Friday, August 29, 2008

A video from the Radiohead show last night

Something I find worth noting

Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin has 5 children.
The oldest, a son named Track.
3 middle daughters: Bristol, Willow, and Piper.
And the youngest, a son named Trig.


Those are some wild names.

In other news Radiohead is nuts live.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Mountain lions were a possibility


There is an abandoned mine in the hills of Nuevo. The other night at around 9:30 pm, me, Jeff, Jamie, and Jeremy decided to go to it. With the summer coming to a close we were itching for an adventure, our stomachs were longing for the exhilarating hollow ache which is only brought on by fear. Getting to the mine is about a 40 minute hike, 15 minutes or so on a private gated road, and then 25 minutes on a path which winds through the hills. Jeff was the leader. Jamie was always falling behind. None of us had been to the mine at night, I had never been to the mine at all so going at night was semi frightening. I had no idea what I had ahead of me. We were purposefully trying to freak ourselves out. Jeremy made me get a pocket knife from my house to protect us from wild animals. The whole way up we were talking about what kind of ferocious animals might be sleeping inside the mine. We were also talking about what we would do if we saw people up in the hills. Seeing people in the hills late at night was probably the worst scenario we could think of; it seemed unlikely that anyone who would be up in the hills at that time of night would be up to anything half as innocent as what we were doing. After many discussions about what we would do if there was a mountain lion, or if we saw a trucks headlights, we made it to the cave. The mouth of the mine is pretty small, you have to crawl through it, but once you are inside the cave you can stand up strait. Before we went in we threw rocks inside, and screamed into the opening, hoping that this would cause any creature to reveal itself to us before we went inside. After Jamie yelled in a commanding voice, "is anyone in there." We figured it was abandoned and safe. I was the last to enter. As I was walking through I was wondering if there were any rattle snakes or Black widows living in the cracks of the cave. The walls of the cave looked like solid granite, you could see the scrapings where the picks had swung. The mine probably went back a hundred feet, the further you went in the thicker and mustier the air became. Once inside, the fear left pretty quickly. When we got to the back of the mine we sat for a while, turned all the lights off, and let the complete darkness surround our silence. It is a good thing to sit in pitch black every once in a while, it takes your mind to places it needs to go.

This song Pumps me up.

Friday, August 22, 2008

Cataloging

This weeks Top Albums
Bruce Springsteen- Born to Run
Top Tracks:
Thunder Road
Tenth Ave Freeze-Out
Backstreets


Beirut - Lon Gisland Ep
Top Track:
Elephant Gun

Bruce Springsteen - Live from Hammersmith and Odeon 1975
Top Tracks:
Thunder Road (Its a version that is just piano and Harmonica)
Lost in the Flood
E Street Shuffle
Jungle Land

Ben Kweller - On My Way
Top Tracks:
I Need You Back
On My Way
Believer
Here Me out

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Inspiration

I just saw a guy walking down the street with a tattoo that said "Cowboy up." I think that is awesome.

And you know what? I think i will. I will cowboy up.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Jury duty #2

I think that in my whole morning at jury duty I had 2 maybe three interactions with another person. I pretty much kept to myself and my book.
Here is one of my interactions: I went to the coffee vending machine to get a hot chocolate. There was a woman ahead of me getting a cup of coffee. For some reason her cup was taking a while to fill up. She looked at me and said:

Woman: Sorry, its going real slow.
Me: Its ok I am in absolutely no rush.

She left, I got my hot chocolate.
I didn't want hot chocolate really, I was simply wasting time. I was pleased that there was a delay.

The thing that gets me thinking is that there are people out there who would have been annoyed that it was taking her long to get her coffee. Some people would be in a rush to get their coffee and go back to their seat to do absolutely nothing but sit and wait. People, myself included, are strange creatures.

Jury duty #1

The guy sitting next to me was wearing this tie. He didn't get on a jury. Like me he didn't even come close. I bet he was disapointed. You only wear that tie to jury duty if you want to appear like you are glad to be serving your civic duty. You only wear it if you want to get on a jury.

You wear these cuff links if you don't want to get on a jury.

Instance

Last night me and Jeff were sitting on lawn chairs in Jeff's front lawn. We were just chewin the fat, talking about everything and anything. Jamie pokes his head in Jeff's window and this is what ensues:

Jamie - You guys want to get some Steak and potatoes, I really feel like a hearty meal.
Jeff - I'm down
Jamie - No you guys have to come with me, I can't go out alone in my underwear, I need you guys with me and then I can go out in my underwear.
Jeff - ok
Jamie - naw, it's ok, we don't have to go.

Jamie made a sandwich. Me and Jeff talked a little bit more. I went home.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

They know....



The flies attack me; I will be watching tv, or reading a book, or lounging talking to friends, or whatever else it is I do. They Land on my legs, my eyes, my elbows, my neck, my nose, my lips, my feet, my hands, etc. Finally I get frustrated enough to grab a fly swatter. As soon as I sit down with the fly swatter there are no more flies to kill. They have all fled. Now you my say: "you should be happy all the flies left when you grabbed the swatter. You have struck fear into their hearts. Your power and cunning with the swatter has brought you victory." But this is not how I feel. I want to punish the flies, to kill them for the small annoyance they have caused me. I want the satisfaction of seeing them smushed on the coffee table. I know that when they flee from me like the philistine army fleeing from David after he lopped off Goliath's head, they have left only to go annoy someone else, to poop and vomit all over the house. I want to terminate them.

I am sensing a general trend in topics on my blog.

I made some montages for call of the wild



The Apoidea have struck back



I felt something land on my shoulder. I went for the palm smash kill technique. This turned out to be a bad decision. My palm smashed a bee. The bee stuck its stinger directly into my hand. Swiftly I pulled out the stinger, stepped on the bee, and put ice on my palm. Luckily I am not allergic so I only had to deal with the temporary pain of a sting.

This was the first wave of attack the apoidea have thrown at me, the war has just begun. The bee that stung me didn't survive, I did survive, thus I won. My enemies place no value on the individual life, their missions are suicide Kamikaze attacks. This will be a long ugly war.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Today....


I saw a yellow Hummer on the free way. The license plate read "Mr Suave."
It was awesome and I apologize that I didn't get a picture of it.

Mr Suave is now number 1 on my list of people to meet before I die.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Since growing my moustache I like to think I look like every famous person with one

Today it's Mark Spitz. I was swimming in the pool, Flopping around, inspired by the Olympics, pretending I know how to do the butterfly. I was also pretending I was Mark Spitz.

Maybe someday my facial hair will look that good, probably not though. He would have made a solid baseball player.

Favorite thing about myspace and facebook:



we get to see what girls couldn't live without. Very often a female social networking page will say: "I can't live without......"

My collection of things vital to life for these girls so far is: Golden Spoon, chapstick, coffee, naked juice, Iphone, coat hangers, hair dye, fiji apples, Whole Foods, and designer jeans.

Sorry if I am being pretentious/a jerk, I hate myself for it.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

I like to pretend that people care about my opinion

These are my current albums of choice:


Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band - The wild, the innocent, and the E Street Shuffle

Top tracks:
4th of July, Asbury Park (sandy)
Wild Billy's Circus Story
New York City Serenade

Pedro the Lion - It's Hard to Find a Friend

Top Tracks:
Big Trucks
When They Get To Know You They Will Run
The Secret of the Easy Yoke

Ryan Adams - Demolition

Top Tracks:
Desire
Dear Chicago
Gimme a Sign

She & Him - Volume One

Top Tracks:
Sentimental Heart
Change is Hard
Take it Back
I Should of Known Better

The glory days

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Surprise, Arizona


Tomorrow I am going to visit my grandparents who live just outside Phoenix in a suburb called Surprise. Should be fun.

Interesting song, Interesting video, interesting guy.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Weird dream


Last night in my dream Steel played a huge concert. I think Thrice was headlining, but it was like woodstock big, just a huge mass of people. The only people from Steel who seemed to be able to make the show were me, Jeff and Jamie (who isn't really in Steel). Jeff was playing guitar and I seemed to always be switching which instruments I played. I never played keyboards, which is odd because that is what I play in Steel. We really sucked and I remember knowing it. I remember playing a pillow as a bass for a while. And I was also the screamer the whole show. For a while I was looking for a bass but couldn't find one, so I kept plucking the pillow. Jeff kept refusing to play any of our good songs. He said "stone your grandmas bear" was too boring and he refused to play "folk" for a reason I cant remember. All he wanted to play was Daedalus by Thrice. It sucked real bad, everyone hated us (which is normally the goal of a steel show), but I was disappointed. I think the woods kids were the only people who enjoyed our performance. I also think I remember someone saying they saw Paris Hilton at the show. It was an odd dream.

Poolside Pt. 3


The heat drove me to the pool. I jumped in and did a few laps, Bruce Springsteen's The River Album playing in the background. I got out and went into my usual post swimming position: Laying with my cold wet back on the hot deck, my arms spread in the style of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio De Janeiro. When drips of water rolled down the side of my face, it felt as though the heat from the sun was pushing the water in the way the backside of a magnet pushes metal away. I sat up. I looked down at my feet, which were dangling off the edge of the deck into the water. I saw a wasp inches away. Coolly, I pulled my feet out of the water, scanned my surroundings for a weapon, found a bucket (the type a kid would play with at the beach. It was yellow). I grabbed the bucket and placed it in the air above where the wasp was tranquilly floating in the water. With force I hit the wasp with bucket. After the first hit it was stunned, badly injured but not dead. My only objective was its death. Neither shall live while the other survives, and I was going to survive. I hit it probably 4 times with the bucket, but the water had softened my blows enough that it did not die. I decided to clean up my technique a bit; I used the bucket to push the wasp up against the side of the pool. I smashed it in between the bucket and the wall of the pool. The Boss was singing "Independence Day," and the victory was mine.

Monday, August 4, 2008

Today I watched

And



It was an interesting combination. Quite a contrast.

Good Authors tend to look pretty cool

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Walt Whitman



John Steinbeck


William Faulkner


Kurt Vonnegut


Jack London


F. Scott Fitzgerald


Flannery O'Conner


The Apostle Paul

Ernest Hemingway

Herman Melville


J.D. Salinger

New Idea

Every time someone says "God bless" try to insert the word "America" as quick as you can, and then say I was just finishing your sentence for you.

Sunday, August 3, 2008

I see this blog as a way to collect things.


Here are some quotes from East of Eden that I thought were interesting:

"And you must not expect to find that people understand what they do. So many things are done instinctively, the way a bee makes honey or a fox dips his paws in a stream to fool dogs. A fox can't say why he does it, and what bee remembers winter or expects it to come again?"

"His Mother and Father thought him a poet because he wasn't any good at anything else."

The Bugs are out with a vengence

Tonight I was reading on the patio, and the bugs are every. All kinds: flies, spiders, gnats, praying mantis, and mosquitoes. I don't feel like I have ever had a problem with mosquitoes in Nuevo, but the are here, and there are a lot of them, and the like to suck my blood at night.

Current Drink of Choice

Bundaberg Ginger Beer, it is the best ginger ale I have tasted thus far. Go get some from world market.

I also wouldn't be opposed to the idea of someone buying me some.

The Beach Boys



The Beach Boys are pretty sweet. When I was in high school they were supposed to play at the Farmers Fair but got rained out. I was upset.
Yesterday me and Jeff watched this video and jeff said, "you would have to be an idiot to not like this." Their melodies are ingenious.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

I just finished rereading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,

And I am a little embarrassed by how into those books I get.

Heres an interesting quote:
"Do not pity the dead, harry. Pity the living, and, above all, those who live without love."

Today I killed a Wasp,

or at least I think I did. I was laying by the pool, my feet in the water, my wet back rested pleasantly against the synthetic wood deck, which the sun had been warming all day. I was listening to Death cab For Cutie, enjoying the late afternoon breeze, when I felt something crawling on my knee. I thought it was just a fly, I tried to gently kick my knee, thinking it would scare it off. It stayed and felt slightly heavier than a fly. I decided to investigate. I looked and there it was: a wasp. I lifted my hand and flicked it into the water. It was submerged in the water and its wings were useless. It was aimlessly flapping around the water. I did nothing but watch it writhe in agony, beating its wings uselessly, struggling to make it out of the watery death trap. I didn't stick around long enough to see if it died or escaped, I saw two other wasps and feared that they had their stingers poised for revenge. I dried off and went inside. I am scared that if I continue my wasp killing ways there will be a wasp rebellion and I will be first on their list of people to sting to death.



Update: I just checked, it is dead.

Friday, August 1, 2008

A dream I had on the farm



Wednesday night sometime, 7-23-2008
Location: Scott's trailer, Gene Wheeler Farms Property, Lancaster, California.

In my dream me and some friends, I don't remember who I was with, were walking through a crowded street in India. We went inside a store and did the normal stuff you do in a store, pick up and play with anything that interests you. We were in the shop for a little while, and then went back to the street. All of the sudden, one of my friends has a shot gun, and he fires it into the air. Quickly following this shot, elephants begin running down the street first only a couple and then enough to fill the street, after the elephants hordes of people start running down the street, completely covering every inch of street. At this point I was standing on the side of the street next to the store I was just in. I had three choices: Run with the people, get trampled, or try to go inside the store. I go for the third option and make it in right before they lock the doors. I ask the shop owners, it was a man and his wife, if all the doors are locked, and we start checking. For some reason it seemed like a matter of life and death that the doors be locked, that we not let any of the massive mob inside our store. I am checking one of the side doors, and it turns out this door is not locked. Right before I was going to lock the door someone opened it. I could feel the danger of the massive crowd rushing into our store and trampling us. I looked at the person who had opened the door. It was an emaciated, bald person, I am not sure if it was a man or a woman, all I know was that this person was very skinny and had no hair. The fear was pounding through my body, and I knew I only had one option: to push this person out of the doorway and into the hungry open mouth of the horde. So i did. I pushed Baldy by the shoulders, feeling only skin and bone, no fat no muscle, just a leathery layer of skin covering a brittle set of bones. I closed and locked the door before I saw what happened to this person. But I had no doubt in my mine that I had pushed him or her to his or her death.

This is when I woke. I had to use the restroom. This dream kinda freaked me out. I had just thrown this person from the safety of my store to a sure death. When the rubber met the road I only cared to save my own skin.

I know only one thing: those hordes of people represent the never ending flow of onions that I was seeing day in and day out at the onion farm.

I Started Reading East of Eden

And this line really resonated with me:
"You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast."
John Steinbeck

Coming from a place like Nuevo, this sentiment really captured a way I feel and think.