Twelve Days

I've been in Southern California for ten days. To most of you, you probably think "oh wow, you get to enjoy some sunshine and nice weather for a change" others of you more in the know say "nice - working on the new album with the band, that must be an awesome time."

I say humbug. I am just not an LA person. It's too hot, it's too dry. I can't see the ocean, I never know where I'm going, and to run down to the corner store for a soda, you need to take two different freeways. I'm not one of those people who really gives much of a damn about regional biases and all that. I don't hate SoCal sports teams because they're in our divisions, or because they're better than us, or because of some great sportsball sense of rivalry, I usually root against them because the SoCal sports fans as a whole really annoy me.

Yes, I am lumping a huuuuge mass of people together here, and I'm sure there are more exceptions to what I am saying than those who fall into my stereotypes. I have had nothing but good experiences with all the friends-of-friends and other well-wishers that I've met in my time here, and despite our differences in regions and our differences in sports affiliations, our mutual love of music and good times has been a big part of what has redeemed this trip.

The studio experience has been great. Erik Ron, our producer for the new Hello Monster record, has been flat-out inspirational to work with. It's always amazing to see someone in your general age range who is pushing towards mastery in their craft, and using their talents to help people realize their potential. He's also been just a great guy to spend time with; we've drank together, we've hung out at his place, we've played FIFA, and we've gone to shows together; it's been a definite rockstar experience. Our music sounds amazing, even if the majority of what I've done on this stage of the recording is sit in a windowless room and verify lyrics and melodies as they're being performed by my bandmates.

But now I'm ready to go home. I'm tired. I've slept on floors, couches, and air mattresses for almost two weeks. I haven't shaved at all. I have been surviving on energy drinks, fast food, and not nearly enough sleep. I think the days I've showered only outnumber the days I haven't showered by maybe one. Maybe. I know I'm currently on showerless day three, and I suspect people are starting to realize that. Everywhere I've spent the night, the host owns some kind of pet. I am ready to crawl into my bed, in my cold corner of San Francisco, freshly showered and comfortable.

I know, if the band goes on tour, this experience will be expanded. But the difference is that on tour, there is always something new and different around every corner. I have seen the interior walls of most of the same places for almost two weeks now, and while the recording studio definitely feels like home away from home (especially after sleeping here for like five days), it's dimly lit, windowless, and soundproofed, which means if I want to know what time of day it is, what the weather is like, or if I just want to see another human being who isn't Erik or Paul, I need to leave the building.

But yeah, that's what I've been up to. There are a lot more stories from this trip, but most are not blog-appropriate, so I'll save you the time, and if you want to hear them, you know how to get a hold of me.

Me in a... Messenger Bag?

As I have been working and commuting on the bus recently, I have had an increased reliance of the majority of my life fitting into my messenger bag. As I sat at work the other day, looking into my bag, I began to realize: the possessions of one's bag really capture the essence of who they are. Honestly, much more than my wallet, my bag gives you a great in-depth look into who I am and what I do. I realize that it's a cliche idea, and it only makes sense that the one place where you put almost everything you might need on a daily basis had better well speak volumes about you, but I figured it could make for pretty good blog to give a brief rundown of what all goes into making a fully-grown Bill.

Glasses. I wear glasses to read, and 99% of my work requires that I wear them, plus I wear them when I read on the bus, which is all the time. I'm one of those sick weirdos who actually wishes he could wear glasses all the time. I realize that if I actually did have to wear them all the time, I would hate it, but I personally really like the way my glasses make me look, and wish more people saw me in them on a regular basis. These days, I keep a red felt-tip pen for editing markup in the case as well, and I always find that it looks just a little bit menacing in there lurking just below the glasses.

Whatever book I happen to be reading at the time. Reading on the bus is the one bright and shining silver lining that balances out the usually awful experience of having to ride MUNI. The trains are seldom on time, more and more people seem to think it's okay to bring a pet or do something gross on the bus, and I am seemingly constantly lambasted by homeless. But taking the bus to work means that I have two hours out of every week day in which the only enjoyable thing I could think to do is stand around and read, and I kind of love it.

Two Moleskine Notebooks. One is for general notes, one is for band notes. I don't use them nearly as much as I probably should, but they do come in wildly handy when I either think I should write something down (sometimes about this very blog) or need it for work, and by having the notebooks, I can keep them all organized and held together in a single book.

An iPod classic. I have an iPhone that I don't hardly ever listen to music on, I need the full 80 gigs of space to stash music on, and sometimes even that isn't enough. I actually kind of miss the days when iPods were considered devices that people used only to listen to music. This whole multi-functionality thing is for the birds. I want something small and light with enough music to let it outlast the battery life of the device.

Headphones. For me, headphones are one of the few places where I don't mind spending money. I hate earbuds, and because I like listening to music loudly in quiet offices, I want headphones that isolate sound well. I have burned through about four pairs of headphones in the last four or five years, but it's one of those things where I can't help but drop decent coin on a high quality pair.

Accordion File. This is a remnant from my teaching days; I found it in the band room where I was, and it is now adorned with a mirror-reflective B that came my way via a chemistry lab. It's perfect for two things: first, it keeps a little bit more structure at the back of the bag, which keeps everything inside a little more orderly. Second, it holds a lot of loose crap. I can put in spiral notebooks, manila folders, loose paper, all that. It's even got a special loop where I keep one of my many pens. I also keep Hello Monster CDs in there. I have a whole folder full of musical staff paper which I don't use nearly often enough, and stack of printouts explaining how you can build your own silk screen press from scratch, which I've never done.

Small pocket notepad. I bought some of these a few years ago, and honestly had halfway forgotten that I still had this one in here. Needless to say, it doesn't see a lot of use.

Writing utensils. I'm a huge pen dork, so I have a wide variety of pens, and somehow I assign a certain amount of significance to when each gets used. By my current count, there are 3 black pens, 3 pencils (two traditional, one mechanical), one red pen, one multi-color pen/pencil, a fine-tip sharpie, and the aforementioned red felt pen for editing. Sad thing is, I used to keep my old glasses in one of the pencil flaps of the bag until those broke, so now I'm thinking about what pens need to get added in.

Gum. One of my oldest friends was somewhat surprised to find that I almost always have gum with me. I keep it in my bag, I keep a huge container in my car, a huge container on my desk at home, and pretty much anywhere that isn't in my pockets. I am an obsessive gum chewer, even though I'm the type who will chew a piece of gum until it is hard as a rock and lost its flavor some hours earlier.

The other day, I even had a volume pedal in there, but that was strictly there because I was selling it on Craigslist and was supposed to meet the buyer that afternoon. Still, it seemed a fitting addition that I could include for the sake of this blog.

Perhaps most importantly, the main thing about my bag is that it is organized to a T. Just like the way I try to live my life, there is always a place for everything, and everything is usually in its place. I know where each pen should be, which side the books should be on, and what needs to be moved where in order to accommodate other items.

In other words, I'm a huge dork who spends too much time looking into his bag.

Different Worlds

Last week I started a new contract job, and was pretty excited not only to make some money, but also to get out of the house, ride the bus, and have some interesting fodder for the ol' blog. Lo and behold, I have already found some pretty blog-worthy material. Earlier today I was thinking of writing a tale about my bus ride the other morning, which consisted of two homeless guys hitting up everyone on the streetcar for beer money (at 11:00 a.m.), two riders with dogs (one of whom sat on the floor with his dog), and a whole bunch of messes of people all over the place.

But then, at the office, I decided to hop in the elevator and head down to the lobby to get a coffee, and I ran into the most stereotypically sleazy sales guy that I have just about ever met. I got into the elevator and he gave me the classic bro-nod. I returned favor and stepped in for the ten-flight ride. After a second or two, he turns to me and asks "Dude, how do you get away with the mohawk?"

Now, a few points of clarification before I get into our entire convo: yes, I kind of have a mohawk, but it's definitely more of a faux-hawk, and I never have it combed all the way up. It's not like I have a foot tall wall of hair running down the middle of my head or anything. Still, I guess it's noticeable enough to comment on. Also, this guy just couldn't stop eating miniature candy bars. He had a handful of about four of them, and ate three of them throughout the course of our forty second-ish elevator ride. So all of his statements are said around a mouth full of little Snickers bars.

So I ask him to repeat himself, in part because it was hard to understand him around all the chocolate and nougat, and in part because I couldn't tell if he was being friendly or being kind of a dick. So I pause to think about it and reply "Well, you cut your hair like this, trim down the sides, and let everyone deal with it."

He kind of nods, adding "Well, what kind of work do you do? IT?" And I informed him I was in the creative department (truth be told, I don't know the official title of the department I'm in) and he says back "yeah, I guess that is more of a creative haircut... I couldn't get away with it." Yes, I know that we looked very different; he was in a blue pinstripe suit and I was in a Dickies shirt and jeans, but what really struck me as the difference was that he was wearing sunglasses, despite having come from inside of the building.

Our conversation continued, I commented "Well, you know, there are pluses and minuses. I'm technically kind of a behind the scenes kind of guy, so my appearance is usually just kind of matters to me, my boss, and my computer monitor. I don't deal with execs or customers, I only have to impress people with my work, not my appearance."

He pauses and mulls that over. "Yeah, I guess you're right. Pluses and minuses.... Like, I make great money and live a life of leisure. I am pretty much set for life. But you have a mohawk. I'd probably trade with you, because you have a mohawk and I don't. I can't buy the right to wear a mohawk. You just can. Yeah, I'd trade with you in a heartbeat."

I assured him that I'd trade haircuts if we could trade incomes as we parted ways.

So again, as per the usual, this anecdote once again proves that apparently I attract weirdos like a fiddler attracts a square dance. All I wanted to do when I set foot on that elevator was to stand in once place and somewhat blankly stare at the numbers go by, just like anyone else would usually expect in the same situation.

Having had a few days to mull this over in my head, and after discussing this with some friends, I kind of assume this dude must have been pretty baked. That is the best explanation for him wearing sunglasses when getting onto the elevator from inside the office, for his insane consumption of mini candy bars, and for his generally strange manner. Nonetheless, baked or no, this guy still saw me and just knew: this guy will make for some good conversation. Little did he know that almost as soon as he started talking to me, I just knew: this guy will make for some good blog.

Long time, no blog

Wow. This is absolutely appalling. It's been months, again proving that I'm absolutely terrible at this. If there is one thing that I can blame at the moment, it is a lack of external stimuli. Over the past few months, I've taken to a somewhat hermetic lifestyle, mainly for economic reasons. See, I had a job for a bit, and ever since that job ended, I've been spending the majority of my time either at home on my couch, at my friend's place on his couch, or at various band practices. While that is good news for my consistently dwindling bank account, it is bad news for this blog.

I'm one of those folks who thrives on external stimuli when it comes to blogging. I see stuff around me on the bus, at a coffee shop, at the bar - wherever - and I find that it stirs up something in me or something like that, and then I write about it here.

So half the reason I haven't written in a while is the fact that plain and simple that I haven't really had much of anything to write about. I don't think anyone is really interested in left side of the couch vs. right side of the couch, or how excited I was when I finally got a DVD rack that I could fit everything into so that I could finally get the boxes out of my living room. Nobody other than myself or my roommates care when I max out my character in Borderlands. You get the picture. I am leading a pretty darn mundane life at the moment, and while there is nothing wrong with that, it doesn't exactly make for good reading.

So, here's to hoping that I become more active again. I start a new contract job next week, which will mean upwards of ten hours a week on MUNI which is always rife with blog-worthy material. Also, I just want to be more disciplined in setting aside some more time on a regular basis to write; I am, by profession, a writer (some might argue) and therefore I do need to keep the old tools well honed.

So let's hope that this is the start of a more diligent trend. As always, I'm not making any promises, but it would be good to get back into the swing of things a little bit more.

This Is What We Have Become

A friend of mine posted this photo on Facebook this morning. This is the line outside of a local mall, where people are queued up in order to get a wristband that will allow them to purchase a pair of the new Air Jordans that come out today.

Yes, that's right. Shoes. These people are in line for shoes.

But they're not even in line for shoes, they're in line for the wristband that will give them the right to buy shoes. Knowing how things work these days, I imagine this is even a line for a wristband to allow them to buy a pair of shoes that they pre-registered to buy on the internet.

The sad part of it all? I would imagine that at least 25% of these people will not even put the shoes on their feet; either because they want to keep them pristine and in perfect condition in the box, or because they want to flip them for a quick profit. Still, that "profit" comes at the cost of having to stand in line for hours on a Thursday morning for shoes.

When did we become a line-waiting culture? How did this "get it before anyone else can" obsession spread to all parts of our consumer experience? I can condone it for something that has a spoiler aspect to it: movies, books, stuff like that. Yes, you want to see the movie before every jamoke on your Facebook timeline talks about how OMG the ending was, and your moviegoing experience is ruined. I get that.

An aside: usually going to the movies for one of the first showings of a movie is enough to ruin my moviegoing experience. But I'm a curmudgeon.

But shoes? Shoes? I can guarantee that every person in this line has seen pictures and probably videos of the shoes already. Some crazy Nike Jordan fanboys have probably even seen design specs. So what is the rush? Spoiler alert! The shoes are mid-tops! I'm the first to realize, these shoes have laces!

This makes about as much sense to me as all the commenters who flock to online newspapers, video hosting sites, etc. and leave one comment: "First". Because, after all, it doesn't matter if you watched the video or read the article (it matters even less if you have an opinion, especially an intelligent one) about what you read or saw, what matters is that you got there first.

And where does it all lead?

Apparently to a parking lot outside a shopping mall at 7:45 in the morning, waiting in the drizzle for a wristband for a pair of shoes you may never wear.

Conflicted

No, I'm not conflicted about abandoning this blog, I've just been busy with the new job and all.

And for those of you who haven't heard, I got a new job. I'm working as an editor for an educational publishing company, and so far it's pretty sweet.

What I was conflicted about earlier today was a task I had to do for part of my job: I had to pull a book apart. Yeah, it was weird. See, whenever we print a new edition or a new printing of a book, we digitally archive the previous printing, from what I can tell, it's pretty standard operating procedure, and it's good because you can almost immediately pull up any edition of any book to see what changes have taken place and all that. It's just the method by which that archiving takes place that was a tough pill for me to swallow.

For those of you who regularly use a multi-purpose copier/scanner deal, you know there is the glass platen where you can place things, and there is a top-loader that will pull loose pages through and scan them automatically in a large batch. That is clearly the more efficient way to go about scanning high page counts. So today I had to take a reference copy of this book, cut its cover off with an old-fashioned paper cutter, and then pull each individual page from the binding to create individual pages to feed into the top loader, and for a book nerd like yours truly, that is just about the same as doing something cruel like pulling the wings off of a fly.

It got me thinking of how peculiar I assume I must be. I'd imagine most of you reading this wouldn't think twice, but it really got to me. I talked to the book, said how proud we all were of it, and assured it that it we were going to send it to a nice farm upstate where it could play in a big field with other retired editions so that it wasn't worried to take that final trek. I reassured myself that this book was giving its life as a bound edition to assure future generations of better books, but it still was tough. Outside of humans, cars, or domesticated animals, this is probably about as sentimental as I get about stuff like that. I can go to a restaurant and eat veal or foie gras without batting an eye. I enjoy watching chefs artfully butcher and prepare meats, but somehow if it happens to a book, I get all glassy-eyed and have to steel my nerves.

I had a similar reaction with a piece of art that I purchased a few years ago. It should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever read this blog that I am a huge fan of Jack Kerouac, and when I saw a portrait that an artist had painted of him for sale at a local restaurant, I bought it right off the wall and carried it home with me that night. However, there was one little part of that portrait that still makes me a little sad to this day: the entire backdrop of the portrait is made up of ripped up pages of On the Road that were decoupaged onto the canvas. It looks great, and it makes an excellent effect, but it also makes me a little sad to know that a copy of my favorite novel of all time was sacrificed for the sake of art.

In summation, I'm odd and you should love and cherish your books like I do. Now I'm off to bed to cuddle with a couple books and assure them that they'll never see a fate like that as long as I have a say in the matter.

Getting Started

I've been involved in a number of conversations with a number of people recently about how I got my start doing something, and I feel like I never have a particularly exciting or insightful answer for the question. It doesn't matter if it's music or writing, I just feel like I found something I like to do and have tried to dedicate my time and efforts to getting in to that practice. 

For music, I was eight years old, I saw the movie "La Bamba" and immediately knew I wanted to play guitar. My parents had tried to get me to play piano first, since my sister had already been playing for a few years and was showing some promise, but I just couldn't get the hang of it no matter how I tried. Oddly enough, I still can't play piano to save my life, so that's something I guess I just have to just throw my hands up and say "oh well" to. I was lucky that maybe a month or two later, a teacher at my school started offering guitar lessons, and I immediately signed up. I was maybe eight years old, and for the first little while, it was kind of hellish: I remember a number of times my parents sent me to my room and threatened some kind of recourse if they didn't hear me playing guitar for at least half an hour. At the time there were probably a hundred things that I would have rather been doing, but now, some 23 years later, I am thrilled that they did it. Because I had a knowledge of reading music and all the basics of guitar playing, by the time I started listening to a lot of music that I wanted to play, I was able to pick things up much easier than friends who were just starting out. 

Since then, all I did was keep playing and playing until I couldn't play anymore. However, I also wonder from time to time nowadays if I have plateaued. It's strange: I don't feel the need to practice much on my own, since I can play what I feel like I want and need to play, but I still always want to believe that I'm getting better at the same time. Similarly, I am the worst person to ask if it is difficult to learn guitar or not: when you start playing as young as I did, you don't think about the challenge, and now that I've been playing for like 75% of my life, I believe that it comes second nature. I realize it doesn't, but I just can't think back to the old days of not knowing anything about guitars. There is plenty of stuff that I can't do, there are plenty of songs that I might never be able to play, but I can play as much as I want to for the time being, and I have to be content with that. 

Writing was a trickier question. You never really take lessons or anything like that, right? Yes, I realize taking English classes is like taking writing lessons, but only a portion of what I learned in school applies to writing that I might do for work (kids, if you're reading this, don't pay attention to that last sentence - school and English classes are the most important thing you can do with your life, ever). 

So when I had a former work acquaintance ask me "How did you get started as a copywriter?" I was completely flummoxed. For me, it has just been a part of self-discovery: I knew upon graduating high school that English and Band were the two areas in which I excelled. When I decided not to major in music, I didn't bat an eye before settling in on an English major. I graduated, I taught for a while, I went to grad school, and all the while, I wrote. I wrote this blog, I wrote lesson plans, I tweeted, I wrote hopefully entertaining Facebook posts, I wrote emails for myself and for my bands; I just plain wrote. It became a way of life. 

Yes, this is the point where you detractors will draw attention to the fact that my blogging has become infrequent at best, and my twitter account has been somewhat neglected, but I have a lot of irons in the fire at the moment. Bear with me. 

Much like music, I don't think of writing as something I work on anymore, it's just something I do. Yes, I work like hell on it, but to me it's all part of the writing process. I read, I edit things that I write, I edit things that other people write, I brainstorm; it's always going on even if I don't have things to show for it. I would like to say that I started writing when I was a little kid and I poked a few attempts at a story on my parents' old typewriter. It was god awful, I'm sure, but it was the first time I sat down and said, "I am going to write something" and sat there until the words came out. It's not unlike what I do now, but now I'm a lot more critical of my writing, and every now and again, someone pays me for the things I write. 

So how did you get your start? Did you determine this path early on, or did it evolve over time? I'm curious more than anything because I don't think that I've asked too many people that question myself, and the more the question rattles around my head and the more I try to formulate an answer, the more I kick myself for not asking of myself and of others sooner.