Fuck this. I'm listening to the Strokes.

I'm listening to metal-like things and finding hope in them. The Melvins. I can't listen to things fast enough. There's hours of music on winamp and thirty seconds to listen to it all in my brain. I found myself missing Philip Glass in music class. Today was the final, not like it matters.

Math rock is seeming really exciting for some reason. The parts you don't get become the parts you get and when you get it you tap it and when it gets you you move to it. Dancing to the seventh listening of any given math song is like dancing with a wife you are almost tired of, except the dancing part.

I just want to play music until my fingers fall off. This will probably happen. More likely the neighbors will call the police and we'll invite the police in to play woodblock. And harmonies if they can sing. Maybe, depending on the desperation of the neighbors an entire police choir.

Love Drums will be ten megatons of you not believing what you are listening to. It will be like you put the cd in the player and ten minutes later are searching for the fastest way to kill yourself because you can't believe it will get better than what you are hearing. When you fail at finding death, you will find salvation in more Love Drums. You will start a band. When that one doesn't work out, you will start another one. Then people will ask about the first band and you'll say 'it didn't work out' and they'll say 'artistic differences?' and you'll say 'the bass player slept with my sister'. Ouch.

In my dream last night I was about to walk around a large field with Nirvana (the American one) on my headphones. As it started up, it turned out to not be the band, but the actual feeling. There were people on the field and they were doing mostly rowdy, distruptive things. The rest of the dream took me from Santa Cruz to Fresno and interchangably. A hypothetical Santa Cruz park (which we now have to find) became McKinley and Palm (or Fruit, whichever one is farther), as I raced to get to City College. I was in a large classroom with kids in Oregon, a math class, and there were some girls in the front row snickering at the futility of the teacher's lecture on how the way science people think is superior to the way literature people think. Then the assistant teacher turned into a claymation cartoon and made funny faces, but they were very benign for a claymation creature.

The heartbreak in my dream came from the vegetables on the floor in the kitchen, as if I was a fruititarian (only eats fruits, because they 'die' naturally) surveying some sort of vegetable holocaust, even though it had nothing to do with that.

Shower and sleep did not cure my hands of smelling like gas. The smell is pretty much a mystery. Not to me though.

There's something robotic about the Beatles that scares me. Like superband stops being a joke about having to enjoy them because... and starts being a scary robot group that writes almost better than Bach. Most of the time I'm just recognizing it, that scary robot quality, but its spooky when they actually effect me. "For No One" for example, was the tune of my heart breaking, even though not exactly.

The reason Beatles stereo is so great is because of how brave it is. Each part is strong enough, according to them, to have potentially their own side of the car or the headphones or the room. I'm afraid of stereo because I don't know what format in which I'll encounter it.

Tyler and Andy's "Get Lost" Day Two...

My left hand hurts. I'm not going to tell you specifically why, but it relates to why there is a black mark on my face. And also being pressed up against a car, close to being rich in a different way than I'd ever have thought.

My left arm hurts. During a race I fell and skidded and got back up and continued losing. A cut on my elbow bled through to the sweater. Andy won. I don't understand how my elbow could be torn up but not the sweater. Its intact.

My left shoe is dirtier than the right. Don't know what this says about the way I walked tonight or where I walked tonight. Or that I was in close proximity to both a party band playing sloppily to drunk teachers (Andy danced with a married lady, one touched my butt) or a blues band playing like they had never been in danger.

My left hand smells like gas, but not for the reason you'd think. Drank so much soda but never once went to the bathroom, still trying to figure that one out. Its always weird to be the one on guard for roadside peeing. I don't smell like cigarettes. Feeling more alive than 100% of Santa Cruz tonight. Maybe even the bay area. Parts felt like there must have been a religious holiday that wasn't spoken of, such was the reverence with which the shadow of quiet hung over parts.

We weren't going to get washed out to sea and drown. If a wave threatening enough came, you just get low and hold on to the rocks. I'm never going to become "But he had so much potential..."

The most disappointing part of the White Album played live for me would be how the bass in "Dear Prudence" would be treated. They wouldn't have the right amps (and even if they did they wouldn't have the RIGHT amps), they can't emulate the sound of studio > vinyl > cd > me, its just guitar to processor to modulator to not-right-amp to auditorium to me. The going into the chorus of "Dear Prudence" would not sound right, it wouldn't even be the right notes. I don't care how many takes on the tablature you'd have read.

To remember - "Three-in-a-row beautiful"

There's two different kinds of albums. Listening albums and party albums. Party albums are easy to talk about, stuff like Andrew WK. What can you say? 'Oh, I love how he layers the drums'. No shit. How about 'its music for a hundred bodies jumping up in down'. Yeah, that's it. Maybe instead of talking about how the record sounds, or what we think about why it sounds that way, we should talk about what it does. 'This record moves me'. Okay, maybe not that lame.

I'm thinking something more along the lines of what the record is meant to be used for. Tom Waits for example, you don't put that on to boogie down to, some people would even put it on to make the three am stragglers come back to their senses and leave. Early Tom Waits you put on when correcting Lit 1 essays so you can chortle to students writing stuff like 'terrifically amazingly' and you can chortle to Tom's clever lyrics. Later Tom Waits you put on when you want the enlightened portion of people that are shopping at the Borders in which you are employed to think 'hey, this place has class'

And there's different kind of listening albums. There's listening albums for smart people, stuff like Merzbow, who you'd have to be a genius to get, and Schoenberg, pretty much anything involving tone rows. Then there's listening albums for people who like their lyrics witty, stuff like Steely Dan and (later) Elvis Costello, where the intention is again, not, 'let's put this on and have a great time', but 'here's some clever lyrics that I'll enjoy'. Then there's listening albums for people who don't want to be bothered to think about it, stuff like Sigur Ros, where the thought while listening is 'pretty', but you wouldn't put it on at a party.

Maybe there's just the different genres that are party-friendly. House, for example, is party-friendly, while Free Jazz is not. You must know that when I am talking about a party I am talking about a party in which everyone is MOVING, not sitting cross-legged and talking about their majors. Rap is a treat, rock is an obligation. Pop is a wink-filled party, classical is your aunt driving to the supermarket.

I don't know what I'm trying to say, except that I've been listening to listening music all day despite my bodies desire to MOVE. Also, I'm sick. Like congested and faint. This is my sick day, Jazz Fusion and early Tom Waits.