You look to keep me on the backburner,
As you peruse the available options.
Sulking in a depression of sorts,
A loneliness of others, I'm comforted
By the rags in this muck,
While you give a verisimilitude
Of interest, or sway.
This is a difficult train to rob,
And a quick bullet to bite
Through a broken heart.

Why is life the great struggle?
And why can no headway be made?
Against the tide of emotions, I struggle,
But when I see the mirror,
Just dark potches and scraggly facial hair appear!
Why is life arcane, or is it just devoid
Of substance of any kind?
Are we made of china to be used formally,
But broken again and again?
Is antipathy festering in technology,
To beat the curve and curb?
Not even so many incompetent
Can manufacture such a fiasco as this!

What is it to reconcile and submit to my aegis, my Ebed-Melech?

For those of you who don't receive the Tennessean on a daily basis, yesterday (Sunday), they included an article that dared to say that most Democratic candidates for congressional elections oppose a timetable or specific time to withdraw troops from Iraq.  Why?  Let me tell you why.  Democrats have been playing the blame game i.e. "Bush is bad, blah blah...Karl Rove is bad, blah, blah..." with only one objective in mind--to discredit the Republicans and win back power.  Problem is that they don't know what to do when they get it.  They're just bullshitting until they can think of a better way to do things.  I think this was evident in the fact Kerry didn't win.  He wasn't for total withdrawal: he was for a multilateral approach, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.  Libertarians were for immediate withdrawal.  Now whether that's a good idea is up for discussion; I'm just sick and tired of Democrats giving us the 411 on why we should hate Republicans when, honestly, they couldn't do a better job at the present moment.  Many people agree that we wouldn't have gone into war (at least so quickly) if we could turn back time, but we can't.  Democrats can't.  So reminding all of the world that America is wrong and that its troops are just cruel bastards to helpless terrorist inmates without a decent solution to all of those problems besides "holding Bush accountable" doesn't aid the current situation.  No, I don't agree with the war, but Saddam was close to Hitler in lack of morality...ask any Kurd what happened to their friends and relatives that stayed in Iraq.  But these things are beside the point.  Looking backward is foolish without a clear plan for the future, which neither party seems to have.  They just seem to be playing power struggle.

Protect the Jimpire

Awaiting I, face toward the sky, clenched fists and jaw--ah yes, awaiting I--while these outward signs mean nothing, I mean everything enough to move out of this cell.  A concatenation of mixed feelings and sorrowful events won't change; but to grow strong, for that everything I do.  Tap, tap, tap...let me in, or I'm breaking the door of forgiveness.

My personality is a funny thing, always bitterly engaging people with their problems and/or idiosyncrasies, while afterward complaining to the lot of those victims my own sad, isolated state.  My personality's strange character can not be trumped by my intelligence.  When all you can do is to silently sough in prayer while crying to God on a basketball court and still not understand what life was supposed to be in last two years and not predict what life will be in the next two, you're at a quandary...and I am.  Still, I could raise the bar of my existence by not being a smartass, if I truly want that.

Because I having trouble remember all I want to buy...

The Mars Volta--Amputechture

Botch--American Nervoso and We Are The Romans

Look What I Did--Minuteman for the Moment

Into Eternity--Buried Into Oblivion

The Dillinger Escape Plan--Calculating Infinity

Converge--You Fail Me 

Small list of what I'm hoping to get my hands on, mostly progressive metal or stuff usually lumped in a genre with "-core" as a suffix.

Ahhh...yes, it's that time again, more fun than a barrel of monkeys...

1.  Korn--Someone kill Korn, or get them saved because only converting the lead guitarist still left the band limping.  One of the forerunners of the nu metal genre, it's no wonder than every album, despite a few good singles in their entire discography, returns the void from whence it came.  Do the right thing: put away artists who're stuck on endless repeat.

2.  Demon Hunter--I can't figure out why people like this band: they're loosely Christian, and copy an already tired nu metal sound.

3.  Barlow Girl--I love to hate Barlow Girl, simply for that fact I can't believe so many people are trying so hard to get signed, but this shit slips through...somehow, some way.  The idea of Barlow Girl is purity through courtship and abstinence, yet still maintaining the ability to "rock".  If that doesn't tip you off to a paradox prima facie, realize that "rock 'n roll" was coined as a euphemism for sexual intercourse.  Now, I'm not one to burst the Christian rock bubble, but I find it funny nonetheless.  Barlow Girl, aside from some vocal talent, can not play.  I know several thousand people in the Middle Tennessee area alone who can create beyond their level, a fact which brings me back to my point: why the hell did someone give them a record deal?

4.  Paris Hilton--Why, God? Why?

5.  Gavin Degraw--Some friends of mine saw him live, then came away stating that I, unsigned joe schmo, was better.  Hmmm...plus, his songs are annoying.

6.  Pussycat Dolls--Have you seen this girls dance?  They're terrible.  What's worse is that their songs make little use of all six of them, and their songs are just not good anyway.

May be continued...

I get frustrated because every single time I think of something to say on this jig, I lose interest or forget what it was.  Amongst the cursory profile changes, I haven't done much with this site, I guess.  Problem is, if I told you everything I thought at this time, most of you wouldn't understand.  It'd just be passed off as some arrogant attempt to say something esoteric or depressing.  I don't know what to say anymore other than life is weird.

Here's an article I think is noteworthy, not to say that I agree with anything or everything said.  Still, it's thought-provoking...

http://nomuzak.co.uk/against_pop.html

I wish life weren't so depressing, and I guess that's an ironic statement seeing as how the blame's supposed to remain on me.  I do, after all, have a tongue about as invalid as a stroke patient trying to swim.  Take, for instance, a jab to someone's relationships during a simple social game; or, better yet, how would you feel if the memories released in reunion were simply that of bad experiences?  Alas, I am a dumb one.  Now, the difference between now and then is that then festered sadness toward self and now harbors anger at everyone, especially self, but sometimes moreso other individuals.  The future is not much better than bleak either.  What shall I write to Lee?  "Sorry, I went nuts for a year but now I'm better"?!  But even that's up for question.  Easy is a boat on a lake to find when fog has not rolled in and sat for 3 years!  Even the wind and the waves hate me!  People say I should hold a positive attitude, servile, genuflecting at even the most barbaric of tragedies, but I can't.  Then again, I'm not very sure what I can and can not do.  So whatever you take, take and hold; for your time is coming; and my time will eventually come, although it's testing my longsuffering!  What a season I have before me--such clutter to clear away.

I'm thinking about skydiving, but don't want to do it alone.  If interested, leave a remark or something...

While there are some bands I simply dislike but can still agree that they might agree with someone else's tastes, these are the obvious bad choices, the ones that are just bad.

1.  Simple Plan/Good Charlotte--I have an idea: let's construct a band and its music entirely off the pseudo-tragedy of white middle-class junior high "teen angst" and make money off of it.

2.  Hillary Duff/Lindsay Lohan--one's a slut with mediocre pop, and one's not.  Any questions?  How about we not give recording label contracts to movie stars, especially from fuckin Disney channel!  In particular, this really grates my nerves to think that half-wit bimbos with little musicality at all can sell more than diligent musicians who have slaved over their associated skills--whether instrumental or vocal--and then record labels complain that people pirate music.  Hypocrisy!

3.  The Simpsons--No, not the animated ones, but rather Ashlee and Jessica and their father.  Neither of which is any good, especially Ashlee, but I call the root of all evil as the main culprit.  Question: why their suddenly abdicate the "call of God to the ministry" to help his kids?  The money, folks...it's called you can't serve two masters!

4.  Nickelback--One phrase--"How You Remind Me"/"Someday" overlay....

5.  Gwen Stefani--I gave some credit to her proboscised vocals when she had a band, but her recent trade-off to join a whole bunch of weird Asian chicks and create the blasphemy that is "Love, Angel, Music...Baby" warrants a harsh rebuke.  Come on, why Fiddler on the Roof...why did you have to go and do that?

6.  Bloodhound Gang--They're not that funny, and they're not musical.

7.  Ciara--Somewhere along the line, you could become an R & B artist by hitting only two notes in a song.

8.  H.I.M.--You may not have heard to them; but yes, they are a band; and yes, somehow, someway, they sell records.  For Heaven's sake, they have an album named "Greatest Love Songs Vol. 666."  Their sheer stupidity in naming an album is reason alone to cast them aside.  Don't fall for their ridiculous "love metal" label.

To be continued...

by Pearl Jam...I think I need to follow it...

You're always saying that there's something wrong
I'm starting to believe it's your plan all along
Death came around, forced to hear it's song
And know tomorrow can't be depended on

Seen the home inside your head
All locked doors and unmade beds

Open sores unattended
Let me say just once that

I have faced it, a life wasted
I'm never going back again
I escaped it, a life wasted
I'm never going back again
having tasted, a life wasted
I'm never going back again

The world awaits just up the stairs
Leave the pain for someone else
Nothing back there for you to find
Or was it you you left behind?

You're always saying you're too weak to be strong
You're harder on yourself than just about anyone

Why swim the channel just to get this far?
Halfway there, why would you turn around?

Darkness comes in waves...tell me,
Why invite it to stay?

You're one with negativity
Yes, comfort is an energy
But why let the sad song play?

I have faced it, a life wasted
I'm never going back again

Oh I escaped it, a life wasted
I'm never going back again

having tasted, a life wasted
I'm never going back again

oh i erased it, a life wasted

1.  How I almost (or better yet, should have) lost my job at Quizno's

After weeks of inner frustration, my nerves still failed to relent thier natural battery of the senses, and to no avail did I choke down each caffeinated beverage to dull their aptitude at whittling away my consciousness.  On this day, I worked diligently on the creation of sandwiches.  Then stepped an ex-employee up to the sneeze guarad, who foiled my plans for world because nothing vexes me more at the meat table than to serve an obnoxious strumpet similar to me in age.  She took her time--too much, in my opinion--while prattling on about her future sandwich.  Anger got the best of me even after attempting to shrug off her questions.  She finally asked, "What sandwiches do you like?"
"I usually rotate between the cabo chicken, the black angus--"
"The black angus," she started. "I hate the black angus."
My doom subsequently rolled over my scowl likes clouds in a fierce, oncoming squall.  "Well, if you're going to be a bitch about it," I smarted off.  Yes, I called a customer--a female customer--a bitch.  My tongue rolled back in dismay and extended once more as my eyes glared at the venomous slits betraying real rage.  Any attempt to mollify the situation was futile.  Eventually, others aided the cause of Quizno's and served her the sandwich she desired.  I described the situation to my startled manager.  Couple with his shock, his disappointment revealed to me my crime's possible damage.  She had threatened to call Dave McClain, the head of operations, but I got to him first.  Luckily, honesty and Dave's spending time with his family saved my job this time.  Ironically, she was fired from the Quizno's on Caruthers (I now work at Concord) because of her temper.  I find that tremendously hilarious, even considering the danger of all this to me.  Yes, her attitude may have warranted my call but not under the umbrella of some of my current financial support.

2.  Why G. Gordon Liddy is complete idiot

I hate G. G. Liddy.  For those of you who don't know, he's a "conservative" radio talk show host (on 99.7 fm for Nashvegas folk) with a penchant for speaking to the "American citizen".  If that citizen is a complete idiot all of the time, his entrance may be justified, but for God's sake, it's not.  Today, I had the pleasure of hearing him fellate Kelly Patricia O'Meara for writing the book Psyched Out: How Psychiatry Sells Mental Illness and Pushes the Pills that Kill.  According to Liddy and friends, mental illness has been concocted by the APA.  Aside from the fact that I have enough personal experience, enough people I've met, and enough information in my brain to beat the shit out for his criticism and blanket statement logic, I try to keep to logic.  Liddy says that there's no really objective method for determination of chemical imbalances in the brain, and that dismisses immediately via "common sense"  Hmmmm...well, if Liddy wants to donate his brain while he's still alive to be tested on, then that will change.  Psychiatry, for all its faults, is the most honest of all fields of science.  It admits that it is flawed.  Of course, Liddy does not think twice about whether light is a particle or a wave, or what gravity is, or that tons of science is just educated guesses!  For a medical example, chemotherapy is fairly rough as far as treatment: you're only swallowing poison in the hope that it will kill only all the bad cells and but just leave enough good cells alone that you will live.  Psychiatry does what it can with what it has available.  If there's abuse, it's only one in tons of medical abuse cases.  Liddy also claims that the pharmaceutical companies don't know what their medicines do.  Wrong...they do have a basic idea, but they can't generalize out a 100% success rate for everyone's brain.  No one can with anything, not even Liddy, unless he's God, and his track record is pretty shabby for that.  He also makes fun of "twitching leg syndrome".  Wow, dumbshit, you're wrong.  It's "Restless Leg Syndrome", and it results from taking certain sleep aids often given to depression patients, who generally have trouble sleeping, depending on the level of depression.  It consists of painful muscle spasms of the legs, and it is a real problem, although the cause is most likely the sleep medicine and is largely unexplainable.  Lastly, since I turned it off eventually, anti-depressive medicine rarely cause people to commit suicide, especially since most people who should be taking them were planning on commiting suicide anyway.  No, psychiatry is not as lethally helter-skelter as Liddy would like to believe so that he can raise his ratings; it does help people, and the opposition to psychological practices and psychotropic drugs offer no viable alternative, save maybe scientology (if that's viable).  Whatever, screw Liddy.

If I claim one and be a hypocrite, my heart experiencing no change, what good am I, but if I remain indecisive until my death, what good have I accomplished?  I am nothing but more confused than ever, my mind having been supposedly enlightened, and what good have I done?

I"m taking guitar lessons from a reluctant man named Ross--no telling where that will lead, if anywhere. 
I need to get together with people and play guitar.

I don't why I keep this site up: I hardly ever use it.  Perhaps, it's for boredom's sake, or to see how my writing skills have degraded.  That's another thing I need to do--write.

God, my life sucks....

I am telling you this because the government has slackened on their primary responsibility--the well-being of the people of this land--but many will deny my factual competence as I proceed with my argument.  According to my research, in the year 2100, feces will cover the earth, exacting a terrible biohazard on the face of our beloved planet.  Matter does not just disappear: all that fecal matter has slowly been building up underneath the surface of the earth until sufficient pressure will expel fecal matter of the most disgusting kind into the air with the chaos of a hurricane, and it is all our fault.  We should've killed off the lowlifes to save the good, hardworking American people from such dire tragedy.  Our only decision now can be to hold it all in.  Yes, my comrades, you must boycott the bowel movement to lessen the impact of the fecal torrent.  Protest against the lobbyists who find the comfort of riches from their evil deeds, such as the toilet paper and restroom industries.  They are also to blame and shall have their day of reckoning when we, the common man, stressed by the woes of everyday life and the inability to properly purge waste matter from our anatomy, take them down.  Also, you must kill all celebrities, for in addition to spewing garbage out of their rectums, they also have an uncanny ability to defecate out their oral cavity, adding to the chaos tenfold.  Yes, comrades, in doing these things, you can help stall the apocalypse, and make the world a far better place for you and me.

World's Smallest Political Quiz

Things I want to accomplish within the next few weeks/months...
1.  I want increase my skill as a musician.
    a.  I want to take more guitar lessons.
    b.  I want to get guidance on my vocal skills.
    c.  I want to practice more.
    d.  I want to write more complete songs.
    e.  I want to perform in front of an audience other than my immediate             family.
2.  I want to beef up my social life.
    a.  I want to meet new people (physically, not over the internet).
    b.  I want to rekindle relationships with people I already know.
    c.  I always want to have something to do on a weekend.
3.  I want to logically formulate what I believe.

(Ehhh...not too shabby?)

I've come across a problem.

Hypothetically speaking, if one was born without the use of any of the physical senses, would they still exist?  We would say so, but I'm not so sure, especially since it's never happened.  In other words, is existence totally contingent on perception, or is there a blank slate that exists before perception occurs?  What ramifications would either possibility have logically?

10.  While I can limit what I perceive, I can not directly control what I perceive; that is, if I choose to perceived a certain event, while I can limit what I perceive of the event, I can not change the outcome by my perception.  This observation leads to a confirmation of the assumption of the existence of the universe.

What do you think?

*Well, although I haven't quite figured it out, it's kinda like this.  So far, the only thing I know exists is myself and my perception is access to my own existence.  I perceive that the universe exists, but it is relatively uncontrollable.  This must mean that it carries on, to an extent, regardless of my existence and has to be equal in some regard with my existence.  Therefore, it can not not exist because if it didn't, it wouldn't carry on in a manner against what I would want.  In other words, if the universe does not exist, then only I exist, and everything is a product of my existence.  But we know this is not true because I have to perceive something in order to fill the "blank slate" of existence, unless I create the universe in a manner unbeknownst to myself.  I perceive this universe as something that exists, and it carries on by itself, even while I exist, further proving that it isn't a product of me, again, unless I created the universe (or my plane of existence) in a manner unbeknownst to me.  But even then, why would I do something in such a way as to displeasure myself, if I had completely control over my plane of existence?  Does that make any sense?

1.  I exist.
2.  My perception allows me to access that existence.  Question:  Is this true?  Do we exist only by perception?  Or is there a blank slate formed before we perceived?  I tend to hold to the blank slate theory, but that would logically follow into the idea that even fetuses are aware of their existence.
3. My perception is inherently flawed relative to itself and limited in capacity.
4.  My memory is a collection of perceptions past.
5.  My memory is inherently flawed.
6.  My cognition (thought) is based off of my perception and memory.  It uses three main methods to process information:
i.  Filtering--Focusing on an perceived part assumed to be of preeminence to the rest of the perception.
ii.  Sorting--Distinguishing between different and similar parts and grouping them accordingly.
iii.  Extrapolation--Using patterns to theorize what information may complete unknowns.
7.  I assume that the others very similar but different to me (humans) exist in a manner to similar to my own existence, but I can not be sure.
8.  My thought is inherently flawed.
9.  I assume that there exists a plane of existence (the universe) for the sake of simplicity.

Cognition, I guess it is better to say, is not so much flawed as it is limited, and in many ways that is a flaw.
1.  Our senses can only concentrate on so much so that a particular perception, although seemingly complete, can be very incomplete and can give us a distorted view that surprise us to be otherwise.
2.  Our senses have only existed for a short time.
3.  Our senses contradict each other.  Perfect senses would not, as I demonstrated with the 3d movie example.
4.  Our perception cannot collect all information at once.  It  is limited by direction and in scope.
5.  Our thought can contradict our perception
6.  Our perception's ability can change.
There is no right or wrong standard I'm implying here, other than the one relative to one's own perception.  I think 3 is the best example of this, simply for the fact that it distinguishes between an outside standard and an inside standard by stating that our own senses conflict with each other.  Logically, I believe nothing perfect can contradict itself: it must be completely congruent.  But that is another debate.

9.  There is a plane of existence I assume carries on its own existence for simplicity's sake.

**There's some sort of famous rule of logic that says out of two equally explanatory answers, the simplest one is normally correct.