I'm out.

After barely dipping my toes into cyber society, I must now depart. I have traded my little space here for the sun and computerless coffee shops and books with weathered pages and frisbee golf and Saturdays spent without thinking about anything that exists solely on a server that I will never see. From now on, I will be writing my thoughts on pieces of paper scattered about my room and possibly in a journal, which you will be able to buy online after I die in 2085 or so. Until then, well, you're just going to have to wait.

Thanks.

I'm sitting at home alone on a Tuesday. Or, I'm in the Bahamas.

I just posted to Team Tinnitus and I can't remember how to link it. So. It's on the right. It's not much, but you should check it out.

I'm back. Or, Am I?

Yes, I am.

It's been a long three weeks. I usually deal pretty well with the whole seasonal depression, thing, but the last three weeks have been pretty tough. A lot of losing all ambition, drinking, and then forcing myself into spurt of creativity and, ugh, productivity. It's wearing. Maybe I should just get a suit, like the bearded guy on the Mens Warehouse adds told me; suits are proven, by scientists, to increase productivity. Or something. But who needs a suit when you can just wait painful weeks to hear an album that lifts you out of the funk.

This time that album is the Decemberists' Picaresque.

The difficult thing to grasp with the Decemberists for me was always how Colin Meloy, the bespectacled lead man of the group, is quoted extensively talking about his influences: The Smiths (and especially Morrisey), the Waterboys and Robyn Hitchcock. The guy even wrote a 33-1/3 book about the Replacements' Let It Be. These artists don't exactly add up to the Decemberists.

But I think it comes through on this album. Meloys written an album that captures the spirits of those artists greatest albums, many of which got me out of deep funks in their own time in my life. It's that whole darkness delivered over pop thing. The "sugar coated pill." That's a phrase that always struck me as odd, paired with the "get use to it -ism" of "swallow that pill." Or maybe I made those sayings up. But it fits with this album. There's something about shaking your ass to a song that skewers American political thought like "16 Military Wives" does.

Not that it's a new thing; but it's always a sign of a great album.

Matos goes mad. Or, a new Team Tinnitus post.

A couple new reviews from Team Tinnitus. One from the Real Matt Wright who was diggin' on the good vibes of Mirah at Nocturnal last night and the promised review of Monday's Karaoke session, with a great photo of Matos. Check it.

Blogs don't die, they just fade away. Or, I just stumbled into the graveyard.

I found this while searching for a different blog. This is an entry from May 20, 2004 and it's the last one this person ever posted. It's not really amazing for what it says, but the fact that this was the last one. There was no attempt to ease off. Cold turkey. I wonder what happened to him or her? There's got to be thousands of these types of final posts. How do you write your epitaph? Welcome to the blog cemetery:

I wonder how many links I ought to have in my blog to make it 'linky' enough.

I wonder if I'm really part of a blogging community.

I wonder if it matters that I have now been indexed by Google.

I wonder what it means to be part of an online community. Is it enough if we casually observe, laugh at, raise our eyebrows at, each other's daily comments about our lives?

I wonder if community requires physical touching. I wonder how much of the senses must be engaged and exchanged to constitute human interaction.

I wonder how the vast reams of writing that people create really contribute to the collective consciousness, the collective unconcscious, or the collective creative brain progeny of our civilization.

I wonder if it's really worth it.

I wonder about Iraq, and Israel, and Somalia, and the Sudan, and every other place on Earth where chaos rules while a border away or a few miles away everything is peaceful.

I wonder if I really wonder. I wonder if I really know there's no answer. I wonder if I know there's no system to tie it together. I wonder if I know that we are part of a blnid, teeming, probabilistic mass of life.

I wonder how much of life I unconsciously avoid.

I wonder if anyone is out there.

I've got a license to ill and I'm using it. Or, I feel like I'm going to die.

I have nobody but myself to blame for my current state. After an extended weekend of 7 am bedtimes and whatever activities are required to stay up that late, the gates of my immune system have deteriorated and some form of invasive crud, let's call it, has infected my temple rendering me completely useless. A small price to pay for a weekend of good memories, though. Let's review, shall we:

Saturday
Michaelangelo Matos, Seattle Music editor and former Minneapolitan, is in town for the weekend before he reads from his book at Powell's Bookstore on Monday. I pick him up in a cab at a Starbucks and we head to housemate Mike's restaurant for a delicious Italian meal with plenty of free wine. Before the meal begins Matos hands me a bag filled with 21 CDs. It's his 15-volume set of singles from 2004 and a 6-volume set of reissued singles. To me this is incomprehensible and I am trying still to digest the idea--along with all the music. There's some good stuff here, and I got to hear a lot of it, but not before Mike, Matos and I spent a few hours at the Virginia Cafe discussing music, women and television. Intense debate ensued. Heated up from our discussion, we headed home and stayed up until 6 am geeking out, playing music for each other off of our iMacs. At one point when Matos and I had our noses buried in our computers Mike turns to me and says, "So this is how we socialize now." He was joking--a bit--but I still felt the truth in his words. So we played some cribbage. It was much better. Of course there is no denying the ease computers lend to playing round robin DJ. A lot of great stuff was played. A couple favorites from the night include:

"Covered in Punk" by Portobella
A sassy British toss off featuring a super crass-and-sexy female lead saying things like "Eat my candy," repeatedly. The beat itself is a trip and then the guitar comes in--a straight lift of the riff from Blur's "Song #2"--and the song reaches orgasmic levels. Leaving all in earshot covered in punk. Gross.

"Hits of '69" by LMP
A 10-minute medley of LMP covers of 1969 pop releases all tied together with a boom-thwack beat, "Hits of '69" manages to induce both fits of laughter and rapt attention, me trying to figure which song could possibly be next. My favorite part is Yoko Ono's "John and Yoko" which features the two simple repeating each other’s names. Douglas Wolk wrote about it and the oddball box set that it comes in in last week's Seattle Weekly.

Sunday
Woke up at 4 and poured over the bankruptcy filing for Art Alexakis, the much-hated-in-Portland singer for Everclear. Things aren't looking good for Art. He owes the IRS $2.75 million, has sold most of his houses and his band's Singles collection, released in October because, we thought, the public demanded it has only sold 40,000 copies. Ouch. Ate some Thai with Matos and my wonderful semi-hippie friend Mackenzie and then watched After Hours, which is a beautiful twitch of a Twilight Zone episode, with all the paranormal replaced by coincidence. Crash

Monday
Woke, worked and headed down to the 33 1/3 reading at Powell's where Matos read from his book on Prince's Sign 'O' the Times, Douglas Wolk made a multimedia presentation from his Live at the Apollo book, the Decemberists' Colin Meloy read from his Let It Be (the Replacements) book and Mike McGonigal read from a draft of the first chapter of his book on My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. McGonigal's use of the word fuck was both excessive and completely appropriate, much like My Bloody Valentine.

The all-male panel was asked if a woman would be writing any of the books, as if they had any say in the matter. I almost followed up by asking if anyone that didn't wear glasses was going to be allowed to write any of the books (noticing that there were a total of 16 eyes on the panel and that I, myself, have 20/20 vision, I was concerned). Then I decided that that wasn't a good idea.

I did get a chance to talk to Colin about his reference to Grain Belt Premium in the latter part of his book. A deliciously smooth Minnesota beer, Grain Belt Premium has long held the nickname "Primo" and Meloy, perhaps attempting to relate to 'Mats fans refers to it multiple times as Primo, but never by it's proper name. I pointed this out to the Colin--who was dressed much better than the actual music critics on hand--feeling that it was my duty as a former Minneapolitan. He didn't seem to care. Then I patted him on the back and said, "Great. Can't wait to hear that new Decembro's record."

Okay, I didn't do that.

Then we went to Dante's for Karaoke from Hell. Check out a review of it, upcoming on Team Tinnitus, which has changed its name from "How I Got Tinnitus" to account for the fact that it will soon feature a couple more writers from Portland. I am building an army.

I tricked out my blog. Or, Mark relearns HTML.

Check out the rad sidebar extras I've added. I feel like a genius. There's some links to things written by some very smart people. There will be more, but these are good to start out with. Check 'em out. And I started a live review blog called "How i Got Tinnitus." The first review is up. It's of the Divorce and the Carolines at Berbati's Pan last night.

Stupidest thing I did last night? Well I paid the karaoke MC at the Boiler Room 20 dollars--20 DOLLARS!--to bump me to the front of the line and play "Love Will Tear Us Apart." Who am I to walk in, waving my money around, demanding to be satisfied? I felt like Donald Trump. I sang like him too.

The O.C. made me dance like a little girl. Or, An unhealthy night on the couch.

Okay, so I'm watching the O.C. tonight with my housemate Mike and, in the middle of all the zingers and jew jokes, the girl who runs the superlame rock club in Newport tells Seth to come back for the Modest Mouse show that night. My response was to jump up and do a little dance akin to the one my little cousin does whenever someone mentions Spongebob. I would have thought nothing of it if not for my roommates laughter (a kind laughter, not a mocking one). All I can think about now is how pissed I was a few short years ago when Low's "Little Drummer Boy" was used in a GAP commercial. Sure Modest Mouse isn't directly selling anything, but it's a short leap from the teen soap to the teen closet.

Mr. Brock got quite a lot of face time in the episode; much more than that doof from the Killers did a few episodes back. And, refreshingly, the band didn't play the hits "Float On" or "Ocean Breathes Salty," opting instead for the delightfully paranoid "Paper Thin Walls" and "Blame It On the Tetons" (the closest thing to a ballad from the latest album). Oh and then they played "The World At Large" as the episode faded to black.

In the middle of the episode Mike turns to me and say "I wonder if Isaac Brock is sitting at home watching this and wondering what the hell is going on." I bet he is, and I bet when Marissa and her dad cuddled for warmth on the beach towards the end of the episode he got a little teary eyed.