i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

I didn't ... mean to disappear for two months. I swear I really didn't. Work just got crazy, and then my life got crazy (crazy good), and college baseball started, and a million bands started touring, and ... then it was March and I hadn't posted since January.

Then it was March, and I was 30. Today! I have a three in front of my name now. A THREE. I AM OLD.

So. Yeah. I'm not dead. I'm just busy; I'm reading, and trying to comment but sometimes failing, and I'm taking a million photos and watching a million baseball games (9, 10 and 11 of the year this weekend! AND they count!) and going to concerts and trying to keep my head above water at work. I'm going to try to get back into the LJ swing of things.

And I'm 30.

Which is something.

Hi.

Since the mid-nineties, Justin has been saying, ironically or not, that this is how your first entry of the new year should always be, and so it is.

1. tales of new year's festivities
   
   Watched three quarters of Kiffykins vs. The Beam, went to a party with shep., drank some Crown Royale and Miller Light, had a good time.
   
   Oh, and I walked into a wall. Yeah, I'm awesome.
   
   
2. accounting for some unfinished business
   
   Last year on New Year's Day, I said: I am going to take photos, dance, get a new tattoo, buy a prime lens, go to a lot of concerts, feed starving rock musicians when they're not on tour, and watch some tall dudes who ball try to do something amazing. and Gain a paid publication credit. Shoot a band's promo photos. Explore this amazing state I live in. Take a picture every day. Manage my money better. Get the Stump's brakes fixed. See 100 shows. Eat a lot of club sandwiches at Linda's. Go on the road with some of my boys for at least a couple of days. Swim in the ocean as much as possible. Take pictures of snow.
   
   I saw a national title for the basketball team. I bought two prime lenses. I missed 100 shows due to 10 weeks of unemployment, but saw my 89th two weeks ago. Instead of getting the Stump's brakes fixed, I bought a new car. I shot some promo photos. Until I got laid off, I ate at Linda's at least once a week. I didn't get paid but I did have a half page shot published in the Triad's independent weekly paper. I posted more than 4500 photos to Flickr, though I didn't shoot every day. I took pictures of snow, on Inauguration Day. shep. and I drove all over the state, to Charleston, to Virginia, and to Tennessee twice.
   
   I didn't get a new tattoo and I was sometimes crap at money management and I didn't go on the road with anybody. But I can always do those things later.
   
   
3. envisioning the year ahead
   
   Stockpiling vacation time, all the baseball in the world, no more food photography unless I want to shoot something presented amazingly well, Bristol again in September, hopefully a crazy cave sight-seeing weekend with A., shows upon shows upon shows, albums by bands I love better and best, studio time with some of my boys. Living and not just surviving.
   
   I'm working on a photo and writing project for March. I'll be 30 on the 18th of March.
   
   
4. any sort of resolutions
   
   This year, I'm going to be happy.
   
   
5. an extended and unfortunately eloquent harangue
   
   swore to myself that i would never say good-bye, so instead of good-bye, i'll just say goodnight
   
   
6. a final thought composed in silence
   
   shep. is my partner in every crime but especially the ones involving TJ Yates, poetry portfolios, Texans, and bartenders dressed like the guys from 300; Lani has known me longer than anyone; t. is always willing to listen to me bitch and bitch and bitch, and then she gives good advice; Ash is always willing to stop and take that photo, and always willing to mediate, and always willing to offer us her family, and I love her for it; the American Aquarium boys are my favorite drunk rock stars to offer food and manfresheners to; the Holy Ghost boys opened a dozen doors for me just by loving me back; a hell of a lot of you guys kept me going this year at those times when I wasn't sure I knew how to; and finally, Billy Donovan, who hates everyone and poops passive-aggressively, but who loves me and is always willing to sit in my lap and give me kisses whenever I need some love.
   
   I remain, as always, thankful for direct flights, cordless drills, my family, Chicago public transportation, wireless internet, OS X, photos of Ben Browder kissing Michael Shanks, torrents of television shows from the BBC and Canadia, Kerry Wood as bad-ass new relief god (even in Cleveland), Matt Wieters and his throwing arm and his ass, prime lenses, sunrise at the beach, live music, successful college basketball (and baseball) teams, [items redacted], Patrick Stump, Frank Iero, and Jon Walker, and Keira's ass. You know. The important things.

So far 2010 hasn't sucked!

Blah blah blah self-reflective-cakes.

( one of those end of year memes, sneaking in under the wire )

THERE. HAPPY NEW YEAR. DON'T DO ANYONE I WOULDN'T DO.

I've been making what I call a Christmas mix -- that is, not holiday songs but a mix made at the holidays -- since 1997; first they were tapes, then for a few years cds, and finally, in the digital age, the last five years have been downloadable zip files, and this year is no exception. These are songs -- primarily but not necessarily released in 2009 -- that meant something to me this year, for various reasons, and they are for you. The whole shebang is available as a zip file [here] (90MB, .zip). (I didn't upload the tracks individually this year; sorry! I just ran out of time.)

Happy holidays, happy 2009, happy music sharing -- whatever floats your boat. This is from me to you. 2009 was basically a year of one step forward, two enormous punches in the face back, but despite all that, I was pretty fucking happy. So.

( the lead in other people's dreams )

If you haven't commented in a while and you download this, now is a good time to say hi to me. I'm just saying.

accurate summation of my life, represented by things i actually accomplished this weekend, in list form, out of chronological order:

• did laundry.
  
  
• found missing striped knee socks! (under bed, with several paperback mystery novels and a lot of cat hair.)
  
  
• had bizarre phone conversation with my sister where i thought her garbled voice mail was about a could-have-been-read-as-bitchy email i sent her and my parents saturday morning and mom wanted me to apologize for it, but it was really about a parental unit unexpectedly having a non-threatening-but-sudden-onset medical issue.
  
  
• mitigated familial worry by drinking half a bottle of wine. fell asleep on the couch and drooled on the john irving novel i'm re-reading.
  
  
• sent kickthebeat approximately 78 text messages about how gay the heisman ceremony was. (it was gay. it was really, really gay. tebow, why don't you gaze lovingly at colt mccoy over enormous sandwiches some more, and then make another nationally televised thinly veiled bitchy comment about his friendship with sam bradford? BECAUSE THAT WAS BEAUTIFUL. video of their sandwich date, and also there is this beautiful OH GOD TEBOW HIT ON COLT HARDER PLEASE video. tim tebow's desperate desire to make colt mccoy like him warms my cold black heart something awful.)
  
  
• watched about 14 hours of espn because i was too lazy to change the channel.
  
  
• went to a show friday night, enjoyed the music, bitched at triskellita about the hipsters, the red light bulbs, and the fact that my head hurt. the music and the company were really awesome, though, as usual.
  
  
• ate an entire pizza.

now i'm watching episodes of bones i've already seen on the tivo, and tonight i'm going out to see micah schnabel of two cow garage (again), and then it's just one more full week of work before a mercifully short week before christmas and a trip to the beach. the beach makes everything okay.

my point being, when i don't post to livejournal, all you are really missing is endless bitching about hipsters and crappy venue lighting, and probably out of line speculation about colt mccoy's sex life.

note that this is not going to stop me from speculating about colt mccoy's sex life, just that i know it's a little, you know, weird.

Thank you for all the snowflakes, both named givers and anonymous folk! You are brightening my days.


In other news, our network at work fell over completely dead today, and there's really nothing funnier than an office full of federal employees trying to figure out what to do with themselves when literally 99% of our work flow depends on our mainframe access. Put it this way: I took a couple of claims on paper, I read a little policy, but my big achievement of the day was winning $4000 at solitaire from the little people in my iPod, until the batteries got too low to play anymore.

If the network is still hosed tomorrow, I may burn four hours of leave and go home at noon, workload be damned.

OH! ALSO: my iPod has recently started crashing iTunes whenever I try to sync it; I'm running OSX.5.8, iTunes 9.something, and iPod software 2.0.1, but this started before I upgraded to iTunes 9. It syncs actively for about two minutes every time, and then freezes up; all my music is syncing as are photos that were on there before this started happening, but no podcasts, no playlists (which makes it weird that there's music still on there, because I sync content via playlists), and no album art. I can't turn anything up via Google. Anybody have any ideas? Leave 'em here. I'm going to restore it and trying a full resync of everything, but I'd rather find a fix that didn't make me have to do that.

Now, nap time.

We went to the beach this weekend and the level of my desire to go to work tomorrow is negative right now.

Uhhhhhhhhhh, so I didn't post at all in September. That may be the first month I've gone in my entire livejournal-having career where I haven't posted at least once. Sorry, kids. I swear I'm not dead. Just busy.

The fact is: the not-so-new job really takes it out of me during the week, and I had forgotten how real full-time employment sort of whoops your ass no matter how much you like your job (which I do); I've been crazy busy with travel and shows and out of town guests and 14-hour football Saturdays when I'm not at work; I've been really up in my own head ... well, not even recently. Most of 2009 I've been up in my own head, working stuff out and planning photo projects and thinking about stuff that isn't necessarily suited to posting frequently to livejournal. 29 has mostly been a pretty spectacularly shitty year, for a variety of reasons, but it's gotten me thinking hard about a lot of stuff I needed to think about, so at least there's that.

I feel guilty when I don't post, though, so I will do my best in the future to be better about it. Hi. What's up? Have you all forgotten that I exist?

Here are some things that I have been thinking about recently:

• The new Big Star box set, Keep An Eye On The Sky, is tremendous. Big Star is generally considered to be one of the, if not the, first "power pop" band to come out of the States, and they're tragically under-known these days. There's a version of "Thirteen" on the first disc that just about stopped my heart with how gorgeous it is. In other news, I love all box sets full of rarities and outtakes and demo versions of things. The Faces box set from a few years back is also fantastic, for example.
  
  
• I bought a new camera lens, a gorgeous little Nikon E-series 100mm/f2.8. It'll never replace my beloved 50mm in versatility, but it's a bit of a wonder in concert venues -- the sharpness of it even at f2.8 is miraculous. Now to just squash the glass envy down for another six months or so, which is about the interval best left for expensive purchases that I might later regret. (I don't regret this particular purchase, but do I really need a Sigma 10-20mm wide angle macro lens? No. No, I don't, at least right now. Doesn't stop me from wanting one.)
  
  
• Mike Leach has a great habit of producing quarterbacks I simply adore despite never having heard of them before they become the next Red Raider 4000 yard passing king. Texas Tech starter Taylor Potts has an amazing mustache, a great arm, and was nearly decapitated by the Texas d-line a few weeks back and kept playing, and over the weekend back-up Steven Sheffield threw for more than 400 yards when Potts was out with a concussion. In other football news, things I am already tired of hearing about this season: Tim Tebow; Bobby Bowden. Play or don't play, retire or keep coaching Florida State into mediocrity, I really don't fucking care. NEXT.
  
  
• I'm rooting for the Yankees in the playoffs. In part this is because my baseball team is bad and I live with a Yankees fan and it's nice to have an interest in a team that wins, but mostly it's because my late grandfather, who passed away in July, was a lifelong -- 70+ years -- Yankees fan. If the Yankees win the World Series this year, it'll be at least, unintentionally, a little in part for my Papou. And I will defend the fuck out of my choice to root for this team, this year, to the death.
  
  
• The next few weeks are an even crazier-than-usual blur with the end of training and going back to finally actually start doing my new job, a million concerts both here and out of town alike, football, the State Fair, fall college baseball, a flying visit from my mom and her siblings, and I'm not going to front: it'll probably be November before I post again. But at least I'll be having fun while I'm not here? :D? :D?

Today is a federal holiday. I'm wearing pajamas and watching SportsCenter and drinking coffee on a Monday morning. Doesn't get better than this.

You guys, I really got nothing. I just feel guilty when I don't post for, uh, a month.

• I've mostly been running around on a crazy concert schedule, taking pictures, watching baseball, and suffering through the epic endless training program for my new job. It's a pretty good life.
  
  
• I've even picked up some paid (!!!) photo work lately, and not just paid in: guest list spots; beer; offers of sexual favors; offers of illegal drugs; eternal gratitude. Paid in cash and real credits. It's crazy and weird and amazing, and I feel like a failure at it all the time.
  
  
• The new job, which is not so new anymore, is awesome. Stressful and scary, sometimes, but awesome.
  
  
• I am in search of an album, because I want to hear it before I buy it; I want to know if it's as good as their first album, which was quietly supremely stellar. I suspect no one out there has it, because random indie Americana bands from Brooklyn aren't, you know, readily available on the internets, but if anybody has Jones Street Station's In Verses, gimme that album now. I'll trade you my undying affection for it.
  
  
• Thanks to katlike, I discovered and am really loving C-Monster's blog, which is about Art with a Big A. Recommend some other blogs to me that are like this one? I'm less interested in the scene in a particular city -- unless it's one of the Triangle cities -- than I am in Art In General.
  
  
• Here, have the song I can't get out of my head this week: [The Rosebuds -- "Hold Hands And Fight"] 3MB, .mp3. The thing I love about Ivan and Kelly is that they make this music with supremely depressing lyrics and it sounds so goddamned cheerful.

So far today the best thing I've accomplished was washing a cat. It was about as much fun as you'd expect.

A song I can't get enough of lately:

[Ha Ha Tonka -- "12 Inch 3 Speed Oscillating Fan"] 4MB, .mp3. I love this song musically; I love the parts where everything drops out but the vocals and the kick drum, I love the bass line, I love the guitar solo. I love that of all the rhymes for "fan" they could have chosen, they went with "divan". I love the line cooling off the living rooms across these troubled lands. I love that I can hear the barest hint of their album stuff in the sound of this but at the same time it doesn't sound anything like the albums at all. (Studio album Ha Ha Tonka is ... a lot more complex and creepy and intimate than this. This is like a song that a stoned Brent Best would have written for Slobberbone. If you like this, you will not necessarily like the rest of Ha Ha Tonka's stuff. You might like Slobberbone, though.) And I love beyond belief that it is, in fact, a song about a 12 inch 3 speed oscillating fan and the narrator's love for it during a heat wave.

This song is awesome.

Have good weekends, kids. xoxo.