Crickets Chirping

I put together an EP from the songs I have recorded over the last year or so. I call it Halfasstronaut. It’s not so much a work of art as it is a crayola drawing you might stick to your fridge with magnets from places we’ve visited together.

Here’s where the magic happened (sob, I’ll miss it):

You can download a .zip of the entire thing here: Halfasstronaut.zip, ~23MB

Or you can skim the tracks here, along with descriptions of the songs:

Adios, Mofos

This is the last song I recorded in the garage, and it’s probably the peppiest damn thing I’ve ever written.

Identity Crisis

I had an idea for a sitcom whose central gimmick was two identical twins who were separated at birth but then reunite later in life. The twist- they’re both blind, and so they don’t even know they’re twins. They move in together for convenience, since they both need roommates. The plot never puts the two in the same place at the same time (except for when they are both home) so people in the building think that there’s only one of them. Hilarity ensues. Instead of coming up with a script, I just wrote a theme song for it.

Lyrics:

Separated, at birth they were
Identical twins
Iodine was in short supply
So they both went blind

Mother, yeah she was a dirty one

No one in the building knows
that there’s two of them
Not even them
Yeah, you could say they’re whole again

Met each other on the subway
After they’d grown old
Neither was aware of the ironic
Coincidence

One needs a roommate
The other needs rent
No one in the building knows
That there’s two of them
Not even them
Yeah, you could say they’re whole again

Waltz of the Melancholy Vaudevillian

This is a re-recording of a song I did a long time ago, this time with drums. And gratuitous use of flange and reverb.

Our Onion

It’s so hard to be sincere these days. Rather than pour your heart out and risk sounding comically trite, it’s easier to parody true feelings and go for the sarcastic angle and make the comedy sound intentional.

These tiny things are precious to me
Easy to lose, and so hard to find
Digging through these dusty corners
I found the truth and I lost my mind
[see, my mind is tiny :)]

Just like you but not beautiful or true
A perfect match, strike me anywhere
Burning down this family tree
Hope is a curse afflicting the free

Someday I am bound to play
Sweet songs of sorrow till then
These tears ain’t falling
For you

Someday I am bound to play
Sweet songs of sorrow till then
Just keep on peeling
Our onion away

Talking in My Sleep

Can’t keep a secret
Talking in my sleep
I’m gonna tell it all
To the wall

Flower Vase

I bought some flowers in a vase for a friend who was in the hospital. On the drive over there I had to keep the vase in my lap to keep it from falling over, but water splashed out of it all over my crotch. Not wanting to walk around a public place with a soaked groin area (“No, really. It’s water!!!”) I called her boyfriend friend to come get the flowers and take them up to her room. When I went home I wrote this song.

Fron the Neck Down

This girl dumped me for a guy in a wheelchair several years ago. We’re friends now but at the time I didn’t take it very well. I wrote these awful lyrics and Brent shamed me into not actually recording them. It would have gone something like this:

I guess you needed
Someone to push around
But my feet touch the ground

So you dumped me
For a crippled asshole
I guess that’s just how you roll

Now you got yourself
The perfect parking spot
That must count for a lot

From the neck down, I’m alright
It don’t affect my appetite
From the neck down, I work alright

The implication being that perhaps from the neck up, I do not work alright and that’s why she opted for this differently abled fellow.

Don’t Mind Me, I’m Just Flying Debris

Brent played drums on this one, as you may have guessed since they’re nigh flawless (especially compared to my drumming skillz). The squeaking sounds at the beginning are two walkie talkies that I placed facing each other. This creates feedback, and you can control the pitch by how far apart you hold the walkie talkies. It’s sort of like an improvised invisible accordion. That squeals.

Musical equipment I’m selling on Craigslist:

Piccolo Snare

Stage Fright-Proof Guitar (It has magical powers)

Bongos

Acoustic Bass

8 String Bass

Blue Kickball Mic

Bass Pod XT

Guitar Stands

All prices OBO.

Check out this post. Scroll down to the comment by “Lester Bangs.” I don’t know if it’s a joke or not but either way it resonated with me. It’s programmery/Ruby related, but still might be funny to you even if you don’t write code. you know sometimes I think I should write less about code since most of my friends don’t write code, but then I think I should write what I know, and I know code. And bacon. I was talking to Craig at lunch the other day about the adage, “you are what you repeatedly do” – that means that if you don’t have something that you repeatedly do, then you are essentially nothing. That got me thinking about consistency, and how what I do on this blog lacks it. They say it takes a while to “find your voice” but shit, I’ve been doing this since 2002 so maybe I just don’t have one. Is this nothing? Is my existence in the minds of others dictated by the consistency of my words and actions? That sounds like a prison walled with mirrors. Consistency is often foolish, as I’m discovering in my reading of Persuasion by Chialdini (highly recommended, btw. one of my many books in progress :). Why can’t people value variety over consistency? I think I do. Consistent = boring. There’s nothing to take away from something after you’ve experienced it a hundred times. Like kids watching teletubbies saying “again!” do we expect to repeat our grown up experiences and interactions with others over and over? Like Ground Hog Day? That’s my birthday so maybe the filmmakers were trying to tell me something. The one thing that I consistently blog about is bacon, and that’s not really what I’d like to be known for. That’s what people remember about my blog, but it’s not the best stuff I put up here. Like when I ego surf del.icio.us for people who’ve bookmarked my site, bacon shows up. I was reading my friends’ bookmarks on delicious and one of them tagged an amusingly titled blog post as Ruby, and since I’ve been using ruby a lot lately I clicked on it to check it out. Bookmark sharing sites are like a freehand sketch of the collective consciousness (or a geeky corner of it) They’re primarily a way to organize your own external long-term memory, but the secondary function of sharing lets us learn from others when and how we structure that memory with tags. I often see people reading the same things I read even though we might not even know each other I know we both had similar experiences reading something. It might seem pathetically fanboyish to subscribe to a famous person’s delicious bookmarks just because you think they’re smart but I think it’s a good thing. I’m glad people think it’s funny but I don’t really want to be known for bacon. Maybe I should blog more consistently about something else. I have to clarify that what I got out of that ruby-related blog post wasn’t necessarily the same thing that my friend got. See, I would have tagged it “funny” because I think it’s funny. Since that comment was posted 8 days ago, and dave didn’t bookmark it until yesterday, he most likely saw the comment but didn’t find it remarkable. So that’s an example of one of the gaps in the retraced lines of the aforementioned freehand sketch of the collective consciousness.

Oh dear god. This stuff is so good it’s going on the Awesome List.

I’ve seen it in the freezer at HEB for a while now, and finally got around to trying it tonight. It’s everything I hoped it would be, and then some.

Josh: Man, I’ve been working on this R stuff all day…
Me: Yeah?
Josh: Seriously, it’s driving me nuts.
Me: [laughing]
Josh: what’s wrong with you?
Me: [still laughing, can't stop]
Josh: oh.

The best kinds of jokes are unintentional.

I wonder if I’m just dreaming this whole thing about leaving Austin, that I’m going to wake up and, oh no, I’m still stuck here. Very much like the escape hallucination in Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.

I first read that story in a dtv zweisprachig short story collection back in high school while studying German. Zweisprachig books are written such that one page is in English (or another language besides German), and the facing page its translation auf Deutsch.

That wikipedia page on Ambrose Bierce’s story mentions The Secret Miracle by Borges, who spent his early career doing translations so it’s funny that I run into it by way of the zweisprachig story.

Anyway I just picked up Borges’ Labryths this past weekend. So I read The Secret Miracle (great story) and this one line struck me:

Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.

I have a lot of projects that I talk about but don’t finish, songs that are recorded but incomplete. Given that I won’t have much time or space to finish them once I move out to the bay, I feel pressure to tie up some of these loose ends while I’m still here and have the opportunity to do so.

more Borges quotes

No, not that one.

This one.

“There were no victories. Surely no one in their right mind wants to go back to those dark days,” said Moore, a member of the Royal Green Jackets Regiment. “All it brought was pain, death and destruction.”