i run three and a half miles every morning. i never, ever thought i would be this person. ever. while i hoped that this would be something i stuck with, i always thought somewhere in the back of my mind that this would end up like so many other attempts to do something good for myself, half-hearted and failed. i leave just about everything that way. everything with me starts as some grand aspiration to do something larger than life and ends with the same epitaph, “what ever happened to that thing you were doing?” this has been just about the most annoying quality i have. it probably makes me best suited to be a football coach really. the ability to be really intense about something for an afternoon would probably make for the type of inspirational locker room speech that rockets the home team to victory, despite being out matched in ever respect.

while it may be a little premature for me to declare that i have actually stuck with running three and a half miles every morning, i don’t feel all that gunshy to do so. it has been almost two months. two months of waking up earlier and earlier so i can get to the gym and run three and a half miles. that is pretty astonishing for someone that can, if properly motivated, start writing several songs, designing a few posters and conceptualize a full scale musical in one week. it’s been known to happen more than it hasn’t been known to happen, it’s just the consequence of a mind that goes more than it rests.

i have a hard time finishing the three and a half miles, i am not unaware of this. i have developed a system of lies that only the worlds biggest idiot would fall for, thus it works like a charm on me. i convince myself that i only have to get to the twenty minute mark. once i can hit twenty minutes then i will be down to the final ten minutes i need to have a successful cardio workout. it’s okay that i am tired, i am not going to make myself do the whole three and a half miles, it’s okay. just do the thirty minutes. of course, then a whole new web of lies is spun at twenty nine minutes, forty two seconds. what will another five minutes hurt, you came this far, do another five minutes, that’s like, one more segment of oprah. that is going to be over before this explosions in the sky song is! five minutes, it’s nothing! this is done until i hit the full forty minutes, which for those who enjoy recreational math without the benefit of a calculator, is how long it takes me to run just over three and a half miles.

it’s not as though my working out gave birth to this process of lying to myself, i have always tried to use this method to trick myself into finishing smaller tasks. i have never thought to apply it to the hours and hours of unfinished songs or the dozen or so abandoned essays and the two or three pages of a pilot that have existed for eternities in stockpiles of paper, magnetic ribbon and magnetic zeros and ones. i had always told myself, but mostly others, that paper was far too inefficient to capture my rapid fire ideas and that all these things would finally be finished once i got a computer, or a better computer, or a laptop.

they know the truth though, just like i do. i have no follow through. “you must sleep on a pillow made of lead for all the pipe dreams you come up with” was a common phrase my mother would tell me as a child. she was never all that enthusiastic about my latest plot for greatness. she was always more insistent that i should spend more time and energy coming up with backup plans. i always thought this as odd, she would tell me that if i put half as much energy into my homework as i do my big ideas, i would probably get into harvard. nothing pisses me off more than someone that can’t dream big, especially when those dreams originate from my head. i  would ask her, in the way that only a snotty sixteen year old girl can, if that wouldn’t also mean with just slightly more effort my big ideas would happen and that these backup plans were a sure fire way of making sure that i would need a back up plan? she was never amused by this but to be fair, she wasn’t ever really amused with much that i had to say back then.

people have told me that i don’t give myself enough credit and that they are always amazed with the things that i pull off. i don’t really get what they are talking about a lot of times as the things they site as evidence have always been filed under “lucy ricardo plots” in my estimation and are hardly the same thing as the stacks of creative abortions that haunt the underside of my bed. honestly, the only reason those plots worked is because bullshitting your way through something requires absolutely no follow through. i don’t have to keep anything going, just handle each obstacle that gets in the way of whatever booby prize i happen to be after at that moment.

that is when i realized, i could bullshit myself into having follow through. if i can convince me, the laziest person on earth, to get up at seven thirty every morning to ride my bike in the cold to go run for three and a half miles, i could probably bullshit myself into doing anything. the idea of putting to battle, two of my worst possible traits against one another had never occurred to me! i mean, sure, i didn’t start out running three and a half miles, but through a series of painfully obvious lies, i had managed to get there! over the course of my life, i had nearly ruined every single good thing i had going for me at one time or another due to my nearly superhuman skill of lying to myself and now, i had managed to turn it around for the powers of good instead of evil. there has to be a patron saint superhero based on that, right? well check it out, i’m that guy!

and that is how i managed to start writing again. by completely allowing myself to bullshit me and everyone else i come into contact with about it. i’ve realized that i don’t have to have any intention of writing well, or even finishing it for that matter. this may sound like exactly the opposite of what i was talking about earlier, you know, the gym lies? i can’t get into the details of it all, just know that the lies are very, very complex and something that only the mother of the snottiest uber-privileged white toddler could fully appreciate. or maybe not, maybe i am lying to you right now, just to motivate myself to finish writing this entry. i guess you’ll never know, will you?

i wasn’t going to get into this part of things, but it’s almost three days later and i am still pissed off. in all fairness, a lot of the getting pissed off is reading other peoples comments about this “getting paid” situation. it’s real easy to make super glib comments about “all these other people” that are allegedly “taking money away” from artists and i would just like to set the record straight in defense of all my fellow, “in the way money grubbers.”

yes, in an ideal world there would be no separating degrees between the almighty artist and the devoted fan but as ice-t would say, “shit ain’t like that, it’s real fucked up.” i don’t know what kinda candyland bullshit scenario any one of you holier than though think tanks is picturing in your new world order, but i would love to hear how it would work out. i know your leader, emperor albini, LOVES to talk this “concept” to death but yet, i have yet to hear how anyone is going to make this little utopia work.

let me make this perfectly clear, i am in no way defending the major label system at all. i am not defending every boo-boo with a business card and a associates degree from hamburger university that ever claimed to be in “the music industry.” there are more shady motherfuckers out there looking to get yours than there is gross on a peep show floor room. this brings up the biggest point there is to all of this, there is a reason that there are all these “unnecessary” people “gumming up” the works…

i don’t mean to blow your mind here with the news flash of the century, but a lot of “artists” are not very smart. most of them are completely talentless hacks that are really waiting for the big bad wolf to pop out and devour them whole. once you clear those people out of the way, then you get to work your way through people with marginal talent but MASSIVE egos. those people get so wrapped up in their own bullshit that they will listen to anyone that tells them they are great. once you get rid of those people, then you have to deal with the people with marginal talent that won’t take the smallest effort to educate themselves on how shit works. doesn’t matter how many books punk planet or the idiot’s guide pump out on how shit works, these assholes aren’t going to read them. so those assholes get gobbled up by the wolves too. i could go on with several other sub-types that feed this shameless system but never get called out but really, you get the point and i don’t dig being overly redundant. keep in mind though, these people i just mentioned, in the real world, will never, ever get signed, play a real show or be anything more than an eventually abandoned band profile on myspace.

let’s say that you have weeded out all these “artists” who are a huge part of this problem ya’ll love to scream about but never even consider for some reason. we’ll call this unrealistic condition one. now we have actual artists that have some degree of talent that you or someone like you might be reasonably interested in listening to. great, right? these people have it together and you know, can just bring the music straight to you, their devoted fan. right?

oh no.. so nooooo. first off, let’s give you another shot in the arm of thorazine so you can face reality. how are you going to hear about these great bands? are you out combing all those myspace profiles? are you out going to see bands you’ve never heard of? do you even go see the opening band? what? you don’t? hmmmmmmm well jesus, someone has to find a way to get you to your new favorite band. if your heros are busy making twelve hour drives in the van to seattle then who is going to do that? probably some parasite that is getting in the way and taking all the money. what’s that you say, pitchfork? pitchfork will do it? well, exactly how do you think pitchfork makes money? how do you think pitchfork even finds these bands in the first place?

well, hate to break the news to you, but at the most basic level, some “parasite” started out by, you know, booking them a show. they probably heard a few songs and decided to give this great band a chance at his evil bar. he probably staffed the bar with some horrible security guy to keep him from getting sued into oblivion. he probably had the nerve to have a bartender. he probably had to pay some sound guy that doesn’t even know the band to sit there and mix them. all these people probably got paid and the band, they probably only got like, twenty dollars or something because of all these weasels. we’ll just forget that that the rotten jerk probably lost his shirt booking this one day greatest band on earth. i mean, after he paid all those people, gave the band twenty bucks, paid the rent on the room and the electricity bill (you think your air conditioner is expensive, well look out sally) he is probably in the hole five hundred bucks or something. what a sycophant!

i’m sure all you great music fans will just start combing the internet looking for bands in your area to have play parties at your house. you know, parties that you can advertise for free on the internet, to anyone! “hey strangers, party at my house with these bands at eight tonight, byob!” then at the end of the night, you’ll just pass the hat and everyone will cough up enough dough so the band can pay the rent on their practice space that month. OR we’ll call this unrealistic condition two.

after months of hosting free shows in your home with strangers you invited on the internet, pitchfork hears about this band and posts their mp3’s and everyone goes bananas for it! oh it’s soo good. since the band doesn’t have to have jobs because this passing the hat thing at your house has gone so swimmingly, they have all the time in the world to set up shows all across the country. since everyone knows who they are, they have no trouble getting shows, so clearly, there is no need for an agent of any type what so ever. the band will be received in each city by enthusiastic, like minded people who will continue to invite strangers on the internet to their backyards that can accommodate around eight hundred people. some guy that happens to have a giant pa is going to come by and set it up for free and run it, because he loves music too. of course the hat will be passed and the band will have enough to pay for gas, insurance, food, fun and will be put up in a someones home that can sleep all of them comfortably. since this is totally guaranteed to happen, then we can just rid of all those agents that keep getting in the way.  unrealistic condition three.

man, this is going great you guys, i don’t know why we didn’t jettison the entire music business altogether years ago! now the only thing we have to do is figure out how to get the new album to all the fans. i guess what will happen next will be cream cheese, since all these fans are just coughing up all this money, willingly and directly to the band that they can just concentrate on making music. all we have to do is find some independently wealthy guy that loves the band to sit around and record them for say, oh, i dunno, six or eight months? that should be easy right? i mean, god knows he shouldn’t get paid or anything, that would be wrong. i’m sure someone can just donate some web hosting space too. and some t-shirts need to get donated too, because you know, that is where the band really makes their money. and you know, these people will go a GREAT job because they love music. there will be so many people crawling all over each other to donate all this time and money directly to the artist that we won’t even need to worry about contracts in the unlikely event that someone fucks every last thing up. we can totally get rid of all the lawyers and managers this way! leeches ever last one of them! i mean, EVERYONE IS TOTALLY ON THE LEVEL HERE. JUST THE BANDS AND THE FANS, RIGHT? we’ll call this unrealistic condition four.

seems to me, that as long as we can get all these unrealistic conditions lined up, shit should come together real nice like. i can’t wait for all these unnecessary people to get out of the picture, taking up all the bands hard earned money. fucking vultures.

*i will say not everything he says is wrong. i will always agree with his essay “what is wrong with the music business” http://www.mercenary.com/probwitmusby.html and obviously the man is one of the best record producers ever. no one gets drums to sound THAT great, no one. i also love big black and have a fondness for shellac, but i still think the guy is a prick.

So unermesslich gross wie der Himmel ist seine Güte zu denen, die ihn ehren. Psalm 103, 11

Wer sind wir?

Sind wir Schreiber, Satzbauarbeiter, Online-Buchstabenspediteure?

Nein. Wir sind die Kinder des Wortes, Tempeldiener eines Heiligtums: der Sprache.

Im Anfang war das Wort, und alles ist durch das Wort geworden.

Du sollst das Wort ehren

Du sollst das Wort ehren – und neben dem Wort wenig andere Wörter haben.

Das heißt: Suche das richtige Wort! Fliehe dem falschen! Und fasse dich kurz.

Frage dich immer: Wie würde ich das einem Kind erklären?

Muhammad ibn Sirin

Ibn Awny hat gesagt: ’Ich ging zu Muhammad ibn Sirin und er befand sich mit seiner Mutter. Mir kam es so vor, als ob er irgendwo Schmerzen hatte und habe nachgefragt was ihn besorgt. Andere antworteten mir: ’Er benimmt sich und redet immer auf diese Art, wenn er mit seiner Mutter ist.’ [Al-Mahasini und Al-Masai Ibrahim Al-Baihaky, S. 614]

Abu Hasan ´Ali ibn Husayn ibn ´Ali ibn Abu-Talib

Auch bekannt als Zaynul-´Abideen, welcher gegenüber seiner Mutter sehr milde war. Er aß kein einziges mal gemeinsam mit seiner Mutter. Als man ihn fragte, warum er niemals mit seiner Mutter gemeinsam isst, antwortete er: ‚Ich habe Angst, nicht einen Teil des Essens zu nehmen, welchen meine Mutter gesehen hat und wünschte es zu nehmen und in dieser Hinsicht werde ich unvorsichtig ihr gegenüber sein.’ [al-Ahbar, 3/97]

Abu Abdurrahman al-Hanafi

Abu Abdurrahman al-Hanafi berichtet: „Kahman ibn al-Hasan hatte einen Skorpion in seinem Haus gesehen und er wollte ihn töten, aber der Skorpion versteckte sich unter Steinen und verschwand. Ich habe an seinem Gesicht bemerkt, dass der Skorpion ihn gestochen hat. Doch als ich ihn fragte, warum er den Skorpion töten wolle, antwortete er ihm: ‚Bei Allah, ich hatte Angst, dass dieser Skorpion meine Mutter stechen würde.’“ [Hilyatil-Anbiya, 6/211]

Ibn Amr al-Muzny

Als ihn einst seine Mutter rief, antwortete er ihr mit einer höheren Stimme als die ihre, und diesen Fehler bezahlte er mit der Freilassung zweier Sklaven. [„Adwatul-Hijab“-Muhammad ibn Ismail,2/126-127 und „Wa bil walidayni Ihsanan“,40-42]