As you transglide the webcloud, do you tend to accumulate bookmarks to read later, then spend hours, categorizing them, sorting them into carefully labeled folders, arranging to folders into yet more folders, until all those folders go into one big folder that goes right into the trash can? Are you sure you want to delete this folder? Oh fuck yes, just get me away from this bullshit, oh god? Of course you do, you’re reading a blog with almost no useful information and possibly even less entertainment value. But we can’t always help ourselves. Binging is always easiest but I’ve had a problem with purging lately. I blame the earthquake. I’m going to do some more posts on/in Japanese and some Japan stuff, mostly music-related but not all…maybe I could write a record review or two (gosh!). Anyway, I’m a bastard with procrastination. (Like, hypothetically speaking, suppose I had to write some record reviews…with no deadlines, how can they be written at the last minute?) It’s shitty. I’ve never gotten freelance work cause I know I’d fuck it up. (Well, I’m trying to train myself out of it…)

Enough about me. Wait this whole post is about me. Me and my backlog. Yep, just keep tellin yourself that…no that’s it. It’s just that I was ok with letting crap pile up while I was studying, I had a really good momentum going. Then you figure, what’s the point learning to deal with a country that’s totally fucked. I know it’s not totally fucked, (on a scale on fucked, America’s not really much less) but it’s hard to focus in the same way. I think I’m over it, but I was so locked in to just reading every single news story, or anything else that would distract me from those news stories, it’s like I was going through every link like it was a study item. And there’s no next level on the internet. It’s just tubes that you…surf. Fuck! Whatever.

I realize the irony of writing about studying when I could be studying, but I’m trying to keep it on top. I already put in a couple hours today. I enjoy it. It seems like my most likely lead in life for making any kind of decent living and I need to really keep drilling that into my head. Been thinking about going back into retail lately. Retail sucks but it’s the easiest way to get a decent steady paycheck with a 39.75 hour week. (I currently only work about 12-20 hours a week, which was fine when I was doing side photo work, that work dried up so I’ve just been scraping by.) Then I could afford to get my Bachelor’s and pay off my credit cards.

Or I could have my eyeballs removed and do skullfucking porn. Depends on the hours.

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If it matters (and it doesn’t) jimhaku@gmail.com is working again. I locked myself out of it about 2 years ago, about 2 years and 2 months after I made it. (My computer crashed, the recovery email was another dead address, and the secret recovery question has some inane non-answer I’m sure I thought was hilarious and unforgettable. I was wrong. First time.) I was more interested in what my answer to the question access to the mail itself at some point. Doesn’t tell you of course. It’s a professional sounding address tho, right? I thought so when I first told everyone about it. How many weird dangling conversations and questions that had gone unanswered? Zip. ゼロ。(Ahh…perfect.) Just a bunch of spam, dozens of dead password assists, and reminders that I am the worst. (Not really…3rd worst, maybe.)

If you have the other gmail address or another address, keep using that; they all get forwarded to the other gmail account. Except for the one that doesn’t. (That one no longer has an outgoing server.)

So.

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I met Joe Strummer volunteering at WFMU. It was July 2001. I had just started working there stuffing envelopes, might have been the very first day. I had just my job at an art supply store and had not yet had to get another job in another art supply store, so I was already feeling pretty good that day. Strummer was taping a guest DJ spot. If it was live, I might have planned to be there that day to try to meet him, but there was no reason to expect the man who myself and fellow recent ex-bandmates nearly worshiped for the previous two years would walk through the open doorway I was standing next to and shake my hand. He wanted to meet the volunteers.

Naturally I was shocked, but didn’t miss a beat. Still grabbing his velvety palm I quickly headbutted and spat in his eye because

P U N K R O C K

…his eye immediately became infected since I, a Punk Rocker, am filled with disease. Not missing a trick, he pulled a dagger from his boot and stabbed me the thigh. We embraced and shared a hearty Punk laugh. Treating our wounds with cheap grain alcohol, we sat for a bit smoking butts from the large communal ash tray. WFMU volunteers routinely scavenge the Jersey City shore for smokables, collect them in an old oil drum, and just sit around all day enjoying urban nature’s bounty, stuffing envelopes and listening to old scavenge stories. It was pretty sweet. But after a few hours of this, he said he had to go tape his show. I spit in his other eye and called him a poseur. It was glorious. He laughed and gave me 20 quid “to piss off”. I asked what I was supposed to do with “quid” in America. He suggested I buy a new dagger. Bollocks! It was true, I had no dagger. It was I was was the poseur.

☠☠☠☠☠
I went down to Quidley’s Dagger Shoppe, were they accept bollocks and bought that dagger, then I went home and thought about daggers. And Joe Strummer. Punk Rock.

No one knew it would be the upcoming Mescaleros shows would be the last. I remember missing them, but don’t remember why. Probably drunk.

Some of this happened.

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…nope. Just the usual. Trying to clean things up. Over on tumblr I’ve been posting mostly links and reblogs with few comments. Thinking about a lot of stuff. Saving things up for real discussions or more in-depth posts. Have a lot of things in the queue I’m trying to clean out by the end of April, but I like to keep the posts in bunches. I’d like to keep to one or two a day. Most people use the site more like livejournal or as an imagedump. I stopped trying to follow everyone back a while ago. Still not that many followers but the amount some people post is crazy. I really keep up with the feed and just check in with the others. Then there’s the fucked up shit. Lotta that. Racism is a real trend. Certain things, it used to punk rock to co-opt, but you can’t really do it anymore. Sad developments. Not for new stuff as much as the old stuff. Some of the kids out there are getting the wrong decoder rings. Hopefully they can figure this out on their own cause most adults are super fucked by this point, I can’t deal with kids, and no one reads this blog.

And people just keep dying.* Try to keep my list relevant to people I cared about. They’re saying Poly Styrene now or maybe not. She’s 53 with some bad cancer either way. I talked about Kurt Cobain a little before, maybe I made it sound like he was a role model to me. I should make it more clear that when I was a teenager I wasn’t looking up to him as someone like me who had “made it”, but someone like me who had remained alive for what then seemed an impressive amount of time. It wasn’t that much of a shock when he went. I’m kinda grateful now I missed out on some of the drama surrounding that. (I made up for it later.) But I should also make it clear I grew out of feeling that way. Instead I looked up to people like Joey Ramone and Joe Strummer. When they both died at 50, this seemed to me a reasonable age to kick it. Not intentionally, but just to live in such a way that it catches up to you right about then. I only stopped thinking like this maybe a year ago. Trying to remind myself of all this because I’ve been getting frustrated with myself and where I’m at in life, I just feel behind other people career-wise or whatever (never wanted my own family) and I just need to remember the whole decade-long nihilistic tailspin of my own creation (well, I had help). Oh right, that. That could be it.

I committed to an artist’s life, whatever that means, pretty early. Most of what I make, whatever medium, sucks. Same as most artists, tho. Even the good ones. But it’s about the life. Been thinking about when I was a kid, I was just a nerd and just getting into music, before the real problems started. I think I can blame religion for some of that. I would hate to be responsible for steering anyone towards religion. I like Buddhism and Taoism as just the bare minimum of something to not be a complete bastard. I think whatever could work if you keep it stripped down, just to check yourself not to be a raging asshole. The Jesus thing does not work for me tho just because of the history (personally and the whole thing really). Seems to also be short-hand for anti-Semitism is some cases. The whole cross thing, I hate it. But I would never use the upsidedown cross cause if you really go into Catholicism, it’s the symbol for St. Peter. It’s different if you don’t know that of course, but I’m scarred for life.

*few more here

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