I told her I wanted to avoid any kind of heartbreak at all costs.

She obviously wasn’t listening, or simply didn’t care, because her next move was to insist that we get modern day mid-twenties married. No ring, nah, the only thing I handed her was a handful of explosive orgasms and clever Valentine’s day gifts, Her, all she handed me was her lips and a massive shit storm every time I forgot to call her after work.

And now, which is different temporally from the time I was just writing about, all I can read is rock and roll folklore. Epic rockstar debauchery. The dark stuff. And now, which is slightly embellished and probably a little frightened, all I can think about is getting Keith Richards-Mcgowan-Reed-Ryder-Vicious-Rose-Costello fucked up and dancing like a fool at a Battles concert. You know, REALLY go for it, smash my teeth out on some ratty, sticker coated green room wall so the acid will absorb better, you know, get in there. Inject booze, go Aerosmith and inject acid, mix hair gel with crushed up painkillers and give myself a mohawk.

After all, I’m a human, I can take it. The closest I’ve come to testing my limits thus far adds up to something like this (choose one):

a. bungee jumping in Wisconsin dells.
b. mixing mushrooms, weed, and beer (oh. snap.)
c. calling my grandma after happy hour.

It never was going to go anywhere, but I will be damned if I didn’t give the impression it was going to end in puppydogs, fairytales, glasses of wine over green fucking fields, flowers in her hair. I knew damn well what wasn’t going to happen, but she didn’t, and the rug came out from underneath. The resulting wipeout probably looked fucking hilarious to the sidelines, but we weren’t laughing.

Afterwards, my dick look like I had used it to murder a thin-blooded public transit wino…

…I’ve never killed, or at least not with my hands.

And then there is my chosen line of work. There we go. The business, which is great, but these aren’t the days of old, I don’t have indie, mob-tied sharp dressed motherfuckers beating down my door, laden with hookers, lines of “work”, and stacks of records to corrupt me with. No way, I have assistants being flogged by their bosses into calling me, wondering where the money for their digital billboard/pop-up ad is. Other people pretending they aren’t looking out for the ol’ number one.

don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, but Nico was constantly whipping Iggy Pop’s skinny fingers for not being full of “ze poison”, as she called it, and she is half right.

Now her medicine cabinet?! That fucker had some rockstar potential. Close your eyes, reach in, and swallow, Syd Barret in five minutes.

So anyway, I keep trying to convince myself that there is a point to all of this…other than to finally write “that abstract shit” I keep hearing so much about. Sounds like a hoot, but I’m only going to write it if my grandmother can read it.

So Polka Dot, this one is for you baby. I hope it is what it should be out there. Make sure to keep the wig on, and cut that fucking dance floor into a million pieces. You can count on me to do the same.

This is the only real time to write, I suppose.

For many reasons, I can’t write successfully yet unless I am supposed to be doing something else besides writing.

I’ve been out, but not for good. Here is a breakdown of what the hell has been going on, supplemented by some recommended listening, Ogre’s brilliant idea.

Let’s start with last week.

EDIT: Make sure you read the guest posts below also.

Monday: Training my replacement. The heir to the throne. The kid is far over qualified for the job and knows more about the music business than I do. He made one of the two major jumps you can make once you are in this business. He came from “indie” (read: independent record labels, mercenary marketing companies, weed-blown recording studios) to “industry” (read: benefits, HR department, red tape, better quality control, mo’ money). I’ve seen many make opposing jumps like this day to day, week to week, criss-crossing each other in mid air long enough to hand out business cards and high fives.

You could also break it down from a “grass is always greener” perspective as my friend Katie and I did. Katie is hardcore, a business woman hip hop head ball buster (with a deep sensitive side) who somehow managed to get Smiff n Wessun to reunite under their original name for a friends birthday party. We decided that any move from either sector is made in the name of scoring better drugs. It is probably that simple.

CMJ (College Music Journal) week began that day, meaning the whole city was overrun by bands with stupid names, showcases, parties, industry scrubs, and drunk-ass college radio music directors. That night I went out to a party put on by The Syndicate (who knows what they do, it probably involves some ridiculous cross promotion) drank as much free booze as possible, embarrassed myself in front of the bigwigs from my label, won an ipod speaker system, and hustled Chuck Klosterman books out of gift bags.

The Knife: “Heartbeats” – A guilty pleasure, but as the saying goes, “If it’s good, it’s good, if it sucks, it sucks”.

Tuesday: Hungover. Continued training, our biggest artist (dead celebrity big) came in to do a press day about her recent exploits in a third world country. I didn’t see her once, partly because of the inevitability that I would cram my whole foot in my mouth, and partly because of the fear that I would turn to stone. It was like the fucking president showed up to use the shitter. I found myself losing my mind, running around doing retarded tasks like telling the bigwigs from her book company (she wrote a children’s book, too) to stand somewhere else.

It was also Halloween, so we had all this little kids in the office who were much more well behaved than any guests we’ve ever had. Power rangers, pirates, jedis, ninjas. The whole crew was in the house.

My workday ended by drinking Patron (gold) in the office, trying to pretend I wasn’t.

At night, got high and overly-appreciated the movie “Feast”. That movie fucking rules, especially if you’ve ever seen “Tremors”, “From Dusk Till Dawn”, “Aliens”, “Demon Knight”, or any other brutal survival horror flick. Not that you care what I think about movies, or anything for that matter.

A quick example of how wonderfully fucked this movie is (NSFW):

Also,
Jose Gonzalez: “Heartbeats” (The Knife cover) – almost as good as his cover of “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.

Wednesday: More training. I fucking suck at training people, and at the time I found myself going quite crazy, because at night when I wasn’t overanalyzing the ins and outs of horror movie formats, waiting for sleep, I would have those moments of intense critical introspection, ending with asinine re-appraisals of the way I deal with people. Not anything of any substance, mind you, but things like the way I answer the phone, my diet, and the appropriate times to do that weird “hug and a kiss” greeting thing they do out here.

Regardless, this is the way I (and many others) do it. Get high and over analyze some shit. Like movie previews. By the way…

Oh yeah, music.

Ratatat: “Lex” – Sounds like someone chopped up some Yngwie Malmsteen shit and turned it into an arena banger. Instant badass.

Thursday: First day of the new job. I was treated like I knew exactly what I was doing. I didn’t. Also, my department is all female, so they became incredibly interested in my love life. They know nothing.

At night, I stepped out with MassHole to BB Kings, a nice venue with terrible, terrible ways of doing business (7 dollar fucking Bud Light) to see one of our bands perform at a CMJ party. Oddly enough, this band is a Christian band, but their management did not want to send actual music fans running for the hills with the “Christian Rock” tag, so they ripped them from their Christ-tacular label and put them on a normal label, with no mention of the almighty. Seemed to work for them, because they are a hell of a band.

The first half of my night was spent trying to find someone cool with an expense account to buy my drinks, and ended up getting quite buzzed.

The second half I was absolutely riveted by this band doing their thing onstage, especially their instrumental stuff. I didn’t expect much, but they blew me away, enough that after the show I was yelling (read: drunk can’t control the volume of his voice) at their manager to force the guys to form two bands, one instrumental and oHe not, so they could open for each other. He thought I was amusing. I think.

Mutemath: “Reset” – Instrumental, fantastic fucking drumming. (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more, say no more…)

Friday: Hangover. More new job. More not knowing what the fuck I am doing. Borat movie. Teste satchel.

Non Prophets: “The Cure” – A little “emo rap” or whatever, but the beat is amazing.

Saturday: Um…oh man this day by day thing is getting fucking stupid. Got really drunk on Vodka and Sparks (I’m calling it the the John Starks, my new favorite drink/NBA Jam player) and played Yahtzee all night.

That’s all for now, it’s good to be back blathering like a fool. Up next, either a guest post by hero Drew, the weird happenings of this week, or all the literature you will need on a religion I am starting.

See you soon, cunts.

Keeping with the “Before and After” Title of this blog, cleverly stolen from Wheel of Fortune: NameDropAcid….I will attempt to drop names and tell stories of dropped acid that In No Way Incriminates Myself Within the Story.

Name Drop

First the classic name drop. There I was, sipping Cristal and taking shots of Patron…all the while watching hot chicks walk in my general direction, before they turned to ignore me and talk to the several NFL players responsible for my classy consumption. We were the guests of these players whether they liked it or not, and judging by the amount of conversation between us and them, they didn’t like us very much. Nonetheless, these Vikings and Lions players showed us how the NFL players roll on a Thursday night in a trendy bar in Scottsdale, AZ. I was too impressed with the situation to even think about how much bigger and richer they were than me, instead trying to drink as much as possible to allow for a long, painful reflection the following morning on the couch. The night went on and I was only able to stand around waiting for scraps, when I realized how stupid I felt acting like a hanger-on for a bunch of guys that were probably younger than me. But, they filled my glass with more Cristal and I got over it.

At the next bar I was pretty excited to tell everyone that I was hanging out with famous people, when I got word that Mike Tyson was hanging out in the bathroom. There was some commotion while I was in line, and I think I missed him. Mike Tyson is like 3 feet tall and probably slid below my legs while I was trying to light my cigarette or something. Undeterred, I went back to the dance floor to dance with my friend, hoping girls would see how cool I was and attack. That didn’t happen, but I soon spotted most of the first round draft picks from the 2006 NFL draft. They didn’t care who I was either and all I realized how sweet it would be if a big fight broke out and all these big dudes started rockin’ other big dudes. It was cool, even though a fight didn’t break out. As the night ended and I waited for something cool to happen, I realized that the guy who had been buying me drinks all night, was about to drive home in his rented ferrari. This ferrari had cost him about $30,000 for 7 days of rental and he had probably 20 drinks. Awesome. NFL players are so hard.

Quick second story: I heard Mike Tice told someone to “Shut the Fuck Up!” in church one time. Awesome.

Drop Acid

So this Friend of mine took a geltab on a Saturday at noon. He had to bounce at a bar that night, but c’mon…it’s noon, how could that be a problem. The first stop on this new drug was at Hempfest where drugs would be welcomed with open arms. The first sight at this place is a man wearing a lizard rubber mask, nodding to the music that was playing. My friend tried to play it cool, but there was no rational reason for this and he was sure it a was a hallucination. After some quizzing of those around him it turned out the mask was real, and situation was ridiculous. Then the giggles hit. My friend sat by the river with his two other friends and laughed until they were told to leave before the police saw what was happening.

A full day of poor decision making ended when my friend thought going to work as a bouncer at a popular bar was a good idea. By this time the acid had bypassed the fun and exciting phase and bottomed out in the painful and introspective phase that is usually counteracted by weed/booze/sleeping. No one should attempt to work in this phase, and my friend soon regretted his actions. He was forced to work the door and check id’s….looking people in the face as they looked back judging him. He knew that everyone knew he was on drugs and semi-retarded. He was sure someone would turn him in and take advantage of his weakened state. By four in the morning he had broken down and had a heart to heart with everyone in the bar telling them “I fucked up today, I took acid and I don’t know what is going on. If you see me in trouble…please help me.” That night he went home and swore off all drugs and thought of a way to get his respect back from all the people in the bar. As he walked in the door to the house, he was met with an alternative to quitting drugs and he took that instead. Go drugs.

Our second guest post came from my good friend Ogre.

EDIT: That Mike Tice story in the middle is more mine than his. Bastard. Good thing only like 6 people know who the fuck that is.