A Sobering Lyric

At my work they decided to jam more people into my cubicle... dumb. Hot-desking, space constraints, flexible workforce. Whatever, all I know is now I have to listen to three stooges singing Johnny Cash songs together. A capella, unless you count tapping your mouse against the desk in some crazy 23/16 meter. One of these three came up to me the other day and said "Mindsnare.......................... good band......................................very good.....................I saw them in Byron.....Bay.....................they were not the headlining band.................................but all agreed they stole the show." (pauses sic, approximate length captured as accurately as ellipses can measure. Rest assured listening to him talk is like listening to a marathon runner thanking his fans and supporters after a gruelling run). To put this into context: man is sixtysomething, man has a defibilrator, man has never once mentioned this show he saw which took place some months before. Unbelievable. The most posi- moment of my month. One can imagine a sixty year old man with a mechanised pig heart opening up the pit and creepycrawling all over the floor, but one can't quite process this... in the abstract it is comprehendable, but to really get down to the nuts and bolts of it, to really get down to BRASS TACKS: no way. No way can I imagine this man either as a long hair up front or caught in the mosh at the back. Head nod on the back wall? Stage dive to the left? Camera to the right? Holy fuck. I wish I was there to see him headwalk.

Further contextual details necessary to take this story to the NEXT LEVEL: this was one of several Mindsnare shows of that period where rumours of their imminent demise were rampant, just before anything official but filtered through friend-of-mine-knows-gordy. Needless to say, shit would have been even more off the wall than usual; the show that this Old Man (have I made it clear that he is old I KNOW RIGHT) was in attendance was some sydney-fest-fuck with a gazillion bands... 60 dollar door charge and for all intents sold out - wall to wall tattooed, lobe stretched, black tshirt, unkempt hair hardcore kids; just think, he doesn't have vans or converse trainers or nike dunks, so what was he wearing?

This rates as number 1 posi moment of 3, two and three being discovering a colleague whose main preoccupation was spreadsheets http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifand updating JDFs had a box of Husker Du and Exploding Mice records at his parents house from back in his punk days, and a train driver stopping the Perth/Mandurah express line to scoop up some ducklings seperated from their mum and let them ride in the cabin rather than crush them into meal, and the ducklings cries coming out over the intercom, respectively. A good month. Almost outweighs the anxiety attacks I've been having, the suicidal thoughts.

(photo credit danny cohen, more cool shit here... http://dannycohenphoto.com/ ... I dig it... Inlays for Mindnsare LPs and awesome Melbz band The Seduction. Feel it).

Abstraction

I don't know if it's ironic to listen to heavy as shit music on noise-canceling headphones. I spent nights in the fortnight preceding staying up to midnight jacked on caffeine, listening to pig destroyer records and watching static rolls on the tv... total isolation, total fear, total paranoia... Eventually you buy into everything and start sleeping with a baseball bat under your bed. Everything has a thin veneer and underneath... pain... And the loneliness.

And then you start to understand the rationale behind a State Department with the agency to legally separate dependents. Behind all the reports and the departmental restructures and third management tier is an organisation with designated legal authority to stop someone putting out cigarette butts on a 2 year old. That is the basic underlying premise. If you do that often enough eventually everything narrows down to a single dot and small steps off high ledges don't mean shit.

You can think listen to pig destroyer as blast beats, sure. Crazy 'edgy' samples, deep growls. Uncomfortable little girl preoccupations. Or you can accept everything as a completely serious construction of a natural response to the natural world. In many ways it's like watching flicking between news channels real fast... rape, murder, abandonment, terror, repeat, rinse, cycle. Follow blast beats with 12 minute samples of 911 calls and men crying and court proceedings...

What's The Word I Am Looking For

http://www.mit.edu/~ecprice/wordlist.100000

"This is the B-side, flip it..."

Things that I have been requested to change in the last fortnight

attitude
tone
diet
language
opinion
sensitivity
ethic
work ethic
the direction I am facing
a 20 dollar note
yen
the channel
my shirt
my deodorant
behaviour
lanes
the record
the (phonograph) record
spelling
insurance policy
mind
order

Blogs Go Bad, Sat 4, 2006

from drew
to user@notifylist.com
date Sat, Feb 4, 2006 at 9:59 AM
subject thanks for all the corrections

hey notifylist people,

thanks a whole fucking lot for all your corrections. it really is
awesome. i mean, i totally needed about 300 emails pointing out that
the porcupine in my last email was a hedgehog.

oh and thanks for the 250 links to fucking snopes about the arby's
thing.

really, i try to do something fun, and you guys just wreck it, and turn
it into something that's a burden for me (it took ten minutes for my
email inbox to load) so i am going to stop doing these notifylists
until you can all settle the fuck down and stop bugging me.

have a good weekend. don't email me. buy some t-shirts. shut the hell
up about how i should make different t-shirts. just shut the hell up.
leave me alone for one second.

drew



-------------------------------------------------------
Get your own free notify list at http://Notifylist.com !

Thoughts Arising From The Ray Martin's Andrew Olle Media Lecture Speech

Channel 7 decided that in the biggest economic crisis of our time it needed in-depth coverage, considered reporting and relevant thought from experts in the field that could be translated to a lay audience by journalists and talking heads.

Channel 7 decided that the best way to do this was to go sort all programs by intelligence and use the headliner as it's lead ship. Some how the work experience kid managed to sort the excel spreadsheet by descending order and no one picked up the error... Which means SUNDAYS WITH ANDREW O'KEEFE is Channel 7s pick.

It's hard to say whether this is parody or if the executive head had a brain hemorrhage when Captain Rudd started talking about Xtreme Kapitalism and executive pay cuts. It's looking like the days when you could do a terrible job and be rewarded is going to be again isolated to the public service.

The financial expert is Koshy. As in, Mel and Koshy. Koshy wears glasses so you know he's a financial expert. The reverse of Clark Kent. Or like some Mike Myers movie where he plays every role... put on a fat suit, I'm the bad guy. Give me bad teeth, I'm the good guy. O'Keefe cutting to Koshy for a live feed is like jerking off your brother. Koshy cuts to some pretty young blonde that fell out of your cereal box and SHE'S interviewing pensioners who aren't capable of telling the difference between the stocks on the market and in their soup. You wonder how long before they decide to cut on location costs and just put Koshy in a roof of mirrors and he interviews himself until his hard hitting questions break open this financial mess.

If I lived out in the sticks and the West decided to deliver me my morning paper at 3pm citing logistical costs, and the shitty reception on my antenna meant I didn't get any decent news channels, I would stop watching news altogether.

Sometimes I don't even have to think too hard why people are disinclined to be abreast of current affairs and news if their only options are these cardboard cutouts. If I pissed on Koshy his little texta face was dissolve.

Partly Stercoraceous

Those half-tolerated acquaintances you see at parties that always ask what you do for a job might as well ask the colour of your stool. Fuck. Off.

Viva la Raza

I've been reading heaps of Cormac McCarthy, Hunter S. Thomspon's early stuff on Chicano politics, Clive James' essays on Spanish writers. If I bleep out in my head the bits I don't understand I sometimes think I could talk spanish/mexican/peruvian. Yesterday I made guacamole and listened to Rage Against the Machine - ya for raza living in lala - and thought about living in a south american slum. Never wearing a shirt. Soccer in the street. Bandana looped around my neck when the wind caught up. City of Men of yo. Strap two revolvers across my chest and tattoo the holy mother across my back. Damn right beuno.

What the fuck do I know. Two months ago I wanted to move to Broome and ride my bike in pink shorts and diamond studs in my ears.

The only thing that excited me today was the prospect of a complete departmental overhaul of office spaces. I got hard looking at maps and building specs.

I should dream littler dreams. Like a bigger cubicle. Like a longer chain.

Everything Louder Than Everything Else, This Goes To Eleven, Feel The Black Wind, etc., etc.,

Sometimes I cross the wires at the back of my brother's reciever and tell him that the weird hum is the next avante-garde underground melbourne noise outfit. 'But the record isn't moving!' 'That's an optical illusion.' Then I make him listen to it for 30 minutes.