What I Learned In 2010

hey….HEY! Hey, I’m sorry. We stopped working on...

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:03:00 -0400

hey….HEY! Hey, I’m sorry. We stopped working on this. But thank you for thinking about us, or this, or just for thinking in general. I don’t know who you are, but my guess is you’re a beautiful, intelligent person who’s struggle is important. And we’ll always be there for you.

That having been said, Andy and I are moving on to new projects. They’re secret, so good luck figuring that shit out, but we shall return in different and fascinating ways.

If we learned anything in 2010, to end this on, it’s that you’re great. And that we love you.

Goodbye, and good luck.

-diggy (and probably Andy; don’t want to put words in his mouth)

Some Like It Hod

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 21:31:00 -0400

oh man, so I was away for a while going on a mystical journey through Kabbalah’s ‘tree of life’ ala Alan Moore’s fantastic comic series “Promethea”, and you guys, it’s totally crazy. It’s way crazier than just Madonna and celebrities and Judaism, it’s like proper D&D, Gary Gygax/ Ursula LeGuin-type crazy.

Let me start by stating that I’m not really studying the Kabbalah, as that seems to be a little more complex; I just quickly went through the Cliff’s notes version of some of the larger motifs (easy joke to make is that quickly going through the Cliff’s notes version is my larger motif). So you have this pattern called the ‘tree of life’, and it looks like this:

Bam! And all those little points on it are called sephira, which is just the hebrew word for number. So you’ve got these 10 spots, in order, and each represents something capital B Big. How big? Well all of Earth and the physical objects we interact with everyday, that’s number 10. At the bottom. *fart sound*

It’s kinda complicated after that, with each path between sephira having a corresponding tarot card, and what the colors mean and the separation of the upper sphere and shit, so fuck all that. I skipped all that because any person’s own journey to spiritual enlightenment is boring to everyone else. Seriously, it’s like listening to people describe dreams.

ANYWAY, the one I became most fascinated with is number 8, Hod. Hod (literally from hebrew ‘majesty’) is the domain of all types of communication. It’s where we have notions like language and understanding and math and symbols. All of that is in number 8.

See I figure it’s the ability to process information and effectively communicate it to others that grants us intelligence. And it’s the ability to give rich, complex and varied descriptions of new things which proves our sentience. Without math to calculate or words to begin to construct philosophy around, we would have lost all the ingenious shit that mankind has contributed, like engineering and poetry and karaoke. So yeah, fuck the Golden truth of the Human Soul (6) or the Foundation of the Human Ego (9, although that’s where everyone’s bangin’), Hod’s where it’s at when it comes to being a thoughtful motherfucker.

And you’re all “uh, whoa Diggy, it’s a little weird that you’re studying the Kabbalah in the first place. Is everything alright?”

And I’m all “oh, don’t worry about it. I mostly got into it as an offshoot of all the Hermetic stuff I’ve been reading”

And you’re all “Hermetic…stuff? Whu-“

And quickly, I’m like “yeah! You knew, like Hermes Trismegistus! Like Thoth, and Mercurial Magick and quicksilver and all that. Just the principle properties of Alchemy at this point, but I’ve got a couple Crowley books and I’ve been reading a lot of Austin Spare, so we’ll see what I can get up to by the end of Summer. My hope is that by the next solstice, I’m ready to take some serious communion with the Magic Square of Eights… maybe channel Ben Franklin or some shit”.

And that is when, even through the cold distance of web-based social interaction, you slowly back away, your face betraying a mixture of concern and disgust.

And it looks like this:

):0

Thanks, Hod!

-diggy

Keanu Agonistes

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 20:12:00 -0400

Hey, so you know the whole Sad Keanu meme going around? Well I was fucking off ~~at work~~ today and I learned, that hooooooooly mothballs, Keanu Reeves has had a kinda sad and tough life:

His father, Samuel Nowlin Reeves Jr., abandoned him and his mother when he was 3, and has never reconnected with him since. His mother, Patricia Bond, became a costume designer and showgirl who constantly remarried and divorced a string of 3 stepfathers for Keanu, and they were always moving. Because of that, he went to different high schools. He had a key interest in hockey (was MVP of his hockey team, named “The Wall”), but his dream of playing in the Olympics ended after an injury. Afterwards, he dropped out of high school to become an actor, thus starting his career. He never obtained a high school diploma.

Keanu has never married and avoids most relationships. In 1999, Reeves’ girlfriend Jennifer Syme gave birth to a daughter, Ava Archer Syme-Reeves, but she was stillborn. Two years later, Syme herself got into a fatal automobile accident. His close best friend, River Phoenix, died due to drug overdose one Halloween morning.

In his career, Keanu turns down big roles if he believes the character he would portray is too violent. He took a 90 percent pay cut on The Replacements just so that Gene Hackman could be cast. Previously, he had deferred 2 million of his salary so that Al Pacino could be cast on The Devil’s Advocate. Even then, he gives most of his earnings to charity and the backstage crew/people who help on the set.

Currently, Keanu’s best friend is his sister, Kim Reeves, who has been diagnosed with leukemia. His remaining money probably pays for her medical bills, and he plays the guitar for a small band to further get finance.

Yeesh. Alright, fuck… I’m gonna go rent the Replacements to make me feel a little better.

-diggy

What Diggy Learned in May

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 02:10:00 -0400

or Live Together/Die Alone

May, May, transglorious May was coloured, nay dominated by two major overarching thematic story-lines…

(…SQUAW! Your crippling loneliness and inability to come to equiostasis with the cosmos?! SQUAW!)

Shut up, subconscious! No instead I’m speaking of the ending of the television show Lost, and the ascension of my favorite basketball team, the Boston Celtics, to the NBA Finals. The baffling similarities, the logic-smashing comparisons and at least a couple links and youtube videoes lie within, brave reader. But beware: beyond this point be spoilers, tygers and jinx-inducing hubris! And the enemy is everywhere!!!

——————-

Season 5 of Lost had ended it’s sci-fi masturbatory season by leaving the various characters shattered, disoriented and filled with self-loathing. Main-man Jack’s attempt to reboot their Universe (!), and prevent them from ever having existed there (!!) by exploding an Atomic bomb at the core of a magnetic anomaly (!!!) had seemingly failed. His gambit fizzled, costing the lives of people he cared about. And the weight of his failure was torturous and haunting. He longed to just agree that he was wrong and be crucified for it. Jack always wanted to be the knight in shining armor that fixes all the world’s problems at the cost of great sacrifice. But when he seemingly didn’t fix the world’s problems, and when the great sacrifice wasn’t his, he was reduced to questioning confusion and self-hatred. All he could do was admit:

But at least Jack had gotten there. And at least the show had gotten there. It was time to pull together and get to the end, for better or worse. We’ll return to this in a minute…

———————-

The Celtics were on cruise/damage control for the entire back 2/3rds of the 2010 season. If I were to congeal a team of 15 athletic freaks into a shitty episode of a drama show on network television, they’d be the Bai Ling episode where you find out why someone got a tattoo, but it doesn’t matter to anything whatsoever and you’re furious you just lost an hour of your precious time to pointless trivium and bad acting.

They headed into the post-season rudderless, and seemingly empty and devoid of passion or purpose. Constantly and consistently, the members of the Celtics staff were telling us that this was all part of the plan; that when it became important for them to turn on the juice, they were going to surprise everyone.

And of course no one besides them believed it even for a fucking second. Because teams simply don’t just “turn it on” when they want to, it’s something that can’t be done in pro sports. It’s bad juujuu, or poor sportsmanship, or more realtistically just not feasible in the modern day and age.

But the Celtics were confident, and annoyed with the criticism. They’d tell anyone who’d listen:

————-

If I could retreat back to Lost for a bit, it’s part of common folklore at this point that the creators became aware that if they didn’t force the network into giving them a finite endpoint, the show was going to unravel. Without an end-Date, there was no end-Game. Nothing to be playing for, or looking forward to. Sometimes the treasure is in the journey, but sometimes it’s at finishing the fucking race!

So they reached a settlement with ABC, and even at the cost of jettisoning a ton of time to explain the mysteries they had set up, and knowing that they weren’t going to please a sizable portion of loyalists by doing that, the Lost creative team began the process of ending. They geared up for their run to the Finale.

————-

When the Celtics won the NBA Championship two years ago, it was by following the motto ‘Ubuntu’, which literally translates from an old Bantu langue to mean ‘I am, because you (pl.) are”. It was the notion that there was a collective that needed to be bought into, and that the individuals couldn’t get to the next place without buying into that collective. Players on the roster had to understand the limitations and their roles; they had to accept responsibility for their jobs, and not try to be heroes. They won together as a team, and it was a sight to behold. We don’t get that typically in the “me first” era of sports on a professional level, but this was a team of humbled men, accepting their roles while accepting their fate.

—————

As Lost hurtled towards it’s end-date, it eventually accepted the notion that as sci-fi oriented as it appeared to be on the surface, it was ultimately a show whose roots were deeply entangled in the relgious notions of spirtuality and communion. In the end, every major character on Lost was there to further the point that people are deeply flawed, and alone; that it’s only by coming together and seeking forgiveness of our sins, acceptance of our short-comings and growth from a shared faith in each other that we can further our standing in life.

Sorry, that’s what Lost is about! It’s about Church. It’s about finding people to worship with and loving them. Not an island, or monsters and gods, not Jack and Kate or why Walt had super-powers. It was a show about finding faith in being part of a community. A better and more passionate critique of man’s great struggle might sound like:

———-

And that, in my needlessly roundabout way, is what I learned about in May. Everyone wants to win, but it’s about giving into the notion that maybe (definitely) the Universe is a bit smarter than you, that your friends can help you, and that you’re only going to be as strong as the people you surround yourself with. I learned about faith and commitment and Ubuntu.

Beyond that I learned that as much as I think I can do this whole thing, I’m a lonely creature, struggling with redemption and direction. Just as importantly, I learned that Elvis said “as long as a man has the strength to dream, he can redeem his soul and fly.”

—————-

So while I can think and while I can talk, while I can root and cheer and hope and enjoy when people get to where they’re trying to get to, whether they be a dozen fictional characters, or a pro basketball team, or an arrogant asshole who tried to get the Beatles deported…

…it’s important to believe in each other, and ourselves.

Ubuntu.

-diggy

Be Ignored by the Stiff and the Bored

Mon, 31 May 2010 00:53:18 -0400

I feel like the guy that’s stumbled into his favorite bar and realized there’s no one else there. Free to drink as much as a I want and slur and scream as loud as I want with only my own intonations of “going too far” to keep me at bay.

Fuck it. Hi, I’m Diggy, and this is my blog. Shit’s probably about to get hectic, I kinda feel like I don’t need permission for it anymore. Der rappa rappa, we’re gonna be scraping blood off the walls when all is said and done.

-diggy

How I Cure Hangovers

Sat, 29 May 2010 11:49:06 -0400

Today I learned that a group of chickadees are collectively known as a banditry.

-diggy

Roland's Twirly Gesture

Mon, 24 May 2010 01:44:00 -0400

I know I’ve written it before, but hell son:

Your heart might break but the show goes on because if it stops, you starve.

…and that’s all I have to say about what happened tonight

———————

Moving on, I’m taking some temporal liberties in saying that ‘Today’ I learned about it, but the new Janelle Monae album is distressingly good. I had one of those weird Saturdays where there’s, ya know, no drama (always a watershed moment for me); I just ended up at some really good parties I never expected to be at. Drinks and dancing and great bands and new friends and stronger connections! Awesome time.

Anyway, the big single from this album had been stuck in my head all weekend, and it took getting a flat on my bike and having to hoof the last two and a half miles back home to actually listen to the record in it’s entirety.

Maybe it’s because I had enough alcohol flooding my bloodstream to be qualified as no longer human, or maybe it’s because I hadn’t needed to just ‘walk and listen’ to an album since the last Future of the Left offering, but I was convinced by the time I got home that music like this should be taught in schools. Or played in utero. Anything but the relative obscurity it’s destined for.

Seriously though, check out this chick just crush a stage:

There’s performances and there is being a showman(/showwoman?). Shaquille O’Neal once famously said “Put this in print: my name is Shaquille O’Neal, and Paul Pierce is the motherfucking truth.”

Well, if I could borrow the phrase, my name is Shaquille O’Neal and Janelle Monae is the motherfucking truth… but with a cute face, killer eyes, and what appears to be a kinda slamming body. Oh, and all the natural grace of Gregory Hines with a dash of James Brown and the self-aware cool of Dwayne Wade. And the first 3 Suites of a 4 arc concept album under her belt. And shit loads of money. And executive producers with names like Nate “Rocket” Wonder and Control Z. And also she’s younger than me.

Fuck, just writing about this is getting me depressed and inspired at the same time. Download it illegally here!

-diggy

Losing LOST

Wed, 19 May 2010 02:51:21 -0400

SPOILER ALERT: This is gonna be one of those articles that is much much more about me sifting through various interesting thoughts going on in my head right now than it is about learning. If you want a post about actual *learning* learning, click on the random button at the top of the page about 5 or 6 times until you come to an article that satisfies you.

SECOND SPOILER ALERT: This posting is also going to discuss in vague detail the comings and goings of the television show Lost. If you’ve never seen the show and don’t want to be spoiled as to what it’s about, Fuck You. I can’t believe you didn’t watch Lost. You’re a fucking idiot. I told you it was good…! What the fuck else did you want? When have I ever steered you wrong as to shit that is “worth your fucking time”? Never. Never. Fuck you, dummy, you should’ve been watching Lost. Get the fuck off my blog and never come back.

——————————-

So. On Sunday, the final episode of Lost will air. It will end what has been for me been a 5 year journey, and it will end with a definitiveness that will be both gratifying and disappointing. Gratifying because it is leaving on it’s own terms, saying it’s peace and then riding off into the sunset with the writers swearing off the possibility of sequels or movies. It will be it’s own set story, and one’s interpretations of it will have to come from rote canon, and nothing else.

It will be disappointing because I’ve become accustomed to the things I really, truly, deeply loving not ending. Truth be told (and in conjunction with the sixth season being so driven by the notion of faith/spirituality or even religion), stories tend to continue on. Stories and myth manifest over and over, and never before has there been a show that took more pride in being the “show about stories”; the meta-fictional self-awareness; the “we know and have to take into consideration how everything may be perceived by everyone everywhere for all time” than Lost.

And trust me, it hasn’t always been easy. But I am nothing if not a Loyalist, and when people complained about the gaping plot holes, or Nikki and Paulo in season 3, or really just season 3 in general, I was there to remind everyone that this was a rollercoaster ride (a free one that you could get on network television, by the way), and you could either enjoy the ups and downs, or you could spend your time doing anything else. Not just a Loyalist, or an Apologist, I became entrenched in the worship of Lost. I think it’s (capital I) Important, and I refuse to back off that claim. Listen: it meant a lot to me.

But on Sunday it ends, and I have no idea how it’s going to end, or why. I suspect I will like the things I like, and force myself to like the things I don’t.

———-

I have this horrible habit of reading really great sentences and deciding that there’s truth in power. I love to quote “Nothing ever truly ends,” and hoping that that’s the case. But really, sometimes things end. I moped when Jack decided he was going to be Jacob’s successor (*dude, I told you there were going to be spoilers*), because, ya know…

Him and Kate, right? Right?!

But no. Not him and Kate. These two fictional characters attempted to have a fictional relationship, and it fictionally didn’t work out. And I can sit here and pretend I’m not writing about something else, about some other work of fiction not working out; that I’m not talking about finally closing the book and realizing that something else has come to an end, but you probably know me better than that. I’m pretty easy that way.

—————————-

Lost was about faith and religion and science and love and people. Just like people, it tried to do it’s best to connect all these things together, and sometimes the project was disjointled. Sometimes it was sublime. I had a relationship with this show, a communion. It challenged me, and frustrated me, and I was beholden to it when it was doing well, and it was put on hold for things that were more interesting to me when I thought it was underperforming.

But it’s ending on Sunday. The story is told, and the game is over. It will be up to me to determine in the long run whether I felt like I got out of it what I put in. I obviously will, but I’m still sad. In all my exhuberance and appreciation, I forgot that sometimes time runs out. That sometimes things move on, and that the world doesn’t revolve around my own personal schedule.

Lost is ending/over/done, and I can’t stop that. I can just be appreciative of the time I had with it.

…. You guys get by Lost, I’m talking about Kelly, right?

-diggy

Hooooooooooly fucking shit. Alright, you’re gonna want to...

Thu, 13 May 2010 18:40:41 -0400

Hooooooooooly fucking shit. Alright, you’re gonna want to sit down for this…
…Oh, right. Well, fuck you smartass, stand up then. Wait! No, go to your car. Seriously, go to your car and look at the fuel gauge. You see that little triangle next to the gas icon? Today I learned that that little icon is always pointing in the direction of your gas cap. So if you’re ever borrowing or renting a car, and you don’t know what side to fill up on, just look at the triangle on your dashboard.
Yeah, how’s your mind? Kinda blown, right? Yeah!
Cool.
Yeah.
Alright, well if you need me, I’m gonna be in my room crying, so…

-diggy

What Diggy Learned in April

Wed, 12 May 2010 13:59:00 -0400

or “PMA + KBO = Blood for Frogs!”

————————-

May! What a month!…

Sorry, April! What a month! (Obviously the first thing to do is to apologize for this post’s tardiness, but no one’s interested in my apologies [APPARENTLY!] , so we’ll just move on and watch as the end-of-month posts move further and further into the future.)

Listen: April was quite challenging. It was professionally, socially and personally tough for a multitude of silly reasons. I was feeling uninspired in my writing, and pretty let-down by a lot of personal things. And there was this quick-sand effect going on where the harder I was trying, the worse things were turning out. I was punching myself out and bloodying my knuckles doing it (I mean that only mostly in a proverbial sense).

So I spent a lot of time stuck in the mud, and feeling sorry for myself about it. I complained so much in fact that I got sick of telling the same stories over and over. Ya know, even my own little personal dramas became boring to me, and it got the point where it was okay to just let the days wash by. “KBO”, I would tell myself, “Keep Buggering On”, but it rang sorta hollow because it didn’t actually make me feel any better. Shit was a bummer.

One day I was talking to a friend who is having a significantly and profoundly more difficult year than I have ever had, and he was talking about challenges he’s facing right now, and I just asked him how he did it. How was he able to maintain his personal fortitude in the middle of such stress and anxiety and disappointment and lord know what else.

”PMA, man.”

”What’s ‘PMA’?”

”C’mon man, you’ve never listened to Bad Brains?”

No, as previously mentioned, Bad Brains is one of those bands I never got around to, so he played me a song and explained that he just tries to keep a Positive Mental Attitude. That’s it. The secret was to have a better attitude. That’s how fucking cynical I had become, I couldn’t recognize that attempting to have a better outlook on life could actually work.

So it stopped being just KBO, it was KBO while trying to smile. Take solace in the little things that you enjoy, appreciate the nice weather or a good record or fucking shoot a gun for the first time.

Do anything you want. You can do it. And when life gets shitty, you have to move forward. We are Human, a stubborn and willful animal that always moves forward whether for better or worse.

So yeah, in April I learned that:

plus equals

…which may not make a helluva lot of sense, but at least it makes me laugh. And it’s way easier trying to stay in a good mood than getting out of a bad one.

Coming in May: Drunk Girls!

-diggy

ADDENDUM: I’d like to take a second to dedicate this post to my dog who passed away peacefully in his sleep last week. He was 16 years old, blind, deaf and had scoliosis. But that motherfucker kept plugging away and bringing joy to my family even while the world faded away from him and life was less than ideal. You were a good dog, buddy.

Slot machines are always tuned to C-major

Mon, 10 May 2010 13:10:35 -0400

I’m going to Vegas this weekend.

I don’t know anything about gambling, except that I like to do it and shouldn’t. I play roulette, because it’s easy to understand. Roulette isn’t a game of odds. It’s a game of expectation management. I like to spread out my bets so I lose slowly — I can bet a bunch on every spin, and there’s almost always money coming back to me (if not quite as much as I put on the table).

Pretty sad, huh?

Last time I was in Vegas, Casey and Lance hung close to the slot machines, which makes sense if you don’t really want to gamble much, just find a place where they will bring you free booze.

I hate slot machines because they are bright and loud and overstimulating and, after a while, you become a reverse ATM, just mindlessly handing out twenties to whatever catches your eye.

But last night I learned that slot machines are always tuned to C-major, which Bob Dylan once referred to as “the key of strength, but also the key of regret.”

Makes sense, when you think about it. Imagine how awful it would be if they were all dischordant.

-andy

I Got Them Black Robe Blues

Mon, 10 May 2010 11:12:00 -0400

Today I learned about the policies and politics of (presumed) Supreme Court-nominee Elena Kagan. Usually at this point, I’d write about how unfortunate it is that I (we [you]) hear about a new previously-unknown Justice and think “well, lemme go look up a couple things on the internet to determine whether I ‘like’ this or not,” which is really just a pompous excuse to be intellectually lazy and have someone just tell one what they’re supposed to think. Yup, usually that’s what I’d be doing.

Instead, I started to write little songs because I think her name is fun to say and has good meter. Also, because I’ve had far too much coffee. This was the best one:

Your record’s not stellar but neither is mine

Double-up, sub semper branch porcupine

Oh Eleeeeeena

Elena and me…

You don’t hire women, you don’t hire blacks

But you’re probably gay, which is kinda great

We’re similar, so similar

Doooo waaaah

*hand claps*

Elena Kagan, Elena Kagan

Harvard Law, Carl Sagan

Or perhaps that’s not how it’s pronounced…

How am I to knooooooow?

I’ve only read about you

We’ve never met, we’ve never met

-diggy

Using Every Part of the Buffalo, pt. 2

Mon, 10 May 2010 01:50:57 -0400

Today I learned that the following is a grammatically valid sentence:

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

Yup. Go ahead, try to wrap your head around it, or just look it up. English is weird.

-diggy

Fear

Thu, 06 May 2010 14:25:54 -0400

Today I learned about the phobias of several world leaders.

I think we give people too much crap for their fears. Kim Jong Il is afraid of flying, which…sure, it’s annoying that the lady next to me keeps clutching the armrest and gasping every time the plane dips, but this guy’s fear was “triggered by a 1976 helicopter crash in which he was seriously injured.” I think he gets a pass.

Also funny is that George W. Bush is afraid of horses.

But, really, the lesson here is that we should all be terrified of Vladimir Putin:

As a child, Chancellor Merkel was bitten by a dog, instilling her deep fear of canines. Merkel’s fear is well known, and perhaps worryingly for Germans has reportedly been used against her by foreign leaders. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a master of psychological diplomacy, has repeatedly attempted to take advantage of Merkel’s fear. In 2006, the then-president perplexed German diplomats by presenting the chancellor with a small dog as a gift and made a habit of having his black Labrador, Koni, sit in on their meetings.

-andy

Last night, after watching L O S T, my brain was pretty fried,...

Wed, 05 May 2010 10:18:21 -0400

Last night, after watching L O S T, my brain was pretty fried, so this was about as much learning as I could handle, courtesy of Jorge Garcia’s blog:

You start with the cup cake.
First you peel away the paper. (Trust me it gets better.)
Then tear off the bottom portion of the cupcake.
Place the torn-off portion on top where the frosting is.
Give it a little squeeze.
And there you have it. Eat it like a cream-filled cake sandwich.

-andy

The Chinese Military-Issue Shovel

Mon, 03 May 2010 21:28:36 -0400

Today, I learned about the Chinese Military-Issue Shovel, which, well-

…yeah, it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. I am prone to hyperbole, so take that previous sentence with a whole heaping truckload of salt, but it’s still the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. Look at it! LOOK AT THE SHOVEL! OBSERVE WHAT IT CAN DO!

It’s not just that it’s Chinese, or military grade, because those are two things that I don’t like. I don’t like those things.

Rather it’s that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself being more and more attracted to things of Superb Practical Use. I like C-Stands, I like gaff tape, I like my moleskine notebook, I like my measuring tape. Here is a list of things that have, in my opinion, Superb Practical Use:

sriracha
Basketball games in HD
zipcodes
the internet
electricity
gravity
bread
PAM

I guess this makes sense, given my line of work, or maybe because of that pesky little Y chromosome. I mean my father had something like 13 licenses, and I always thought that was really cool. Also, this right here is my leatherman, which I got for Christmas in 2005. I fucking love my leatherman, and it’s with great sadness that I leave it behind whenever I get on an airplane.

It works with people too. I really like people who Know how to Do Stuff. If you can cook, or sauder, or knit, or fix a car engine, chances are I will like you more because of it. I can’t do anything, and I’m pretty smart, so I find you being able to do stuff really impressive. Do you know people who can do stuff? Send ‘em my way! I’ll try not to scare them. Although I’m not making any promises.

-diggy

A Response to Andy's Question from the Previous Blog Post

Mon, 03 May 2010 01:16:26 -0400

or More Things We Could’ve Done Privately, But Then They Wouldn’t Be Proper Cries for Attention, Would They?

—————

I have always written because of women. There’s no women in my life. I have no one to impress, no one to turn to for any kind of validation. The cat thinks everything I do is fantastic and boring.

Also, life’s kinda sad. Ya know, being lonely is tough. No one wants to hear about how being lonely is tough, everyone already knows that. I look at my life, where the highlights are getting to watch the new Doctor Who episode on Sundays, and the lowlights are cringing because of the alcohol-fueled escapism that every non-working moment (the few that remain) has become. Drink, fight, go to a new place, don’t sit still, don’t think, not even for a second, drink drink, consume, watch, worry, go back to work, read, walk walk walk think walk, bike, yell, drink drink drink, keep moving, don’t stop, no roots, if you stop you die.

No one wants to read that shit! People like adventure! Romance! Indomitable spirit! But we’re getting older and more tired and that pace is tough to keep up. It’s easy to write when you’re in love (with anything), it’s hard as hell when you’re in reality.

Also, we lack discipline. But more also, it’s the woman thing. For me.

…did that, like… was it a rhetorical question?

-diggy

What Andy Learned In April

Sun, 02 May 2010 15:45:37 -0400

Hey, Diggy: Do you think we didn’t learn much in April, or do you think we were just lazy about writing?

That’s not just the standard boring “post about not posting much” motif. I’m actually curious to know if this blyrg has run its course, or if it’s the idea of continual learning that’s gotten old.

Or maybe it’s the self-analysis that we’ve gotten sick of. After all, sitting here at my new (well, acquired-this-month) dining table, with Rocket sitting next to me looking out the window at dogs playing in the heat, I can’t think of any lesson I learned this month more valuable than:

Even if all you have is Diet Pepsi MAX and shitty Safeway ice cream, you can make an ice cream float, because that’s actually all an ice cream float is, genius.

But you didn’t come here for that kind of insight.

This has been a pretty quiet weekend. My usual crew has been dispersed around the country, and although I haven’t exactly been doing nothing, I’ve had a lot of time to sit and look out the window with the cat.

It’s strange to enjoy doing not much — as I’ve written before, I’m not good at downtime.

But the opening of tennis season led me to start going to bed at like 10 (so I could get up at 6 to play), which somehow screwed with my circadian rhythm, which somehow resulted in my body deciding it wants nine hours of sleep every night, no matter what.

Okay, all this to say: My daily routine involves a lot less stuff than it used to. I get up, I go to work, I come home, I eat, I go to bed. Maybe once in a while I’ll have dinner or drinks with friends, or maybe I’ll go to the gym or play tennis or something, but the days in April just kind of sped by.

I end the month in a weird kind of holding pattern — waiting for things to change in my professional life, trying to make sense of the things changing in my personal life, taking some time off from trying to advance my material life.

It doesn’t feel…good, exactly. But it doesn’t feel wrong, either.

In other words, holy shit, is this what growing up is like?

I went to see the National in Richmond earlier this month. And one of my friends (he plays music) had never heard them before. I sent him their new album, and he wrote back: “I should just fucking quit. This band is everything I ever wanted my band to be. I feel both depressed and validated.”

And that, as I told my mom, made me realize that writing is what I want to do, because while I certainly agree about this band, I get that same wonderful/awful validated/depressed feeling when I read a really good piece of writing, like the David Foster Wallace commencement speech or a good Matt Taibbi essay or a great novel.

She said that’s how she felt when she saw the Mark Morris Dance Company.

And the more I thought about that wonderful/awful feeling, the more I recognized it.

I think it’s related to why we cry at really good movies, even the not-sad parts, or why it’s weird to look at yourself in the mirror for the first time in a long time and notice who you are and how you’ve changed.

As I told my mom, I’m willing to bet that’s what it’s like to watch your kids grow up, too.

And I guess it’s what it’s like to grow up.

So, the moral this month:

Growing pains are worth it.

-andy

I don’t know what’s been wrong with me since I last...

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:23:52 -0400

I don’t know what’s been wrong with me since I last wrote here. You know how sometimes you get into a rut, but because it isn’t a particularly unpleasant rut, you don’t notice it’s a rut until you’re way in there?

No? Anyone?

The point is, I haven’t written because not much has penetrated the dull whirr of life. This did. It’s a Labour Party ad from Britain — they’re having their elections on May 6.

And, watching it, I learned that maybe I should go work in Britain.

It’s not so much that we don’t spend enough of our psychic energy on campaigns, but the Brits seem to feel about politics all the time the way I do at the moments when it seems like I was put on Earth to do it for a living. Watch the video and tell me it didn’t penetrate your whirr.

-andy

I Have No Excuse

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:05:00 -0400

I have a bad habit with music… okay two bad habits with music; the first that I’ll illegally download (three bad habits) tons of music that invariably gets lost in the shuffle and I never really get around to giving it enough time; the other is that when there’s some kind of seminal band that everyone else has heard of/adored and I never got around to listening to, I’m to embarrassed to give it a listen. Eventually, I have a flickering moment of humility, ask someone what all the hub-bub was about, and listen to it for little more than my own personal edification. Then feel like an idiot for not having listened to it years ago.

So today I learned that the Dismemberment Plan’s “Emergency & I” album is pretty great, and has the greatest second half to a record that I can remember. It’ll go up there with Converge and Jay-Z as something I should have started listening to years earlier, LCD Soundsystem and the new Titus Andronicus record as something I had to get harangued into doing on my own, and my perpetual loneliness and lack of a bike helmet as evidence that I have no capacity to learn from past mistakes. Download illegally from HERE.

-diggy