sonic reducer

:: 2009 8 September :: 12.45pm

Jonathon the zombie, he likes turtles.

:: 2009 2 September :: 1.07pm

A joyful meandering that wound up being about driveway hockey.
i had just gotten up today, and gone to the bathroom for a solid B.M. the bathroom window was open, and outside it sit the garbage/yard waste/recycle bins. all of a sudden i hear someone walk up alongside our garage, and open up one of the bins. i had finished at this point, and was blowing my nose for good measure. so, the person getting into our recycling heard me and said, "oh, hey, just dropping off some cereal boxes and milk cartons." i recognized Valerie's (the neighbor) voice, and said, "yeah, have at it. the trash is kinda full, though." it was just a very odd way to start my day off.

in other news: happy september! the weather's gorgeous, and the air smells crisp and clean.

:: sorry, neighbor came over to smoke a ciggy ::

what was i saying? eh, whatever.

i should play disc golf again. i made it out there quite a bit the first half of summer, but i haven't played in several weeks. I guess it has been overtaken by driveway hockey, which is honestly a better workout, but you really pay for the next day.

it's actually a lot of fun. we have a net that bruce built, and they spray painted a crease to go in front of it. the garage door is about 2 feet behind the net, so there is some playable space back there, just like the real deal. The rest of the rink is surrounded by short wooden boards to hold the puck in. the rules have been adapted - obviously - to suit our needs, and there's a continual evolution there, but the gameplay itself remains pretty much the same. we have three offensive players (a center and two wingers), a defenseman, and a goalie. the three offense and the defender will rotate positions after every goal. goalies rotate every 30 minutes (the mishmash of homemade pads takes a while to put on). it's like a full-time 3-on-1 rush, but since we suck so bad, sometimes it's still tough to get a puck to drop. even still, if you pepper 'im long enough, something's bound to go through eventually.

here are the basic rules:
> no high sticking (we're out there in our tennis shoes for pete's sake. we don't want to cart anyone to the hospital)
> no cross-checking (same reason)
> no slapshots (or we'll have to listen to the goalies bitch. loudly.)
> the center has to pass before anyone can shoot
> if the puck goes over the boards and out of play, it counts as "clearing the defensive zone," and the offensive players must go back to their start positions (marked with chalk)
> if any of the offensive players are not in their start positions when the center starts the puck, the play is "offside" and must be reset.
> if a defenseman clears the puck over (or through) the fence and into the neighbor's yard, it's a two-minute minor penalty. since the power play has yet to fail, it's pretty much a death knell. although, bruce once killed off 1:56 of the penalty before they scored on him. that's the current record to beat.

they typically like having new people try it out. kevin and masa joined in this past sunday, and i think they had a good time. so hit me up if you're interested. there's no set day that we do it, so it's kinda random. we usually play from mid-afternoon 'til dark.

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:: 2009 31 August :: 12.56am

skewl tommorow , FML

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:: 2009 27 August :: 12.21pm

Mark Twain Had a Grisly Sense of Humor
In 1863, San Francisco newspapers reported endlessly on the cooked books and financial trickery of mining outfits, and the San Francisco news outlet Territorial Enterprise advised investors to instead put their capital consisting of plague-ridden blankets and Buffalo nickels into San Francisco utility companies. Not out of financial responsibility, or anything; the utility companies were paying several papers bribes for reporting the tips. Still, most people didn't realize what was going on, they just read story after story to the tune of "Oh my God, investing in utilities is so good, you guys."
Read more..

:: 2009 22 August :: 12.17am

Inglorious Basterds is absolutely glorious

:: 2009 21 August :: 6.31pm

This is what happens when little kids try to bug me in online games

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:: 2009 19 August :: 12.52pm

Classes this fall:
Database systems
Unix using Linux
Cisco Wireless Network Administrator
Computer Security and Assurance

This semester is either going to be really fucking cool or really fucking hard.

:: 2009 18 August :: 11.53am

i like to eat giant turds.

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:: 2009 13 August :: 1.13pm

Got the results of my MRI, torn cartilage and a micro fracture, have to go to a specialist.

:: 2009 11 August :: 2.13pm

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

[] Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
[X] The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (way better than the movies)
[] Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
[X] Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (Hellz yes!)
[X] To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (too autobiographical for Lee to make a career of it...)
[] The Bible (never got through all of it. kinda big.)
[] Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
[X] Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (just turn the fucking telescreens off, already. and quit drinking gasoline.)
[X] His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (i LOVE this universe. so vivid.)
[]Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

[] Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
[] Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
[] Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
[] Complete Works of Shakespeare
[] Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
[X] The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (i wish they'd make a movie of this one.)
[] Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
[] Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
[] The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
[] Middlemarch - George Eliot

[] Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
[X] The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (live fast, die young)
[] Bleak House - Charles Dickens
[] War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
[X] The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (don't trust mice anymore.)
[] Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[] Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
[] Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
[] The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
[] Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

[] David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
[X] Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (allegory, anyone?)
[] Emma - Jane Austen
[] Persuasion - Jane Austen
[X] The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (totally redundant)
[] The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
[] Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
[] Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
[] Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (might have... can't remember)
[] Animal Farm - George Orwell

[X] The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (and angels and demons)
[] One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[] A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
[] The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
[] Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
[] Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
[] The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
[X] Lord of the Flies - William Golding (totally fucked up)
[] Atonement - Ian McEwan
[] Life of Pi - Yann Martel

[] Dune - Frank Herbert
[] Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
[] Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
[] A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
[] The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
[X] A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (leave it to the french to kill my favorite character...)
[X] Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (nothing brave about test-tube babies)
[] The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
[] Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[] Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

[] Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
[] The Secret History - Donna Tartt
[] The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
[] Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
[] On The Road - Jack Kerouac
[] Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
[] Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
[] Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
[X] Moby Dick - Herman Melville (sean connery is still my favorite ishmael)
[] Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

[] Dracula - Bram Stoker
[] The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (think i read this one too.)
[] Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
[] Ulysses - James Joyce
[] The Inferno – Dante
[] Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
[] Germinal - Emile Zola
[] Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
[] Possession - AS Byatt
[] A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

[] Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
[] The Color Purple - Alice Walker
[] The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
[] Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
[] A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
[X] Charlotte's Web - EB White (been a LOOONG time)
[X] The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (depressing)
[] Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
[] The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
[X] Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (good companion piece for lord of the flies. reeks of symbolism.)

[] The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
[] The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
[] Watership Down - Richard Adams
[] A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
[] A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
[] The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
[] Hamlet - William Shakespeare
[X] Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
[] Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

My total: 19

Unforgivable omissions from this list:

A Separate Peace - John Knowles
The Trumpet of the Swan - EB White
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
The Odyssey - Homer
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Candide - Francois Voltaire
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Stranger - Albert Camus
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells (others might say War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, or The Island of Doctor Moreau, but i have not read those yet)
Mark Twain (c'mon, he couldn't even make the list?)
same for Edgar Allen Poe

Man, I really need to get a life. I can't belive i've actually read that many books. ah, well. at least they're good ones.

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:: 2009 7 August :: 11.38pm
:: Mood: alone
:: Music: the Beatles

i often wonder whether it's better or worse that i don't post on here very often. i know that when i'm cruising my friends list, and i'm just doing a cursory screen, i'll sometimes ignore the ones that post like seven times a day. but if there's one that pops up that i haven't seen anything from in a while, i'll give it a read. i don't know. whatever. it is what it is, and if someone gets something out of it, then so be it.

apparently i have to re-learn how to be alone with myself. because i've been solitary here for approximately 9 hours, and i've been bored and lonely for approximately half of that time. so, i played wii, i did my rubiks cube, i cruised the internet, i watched superbad, and now i'm fuckin' here.

that's just lame.

and the more i think about it, the more i realize that it's exactly what i used to do to hide from myself. do a puzzle, play a game, read a book. which i think i may do shortly.

i suppose it's better than drinking myself into oblivion or getting doped up.

speaking of which, our front yard has a mole in it. probably a couple. pretty bad. i mowed this afternoon, and there were tunnels fucking everywhere. the lawn care people sprayed pesticide on it, which means the bugs that the moles feed on should die, but then the moles will just move somewhere else. we just need to kill those bastards. the neighbors won't like us very much if we just scare them off into their lawns. although, maybe then the neighbors will kill them for us.

whatever. i feel too crappy to really care that much. this sinus crud can go away any time now. it's been three days now, and i'm just getting tired of it. and i would like for my nosebleeds to have a chance to heal. that'd be great.

yeah.

well, this was uplifting. sorry about that.

i'm running sound for a live band at the crazy horse saloon on the 21st and 22nd. if you're in the area and would like to stop by, feel free. classic rock goodness, and your daily dose of spud. what more can you ask for?

i thought so.

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:: 2009 5 August :: 12.01pm

Good Ole Teddy Roosevelt is cracked's most badass president, quite a formidable top five as well.

I hope that someone can say this about me when I die "Death had to take him sleeping, for if Roosevelt had been awake there would have been a fight."

:: 2009 4 August :: 1.45am

Life has been different since the wreck. You start to look at things different after that, I appreciate my life and the people I care about more.

:: 2009 3 August :: 12.07am

Gnarkill Vs Unkle Matt And The Shitbirdz

:: 2009 1 August :: 2.16pm

On motorcycles
From one of my ex guild members

"You're like PETA's worst nightmare - a dude who rides around, wears leather and looks for fawns to slaughter, then weigh for consumability."

:: 2009 29 July :: 4.06pm

Here's the damage report

:: 2009 29 July :: 8.17am

Had a terrible evening. Ran my motorcycle into a deer and skidded for about 20 feet to promptly hit the ground and flip over 3 times. Spent the rest of the night in the ER for shoulder injuries and now I have to go to my Doctor's office.

The stupid part is I was only going about 40, slowing down for a turn, and the deer couldn't have been 30 pounds. Fucker went through my windprotector and jerked the handle bars which caused my spill.

Ruined my favorite pair of jeans, my WW2 Jacket, and A ONE DOLLAR WHITE T SHIRT. Have some nasty road burns and soft tissue damage to my right shoulder.

I'll post pictures of the bike later, the right side brake pedal and lever are melted and the windshield smashed. Even the tip of the muffler on the right side melted a little bit from abrasion heat. Bike still runs and drives however, Honda built a tank in 81.

I've been up for 24 hours at this point, waiting for these painpills to kick in so I can maybe get sleep. Highlight of the day was eating a pretty good breakfast at the hospital.

AND BROKE MY FUCKING NEW GOGGLES

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:: 2009 28 July :: 7.56pm

I want to go to Michigan's Adventures before I have to go back to class August 31. Like during the week maybe.

Who's in?

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:: 2009 27 July :: 11.27pm

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:: 2009 27 July :: 3.48am

I am tired from working late so here is this

:: 2009 27 July :: 1.54am
:: Mood: depressed

::

"There's a way about you that just seems right surrounded by drums, and you come alive to battle it."

i understand what they meant. and yeah, maybe it was just a nice little compliment, and that is all. but maybe not. it almost seems to me as if there is something more to it. as if, in that moment, they had a lucid picture of my mind and my heart and my emotions. like they took a polaroid of my soul. and, it just so happened that - as they saw it - my soul was doing its happy dance, for lack of a better term. and it's true. most of the time when i'm playing drums, i'm happy deep down. it just feels good, and i can focus on that one solitary task (which is actually quite complex and anything but solitary), and it will be enough to distract me from whatever else is going on in my life. unless of course there's a crowd of people watching. but that's not the important part. the important aspect of this observation is that the battle - the maelstrom - that they saw in that instant, isn't happening for me anymore. i mean, it happens every time i go into the basement and jam for half an hour. but then i get done, cool down, and it's gone again. i feel the same way when i'm working on cars, or running sound, or making a recording. it's fun, exciting, exhilarating. it's a challenge for me to conquer. it's a puzzle that i find absolutely fascinating. i need to figure out how it ticks... how to fix it if it's broken... what i could do to make it work better, easier, faster, louder, stronger... you get what i'm saying. then and only then am i truly happy, truly satisfied, fully energized and motivated and ... alive.

and what i want - what i REALLY want more than anything - is to feel that passion in all aspects of my daily life. and it seems that i barely feel it at all anymore. like someone just took all of my energy away. or maybe it's there, but i can't seem to reach it when i need to. it absolutely baffles me.

okay, saying all aspects of my daily life is probably misleading. if i was that excited about taking out the trash, or doing the dishes, and did those chores with the same kind of zeal or fervor that i do in playing drums, it would be creepy and weird. and i'd probably need 12 hours of sleep every day just to maintain my energy levels. so, no i don't want it quite like that. but i want to be able to have a job that i do every day, that offers me the opportunity to have little glimmers of that passion bubble up to the surface from deep within my soul every so often. just enough to remind me of why i'm alive. of why i'm here. of why the fuck nobody's killed me yet. and get a bit of a boost from it, so i have enough energy and self-motivation to be able to get in there and kick it in the butt, like i'm supposed to.

all i know is i'm sick of being poor, i'm sick of being bored, and i'm sick of being either A) stuck at home with a chore list five miles long that i refuse to do, or B) being out and about, thinking about all the chores i have back home that i'm not doing, and about all of the money i'm spending (and not making) in the process of being out. i need something else.

"Well then, I think I may be able to help you. You see, your cat is suffering from what we vets haven't found a word for. his condition is typified by total physical inertia, absence of interest in its ambience - what we vets call "environment" - failure to respond to the conventional external stimuli; a ball of string, a nice juicy mouse, a bird. To be blunt, your cat ... is in a rut. It's the old stockbroker syndrome; angst, weltschmerz, call it what you will-"
"Moping."
"In a way, in a way. Hmm... moping, I must remember that. Well now, what can be done? Tell me sir, have you confused your cat recently?"
"...well-"
"SHH! ... no."
"Yes, well I think I can definitely say that your cat badly needs to be confused."
"What?"
"Confused! To shake it out of its state of complacency. I'm afraid, I'm not personally qualified to confuse cats, but I can recommend an extremely good service. Here is their card."
"Oh... Confuse-a-Cat Ltd..."

:: 2009 26 July :: 12.24pm

Hellions on parade

:: 2009 23 July :: 7.50pm

TO THE BAR!

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:: 2009 22 July :: 7.18pm

I'm Old Greg, I got something to show ya

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:: 2009 21 July :: 11.32pm

Dice really abandoned their fanbase by putting 1943 on consoles only.