goblinbox

In which I talk about really old stuff.

The fact that I’m still wasting processor cycles on this pisses me off. I shouldn’t care. I don’t care. I couldn’t care less.

But.

When I left my husband, I moved into town and my good friend AmmZon let me live with her. She even let me crash rent-free for a few months. She was dating Joesus at the time, and she and I commiserated together about red headed men more than once.

Flash back a couple of years:

The very first time I met her, she was dating BoSe and he’d brought her out to the farm. When I saw my husband and AmmZon meet for the very first time, I knew that those two were the best match of any combination of any of us. The Ex flirted baldly with AmmZon every chance he got for the next few years. It really pissed her off because she thought he was an asshole.

Flash forward five years:

After I left Iowa, AmmZon and Joesus broke up (which was no surprise to anybody but Joesus) and a couple months after that, maybe as much as half a year, AmmZon and The Ex got together. The consensus was that it was a rebound relationship, but hey – they’re still together. I think they’ll stay together.

None of that bothers me. I quit wanting my husband a couple of years before I left him, and I hope the two of them are madly in love and having awesome monkey sex. I like him and would like to see him in a good relationship. I like AmmZon too, and she’s probably the only chick I’ve ever met who has balls big enough to deal with a man with a skull as thick as The Ex’s. They have tons in common (OMG I could write you a list twelve feet long), they’re the right ages for each other, and they should probably get married and breed as soon as possible with my blessings.

What bothers me, stupidly enough, is the farm house.

Fifty-eight minutes ago, AmmZon posted a picture on Facebook of her dinner. I clicked on it and ended up looking at her albums, and, of course, there are pictures of the farm in there because, hello, she’s dating my ex-husband.

Apparently she fixed the rotting, falling down old arbor and trained the grapes back up off the ground. I never did that myself because I didn’t give a shit about the grapes. They didn’t produce, I didn’t know what I’d do with them if they did produce, and what I know about viticulture would fit in a thimble.

There’s a picture of something she’d bought on the counter from my old kitchen. My old kitchen. The only kitchen I’ve ever owned. My shitty, ugly, fucked up old kitchen.

There are pictures of the new kitchen and living room. The last time I was at the farm, I’d driven out to get my stuff shortly before moving to Washington. Much of what I wanted was ruined from having been in those rooms while they sat, half demolished and untouched, for a couple of years. He’d just piled all my crap into the future kitchen and left it there, exposed to the elements. My leather jackets were rotted with mold. A couple of computer components were ruined from exposure. Everything was incredibly filthy. You’ve never seen stuff this fucking dirty, and it was inside the house that I’d lived in for years.

That’s the house I moved out of. A house he cared nothing about. A house he’d ripped apart and then ignored. A house whose intolerably uncomfortable, filthy condition he blamed on me, because, as far as I can tell, I didn’t fuck him enough.

No, honestly. That’s not a joke. I don’t know what happened, but we moved out there and began this awesome remodel with enthusiasm and energy, and then the next thing I knew he’d been lying on the couch doing nothing for two years and he resented me damn near as much as I did him. The house was ripped apart and he wasn’t doing anything at all to fix it, and somehow it was all my fault. I was the lazy one.

I gave up my job to wait on him. I had half a dozen miscarriages with him. I washed his socks and cooked his dinner and took his dog to the vet. I paid his bills and ran his errands and he got laid at least twice a week (I know because his accusations were so upsetting that I kept a calendar), and yet he was so unhappy that he couldn’t work on the house.

The house I moved into was funky but livable. The house I moved out of looked as if it should be condemned.

Well, now it seems The Ex has gained the equilibrium he needs to be able to work on the house. The room I rescued my things from is now plumbed and has electricity and is drywalled and has windows and sills and appliances in it. It looks really nice.

The Ex, for all his flaws when I’m around, is a master fucking carpenter. His custom work is gorgeous and if he lived anywhere other than Iowa (and had the discipline and patience to get the licenses he’d need) he’d be up to his eyeballs in high-end custom work.

I knew this had to happen. One way or another, The Ex had to make the place livable because he could never sell it the way it was, and not even a man could live there like that for long. And yet, for some reason photographic evidence of the house’s transformation makes me angry and sad and resentful.

Read the rest of this entry »

In which there are two good things.

Good thing the first is that yesterday I signed an NDA and a contractor’s agreement and filled out a W9, and Monday I start breaking software for money. Yay! I know no details at all about the project’s expected longevity, but who knows – I might get lucky!

Good thing the second is that today is the Bronze Blues & Brews festival in Joseph, OR. The festival ends at ten, and Coyote Kings (featuring: me!) will be the only band playing in town tonight. We’ve already invited tons of the musicians who are booked at the festival, and it should turn out to be the Best Jam Ever.

In which I tell a world full of “SEO Experts” that they’re all fucktards and that the loss of net neutrality, when it happens, will be their stupid fault.

Last week, my bro mentioned a jobs website for freelancers, said I might want to check it out.

So I did. And I signed up, and I bid on a job moving a WordPress site and the guy and I exchanged five or six messages. His last message said he’d be getting me my down payment and the server logins so I could begin the work…

That was Sunday. Haven’t heard from him since. Oh well.

Meanwhile, I get about seven messages a day from the freelancer site, telling me of work I might be interested in.

~+~+~
Okay, so, you know how sometimes you stumble across a website that offers you something for free, and maybe you’re under-caffeinated or you’ve just been lobotomized or you’ve never been on the Internet before or you’re just plain stupid, and you click on the free thing – like a button that says you can watch a movie that you know, if you think about it, isn’t even out on DVD yet – and on the next page it says you have to “click on one of these offers” before you can see your TOTALLY FREE MOVIE and so you choose something like, “Have you ever shopped at Home Depot?” and a new window opens, and you’re supposed to sign up for a Home Depot account, and after you do the movie page comes back up and says “Offer Completed! Click here for your FREE MOVIE!” and when you do, about five windows full of ads launch and you end up watching a video about the power company and there’s no way to see the movie online because it was never there in the first place because it’s still in the fucking theatres and you knew that and now you’ve signed up for something you don’t even want and somebody’s going to get paid for tricking you into doing that?

Well, I always wondered where the fuck those websites came from. There are millions of them, maybe billions, and they come from somewhere. Someone had to buy the domain and set up the hosting and install the CMS and design the theme and write the copy and build and place the ads to drive the traffic. These things, ugly and stupid and irritating as they are, don’t grow like weeds: they’re made. And they must be worth it or people wouldn’t do it.

~+~+~
In the past few days I’ve found out where they come from. Some asshole in the US or the UK, some self-styled “SEO expert,” pays people in India and Thailand to build them. Somebody like this douche, who says his areas of expertise are in “advertising, branding, Facebook, Internet marketing, PHP, SEO, Twitter, and website design,” and whose latest job posting says this:

I have set up a wordpress theme very similar to this one watchmovieonlinefree.com. I just need someone to copy paste the last 35 posts text and pictures from watchmovieonlinefree or other sources, and add 5 new ones from my choice.

This job can be done in one day, if you focus on it. I would prefer to change the content of each post, or at least add on it from other sources.

Please bid and be ready to start working on the project, give your time frame, that you will need to respect. Payment will be released once the job is done.

Yeah, he says right there that he intends to copy a site verbatim, and then “change” or “add to it a little.” Isn’t that, like, plagiarism? (Not that it matters, since the original site was built by a fucktard just like the guy who intends to steal it.) And he won’t pay until the job’s complete, even though the site’s standard is a percentage up front, a percentage at halfway, and the remainder on completion? Yeah, real honorable, buddy.

The target site itself is a lie; the movies aren’t available. They don’t exist. People fill out the offers and get bored after being bombarded with ads and crap, and they wander off to do something else because they have no recourse. They can’t complain about the fact that they were mislead, because there’s no one to complain to, and THIS IS THE SHIT THAT’S GOING TO LOSE US OUR NET NEUTRALITY. This crap – this confusing, unregulated crap – is going to cause people to think, “Oh, yeah, it would be great if there were some way to stop those guys. We need regulation.”

I literally can’t stand the advertising/marketing/SEO people. They’re making money where there is none, simply because they’re immoral fucktards and they’re capable of badgering people just to make a little ching. They’re paying overseas workers crap wages to do technical work that is immoral if not illegal, and they do it simply to make money.

Now, I like money, don’t get me wrong. But there’s a limit to what I’ll do to get it.

These people are designing misleading ads to drive traffic to sites that outright lie, and they do it in such a massive way that it’s somehow worth it to them to get a cent or two for each completion. They outsource the grunt work to India and keep the click-thru checks from big advertisers for themselves… NO ONE is getting anything decent out of it. It’s real money for imaginary services rendered. The advertisers are serving ads to badly targeted and/or confused demographics. The survey info is untargeted. The signups are full of errors and lies (I always make up information when presented with a demand for personal information). It’s all crap. It’s all greed.

I opened a ticket with the freelance site to find out what their standards are; I know I’ve seen several job listings disappear so there’s some kind of surveillance. I mean, you can’t just ask people to build you illegal automatic voting programs in public.

~+~+~
Is it some kind of mental imbalance, then? What makes the vast majority of people do real work for real pay, but misses a few immoral freakazoids who can somehow manage to sleep at night after doing what is, obviously, total crap all day long?

It’s like self-mutilation: there’s a line, but nobody can say exactly where it is. If an intelligent, competent person gets their ears pierced, nobody blinks, even though piercing one’s body hurts and carries a risk of infection or worse. Tattoos, ritual scarification, forked tongues, implants: we accept these things.

But if someone decided to, say, castrate himself, we’d all think that was going too far… but is it? Really? It’s no more extreme than the body mods you see on your typical tattoo parlor employee, in terms of pain and risk.

I think there’s a type of salespeople who are crazy like that. They act pretty much like normal people, but they’re psychologically stunted in some way that enables them to do wrong things for money and think it’s not only okay, but that it’s good. Exciting. Challenging. They’re incapable of knowing that some things just Shouldn’t Be Done.

You’re going to say, “But it doesn’t really hurt anybody.”

And I’m going to say, No, of course it’s not life-threatening to corral someone into filling out a form or taking a survey so that you can earn your couple of cents per completion… but it’s still wrong. That you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.

It’s lying, plain and simple, and lying is wrong. And making money out of nothing is also wrong. There’s an entire industry now based entirely on lies and greed. Advertiser’s greed, who think they can get real data for a couple of cents per database record. “SEO Experts’” greed, who think it’s okay to build all this crap to entrap people. End users’ greed, who want to see a pirated movie online for free.

And no, “SEO Expert” person, you don’t get to snicker and think to yourself that only the stupid end up in your trap. They’re not stupid; YOU’RE just a DICK.

And because you’re a dick, you’re going to lose the Internet for everyone. You’re going to pester and confuse the unwashed masses, and they’re not going to want a free and open Internet, and then you’re going to have to go back to scamming people in person. You fucker.

~+~+~
I applied for a couple of virtual assistant positions that looked like they might actually be real. Maybe somebody will hire me and give me something to do for the next few weeks.

~+~+~
A friend of mine told me a few days ago that he’s starting a new job soon, and will be team-building immediately after that, and asked me if I would be interested in working on a QA team? I said something along the lines of omgwtfbbq!!1 WOULD I EVAR and he said “I know you were looking forward to school” and I was all planz change omg srsly d00d.

And now I’m trying not to think about it. It was an idea, not an offer, and who knows if he’ll even get to make his own hiring decisions, or if I’m qualified (or if I’m clever enough to make myself sound like I am), but the point, I guess, is that as totally fun as school sounds I’ve just discovered I’d be way more stoked to get an interesting job.

If no interesting job presents itself before September 20th, however, I will be going back to school with a bunch of 20-somethings to study freakin’ LAN architecture. Which should make for hilarious blog posts, at the very least!

In which I had a really great gig this weekend.

Saturday, I joined the Coyote Kings at the Pastime in Ritzville for the 17th annual Blues, Brews & BBQs festival.

It was a fantastic time. Great people, great weather, great music (and a fully-stocked green room, so I didn’t have to starve or beg someone to buy me food), and I met tons of great musicians.

I’d write a big fat descriptive post about it, but I’m lazy and I have a movie to watch. (In a nutshell: I rode up with Curt & Shelly, gigged, had some drinks, ran around, got mildly sunburnt, drank gallons of water, met players, and rode back with Frank.) If you want moar you can click the picture for the photo set!

Tomorrow’s to-do list: 1. Get paid for the gig; buy groceries and pay the Internet bill. 2. Work on NLW’s little data entry project. 3. Call the unemployment office and be all, WTF, OVER? WHY DID YOU SEND ME AN EB APP WHEN I’VE ALREADY BEEN APPROVED FOR EB? WHY WON’T YOU GIVE ME ANY MONEY? DO YOU LIKE THAT I’M LIVING ON LENTILS AND RAMEN?!

In which I argue with our collective conscience.

The screamers and the outraged ones seriously need to go home, shut up, and take an honest look at how oil affects their lives. If they want to give up all that stuff, fine: they need to find a way to do so and thereby change the market.

If they don’t, they need to knock off the bitching and vitriolic language and figure out grown-up ways of expressing their grief over the gulf, like getting trained and going there to help, or helping to draft new safety regulations and responsibility caps, or deciding where not to drill, or giving their money to brain trusts who can figure out how to replace oil’s ubiquity in modern life.

Everyone’s pissed off at BP.

They’re so mad they want to put the company out of business right this goddamned instant. At protests, their posters say things like, “BP gets rich, the people and the planet pay the price” and “Seize BP’s assets!” ¹

The heartbreaking images of birds covered in muck stir them to a seething rage. They’re instigating anti-BP groups all over the net². They’re pissed off, and they want you to do your part and boycott BP stations beginning right freakin’ now.

I humbly submit that these people are all being ignorant asshats.

What? What?! You’re wondering how I, your friend and previously non-insane person, could possibly think that? Well here’s the deal, people:

BP is our fault.

A 42-gallon barrel of oil³ only produces about 20 gallons of gas. The rest of the barrel is used to make virtually everything in your home. And I mean everything: umbrellas, pillows, thermometers, Scotch tape, snorkels, ear phones.

Poker chips, insulated boots, Q-tips, prescription glasses. Bubble bath. Coffee pots. Glad Ware.

Vacuum bottles. Patio furniture. Garden hoses. Caulk. Brake fluid. Crayons.⁴ I don’t care how crunchy and “green” your life is. If you’re in society at all, you use oil every single day of your life. Read the rest of this entry »

In which I heartily approve.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes.

If you’re not familiar with the details of the good doctor’s story, Dr. Wakefield is the guy who published the shoddy research that led thousands of people to believe that there was a link between certain vaccinations and autism. I say ‘shoddy’ because The Lancet retracted the paper soon after it was published (the research was bad and no one could replicate the results) but people continued to believe the results anyway. Long story short, the kicker is this: Dr. Wakefield’s research was paid by lawyers for parents seeking to sue vaccine makers for damages. The anti-vaccines guy? Was one of them. A guy who didn’t mind doing unnecessary tests on children to get a big paycheck. A big pharma asshole with low morals and a lust for money.

Actually, go read this comic. It’s informative. It’s awesomesauce. It’s just plain easier. I’ll wait here.

Okay, are you back now? Great. Allow me to go off for a minute: I’m totally and completely pro-vaccination, even though I know that once in very, very great while there’s some kind of complication. Why accept the risk? Because vaccination WORKS. If you don’t believe me, go look it up. Look at juvenile death rates by disease for the past century, correct for nutrition and education, and then tell me that you really don’t think vaccinations work.

And if you can’t read, go ask someone over eighty: they’ll tell you right to your face that kids “just don’t die as much as they used to.” (G’ma told me that when she was a kid, “everybody knew someone who had lost a child to illness.” I personally know no one who has lost a child to measles, TB, smallpox, mumps, rubella, or polio.)

And it’s not because those germs just went away on their own, people. More kids survive childhood because of the use of vaccinations. Period. This is not a belief, it’s a fact. If you think vaccines cause [insert latest paranoid scare], go find the research to back up your assertion before you let your offspring become a disease vector in the middle of the culture I live in, thank you very much, because many of my own vaccinations are really quite old and I deserve to live somewhere with herd immunity.

In the autumn of 2008, some areas of the U.S. had school populations in which 10% or more of the children were un- or under-vaccinated. “We’ve already dropped below the level of vaccine coverage where herd immunity exists for some diseases,” said Dr. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases and head of the vaccine institute at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. “At some point, we’re going to be forced to decide whether it is an inalienable right to catch and transmit potentially fatal infections.”

Kids are now suffering from outbreaks of things like measles and – get this – whooping cough because their parents have skipped their vaccinations. The world is small. People bring germs back from overseas all the time. How bereft would you be, seriously, if your child got sick and died from a disease like that? A disease that was, in the not-too-distant past, virtually wiped out? A disease that is preventable?

Remember, before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, measles used to kill on average of 400 kids each and every year. Measles! I’ve never even seen a case of measles. (And, after googling the disease and catching some images, I’m glad.)

If you surf the anti-vaccine web sites, you’ll notice that most of the cited research isn’t linked. The claims that unvaccinated children are “healthier” are unsubstantiated because there’s no such condition. (As far as the medical sciences are concerned, either you’re healthy, i.e. free of disease, or you’re sick. Of course there are gradations – the kid whose mom feeds him a balanced diet and who runs around outside is going to be less likely to have behavioral and emotional problems than the kid who lives on junk food and never leaves his computer – but even if it seems counter-intuitive, there’s no proof that one is more likely to survive a deadly infectious disease than the other. And a slightly better first-world diet is not going to produce an immune system incapable of catching a deadly infectious childhood disease.)

Such sources are rife with emotionally-phrased speculation about how the medical and pharma establishments just want to make money off of selling vaccinations, as if the act of making money immediately means that there’s no reason for vaccinations in the first place. I’m not even going to bother to point out how utterly irrational that kind of argument is, because it’s so irrational it can get your kids dead.

And for what? Are you really going to feel good about sticking it to the man as you bury your kid?

I mean, think about it. Vaccines work. There is no evidence that any kind of vaccine is linked to autism or any other condition. The people we think of as “them” have children too, and they get their babies poked with needles full of the same stuff: it’s in NO ONE’S interest to continue producing and selling any vaccine that harms or kills, not even for money.

Vaccination works. If you don’t believe me, look it up.

In which I’m torn between really liking a device that works well, and feeling like I should never use it again.

Last December, I bought myself an Amazon Kindle as a Christmas-slash-layoff present.

I bought it not because I didn’t already have a way to read ebooks (I have four separate ebook apps on my iPod Touch) but because I had device envy: the Kindle was a sleek little number with a 3G connection.

Plus, NLW said I’d like it, and she’s usually right.

The 3G connection was the kicker. I could buy books anywhere – in the car, at the store, in an airport! Imagine how great it would be to finish the second book in a trilogy and be able to download and begin reading the third book without even leaving your chair, man. That’s just plain hawt.

So now I have a Kindle, and it really is a slick little device. I carry it around with me more than I expected to. I currently have 77 items on it, from full-length books to short stories to today’s New York Times and this week’s Amritapuri news.

Since acquiring my Kindle, I’ve changed the Amazon bookmark in my browser to take me to the Kindle store instead of the main page. I have 31 items in my Kindle account, which means that Amazon got much more money out of me then they ever did when all of my ebook money went to Fictionwise and Baen and Mobipocket.

My Kindle works really well. It recently received an operating system update that made it even cooler than it already was. For the first time in all my years as an Amazon customer I started a second Wish List, so I could track the Kindle books and accessories I’m lusting over.

But then there’s Amazon’s party line:

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

- Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

Which means, in a nutshell, that Amazon can brick your Kindle remotely whenever it likes. Which means you don’t own your ebooks, you’re just licensing them. (They’ve already mass-erased books from lots of devices.) If you decide to break the DRM and read a Kindle book on another device, you’re breaking the agreement and possibly even the law as well.

Cory Doctorow refuses to sell his works in Kindle format – you can get them for free from his website, but you can’t buy them from Amazon.com: he’s that against DRM and all it implies. He says that book ownership predates even the publishing industry itself, and he’s right. The ideas in a book might belong to the author, but the book itself belongs to its owner.

In the olden days, after you bought a book it was yours. You could read it, burn it, loan it, re-read it, let 11 family members read it, and then sell it: it was YOURS.

Now I’m giving money to a company who can brick my device if they merely think I’m acting funny. I have to back up all my Amazon ebook purchases and DRM-strip them just in case, or I risk the possibility of having rented rather than purchased the works in my account.

All of this pisses me off. I want to use my cool new technology, and they make it really easy for me to do so, but I don’t want Amazon thinking they’re getting away with this. They probably think the majority of their Kindle users are morons, and the more we use our Kindles and the more we accept their crappy licence agreements the more proof they have that we really are.

Yes, I still buy books from the other sites, but it’s just so much easier (and often cheaper, because Amazon sells the majority of their ebooks at a loss) to buy them directly from the Kindle itself.

Read The Future of Reading. It’s short and sweet and says most of what needs to be said.

I’m wondering if I shouldn’t abandon ebook reading on both the Kindle and the iPod Touch and find some other way of doing it. Isn’t it my duty to vote with my money?

In which we take a look at the blue dog for a sec.

Best dog ever, scowling at me for making her sit while I snap her picture with my cell phone.

In which I tell you about my weekend. And the crazy fluctuations in my state of mind. (Seriously, watching your mind do whatever it does is EVER an exercise in weird.)

Friday night I went out and got drunk for no good reason. I hadn’t intended to get drunk, but I was sitting at the bar having a really nice conversation with one of the regulars and Amy kept pouring the way she does, and, well: shit happens. Saturday I had to get up about three hours earlier than I usually do and if it was a little rough, well, that was my own damn fault, wasn’t it!

Curt & Shelly came and picked me up and they gave me an egg biscuit and hash browns from McDonald’s the very minute I sat down in their ride (and OMG I srsly LOVE THEM for that). The drive to the Benton Franklin County fairgrounds was uneventful; we didn’t need to be there early because it turned out there wasn’t going to be a sound check after all. I was, hangover-style, a little agro that I’d had to get up when I did. We milled around aimlessly instead. Steve bought me a coffee. I love him, too.

At noon, Romagossa Blu kicked off the festival with a bang, and then Vaughn Jensen went up and smoked. Coyote Kings went on at 1:30 and three songs later I went up and joined them.

Playing festivals is great. The stages are huge, the crowd is way into what you’re doing, and there are actual professional sound people at the board. Monitors! Lights! No schlepping!

There was a wedding on stage directly after our set. I got to sing ‘At Last’ for the happy couple, then bluesman Billy Stoops officiated the marriage of (our friends and fans) Nancy and Steve right there in front of everybody. It was cute.

After the set I changed into comfy clothes and promptly started drinking the free beer from the craft services tent. I spent most of the day backstage because I could (UnTapped doesn’t take your VIP pass away after you finish playing, like other festivals sometimes do) but I did wander around enough to have seen absolutely everything. UnTapped has tons of beer and wine makers and lots of food and a scattering of other vendors. It’s a really cool festival.

A few of the NW players I met told me they’d heard of me, which was, as you can imagine, immensely gratifying. I was encouraged to move to Portland; I was encouraged to start my own band. In short, I got a lot of ego stroking, but – because the mind is a terrible thing – I somehow managed to feel self-pity anyway.

I know, right? WTF, Mush? Fun blues festival, stage time, free beer, beautiful weather, good friends, and my internal dialog is fux0red. This is what happens when one doesn’t deliberately choose the upside.

My (admittedly not accurate) perception was that the musicians got younger as the day went on. In the early afternoon we had guys pushing 60 but the kids in the headliner’s band all looked like they were still on the fresh side of 30. I was having, in the back of my mind, one of those completely negative “since I wasn’t headlining at 26 it follows that I suck” thought processes. Why? It’s stupid, but lemmie tell you what: all that crap about the negative psychological effects of unemployment? Appears to be true. After not getting yet another job, I’m having a glass-is-half-empty crisis in the form of a really insidious “I’m totally mediocre” mental litany.

It doesn’t help that this is my second long-term bout of unemployment in the last five years, either. Stupid job market!

I met a metric ton of musicians, including the superawesome Miriam (of Portland band Miriam’s Well) and her bandmates; Chicago tenor player Eddie Shaw and his son Vaan (who is a really cool dude); trombonist Ed Earley; and the headliner, Hamilton Loomis (who was not only a smokin’ musician but a really, really nice person), to name a few.

Loomis’ set was not at all what I’d call blues; his has been described as a “blues-rock-funk-groove-soul band,” and he did charts that broke down into funky Stevie Wonder grooves, charts that were pure rock, charts that were pure soul. It occurred to me that from here on out, it’s all meta. Every song will contain shades of every genre that’s ever gone before, and descriptors like “R&B” and “pop” and “blues” will go the way of the dinosaur. Listeners will be expected to understand music from a global perspective that spans the whole of recorded music.

In other words, it’s so meta it’s actually like this: I have some cheesy pop in my library that features a raga in the bridge, house with a gypsy violin in it, and funk with a banjo solo. There’s really no reason I can’t do R&B-soul-blues-jazz-rock and still get booked at blues festivals, that’s all I’m saying.

Applying this meta concept to the idea of “work”, I’m realizing that my bad attitude is stupid. I’m online all the time, so I know that very little can truly be monetized. All this free information on the Internet is there because people want to do it. They try and try and try to monetize and the vast majority of them fail; overall they do this shit for the love of it. Free ebooks, free TV series, free how-to videos, free games, free lessons, free recipes: some people manage to be offering the right thing at the right time and they break through to monetization, but most of them don’t. And that’s okay.

I do what I do for the love of it: I sing, I take pictures with old film cameras, I publish thousands of words online per year, I share recipes, I comment on tech. These things are fun, and I don’t need to feel guilty – or mediocre – about not turning them into money.

I have this belief that life is structured like this: there’s this job thing you do, and it pays your bills. You do not love it. You’re very fortunate if you like it. It takes up much but not all of your time, and it subsidizes the other things you do. Some people get paid a lot to play at whatever they play at and they don’t have to do the job thing. They are rare and special, and I am not one of them.

That’s my job meta. I don’t like it, but I don’t think I’m eligible to transcend it because it seems that if I was I already would have. So, I believe that I need a job, and I don’t have one, and it’s messing with my head. Since I can’t through any amount of effort on my part cause a job to exist, I need to do something else meaningful to structure my time.

Tomorrow I’m going to visit the WorkSource office and find out what options are available. I’m ready for some options. I’m a displaced worker, I guess, since there aren’t any ISP support gigs around here and I’m 41. I think I might be eligible for grants and scholarships.

I think I’d really like to go back to school. I’d much rather be in class than on the job market since the endless rejection, poverty, and uncertainty is, um, starting to bug the shit out of me.

I mean, sure: I love having nothing but free time. Who doesn’t? I like eating when I want, sleeping when I want, playing guitar when I want, going out when I want: it’s fun. I read all the time, I can meditate whenever I want, or do push-ups and crunches when the mood strikes rather than when I have to. The freedom is great, but apparently I just can’t stop worrying about what will happen. What will happen when my benefits run out? What will happen ifone of the minimum wage jobs I apply for actually offers me a position I really don’t want?

Anyway. Sorry about the digression. All the pics from the blues festival are here, if you want to check them out.

My next gig isn’t until July, but we’ll be playing The Pastime at the Ritzville Blues Brews & BBQs festival, which should be a total blast.

In which this post is, like, totally ILLUSTRATED.

I lost two pounds last week, in spite of that four-slices-of-pizza debacle. I lost no inches, though, because of all of those damned squats and crunches and push-ups and shit. Nine weeks to go to achieve my goal weight.

So naturally, yesterday Adam sent me some Swedish Fish. They’re delicious superfruity fish-shaped gummi wonderfulness. They’re also 150 kcal per serving, so I am ignoring them as we speak:

Last night I went to an afterhours party at a friend’s house. She has a cat that will walk into a plastic grocery bag and let you carry her around:

I found it to be so hilarious I carried that cat all over the house. In a bag! LOLz!

This morning I took Bindu to her annual check-up. They poked her with a needle and her rabies cert is good until 2013. She has some tumors the vet thought were not fatty lipomas, but since her overall health is good for her age, I don’t think I’ll worry about them. She pants a lot, she’s nearly deaf, and she’s always rubbing her face on the floor like it itches, but she also eats well, has lovely ears and teeth, wants to go on walks, and runs up and down my bedroom stairs all day long: pretty good shape for a 13- or 14-year-old dog. I might get a basic blood panel done next month, just for the hell of it, but the vet thought she seemed fine overall.

We stopped at the store on the way home, and although I did find fava beans (yay! ful meddames!) I didn’t buy any garlic. Ooops. I made freakin’ awesome delish chickpea curry for lunch, though:

I realize that today is Tuesday, but there’s a nice disco-y Monday Morning Mix for you, if you want!

In which there’s a YouTube video. Sorry.

Okay, I’m obsessed with this track right now. It’s musical brain crack, as far as my musical brain is concerned.

This is only the second time I’ve ever embedded a YouTube video here ever (and the first time the video was of me). So it’s not like I do this very often, since verily I don’t like blogs full of YouTube videos, and even then I kinda feel bad about it.

Anyway, the day before yesterday a friend linked to this from Facebook and for some weird reason I actually went and watched it. I’d downloaded the track from iTunes within minutes and have played it 23 times so far. I’ve watched the vid at least half a dozen times. It’s just so freakin’ wonderful.

Behold! Tightrope by Janelle Monáe ft. Big Boi:

Groovy choreography, great voice, great beat, fantastic costumes, weird freaky hair – it’s just freakin’ AWESOME. (Apparently the track is part of a concept album about androids, even. Can I get a hell yeah?)

In which there’s a barely organized ramble to get you up to date.

Health

I relaunched “Operation: Quit Smoking” on the 25th. It sucks and I hate it.

All I want to do is eat and sleep and never go anywhere or do anything that reminds me of smoking, because nic fits suck, but of course that’s unreasonable. I was miserable between sets at Saturday’s gig because every cell in my body wanted to go outside and smoke, and no the nicotine gum didn’t help AT ALL.

Seriously, though, in spite of my words my attitude is pretty good… I just want to complain because quitting is hard. Here are my notes on the process. There’s a link to my daily diary if you’re interested in that level of detail.

Did I mention that it SUCKS? Good. Because I hate it! Rar!

Help

My band has entered into a contest to play at the Crossroads blues festival in Chicago this September. It’s all very exciting.

If you could, please click here, register for an account, and vote for us. Every day, if you can. I totally want to go play blues in Chicago for my birthday!

Other

I’ve seen the Wolf a few times since we broke up, and he’s been totally cool about it. I’m both grateful and relieved.

Want to add some music to your library? Apropos of nothing, I posted a lovely mix here this morning. Have at it!

The Curse^™ has arrived.

I still don’t have a job.

It’s totally spring here.