Tag Archives: Blues People

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I Just Wanna Say This

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Well, spring is the mischief in me and in the world so it seems. That is all.

There are so many colors outside now. And the whole week is supposed to be nice, nice, very nice. Yesterday was cold and wet and I took the bus to work instead of riding the bike. Big mistake there. The bus was late getting here and then I ended up taking a cab back from work because the next bus was in 96 minutes. 96 minutes. How does that even work?

That reminds me of a newish thing I hate. It’s funny that I hate it because people say it when they hate or don’t understand something. I hate when people say, “Really? REALLY?” Everyone is at it now. It makes me want to say, “Really?” to them for saying “really.”

The bus situation would have been a perfect occasion for me to say “Really?” And that’s why I thought of the fact that I hate when people say that. Recently Leo from Zen Habits wrote a post about anger stemming from selfishness. Like if you get mad at someone for doing something then you’re just imposing your expectations on a world that obviously doesn’t conform to your expectations even half of the time. In light of that of course I’m just being childish when I expect the bus to come more than once every god damn hour and a half.

Yesterday when I got to work I was like, “Shit man I left my house at 9:30 and just got here at 10:30.” And this new dude at work says, “Well I left my house at 8:30.” Well I’m like shit why do you live so god damn far away? Because this mother fucker drives to work. I’m like damn man you practically decimated the ozone on your way into work every morning. Haha but of course we’re all at work on that one, or maybe it’s a conspiracy. But anyway, I guess you could counter by saying well shit the economy is such a bitch that people have to drive two hours to get a restaurant job! To which I’d say bullshit. The economy is depressed as Eeyore out this mother fucker that’s true, but restaurant jobs are everywhere. But maybe I’m lying to everyone. It did take me a while to find this one. And the general manager drives down from New Hampshire every day. I really don’t think it’s necessary but I could be wrong. Anyway if I had to drive two hours to get to the nearest job, you know what I’d do? I’d fucking move! AKA if I didn’t have any money I’d sleep in the employee bathroom. Fuck driving two hours to work every day.

Yeah but anyway. What the hell was I talking about in this bee-itch. Oh well it’s pretty obvious to certain readers that I have had a lot of coffee today. I try to get down on coffee, like I try not to drink it. I don’t know why, I hear bad things about it and I have a fear of addiction. And GF is definitely addicted. Not crazy addicted but she needs to have it every morning. So just a normal American. But to me that’s scary. I am not reinforced by that. I read a blog post somewhere about how coffee works, some blog about keeping your health or something…shit how did I even find that blog? But anyway it just blocks the chemical that triggers your body to go to sleep from getting into your brain somewhere, so in essence it doesn’t do anything for you, or that’s what the post was trying to posit. And I agree with that from a purely materialistic standpoint. And I usually try to think of things in purely materialistic terms. I have been thinking of cutting that shit out…materialistic thinking that is…but I’ll talk about that later maybe.

But anyway, when I drink too much coffee I feel really great for a little while. Maybe I do crash later and that’s why I am afraid to drink to much of it. But you know what I do when I don’t drink coffee? I crash the whole day. Ok no I don’t crash all day. I just stay at the same level all day. Maybe I’m bi-polar.

Here I found that blog post about caffeine.

Hey while we’re talking about other people’s blogs, here’s a reference:

Q: What do you say to somebody you just murdered for talking to much?

A: Well you’re DEAD now. So SHUT UP.

Oh good Christ that is some funny shit right there.

Hoo damn well it’s nice as a bitch outside and I am sitting in here like a mad man. I was rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s Man Without a Country. It gave me so much joy to read it. I feel everything that he says. The world is so fucked so let’s all laugh and dance, he says, and you can really get behind it because he is a very kind person and he never says fuck or shit and he’s smart and old and wise, even though he’s DEAD now.

Ah but it made me think maybe I should just stop reading new books and just reread the ones I’ve already read that were really good. I think that would be a satisfactory way of avoiding the feeling that I’m missing out on everything.

I’m listening to Charlie Parker now because I read most of Blues People about three times but I still haven’t gotten all the way to the very end. I’m like ten pages away and I put it down to read something exciting I saw at the library. And I’ve got this damn book from the library that will probably make it impossible for me to take new books out since I’ve had it for like three weeks past the due date. I always do that. I don’t see any reason for making a special trip to the library and I haven’t been by there so the book just won’t get returned I guess. But there’s a part of the book where he quotes from an earlier book of his, Cat’s Cradle and he says something like “There was a lot of suffering and misery so I made up lies so that everything would seem to have meaning and everyone could live in peace and happiness.” Something like that. And of course that’s the fake guru Bokonon saying that about Bokononism, which I’ve talked about before.And anyway it’s making me rethink materialism. If I could just convince myself of the lies maybe I could also feel fulfilled.

Well I could go on about whatever now. But I guess I’ll keep this to a somewhat readable length.

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Reading About Jazz, Listening to Swing

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Readabilty Index: Unreadable

This morning I woke up around 8:30. I had some kind of weird dream. Ah fuck I don’t really remember what it was. But at the time it was very vivid. I stood out in the kitchen just staring at shit for a while. I don’t know why. I didn’t know what to do. I always feel like I should be doing something important. But there’s nothing important to do.

Yesterday my girlfriend and I went down to the coast for our anniversary. We went to this Turkish coffee shop called Sofra. I got this orchid root drink that was too sweet and flowery for me. She liked it. She got a hazelnut latte that actually tasted like hazelnuts. I got an egg sandwich on bread that they made there. It was super light and flavorful. There’s got to be a better word than flavorful. Zesty. Nah. But fuck it. Then we drove to Newport and toured The Breakers. Then we went to lunch and had oysters and beer and chowder and a burger and talked about taking a trip to Europe instead of Asia. Then we drove around and went home. We were supposed to go out to eat but instead I got us some takeout from Bon Chon Chicken. It was delicious. And flavorful. So fucking flavorful. And we watched The Pirates! Band of Misfits (interesting quote from the Wikipedia article: “In January 2012, it was reported that the latest trailer of The Pirates! attracted some very negative reactions from the ‘leprosy community’.”). It was funny. I watched the end twice because she fell asleep halfway through. But then she fell asleep before the end again.

This morning I still had the Zipcar so I told her I’d take her to the train station before I dropped it off. Then I was going to go to the bank and then the library on the bus and get some more coffee, but once we got in the car I realized I had left my bag inside with the books I had to return and the cash I had to deposit, so I said fuck it. I came back here and started reading Blues People. I was looking for this other quote I’d seen and it didn’t take me too long to find it. Just about half an hour or…more like an hour I guess. I’m trying to just calm down and enjoy doing one thing instead of worrying about the things I’m not doing.

The quote was on page 199: “…the music by the mid-forties had also begun to get tagged with that famous disparagement art (meaning superfluous, rather than something that makes it seem important that you are a human being).”

It’s interesting because he’s talking about how the music was a way for black people to think and express themselves in a culture that wasn’t their own. Music was just something you did to get through. It was a necessary part of life. Whereas art is contrived. Or something. I guess in the 1940s the word ‘art’ had different connotations than it does today, because today it’s viewed positively. But I can still make a connection to my own life because I worry that what I’m doing isn’t art. But art, at least according to Kurt Vonnegut, is just something you should do to deal with life. In A Man Without a Country, one of my favorite books, it’s a book of essays about divers subjects, he says:

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

I think I’m definitely going to get in trouble for just quoting these books. Or at least I hope so. I just hope they don’t want any money, because I haven’t got it.

Ah shit speaking of that I was supposed to close my Wells Fargo account today before American Express tries to take some more money out of there and overdrafts the damn thing for the eighth time in two months.

But anyway. Why wasn’t I on here writing up a storm on Saturday? Well, shit, my girlfriend and I spent the morning together. Walking down to Oak Square and then back up to Treats bakery on Washington Street. Then I went to work and it was crazy. I missed the one bus, then I had to run up the street to catch a different bus, and it crossed the road just out of reach and I ran after it and it stopped at the next stop to pick up like five people. It was right in front of a stoplight that had been green for a while so I thought it would stop…hoped it would anyway. So I kept running in my thick boots and closed in…but that damn light didn’t change. And the bus went right through and then the light changed. So I walked the four miles to work. Ran the last mile because I was running out of time. Then we had a huge party and I made like four hundred bucks. But it was another one of those situations where people were getting drunk by the end and we were about to have to cut people off. Thankfully we were able to just close the bar at the appointed time and didn’t have to do that. It’s the one part of bartending that I really suck at. And then four of us got into a car and my friend took us all home, which was fucking suite.

Ah shit. But today I’m supposed to do the laundry too. Yesterday my fellow bartender texted me and asked me to cover for him today. I guess I pissed him off because I asked if he still needed me to cover for him…I guess it was because I texted him like ten hours after he texted me. Because I had my phone off all day because I had gotten like three straight calls from some bill collector. Oh that’s what my dream was about. My friend who went to Afghanistan came back and stayed with me and my mom at my childhood home, but he was still pissed at me but we were supposed to hang out a lot and I knew my girlfriend was not going to like it. Yeah.

So that’s what’s going on around this motherfucker today. Shit I better get to it.

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Bastards Downstairs

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God damn I can’t tell if these mother fuckers downstairs are purposely trying to get me out of bed or what. They rolled in here at 8 AM. It’s funny too because he’s the landlord, and he kicked the last people out for being too loud, and I thought they were too loud, too, but when he’s down there he’s louder than all of them! Jesus God.

But I had some interesting things to say, I thought of them all last night in bed and now I can’t remember shit. I can’t remember anything.

It’s become weird, because some people actually read my blog yesterday and I never expected that to happen, and now I’m worried that if I publish some stupid shit about people downstairs it won’t be any good. The other stuff wasn’t very good either, shit, I just threw stuff out there, but now I’m feeling the pressure. Maybe it’s just the hangover.

Last night I went out for a beer with my boss after work. That beer was banging! Bangin like a storm door. Drop dead awesome as shit. Hell yeah. This morning I ate some Puffins. This is the first time I consciously put the “get the blood flowing” theory to work on the old hangover. Usually I would try to sleep it off but I never got that that didn’t even work at all. WordPress wants me to use the tag “storm door” on this post. Fuck it, I might as well. Maybe I’ll get some salesmen.

Met this wine salesman the other day and shit went all awry. I couldn’t keep up with the bastard. I had no idea what was going on, I think he stole some money with the old Kansas City Shuffle. That right there is a hot mess. Kansas City Shuffle. I mean that’s from Lucky Number Slevin and reminds me about what djmatticus was writing about, movie quotes that you can apply to real life. I looked up movie quotes yesterday and saw something I figured was profound before I saw it there but as soon as I saw it there I completely discredited it. Oh shit this Zenmata thing is crazy. I don’t even know what it is. But it’s telling me that there really is a Kansas City Shuffle.

Fuck it might as well throw it on there.

I was thinking I would save this as a draft and then figure out how to separate it into a few more meaningful posts and maybe one rambling bullshit one, but fuck it. I think one thing I’m trying to get from this blog thing is my thought process on paper with dates and shit like that, so I’m just going to publish everything and edit after that.

Some posts I’d like to write before work today:

Rules of the blog, of which I have thought of one

Shout out post, to the cool people I connected with yesterday. Fucking awesome that people can just all the sudden have read what you’re writing and respond to it. I never knew it was possible. I’m straight out of the stone age with this shit.

Something about religious debate, I had a thought yesterday

Some Chuck Klosterman type shit about soul mates

Some Blues People type shit

Some shit about how it’s freezing up in this bitch! Better stand up and walk around.

On using a timer

On bartending

On drinking redeyes

Hoo shit I can’t be posting all that! I’d better just make it one post so I don’t blow away my new followers with all kinds of shit inundating the mailbox. I just wanted to use the word inundating there I kind of jammed it in. Dang Chuck Klosterman’s got this shit on lockdown. He has like a thousand essays just chilling on his website.

Ah fuck it. I’m not Chuck Klosterman that’s for damn sure. I got to do me! And me is posting a bunch of fucking posts all over the damn place like a crazy person and not worrying about the consequences. Fuck the consequences. Came in here with nothing I’ll leave with nothing. Try to act like this shit is going viral out this motherfucker. What is happening.

One thing I don’t like is that this time is in like California time or some shit. Need some EST around here.

Well, fuck it, I’ve done 728 words now. Looking at the word count means it’s time to stop writing, means your brains warmed up.

Message for myself and anyone who read this far – I promise to label all the posts that are worth reading. That’s kind of a rule right there.

But fuck it, I might as well get these fingers started, get them in motion, get the mother fucking timer started. Figure some shit out. Ten minutes to ten out here on the East coast.

Oh and I wanted to write about the god damn super bowl. Never saw that shit coming I’ll tell you what.

But yeah got to roll to work around two so that gives me about four hours of bullshitting. No actually it doesn’t because I got to do some cleaning.

My girlfriend and I are hosting our first AirBnB guest on Saturday night so got to get the room cleaned and all that.

Ah shit I got my paycheck last night and didn’t even look at it yet. Yet I had time to fuck around and comment on some posts and eat Broccoli Soup that my girl made but I thought it was cucumber so I ate it cold. I knew some shit was wrong. I just couldn’t place it.

Oh shit I got paid big time! Not that I can keep any of it of course, got to pay the mother fucking piper and his seventeen brothers that’s for sure. But good to see that anyway. Means I’ll be out of the whole in six years or so. Ah but what was I going to say…I don’t even know. Shit seems to be going alright.

Man, I started looking at these links to see what’s up…they’re pretty damn useful. I just learned about Bennie Moten and the real Kansas City Shuffle. I just used that shit from Lucky Number Slevin never once knowing what the hell it was. Turns out that shit is mad interesting. And it’s funny too because I’m reading this book, Blues People, by LeRoi Jones and he talks about Bennie Moten, who apparently wrote the song “Kansas City Shuffle.” Man shit just gets connected everywhere you go.

Ha, these links want me to link the phrase “fuck it” to Amazon where you can buy Eamon’s single of the same name.