Track six of Red Hot Chili Pepper's By the Way has been playing almost non-stop in my car while I drive around, and non-stop in my head all other times. The Zephyr Song seems to perfectly fit everything I've been doing here in Phoenix. Driving around in the wee hours of the morning. Driving around in the middle of rush-hour. People-watching at a coffee shop, working on my laptop, reading, lounging around. Standard Ray fare. But it's not just that the song makes a good soundtrack to my life, I find it very difficult to stay stressed while I'm listening to it. My worries just seem to melt away... and I drive really fast no matter what the traffic's like. The song just seems to have this infectious passion for life. It's along the same lines as what Kerouac said in On the Road:

"Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness-- everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being."

*shrug*

drawn sometime during freshmen year.

X - Is your paintball gun good?
M - Yeah, it's awesome.
X - How good is it?
M - What, you want a number? Fine. It's 8 good.

G - M has never used a condom, but has never gotten a girl pregnant. It's because his sperm is just like him. They think just like he does. They're in there swimming their way through tubes and one of them says, "Waitaminute. This is not getting us a jetski. We're outta here."

E - You ever walk around your house just butt-ass naked? Not your room, your whole house?
X - I do that at my girlfriend's apartment sometimes.
E - Nah man, that's different. You should be naked for yourself. You should be naked for your own sake.

I wouldn't say that this is a full blown obsession so much as part of something I'm becoming increasingly interested in. The title comes from a CD my buddy Ethan and his band Continuum put together called Discontinudity. Lately, I've been listening to it with new ears and being totally blown away by all the lyricism and depth of wordplay. This is a new thing for me. I've never been one to listen to or even notice lyrics. I can listen to some songs a hundred times over without getting a single line closer to being able to sing along. I'll probably study this in greater detail if I ever make it into grad school for psych, but suffice it to say that I'm not the only one who doesn't comprehend lyrics and I haven't pegged the cause of it yet. Thinking back, the first and last time I paid attention to lyrics was back in the 80's when an older cousin came to visit and blared Depeche Mode's "People are People" in the living room.

People are people so, why should it be
you and I should get along so aw-ful-ly?

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Perhaps my young brain recognized the overwhelmingly destructive power of the stupidity in these lyrics and sought to protect itself from further possible damage by denying any sort of higher processing of lyrics ever again. The words come and go, but I only hear the rhythms and the melodies; no meanings are stitched together into anything resembling coherency. I think this is very similar to the nag filters that go up when parental units want to "have a chat." Space your nods out to match sentence stops. Say "yea, you're so right" when you detect a pause. Think about what movies you haven't seen this summer yet, and if they're worth seeing. This rarely is even voluntary for me anymore. My brain has already decided that in lyrics, as in nagging, there is little worthwhile content to spend it's feeble resources processing. Considering that I've subjected myself to the stylings of Gravity Kills, my tendency to overlook lyrics is probably a very good thing. No telling what damage could be wrecked by lyrics like Hey hey hey / I'm guilty, and you're guilty too / hey hey hey. Pure undeniable genius.

Outside of a very few exceptions (Tool, They Might Be Giants-- diversity is a wonderful thing), I never considered lyrics to be an incredibly important part of the music I listened to until these last few weeks. When I went home for the weekend, I spent a great deal of time driving around in a car without a CD player, so I spent a great deal of time listening to the radio; subjecting myself to "what the kids listen to these days." One song that caught my attention was Eminem's "Without Me". Previously, I had simply dismissed the Eminem phenomenon as another manifestation of stompy fist-pumping angst music so prevalent these days. This time, however, something caught my attention:

I'm back, I'm on the rag and ovulating.

What the fuck? Something clicked. Maybe it's just my fascination with ovulation. I made a conscious effort to pay closer attention to the rest of the song and laughed through most of it. Fantastic. I had never cared about rap or hip-hop at all before because I didn't think that there was much to listen to if you weren't listening to the lyrics. (Don't talk to me about beats. I get my beats elsewhere.) On top of that, the few and far between lyrics I tuned into were usually about getting ho's and gangsta's and bling bling and getting ho's. The retardation that is Top 40 pervades every song it brings into its fold. I comprehended how Top 40 has perverted popular notions about what techno is and can be, but still, I had let it warp my views on what hip-hop and rap were. Fortunately, amidst the drivel there are one or two gems that got me finally interested in further exploring these genres (beyond the safe shores of Top 40.) And luckily, I have a slew of people to help me with my expedition.

My buddy Ethan and I were his place playing a couple rounds of chess. I told him about recently becoming fascinated with hip-hop and lyrics. He decided that my education should begin at the beginning, so he put on a De La Soul album to play in the background. As the chess game progressed, I stopped paying attention to the music. I thought about Nabakov and how he saw the chess board as a square pool of limpid water with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible upon the smooth tessellated bottom, which to [his] confused adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud.. My move. Look. Pieces hinting at utter domination. Think. One move in advance. Two. Three. Sweet. Awesome-ness is about to be unleashed. Pause. Look over everything again. Calm before the storm.

I'm like Bruce Lee
Beatin up the cootchie
profusely

Fuck. I forgot what I was about to do. I was laughing too hard. Slick Rick replaced all the strategy and forethought with an image of Bruce Lee posing in classic Bruce Lee style, tensing his arms, making his crazy face while he... uh... beats up the cootchie profusely, I guess.

Yeah. Something like that. In any case, my interest was piqued. I went to a hip-hop show last Friday night to check out Ethan's band / group Continuum in action. There, I was absolutely blown away by a guest freestyler / poet / artist named Abacus. Whereas before my recent epiphamy, I would've only heard bluhblahbluhblahblublublahblahblah to which I'd respond, "Damn. He's saying a lot. Awesome." This time, I strained to follow along. I strained to undo years of habit and conditioning and strained to follow the words, to follow the story of a guy trying to talk to a girl, to someone, to anyone. Anyone to just hear what he was trying to say without dismissing him as a lunatic. It's a story similar to one we've all experienced; nobody sees me for who I am, nobody hears me as I want to be heard. The difference is that Abacus told his story without angst, without anger, without whining. He told it as one who was incredulous, but resigned to his situation. And he told it at 500 words a second weaving sound and meaning together into a stream of amused desperation. Incredible. Awe-inspiring. Nothing would short of watching the performance first hand and realizing that "oh my fucking hell; dude is freestyling" does the man or his art any sort of justice. It was too good, it was too amazing. And as my friend Chuck pointed out, "It's just not fair."

Since then, I have gone to another show, I'm planning on going to several more, and I'm trying to put a dent in this monstrous stack of CD's recommended by just about anyone with a decently formed opinion about hip-hop. And so the journey begins. The first few tentative steps have been taken. I will try to keep posting of my travels.

Frequent readers of the site and others who keep close tabs on me understand that my life is not one that would be called "particularly interesting." As such, I spent one evening rummaging through old pictures I took with my digital camera. I forgot that I had amassed quite a collection of photos of tabletops I started sometime last summer for lack of anything else to take pictures of (neighbors got a new set of curtains.) Here is the first of what will be a regular feature.

July 20, 2001 in dorm room (Evanston, IL)
This is why I thought I was cool enough to have a website. It is the top of my fridge and shelf-thing in my dorm room and it just happened to show a good cross section of most of my interests at the time. Last summer I had absolutely nothing to do. I was taking one class that met 3 hours a week and that was taught by a friend of mine. I was playing ultimate frisbee three or four times a week. Outside of that, the only thing I had scheduled was occasionally sleeping. Most of my friends had left the area or were working more than a few hours a week. The people who lived around me in the dorm were all taking Orgo-- one of the hardest classes here at NU-- so none of them intended to see any daylight that summer. After a few weeks, I figured I had to find something better to do before they killed me out of sheer irritation. There were a few times I bumped into them as they came back from 8 hours of class whereas I was wandering out of my room having just woken up at 5 in the afternoon (did I mention that I had a night class?) Whenever that happened, they didn't say much, but those eyelids got a little twitchy.

The only arranging I did for the picture was to move the case logic in the back to where it would be more readable. In it, you can barely see two DVD rips; Rounders and Chasing Amy. That case logic contains about 80 DVD rips-- the rest of my collection is elsewhere. The stack of books on the left contains Idoru by William Gibson, the Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis, Hold'em Excellence by Lou Krieger and Modern Portfolio Theory by Robert Hagin. Next to that, there's my Brood War CD caught in a rare moment outside my computer. For a few years, I think my interest in the game Starcraft and the expansion set Brood War could be classified as "near fanatic." My cool friends (as opposed to my dork friends) think they appreciate how much of a complete dork I can be. They have absolutely no idea. I can be downright embarassing without even trying. The stack of CD's was meant to introduce and educate me in the ways of misc rock (popular and non) as was the Rolling Stone magazine. I read, skimmed, and referenced the stack of books on the right to learn Perl and to create the dynamic and magnificient site you see before you today.

Then, of course, there's a Red Bull to help me get through everything. The water and Gatorade are to keep my piss from coming out like toothpaste. Like I said before, I played a ton of ultimate. It's humid as hell out here during the summer; I basically irrigate the field with my sweat every time I play.

So that's what I spent a bunch of my time on. I didn't sleep any earlier or any less, but I guess staying in my dorm room more kept me from wandering around in my pyjamas and annoying my suitemates to violence.