Plague Diary: The Cruelest Month

Wednesday April 1
The amount of work ramps up daily, even hourly some days. Telecom assistance and setup alone takes up huge chunks of the day now, and there's still the regular helpdesk and dashboard maintenance. It's good, but I reserve a part of my mind to review personal projects still in motion. So many sounds to check out, ideas to get scratch recordings of, fiction and poetry themes to sketch out for further development as soon as possible, whatever that means.

It's great to have that creative hunger returning more and more every day, but only when there's enough time to do justice to at least some of those ideas. And it's hard to "make time" when you're tired at the end of the day.

Probably not an ideal time to indulge in the usual April Fools office pranks, as tempting as it may be to glue phone handsets to their consoles, and put clear plastic wrap under toilet seats. Maybe the odd upper-decker will suffice.

There is a strange sensation of everything moving a mile a second, and yet standing still. It makes no sense, and yet there it is. The eerie silence of a massive ocean wave rearing to its full height, just before it crashes with a deafening roar.

Imagine a 9/11-sized body count -- or two -- every week for the next month, maybe the next two months. And not in Puerto Rico this time, but in New York and Florida and Michigan and other places that can't be ignored or written off so easily.

Adam Schlesinger died today. I like his music a great deal. He was five months younger than me.




He was killed by a cellular phone explosion.
They scattered his ashes upon the ocean.
The water was used to make baby lotion.
The wheels of promotion were set into motion. -- Fountains of Wayne, Mexican Wine

Friday April 3
Looking forward to the next sinecured moron scuttling to their battle station to let us plebes know how much the idiot's "tone" is "changing," an internal heuristic signifier they use to indicate that they can change the angle of their wretched coverage accordingly. It didn't even last an hour the other day, before it was back to its usual tricks and insult comedy.

At some point you have to glance at the track record and conclude that individuals are either irredeemably stupid, or flat-out complicit. Create a line between those two points, and you will find many MSM journos somewhere on that line. And they know it. A hit dog hollers.

Ten million out of work in just two weeks. More than that, really, since many states' application sites are down, or their processes (like Florida's) are deliberately set up to be difficult and opaque. Or applicants just can't get through at all, on the phone or on the net.

It will be twenty million by the end of April. At least. Count on it.

Hope to have enough energy at the end of the day to work on something creative. Brain feels like a whirring engine in need of oil. Or sleep, although sleep has been rich and deep lately.

Keeping a spreadsheet to track all the new tones on the keyboard software for easier reference. There are thousands of tones, hundreds of drum kits and patterns and loops and all the rest. Kind of the same thing with books -- too many at hand to read in a lifetime, so you have to sift and move forward quickly, before more new cool stuff comes through.

Knocked out a few quick scratch tracks to solo over, just live guitar and bass over programmed drums. If it sounds real, it's "real" enough. Just basic demos for now, something to work on and develop the ideas.

Sunday April 5
Daughter's birthday today. Bummer that she can't go anywhere or do anything. She handles it well, enjoys the pizza we ordered, gets back into the usual chat group with her friends, watches the movie we got for her. Kid's a trooper.

Makes me think about all the kids coming of age now, born around the turn of the century, never knowing anything but a country perpetually at war on the other side of the world, and the people in charge using -- or engineering -- economic crises as an excuse for keeping a handful of people fat and everyone else on the edge of poverty.

That, plus the damaged climate and planet, mean a nasty inheritance we are leaving for them, and nothing to pay for the eventual cleanup. Thanks boomers, it really is all about you. You won. How does it feel?

Monday April 6
Really good late-night recording session, some good tones on the rhythm tracks. I still have all my analog gear -- Mesa Boogie 4x12 speaker cabinet, rack Marshall 80-watt amp, rack effects, etc. There is something ineffably "organic" about big speakers with lots of wattage pushing physical air.

But as I dig deeper into all the on-screen digital tones, I am impressed. The simulated amplifiers and cabinets are very, very good, and easy to dial up -- plus you can interchange mikes and mike angles, speakers, amps, all that shit, with just a click. Dozens of amps, from classic vintage to modern crunch, tons of effect pedals, all of it. You can only go through the various combinations an hour or so at a time before your ears get tired, so there's really enough here to last me the rest of this year -- and I've barely scratched the surface on all the amp/cab sims and "pulses" I have available, I just loaded the fifteen percent or so that were familiar to me.

It's a great problem to have.

I already have at least an hour of instrumental material (chord progressions and melodic themes) that I'm ready to develop and start recording, and then another half-hour of songs, if I can get happy with whatever words I come up with. Bottom line is that I can easily see knocking out close to two hours' worth of material, without ever turning on a real-life amplifier/cabinet combo, and still being happy with all the guitar tones. It's nice to still be amazed by that concept once in a while. I don't take any of this for granted.

Tuesday April 7
Listening back on the mixes is maybe the most important part of the recording process for me. Still like the tones I got, just not happy with my performance. I can punch-in the fixes, but I hate doing punch-ins. Might just do another full pass. There's always that internal struggle between the wannabe perfectionist, and the "done is better than perfect" inclination to get shit done.

It's the struggle itself that makes things happen.

Compromise is for lesser souls. Die, werewolf zombie! -- Tracy Jordan, 30 Rock

Wednesday April 8
Every "journalist" who is still attending or even mentioning the daily disinfo sessions needs to stop, right now, think about what they envisioned for themselves when they spent their trust fund going to j-school and interning, and adjust accordingly. Do you want to be a megaphone for a megalomaniac? Do you want to be a navel-gazing asshole complaining about how tough it is to "frame the discussion"?

There is no "frame" for this. There are only facts and lies, and if you can't be relied on to point out which is which, then learn something useful, like asking me if I want fries with that. Truth does not need a frame, folks. Only cowardly editors and headline monkeys need a fucking "frame" for open incompetence and deadly corruption.

Thursday April 9
Bernie drops out. There are no more excuses for the DNC types now, it's fuck or walk, folks. The equation is amazingly simple -- some voters need something to vote for, some will show up just to vote against the monsters currently in place. It should be a cinch to identify both groups and give them full dump-truck loads of material to motivate them.

The main thing is to stop with the "electability" bullshit. This cannot be repeated too many times -- you know who everyone across the spectrum assumed was completely unelectable? That fucking clown lying to you every day about the plague while he stuffs the treasury into his coat pockets.

Electability is what people think other people are thinking about when they vote. That's it, and as such, it is fraught with logical fallacies and biases and flat-out methodological guesswork.

The act of voting is not nearly as complicated as the folks in the perpetual campaign consultancy racket would like you to believe. It is merely this -- look at the available choices, and make a reasonably informed decision on which individual is most likely to enact policies closest to your personal preferences, and what will most benefit your families and communities. Everything else is myths and lies and marketing (which are all the same thing, really).

It's kind of like sex or driving or playing a musical instrument -- pay attention, but don't overthink it.

Friday April 10
Good Friday? The best Friday, yuge, tremendous Friday. What a great week for the hallowed, insatiable market beast, to whom we sacrifice the weak and vulnerable routinely and willingly, in order to appease its capricious will.

Lookie here at this photo, if you would like a concise summation of what our economy really is, at its spent black heart:

Think of that -- sixteen million people out of work in just three weeks. That's five percent of the total population, not just the workforce. And it's the best news those motherless fucks have heard in four fucking generations.

You like apples?

Again, this positive feedback loop is entirely due to straight-into-the-veins socialism, period. Anyone who tells you differently is on the pad. Public subsidy, private profit. There is no other honest interpretation of this dynamic. They took the money, and now they are running with it.

I don't know if the, er, Steak-umm Twitter account is some sort of socially conscious parody, like an earnest Nihilist Arby's take, but this thread is worth reading and considering.

However....

Reaching out to the "vulnerable" is one thing, but as this point, there's not much percentage in expending too much effort in trying to sift between merely vulnerable and people whose grievances have gone into that toxic spiral of insanity and spite. The library is still free, you know. Only people who want to stew in their ignorance are still ignorant. Life is too short to go around trying convince these fucking toads to read a goddamned book once in a while, seriously. Let them live with their consequences, while you insulate yourself from them as much as possible.

Don't like it? Me neither. I am certainly open to better ideas. Making overtures to nasty, spiteful thugs is not at the top of that list. Nobody ever asks them to grow the fuck up or meet anyone else halfway, and that is a huge part of the problem.

Whatever the final body count of this plague ends up being, it really doesn't matter whether the threat was "real" or "overblown" or what-have-you. They have shown you what they will do when the "real" end-of-the-world shit comes down. And there are simply some people who have no stake in that game, no personal gain from it, and they still support it wholeheartedly.

Those are the lessons that nobody -- Republicans, Democrats, mainstream scriveners, professional pundits -- seem to be willing to say aloud. The politicians and financial hucksters that own and operate this popsicle stand for their personal gain, do not care about you in any conceivable way, shape, or form. And there are people whose communities and lives are being gutted by that, and they're still cool with it.

And we keep being told that we need to think of things from their point of view. Awesome. I suppose we have all wondered from time to time what was going on in the worm-ridden brains of Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer.

I think many people have trouble really considering the practical ramifications of that....let's call it "aggressive indifference" for lack of a better term. They see the idea and know what the words mean, but it really hasn't hit them how completely indifferent these transnational merchant princes are to any of the fundamental ideas that their cultural arms have inculcated the rabble with over the years -- the ideas of country and community and family.

Hashtag AloneTogether, oh really? How much you want to bet that right now, Dear Leader's daughter, who he desperately wants to fuck, is securing trademarks from the Chinese on PPE and body bags and coffins and mobile crematoria? How much do you think the Kushner family alone have profited from this crisis, not to mention all the "Joseph Pizza" donor types, the guys who learned everything they know about "business" from Goodfellas and The Sopranos, and are merrily setting the gas-soaked rags in the corners of the tiki bar, just cashing in on the bust-out. There's way more money moving here than there was after, say, Hurricane Katrina.

You just watch -- or not, since the media gatekeepers are all too happy to self-censor any truly disturbing facts. Pace Chomsky, they don't even have to be told to hold back -- they got the job because they know what to do without even being told.

I wonder why that might be? [strokes chin thoughtfully]

In spite of all that, it's a fine day out there -- the weather is beautiful, I will bug out of the office early this afternoon and get a jump on the lawns, and tomorrow we'll cue up a nice tri-tip, make some cocktails, record some acoustic guitar ideas, walk down the country road, and maybe watch a movie, before playing and recording and writing some more. If nothing else, it's proving to be a great time to flex creative muscles.

It's going to be an excellent weekend, but I feel for all the people who won't have one.