Shark Attack

And If I never was a loser growing up
don't think I would've tried to study hard
But maybe if I didn't spend so much time on Warcraft
I'd learn to play a song you deserve

They laugh off the danger
break all the rules & I
want to join them

Are we called to something more? I hope so
Otherwise we're the hopeless among men
Life is an ocean
but we're calmly wading, hoping, praying for a shark attack

T.S.R.

Current Weight: 206 lbs.

I'm changing my writing style as an experiment. We're only going to focus on one topic each post. When I started writing the older posts I would loose interest half way, get bored & cap it off some how uninteresting. So we're just going to talk about a favorite band of mine, "Against Me!".

I first heard of Against Me! in the Winter of 2003, on Mitch Clem's website Nothing Nice 2 Say. I had no idea who the band was but Mitch is great about setting up punch lines so I just let it go & waited for the next update. Throughout NN2S's run AM! jokes continued & I kept thinking "I really need to check out this band, hell- in his first news post about then Mitch said they were God's of Punk Rock." but I was too lazy.

When I got to college my neighbor/roommate/friend/philosophy advocate Daryl & I started swapping mix tapes & he asked what I liked because he knew of this great acoustic punk band from Florida that he thought I would like a whole lot. I asked what their name was & then fell out of the chair when he said "Against Me! The apostrophe is theirs, it makes it sound charged up when you say it out loud." So he gave me a copy of Crime as Forgive by Against Me! their second acoustic EP. Holy Kablamos is this an awesome record. Every question running through Tom Gabel's chorus' were things I was wondering about, it was like AM! was offering a handshake. "Welcome to young adulthood spiked with conscious decisions. It never gets easier. Try to stay comfortable." I still scream along to Y'all Don't Wanna Step to Dis, What We Worked For, and the rest of the album.

If anyone is looking for some simple, stripped-out songs speaking on the comfort pains of living in too familiar of a place, relationships that could never last but have been started, and seeing the inner workings of a touring band Against Me! is the place to go..


Maybe somehow
This scam will still save us all...

When I'm through, scuzzbucket, they're gonna scrape you off the walls with a squeegee!

Current weight: 204 lbs.

So I'm playing thought Fallout [the original- it's a combo pack with that, Fallout 2, and Brotherhood of Steel.] I was using a walk-through to beat the game quickly but I'm having so much fun with it I'm debating going back & starting over, I know where the key objectives are now but I just want to do all the side stuff.

I think this is why I loved but never completed Morrowind; I enjoy the world & people more than the overall quest. Or maybe it's that I wanted to immerse myself as much as possible to strive for a sense of resonance with the NPC's. Sure they wanted me to kill Dagoth Ur, but maybe he's a nice guy? Huh. Turns out he's not so nice. He sent vampires & brainwashed slaves to kill me. I understand the plight of these people a little clearer now.

Have I mentioned I own one of those Bender Balls? They're just miniature balance balls you see at the gym. The ones with people just trying to lay backwards on them but they end up pile driving themselves into the ground? I've been using it to get in better shape for my wedding. The first week and a half I had a problem with it though & it's the same problem I have with most exercise tools like that that aren't free weights or running. It felt good but it didn't make me look good. I look at myself now & sure I can see the improvements, my stomach is closer to me & not rolling out from my pants but that notion I had originally bothers me. Why do I feel so entitled to see immediate results? I think I watched too much G.I. Joe as a kid, internet. So aside from decidedly *not* looking like Sgt. Slaughter I am enjoying the little ball. [Secret note to Sgt. Slaughter: I always picked you over Duke, that guy was a chump!]

And there will be a poetry
spoken silently between me and the stereo
-Against Me!

Just for the sake of staying warm

And in the end
this America?
This place with borders that transcend your map, with policies that clap down on other places lands & faces. It's all for naught. It was all in your head & one day you woke up. You just woke up tucked in the bed spread, turned out the lamps, took your morning piss & said "To hell with it, let's have some fun."

And you turned on the music, the diplomacy in the news was too loud anyway.
And you spent money you never had because baby this is liberty and liberty means that nothing came by you and your real estate if it wasn't fast convenient and in high quantities. Any time some one asked what you thought you just smiled, shoveled more filth in your mouth because your grin said you could take it. It said you could take it and you would like it. and when they asked again, asked you what you thought you said you couldn't stop to answer you had too much to do. because you could never tell them the truth, that the thinking kept you awake at night, it made your head hurt, and most importantly you couldn't tell them the scariest part of the truth.

you didn't know if you liked that it made your head hurt. But that kept you up at night so you said let's have some fun.

and the thoughts came back so you moved away to somewhere with cheaper drinks and colder air. and the thoughts came back so you held on tight to that firm young body and begged for that fuck. that one fuck that would take away your head, that would end your life and take you off the wheel. There wouldn't be a life or a thought or a hurt head after because you could string yourself out for days and then that america you sang and pledged to and shot your fireworks and guns and superiority off for would still be there. Those other boys and girls and countries and jobs and blankets would all wait and maybe. and maybe some of them would be there whenever you got back. but you didn't have time for that right now. Now it was time to have some fun.

Yo! Check out this write[ing]! /pun

Current weight: 205 lbs.

Ahoy; are you curious about that first line of text? I've gotten in the habit of typing my current weight into my journal entries so that I can evaluate whether I'm loosing or gaining weight in the last four or five weeks. My goal is to hit 200lbs. & then hopefully 185lbs. Currently I'm being a bit lazy about the whole method; I could simply cut out coke's with Stacy [easy] & chocolate milk [incredibly hard] but am doing neither. You reap what you sow, yeah?

This last weekend I celebrated Halloween. You might notice it was the first weekend of November- but I was never a traditionalist so you'll have to bear with me. The Lady & I went to Waco [sans BMatt] to play a murder mystery with our good friends Josh, Angie, Julie, Russel, Megan, & Kevin. It was a Mardi Gras in New Orleans theme [post-hurricane setting? Would have made it a good metaphor involving the depravity of our inner self while we uphold the exterior, alas it was a poorly written game] Stacy was the live-in French Maid & I was a bastard relative born to a stripper. Overall I think my character was a Red Herring to the true murderer [I didn't do it!] since I did come to the party to murder the, ah, the murdered; however someone got to them first. In the end I was the only one who figured out the real murderer [Josh, the best friend & family lawyer] so takes one to know one I guess. Other than the murder mystery, Kevin got Rock Band 2 so we played that for a bit [The Lady quite enjoyed it] & I beat Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins for the original Game Boy, seven-year-old-me would have been very impressed.

Part of going down to Waco was to also get my lip pierced at the tattoo parlor but there was some communication shenanigans with the job so I didn't want to come back with that on my face just yet, one day though. Speaking of work it has been awesome lately. Granted, there are some parts I'm not too fond of [the length of a certain packet I need to fill out occasionally specifically] but I like what all I'm learning. Hopefully by this time next year I'll be a shift-manager but who knows?

I have a question now: Does anyone who plays D&D or have basic skill in HTML editing, or any sort of wiki editing that Obsidian Portal uses? The 'Portal is a website that is parts journal/cast bios/atlus/wiki/etc. It's really neat & I love the idea of it, but problem is that I can't seem to edit it very well. I thought it would be similar to my guild's wiki page, but I guess not. To be fair, I thought this website would be similar to editing my guild's wiki page, but that was also not the case. Please crush me with your information about this; searching for the answer on my own has been slow. fin

Preeeeow, world.

This, this isn't a good start internet; I've begun with an obscure Homestar-Runner reference. Can't take it back though! There will be a section about myself & what I like so I'm not going to blow the first payload on that topic. This is a [i]journal[/i] for me to write snips of lyrics in my head, paste my own photos [Ha! I don't have any photos] of activities, talk about video games, music, etc. I used journal because I'm self-conscious about the word 'blog'. It reads like double-popped collars.

Today I got off work early so I came home to finagle my budget, listen to Gorrilla Biscuits' s/t [Self Titled for you philistines] & practice guitar. The guitar is nothing to really harp on, just a student-level Harmony named Paula.

You see, that right there?

I'm horrible about warming you up to habits I have, I just threw that at you. I name things, all kinds of things. I name my guitars, the cars I drive, the bike I ride, my fists. It just happens & it's not even for a good reason. I saw a play where a cop had named his billy-club. He said good cops chose to name it because "She's the only girl you hold on to all night." For whatever reason I took that as a great philosophy but expanded it to all walks of life.

Anyway I took up two songs that I could pick up easily, the first is "You in my heart" by [i]The Dingees[/i], sort of an acoustic reggea song. The second is "Drunken Lullabies" from [i]Flogging Molly[/i] which in a nutshell is a warbling drunken Irish folk parade [that statement fits for both the band & song].