That friggin’ Reznor dude I used to do publicity for has announced today that the next album by the excellent Saul Williams (which Trent produced) will be released via a “pay what you like” business model, ala Radiohead’s “In Rainbows”. The album’s coming out on November 1st, and will hopefully be as awesome as Saul’s last record. Go check it out, and either do a pre-order to grab the stuff for free (at 192 bitrate, better than Radiohead!), or, if you like, hook Mr. Williams up with $5 and get higher bitrate MP3s and FLAC files, for you FLAC nerds going through Oink withdrawal.

After over a year of screwups with eMusic that none of us can even figure out, my score for “the ritual.” is finally available on eMusic. Big thanks to Taylor at TuneCore for sticking with it and finally getting to the bottom of this. As for the rest of you, if you’re eMusic users, you can help a brother out by getting my record there. It should also be coming to Amazon soon, and as you already know, it’s on the iTunes store (link opens in iTunes) and lulu.com, as well as a bunch of other places.

I seem to be writing these monthly now, or somewhere thereabouts, more for you guys than for myself, though I could probably track plenty of my own progress with them too, so I should go back and read them all and see what’s what, rather than just reading the previous month’s. I’ll let y’all know how that goes. In the meantime…

I’ll try to make this as brief as possible, even though I’m sure some of you might be up for me not leaning toward brevity:

Zoloft: Still doing what it’s supposed to, though I’ve felt some minor signs of pre-Zoloft me creeping back in, so I’ll be monitoring that, and possibly upping my dosage in the future. The Powers That Be, who I think make these decisions out of boredom more than anything, have started suggesting Luvox (which is geared toward OCD, interestingly enough), but upon my initial reading is kinda like suggesting a game of Russian Roulette, so we’re going to probably pass on that one.

Atarax: Total fucking garbage, for me anyway. No relief of any kind, and it’s kinda like taking a sledgehammer to my already messy sleep patterns. Done with that.

Xanax: Haven’t needed to take any in a while, and I took a half last time I took one with definite relief. I still realize that there are a ton of dependency risks with Xanax, but carefully managed, I really think that a Zoloft/Xanax combination is probably my best bet.

Therapy: There’s a lot of back and forth with my current therapist. Like I said, she is tough. Again, I want to like her, but I haven’t quite made my mind up yet. I feel like she’s rushing me a bit, which I can understand from one point of view because I came to their practice in full-on crisis mode, but some of the major issues that made it a crisis have calmed down, and the other stuff, while it’s no fucking fun at all, I’ve been dealing with for 33 years plus now. I’ll have to mention this in our next session. Change is supposed to be hard, scary, etc., I know, but it doesn’t have to be, and I do feel like I’m making decent progress, even if perhaps an outside, one hour a week window into my life would have it appear otherwise.

Sleep: Still fucked, but getting closer to my optimal day-night schedule (which I estimate is waking at 10 AM and going to sleep between 2-4 AM). Atarax WRECKED the pattern I had been establishing (which I’ve been charting with the awesome SleepChart software, in lieu of having the patience to set up a spreadsheet I’d be happy with), but it wrecked it in a way that pushed me far enough forward that I might be able to right it again, if that makes sense. What I’m also considering doing, strangely enough, is programming my television set to turn on CBS at 11 AM Monday through Friday, so I can track Drew Carey’s progress as host of The Price Is Right. Plus, as plenty of you have heard me say over the year, that’s a great way to start a day. When I used to play hooky from school, hearing “COME ON DOWN!” at 11 AM meant that the grown-ups had given up on trying to get you to go, calm had been restored to the house, and the rest of the day was going to fix you up right. I think that, as potentially OCD-ish rituals go, it might not be a bad one. Alarm clocks are dreadful, even music ones, where you’re at the mercy of whatever music it wants to throw at you (and even with a CD or iTunes-based solution, you just might not be in the mood to hear the theme from “Rocky” or “Eye Of The Tiger” or “Man In The Mirror” or “Drink, Fight and Fuck” or whatever motivational theme you choose to start a given day when wake-up time comes around). I can’t think of a single time in my life when I’ve been unhappy to hear the words “COME ON DOWN!”, so I think that’s a safe bet. (As an aside, Drew’s interesting. It’s kinda like having one of us up there, hosting the show. He still needs to pace himself more, and I think some of his existential humor about the show’s segments and specifically its sponsors may get him in Dutch, but he’s making slow, steady progress, too, and it’s still worth watching the show.)

Migraines: none since last month, thankfully, which is a minor miracle considering how messy my sleep got over the past 2 weeks.

Music: I’ve been dipping my toes back in the water tentatively. Kage and I are real rusty on the old material, having taken 9 months off from it, but we’re gradually getting back in fighting shape. We even did a short set in Second Life as part of our last rehearsal. It’s going to be a while before things are where I’d like them to be, and certainly a while before they’re where everyone else would like them to be, but it is a work in progress.

General life-type things: I’ve often said that every major reconstruction of what passes for my day-to-day life starts when I re-alphabetize my CDs. It’s part tradition, part ritual, but it’s really how I get going. I finished the alphabetization, and the ripping of all my CDs over the weekend, and I finished my archiving of the rips on Tuesday, so I won’t have to re-rip them if I have a hard drive failure (and yes, this is covered under Fair Use provisions, copyright Nazis!). This is something I’ve been trying to get done for 8 1/2 years, and it feels great to have it done. So, now I’m moving onto the rest of my belongings, throwing out things that are broken, putting aside things that can be sold (and there’s a surprising amount of stuff here that’s very sellable that I’m just not using; anyone need a Swordquest: Waterworld for Atari 2600?), and organizing what needs to stay. I really am making sound, sane progress on all fronts, but it’s also slow, methodical progress, because it has to be. If I half-ass this, it’ll just end up snowballing into the same kind of mess it is now, at some point. Thus, I haven’t been able to “monetize” it much yet (I love that word; it’s so pukey and marketingspeak-ish), and I also haven’t gotten the ball rolling on any potential disability case (I’m probably going to start that after the first of the year; I was thinking about it yesterday, and that’s what seemed to make the most sense to me, timewise…), so…

Money: stilll completely, utterly and totally fucked. No change on this. Hey, at least I’m making some progress on the other stuff, right? :D Any help you can offer is greatly appreciated.

That’s all for now. I’ll keep y’all posted on things, as they happen. I’m doing the best I can on transparency and full disclosure here, and as some of you might have notice, I’m not just using this site to tell you how fucked I am at the moment anymore. I’m trying to get back to writing the kinds of things you actually want to read.

Story here.

Damn shame. Homeboy laid down some great basslines with some great bands, most prominently Killing Joke, but also Prong, Ministry, Godflesh and a bunch of others. Saw him live a couple of times with Prong, very solid. He’ll be missed.

Never, ever take for granted the ability to have a decent night’s sleep and to wake up from it at a reasonable hour.

…and all I keep thinking is:

Why the hell didn’t anyone bust a cap in Angela Lansbury’s ass?

Let’s review, shall we?

The show was on for 12 seasons, 264 episodes. Assuming that Jessica Fletcher (Lansbury) didn’t solve a murder in every single episode…we’ll use a conservative number of, oh, 200 murders solved in 264 episodes, though it’s possible that the number was much higher, considering that multiple people may have been murdered in some eps (I’m not hugely familiar with the series, though I have watched it). Now, that’s 200+ murders that were solved by one woman, a woman of relative fame to boot, as she’s a mystery novelist. Some of those had to have made the papers. Considering that, from what I’ve seen of the series, most of the murders were committed by people who weren’t far from the crime scene, don’t you think this might set off some warning bells in the perps’ heads? “Oh, fuck, it’s Jessica Fletcher! I’m screwed! Unless…”

I mean, help me out here, people! I’ve seen footage where the perps go into the long-winded, Dr. Doom-ish speech where they essentially confess and tell Lansbury’s character why they won’t get caught, which always seems to buy just enough time to keep her from getting shot, but couldn’t you beat that to the punch by just kicking the old broad down the stairs 15 minutes into the episode, after realizing who’s snooping around and how good said person is at solving these things? She has lunch and tea in the homes of plenty of these murderers…how hard would it be to poison her? The opportunities to have spared fellow murderers the indignity of being taken down by Angela fuckin’ Lansbury abounded, and yet, no one took the bait, not the murderers nor the writers of the show, who included sci-fi sacred cow and current “Thor” writer J. Michael Straczynski! (Yeah, think about that the next time you see Thor kickin’ the ever-lovin’ shit out of someone: the guy writing the dialogue used to write “Murder, She Wrote”. Sorta shrinks the testes a bit, don’t it?) That couldn’t have been fun for the perps, getting to the fictional prison where all fictional murderers on TV shows go, and having to exchange stories in the yard…

“Who took you down?”

“Chuck Norris.”

“Oh, shit! How about you?”

“Steven Seagal.”

“Before he got fat or after?”

“After”

“Well, at least he was a badass at one point. How about you?”

(sobbing) “…”

“C’mon, tell us…”

“…Angela Lansbury.”

I can’t imagine that there was a dry eye or a spare tube of Preparation H in Cell Block B on that day.

Seriously, murderers! You had 12 years to stop prisoner rape on a weekly scale, and you dropped the ball! How hard would it have been to take out Angela Lansbury? We’re not talking Joe Friday, we’re not talking about the aforementioned Walker, Texas Ranger, we’re not even talking about that fat shit Grissom on the CSI show…we’re talking about a woman who was in “Bedknobs And Broomsticks” a looooooooong time before the series even started! This is an entry-level job! I wouldn’t do it because I’m not a hardened killer on a television show, but I could probably take out Angela Lansbury while jerking off without messing up my rhythm! (Flow is important, after all.) I just don’t get it! Why was such an easy job bungled? I want answers!

Oh, and before any of you smart-asses try and say “Well, it didn’t happen on “Matlock” either”, let me tell you something about “Matlock”. Ben Matlock used to be Sheriff Andy Taylor (not to be confused with Duran Duran’s erstwhile guitar player), before he got put in the Witness Relocation Program for some bad shit that went down in Mayberry, and both characters were played by Andy Griffith. Anyone with half a brain knows that Andy Griffith will stone cold fuck your shit up as soon as look at you. That’s like Television 101. You do NOT fuck with Andy Griffiith, especially not if he’s eating Ritz crackers at the time, because he really gets his rage on if you interrupt his Ritz breaks. Don’t even try to front and say that Angela Lansbury’s in the same weight class. You know how I said that I could take out Angela Lansbury while jerking off? Andy Griffith could kill 10 Angela Lansburys just by THINKING about jerking off.

Pace yourself, Drew! You’ve gotta do this gig for 35 years, man!

Really solid, pretty record. Nice combination of good Radiohead and “important” Radiohead. I think it’ll do very well for them if they get the distribution squared away, because it’s very listenable, and I think it has the potential to win back a lot of the people they alienated post-”OK Computer”. Good stuff, and I think it’ll hold up to repeat listens.

For those wondering about the ordering and downloading process (since I think some are more curious about that than the actual album), it was slightly intrusive on the ordering side (Phone number as a required field? Hopefully, we don’t end up renaming this album “OK Telemarketer”…), and I take points off for using 160k MP3s (320s would’ve been appreciated), but they were solid sounding 160s, so we’ll let ‘em slide a bit on that. After all, I did pay $.93 USD for the record. =) The most important part of the system was in good order this morning, though: the download email did work like a charm, and the process was fast and simple (they send you a link to the zip file the mp3s are in, you click it, it downloads quickly, done).