So You Call Yourself A Musician

So I call myself a musician. We come a dime a dozen. Some musicians play covers while others write their own songs. Some have dreams of making a living out of it while others do it for fun. We are all delusional and most of us smell funny.

I have written a few hundred songs in my lifetime. A majority of which will never be heard. That's fine with me. It's mostly therapeutic anyway. Some people have to shoot defenseless animals while others need to rape old ladies to relieve stress. I just write songs, so I am better than them.

Movies Waste My Precious Time

There seems to be a constant flow of bad movies coming out. Now I understand that movie trailers can be decieving and films that look bad are sometimes good. Not usually though. I can tell by those 30 second ads if a movie is going to be a piece of crap or not. Movies are something that I was always picky about. If I'm supposed to waste an hour and a half or longer of my life to watch a movie then it had better be good.

Nowadays, as us older folk like to say, a majority of the films being made are either remakes of older films or musicals. The remakes are always ones of movies that didn't do so well in the first place but some idiot decided to give it another shot with younger actors and a modern twist to the storyline. Yeah, that'll be good. As far as musicals go, well, they musn't even want us straight males to go to the theater anymore. The idea of a movie with overly dramatic songs set to a idiotic storyline isn't appealing to most people. What's that? It is? Oh well.

I saw a trailer today for a military movie called Annapolis that almost made me loose my Ramen Noodles. First off, I never knew that Tyrese Gibson was an actor let alone that he had a last name. I also see that he is an R&B singer as well. Anyway, in this trailer a woman's voice says "Why are you so hard on him?" (speaking about one of the military underlings) and the general says "Because I believe in him." Well what I believe is that if you look up trite in the dictionary a soundclip from this film is played. Whoever looks at previews for garbage like this and thinks "I gotta see that." should be slowly dipped, toes first, into a vat of boiling monkey semen.

Baby Tricks

Is it wrong to teach babies stupid tricks to amuse friends and family? The main reason people do it in the first place is to let others think that your child is smarter than other kids. That's my theory anyway. My daughter will be one tomorrow so I decided to hurriedly teach her how to hold up one finger when she is asked how old she is. I think I started late. She didn't catch on. But she can raise her arms when you say "Touchdown", and now that the Steelers are in the Superbowl I think that's a swell trick.

Are People Really As Dull As I Think They Are?

I know that I am doomed in fate to be fat, bald and unsuccessful and I have known this for sometime, but at least it's all happening at a fairly slow rate. Teaching myself to not complain out loud doesn't usually work. I'm naturally a pretty vocal whiner.

But it also seems that I have an obligation listen to other people's problems. It's a part of life I guess. I realize the torture that I would be putting them through if they had to endure my tiresome rant about aching feet or unpaid utility bills or a pet cat of mine that pisses on everything. Yet, I still do it.

But it's not so much people's problems that I have trouble listening to, it's the small talk and the subject matter they chose. Do I have to sit there and listen attentively while people tell me about their children going to the prom or some shit like that? And then they have to show me pictures. Oh lord, not the pictures too. All the while I'm thinking "Oh wonderful, I get to look at pictures of your ugly kids. This is exactly what I wanted to do today." It all just makes me uncomfortable (obviously). I do my best to keep people from talking to me but somehow I think they sense it and, much to my dismay, they want to talk more. It's not the actual conversing that I dislike, it's the fact that most people talk about things that I could give two shits about. Is asking that people to not be so boring when they speak such a bad thing?

Don't Waste Strength On Idiots

It was 5:45 a.m. and we had 15 minutes of sleeping time before the 6:00 a.m. shift started. Whether it was the van ride to work or a lunch break, we slept. If you wanted a bunch of trouble-making punk asses to do manual labor then you had to let them rest.

One co-worker, John Noel, was the type of person who walked with his arms out to give the impression that his biceps were too large to rest against his torso. The attempted illusion was not convincing. He spoke strong words but we knew he couldn't back it up with actions. We sensed that he had either a troubled past or slight retardation or both.

Everyone but John and I were napping one particular morning before our shift started, so I thought that I'd have a little "fun" with him. I snuck up behind him as he was sitting in a chair and gave him a good bitch slap across the back of the neck (just believe me, he deserved it). I giggled to myself and sat down at a nearby table. Then WHAM! I was clotheslined out of my seat and knocked flat onto the floor. Not a suprising move from someone who was a fan of pro wrestling.

I stood up and a rage I had never felt before boiled inside me and John knew it. Immedietly he crouched into a fetal position as I was wailing on the back of his head. Punch after punch landed on the back of his well groomed mullet. I felt a crack in my hand as soon as I hit him with the first blow but I continued thumping on him. One of the game commissioners raced up to me and picked me up by the scruff and slammed me against the wall three times. By the time it was over I was in tears. Yeah, my hand was broken but it was tears of overwhelming anger. I felt like punching the commissioner or anyone else that needed punched that day. But somehow I gained my senses and thought better of it. I decided later that he won the fight because I was the one with broken bones.

I've always been a peaceful person and this was the only fight I had ever been in. So I thought I'd share this story of the one day when I was not so peaceful.

The More I Think About Things The More Scared I Become

1-I'm getting a little chubby these days and to make matters worse I have dried up macaroni and cheese on my shirt.

2- Boredom is bringing on new adventures for me. In fact, this past week I decided to do something with myself; I'm growing a beard.

3-I like pickles more than I used to. Gherkins are pretty good. Aren't those pickles? I think they are, just with a fancy name. Well, I guess it's not that fancy. Maybe it's that silent "h" that makes me think it's fancy. ihategherkins.com

Baby Beer Bottle

Don't you just love those headaches that are so bad you feel like you're going to puke. Ah yes, one of the pleasures of life. I think this one is a result of a delayed hangover. I tried the "drink your hangover away" method. It didn't work. I even used good scotch to do it but I think the fact that I drank 9 dollar whiskey the day before fucked that up.

I haven't had a job for over a year now so I have no interesting thoughts anymore, just strange ones. Thoughts that if anyone knew they about they would turn the other way when I started to speak. Good thing I don't speak to many people. I was anti-social to begin with, now I never leave the house. Watching my daughter is a bit of a full time job but it's not all that bad. Trust me, she'll be o.k. I only drink after her bed time while I'm in my basement pretending I'm someone I'm not. It's not like I sit around with a baby bottle in one hand and a beer bottle in the other. I doubt she'll end up being a people-hating drunk like me. In my experience, I wanted do the opposite of everything my parents did. So maybe my daughter will end up a milk-drinking community worker.

The spell checker wanted me to replace "o.k." with "Ohio".

I Wish I Liked Drugs More

I don't like to be fanatical about anything except drinking but I can't help myself sometimes. These two guys in this picture are geniuses which leads me to believe that I must have missed out on something by not being a coke-head or a junkie. We've all heard before that drugs and alcohol create great music. But the part I personally find difficult is being just sober enough to actually play your instrument. There is a fine line there.

I thought it would be a nice concept for a band to make a few albums while under the influence of a particular drug for each of them. You'd have your heroin album, your mushroom album,your glue album, etc. Ah, it's probably been done and it might not have even been intentional.

At this point in life my paranoid brain can barely handle weed anymore. So now I just drink and hope that I can find some talent in a bottle because sobriety gets you nowhere. Listen up kids!