here now.

I have just applied for a job in Victoria, BC. Yes, in Canada.

The Coalesce show has come and gone. It was last week.
Things that meant the most to me about the show:

• Meeting and hanging out with Mr. Brady McGarry, who also writes and occasionally edits my writing for SSG.
• Having a couple of dudes in Coalesce recognize/hug me from the bunch of times that I've traveled to see them.

That about covers it. Coalesce were great and so were Converge (who were better) but I hung out at the side of the stage and just watched from there, where the sound wasn't quite as good. Part of me just felt... old. I still beat my chest and air-guitarred but I feel like some of the magic of these shows, especially the incredibly packed sold-out ones, is lost on me.

I had a better time watching Dosh at a far smaller club from a far shorter distance just earlier last week. He and his buddy Mike Lewis put on a hell of a show. They looped, synthed, made crazy sounds with their instruments and bantered with each other and the audience, which maybe amounted to about 80 people. Everyone should at least check out Dosh's myspace page to see what that dude is doing. I've seen him be Andrew Bird's entire backing band at least twice. The guy is a genius and his new record, Tommy, is great.

I'm surprised that this is the case but the Dosh show is more likely to wind up on my top five shows of 2010 than the Coalesce one.

Tonight I'll be seeing Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars. I expect it to rule.

Next week Coalesce will be playing at Neumos with Converge.
Say what you will about their post-Give them Rope material.

This is all that matters.

My coughing situation is getting better. I went to the Doctor and was given a prescription for a Z-Pack. A Z-Pack is a pretty heavy duty anti-biotic and last time I had to take it it was for mono in my early 20s. It destroyed me and had me in the bathroom a lot.

This time, though, Beth suggested that I pop some pro-biotics at the same time to help with my stomach and really, they have. I'm still coughing, but the anti-biotics are done and supposedly they work for a whole seven days after they're all gone. That sounds kind of arbitrary to me but hopefully it'll translate to my being cough-free very soon.

Now I'm supposed to go to the gym for the first time in a couple of weeks. ugh.

It's the second time I listen to Rob Swift's new one, The Architect. I was a big fan of parts of Sound Event. There enough emcees I didnt' necessarily like littered through the album, but the instrumental tracks were flawless. They made me bob my head and kind of made me want to dance, which is rare, given my inability to do so.

The Architect is his new one, and it's on Ipecac Recordings. I'm not surprised to see this-- Mike Patton has collaborated with the X-Ecutioners in the past.

(I should say at this point that I just checked Wikipedia and Rob Swift has released a number of albums between Sound Event and The Architect. I've been completely out of touch.)

The Architect is a very different record form Sound Event-- the scratching is there and he still sounds amazing but there's a lot of slow beats here. The music is a lot less funky and frankly, darker. I guess that's a little bit of the Ipecac influence showing. As far as I can tell so far, this record rules. Rob Swift is using a lot of classical soundtrack-y kind of music here layered over the beats and it 80's big budget horror movies to mind. I suggest everyone check it out, especially fans of scratching/turntablism.

How am I sick again?
I was sick in January, I think. Maybe early February. I got a nasty cold after spending an evening on a bus. Beth and I had gone to Vancouver to see the Great Lake Swimmers for the third time (fifth time for her- she saw them once before we met and I bought her and a friend tickets to go see them in Victoria the night before our trip), and on the way back to the States, the Clipper broke down. For those who don't live here The Victoria Clipper is the only ferry that goes directly between Seattle and Victoria. It's the expensive way to travel back and forth, but it's faster than driving to Port Angeles in my little car and then taking the Coho Ferry, which is the other affordable way to make the trip. Anyway, on the way back after our Vancouver trip, the Clipper broke down. They put us on buses and sent us back through Vancouver and then south through the border.

At the border there was a a couple in which one of them was Danish. I guess she didn't have her papers together because those border patrol freaks decided to hold the bus for about 40 minutes. After the couple got their shit straightened out and got back on the bus, we got a flat tire.

Basically, I got back to Seattle at about 2am with a nasty cold.

And now I have something that may be bronchitis. It isn't a cold but my throat is all scratchy and I can't stop coughing. The thing, the real heartbreaker, the worrisome part, is that I'm not supposed to get sick this often. Since I left Miami two years ago I've been sick three or four times. Back in Miami I got sick fucking constantly. My friends noticed and always said "you're always getting sick" as if that helps anyone in any way.

Since moving to Seattle I've exercised more days than not and I spend a lot of time outside. I'm not supposed to get sick this easily. My coworker came in with his stupid bronchitis and I'm the only one who got sick.

What am I missing here?

Jordan Crane is a master of making me emotional.
I just read The Last Lonely Saturday. I gave this little book to Beth for Christmas because last year I gave her another Crane book and she spent a good bit of Christmas morning smiling, reading, and ignoring the rest of us. She looked so happy.

This year I put The Last Lonely Saturday in her stocking and she looked at it and was excited to see it, but decided not to read it right then. I was surprised that she didn't push out the rest of the world to read her new Crane book this time, but I'm glad she didn't. She read it that night, I think, after I'd fallen asleep. The next day she warned me that it was a pretty devastating read. I figured as much, because the front cover made me think of the movie Up!

This book is devastating. There's almost no dialogue, and each page contains only two pictures. There aren't many pages, either. The entire book took maybe five minutes to read. Five minutes to bore itself into my chest and destroy what is in there. But then it was kind of happy, too. No way to explain it without spoiling it. I recommend it, though, to anyone looking for an emotionally resonant comic book experience.

When the going gets rough, take a spinning class.
That's what I did today. I felt bad all day. A mixture of an awareness of my weight, my job, and the speed at which time is passing me by--this is what defined my day at work today. I listened to an entire episode the Best Show on WFMU and smiled, even giggled a little, but nothing changed. Beth and I emailed some and really, that's the best part of my day. My mood and state of gloom, however, stayed put. I refused any conversations at work today, sticking to my headphones and podcasts.

Enter the gym. I went right after work. I finished to an episode of the Slate Culture Gabfest that I had started listening to at work and switched to something more workout-able: Blu and Exile - Below the Heavens. A hell of an album. Really- I can't believe how good these guys are. The rhymes and production on it are so impressive. I took in the music and I had a decent workout. I thought a lot about whether or not I would hit the music store after the gym, and what I would buy if I did. I did a chest work out that left me sore (I went easy on the weight, though. I hadn't really done more than one chest workout in the last month.) and I walked/ran a couple of miles on the treadmill but I still felt the weight of that funk on my shoulders. I wanted to learn to dance, get a new job, build a house, write a novel, save a life, and finish school. I felt like I needed an injection of pride. Then I noticed a spinning class was starting. I noticed that a girl who I'd seen working out earlier was the teacher. I thought about her and the fact that she'd worked out but still was going to teach an hour-long spinning class. I wandered in and sat down on a bike. These are more streamlined versions of the stationary bikes one usually sees at gyms-- thinner and smaller. Nothing electronic about it. No dials, counters, etc. I sat down nervously waiting and doing what other people were doing-- spinning their wheels and stretching. Some girl walked in and asked me if I had removed a towel she'd placed on the bike. I guess she was saving her place on that bike. But there wasn't any towel there when I came in and I told her so. I was immovable. It was hard enough just walking into that room and getting on that bike. I wasn't leaving because some girl wanted to save her spot.

The music started, and the instructor, who had a bike in front of everyone else in the class, spoke through a headset microphone. She drove us hard and seemed nothing short of merciless to me, but she didn't give me shit when I slowed down and I really appreciate that. I could barely keep up with the class. I spent the entire hour moving, but a lot of the time when the rest of the class was doing stand up pedaling, I just fell onto the bike. This thing was hard to do. My hands were slipping off the handles from all the sweat and my shirt was so wet that it became a part of me. I kept looking at the clock and wondering when it would end. I wondered what the hell I was doing there, in a spinning class. I didn't belong there, I'm too damn fat. Everyone's always talked about how hard a spinning class is. My ass hurt bad from the stupid seat. I thought about all the pain I would be in tomorrow and I felt embarrassed every time the instructor looked my way and I wasn't standing on the bike pedals the way the rest of the class was.
I didn't stop pedaling, though. And I didn't walk out. And that feels good.

I may even do it again.

I haven't finished a book in months. I don't know if its depression or a parasite or the winter (I doubt its a parasite. Too gross.) or what, but I haven't finished anything in a while.

Including movies. I've been to the movies, and that pretty much guarantees that I'll finish them, but I haven't watched anything at home, by myself, in a while. Only one movie, Sin Nombre, a Mexi-Salvadoran thriller about immigrants and murderous gangsters who hop trains to get into the states, have I been able to get through. Sin Nombre is a movie I totally recommend, by the way. A little generic--you know where its going for the entire film-- but it still managed to enthrall me with the violence, setting and characters.
3.5 stars, if Netflix had a .5 setting.




I also have only been to the gym a couple of times since late in November. Its been rough. I've thrown caution to the wind and eaten everything in sight. I've put on some weight.

Still, I did read one thing. It may not be a proper prose book but IRON MAN: Demon in a Bottle is the one graphic novel I've read in the last couple of months. I liked it, too. It was so much a product of its time in ways that I hadn't really noticed in my years of reading comics. It is rife with thought bubbles and commentary from bystanders. It even has an origin retelling so that new readers wouldn't be lost. They used to do that every few months and I always thought it was kind of neat that they did that. Everytime Iron Man did anything, someone in the background would offer something up like "Dickie! Come quick! Thar's a man in red-an'-gold armor just crashed in ahr back yard!" or after Iron Man flies away from an aircraft carrier, two of the sailors onboard have this exchange: "Hey Cookie! Y'all evuh see anything lahk that back in Omaha?" "You kiddin', Beau? A flyin' man in shinin' armor? Shoot, we don't even see stuff like that after tokin' corn silk!"



Clearly the writers and editors at Marvel of the late seventies thought the world was just crawling with hicks. Iron Man: Demon in a Bottle also deals with Tony Stark's alcoholism head on. Tony's a millionaire playboy with a big mustache and Burt Reynolds good looks who loves his scotch and his brandy, and his wine. Demon in a Bottle collects eight issues or Iron Man from 1978-79 (at least one of them was released while I was being conceived) and at least once in every issue someone notes the alcohol in Tony's breath or says "well, uh, you have had three already, sir. Are you sure--?" While Tony thinks things like "well, I am drinking for two men..." Himself and Iron Man, get it?! The whole book is a great if not a little-too-campy look into old style comic-booking. I don't know what 'age' its supposed to be (possibly silver age?) but I never paid too much attention to that stuff. There are other adventures and ridiculous villains along the way, but the underlying theme is that the world coming down around Tony and he hits the hard stuff to deal with it sometimes.

I'm just glad I read it and that Tony Stark got some help. The lush.