Concert Review: Minus the Bear

Minus the Bear was initially a band I knew little about other than their presence on the indie scene as some vaguely interesting amorphous mass of music.  I downloaded a discography of theirs and synced it to my Zune and promptly forgot about it for about a year.  At some point, I started randomly playing some of their music and while I liked it, I was nowhere near their greatest fan.  They made for very good desert cruising music and that was the extent of my knowledge of the band.  Until one fateful day, after meeting up with Chris and his crew for the first time I crashed at their place after going out and drinking somewhat heavily.  Jimmy had left his music playing during the night, and everything that came on was just wonderful.  A heavy variety of Minus the Bear songs was included in the playlist, and from that night on I made a point to actually sincerely listen to the band.  I became downright addicted to the Highly Refined Pirates album, spinning it endlessly through my Winamp queue to the point where it would have been ruined had it been a cassette.  Thankfully 1s and 0s of digital media don't degrade so my listening experience stayed just as pristine.  Eventually as these things do, my frequency of listening dropped off in favor of other bands to inject a bit of variety, however I had not lost my love of their upbeat and spacey sound or somewhat in-your-face lyrics about drinking and fucking in France or anywhere else one could think of for that matter.  When Jimmy mentioned they were coming to the Marquee here in Tempe, I graciously took in the information and mulled it over for a bit.  I really liked the music, but would the show meet expectations?  I took a gamble and bought a ticket, then pushed the gig out of my mind for the next month and a half.  I spent October doing myriad activities, including taking a trip back to Pennsylvania to watch my friend get married, see Man Man, smoke a hookah for the first time and just participating in general merrymaking.  I also spent a large amount of evenings in October attending shows, the most shows I've ever attended in one month.  Minus the Bear ended up being the last on the docket, but far far from the least (that honor goes to Opeth, as I was expecting to see a metal show and got a prog-rock show).

The show was attended in costume.  I threw on some green facepaint, a bloody painted shirt, and flannel and shuffled my way into the venue after our drive.  Moving Mountains opened the show, and their drummer caused a mighty ruckus.  He looked like Hurley from Lost and was pounding on the skins with a theatrical flare and vigor that easily made him my favorite to watch.  After a brief intermission consisting of pissing and smoking, Minus the Bear took the stage.  Now, although I really like their music, I don't know all the lyrics of all the songs on all the albums as I do with a lot of other bands I love (for example Clutch).  The five man troupe took over the audience's will with the deftness expected of experienced performers.  The crowd immediately came to live and started singing along word for word with front-man Jake Snider.  The band packed in a huge amount of material, many songs I had only heard once or twice, a few I had never heard.  These formed the bread around the meaty core of the music that night, the entirety of the Highly Refined Pirates album.  It was wonderful.  The band sounded excellent and the crowd went wild for each song being played.  I had heard from Jimmy that if the band gets too drunk, they'll fuck up all the time during the show.  Not that night.  I felt they may have been riding the energy of the crowd, for although they were drinking beer the entire show, nobody faltered, as if the crowd's momentum pushed them along through the night.

That night will be memorable for a few reasons, and Minus the Bear is going to be a large part of that memory.  I will not hesitate to buy a ticket next time they are going to be in the Phoenix area.  Now to start tearing through the rest of that neglected discography.

Internetting for a relationship

How does one toe the line between making mundane exploits exciting and not making up outright lies? This is my prevailing dilemma when creating a profile for online dating sites (namely OkCupid). What are the necessary components for creating a profile which stands out enough that a girl may be interested in replying when faced with a huge influx of "haey babby" and "wanna putt dat dik inya" type propositioning? How do women on dating sites deal with the huge amount of shit messages without cracking?  A portion of my trouble seems to be that I am so defeatist that I immediately assume nothing will come of sending a message so I just put something asinine in the box and send it.  More often than not a visit to this site leaves me feeling very misanthropic and argumentative.

I thought this would be a bigger post but then I realized I am fucking tired and don't feel like thinking.

Shit my parents' DNA expresses

I've inherited my mothers iron resolve
and my father's crippling bouts of depression
I've inherited my mother's frugality
and my father's free-spending ways (enough that I will be taking a second trip to Vegas this year)
I've inherited my mother's rational thinking
and my father's propensity to drinking

I've inherited my father's occasional narcissistic streak
and my mother's crippling bouts of social anxiety
I've inherited my father's affinity toward creative pursuits
and my mother's inability to express any of them publicly
I've inherited my father's sense of entitlement
and my mother's lack of aggression towards those that deny it

I love my parents
and realize this is nothing they could control
but dammit, why can't I arrange the pieces
in a way less detrimental

I've Seen Jupiter as a Human Place to Live

One day, everything will end. The earth will be naught but dust swirling about the reddened, dying husk of the sun. Mercury and Venus will have long been gone, and Mars not long after earth. Even the asteroid belt will have met the same fate, becoming orbiting particulate, dissolved by the death throes of that which once produced life. At some point afterwards the matter on Jupiter, or perhaps just one of its myriad satellites may coalesce into something resembling our pale blue dot. To be able to observe this change wrought by death on a cosmic scale would be indescribable. Perhaps future generations will be so lucky as to come back, as tourists, to the place where earth-that-was resided and met its demise. Perhaps they will even be in awe of the fact that humanity was ever bound to just one star.

My top a few most favorite song lyric writers/singers

Isaac Brock
This man expertly captures the ecstasy, agony, and angst of being. He doesn't use a lot of complex or obscure words in his songs, but he is a master of lyrical construction, flipping simple phrases back on themselves to succinctly explain an idea. The spaciness of Modest Mouse's musical composition greatly enhances the gravity of musings, and his loud, angry, soft, reflective, fucking pissed delivery makes sure you'll remember what he has to say.

"The universe is shaped exactly like the earth, if you go straight long enough you'll end up where you were."

Tom Waits
Master past, present, and future. The slurred, carnival barker voice coupled with lyrics consisting of reminiscing about a man with two faces or a piano player with no body is eerie enough in its own right. Add in the ability to croon like Frank Sinatra with a gizzard full of gravel and his breadth of emotion is boundless.

"And I must be insane/to go skating on our name/and by tracing it twice/I fell through the ice/of Alice"

Craig Finn
Injects a huge amount of humanity into the situation surrounding junkies, drunks, pimps, and other "low lifes". His drunken delivery is suitably intoxicating, and the stories, which normally involve everyday people with bad judgement, are excellent at expressing the fragility of any given situation and the potential fall lurking behind any decision.

Conor Oberst
He can handle any subject thrown at him dealing with nearly any existential issue with sublime grace. He will sometimes make reference to obscure events to enrich his material, and allow the listener the opportunity to do some research to enhance their understanding of the music.

Neil Fucking Fallon
Pure fun, with a razor sharp wit. References tons of historical events, literature, and mythology. Delivers it all with a terrible roar and energy.

A Partial Dream Journal

Felt I should record a recent dream for posterity. It creeped me out to the core, due to the physics present in the head simulation. Note that this covers only a small portion of the dream, not the entire thing. It's worth skipping the introduction and irrelevant details to preserve the brevity and impact of the place. It started with me and a few vaguely familiar people traipsing through an urban wasteland in search of a pot-farm. We poked through an impossibly long row of abandoned bars, stores, and shacks in our pursuit of weed. Seeing as I don't even really like getting high in real life, I'm going to assume our quest was to steal and resell the merchandise for a quick profit. Eventually, and finally, after poking through countless bric-a-brac laced storefronts we had found the one. In the back of the place was a sort of trap door that lead to the base of operations located below ground. The room featured climate control and irrigation for the plants, and was very well maintained. There was also what looked like a bathroom door in this area. After such a long and tiring trek my bladder was filled to bursting, so I decided I would check out this room.

It would me no exaggeration to say the place was ripped straight from a Resident Evil game, albeit one which allowed for rooms with variable dimensions and ludicrous liquid physics. It resembled a dilapidated school gym shower room with a wall of toilet stalls at the main entrance. It was stained, dimly lit, and smelled of sweat and brimstone. From that description, it seems none too menacing, but the eeriest quality was the apparent sound dampening. There was no characteristic echo heard when performing any action in the room, and the air pressure seemed oddly increased, to the point where I noticed it pushing on my ear drums. I used a stall, all the while aware of these slight variations of normalcy, and by the time I was finished I was doing everything in my power to leave quickly. After exiting the stall, I was oddly compelled to use the sink instead of saying fuck it and bursting out of that creepy hellhole. I shouldn't have, but once I turned it on there was nothing to be done but let the pieces fall where they lay.

The sink was a just another piece in the jigsaw puzzle of weirdness this room had become. As the water ran and as I washed my hands and face, I was hypnotized into letting the thing run. I lost whatever little motor skill I had left and from that point forward could do nothing but stare slack-jawed as the sink filled up. The sink filled up and filled up some more, and when it over-filled, a gut-wrenching distortion of reality occurred. The water started pooling on the floor of the bathroom, but only on one specific area, near the front where I was standing. There was nothing obstructing the water from flowing to any other part of the room, but it was hemmed in by an invisible force and diverted towards the center. As the water ran, the room filled up more quickly. I began to come around when I realized the water had reached a point where it had soaked my shoes. I saw the level approaching the point where it would flow into an electrical outlet and began to panic as this particular outlet did not contain a GFCI circuit. I tried running towards the section of the room containing no water, but a sickening event took place. As I tried breaking through, I was blocked by an invisible, elastic force, presumably the same force that kept the water contained. The force manifest itself physically when I made a futile and panicked run for the unsubmerged portion of the room. It deformed and the water rushed in to fill the "gap" made by my charge, which surprised and sickened me, and caused me to bounce back and land, back first, complete with a loud and terrible splash into the drink. I sprang up in terror, immediately fixating on the electrical outlet situation and waited with mounting dread and despair for the water to hit the outlet, not knowing what to expect from the demon room. When the water reached that point, the pale fluorescent glow began to flicker wildly. I began to feel strange jolts going through my body, and although it didn't hurt I began feeling dizzy and lightheaded. I could do nothing at this point but slog my way to the sink and attempt to get to a higher spot to get out of the water, all the while feeling tiny spasms shoot up my legs. Before I even attempted to clamber my way onto the sink, however, the tiles in the floor parted to reveal a system of storm drains. At this point the water was nearly level with the sink and though I was a bit relieved about the situation, for some reason dream logic compelled me to be worried as the receding water would leave me vulnerable to a very nasty electric shock. I set myself in a superhero pose, preparing to bear the brunt of the shock. As my dream addled mind predicted, the zaps got more and more intense as the level receded lower and lower, but once the water was below the outlet's level I felt nothing else. For reasons that escape my conscious, rational mind I never thought to try the door to the place until after that point.

I awoke from the dream at precisely that point, and never got to find out what happened with our little operation, or what the point of us going to this room ever was. All I know is it stuck in my mind well enough and was eerie and creepy enough to deserve mention in some expressible format. So, to you internet, my love, I present my crazy haunted bathroom dream.

THE WORLD IS A GIANT FART BUBBLE

Goddamn I can be an Emo Bitch

Time to put a spring back in my step, interfags! I'm talkin' bout that lovely season of regrowth, greenery, and copious fucking by both plants and animals! Allergies, bees, and picnics! SPRING! Spring is the time when everything in Arizona grows for a week, then wilts under the heat of an uninhibited and vengeful sun for 5 months! Spring in Arizona accounts for hundreds of weeds worming up through the gravel in my yard and costing me time and money in maintaining their absence! Also, return of motherfucking crickets in my house! They will stop at nothing to shove their squishy, noisy, jumpy little insect bodies into any highly conspicuous spot, especially in the drain of my shower! Ah, spring, you artist with a well of fathomless talent, decorating one side of my house in pigeon shit, egg shells, and blood-caked dead baby birds turned cat toys. The most wonderful time of the year, truly.

...and a Crappy New Year

I feel pretty awful right now and I'd assume much of it is from the stress this disorganized mess of a project is putting on my shoulders. I feel like I can't be happy right now, not with the weight of this stupid thing riding my back. It's making me lethargic and sickly and I just can't wait until I get to Florida and get this presentation over with. Whatever the outcome, I just have to remind myself that it's only a job, it's not like I'm charging with the front line. The worst that could happen is I get fired, which is in and of itself doubtful, and even if it did, could be the best occurrence in my life right now. I'll do my best, and prepare for the worst.