to be cleaned up and blended w/ beat samples

Used to carry this card in my wallet
So if I was chatting with choirs of angels
'twould tell what I had, and what it would take to tear them away from me.
You've gotta think, 'man, that's the easy way to live'
Cause right next to that's the plastic saying 'someone's got to give'.
I hate to break it to you, folks, but if I was willing to waste another moment
Of your obviously valuable time,
Any one of us 'pill heads' with this in our wallets could tell you,
We've got ten sad stories to your every snarky line.
While you climbed the ladder corporate, facing glass delusions at every turn
We'd be in a field naked, slaying orchids,
Afraid these sirens we hear will mean the wires this time.
So the next time your face turns to anguish, your tax dollars fueling your gall,
Remember we've seen fear, rage, and languished
In shit where you're looking three feet tall.

Most people here
Would say my drugs are bad.
Might even jest it may be time
To reup the dose.
All I have to share with y'all is:
If you aint found a thing in this world
So hard to relate it makes your soul spin
You'll beg and plead, and pay out the ear
For a little round Self-preserver;
You aint found a thing like that?
You aint looking hard enough.

It's easy for the puppets to say
Drugs destroyed the minds of our generation
But before you go running for pulpits
Your demons aint weed, eX, yay, or the dragon
For those, it was you, in your teens, who were culprits
Finding your cure for concern in your parents the heroes' old station wagon.
Your speed, your weed, you're Leery
You bred a deep hole for Jung, Yippie Noonian Sung
Soon came MDMA, making everyone gay
Straight through coke, '80s dough, then McVeigh
Kazinski slang code, strang nodes, lost hope
Bought Guttenburg blocks, did dope, and coped
Writing down lessons ignored about people inured
Dialing cell phones all day, never having but one word to say.

The Federal Government has written executive legislation
Banning the distribution of drugs deemed 'functionally identical'
To existing dea scheduled narcotics. Arguing that chemical obfuscation
Was no excuse for conscientiously objecting
To an ugly death in America's war on drugs.
But way back when, corporate pill shills
Made fortunes making these same analogous toxins
To keep us from fearing the Jetsons.
The dentist's shot hits your jaw in exactly the way
You'd have felt from a whiff of the Yay, so
Send dear Dr. Sadist to jail,
But please lay off my freakin' TIKAL.


Most people here
Would say my drugs are bad.
Might even jest it may be time
To reup the dose.
All I have to share with y'all is:
If you aint found a thing in this world
So hard to relate it makes your soul spin
You'll beg and plead, and pay out the ear
For a little round Self-preserver;
You aint found a thing like that?
You aint looking hard enough.

I hate monopolies

This is ripped from an angry email I wrote. Pretty much speaks for itself.

I was deeply disappointed today by the state of Boston commercial radio. I had much driving to do, helping a friend move, and I wanted nothing more than to let the steady beats and staccato lyrics of mainstream hiphop keep the pace for the move. I found, though, that the programming practices in your studio have become so monolithic I was forced to switch over to New Hampshire alt. rock just to hear something different.

I don't mean a different kind of music, I mean I had to switch radio brands just to be able to hear a different individual song. I have some understanding of the economics of music production. I realize that it takes some capital investment to produce a bland, tasteless, pitch-corrected synth-pop single like "Fire Burnin", perhaps even moreso given the apparent lack of backing by anyone with any serious interest in artistic talent. It's probably a drop in the bucket to buy the air time required to prop up a label by playing their flagship work(?) on any radio station that matches the target demographic. But to make the rounds of every frequency in the area committed to playing the style of music I wanted to hear, and to find EVERY ONE OF THEM at some timestamp withing the SAME EXACT SINGLE left me with a bitter, betrayed taste in my mouth.

Both of the stations I've addressed this comment to belong to Clear Channel Radio. Both, in fact, accept mail at the same broadcasting address. It is not outside my imagination that you could coordinate from that building this kind of consumer-numbing barrage, all I ask is that you wouldn't. Please keep in mind, the alt. rock stations play 4 to 6 minute tracks, featuring instrumental solos and verses. If this shady corporate programming chases your customers to them, regardless of our musical preferences of the moment, it's quite likely you'll be on one of your distinct 2 to 5 minute commercial breaks by the time they decide to tune back in. I know you were when I did.

Quite sincerely,
PhineasQ

Never gonna happen

I'm in the habit of planning out and scripting my responses to horrible and unlikely scenarios, so that I get to look witty and cool should they ever happen. Here's one I'd like to share entitled, "The only way my crappy p.o.s. Craigslist special car could ever save the day."

me: *Stop for red light*
thug: *steps up to window* Getoutofthefucking car!
me: ...What? (can't be too witty, it'd break the fourth wall on the narrative)
thug: Get out of the car, and don't try anything!
me: So your plan is to rob me, and then drive away in this... thing? *lets off the gas and allows the car to sputter and stall due to its rain-soaked spark plugs and overambitious zero lb-ft load*
me: My advice is you go back in that alley and wait for a car worth stealing
thug: Don't fuck with me, man, just get out! *goes to open door, looks confused*
me: Yeah, that handle's busted. Look, man, you want my wallet or something? I mean, there's no cash or credit in there, but you can amuse yourself, as I often have, looking through all the papers telling me how much I'll need to make to have no money.
thug: whatever, just get out of here, loser
me: ... Actually, it's been quite a few seconds standing here with the radio powered. Think I could get a push as far as that downgrade up ahead?
thug: Fuckin hell, dude. Look, I already lifted a couple wallets today, and a few of them actually had money in them. I'll split it with you if you promise not to come around here again till you get that shit fixed...

Hello world

Depending on one's opinion toward solar scheduling, two very opposite timestamps could be attributed to moments like this. I've noticed that, on those nights (i.e. spans of moments during which I'm in the world's shadow, and thus it's dark outside) when sleep escapes me, I'm left with a lot of opportunities to evaluate myself and my impressions of the life I'm in. This usually results in a lot of realizations that come to me when there's no one I know awake to share with them - and in fact the existence of those realizations is probably a direct result of time spent away from popular interference. To most of the sun-scheduled world, this would mean that my favorite thoughts come to me in a time best labeled very early morning, right before they plan to be awake. To me, corresident alarm clocks most often feel like the closing bell on my day, heralding an urgency to finally yield to sleep before getting in the way of morning ritual and provoking some strange and awkward conversation on why I'm alert and prepared for any conversation at all when everyone I see is still trying to shrug off the dreams they've had interrupted by time commitments.

Regardless, whether you see it as time for breakfast or time for bed, this is the time for which I most desperately need a medium to store my first light conclusions, not because I consider them to always be particularly valuable, but because I want a chance to consider them at all. If I don't take a few moments to write down these thoughts I have when I'm by myself in the dark, then I will likely forget them over the course of more practical hours, and it will be like my favorite times to exist never happened, or at least never amounted to anything. I can't let it come to that, so I won't.