On this day two years ago, I was an angry, angry man.

Pardon the "classic post" from July 13th, 2007, but I've been staring at the screen for an hour and a half and all I can think of is running out and getting spaghetti sauce. Could be marinara, could be alfredo, whatever, I just need something I can put on pasta and I don't have enough vegetables to warrant a pesto.
Anyway, I'm sure you'll pardon the tone of this post; I was still very green at blogging at the time. Complicating matters was that I was blogging under time constraints from having to use public computers, that I was an alcoholic and an insomniac, that I was angry at my ex-fiancée for stranding me in the big city on my own, and (as you're about to read) that I was getting the least romantic ass-reaming I've ever received from my student loan lender.
As with most of the "classic posts", where I see something that needs amending, I'll slip into something more comfortable to do so, and as with all "classic posts", this one is indeed abridged.
But, man, if I wasn't one angry motherfucker back then.

Charlie the Taoist vs. the Corporate Beard

I've got a chip on my shoulder and no mother-loving dip, so to speak.

Let's start with Sallie Mae, who, unbeknownst to me, decided that they were just going to take me out of deferment status WHILE I WAS STILL IN SCHOOL, FERFUCKSAKE! That's right, regardless of whether I was in school, therefore incapable of working 40 hours a week (and I was busting my ass to make 32 hours), therefore incapable of paying $1500 per month (and that's a rough estimate, as each and every department that I've been in contact with seems to have different numbers; one said $1100, one said $1400, one said $1500), Sallie Mae just up and decided that I had run out my deferments (which is bullshit, according to IPR's director of financial aid; I can defer for up to 24 months, my deferment schedule would've barely given a baby kiss to month 21). So instead of sending me a bill (as we had been through it roughly a half dozen times, now) in a timely fashion, they decided to wait until I was 20 days overdue on a $1500 payment to call my cosigners. Sallie Mae has insisted that they emailed me a bill. Nobody emails a fucking bill. I ought to know, because I never got one. I check my school email every week for the latest job leads. I don't see any fucking bills. (And it should be known that I do consider these "fucking" bills, as lately every time I fart it sounds like a whistle.) So I really only had 10 days to get paperwork together and fight this got-damned mess (clever bastards, they are, making me late, trying to strong arm me on account of their interdepartmental screw up), and then when I got the paper work together, they wanted to come up with some bullshit excuse, so of course I go to the school to sic my junkyard dogs on them. Everybody knows I want to nail Maureen, Still do. that's a given, but now I must use her for something other than the fuck-puppet I so debauchedly thought about whilst rendering my blubber into oil. That's a good one. I ought to reuse that. I've got to use her for her powers of revenge, like mothra-fucking Taarna the Tarakian at the end of Heavy Metal, B.

J.R., he's a scrappy little feller, but he's my main liaison to Sallie Mae in this mess, and gets pissier with them on the phone than I had previously thought was allowed. If you're wondering, the closest I got to any sort of perceived victory was lowering my monthly payments from US$1500/month to US$200/month, meaning that I'll be paying the damned thing off well into my late thirties unless somebody gives me a fuckin' job.

That's that. And that being that, for what it is, brings us to yesterday, in a little section I like to call:

CORN-FED CRACKER-ASSED KRAUT/LIMEY WHITEBOY FROM HONKY TOWN LEARNS THE MEANING OF THE WORD "DISCRIMINATION".

It happened at work, again. Again. The subject of why I don't sign my name to the list comes up, again. Y'see, we have to sign this fucking sheet every time we complete our paperwork, Oh, man, I fucking hated that list. It was basically the "Who can we fire?" list. and I don't do it. I have my reasons. Nobody bothers to ask me why, I don't bother to tell anybody why. Because I was never officially required to sign the thing, only requested to "play ball". After all, what am I going to do, make a big spectacle out of it, raise my voice every time I could just (and do) quietly decline and say "Taoists don't frown upon much, but if they do frown on anything it's competition!" Since then I've lightened up on things but you know how it is; when you first find something you believe in, you are completely 100% about it. But I still tell people to go fuck themselves when they say, "But you like baseball." Sure, and you read the Bible and fuck before marriage. Eat my ass. But yesterday at work, people wanted to know why, again, and chief among those was the Queen of the Shit-Heap herself, Trimstin. You see, I called her Trimstin as a reference to the landlady in Next Friday, to whom Ice Cube says, "I like how you got that trimmed up," in reference to her moustache. Because, you see, Trimstin has a moustache. So now we've got two or three people in the office raising their voice and me raising my voice to say that I just want left out of it when Trimstin decides to pronounce loudly that my beliefs are "primitive". "Primitive". Just so everybody's on the same page here, please refer to the link above for Taoism Does that link even work anymore?, and then check these definitions for "primitive" as supplied by Merriam-Websters, B.

Main Entry:

¹prim·i·tive

Pronunciation:

..'pri-m?-tiv..

Function:

adjective

Etymology:

Middle English primitif, from Latin primitivus first formed, from primitiae first fruits, from primus first — more at prime

Date:

14th century

1 a: not derived : original, primary b: assumed as a basis; especially : axiomatic <primitive concepts>2 a: of or relating to the earliest age or period : primeval primitive church> b: closely approximating an early ancestral type : little evolved <primitive mammals> c: belonging to or characteristic of an early stage of development : crude, rudimentary <primitive technology> d: of, relating to, or constituting the assumed parent speech of related languages <primitive Germanic>3 a: elemental, natural primitive feelings of vengeance — John Mackwood> b: of, relating to, or produced by a people or culture that is nonindustrial and often nonliterate and tribal <primitive art> c: naive d (1): self-taught, untutored <primitive craftsmen> (2): produced by a self-taught artist primitive painting>

— prim·i·tive·ly adverb

— prim·i·tive·ness noun

— prim·i·tiv·i·ty..?pri-m?-'ti-v?-te.. noun

Main Entry:

²primitive

Function:

noun

Date:

15th century

1 a: something primitive; specifically : a primitive idea, term, or proposition b: a root word 2 a (1) an artist of an early period of a culture or artistic movement (2): a later imitator or follower of such an artist b (1): a self-taught artist (2): an artist whose work is marked by directness and naïveté c: a work of art produced by a primitive artist d: a typically rough or simple usually handmade and antique home accessory or furnishing 3 a: a member of a primitive people b: an unsophisticated person
Thank you, Webster.
So, now I'm getting steamed Getting steamed now again, too, but it's old news. but insisting that the office is not the time or place to have this conversation and from Wendy I get, "Oh, come on, Charlie, we're just joking around."
I respond with, "Yeah, real funny, what do you believe in, by the way?"
That's when Trimstin comes out with "Charlie, you need to take a chill-pill [yes, she said the words "chill-pill"], this is not an appropriate conversation for the office." What a fucking mastery of the obvious.
So I'm standing there thinking "Well fucking duh!" So I says to her, "I am chill, I want out of the conversation."
Trimstin tells me again to chill out, by again using the words "chill-pill". Now she's yelling that she's not even joking. Well, I can't let the bitch have the last word, so I get it in there and I go back to work. WHISKEY. TANGO. FOXTROT. Fuck it. Who cares? Blah, blah, blah, you're all a bunch of fucking imbeciles, let me do my job.
Y'know, when Kathleen in upper management bitched about the Christmas tree offending her Jewish heritage, they took the thing down, no questions asked. And of course, they quietly bitched about Christmas spirit and shit like that. Mr. Honky McTaoism says he doesn't like competition, and he's a figure of fun and everybody, his own fucking lady-friend included, tells him his belief is full of shit and that he's wrong about competition. George even wanted to challenge me on my beliefs because I play Uno and enjoy baseball, insisting that it's like a Jewish person that won't eat bread off of a plate that has pork on it. (Which is to her awfully silly and doesn't make much sense, despite that these people live their fucking religion, and she's probably only studied it, at most, so, yeah, let's all tell the Kosher Jews to "lighten up" based solely on the fact that their beliefs are foreign to us and they should really try to be more like us, then let's burn a cross on someone's lawn during Kwaanza, why don't we?)
Wait wait wait, can we rewind the tape and play that last part again?
... they should really try to be more like us, then let's-
No no no, the part before that.
George even wanted to challenge me on my beliefs -
Yeah, that one.
George even wanted to challenge me on my beliefs because I play Uno and enjoy baseball, insisting that it's like a Jewish person that won't eat bread off of a plate that has pork on it.
Can I see that in a bold?
George even wanted to challenge me on my beliefs because I play Uno and enjoy baseball, insisting that it's like a Jewish person that won't eat bread off of a plate that has pork on it.
Thank you. I now know why we broke up.
Was I asking to be challenged? Did I ever claim to be a textbook definition of Taoism and inner-peace and whatnot? At the time, yeah, I was pretty zealous. Fuck no, got-damnit. Cock-suckers.

Oh, and I'm changing my name to Cathal. It's the Gaelic for Charlie. And we've seen how well that worked out.

Some things in life, you just can't explain.

Like a grown man who drinks the hell out of some 3.2% and brings (and leaves behind) his own Miss Piggy pillow case.

Yesterday's Sessions

I was in a fantastic mood yesterday; I don't know what came over me; I was volunteering to help people move couches, I felt no need to have more than the one glass of wine I had with lunch, I beat off twice; just in a fantastic mood. And then, while my chili was simmering, I got to thinking, "Why don't I record some wine glasses?"
So I raided the cupboard for the wine glasses and then went about collecting all the bottles in the house that could so I could do that jug band thing, and the next thing you know the time I spent eating a bowl of chili for lunch was the last time I was above ground yesterday. The compulsion to just work on stuff overtook me so I wound up with two new pieces tracked and half-mixed.
The cool thing about the musical wine glasses, though, is when you view the digital representation of the waveforms they generate, you can see a naturally sinusoidal amplitude modulation which occurs at what would appear to be double the frequency of the oscillation applied to them. This makes me think that there must be an inverse oscillation occurring 90^o out of phase, which would kind of make sense when you consider I mic'd these from the side rather than from above. (What? I never did this before.) As my finger oscillates the glass, I'm creating compressions and rarefactions of air which give us the note, the LFO that's occurring is probably due to the spatial compression and rarefaction of my finger in relation to the microphone. Why the LFO frequency is occurring at double the rate at which I played the glass is beyond me, though.
Wrapped up working on things about midnight then watched two episodes of Heroes and went to bed. Got back up this morning at 0645 and I gotta tell ya, my mood today is OK. It's not on par with yesterday (I aint liftin' no fuckin' couch today.) but it's still pretty good, I guess.

Saturday Sunday Monday Tuesday Track X Mix X* *Rough Mix

Instrument: Bass Drum Kit/Program Glass Jaguar Voice

	Level	Pan	EQ/Filter	Dynamic	Time-Based	Issues / Notes
Kick	+2.5dB	Midnight	HP ~ 50Hz ~ 50%Q Bell ~ -1.5dB ~ 136Hz ~ 75%Q HS ~ -6dB ~ 616Hz ~ 0%Q
Snare	0dB	2330	Notch ~ 2218Hz ~ 90%Q
Rack	-7.5dB	0100
Floor	-7dB	0130
Hat	-12.5dB	2200		Threshold: -30dB Ratio: 3:1 Attack: 0ms Release: 340ms Gain: +6dB
Ride	-12dB	0115
Crash	-12dB	0145	Notch ~ 800Hz ~ 61%Q
Bass	0dB	AT: 2330 WE: 0015		Threshold: -12dB Ratio: 3.33:1 Attack: 12ms Release: 417ms Gain: +4dB
Jaguar (1, 2, and 3)	-6dB	AT: 0030 WE: 2345

	Level	Pan	EQ/Filter	Dynamic	Time-Based	Issues / Notes
Kick	+2.5dB	Midnight	HP ~ 50Hz ~ 50%Q Bell ~ -1.5dB ~ 136Hz ~ 75%Q HS ~ -6dB ~ 616Hz ~ 0%Q
Snare	0dB	2330	Notch ~ 2218Hz ~ 90%Q
Rack	-7.5dB	0100
Floor	-7dB	0130
Hat	-12.5dB	2200		Threshold: -30dB Ratio: 3:1 Attack: 0ms Release: 340ms Gain: +6dB
Ride	-16.5dB	0115
Crash	-6dB	0145	Notch ~ 800Hz ~ 61%Q
Bass	AT: -4dB WE: 0dB	AT: 2230 WE: 0100		Threshold: -14dB Ratio: 2:1 Attack: 5ms Release: 295ms Gain: +6dB
Jaguar	1: AT:-2dB, WE: 0dB 2: AT: -8dB, WE: -6dB 3: AT: -14dB, WE: -12dB 4: AT: -6dB, WE: -12dB	1, 2, 3: AT: 0130, WE: 2300 4: AT: 2230, WE: 0100
Glass	Wine glasses: -21dB Bottles: -5dB				300ms 50% feedback

Some things in life, you just can't explain.

Like having the theme from Yogi Bear stuck in your head.

What the hell are we going to do on Friday, now?

OK, so yeah, yesterday, I copped out and gave you a Cthulhu Cthursday. I think I noted yesterday that there's a precedent for slowness in July, so there's that.
Sssooo... I guess since... Well, I'll explain it again for the newcomers. I'm an early riser and I work second shift. Granted, there are nine hours between 0700 and 1600, so I could be making musics in that time but I'm the only one in the house that wakes up in the morning on a regular basis. George doesn't get up until 1300, Dave sleeps during the day due to third shift, and Laura's schedule is all over the place (as an example, yesterday she got home at 0530 and had to return to work at 1100). My music makings time is as limited as it's ever been, so when I do get around to handle music related things outside of our Saturday through Tuesday schedule, it's mundane stuff or stuff we've gone over before, things like making stems, sifting through material I may or may not use, yada yada yada... Basically, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are the Dead Zone, here.
What I have left is the hostel to gripe about and even though we're half full over there, it's been remarkably slow, aside from last night when I had three check ins during the last half hour of my shift. The check in process at the hostel is more involved than it is at, say, your average Best Western or Holiday Inn; in fact, it's fairly close to a five star, US$X00/night hotel (I use "X" in place of a number because I don't know what the fuck those places go for, but I suspect that X ≥ 2), in that we detail the house rules; we give you a tour; we explain how everything works; we show you to your room; and, if you're hot, tiny, old, or crippled, we help you with your luggage... This five minutes is the most time you will ever have to spend with the staff. It is five minutes of important shit we want you to know and, like anything else in life, you'll need only half of it.
And believe me, when this five minutes is up, we want as much to do with you as you want to do with us. You're looking to explore museums and eat local cuisine and attend whatever conference you're in town for or you're just passing through, shit like that. We're looking to play Tetris and post LOLCat pictures on internet discussion forums when we're not beating off in a vacant room and explaining our absence from the office as "housekeeping" because there's a cute punker girl sitting barefoot and eating some organic nachos in our line of sight from the office door that got us all worked up. OK?
But the fact remains that we have to spend five minutes together and that's the point: shit takes five minutes. So when you get three check ins in a row at 2130 and you have to close up at 2200...
I had nothing, nothing all night and all of a sudden, BOOM! three in a row. This takes me all the way to 2145 which is right about when I start counting down the till, taking out the trash, shutting things off, yada yada yada...
The second guy, I gotta tell ya, was a pain in the ass. First of all, he's from the bustling metropolis of Grand Forks, ND, so his backwoods ass is afraid of the big city. I know this because - well, here:

"Where can I park my car?"
You can park out here on Stevens or 24th.
"On the street?"
Uh, yeah.
"Is there parking in back?"
Huh? Oh, no. That drive way back there actually serves as the driveway for two residences and two businesses, so we have to keep that area clear.
"So I can't park back there?"
Nope.
"How do I know it's safe?"
I'm sorry?
"My car, how do I know my car is safe?"
Well, there's museum security, park police, and metro police that patrol this area twenty four hours a day so it's pretty safe.
"Oh, OK. It's just that I saw a lot of people out there and I got scared."

Need that one again?

"I saw a lot of people out there and I got scared."

He literally said that. He saw a lot of people and he got scared. I guess it kind of makes sense, Grand Forks, ND is the kind of bullshit Caucasian culturally desolate backwater that makes Mayberry look like Detroit. Chances are, this guy just saw his first black person and it freaked his shit out because he'd "never sawed a colored before" outside of New York City or Los Angeles on TV. To this dumbass yokel, the existence of black people must be some sort of coastal phenomenon. Further, I speculate that because of his isolation from the rest of the world, he's probably like one of those Civil War soldiers that never received word that the war is over, which is to say, he probably thinks there's still a white man in the White House.
So I give this asshole the tour and I have to do it with a smile on my face because some Welsh prick gave me a terrible review and Boss Lady... Let's just say I have to smile from now on.
Quick rant: I'm a twenty eight year old man. I have a college degree. I have been actively looking for work for two years. I have a twenty nine hour per week job that pays US$7⁵⁰/hr. I'm expected to smile.
So I'm giving the Grand Wizard from the North Dakota chapter over here the tour and I show him to his room: the fifteen-bed male dorm. I tell him he can have any bed that is obviously unoccupied.

"Any bed?"
Well, any of the unoccupied ones, yeah.
"How do I know if it's unoccupied?"
Well, it's not made. You see? Those over there (pointing at occupied beds) are made and have luggage next to them, so you can tell there's somebody in them. This one here (pointing at unoccupied bed) has the blanket and pillow folded at the end of the bed, so you can tell it's not occupied.
"But how do I know - I mean - What if somebody is in that bed?"

I do not have time for this shit. I've had a lousy work week so far and I am not getting held past closing for this dipshit. So I begin walking around the room, pointing at the unoccupied beds:

You can take this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, or this one.

That's right, I talked to this dumbass like he still played with Playskool toys. I watch him pick a bed and tell him that staff is in the office until ten pm, so if he needs anything, he needs to tell me in the next twenty minutes. He asks:

"Where can I put my stuff?"
Next to your bed?
Nervous guffaw then, realizing that I'm serious, his faces falls and he asks, "How do I know it's safe?"

There's this line I picked up from one of our regulars, he's been traveling between Florida and Alaska four times a year for three or four years now. Our hostel is a favored layover of his, pretty much because he likes to stop in and get drunk with the night crew (meaning me). He explained luggage theft like this: "People in hostels already have enough stuff to carry, they don't want to add to that pile of stuff by stealing anything." This has proven true time and again and there has, during my employ, been only one instance of theft.
At junctions such as this, when people are worried about their stuff, I normally relay this philosophy to them. This asshole heard only this emit from my mouth:

It'll be safe.

He looked at me with wide eyes and slackened jaw and emitted another of his nervous guffaws. I asked him if he needed anything else. He said something to the effect of the negative and I reminded him that I would be in the office for only another twenty minutes as I left the dorm.

Fifty / fifty shot we're getting a thunderstorm today.

Believe me, I tried today. I really tried. I eventually decided to call this one a wash and just repost one of the so-called "classic posts" from 2007. There was no July 9th post. For shits and giggles, I decided to look up last year's July 9th post. No dice. So it makes sense that I'm stuck; there has, until now, never been a July 9th post. Further, looking over some of the old material, July has traditionally been a slow month. This would explain how we go from two posts per day to struggling for one. Let's just call it a wash.
No! Let's call it a cliché! Let's do a Cthulhu Cthursday!

Uh, what?

No sessions yesterday.

The most musical things I did over the past two days were buying bass strings and making stems. That was about it aside from sorting through all the stuff I'd been concocting. Searched high and low for The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., turned out it's not something you can find on Hulu and the more *ahem* "less than legal" avenues offer only a 10GB version. Built a scarf rack for Georgie. Mopped cat pee. Ate a lot of corned beef. Did a lot of dishes.
Ran into the Gerbs on the way to Gangchen with Georgie. Lots of metros, homos, and hipsters in there last night, packed in like sardines and they all got pissy when I tried to move through. You've never seen so many grown men shamelessly wearing coochie-cutting Daisy Dukes in your life. (I have, but that's because I go to gay bars. The drinks are stronger, the prices are cheaper, and I'm still waiting for the instance where my dashing good looks scores me a few free drinks.) Turned out it was some guy Richard's birthday and all fifty of his closest friends chipped in and got him a chocolate dick cake.
Some guy tried hassling me for change in the bathroom. I'm standing there, in the urinal, with my dick in my hand and this guy starts hassling me for change so he can get a night in a St. Paul homeless shelter. The guy had nicer clothes on than I did and he decides to start hassling me for change while I'm trying to piss. I tell him I spent all my money on the bar tab and he gets this angry look on his face and asks, "You mean you got no change?" I repeat myself while leaving the bathroom with a still full bladder. He starts hassling the guy taking a shit as I leave.
I see him come out of the bathroom and Georgie and Gerbs are ready to go, so back into the head I go to evacuate my bladder. I come back out and have to make my way through the throbbing, thonged throng of screaming, flailing merries and ladies wearing stylish hats with long sweater dresses over tights to get over to George and Gerbs and we leave from there, and I see the bathroom pan-handler leaning on a car talking to some woman. Sometimes, most of the time, I really don't get Minneapolitans.

Busy day, yesterday.

All times are approximate and in Central Daylight Savings.

0700: Awake. Turn off alarm clock. Let cat in. Play opossum. Cat leaves.

0800: Awake. Wonder why the hell I slept in.

0800 - 0830: Feed cat. Find Dave passed out on couch. Poop. Shave. Shower.

0830 - 1100: Wash, dry, and fold laundry. Do dishes (x2). Drink coffee (one pot).

1100 - 1220: Cash paycheck at the check cashing joint, tenth one. Free. Go to Aldi, think about catching the 2 Westbound for the return home, only to see it fly by as I exit Aldi. No biggy. (Trip: 2 miles.)

1220 - 1230: Put groceries away. Drink one quart of cold water.

1230 - 1350: Go to post office down town. Encounter first woman with large red and black butterfly tattoo. Purchase money orders. Pay "big" student loan bill and the credit card bill. Encounter second woman with a large red and black butterfly tattoo. Go to bank. Make deposit. Exchange niceties with Banker Steve. In skyway, encounter third woman with large red and black butterfly tattoo. On return home, purchase cat food, cat litter, and a can of corned beef. (Trip: 3 miles.)

1350 - 1400: Drink one quart of cold water.

1400 - 1440: Go to guitar shop. Encounter fourth woman with large red and black butterfly tattoo. Purchase bass strings. Hear customer ask clerk who he liked more, Led Zeppelin or Whitesnake. Clerk replies, "Whitesnake." Want to scream so many things at this point that I'm lucky my brain doesn't explode from the sudden flood of words. Stop in at different liquor store. Long haired guy in back looked like one of the guys from Fu Manchu. Purchase twelve pack of Olde English 800 for weekend (my weekend being Monday and Tuesday). Guy behind counter wearing sleeveless black t-shirt with a horror movie poster on it. Run into Georgie outside the house as she's departing for downtown. (Trip: 2 miles.)

1440 - 1500: Restring bass.

1500 - 1530: Make pizza. Do dishes.

1530 - 1610: Lunch. Shoot shit with Dave.

1610 - 1620: Field call from Georgie. Bank fucked her again. Not happy with her sister.

1620 - 1700: Go to bodega. Purchase two orange push-ups. Take one to Georgie at the hostel.

1700 - 1800: Have beer with Dave. Make stems.

At this point, time becomes irrelevant.

Practice.

Hang out with Dave and Rob. Start fire. Georgie returns home from work at around 2200, joins group.

Georgie and I watch Heroes.

End of day.

I aint doin' shit, today.