Spanning the Miles Majestically

Dear Amy,

Shut up about my blog no one cares about this crap.

Sincerely,

Dr. Von Bloggington

Lately I can't stop listening to Tupac. It's like a lightbulb went on, and I suddenly get it. Because of that, it just feels fresh and new to me. And I haven't had anything like that in music for a while.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like suddenly I identify with the words because I know how hard it is to grow up on the streets or whatever. That's not it at all.

I've always liked the music in rap - the beats, the bass lines. But I used to just feel "meh" about the rap part of rap music. But since it started clicking with me, I love the rap part as well. I would be happy to listen to someone rap even if there was no music. And Tupac is a very good rapper.

Another thing about Tupac is that it feels like he means what he is saying. Even if you can't identify with his experience, for a second you can feel the way he feels because the inflection of his voice just sells you on it. I've never been worried about the police treating me badly because of my skin color, and I've never gotten paranoid every time I see a police car. But when Tupac raps about it, the frustration is so real in his voice that you can identify with the feeling, if not the experience.

And the rhythms. I have always loved rhythm. I've always listened to a lot of electronica / downtempo / dance because I love beats. With a good rapper like Tupac, the rapping meshes with the the beat of the song to be exotic and addicting. There are just lines and strings of words he puts together that I want to hear over and over because they just sound so good. I think that is the main part that you either get or you don't get. For the longest time, I didn't get it. Now I'm getting it, and I have a new addiction.

It doesn't come across as well typed out, but see if you like the rhythm in this line, from "Late Night" : (a key part of the rhythm is that "our" is pronounced with 2 syllables like "hour" - and only pause at the commas, everything else runs together. It's beautiful.)

Around the corner it's like Vegas, or better yet like Reno ni**az poppin welcome to our casino, Cause you and me know...

You didn't believe me, did you?

It's ok. I have proof. For one entire day I decided to answer my phone every time it rang, and keep a record of it. Maybe now you'll understand where I'm coming from.

7:31am: A girl who works for me calling to ask if the vacation calendar is open so she can be off today.

7:47am: A different girl who works for me calling to say she's not coming to work because she is sick.

8:39am: A girl who used to work in my department calling to ask me to fix a problem with a customer's account. Bonus: Now I have to call the customer and explain it to them.

12:21pm: Shortly before I take the first delicious bite of my pizza rolls (fresh from the toaster oven) Sarah calls and says she is stuck at the hospital and wants me to bring her some food. So I have to leave, go wait in line at Wendy's, take the food to Sarah, then come home and eat cold pizza rolls real fast and go back to work.

1:50pm: My boss calling to say she isn't coming in to work today, she assigns me two projects.

2:55pm: My co-worker Shun calls to remind me that I owe him a Saturday. Thanks to me answering the phone, I have to work on Saturday the 29th.

4:05pm: Sarah calling to say she has to be at hospital til 6, but could I clean the kitchen when I get home? She's gonna make spaghetti and it would be easier if she didn't have to clean the kitchen before she started cooking.

5:22pm: I get home from work. Screw this, I'm not answering anymore phone calls today.

6:09pm: Sarah gets home. Yells at me because she tried to call but I didn't answer.

I hope now you have a better understanding of why I wish I didn't have a phone.

Oh hell yes do I hate having a cell phone. Or really any phone. I wish the only way to contact me was through email.

I seriously need to attend anger management in relation to my hatred of my cell phone. I mean yes, it's a crappy model and the battery doesn't last too long. But that's not why I hate it.

I hate my phone because everyone calls me all the time, and I don't ever want to talk to them. Not even my wife. Because I HATE talking on the phone. If my wife calls me on the phone, I don't want to answer it. I mean I do answer it, but I don't want to. Talking on the phone makes me want to stab.

Not that I don't want to talk to my wife, I just don't want to talk to her on the phone.

If my phone rings and I don't recognize the number and it's not in caller ID, there is no way in hell I'm going to answer that. There are just too many things that can go wrong if you are suddenly talking to someone you weren't expecting to talk to.

That's the thing, 99% of the time when the phone rings, it's because somebody wants something. They want me to do something or go somewhere or find something out for them. Listen, if I wanted to do that or go there, I would already be there or be doing that. So answering the phone means I have to do something I don't want to do.

Voicemails are ok, but tell me why you called. If you don't say why you called I swear on Caesar's ghost I will never call you back. I'm just not that curious about why you called.

I often have fantasies about breaking my cellphone in half and then throwing the two pieces out the window of my car. I would flip it open but then keep bending it back until SNAPPO I'm holding the two pieces in my hands with wires shooting out and I go HAHAHAHA phone! YOU'RE DEAD

I don't expect you to answer when I call, but I leave a message about why. It's going to say "Hey Blaine tonight I'm going to Sticky Fingerz at 9pm because MuteMath is playing. Call me if you want to meet me there."

Sometimes I wish I could quit this job and become a carpenter.

I've been trying to come to grips with the fact that I am average. I mean, not everyone can be special. By definition that just wouldn't work.

I think I have come to grips with that fact, or I'm just lying to myself.

I think I'm one of the most selfish people I know. Yep. I just thought about it for a minute, and I could only think of one person that I actually know who is more selfish than I am. (You cannot convince me to tell you her identity except for the hints that:

a) She will never read this blog

and

b) No dumbass it's not my wife. Why would you think that?

and

c) Even though she won't read this blog, if YOU are reading it you might know her so that's why I'm not telling.

What's my point? Since when have I had a point. Here are my thoughts. Why would I want to become unselfish? Because my selfishness causes me unhappiness. Oh ok, so I have selfish reasons for wanting to stop being so selfish? Err....I guess. So how is that stopping being so selfish? Well I guess it's not. It's just being happier about being selfish.

I think the root of the problem is making a change in your heart where you decide that the happiness of other people is more important than your own happiness. So how do you do that?

Hell if I know.

Perhaps this blog will come back to life. You know why? Recently, my job has gotten extremely boring. I'm scheduled to work from 11am to 8pm. I usually finish all my work by 6pm. So the 6 to 8pm time slot leaves me a chance to blog. It's a unique situation, because the proxy at work blocks me from visiting my usual websites. (No not porn sites. Gaming sites / gaming forums.) So my choice of websites is down to pretty much either news sites or blogs. So blogs it is. Blogs is a winner.

Spending a few minutes musing and coming up with half-cocked theories is my normal method of avoiding the fact that there is a God I believe in and I'm not doing what I think He would want me to do. I'm not even asking Him what He wants me to do. It's probably not the best way to live my life. But I do end up with some fancy questions. Here's a couple of them. They all have the same theme.

In his infinite wisdom, Stephen whats-his-name from the band Third Eye Blind wrote the following lyric: "...shines on the people that Jesus couldn't save." Which brings up the question: Are there people that Jesus couldn't save?

To approach this question you can make one of two assumptions:

1) Jesus wanted to save everyone, but He couldn't.

2) Jesus didn't want to save everyone.

If you can think of a third option, let me know. I can only think of these two, so I'm gonna talk about these.

Assuming that Jesus wanted to save everyone, what was the reason He couldn't? If you believe what He says, there are a lot of people who are going to hell. If he didn't want some of them to go to hell, why wasn't he successful in keeping all the people from going to hell?

Looking at the second assumption you have to ask the question: Why didn't Jesus want to save everyone? I think this one is more likely. God wanted to create a universe in which He would obtain the most possible glory. It just so happened that in the universe where he would obtain the most possible glory, not everyone could be saved. But that just loops back around again doesn't it -- God created the nature of the universe. So why would he create the universe in such a nature that the only way for him to obtain maximum glory would be for some people to not be saved? Maybe he had to make it that way because he has so much glory. So if that is true, his only handicap is that He has so much glory. Except that for Him, it's not a handicap. It only becomes a problem for us. Actually, it only becomes a problem for SOME of us.

To summarize: Why can't Jesus save everyone? Because he has too much glory.

I think now would be an appropriate time to quote my friend Thom Yorke, from the song Karma Police: "Phew, for a minute there, I lost myself. "

And another thing...

Well, I'm lucky to have my job but it's really boring. Especially on a Saturday. I have a picture on my desk, and this picture happened to be taken during the single happiest moment of my life. I'm going to explain the moment, but it takes a lot of back story.

For most of my life I have been obsessed with music. I started taking piano lessons when I was 12. I love playing the piano. When I got to college I had never touched a guitar before. The way it ended up, every roommate I ever had could play the guitar. Some of them were very, very good. When all your roommates are good at the guitar, you can't help but start to learn to play it (if only by osmosis.) Learning the piano had come to me pretty easily, but the guitar was very very difficult for me. I sucked. I didn't practice enough, but a normal person who practiced as much as I did should have been much better.

The summer after my junior year of college I got a chance to go to Ireland for a college trip. As it turned out, I was to play piano for a band we were putting together. This band would play covers of popular songs for Irish teenagers. For some reason Irish kids are fascinated with American kids / American culture. If you are an American in Ireland, you are automatically a rock star, even if you're actually a dork.

I was in this band with some very close friends and former roommates, people I loved hanging out with, people who were always fun and always made me laugh. People who were on the same page with me musically (which is rare.) Before going to Ireland we had a lot of fun practicing our cover songs.

Let me tell you about Ireland. I tend to exaggerate from time to time. Ireland is the exception. I'm going to make some fantastic claims about Ireland. In this case they are all true. Let me warn of you this before make plans to go there: The beauty of Ireland is such that once you leave, the memory of it will haunt you for the rest of your life, like a sickness that can never be cured.

Every morning when I woke up in Ireland, I flew out of bed like a kid on Christmas. As soon as I remembered where I was, I had to get up because I didn't want to miss a single second of being alive and being in Ireland. Each day I was up around 5:30 and walked to the beach and practiced playing the guitar. It was like a 2 hour orgasm every morning. After that I went back to the dorm where my friends were awake, and ate breakfast. Then we would go and play with Irish school kids (which was why we were there.) After lunch, we had band practice. After practice we had free time. We usually walked around town and ate ice cream in between delving through the inventory of every thrift store in Ireland.

In the evenings, we played the concerts. This is where my moment happens. I can't explain what it feels like when you are playing music and hundreds of people are ecstatically jumping and screaming and loving it. For some reason, these kids loved the song "Sweet Home Alabama." We made a point to play it everyday. After one particularly good playing, the kids wouldn't stop screaming, demanding that we play it a second time in a row. It was unreal how excited these kids were.

Then came my moment. Riding the momentum from our triumphant second helping of "Sweet Home Alabama," we slipped into the Phish song "Character Zero." For this song our rhythm guitar player came to play piano. I was supposed to go and pretend to play guitar on this one (because I didn't actually know how to play the guitar.) But I had been practicing.

Our rhythm guitar player turned off the volume on the guitar and handed it to me. He sat at the piano. I turned the volume back on. It wasn't an elaborate air guitar performance. It was real. I was playing guitar in a rock show for rabid, screaming fans.

I'll never have another day that perfect. But you know what? I'm don't even care.

Admittedly, I'm a huge nerd. I say this without hesitation because some part of me thinks that by admitting this, it makes me less of a nerd. The truest nerds don't even realize that they are nerds. Nevertheless, just realizing that I am a nerd doesn't change the fact that I am.

I love video games. I've loved them ever since I was 10 and my best friend Greg got a Nintendo. I got blisters on my fingers from playing Mario Brothers.

Now I'm 26 and I am addicted to two video games. The first one is "Minna Daisuki Katamari Damacy" (translation: Everyone Loves Clump of Souls) for the PS2. Trust me, it's worth selling your most valuable possessions to buy a PS2 just to play this game if you don't already have one. I'd probably drown a bag of puppies to be able to play this one. I won't even try to explain the game - I'll just say that it contains eccentric Japanese music and poor translations into English. You can't play this game and not be happy. It just isn't possible. If a doctor told me I had cancer while I was playing this game, I'd say "Ok great thanks!"

The second game is World of Warcraft. For over a year I resisted the temptation to play this one because I knew it had the potential to become an addiction. Then my wife started a surgery rotation. She works 16 hours a day. Literally. Since I can't see my wife, I decided to start playing World of Warcraft. It has instantly become the worst addiction I've ever had. I hesitate to compare it to Katamari Damacy because they are so completely different. It's just as fun, but in a different way. Katamari Damacy is like crack cocaine, extremely fun for a short period of time. World of Warcraft is like a week long drinking binge - not quite as fun, but you can do it for longer periods of time without getting tired of it. If you want me to prove how much of a nerd I am, I can go into great detail concerning my World of Warcraft character. But for now I'll spare you.

Yes I'm a nerd. But it makes me happy.