Music is bad. Or at least thinking about music is bad. Today I spent all day in a trance thinking about music, music, music (to be precise, Creedence Clearwater Revival of all people), puzzling out why they aren't just a "country-rock" band, remembering the blonde Wisconsin girl singing "Down on the Corner" in absolutely unfunky choir-girl style on the ferry across Lake Michigan this last summer, sipping lemon-balm tea while nodding my head to a faint image of "Effigy", burning the day like so much newspaper, and then:

I realized I forgot my bike helmet in the bathroom.

I've never ridden a bike without a helmet for more than a couple blocks before. I did today. It felt weird to have my big poofy power-pop unkempt hair flopping around like the pelt of some unfamiliar animal in the breeze. I wondered what people were thinking of me. I looked up at the heretofore unseen sky through wisps of bangs. I rode gingerly. I arrived home safely but a little stunned.

I need to stop thinking about music. It's weird how addictive my personality can get; if I have access to a computer, it's the Internet; if I'm deprived of any sort of sensory stimulation (e.g. temp job looking through personnel files) I make my own amusement. I wish I could think about something more productive. I really do. But my mind is like water and it settles down into its well-worn course, flowing toward whatever the sea would be in this already unlikely metaphor.
posted by Jacob Anderson at 5:33 PM

Oh man, I've been so lazy these days! This sort of sunny weather reminds me of this old (teens/twenties) questionable geography book that I had that put forth the fairly racist theory that "the people of the torrid zones have never had to work for anything; rich bananas and mangoes have always fallen into their laps; and this is why the peoples of the torrid zones have never made any valid contributions to Culture; blah blah blah". I can see the warm-humid-weather-makes-one-lazy part of their argument--but obviously these people have never heard nor felt a wisp of gamelan...

So what has happened since April 26? Well, first off, the big news is that I finally finished my comic book _Companion Piece_, 14 pages of vehicular and romantic trauma. It's available through Unread Records or through me.

I just vacuumed my room.

The second thing of note is the debut of the Scorched Earth Orchestra: me, Sean from Minmae, and Sean's housemate Taj. It's an improv-trio thing kind of like Gang Wizard, but with a sort of minimalist space-rock flair instead of that crushing screaming Gang Wizard Sound. We played a show (along with our alter egoes Celesteville and Minmae) at Stumptown Coffee last week. The Celesteville and Minmae shows were a little lackluster (I think I need to stop cracking so many bad jokes and doing more rocking; rocking is sort of like being a T.A. in that respect...) but the SEO show was pretty great. I broke five strings, three of them in the course of the same "song", which, admittedly, was probably ten minutes long.

I'm still working at Emanuel Hospital, which is getting a little old but is still okay; this job seems to have transmuted into a more computer-oriented job wherein I enter Social Security numbers into PeopleSoft all day and see what is up with these employees. I can't say it's a great job but it's comfortable and I can't argue with acres of free cheesecake and cookies and coffee last week (Employee Appreciation week), although I don't believe one could have an acre of coffee. At least not in its liquid or ground form.

Okay, this is making less and less sense. I promise to update this thing more frequently but I've said that before and ever since I started biking to work I haven't been bringing my laptop (to save my back!) but maybe I'll have to.
posted by Jacob Anderson at 11:41 AM