that life is more than the sum of its parts, kiddo."

I kind of felt my heart breaking for her but I knew that was no good. I wanted to do something for her but there wasn't anything. There wasn't one thing I could really do. The electricity wasn't in her eyes anymore. Her eyes were still reflecting what was there, but now it was the sadness. I started to see it everywhere.

It covers my eyes. Say there's some kids playing baseball. All I see is the one kid they won't let play because he tells corny jokes. And no one thinks they're funny. Or I see a boy and a girl in love and kissing. I just see that they're gonna be one of those sad old couples one day - who just cheats on each other and can't even look at each other in the eye. And I feel it. I feel all of their sadness. I feel it probably even worse than that sad old couple or that corny kid will ever feel it.

blog·ger noun

: the fact that people seem to be getting dumber and dumber. We have all this amazing technology and yet computers have basically turned it into four figure wank machines. People, they don't write anymore. They blog. Instead of talking they text. No punctuation. No grammar. "lol" this. "lmfao" that. It just seems to me that it's just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people in a proto language that resembles more what the cave men used to speak rather than the King's English.

Hence my self-loathing.

Greyhound

It's not the worst way to go once you know what to expect. It's all the people who aren't rich enough for Amtrak or airfare and aren't bothered enough to care how they get to wherever it is they're going. And when they start talking, and they always do, you find that each of them has a story they want to tell. Everyone, no matter how young or old, has some lesson they want to teach. And I sit there and listen and learn all about life from people who have no idea how to live it. Nobody knows how to just shut the fuck up and look out the window anymore.

The bathrooms are tiny and filthy and you have no choice but to piss all over yourself when the bus swerves, but the streetlights look like blurred stars exploding in the window when it rains at night, and you can sleep knowing that if there's an accident and everyone on the bus dies it wasn't your fault.

Forecast

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.
If you've reached middle age and you see how you're never going to be the big famous artist you dreamed of becoming and paint something that will touch and inspire people, really touch and move them and change their lives. You just don't have the talent. You don't have the brains or inspiration. You don't have what it takes to create a masterpiece. If you see how anything you create would just be adding more mediocre shit to a world already crammed with mediocre shit. If you realize you're forty-one years old and you've reached the end of your God-given potential, well, cheers.

Here's mud in your eyes. Bottoms up.
Here's as smart as you're ever going to get.

Just for the record, the weather today is bitter with occasional fits of jealous rage.

Waste of Paint

I want to scream out that it all is nonsense. Your life is one track - can't you see it's pointless? But just then my knees give under me. My head feels weak and suddenly it's clear to see, it's not them, but me who's lost my self identity as I hide behind these books I read while scribbling my poetry. Like art could save a wretch like me with some ideal ideology that no one could hope to achieve. And I'm never real. It's just a sketch in me. And everything I made is trite and cheap and a waste.

Diary

Here in the City of Roses the clouds never fail to cover the annual Rose Festival. The annual soggy-shoe, makeup-smeared, pantie-stained wetness--except cold. Isn't it "April showers bring May flowers"? Well, it's nearly June and we are still waiting for the majority of buds to bloom. This can, also, relate to everyday life in certain situations, at specific times.


The weather today is increasing concern
followed by full-blown dread.

Golden Arches

McDonald's almost hired me one time, and I only applied for the job to meet younger girls. Black girls, Hispanic, white, and Chinese girls, it says right on the job application how McDonald's hires different races and ethnic backgrounds. It's girls, girls, girls, buffet-style. Also on the application McDonald's says if you have any of the following diseases:
Hepatitis A
Salmonella
Shigella
Staphylococcus
Giardia
or Campylobacter, then you may not work there. This is more of a guarantee than you get meeting girls on the street. You can't be too careful. At least at McDonald's she's gone on record saying she's clean. Plus, there's a very good chance she's going to be young. Pimple young. Giggling young. Silly young, and as stupid as me.

Silence

Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value. Imagine traveling the world until you're bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melodramatic soup opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away.

Think of deep outer space, the incredible cold and quiet. The heaven where silence is reward enough.

Invisible Monsters

You're a product of our language and how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you. Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive it. You can't imagine any way to escape. There's no way you can get out. The world is your cradle and your trap.

There isn't any real you in you.

Love♥

Because no one is singular, no feeling is permanent, and no standardized definitions of emotion can exist, there can be no such thing as LOVE. Along with God and patriotism, love is just another great marketing tool.

Another paradox of love is that the lover wants to use the lovee as a physical and emotional toilet, wherein one can flush a variety of messy longings, freaky fantasies, and pathetic needs. If someone really loved someone else, they'd stay the hell away from them.

Lydia

This is what your ears have been missing.



Their sophomore release, Illuminate, is beyond expectations. A masterpiece of an album, in my opinion. Click the banner above to hear some of it and some old songs as well.

If you want to preview and/or buy the album, or each song individually, go to Amazon.com.

I've also written a short review of the new album Here (first one at the top).

Bamboozle Left

NEXT WEEKEND (April 5th & 6th)
I guarantee at least ten, or a billion, of your favorite bands are playing this show. The Bamboozle festival has cloned itself and sent its better half to the west coast. Everyone should go and spend all your (parents') hard-earned money at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine, CA.

Click this flyer for more info and complete lineup.

Welcoming myself

Myspace, livejournal, facebook, purevolume, absolutepunk;
Blogger[spot]? Sure, why not.

It's liberating being able to say/write/express/share whatever I want knowing that, virtually, no one will read the words. But for now, this will be used as a promotional tool. So [whoever's out there] maybe you'll see something you never knew about, want to know more about, wished you'd never knew about, or even that you're glad you came across.

Whatever.