Oh, Oh, Oh! Totus Floreo!

October has a pretty useless name.

Evidently, it used to be the eighth month, Octo being the root meaning "eight", back when we hadn't quite invented the wonders that are January and February. Thank goodness we (humanity) got around to that, who knows where we would be if these two completely, genuinely fantastic months were never imagined. Think of it! If there were no January...WAIT. Nothing of consequence at all would happen. But what of February, surely our comrade cannot disappear without a cosmic misalignment of insurmountable gravity! OH WAIT February is completely useless too.

So, we're left with a misnamed month. For ALL ETERNITY. IRONICALLY, January, one of those throwaway months that the Romans didn't quite get around to inventing right away, has one of the more interesting and more thought-provoking original stories. You see, Janus was the god of the doorway in Roman mythology, the gatekeeper. January, thus, becomes the gate-keeping month of the new year. Much, much cooler than a misnamed misfit of a month, of whom the only distinguishing characteristic seems to be that various horticulture begins to rapidly wither and die, and there's a day at the end of the month where public (female) nudity and eating massive amounts of product with massive amounts of high fructose corn syrup is appropriate.

OCTO=EIGHT.

Perhaps we should call this linguistic nightmare "Dectober". But wait, hold on one moment. Could it be that December....YES. Don't tell me! YES. The prefix "Dec" means TEN. Check your calendars lads and lassies, December is the TWELFTH month of the "modern" calendar.

Is nobody else offended by this? Am I shouting eternally, soundlessly into a void into which no one else will command their spirits, their collective will? As luck will have it, I will one day perish, and will no longer be alive to be offended by this cavalcade of ceaseless suffering. I'm glad that this will be at a soonish period, because I don't want to be around when they add even more months, because you know they will. They'll have to, Winter will end because humanity as deemed it appropriate to choke the planet with hydrochlorofluorocarbons and the like. The winter months will become irrelevant, and Humans will try to comfort themselves by adding new, less season-dependent months.

Dear John To Consciousness

This must be unique to humans.

I have occasioned to experience moments recently where I’m chugging along on a pattern of thoughts; of rational, inconsequential thoughts. And all of the sudden, a deluge of uncertainty, discombobulation and lightness. “Who am I? Is really the same body I inhabited as a child? Where are my thoughts coming from? How can any of this be?”

I suppose it’s a bit more natural for these moments to come at times of profound change. I hesitate to call what I am going through profound: its profundity is limited to a change of address and to the books I read, really. I still plop down in a chair for a few hours a week to be spoken to about something, plop into another chair to make sure I know from what context the something is emerging, and plop down into another chair in between these particular events to either eat, rest, or take in a few episodes of Star Trek which I’ve seen 40 times and yet never seem to age. So, I still sit quite a bit.

But the nature of my sitting, and what it represents I suppose, has undergone a rumbling, numbing sea change. Certain aspects of the knowledge I take in disturb me...not so much the knowledge itself, but how we get that knowledge. It’s all so much rearranging humans as figurines in some sort of dollhouse. You owed this man this duty, but you no longer do; you’re in the backyard. You engaged in this behavior which, though not at all morally or practically harmful, offends our sensibilities for some reason. Time out for you. 20 years from now, we may change our minds: but you are subject to our whims for now.

A perverse part of me wants to be the child doing all the rearranging; vetting and setting the rules would be such fun. I always liked the control of playing with action figures. Spiderman didn’t necessarily have to be Spiderman; I could rename him Erasmus and characterize him as a heavily tattooed postal worker. He could team up with Bucky O’Hare, Napoleon and Commander Dogstar and perhaps stage an invasion of some random Lego fortress, which was a competing private postal service. Or something. I think the law is sort of like this. At the end of the day, you’re either making shit up, or you’re scarfing up the shit people made up 3 days to 300 years ago.

This power, what it all means, it doesn’t usually hit me until I’ve had a moment or two to reflect on it. It’s impossible not to get lost in the verbosity and pretentiousness of it all, but ultimately, it’s quite a monopolistic system. So while my plopping may be the same (though the chairs here are generally provide a bit more lumbar support), it really is infinitely different. So maybe this does explain my disconnectedness from myself; I'm not familiar with this version of myself, the one that knows these things and lives this way, and my cranium's attempt to search the database for older matches has failed.

Ostriches don’t do this, I guarantee it.

I'm In Love With Destruction

Chipped teeth, lacerated chin, cracked vertebra at a Taco Bell. Collapsing roofs, violent tractor accidents, exploding Audis, and the act of apathetically watching a man scream, flail around and drown..for half an hour.

Perhaps these are events that will fill up a screen in a new John Woo-directed film. Or some other director, I really don't care. I'm a doctor, not a film critic.

But what they truly are is the bizarre, immaculate, undeniably amusing events that have colored my law school reading thus far. If nothing else, case law has illuminated to me the seemingly endless possibilities of human incompetence, indifference and of a particularly profound brand of rancorous stupidity. It is at once depressing, exhilarating and exhausting.

I write this at my home, not at school, and these weeks have been such a whirlwind, such a wonderful shock to my functioning, that I find myself puzzled that any of it has happened at all. This high a volume of new people, new concepts, new surroundings, new lifestyles, new underwear...err....well, it all seems a little surreal right now. As if I've been simply a spectator while someone else performs in my place. But I have memories of it all, so I guess it must have been me.

I'm not used to any of this. And I am reveling in that. Perhaps I'll look back at such a blog entry 1 month, or even 2 weeks, from now and say, "You surely couldn't have been that happy!" But I was, and I am.

"Sic Transit Gloria" Means Get Gloria Home Before She Throws Up In Your Car

I always seize the opportunity to use something my grandmother says as a blog title. By always, I of course mean just the one time. But I'm one for one you see, so always is an apt term.

Anyway, my intent is really not to write about the random stuff my grandma (who will soon be an octogenarian, and party's at our house, by the way) says, though I suppose that could be a supplemental blog. Then, I don't even update this one...



What my house will look like the weekend after next.



My intents are as follows:

1. Update you on Three Dimensional Rhombus.

2. Ramble on about totally rational fears.

3. Stop writing at some point.

Ok, let's tackle these one at a time.


3DR: The project initially conceived as a space opera about my cat's love of salmon-flavored glop has (d)evolved into a series of rambling, thematically incoherent sound pieces. This is probably what my brother and I are actually capable of producing.

Here is the best(!) of our glorified auditory chicken scratch, "Cackle of the Disenfranchised Donkey":




Not really sure what we were going for there, but we do play all the instruments.

Credits:

Kevin: bongos, transcendent call of the weasel, production

Jimmy: synth, perpetual wailing of the mist, eternal screeching of the bountiful eggplant, production


So there's that.


Fear:

Ever since I signed on for this law school thing, something has been gnawing on my brain, like some sort of teething child of the damned.

As much as I believe I will excel in law school, given the various skill sets I possess, I also believe that the experience, the demands and the curricula will sap me of any sort of creative or playful desires. I'm not kidding myself: it's going to be a hellish three-year sprint. But I constantly wonder whether or not it will come at the cost of what I perhaps value most about myself: my individuality, my sarcasm, my (benign) cynicism and sarcasm even. The law is, for the most part, rigid, though interpretation does lead to some interesting debates. I am, for the most part, Gumby. A match made in heaven, or in Cleveland?

It's a long shot, but law school very well might transform me into some sort of android...thingie.

Anyway, I'll try to update more often. Here's a monkey to be sorry for me.

Rehearsals Have Commenced!

Alright, so maybe rehearsals is far too generous a term. "Creative sessions" is probably more accurate...if you drop the term "creative" from the phrase.

Regardless, Three Dimensional Rhombus got off the ground today with some borderline illegal jams that ranged from this weird mix of funk and Japanese folk music to Latin disco with church bells. It was going pretty well until one of the cats walked across my feet while I was playing a particularly emotional music box solo and I threw a Christian Bale hissy fit and destroyed the basement.

The sessions were documented with the following photos. No material was recorded, I only dropped my soprano sax twice (once on my foot) and we took two breaks for pretzels and Juicy Juice.



Kevin seems perturbed. What's the matter, is the arpeggio button sticking?





Yeah, ok, so it's on a pool table. Bob Dylan didn't even move out of the sewer until his fouth album was released.




Blurry, perhaps. But a genuine double-keyboard moment is too precious to pass up. I think at this point my dad asked if one of the cats was hacking up a hairball.





LOOK HOW ARTSY THIS SHOT IS WE MUST BE MAKING GREAT MUSIC RIGHT.




Note to self: Rock Band microphone probably not most effective recording device.



I hope you enjoyed this not-at-all-staged look at our not-at-all-completely-hopeless pursuit of a space rock opera about cat food. More pictures available here.

Music Festival Treatise in F minor

These outdoor music gatherings have some inherent charm, this I will admit.

The kids love it: you pitch a tent, it quickly fills with syringe caps and empty cans of Barfstone Lite, a few bonfires get started, melodramtic, sanctimonious hippies wallow in their own filth, some acidwashed indie rock bluegrass merengue jazz fusion band you've never heard of plays for two hours, all while the paralyzingly amorous fragence of human regurgitation, spoiled, flea-infested corndogs and mothballs fermenting in urine wafts redundantly through the crisp, evening air. It's basically America on a field for 4 to 5 glorious days.




Have a blast, Bonnaroo attendees. Perhaps you will sink deep enough into the mud that you will commune with the reptilian android people that dwell beneath the surface but, most likely, you probably just caught too big a waft of some sort of happy smoke from the bong of that guy two tents down. Let me know if neon elephants really do dance to make gypsys cry.

Perhaps Donkey Pong Next Time?

Athleticism, coordination and even the ability to walk without tripping and smashing and disfiguring one's face into something IHOP wouldn't flinch about serving are not common traits in the gene pool around here.I readily and easily admit this.

I've heard stories, legends really, about relatives from back on the Emerald Isle performing simply magnificent feats of strength. My grandfather was said to have carried 100 kg barrels of turf (fuel) up and down steep, moist hills in the glen, a hill I have climbed myself and couldn't do it without looking like Otis Redding after a night at the Whiskey A-Go-Go.

Uncle John was purported to have worked tirelessly everyday, digging praties and shearing sheep throughout all hours, and still be able to sprint back to town and back for a glass of whiskey.

I believe none of these stories. Because there is no way I couldn't have inherited at least some of that coordination.

Why do I prattle on about all this? Because it is extremely relevant when one is trying to play a game called "beer pong". Befuddlingly popular among folks my age group, you have probably heard of this at the very least.

The rules are simple enough: throw an exercise ball through a basketball hoop, and do it while stumbling, stark-raving drunk and while entering that state.



Or at least that's what it felt like to me, the man of the coordination skills of the average blind, mute muskrat, even without the assistance of a Golden Monkey. At some point during a gathering I attended last evening, I was coaxed into partaking in this bizarre, somewhat wasteful ritual. I managed to sink only one "good" shot, and the rest ended up somewhere between 3 feet and 9 dimensions away.


The last known sighting of beer pong shot 14.


The results of too much incompetence? The forced consumption of the cheap beer of the day. Oh, and you lose too. My attempts to have the substance of choice replaced with Juicy Juice, or to use slightly larger cups...or pitchers...were looked upon with scorn and dismay. I believe at one point I even noted the remote possibility of a game of backgammon or chinese checkers getting started up.

So, if young people must have a game that involves the consumption of beer, I propose a couple of alternatives.

1. Beerus Exactus

-A game for any number of players. One player, deemed the "Beergen Master" chooses a liquid measurement (metric or standard systems are valid). Let's say, 300 ml. Players must then pour that amount of beer out of the can to the best of their ability. The player who is the closest to the precise measurement chooses someone from the group, who must drink their entire beverage and perform an action chosen by the winner. This continues until players can no longer count high enough to give a valid amount.


2. Elton Bong

-Named, of course, after Sir Elton John, this game requires at least the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album in one's discography. A neutral official plays an Elton John song at a reasonable volume. Players must anticipate when the chorus of that given song is going to arrive and, at the very moment Elton reaches the first word of the chorus, players must put on a pair of brightly-colored sunglasses and shout "I'm Still Standing". The sunglasses will be arranged on the ground in front of the players, ensuring a mad scramble, a la Musical Chairs.

The last player to do this must chug their beverage and dance around like a fool. The game ends when you hit "Rock of the Westies", because nobody freaking likes that album.


I will fight anyone who says they like this
sorry excuse for a musical record.

Are these ideas perhaps a bit too eccentric? No, I came up with them, so I obviously think they rock. If you play one of these games at your party, I guarantee that everyone will remember that way better than an aimless, wasteful game of beer pong. They may also disown you as a friend, but at least they'll never forget why.

Plus, they're not any more ridiculous than beer pong.

Summer Project: Savory Salmon Feast

Right, so I may as well not do that whole "picture of an album" thing, since I recently welcomed myself to Web 2.0 by adding what we call a "widget" that links with my brand new last.fm account. So this time, I wouldn't be able to BS you fine folks about listening to some highfalutin modernist jazz when I'm actually getting my hanky-panky on to ABBA and Orleans.

Wonderful technology and all that, though I fear that a Web 3.0 widgapplitweeterwave that logs where, when and how one scratches oneself cannot be too distant in the future...

"jagallag LIGHTLY SCRATCHED his PELVIS at 03:46:23 AM. He seemed to MODERATELY ENJOY it."

Dangerous.

Anyway, my true purpose this evening is to inform you of what will perhaps become one of my most ambitious summer projects since I made that exploding beluga whale sculpture out of toilet paper rolls, Jello and arsenic back in '86. My brother, Kevin, and I have decided to compose a twelve-part rock opera in commemoration and in honor of the best flavor of Fancy Feast cat food ever, Savory Salmon Feast.



Now you may ask yourself, "How did I get here?" And you may ask yourself...ok, enough of that. Why we decided to compose about cat food is what is on your mind. Well, the culprit is one Catkin, the most infamous (and perhaps slow-witted) of our four feline friends.












Savory Salmon Feast is Catkin's favorite cat food BY FAR. While he'll eat "Cod, Shrimp and Sole Feast" and "Supa Dupa Tuna Special", he does not consume them with the vigor and enthusiasm that he does with SSF.

So, seeing as we like to draw an irresponsible amount of meaning from Catkin's actions, we decided that, indeed, the feast must have some very lyrical, mythical history, properties and that violent, bloody wars must have been fought over it in the years of yore.

Thus, the idea for a space-rock opera was born. Frankly, I'm really not sure how Kevin and I, instrumentalists of just moderate skill (and lyricists of no skill), will be able to fill the 50-minute minumum we have set for this opera. My first guess would be aimless keyboard solos and stream of consciousness poetry reading.

But we have practiced composing already, under the moniker "Three Dimensional Rhombus", the origins of which are probably worth a whole other blog entry. Our first effort, "Jailbreak from St. Petersburg", was derided as "elevator music" and "repetitive schlock". Thanks, mom. Our next effort proved to be somewhat more memorable, as "Deathpin Raveout X" features FIVE layers of drums, Latin piano riffs, and a blues organ playing it out. It lasts all of 48 seconds, so I think it's worth it to debut it to the world.




I swear we'll get better. And that we won't cheat by using Garage Band next time, there will be real synthesizers played, real mellotrons engaged, and space music so otherworldly will be created, even Sun Ra himself will flinch.



Enjoy your weekend, people, and may the feast be with you.

Jass Iss Guds Fer Yoo

Currently Hearing: Portico Quartet, Knee-Deep in the North Sea


So I figured that there above would be a nice little thing to do. Cliche, perhaps, but a cliche never incinerated a small village. Trogdor cannot say the same.

But this particular listening moment for me brings to mind a subject to which I am well acquainted, and that is jazz music. Ninety percent of you are no longer reading, and one hundred percent of you were never reading in the first place, and 1.3337 percent of you should pick that slice of sausage and jelly pizza off the floor.

My point is that, chances are, you find the music either intolerable, impenetrable, or haven't given it a chance to spin through your soul. My fundamental problem with your (yes, your) characterization of "jazz" is this: jazz, as an all-encompassing genre, is a grand misnomer. There is no such thing as "jazz" music other than to suggest that black people playing saxophones, trumpets, percussion and a double bass in some sort of greasy, devil-summoning cacophony or some silver-haired, large-snouted white guy blowing pompous, silky drivel out of a clarinet to the beat of a drum machine is all jazz can be. It's like pointing to a Stromboli and saying, "This is the only Italian food that exists." While Stromboli is characteristic of Italian food (you dunk it in some kind of red sauce, and it averages 900 k-cal x sq inch, it creates a grease that I like to use as a pore-cleanser), it sure as hell doesn't define it.

Instead, I tend to side with what one truly regal musical mind, Duke Ellington said: "There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind." Ellington shunned those who attempted to stick a monosyllabic word onto his music. In fact, he probably had this face on while doing it.

He shuuuuns you.

Ok, that's about the meanest picture I could find of the Duke. He's wearing a smile as wide as an overfed hippopotamus in the rest of them. Why? Because he's playing jazz, man. Why would you NOT smile?

So, if you ever decide to end your obnoxiously unreasonable ban on "jazz" music entering your life, please let me know. I will be delighted to show you something under the umbrella that you will wonder how you lived without hearing.

There's No Way I'll Keep This Up

But I try anyway. Greetings to whomever you may be, and welcome to this source of potentially harmful and brain-frying musings by me.

Blogs (colloquial short-hand for "Boring self-aggrandizement...log) have always struck me as somewhat self-indulgent, especially ones that literally and genuinely only present the events in one singular person's lives, as if all of the rest of us care to divert ourselves from twittering about our own follies in upper-middle class Americana.

But you know something? I'm a self-aggrandizing, self-indulgent, boring person, and I'll be golly-gee gadfly-ed if I won't impose that on anyone who brings their contemptuous gaze to this pixelated nightmare.

If you know me, you will not be surprised to learn that I have no particular plans for what I will spew forth on these pages. Just know that you may want to bring a poncho or two, as spewing will be by the hogshead. Until I hear from my local soon-to-be-extinct newspaper, I have no legitimate outlet for writing. This usually results in me trying to compensate by creating spaces to do so, being the sanctimonious bandersnat I am.

It seems as if my pretentious introduction is complete. Now, to sum up my summer thus far:

-So, I guess I graduated from Syracuse University

-Though I expected to do this, it still felt pretty nice.

-Afterwards, I went home, pretended I was NOT an employee of Advanced Cardiac Care for one day before my boss, my dear mother, decided that was unacceptable.

-Regrettably, I returned to my combined EKG Biller/Office Monkey Extraordinaire. I've probably billed you for an EKG.

-Things at home that are exciting: the whole family is engaged in a daily regimen of Wii Fit, which is quite amusing. Never have I met a more judgmental game, however. The program gleefully points out all of your bodily flaws with the help of a capricious, bubbly cast of characters, including a talking balance board, a fitness-freak female trainer and a squeaky voice that always greets me with a disdainful "Oh..." everytime I step on the balance board. Oh, as in, "Oh, it's you, you hideous porcine gastropod."

-Recent times have birthed the highlights of my 15th-to-last summer of living at home. I hosted a chaotic, rambunctious marathon of a graduation party, which featured only 3 (human) casulaties and only one person who needed to be fished out of the pool. My soundtrack of calypso music, Bruce Springsteen, prententious modern jazz and 70's funk was well-received, probably due to the fact that it was mostly inaudible.

-Even cooler, there was this ridiculously violent hail storm during the party, in which the stones were, no lie, the size of strawberries. Baby strawberries, but strawberries. As we were running out of ice, this was a welcome development.

-Kind of a let down after it all ended, though. But good swimming day on Memorial Day, followed by more work, and the impending celebration of my mother's (CENSORED)th birthday tomorrow.

Overall, a swell time. If you made it through all of this, you are a hero. If not, WHY DO YOU HATE ME SO MUCH?!?!

By the way, find the hidden message in this post. May you live long and prosper.