Eyes Spies and Lies

So phase one of moving into "the house of class" is complete. Allan will be happy to know that the one bag of "whatever" that was left from his move back to Ottawa is living peacefully in Allan's new room. I moved my computer (complete with printer) and my stereo into the house. I also got a single bookcase and a couple of random electronics. My only real problem is that no clothes got moved, neither did my guitars or amps. None of my books or personal belongings got moved. Hope is being held out for tommorow. I may get a second crack at moving my stuff up to the city.

Thats all the news, hope you're day was easier than mine

Elvis,

Love him or hate him he influences everything we hear on the radio, and pretty much everything about the music industry. The orginal bad boy of rock and roll died on this day. Well was found on this day. Pants down, face down beside a toliet isn't the way i wanna go. Even cobains death had more class, and the police were picking bits of his wonderful mind off the wall behind him. Anyways, lets remember elvis for the good he did.

Name the song these lines comes from:

"I got sunburn waiting for the jets to land"

"I can't seem to see through solid marble eyes"

"Fiery pianos wash up on a foggy coast"

Anyone, i'd love to find one other person that listens to this band. Just one other person would be wonderful.

Tonnes of extra points if you name the special guest that plays guitar and sings backup on this song too

Don't cheat and look the lyrics up on google either... Karma will get you.

Its Pioneer Days here in wetaskiwin this weekend. Every year the town hires some shitty travelling carnaval to come to town and block the entire downtown street (main street). Every year high schoolers get way too drunk and just cause problems. I ran downtown to the bank this evening because i need to buy a microwave for the house. Anyways i walked (because i actually care about the environment) anyways i ran into this crazy old man on a bike trying to convince me to get him $1.50 for a hotdog. You can't buy a hotdog for under $2 at one of these carnavels. Anyways he followed me for a good 8 blocks. He said one very amazing thing "If you put people in paradise they'd still find a way to complain". I thought that was a very weird thing for a man that was bitching about the army because they wouldn't let him in. A guy that rides around town on a $400 mountain bike doesn't need me to give him $1.50 for a hotdog. Well he followed me until i found some people i knew on main street and then he went away. Crazy old man, afraid of the police doesn't make me want to give him money. Not that i was going to in the first place.

I'm moving into the house (in edmonton) tomorrow afternoon. Carrie and I are going up in two mini-vans full of shit. Should be fun, i'm call the master bedroom and there isn't anything any of you can do about it. Taking the big desktop computer up at the same time. So this will be my last blog on this computer for a couple of weeks. I'll still be blogging from home on my laptop until it moves with me. Just thought i'd tell all of you, not that any of you care.

I'm looking to start a band again. I need a drummer. Well i need a full band and right now i have myself but a drummer would be a great help. Do you have a drum kit? Do you listen to Nirvana, the white stripes, Live, Foo fighters, Godspeed! you black emporer, and a host of other real rock bands? Do you live close to me, thats edmonton alberta? Contact me, i want to start a band.

My muse isn't back yet, but i'm slamming her in song...

Fight Club!


What movie Do you Belong in?(many different outcomes!)
brought to you by Quizilla

Quizilla, wasting my time and your time for much too long

I will never understand how my life, my simple life can be so grossly affected by the actions of others. Whether it be the chick at the coffee shop fucking up my coffee (double double... its fucking simple!!!!) or my parents trying to keep me from moving away, everything in my life is completely out of my hands. And it blows. Oh it blows hard. It blows like a ma'fucking winter Alberta wind.

All i want is the control to do what i want when i want. But i can't. I have work controlling a good 10-11hrs of my day (night to be exact) and the rest of the time is either sleeping ("thats where i'm a viking!") or doing things for other people. I want to go to edmonton and move in on Friday. In a perfect world i'd wake up whenever and just go, by myself and move in. Instead my parents are flying to Regina this weekend and the person i'm going to edmonton with has changed her plans and now we're going on saturday. Good thing i don't have a life. I only want one thing, one simple thing: let me live my life my way. I figure i have another 50 years of dealing with other peoples shit until i either die or stop caring from old age. Lets all take a moment and cheer on those in society today that are so old that they just don't get a fuck anymore. I wish i was senile, or perhaps a frontal lobotomy is really what i need

My life currently revolves around only a select few things. I have my music (listening and playing) and my computer. Apart from those two things there's not really too much else going on. All this shit that happens in the US just doesn't seem real to me. The FBI caught a man trying to smuggle SA-18's in from russia today. Scary, but there isn't any chance i'm getting on a plane in american airspace anytime soon. Bali's getting bombed, trying to kill americain's away from home. Still doesn't affect me, i'm not going to Bali, i couldn't even point it out on a map without a good amount of searching time. For fucks sake i live in canada, and am still bombarded with america's problems. Not that our news is any better. We got BSE, and west nile. Two things i just don't care about. Mosquitoes don't scare me, i don't go outside anymore, and i never liked cattle as it is. Was news always so negative and distant from my reality?

So i work with this drooling idiot that goes by the name Kyle. I call him "mumbles too much walking waste of carbon". But both names have merit. Yesterday kyle pulled a joke on my cart at work. First by tied the cart to a post. Yeah i noticed right away and cut the string. Then he tied all these plastic totes together. Which wouldn't have been a problem but i filled the top tote full of about 40lbs of useless product. Then tried to lift it. It was noticablly heavier than usual. All the fucking totes underneath got lifted why the one i was trying to lift. Anyways i put the tote down, cut the string tieing then together and moved on. Even later yet kyle tried again to sabatoge my cart by tieing the two wheels together. In theory (he said) it would keep the cart from turning. In reality the string broke and i never even noticed anything wrong.
Now playing jokes on people at work is funny. But i work the fucking night shift, and i really don't want to deal with kyles adolesent behavior after being up for 15 hours at 5am. Fuck this kids going to die. To quote robin williams in "death to smoochy": "you better grow eyes in the back of your fucking skull... I'm going safari on your ass motherfucker" Oh he's dead. When i get to work the first thing i'll going to do is sucker punch the fucker in the back of the head. Then throw tennis balls at his bare legs for the rest of the night.
Don't fuck with me. This isn't eye for an eye, this is break my finger and i'm breaking your hand.

Dumb cunt, he's gonna pay.

That is if i have the extra energy to fuck him up at work tonight.

Dear muse,

You have been gone for so long, i've almost forgotten what you look like. Not that it would be easy to forget something so influential in my life. Where have you gone? For a couple of weeks now you've been missing. Did you go to inspire some other lost soul. Or are you still here, in silent protest of my life and thoughts. I'm curious to know. The space which you once occupied isn't empty, but whoever is in there isn't answering my calls.

Come back and be my muse again. Come back show me the ups and downs of a tree or a coin or whatever catches my eye. Tell me to read books and write with those ideas. Or even find me some pictures that spark some imagination. Do something to get me out of this rut that i am in. I can't write, barely speak, and i see through all that would normally interest me. Come back, oh little muse, come back and lead me to something better than this.

Don't sing and tease, I don't need another siren. Just find the strength to ignite me. You or any of your sisters would be fine. I'm not choosey when it come to beautiful goddesses.

Thanks,
Joel

Woman battling Alberta town to save grandkids' tree house praised as hero. Now i live fairly close to this, and today the media was kicked out of the towncounel meeting to decide what to do with the tree house. Turns out its not allowed.

I hate talking about the weather but yesterday we had a tornado touch down 30 min drive south east of where i live. Today we already had a tornado touch down 30 min drive west of where i live. This is a bad sign. I'm just going to hang in the basement until i have to go spend 10 hrs in a giant tin box.

Joel is offically broke. I got my fees for university this year. There is no possible way i can pay nearly $5000 for tution. So i guess there will be a very hungry educated boy wondering campus this year. Go figure, i could have bought some pretty sweet stuff with all the money i earned this summer, instead i'm poorer than ever.

I've been thinking about whats wrong with rock music today. Been asking the question "Why does everything i hear suck?". I may have finally stumbled upon the answer this weekend. See there are tonnes of things wrong with rock music right now. Traditional rock bands are changing their sound (Have you heard pearl jam or radiohead recently?) and new rock bands haven't tried anything new. The last great achievment in rock and roll history was the power chord (root, fifth, octave) and since we all figured out how to play simple power chords its all been down hill from there. So armed with these power chords rock has progressed into different ways to play the same chords. Play them fast, you get punk, play with tonnes of heavy distortion you get metal. No one is changing the actually music notes, just the way it interacts with the listeners ears. Now i ask "who can we blame for this?" Do we blame the guitar makers, or maybe the amplifier companies. Blame the effects units and shitty recording techniques. No, thats stupid, its not the guitars fault that music sucks. I don't even think its the musicians fault either. Blame radio, seriously. Blame radio and its slutty relationship with the record labels.

Radio makes music popular. You can't be a pop act if you don't get radio air play. All the new music that we get accustomed to is brought to us via the wonderful world of radio. Radio is where i first hear Nirvana, the first place i heard Nada Surf, hell it was even the first place i heard gorillaz. Radio is where music changes from art to money. Radio is the Wal-mart of the music industry. Its big enough it changes everything, well everything thats popular that is.

I'm disappointed in how radio have shaped rock music. Mediocer Bands become popular because they get their songs played so much that they start to sound good. Well good enough that you can sing along to them and then feel some personal connection to the music. Play a song enough and anyone is going to start to enjoy it. We relate the experiences that happen to us to the music that we're hearing at the time these things happen. If i was happy and while i was happy i heard some shitty creed song i'd feel less resentment towards the song because it recalls good memories to me. Also when we hear something over and over and over again we get used to it, it becomes less meaningful but we don't think about it anymore. How many times have to been singing all the lyrics to a song without ever actually understanding whats being said. Have you ever sang the words to "today" by the smashing pumpkins? Over all these years that the song has been out did you ever realize that the song is about depression? Just because the chorus has the lyrics "Today is the greatest day..." doesn't mean its a positive song.

Although radio has done infinitely more evil than good it has done song fairly desent things. I fairly sure that most of my generation can sing "Mr. Jones" by the counting crows, or "last dance" a cover pearl jam does. See although radio has stripped music of all meaning through over playing we still get morsals of greatness out of that evil box every once in a while.

Radio is also the reason downloading music is such a huge goddam problem. And before you start jumping up and down throwing feces at me take a minute and hear me out on this. Radio plays only singles. They only play the "popular" songs. This has turned a generation of people into musical consumers that expect an entire album to be of the quality of the singles. Which is hopeless because there is no way a song you've heard a couple hundred times is going to stack up to a brand new song off an album. We've indirectly taught all these music consumers to like what they hear, not open their minds up to new and different things. So now we have a world full of music fans that only like a song or two off an album. It only seems natural that they really only want to listen to the one or two songs they know off a certain album. Enter the internet and the wonderful promised land of music downloading. Here these people can download only the songs that they like. These people probably aren't downloading entire albums, they're downloading their simple plan singles and running with it. Funny how things work like that.

This kills the music industry. We've got music labels bitching constantly about how music downloading is stealing their profits. When really the record labels a) Pay the fucking radio stations to play certain songs over and over (see popularity of avril...) and then b) complain that people are downloading
these songs that they hear on the radio. Record labels caused this mess with the help of radio. Record labels need to fix this mess. People shouldn't have to pay for the shitty rock music we hear for free on the radio. We should however have to pay for radiohead albums, the white stripes albums, strokes albums, vines albums, and hives albums too. Apart from that its all open and free for songs with regular air play.

Radio is the Siren singing us real rock fans to shipwreck

I don't know if anyone read's this site writes (creatively) at all, besides Joel that is. But I do, poems and songs. I feel a little unsettled at the moment, so many ideas but I can't find the right moment to write or get them out the way I want lately. I wrote something half decent and its seems to get better with each read but I think its reading what Maynard from Tool and A Perfect Circle write and what Chino from Deftone's writes and what Trent Reznor writes, its really quite intimidating. I know they've been doing it forever so its probably just me being impatient since I only started writing 3 years ago and I've come a long way since then but . . . well take a look at these lyrics, I'll post them

Weak and Powerless - A Perfect Circle

Tilling my own grave to keep me level
Jam another dragon down the hole
Digging to the rhythm and the echo of a solitary siren
One that pushes me along and leaves me so

Desperate and Ravenous
I'm so weak and powerless over you

Someone feed the monkey while I dig in search of China
White as Dracula as I approach the bottom

Desperate and Ravenous
I'm so weak and powerless over you

Pale angel go away
Come again some other day
The devil has my ear today
I'll never hear of what you say
Promised I would find a little solace
And some piece of mind
Whatever just as long as I don't feel so

Desperate and Ravenous
I'm so weak and powerless over you
Desperate and Ravenous
I'm so weak and powerless
over you
------------------------------------------

I think theres just a lot of thought put into what Maynard says. I like the angel/devil on your shoulder part, thats happened to everyone I'm sure. But what I love even more about this is the "I'm so weak and powerless, over you" Now to state "over you" could be taken 2 ways (at least) its almost an empowering phrase in itself, over you, you're higher/greater then someone. So it almost sounds like he's weak and powerless yet still somehow over top of someone. The more obvious take on the line would of course be that it sounds like a break up/split, something that has left him weaker as a result.

Damn I must be tired, no one gives a shit about this anyways. I don't know, I'm a lyric freak so I tend to like to sit down and read something someone wrote and look at it different ways. I find that Maynard is one of the best writers in terms of looking at a song and looking at it in different lights, different angles.

Peace out I'm going to sleep

Ok, back in the day i wrote this post which i should have taken as an omen to run away. Turns out that my Dad just got a job offer in Regina. Thats not vagina guys, regina. Both may be weird and funny looking but they are totally different. Anyways, he's got a couple weeks to decide whether he's going to move. Either way i don't think its going to affect me that much being that i'm moving to Edmonton in a couple weeks. I only difference would be, as it stands right now my parents want me to come home every couple of weekends to visit. Now my parents house is currently a hour long drive away from my house at school. If they take the move they'll be an easy 8 hours away. In a different province too. Fuck i hate saskatchewan... sorry to all people that like that flat hell hole.

In moving to a more positive subject my girl friend came to my house this weekend. For the first time in 3 months, she's been backpacking europe. Anyways i got a bunch a cool gifts, none cooler than my brand-spanking new "there there" UK printed Radiohead single with two previously unreleased tracks. I'm so happy with the single. It even came with another radiohead poster. I'm just collecting radiohead wall coverings now. "paperbag writer" has gotta be the coolest sounding radiohead song i've heard in years. Why wasn't this released on the album? It's fucking incredable! It's got a 70's disco beat/James bond feel happening, very different, very very good. Did you know that singles in London aren't sealed in plastic covering. Like that cheap plastic gonnasufficateyoungchildren shit they wrap the cd's in, its not used in the uk. Go figure, you can open the cd up and check for scratches before buying them. Very cool, i like that

I also got a leather braclet (elizabeth is tagging me) and a couple other things. Cool gifts you can't get anywhere else. No hashpipe from holland though... i'll just have to go to whyte and pick myself up one, a glass one, i've seen stone one's before, thats cool. Being that i'm studying geology as it is. In other whyte ave news i bought Kurt Cobains journals from "the wee book inn". Half price baby!!!! Kurt rants, its funny as much as its sad. Is there a difference between Heroine and a Muse, i think kurtd kept switching between the two so much that he lost track which one was which. Of yeah we wrote Heroine instead of Heroin, a true addict admits wrong, but covers the problem

I'm very tired, elizabeth drained me... going to take a nap. Another rant about music later this afternoon, all this new radiohead and Kurt Cobain makes me want to change the world

Ok, I have a beef with some music fans. Well actually I have a beef with a couple different types of music fans. Music fans that hide behind the real music fans to try to be cool. Jumping on to the bandwagon without the risk of the fall. See, my first problem lies with haters. All types of haters. People that hate every type of music except one genre. Lets say you like “the original Puget Sound”. So every single time you here any other type of rock on the radio you cringe and start ranting about how much this band sucks. My problem is that if you only like one type of music, your taste in music is going to eventually go stale. No one is making music like that anymore, you can’t go out and buy any “new” cd’s. You’re forever stuck sitting in your basement on Friday nights listening to your “In Utero” cd. Then on top of that you have the gull to insult other bands that don’t live up to the original. No band is ever going to top or match the sound of Nirvana. I might as well stop basing your opinion of a band in comparison to Nirvana.

Now from this group of people we have another ever scarier subset of listeners that are even worse. The ignorant hates. I’m talking about people that hate all popular music. These people have no problem slamming Creed, when in reality they don’t even really know why they hate the band. Other than the fact that “sound like Pearl Jam” or “they suck”. Those aren’t reasons to hate a band. Those are excuses to not form a real opinion of music. Just because George from much music hates the band doesn’t make it ok for you to hate them too. I mean I personally don’t like a lot of bands. Mostly the bands running with the “sum 41 and blink 182” sound. Bands like “simple plan” and “good charlotte” are good examples of what’s wrong with rock these days. They are catchy and fairly good sounding (if you like that kinda thing) but rock isn’t just based off whether you can get your listening base to sing the chorus back to you at live concerts. Rock should be more emotion than catchy song writing. Rock is suppose to have something to say. Something important, something meaningful, not “She fucking hates me”, not “I’m addicted to you”. These are good starts but the lyrics are suppose to hold a meaning, a real meaning. If she hates you that’s a start, but run the idea out and say something profound. That’s what lacking in most popular rock these days. Barring some bands (radiohead, the white stripes, foo fighters) there seems to be too much emphasis on the sound and not the lyrical content these days. I hear songs with something to say, I want another pearl jam, but that’s not going to happen again…

If you hate a band, have a good reason to hate them. Because odds are, the band is doing quite well, making money selling out shows and doing basic rock band things. While you sit at home a bash the band on internet chat rooms. That’s great, simple plan may not be able to write a lyric with double meaning, but at least they’re doing something. And we have to hold out hope that at some point they might turn around. Some things get better with age. We can only hope that music follows that world of wine

11:50 pm (friday night, blogged on word)