y'all can't all be wrong: June 2003

Artist: BoDeans
Song: Far Far Away From My Heart
Album: Joe Dirt Car
Year: 1995
Lyrics: bodeans.net

It's funny how that works. We can build empires, but when it comes to doing something simple, the task always seems to contort into a larger, unbreakable monster. My simple task was to find a song for this Song of the Week idea and, immediately, the consciousness of simplicity starting eating away at me. (Agonistic) gods forbid I choose something too outlandish, too avant-garde or mother-of-all-gods forbid I choose something too kitschy. Right there I killed thoughts of the Cars, Rebekah Del Rio, and Russell Gunn for seminal SOTW ideas (y'all can figure out the associative order). So, to honor elusive simplicity, I chose a band from my hometown: Waukesha, WI, home of Les Paul, Tim Cahill, and the *BoDeans*. Waukesha is a dump place -- a typical western exurb of any insipid suburb, of any Midwestern urban center that has a big lake on its east side. But I'm a sucker for nostalgia and statriotism and like everyone else from Wisconsin knows, life really does revolve around cheese, bratwursts, and the Green Bay Packers ('cept I don't eat meat anymore, but this is just a digression of digression). Homeward yearning is pure simplicity. It's that unobtainable metaphorical mother with ever welcoming arms. So you can't get there, but simple songs will get you close... Truthfully, I never listened to the BoDeans when I lived in 53188. It's that disease where an outside opinion, regardless of its invalidity, is somehow taken above and beyond those in local scope. So, here, in Seattle, which has very little to do with Waukesha or the BoDeans -- this is where the BoDeans burned a (4-non-Blondie) rapture into my heart. For those that don't know, I bounced around for nearly two years without a job. Along the way I picked up some serious upper level psychology. Thank god I could rave to all of my friends about all the traveling I was doing, 'cause a lot of the days the mirror looked funky. Really, the only thing that kept the whole experience from morphing into some unwanted ascetical nightmare is that the un-employment checks (essentially) never ran out. That -- and the BoDeans. Joe Dirt Car, a 1995 double-live CD. There's a bunch of tunes I could have chosen. "Idaho", "Naked", and "Looking For Me Somewhere" all come to mind, but in the end, "Far Far Away From My Heart" won out. It's musing how the spirit takes comfort in the irony of a sad song providing cheer.

Yes, but I know everything will be all right... I planted a garden today -- what more do I need?

Artist: Queen
Song: Love of My Life
Album: A Night At The Opera
Year: 1975

Last week's writing will probably act as a lifelong emetic for me, but time will tell. Yuck.

I'm reasonably tapped -- mostly caused by a week filled with cat-sitting and lots of mulling over what song I was going to pull for SOTW volume 2 (SOTW: the new big game inside my head). I finally found one, but it took a lot of self-convincing and it took a huge sidestep of an intellectual hurdle. (In oblique fashion) there are many reasons why this week's song should have failed at the cut, but out of the ashes of burnout, I cleared the hurdle -- but song explication soon, cat sitting ramblings now.

Last week I stumbled upon the metaphor of cat (or house, or dog, or plant, etc.) sitting. It's a lonely metaphor, a truly isolating experience. Normally, a home proffers warm and amiable feelings, but when it's not your home and when the home's owner is in Costa Rica drinking Cuba Libres (from a can!), then it's a different story. No one will ever call on you when you are cat sitting. The phone will never ring for you when you are cat sitting. Destiny stops and your life becomes masked by someone else's temporary absence. It gnawed on me so much; I had to call a friend to discuss. That discussion illuminated the positive sides to the isolation of cat sitting. And, although I am a champion of having that place you can go where nobody knows your name, when it's a friend's living room and a daily experience, that's a bit much.

So from volume 1 to volume 2, home surfaces again. Hmmm, maybe it'd be like returning from a holiday home, taking psychotropics, having your friend ask "how was home?" and then realizing five minutes into your (probably unwanted) reply/monologue that you've thoroughly switched home the concept and home the location. It's how holes get punched into things.

Artist: Tina & the B-Side Movement
Song: Play That Fool
Album: Salvation
Year: 1996

I fell asleep with my head on my computer's keyboard last night. Technically, my head was resting on the wrist pad -- it's definitely more comfortable that way, but either way I haven't done that since my nearly role-playing-extremist software days at The Evergreen State College. It's a shame that it hasn't happened more.

In my family I'm the baby by a mile. Now that I have acquired some years, it's a bit freaky thinking about the age of my immediate family -- so much so that I've decided that I'm going to start living peoples' midlife crises for them. I'll surrogate their midlife crises now in exchange for not having mine later. Someone needs to worry for them -- we can't have too many people dancing around naively happy at age 45. I'm all for happiness, but I like freaking out too. So if I am allowed to freakout about 45 at 31, then I'll simultaneously keep my worry cup full and preserve the world's happiness balance.

Cognizance of destiny's squiggly line is bit tricky: there's definite admiration in a waylaid course towards personal definition. On the other hand denial of *wasted time* is manifest bullshit and extreme laziness. If I had to tag a personal definition on certainty -- it'd be found in the moments where I know I'm wasting my time. It's crazy scary too -- sloths can rationalize much better than they can hang from trees -- and if I had to define my hell it would be the moments I rationalize my indolence.

Artist: Nåid
Song: And When I Heard Her, I Knew We Were Going The Right Way
Album: Nåid
Year: 1996

eatpaste.com ??? C'mon, that's just not fair -- that should have been my site. Now, I am wondering if I have a cosmic double out there? Forget Internet dating, just find that random domain name that you really like and that somebody else has all ready scooped up. Bam -- you've found your (in?)significant other.

Nevertheless, to test the other side of the nothing-new-under-the-sun theory, here is a list of still available domain names (as of 2003-06-06):

012358.com
hisnameismynametoo.com
givemesomecandy.com
sitdownandshutup.com
theseampsgoto11.com
youwontforgetit.com
mymothersmaidenname.com
orangehightops.com

You would think that if you went through the trouble of registering johnjacobjingleheimerschmidt.com you would also fork over the cash for hisnameismynametoo.com Similarly, the first one on the list is the first six numbers of the Fibonacci sequence (the fist five are taken). A great, useless, expensive, and somewhat-performance-art piece would be to register every number in the sequence (up to the domain name length limit). Then have each domain contain a page with its given number and have that number be a hyperlink to the next number in the sequence (e.g. 8.com points to 13.com and 13.com points to 21.com and so forth). Is it anymore absurd than the John Cage piece that is currently being played -- the one that is going to take a couple of hundred years to finish? (639 years, click here)

Forgoing segues, SOTW Volume 4 is from a band from Sweden. I bought the CD on the recommendation of a friend of a friend (Matt then Mark) on the second to last day of my 2001 Stockholm trip. Less than a day after returning from Stockholm, two of my friends and I piled into a car and drove straight to San Diego. The Nåid (pronounced noid) CD was one of the few CDs we listened to en route. The trip was misery personified: three people, two weeks of camping gear, one Beetle, and no sleep. Plus, I had written incessantly in Stockholm. Most of it was for the betterment of humanity. However, one piece -- mailed in an unforgettable-headache-provoking-yellow envelope -- that one had other intentions (you know, words good and bad, they do what they're told without conscience). That one piece of (unfortunately) mailed cruel intentions -- it never left my mind the entire trip.

Artist: Mike Keneally & Beer for Dolphins
Song: Kedgeree
Album: Dancing
Year: 2000

One million-plus registered users on Blogger and I'm telling myself, blog-this or blog-off -- the world surely doesn't need one million and one blogs. Especially, especially in light of Cristina Nehring's very recent Harper's Magazine article, "Our Essays Ourselves" (Harper's, May 2003) which severely questions the autobiographical banality of the modern essay. Even more especially that a Google search on this essay yields results that only includes blogs. Further damning is that one of those blogs cites a line that I wanted to use for this essay:

No detail strikes these writers as too small or too banal to include: if they noticed it, it's important...

That even writers as formidable as Frazier and McPhee have yielded to such pedestrian rehearsals is testimony to the pettily autobiographical frenzy that has lately seized American essayists -- a frenzy for cozy, complacent, and oddly insular self-revelation that has swallowed them up in numbers.

So, for every blog that's out there, there are easily ten reasons it should desist. Combine that with Nehring's article and I had nearly enough reason for me to scrap the "y'all can't all be wrong" blog before I even made my first post. But, as I assembled my blog and pondered over such things as which shade of gray is the coolest or whether to use horizontal or vertical menus -- I happened upon a few sites that propelled me forward:

The being jennifer garrett blog provided instant comfort to my fears of bombarding the world with insipid details of my life (like those shades of gray I just mentioned). The "being jennifer garrett" description is "Everyday an adventure in mediocrity," and I'm thinking hey, there's at least one blogger out there who isn't trying to fool anybody. In fact I created a word for this: derationalized. So if "being jennifer garrett" is the first derationalized blog, perhaps "y'all can't all be wrong" will be the second?

Moreover, I didn't create my blog in a quest for greatness, nor did I create it to disseminate dull personal details. I did it because I felt I had no choice in the matter -- it was borne from the essence of incitement. There's a great Molière quote that is also found on the "being jennifer garrett" blog:

My journals and thousands of letters and emails prove my love for writing. "y'all can't be wrong"/Song of the Week is for my few close friends (except for the few who sent me hate mail for spamming them). If I never get to the prostitution stage -- I'm OK with that.

You know that you've achieved serious bachelorhood when you have an empty pizza box in the garbage, an empty pizza box in the fridge, and a soon to be empty pizza box on its way. It reminds me of my friends who would run out of toilet paper and paper towels -- it left little to explain when you saw a stack of coffee filters in the bathroom. Man, what's the cost-per-wipe on that?

The title of this post is a thought that kept popping in my head while designing my site this past weekend. Our technical progress has made it possible to identify good bars and restaurants by their lack of neon (unless, of course they are beer signs). I mean, check out these hands:

I spent forever adjusting the height of each of them -- shifting them one pixel one way or the other. What's funny is that nobody has sent me an email remarking how well the hands are aligned on my homepage.

Check out this word: profundity. At first I called bullshit on it, but I like the "intellectual depth" part of it. It was found here. Following the learn-a-new-2-u-word trail leads to this: abstruse and then to this recondite. Like Todd Rundgren said, "we can go all night if you want us to," though that's probably a bad memory paraphrase.

This was from an email dialogue discussing the Living Colour song, "Funny Vibe." Andrew's comments provoked me to write some tongue-in-cheek-in-angst lyrics:

----- Original Message -----
From: Andrew
To: TQ
Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003
Subject: shoreline

Funny vibe is great! I listened to that CD right before our car was stolen on one of our runs up to Bellingham (might've been the show that you came to), and was blown away by the music *and* political content. Nobody was trying to write shit like that at that time. Seems that was right at the beginning of the "my life sucks, and I don't give a crap" phase of lyric writing. And here they are writing some really aggressive political stuff!

-a
----- Original Message -----
From: TQ
To: Andrew
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Subject: Re: shoreline

Funny Vibe!!! Hey, I like writing "my life sucks" lyrics:

"My life sucks, way more than yours.
I weep and drown myself in my own shit
And I don't even care anymore
Because what's the point when there's none?"

OK, back to this: Jason's rules for the NYC subway. I just got back from an elevator ride that ended with 4 people trying to get on before I could get out. I think this calls for t-shirts with huge block letters that say "Out First, Then In." Actually, if someone hasn't done this already, I will be disappointed in the collective creativity of humankind.

I acknowledge that I am on the threshold of pale exhaustion and some kind of whiny forever-sickness that's got me hacking up black particles. Regardless, that doesn't change my polar experiences with the Seattle Metro bus process.

Today's experience ran on the foul side. I wanted desperately to arrive home and grind up some dried tofu and mix it with chicken by-product. I'd throw the concoction into a stainless steel cat bowl that was two days tuna-encrusted and I'd get down on all fours and plant my face straight into it. I'd consume the fodder ravenously and without conscience. I'd clean my face, not by napkin -- but by rapidly flapping my head side to side. The bits and chunks of tofu mash with chicken by-product would be flung from my face, freckling the surrounding walls and carpet.

Then I could freely snarl and spit, sneer and growl, and ride angry buses or drive angry cars and run over people ignorantly. Then I'd have subject-verb agreement between my neo-cortex and flesh and the bus thing would never tweak me again.

Anybody notice that Blogging greatly increases voyeuristic skills? Six billion bloggers and six billion voyeurs. If everyone is a voyeur does it negate the need for the word?

I'm writing too much for my lack of sleep and lack of web traffic -- OH FOCK NO -- I really wanted to throw in a reworded Frank Zappa lyric here ("I'm a blogger man; I can't help myself"), so I did a Google search on it and a damn blog entry popped up. It even seems reworded, unless FZ made two versions (these are the lyrics according to my memory). This is insanity.

Anyway, little to no traffic. Ah, it makes sense now. Dearth came first. That made it convenient to create death. Death from dearth -- I'm your epitaph creation machine. No, I won't die, but I feel this way too (the generate-a-reaction part).

Damn, I wrote *two* things tonight. Don't forsake the other one for this one. It's lonely there lower on the page.

Side note. I lifted the quotation formatting from http://kottke.org/ Tell me if I've lifted anything else. I've got a lot of extra room in my sub-conscience and life is too short not to cite.

Tonight I will roll on tranquilizers. If I don't, the world will despise everything I say and I'm in such a mood to say it. I'm not afraid to spite my existence to spare those who are innocent (and even those who are less innocent). I'll stay in my happy-go-lucky tamped groove and y'all can smile around me. I'd rather be shit on than spit on. I'd rather be punched in the face than smacked in the back. I'd rather have my head blown away than have my nose blown off. That's just who I am -- even if it's puerile and wrong and selfish. Do what you feel. Doowutchyalike. Extreme apologies to being jennifer garrett. I'm not sure if I ever think. I'd like to think I do... Psychoanalytic theory is composed of the id, ego, and superego. Blog reality is composed of writers, voyeurs, and narcissists. Tonight I'm letting the narcissism and ego channel me in undesired ways. But soon I'll be on my tamped groove and y'all will never know. We'll all be celebrating the solstice, talking about nothing, and pulling David Crosbys on our livers. But, we'll all be happy, so what the fuck. If former vice presidents can invent Internets and current presidents can point fingers at history revisionists -- while their writers are long in the editing room, then it was *me* who invented the word paroxysm. And the thing is I'll use it. Just not tonight. Tamped groove.

Looks like another long night is on tap. I think my creative subconscious craves pale exhaustion. It's like when my body gives up, my mind turns on the jets. I think I can get SOTW Volume 6 finished before 4:00 -- me against the blogger.com post clock. The only thing that sucks about tonight is that I'm out of beer. A beer usually feels good around 1:30. I don't like to forego sleep and I tend to get real cranky and edgy if I push it too late (if you live alone, does it matter if you are cranky?). Pushing it too late kills my already challenged editing skills -- but I'll take the creative jolt trade-off.

Artist: The Kinks
Song: The Village Green Preservation Society
Album: The Village Green Preservation Society
Year: 1968

Six is going to be flawed. It's late so I'm already hosed on time. I'm frustrated because I have topics that I want to cover, but no song to accompany them; and, I have songs, but they would all be out of context in relation to my planned topics. Now I am doubly hosing myself since I'm writing about what I want to write about instead of just writing about it.

I'm also sidetracked since the past week immersed me into the blog underworld and I want to cover those emotions first since they are foremost in my mind. In time Song of the Week will settle back into its intent and I'll use the remaining six days to blog about blogging or any other topic the doesn't fit within the bounds of SOTW. So sublimation tomorrow, impulsiveness today.

Actually, I was kicking through the channels earlier and Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors" was on VH1 Classic. So much of that song is aligned with the framework of my emotions of the past week. I heard it and knew it was volume six. Unfortunately, I don't own the CD, plus none of you would download it since it's Cyndi Lauper for fucksake. Maybe I'll just throw a dart and see where it lands.

Blogs of notice (one is defunct): o2bee and waxy.org and indierocket. It's a mother, daughter, and son blog combination (independently maintained). Well, ostensibly it is -- though I highly doubt that it isn't. That would be a cool thing to pull off -- write three different blogs from the perspective of individual family members. The things life allows you to do.

o2bee is a chilly site -- at present she's covering her mother's severe sickness and imminent death. Y'all can check that part out if you want to. The site makes me groove 'cause her writing reminds me of someone scraping out her hardest-of-hardcore insides and then serving them up on one of those steely cold platters (the kind you might write about in a beginning poetry class). Or maybe it isn't serving-up, but more-exactly, force feeding and cramming down. I like either method. It makes me feel like someone stole my eighth grade journal and posted it on Google's front page.

Try mixing an iced-double-tall mocha, a brick sized rice krispies treat, and 3.5 hours sleep. That's pretty good -- it's AM punch-drunkenness. Then try the aforementioned combo while standing in a deli packed full of people when The Doobie Brothers' "What A Fool Believes" is playing on the radio. You'll soon be dancing through the aisles between the bottled water and Almond Joys. Screw Allen Ginsberg -- the FBI really has monitored the wrong artists. Michael McDonald was way more insidious for creating such a guilty addiction.

Hmm, I am thinking about moving to Movable Type. Then I could add comments to my blog and really reinforce how many people aren't reading it.

I hate the way my posts scroll to the bottom as I post new things. I guess that's the way the world works, new replacing old [update, 2003-07-03, here is a post that deals with the direction that posts float away and conglomerate: posts are the atomic element of weblogs]. Abhorrence of it is merely a psychological flaw. At least one blogger struck back at this: Mighty Girl's My Favorite Posts.

My favorite post is this one: Bleh! Though it isn't a post, nor a blog. Just a custom HTTP 410 message. The page has been around since 2001; I hope it stays forever.

Virtual knives (or -- bigger freaks than me): Stab Things (love this one: smile)

Don't get a cell phone. Even as a gift from a dream friend. I hate that part in the user manual where it says "for best results use the entire time you are driving or in a restaurant." You would think technology would have evolved and removed that requirement.

Then, as I complain about no web traffic and how SOTW Vol 6 really sapped me (though I really like it, at least I'm not complaining about that or crossing out everything I wrote) -- then as I complain about all the things I'm going to complain about today, I think of Tim Cahill:

I put my Evergreen State College license plates on my car on Monday. Officially it's The Evergreen State College, but "my The Evergreen..." sounds terrible. My plate number is 0279 so if you are driving around Seattle, you'll know exactly who you are giving the middle finger to.

Admittedly, collegiate plates are a wank idea. But it's Evergreen (no grades, no glory), so the plates really fall into the so-wrong-it's-beautiful category. Another entry in that category is Evergreen's collegiate basketball program (M's W's). That's so wrong, well...

I love the blindness of blogs. I feel like I'm getting the inside content of people's brains without all that cosmetic static that we tend to paint our bodies with. Of course, cosmetics also extend into the blog world. However, regardless of what font gets used, the order and arrangement of words prevails. Yep, even big-ugly-white-guys can have their blogs.

'cept right now, there's a gas shortage, my hood ornament is missing, and I just lost a hubcap going around the last bend. Y'all sick of me whining about it yet? NO TRAFFIC. Traffic is trickling. Although, I am being unfair to myself. I've got readers -- and I know who you are! I'm humbled; I'm beyond flattered. This whole blog thing was a hiccup of an idea -- and now I'm eating peanut butter and permanently standing on my head, but I can't stop. Somebody post something in my non-extant-comments-section and scare me back to philistine recliner shopping -- 'cause right now my ego's got more syllables than megalomaniacally. It's sick and embarrassing.

What the hell is ycabw turning into? A photoblog? I love my guys, Pascal and Madison. They don't care about traffic. I don't know, maybe I'll pop over to friendster and try to get laid from friends of friends. Maybe I'll just link to a real popular site, be a link whore and hope to gain traffic. In the meantime my scanner is my excuse for the lack of words. If you're desperate, you can find words at the fossumstream.

I spent the entire weekend in bed with Movable Type. And now, among other things, ycabw has comments. Not everything is in place yet; and, to add to my traffic woes, I nixed the sub domain. So point your browsers at http://tqed.com/ instead of http://ycabw.tqed.com/. Ooh, the blog personifies itself, "moving on up! moving on up!"

A few things about Movable Type. The install was amazingly smooth. CGI-everything makes me feel like it's 1996, but I can look past that. Veteran ycabw readers know that tqed.com ain't going down due to CGI performance reasons. One complaint is MT's notion of a template. It seems like there's a 70% redundancy in the different default templates. To alleviate this, I wrapped my archive templates into a JSP. The archive JSP forwards requests to my main index page, which, in turn, includes the calling JSP. This saved me a ton of time since I really only had to create one template that includes modifications where needed. Yuck, tech speak. No more of that ever again on this blog. Ever.

I have crises in the dish and laundry departments. I purchased paper plates to mitigate the dishware situation, but before you thumb all your green fingers at me, check this out: Fuckin' Hippies.

On top of that I lost my letter opener last week and subsequently found it in the refrigerator today. Not that losing a letter opener is a crisis, but finding it in the refrigerator -- that's borderline.

I'm off to NYC soon. Since it looks like I'll have to drag dirty laundry all across the country, I'll take suggestions for the best laundromats in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and/or Queens. Other "best of" suggestions are welcome too. God, just recently I was at my local tavern and I saw this dude wearing a shirt that said "Lower East Side." Has it come to that?

More tavern philosophy: on Friday my friend remarked that she, "exaggerates all the time." I had to duck out for a bit to think about it. I think it is not logically possible to exaggerate all the time. Does a proof exist?

Nothing of a second: I begged a great writer friend of mine to start a blog. She shaped-shifted and countered and mentioned stuff about Buddha and moments and inwardness. There it is! The death of everything Blog by the only sage I know.

Blogs: the king embodiment of useless ephemeral moments -- that is until Friendster assumes the crown.

Hey, I don't even make sense to myself tonight -- perhaps it is due to my 36-hour bout with Movable Type.

During a Pentagon briefing, Rumsfeld compared the postwar situation in Iraq to the difficult path taken by the United States after declaring its independence from Britain and before establishing a new Constitution and electing a president.