Pt. 2

October 25th – Fern Park, FL
Matt Mose hates vegetables and doesn’t like most meats (…). Kyle Knight will eat anything but bananas and watermelon. I don’t eat meat, but will eat a lot of different vegetables. Oliver usually prefers foods that aren’t meat and Chris doesn’t seem to mind any food that much. Claxton works at a Pizza place and likes things customized and complicated. Ordering pizza for the 6 of us is literally impossible.

October 26th – Sarasota, FL
For the record, and I am not going to say this again, but writing a record about Moby Dick is infinitely less silly that writing about Vikings. There is absolutely not way to argue about this, there is no debate, it is just a simple solid fact of life.

October 27th – Sarasota, FL
If I was interested in DJs and Dance bands and going to a venue to watch dancy pop bands and DJs perform, I suppose I would be a little bummed out by Mose Giganticus too.

October 28th – Sarsota, FL
The reason Paranormal Activity is such a horrifying film is because it takes all of the elements of the Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield that totally sucked (Never seeing the ghost or carnage or seeing the monster too much respectively) and fixed them. There is absolutely nothing you can do to protect yourself when you are asleep, especially from a goddamn ghost. Emphatically the most terrifying movie I have seen in the past decade, and I wish Adrianna was here to watch it with me, even though I know there is no way I could ever force her to watch this movie. Still the idea of her vehemently resisting seeing this movie with me is something I miss the hell out of.

I miss my dogs, too.

FestQuest Pt 1 of.....

October 19th – Atlanta, GA
At what point does a band stop being from Philadelphia and start hailing from Atlanta?

October 20th – Greenville, SC
Club Escape either once was, or might currently still be a strip club. There are cages for GoGo dancers on either side of the stage and no less than three stripper poles. This is what my life has come to.

October 21st – Athens, GA
We nickel and dimmed our way into about 30 gallons of decent grease. Being able to travel for free certainly has its disadvantages that no one really considers…when you fill up your car from QuickTrip, their isn’t just a huge bucket of gasoline that you have to suck out, filter, and put in your tank all the while getting it all over yourself, your clothes and every last possession you own. On top of that, the band Music Hates You just made me feel like the biggest poser ever. Some gnarly dudes getting some brutal sounds out of some bullshit amps. Its like in all those kids sports movies where the shitty underdog team takes on the real polished team, and even though they might not always win, at least the underdog put on a hell of a fight. That’s kind of how I feel about their amps versus my amps, and I am incredibly sad that I have put this much thought into a metaphor involving goddamn amplifiers.

October 22: - Charleston, SC
4:00am: Arrive in Atlanta. Pack, process oil.
4:45am: Arrive at Ethel St. Kiss girlfriend, cuddle, set alarm to wake up at 8:50, plan to hit the road at 10:30
5:15am: Sleep
9:35am: Awake. Drink soda, drive to Smyrna, load bags in IZ, awaken travelers.
11:30am: Leave to pick up Claxon and Kyle
12:00ish: Pick up Kyle and Claxton, head towards Charleston
6:50pm: Arrive in Charleston. Find Upperdeck Tavern, which is down a narrow hallway and up a large, narrow flight of stairs.
7:15pm: Sigh profoundly. Start loading in gear, fully knowing that within an hour it all has to come back out
7:45pm: Mose Giganticus
8:15pm: the Emotron
9:15pm: Load gear back into bus.
9:20pm: Start looking for oil
11:45pm: Actually score some oil, after making several stops and destroying a roof rack in the process
1:15am: Shower
2:30am: Sleep on a couch about 6 inches too short

October 23rd – Jacksonville, FL
The King of the South, Big Dunn, is a majestic creature. His band sounds like what Latterman would have sounded like if they decided to not use those pesky guitars and basses and simply settled for keyboards. I actually don’t know why I would use the word pesky in that situation…two dudes playing posi-punk on keyboards is a much more daunting task than on guitars.

October 24th – Fern Park, FL
I speant this entire off day at my computer, telling myself I need to write more and wishing I could read Chuck Klostermans new book. All day I named the first book I want to write several times, never really settling on anything (Stay Negative: Essays, Stories and Memories from a Bitter Asshole is the best I can come up with). I have been awake for 15 hours and these are the only words I muster before going to sleep and inevitably have Matt Mose snuggle a little to closely to me before I wake back up

Happiness isn't writing on your phone, that's for sure.

Sometimes I wonder if their is no such thing as happiness. Maybe happiness is something that exists for most people in the world, but as I get closer and closer to being "old," I'm starting to think that the only feelings I am able to feel are simply raw passions. I understand hurt, because I know how it feels to be hurt...all I have to do is think about one simple thing and I instantly understand hurt. I know sadness too, because when I think about sad things, I instantly feel sad. When I think about things that would normally constitute as something that should make me feel happy...I feel nothing.

Happiness is a short term emotion, it's something you strive for and work to maintain. If someone were to give me $100 I would not feel happy about it; The instant emotion that comes from positive aspects of life isn't happiness - they are simply joy or excitement. Happiness is a condition more than emotion, it's more like a state of being. When I was a kid and my parents got me every last gift I wanted, I wasn't happy, I was joyfull and full of Christmas cheer, but these things didn't make me happy. The older I get the more I start to think that happiness isn't something you can feel at all, it's more just inflated contentness.

My problem is that if I can't define something, I can't believe in it. The reason I wonder if happiness is real is the same reason I don't believe in God, Satan, or the 2009 Atlanta Falcons, and that is all because I have no proof that any of these things are real (and in the case of the Atlanta Falcons, I have no proof their Defensive Line exists, and, after all, offense wins games, but defence wins titles). I understand love, and I know the feeling I get when I think about the girl laying next to me is love, and I enjoy LITERALLY every secon we spend together, I'm not sure if having this in my life is happiness. Listen, I am not saying that I'm not happy, I am saying that I don't think happiness, the emotional idea of being happy for a long amount of time even exists at all.

I think I provoke myself into feeling upset about things simply because it's a raw, visceral emotional experience. I like to stay upset about things because then I am actually feeling something, and can usually quantify that experience (usually by how hard I punch my steering wheel or how many Park songs I may be listening to). But happiness just feels like nothing. Happiness doesn't make me feel good, but it doesn't bring me down; it doesn't give me hope but it doesn't make me want to strangle myself with my belt either. Happiness is just there and it's existence in my life is often pretty questionable.

Just like the 2009 Atlanta Falcons

Things I Could Write About
- How Atlas, the new puppy, is much like having a young child
- The possibility of renting a loft with Adrianna
- Touring around the corner
- How American it feels to hate my job less than a month after getting it
- Some metaphorical bullshit about the Atlanta Braves
- Not booking for WonderRoot anymore and how the experience changed my view on punkrock/music.
- The Fest is around the corner, so there's that.

Things I Will Write Write About Tonight
- ............

2:41

I have been having some serious trouble sleeping recently. Whether it is due to the stress of a new puppy or the complete lack of any kind of real stress, my idea of how sleep should be involved in my life and sleeps idea of how it should be involved in my life are never matching up. For most of college I took over the counter sleep medication to fall asleep, and tonight i am probably going to have to do that again. I hate sleep. I hate the idea that my body feels like it needs to sleep. I hate that when I fall asleep, all I want to do is sleep. I hate that 1/3 of my time of this planet will be devoted to nothing but blackness, nothingness, and the occasional visual manifestation of my sub-conscious. But more than that, I hate that, since I do have to sleep, I can never fucking get there when my girlfriend is ready to go to bed. We have been together for the gestation period of a human fetus, and of all the nights we have spent together I would be shocked if she has stayed up later than me more than 3 times. 

My body shuts down, but all i can do is lay awake, tossing turning thinking tossing turning turning tossing turning thinking and tossing. Nothing good comes of a sleep depraved mind at 3 in the morning, where there is nothing to stimulate it but everything that you dont like in the world. I've spent so much time focusing on positivity, and wanting to surround myself with a positive atmosphere and people who are doing and creating positive things that i forgot that I am, apparently, so morose that people find it hard to believe that I am "very funny." If positivity is something I am so concerned with then why do I dwell on, well, everything negative and not focus on all this supposed positivity? You know why?

Because we all want to be something we're not, and at 2:35 in the morning, these are the only things my tired mind will concern itself with: all the things I am not and all the things I can't change. 

What I do when I can't sleep.

I dont think I have ever written anything in here that doesn't have to do with either sports or music/playing in bands/touring. I think that is why I havent posted anything in here recently, or at least not as often...I litterally have nothing left say about any of these subjects; I dont give a shit about Blink-182's reunion tour, I still think Mastodon is a good band, and I high fived myself when I heard that David Ortiz used steroids. There is nothing going on in my life that is of any substance or is anything that I think qualifies as "interesting," and certainly not worth reading. I'd rather spend my time watching the Office and not looking for a new job than post anything on here about sports, music, or anything in my life that will ultimatley bore me to tears. I tried writing a short story I had outlined a while ago and it turned out to be so depressing that I didnt feel like working on it...creating something depressing when you don't think you are all that depressed is a strange feeling. It'd sort of be like (in a totally exact opposite kind of way) if Conor Orbest tried to write a posi-punk record...it's just confusing and scary.

The interesting thing is that there is nothing interesting happening in my life right now, yet I am still typing. Which is sort of the whole ethos of "blogging."

The internet has really sort of thrown culture into a weird sort of tailspin. Their is literally no aspect of life and culture that cannot be immediately consumed, which is a lesson Erin Andrews learned the hardest of hard ways. In the next 65 seconds I could Tweet a 140 character idea, thought, pun or antidote, and it is available for immediate consumption. Facebook and Twitter and Myspace and Blogger and Tumblr all give the average person (present party included) the chance to say whatever is on their mind at any given point in time during the day. If I wake up at 6:48 in the morning and want to tell everyone that my girlfriend steals the sheets from me (1) or that my cat is the worst possible animal to try and share a room with (2), then those thoughts can be immediately put into the public sphere and immediately consumed at any given second by anyone who thinks that my life is at all interesting. Any aspect of my life can be put on the web for anyone to read, whenever they want, and interpreted however they want.

So does that mean that my life is important?

The answer is, of course, no. Sure life is what you make it and our lives are all important to the people around us and the world we create for ourselves, but in the grand scheme of things, just because I have something to say and it can be immediately consumed, that does not mean there is any merit to anything I have to say.

The problem with the Internet, blogs (both micro and regular) is that it allows the average person who has nothing interesting to say to feel special. Soccer and Blogs work and exist on the same level...they allow the vocal majority (kids who arent good at any other sport and people who really cant write all that well) to compete on an even playing field. Comparing any blogger to Keruac would be like comparing the 2008 Columbus Crew (3) to the 2008 Pittsburgh Steelers. It's just fucking unfair. But the beauty of blogs and soccer is that everyone is virtually equal, and everyone gets a chance to play goalie. Their is no hierarchy or meritocracy to blogs and Tweeters, they all simply exist, and grasp for some kind of celebrity or notoriety (not unlike David Beckham). Their is a reason that bullies exist in the world, and it's not just to make fun of the fat kids. Culture needs the hierarchy, and literacy cannot exist without a meritocracy.

The single worst thing the internet has done for culture is that it has allowed the average joe to feel special. People who have nothing interesting to say, no good stories to tell, and live a fairly mundane, average life can now cleverly disguise their Tweets and blogs in a manner that completely fabricate their existence. Reading blogs has become the new sitcom...reading any blog post from anyone i went to highschool with is not unlike watching an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bell Air. The posts have no linear narrative, they are simply a series of episodic posts that just existence within themselves, have very little in the way of thematic elements, and are ultimately just there. No one is breaking new ground, we're not contributing new idea's we are just doing.

People who are paid to write are paid to write for a reason, and it has nothing to do with their ability to post sotires in 140 character tweets. Literacy is changing every year in our world, and I'm honestly starting to think that when my kids take a "history of the english Language" course when they are in school, a major topic will be how literacy eventually made the jump from quality to quantity.

I know that anything I have just said will never make a dent in the world. But i least I understand that. Putting my puppy in his crate and finally falling asleep without waking Adrianna up is a much bigger concern of mine than anything that happens in the Blogosphere (4).

========================================
1) She does not, by the way. Habitually, I am the blanket-stealer
2) I have, unfortunately, done this
3) unquestionably the worst sports franchise team name in the history of professional sports.
4) I am so bummed that "blogosphere" does not register as a mis-spelled word. So. Fucking. Bummed.

In 7 months I will turn 25 years old, meaning I have been alive for a quarter of a century, meaning that I have roughly been alive for one third of my life. In 7 months I will have used up a third of my time on this earth. I'm consistantly worrying about what I have to show for 25 years of being on this planet.

Last year I embarked on an epic journey that spanned 8 countries and too may American cities to count. I felt such a sense of accomplishment knowing that I could sustain myself while being so far from home and be perfectly happy and content in this totally different type of environment and style of living. August 27 - December 8th last year made ever miserable second of 2008 leading up to it worth dealing with.

Right now, as I plead with myself to just be sleepy, all I can think about is what I have to show for this year, what will I have to say about 2009 when in wraps up here in a couple months, and, more importantly what will I have to say about myself on April 1st 2010.