Champagne for my Real Friends, Real Pain for My Sham Friends

Say whatever you want about me, but I can't help but think that the new Fall Out Boy record, which comes out next week, is actually pretty good. If you don't know about Fall Out Boy just wait about a week and I guarantee that you will see that shit all over MTV, Fuse, M2, whatever. Or if you have a teenaged sister just look in her bedroom and I'm sure that shit will be there. I don't know what it is about mall emo that makes me so happy, but it just does. I mean, with songs titles like "Champagne for my Real Friends, Real Pain for My Sham Friends" how can you not like FOB? And just look at how adorable homeboy in charge is, especially next to my burly ass. I think I need to get a job at Hot Topic.

I <3 Eleanor Friedberger

So the other night and went and saw The Fiery Furnaces, which aren't necessarily one of my favorite bands in the world, but they are growing on me a little bit. Plus it helps that Eleanor Friedberger, the singer lady, is the Queen of all spocks. She's like a sorority girl spock, a princess with total nerdy hotness. I guess she used to date some dude from Franz Ferdinand, which makes sense as I'm sure lots of girls find the dudes in Franz Ferdinand to be similarly hot but not but hot. And I think girls are into her shit too: at the show there were a little crew of girls in the front sticking their fucking camera phones in her face the whole time taking pictures. This one girl had to have taken at least 60 photos. I felt kind of bad because Eleanor seems super not stoked to be in front of people singing and whatever and seems super worried about the monitors and drinking water and whether the songs are too fast or too slow. But I guess that's what you get for being a spock superstar.

I also got to interview her brother, the mastermind behind the Fiery Furnaces, who was a lot less serious about shit than I would've guessed. I think I hurt his feelings when I told him I expected him to be totally aloof and all weird and whatever. They were even nice enough to let me take a polaroid which is always pleasant. I took a lot of live photos but the people around here don't really get on that shit so I'll probably post those after awhile.

Noble Truths

A Path: People, for one reason or another, have pretty much always hated me. But I’m not too worried about it. Personally I don’t really hate anyone. I mean, sure I get pissed off at a lot of people. But there is such a thin line between love and hate, that hating someone is way too close to loving someone for my taste. I’d rather just not give a shit about someone and leave it at that. And that doesn’t just go for people, it works for issues, too. Because the problem with standing up super passionately for an issue is that there’s a good chance that someday you might realize that you were wrong, or maybe just misinformed, and then feel like a total asshole. Moreover, since no one’s really perfect, it’s hard to defend yourself as an example of adhering to whatever sort of conduct code or moral standpoint you are endorsing. It’s like the right-wing congressmen who fuck their secretaries, or environmental activists who drive SUVs. People are all stupid, some just show it more. It’s easiest just to not care about the stupid bullshit most people spend their days worrying and fretting about. Because the real fact of the matter is, most shit doesn’t really even matter anyway. It’s easiest just to stick to coffee, alcohol and sushi and not get too involved with anything much beyond your own sphere of influence. Leave the hating to people with nothing better to do with their day or who want so badly to feel important, to feel like only they were blessed with pure objective moral clarity. Some might call that apathy. But if ignorance is bliss, apathy is a close second.




The Virtues of Apathy: The thing about apathy, the very aspect that makes it such a crystalline, flawless approach to everything is that there is no wrong way to be indifferent. You can’t not care about something and be wrong. It might offend people who don’t have the ability to not care. It might bring about a horrible, terrible world ruled by despots and genocidal maniacs, but what do you care?





Buddha, the Father of Apathy: The first great adherent to the path of apathy (etymological coincidence? I don’t think so!) was, of course, Buddha, who didn’t give a shit about really anything. He of course didn’t really want to say that out loud. So he talked a lot about meditating and nirvana, and whatever. But what that really all means is that the true path to enlightenment is not really giving a rat’s ass about the stupid bullshit that people choose to center their lives around.




Walden: Though Henry David Thoreau certainly did give a shit about certain things during his day, Walden, by virtue of its endorsement of various forms of tuning out most people in favor of books about ancient Greek dudes humping mermaids, or walking around looking at squirrels and birds and train tracks and basically anything that didn’t really matter all that much, is something of a beginner’s guide to apathy. Granted, if you read it too closely you will get the more veiled political and social commentaries. But that’s why apathists SKIM AT ALL TIMES. If you skim, pretty much any book becomes nothing more than dudes hanging out. Catcher in the Rye: some kid hanging out super emo. On the Road: some dude hitchhiking and trying to score. Moby Dick: some dude, some whale, a lot of boats and shit. See!

Cred Weekend

Even though its already almost the weekend again, I still feel compelled to write about last weekend, as it was probably about the funnest 3 days I've had in a while and since I don't really have shit else to do anyway.


Friday night was a surprise birthday party for Conrad Nystrom, the bass player in my band and bass player for a litany of seminal indie rock bands like the North Magnetic and Cowboy. Being that Conrad's favorite thing in the world is rock music, about 38,000 bands played that night including a one-night reunion of Deathstar (the greatest Chico band ever), the Becky Sagers (which includes eminent artist Aye Jay Morano whose portrait of the aforesaid birthday boy appears above), Mid-Fi, The Americas, and too many more to list. A good time was had by all, and better still, no one even blew the surprise, a feat in this day and age of bloggin and myspacing and whatever.



Saturday night, another of my more whimsical musical groups, The Bleedrock Trio - consisting of myself, tattoo king the Reverend Shelby Cobra and Cayle Hunter of sav metal bands Ghostride and the Abominable Iron Sloth, the homely fuckers you see above - were hired to play a wedding in the metropolis of Ord Bend, CA. Stacked scrill, got drunker than piss, peed on a girl's back and signed lots of autographs for little kids, whose parents got all pissed when they started making Shelby draw them skulls on fire and all kinds of other gangster tattoo flash shit. There was also a retarted dude who pretty much danced the whole time, which was cool.



On Sunday, Bleedrock got to play with our friends Red With Envy at one of Chico State's dorms. Though the Garth Brooks and Lynard Skynard covers didn't really go over as well as they had the previous night, a good time for had nevertheless: there was lots of dudes throwing other dudes in the pool, diving into the 2 ft. deep shallow end head first, college girls in bikinis and all-around hijinx. The best part was when they let us go inside the cafeteria and get at their fountain drinks. Swear to god there had to have 45 different kinds of fucking soda up in that bitch.

In summation, this weekend was definitely off the fucking chains piece. And if you need a band for your wedding, corporate function or event, you should hire the Bleedrock Trio. We suck in that super good way. We also do a stunning rendition of "Secret Agent Man." Most importantly, we look damn good doing that shit.



Cayle and Shelby Signing Autographs like the rockstars they are

RIP Milton E. Walker

My Papa, as I called him to differentiate from my other grandpa, was not so much someone I looked up to, or even thought of as being a spectacular person, as he was just someone to kick it with. He was legendary for his Jeep rides. He had a WWII Air Force Jeep that he would bring up to our cabin, in the mountains west of Willows. $ hours was not an unheard of length for these rides, which traversed logging roads, steep ravines, deer trails wherever wheels would go. He taught me how to drink whiskey and soda water, by example more than by design. He was the guy who spent his entire speech at his 50th wedding anniversary detailing the adventures of him and his fellow sheriff's department buddies, transporting criminals cross country, ending each with "Mary Lou and the kids were back at home." He was the guy that my mom swore would forget her name when she was a kid. He had a cabinet full of mementos from his days in the service, but had doubtlessly killed more fowl than men in his time. He was an alright guy. Doomed by his generation to cancer courtesy of too many ciggarettes, highballs and bacon breakfasts. But I would be lucky, as would anyone, to have lived his life.

Return of the Jedi

Waking Life: Though it’s become something of a poetic convention to liken life to a dream (or maybe even a dream within a dream), in a lot of ways it’s true. Dreams are only really worth it when you figure out you’re dreaming and you can do whatever you want: spit game at the breezy you’ve been longing for, swim through the air naked, whatever. It doesn’t matter what it is you’re doing, only that you know you’re doing it. If you just take the easy route and let yourself be steered by dream consciousness, even crunk shit isn’t all that enjoyable. Likewise, sometimes in the course of living day-to-day life it’s easy to forget that you’re living at all and just go with the flow. You get up and go to work and get coffee and check your e-mail and go home and go to bed and even exciting things get to be part of the directions on the bottle. Work, play, have fun, be sad, enjoy, regret, rinse and repeat. You forget that reflection is the better part of experience. Your life turns into a game of Zelda, only stupider. You try to survive and get as many points as possible to try to get to that next level: assistant manager, college graduate, married mother, etc. And it seems alright, especially if you’re good at it. You beat level after level, earning weapons and extra powers and beating various nemeses. But unlike Zelda, you don’t win at life. At some point you die. Even if you stack 19,000,000,000 life points you still lose, eventually. In due time the dream ends. And though it’s easy enough to realize all this, it’s a bit harder to do anything about it. The transience of life is a tough cookie to bite into: that’s why they made up shit like God and ghosts and cryogenic freezing. So you can keep on trudging through your daily bullshit, earning points, thinking that you’ll beat the game of life somehow. It’s hard to wake up and smell the coffee. It takes some shit to piss you off.

Sandpeople: It’s like in Star Wars, when Luke Skywalker is just some dude chilling out in the middle of nowhere, blowing up rats, beating off to hologram porn, not doing a whole hell of a lot except getting through each day as another lump of shit on some lump of rock in some lumpy galaxy far, far away. Then he gets served by some sandpeople and realizes that it’s time to get his thumb out of his ass and save the universe from the Dark Side. The same kind of shit happened to me this week. The sandpeople of life kicked my ass something fierce. It was only then that I realized that I too had slipped. That, like Luke Skywalker, I had denied my destiny in an attempt to be like a regular average dude with a backwards hat. I had been satisfied with drinking my coffee and eating burritos, writing substandard columns and letting dudes at shitty local papers take control of the empire. But now I stand to reclaim my destiny as defender of all things righteous and totally sweet. So I got a Mohawk. And sunglasses. And a lightsaber. Well not really a lightsaber, but two out of three ain’t bad. And, as I’ve found out, if you have a Mohawk and sunglasses you don’t really need anything else.

Ass of the Mohicans: Having a Mohawk is probably a close approximation of what it’s like to have gigantic breasts. Even if you’re just walking down the street, you’re walking down the street with a Mohawk. Moreover, it seems to be a surefire cure to the abovementioned malady, the lifeless living of everyday life. Because when you wake up in the morning to brush your teeth, look into the mirror and see Travis Bickle, you can’t really help but get pissed off in a good kind of way. You realize why Indians could get crazy and cut dudes’ heads off and kill the hell out of cowboys. When you have a Mohawk on your head you feel like an animal. And if you wear sunglasses, especially at night, it just intensifies the feeling. If Luke Skywalker would have had a Mohawk and sunglasses they wouldn’t have needed three movies to defeat the Empire. That shit would’ve been done in about 20 minutes.

Advice: Tell the barber you’re tired of looking like an asshole. Cut that rat’s nest off your skull. People always ask me why I write about my hair all the time. Get a Mohawk and you’ll understand. Or maybe you’ll still be a piece of shit. But a least you’ll be a piece of shit with a Mohawk.

BREAKING NEWS ALERT

So yeah I got a mohawk. Plus I got Paul Frank sunglasses; I'm going for the gay soccer hooligan look, which is working out pretty well for me, I guess.

In other news, the new Team Sleep album is really actually pretty good which is kind of surprising.

Life's Strangely Cinematic Moments

So even though life for the most part is nowhere near as cool and dramatic as it seems like it ought to be, sometimes it actually turns out to be pretty crunk. Like yesterday, my grandpa, who's had cancer for awhile, finally got finished off to the point where he had to go into the hopsital for probably the last time. And though this was not really that great of a time, hospitals being the drab, stale places they are, there was a redeeming moment of cinematic drama While the doctor, who with his southern drawl and animated features seemed rather like an actor himself, was telling my family about how my grandpa shouldn't be allowed to get up (as a fall would not only break most of his cancer-riddled bones but also result in what he colorfully called a "pathological break," which I guess is pretty much like a broken brain) and how we should be sure to bring in the signed "Do Not Resuscitate" order, the hospital stereo system started playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, probably the most morose, somber piano piece ever written. Why, in god's name, whoever the guy is who makes the mix tapes for hospitals or makes the playlists for Hospital FM or whatever would choose broadcast such a dirgish requiem is beyond me, but I was supremely glad for it! As the piece reached its crescendo the guy in the bed next to us, sensing the impending climax, decided that the time was now to go ahead and die. And die he did, easily and calmly, with no added fanfare, nor recognition, save for myself and my aunt. Sometime later, a nurse came in and found him in that state, after we had tipped them off that maybe he wasn't doing as well as could be expected. After verifying that he was in fact quite dead, the nurse attempted to comfort us by saying "Oh, well he's been here a long time," before halfheartedly closing a curtain just far enough to allow us a still unimpeded view at the corpse we had by now grown somewhat accustomed to. My grandma later expressed some surprise at the hasty departure of our friend, saying that earlier he had devoured a not insubstantial meal of various baby foods. "But, he ate such a big dinner!" she kept saying with incredulousness, as if the eating of a big dinner was guaranteed insurance against death. I guess not.

Bringing Back the Backwards Hat

So remember, the other week, when I said I wasn’t going to write about myself anymore? Well, I guess I lied. But you see I have something I have to clear up, a lingering misconception that has somehow built itself into something of a myth. Because at some point, one realizes that the madness has to end. At some point, when foreheads start turning into eightheads, when the shorts that you’ve had for years start not fit around your fat ass anymore, when you get too lazy to comb your hair in the morning, or even better, too broke to afford the gel that molds your coif in its pointed glory, the charade has to end. You see, though some might not realize it yet, I’m not really that cool. I mean, I guess at one point I might have been. Maybe back in Willows, or maybe in my salad days in Chico. But even then, it was mainly just smoke and mirrors. It was also a constant vigilance, knowing when to play what fashion, social, or musical card. It was timing. It was luck. It was sometimes lying, sometimes biting someone else’s style, sometimes going to shows just to be there. But eventually, the effort becomes too tiring. That’s why I’ve officially quit being cool. To signify my newfound humbleness, I’ve decided to don a baseball cap, backwards. Like the Mennonite women you see around town who live out by the river and have to wear those little black hats as soon as they, you know, reach womanhood, or those Hasidic Jewish dudes who rock the yarmulke, this baseball cap will symbolize my devotion to this most ascetic of lifestyles. I chose the backwards hat because, not only is it not very comfortable — you can’t even lean back in your car seat or office chair—thus offering a bit of the old corporal mortification (this one’s for your John Paul), but also, thanks to the rampant bromophobia of the scene these days, its about the most uncool thing, short of baggy pants, that you could possibly wear. But don’t worry I have those too. I mean that’s part of it too. Even when I buy tight ass $200 girls pants, since I have no ass that shit hangs off and looks like I’m sagging anyway. Plus, the thing about buying expensive ass clothes is that they’re way easier to fucking ruin. I mean, you would think that you pay a couple hundred bucks for a pair of fucking pants and they would be indestructible, like you could get dragged around behind a pick up truck and not even have to iron those bad boys. But the truth is, the hardiness of clothes is inversely proportional to how much they cost. Which means that expensive shit usually falls apart the first time a dumbfuck throws it in the laundry. So from now on I’m just going to put on my stupid ass Expos hat backwards, put on a big ass shirt to hide my fat belly, go out and buy some Anchor Blue jeans and call it a day. There’s plenty of dudes out there with plenty of cool to compensate. Sorry if that’s a bummer or whatever, but sometimes you just got to be honest.

Proof: Some people, of course, will feel that the above paragraph was written entirely in jest. Some may even take personal offense to the fact that someone so “obviously cool” such as myself, would patronize them, mock their uncoolness, by claiming to be otherwise. But I insist that it’s true, I Daniel Taylor, am not cool at all. I listen to the Counting Crows and the GooGoo Dolls. I have toe nail fungus and three warts on my knee. I went to see The Used and I liked it. I have books on my shelf that I’ve never even read, but have there because they make me look smart. I take pictures of myself on my phone to make sure what I’m wearing looks ok. I got my ears pierced at Claire’s. I bought my white belt at Hot Topic. I Google myself pretty much every day. I have rehearsed greetings for people that are meant to sound spontaneous. SEE! Not cool at all.

Salvation: However, all is not lost. By coming clean with all this, by liberating myself from the bondage of trying to maintain some falsified hip persona, I can find true salvation. I can sit at home and eat the hell out of cookies and drink all kinds of Bud Light and wear my fucking hat backwards all I want. Being cool ain’t really even all that cool. Not like I would know, but at least that’s what I’ve heard.

What I do At Work

So the other day Brian Brophy, head wrangler of this fine cat farm, pointed out to me that a big ass picture of my ugly face, which was previously posted on this very blog, had mysteriously appeared in the middle of a conversation on some underground hip hop board. I wondered aloud, how anyone - aside from the 3 of my friends and 2 people who hate my guts that actually read this blog, none of whom are people who would be posting on some East Coast rap board - would have found that picture and put it up like that. So I read deeper into the posts surrounding the picture, looking for a context. The convo was about someone, having a "fucked up grill" which in the current lexicon means something along the lines of "ugly ass face." Looking back on the title of the original blog post that hosted this picture, I noticed the title of the post was indeed, "My Grill is Fucked Up." So being a master of The Internet, I put shit together, Googled the phrase "fucked up grill" and lo and behold, there be me. Solved

In other news, looking at the current Google charts, I have risen meteorically in the world of Daniel Taylors, rising from page 57 some months back, to page 1 recently. However, in this week's numbers, I have fallen back a notch to page 2. Hopefully a strong showing on the next couple posts will get me back in the number on position. Damn my parents and their strange affinity for Biblical names despite the fact that they are fervent atheists. Why can't I have a name like Wilbur Humpernickel? Then Google would be my bitch, and fame and pussy and all sorts of endorsement deals would be mine.