I went to a St. Patrick’s Day Tea at The Crown and Thistle this weekend with my parents and aunt.  I was wearing a very green sweater and my red beard.  A quiet lady who worked there put her hand on my shoulder as she was walking by our table and told me, “You look like one of our real Irishmen today.”  I took that as a compliment.  I wore several pieces of green yesterday to a family party.  More today.  I’m drinking Irish tea and listening to Celtic music and enjoying the sun.  I am not much in the mood for drinking, though I think my heritage requires at least a pint or two of Guinness tonight, with the cabbage I am eating for dinner.

I delivered a head of cabbage to my parents’ house in Hampden on my bike rack today, wearing green.  I’m like a leprechaun today, I swear.

Triumphant rock.

Then I went to graduate school, and we all got older.  Even playing for the past year, we have not rocked like we rocked last night.  My skin is coming off, and every muscle in my fingers aches like a thumb-wrestling champion.  Cookie skin.  My thumb looks like I dragged it under my bike from playing 4-string bass chords sans pick.  I have blisters on my bass pumping fingers.  Typing this hurts.

Awesome.  With permission, maybe I’ll host and post some snippets of Rock.  One of these days.

I’m a little deaf today, too.

Awesome.

Two of our three wedding songs were from Ed Roland and the gang. “Heaven’s Already Here” and “Needs.” The first time Dan and Paulie and I met, we jammed on Collective Soul. “Gel” I think. I don’t recommend music very often, but I think I should start.

*[Mine is objectively good.]

When I got off the Light Rail yesterday at Cold Spring Lane, who is coming off the ramp but Paulie? And who stops on Cold Spring Lane but Paulie? Turns out I was away from my phone all day, and we were jamming/recording last night. Paulie was in a mystery traffic jam to put him there, too.

Cosmic.

And we got more stuff done, which was awesome. It’s getting to the point where our recording is going to be more intentional, so I have to stop playing through the PA and bring The Nemesis (that’s the model). My bass amp is designed for heavy gigging (which we really only did before I bought it), and it will knock stuff off your walls. Seriously. I haven’t played on that monster since Carbondale, when my downstairs neighbor was gone, and my only next-door neighbor was also a musician and didn’t mind. I can only imagine what would happen if I cranked that thing up in Roland Park.

I still giggle when I say I live there. And if you’re in Baltimore and know how broke grad students are, you’d laugh, too.

It’s nice to be on bass again, and not playing mandolin by myself in Boston and Carbondale.  We might put some MANDO on the album, but I generally do all my writing on bass.  Yes, you can write a song on the bass.  Hell, our drummer bucked that tired joke and wrote some damned good songs.  So there.

Perhaps we will make it available for download, here or if we set up a site just for our awesome jamming.  To get you excited, we’re working on a uber-cliche version of the Vaterunser in a death-metal style with your’s-truly screaming the vocals.  DEIN REICH KOMME!!

The cover of the latest album by The Roots has a hangman game on it, which is funny to me, since my wife and I like to play dirty hangman on scrap paper while we wait for movies to start at The Rotunda. I insist on getting there very early because I am very particular about my seat at the movies (!!).

I walked ten miles today, all over North Baltimore. Long story. Ate leftover fried rice I made last week with cheap chopsticks next to a lake that was a weird green with yuppies’ fertilizer runoff. Or maybe I was in the mood to hate yuppies a little today. I know I live in Roland Park, but please don’t get on my ass about it. The yuppies are not here that much anymore. Everyone is either very young or very old on my street. And it’s cheaper to live here than Hampden. Or maybe I don’t know what a yuppy is.

Tried to explain my dissertation topic to a religious 13-year old today, too. He genuinely tried to have a mini-dialogue about it, too, which gives one hope about the next generation of religious folks. Then again, I think he’s just a nice kid who happens to be religious, which makes me feel a different kind of hope — that there are nice kids out there when everyone paints such a doomsday picture of today’s youth. Which I guess might not include me anymore, at 27 & 1/2.

Noisy black and white shot of my bass and I reflected in my television set. With tomorrow being Shut Down Day, I thought I would pull out my bass because I thought it was Unplug Day, and I thought I should plug in now since I have not in four or five weeks. Had to play on my crappy little practice amp though, leaving the monster amp gathering dust instead of dusting the rafters and waiting for my rocking days to return. Because I’m not fond of posting photos of myself, this will go on during Shut Down Day, thanks to the awesome power of Wordpress. I’m thinking of shutting down tomorrow. I hope it works out. Maybe I’ll use my computer stool to sit and play some music, inspired by Gary’s Riff Dreams.

I have been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately with moving, my friends’ wedding, computer shopping, the dissertation. So when I finally start drifting off at 1:30 a.m. on a Tuesday night only to get startled awake by some complete idiot screaming and banging things around in the night, it’s the first thing I think of when I oversleep and don’t get up until 8:30 a.m. And I download Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake Up” (because I have no idea where the CD is) and crank it up on my computer, over their bedroom, with the subwoofer turned up. And unless he lives under a rock and never heard Rage or saw The Matrix (it plays as the end), he knows what this song is called and why furniture banged around above his head this morning and why bass is waking him up. Why this song is playing over and over and over. Why I took a ride on my desk chair all over the creaky wooden floors. I want him to come up here so that I can laugh at his complaints and slam the door is his face.

But then again, I think he’s positively stupid, so maybe he won’t get it. At least I know I’m not waking anyone else up. No one sleeps that late here on weekdays.

I really wanted to pull out my big bass amp that I haven’t played on since the apartment under mine in Carbondale was empty. Play the [sweet] bassline of this song along with it and knock some stuff off his walls. But I don’t have the energy to be moving that monster. And I don’t want to get myself into too much trouble breaking windows when the managers are so dang nice to us.

All is frustration
I can’t meet all my desires
Strange conversation
Self-control has just expired

My dissertation is largely about making hate (which I am not sure is avoidable by we feeble mortals) work for you, but I can’t seem to get anything out of the frustration with the Stupid Poopies who live below me.   No bad poetry scribbled into a Moleskine. No hardcore bass riffs or even any jingly-jangly mandolin tunes. Nothing.  Just two sleepless nights in a row and several pints of a new oatmeal stout.

I’m telling myself that frustration is not the tool that hate can be.  But I think I might hate our neighbors.  I hope not, though.  We’ve never even met, and I would hate to put someone in a pool of people I actually do hate — people who you’d hate, too, if you knew them.

So don’t get all judgy, you professors of the non-hate.  Fakers who think they love everyone.  Confess your hate.  It’s Okay.  I won’t tell anyone.  I’ll give you a hug to make you feel better.  My hugs are the best, since I am always soft and fuzzy, at least until I get out on my bike more.

No hugs for the Stupid Poopies, though.  No hugs at all.

Things are busy around the university these days, as you can imagine. Everyone in the philosophy department and the university situation at large seem much busier than I am, so everything seems to be swirling around me very quickly and blurily. I was happy to get away for a walk to the campus lake today, on a brisk spring day. I shot a ton of photos. Yeah. And that’s one of the campus lake.

I almost stepped on a duck. I made a red-headed woodpecker flee for the shelter of a maple tree. I trampled some wildflowers. And I scared the bejesus out of a poor painted turtle sunning itself on a submerged treestump. I think I accidently disturbed the whole scene with my clumsiness. Sorry, lake dudes.

So, while I’m not going to cross the line and actually endorse downloading un-purchased (i.e., stolen) music via the internet (cuz I never do that — right), I think you should aquaint yourself with a nice selection of tunes for some crazed-dancing, power-walking, fast-driving, love-making or term-paper-writing. Of, if you’re like me, all of the above. Except power-walking. I’m usually shuffling along in flip-flops these days. Or sauntering in Tevas. Never power-walking. Never. I swear.

Without further ado, get these songs for yourself to listen to somehow:
1) Simon and Garfunkel: “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”
2) Modest Mouse: “Paperthin Walls”
3) Depeche Mode: “The Love Thieves”
4) Kanye West: “We Don’t Care”
5) Colin Hay: “Overkill (Acoustic)”
6) Lunik: “Most Beautiful Song”
7) Interpol: “Obstacle 1″
8) The Police: “So Lonely”
9) Melissa Etheridge: “Secret Agent”
10) Jane’s Addiction: “Just Because”

If you ask me very nicely, I’ll email you one or two. Because Gmail rocks like that. That’s how it rolls, B. What, you want Gmail? Ask me not-so-nicely, and maybe I’ll give you a Gmail invite. Free. You see, you get the sweetest deals on this blog, baby.

As a side note, check out the latest REM release, Around the Sun. I really didn’t care for Reveal (2001), but I liked this one a bit when it came out in the fall. I heard it twice tonight, and I think it’s more on par with and in the vein of Up (1998), one of my favorites. At least download “The Outsiders” (featuring Q-Tip) and “Final Straw” from some online source, legit or otherwise. Or the whole album. Whatever works for you.

*[We have not had a normal coffee-maker in two years, as our five French presses have reigned. For multiple morning cups, however, we need something that keeps the coffee hot. More on the new toy later.]