Today has been a day of disappointments so far. Just bad news all around. Weekend will probably be more of the same. It’s times like these that really make life worth living.
What a joyous cycle.
having an active-only pickup bass, no 9-volts in the house, it’s 11 pm, and you want to record.
Also… having one of your cables somewhere in there go tits up for no reason whatsoever, thus leading you to a 2 hour snipe hunt before you figure out its not your gear, it’s a motherfuckin cable patch bay input, and that cable input happens to be in your supposedly good bay that you got specifically so you wouldn’t have to worry about failing bay inputs. As an added bonus, while in the process of searching for the gremlin you erase every single FX modification you had made to your FX unit over the past 3 years … and now you can’t get a reverb that you like, much less the megaawesome one you had set before. And now it’s 1 in the morning and all you’ve got is a scratch track, a scratch bass, and kick and snare … and the kick needs some punchins and the snare’s only half done since your POS e-drum snare’s rim trigger is intermittent and you have to record xsticks separately from snare hits. And you have to get up in 5 hours for work.
JFC, this is ridiculous. So much for finishing that project this week. And people wonder why I don’t record much anymore. Creative blocks are one thing, but fighting purely mechanical issues really put a damper on that whole “fun” part.
Seriously. A cable patch bay failing? Out of the blue? Nothing was moved, nothing was changed. WTF?
… and now the output level is slightly louder (2-4db) out of the left channel of my FX unit, even if bypassed. I say again… the hell?
Today is definitely feeling like a 97 day. Maybe even a 98. I can just feel it.
Also, someone should really use this time to finally take that half-day excursion. After all, the timing is ideal.
This goes out to a special someone, you know who you are:
Last night I had this vivid dream. It went something like this:
I was in a maze, hunting someone(s) (I think there were multiple ‘people’ who represented the same entity, though the look of each could have been different). The maze had slate-gray walls and a sand floor. It was hot and arid, under an open desert sky. The sand was beige with occaisional bits of round, water-worn pebbles and some green bits of somethings here and there. The maze was not flat, there were inclines and hills, but always with the sand underfoot.
I knew I was hunting. I was unafraid.
I saw the quarry run around one corner, it may have been a man in a navy pinstripe suit. I heard one of the huntee’s guards approaching from behind. I knew I had to take out the guards as well, but they too posed no problems.
I hid around the corner or found some form of concealment (it’s a dream, man, all I knew was I was peaking from seclusion), and I see one of the guards come up to the intersection. He is tiny, like a pygmy. Actually, he is a pygmy. Straight out of Hollywood stereotype – brown skinned, with some sort of bead/bone necklace and a skort. Bare feet. A spear. A bit over a meter tall. He was wearing a long, wooden tribal mask that extended from a foot above his head down to his belly. The mask was wooden, with deep grooves and holes for eyes and mouth, and gray brown. It was possible that it had been painted long ago, but the colors had faded to a barely-discernable red around the lips.
I snuck up behind and tackled the guard, pinned him to the ground with my knee on his chest, and wrapped my hands around his throat. The wood had become part of the body and I was surprised at how large this throat I was trying to choke was. It felt like an innertube, though I’m sure you Freudians out there can come up with a different idea of what I was choking. More than an innertube, it felt like warm, comfortable, pliant, vibrant, alive skin. Like a puppy, only a lot bigger and slightly oily.
The guard did not resist. I did not want to kill him. As I realized this, I looked into his eyes and discovered that the guard was actually a seal. A cute, harbor gray (the ones with the broader nose and shorter snouts). It (its sex was undetermined, but in the dream it had both masculine and feminine aspects) didn’t want to die and I didn’t want to kill it, so I made a deal with the seal – you play dead and we’ll pretend I did kill you. But the seal would have to lay there for a while until I’d finished getting the the things I was hunting, and I would have to kinda choke it. Enough to cause discomfort but no pain.
The seal agreed. But I only choked it for less than a second before I realized I didn’t want to cause it any discomfort at all. So it was just going to play dead, though this might cause some problems somehow with my quarry. And now the seal and I were friends, with absolute uninhibited child-like love and adoration going in both directions.
And then I woke up.
I dunno. Maybe the seal is my daemon, though given the water requirement, I doubt it.
You wouldn’t want to hurt me, would you?
No, no I wouldn’t, buddy. You’re the Seal of Love. You can’t hurt the Seal of Love! All you can do is adore it.
Have I mentioned Grumpasaurus.com lately? Fun-nay and insightful. Grumpy is totally not me. Totally. ‘em just happens to prolifically blog in the same tone and about the same subjects as I used to. Coincidence, I tell you! Coincidence!
Doing some creative writing for a couple weeks, probably light posting over here.
On the plus side, I finally wrote a new song that didn’t have that goddamn E-G-A thing in it. On the downside, I realized later that it was really just an uptempo version of the White Stripes Ball & Biscuit.
Which is kind of like saying it’s an uptempo version of Generic Blues Vamp in Eb, but people seem to like comps. And that’s what I’m all about. Pleasing the peep-hole.
Actually, I just listened to it again. It has potential… if I can channel the rage again.