Entry Thirty-Two.
Friday 2004.12.03, 11:13 PM CST.
One year older, and so much is different.

"hold your breath and count to ten.
fall apart. start again.
hold your breath and count to ten.
start again. start again."
(Placebo, "English Summer Rain")

Today, I write to you from home on what is normally a workday, in a lukewarm room smelling faintly of blackberry incense.  I officially became another year older today, so I figured that was a good enough excuse to create a personal holiday and take the day off from my day job.  I figured I would clean my apartment a bit, go get my oil changed, and hopefully post a Journal update.

I haven't posted an update for a very, very long time.  In certain ways, I've been too busy to do so.  In other ways, I've just been hesitant to do so.  I have LOTS of big news, and while some of it is really great, some of it is far from being good.  I'm going to summarize all of the stuff to start off, for those of you with low attention spans.

1) I have an awesome new girlfriend.
2) My mum has cancer.
3) I saw the Dresden Dolls in concert (with the awesome new girlfriend).
4) I DJed another party at the Gypsy. Hooray.
5) I'd like to thank everyone who didn't vote in November.
6) Had problems e-mailing me over the past, oh, year or so?  You're not alone!
7) Some miscellaneous crap.
8 ) I hate Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.

So, I'll now tackle these items individually in greater detail.

1) I have an awesome new girlfriend.
While the top two items are both extremely important I wanted to start off with good news.  I have a new girlfriend named Lanna, and she means the world to me.  That last breakup was such a blessing in disguise.  Lanna is the most wonderfully compatible person that I've ever gone out with... and I can honestly say that I have never been in love like this before.  If you had asked me five months ago if I thought that I would somehow stumble onto my near-soulmate before the end of the year, I would have said it would be impossible.  It was my theory, starting a few years back, that I would never meet nor know my soulmate, as she apparently had gotten squashed by a truck somewhere in Europe years ago, thus cancelling out any possibility of the Badger having a particularly happy life.  I might not have found a 100% soulmate (while I believe wholeheartedly in the concept of a soul, I do not believe in the concept of a soulmate), but luckily, I think I've found the next best thing.

Lanna is absolutely phenomenal.  I don't have a really great picture of her to share, but I will soon.  I can at least tell you that she's got beautiful reddish-brown hair, light blue eyes, and a smile that makes me melt. Kids, I can say that she is probably "the one."  From our first date, I knew that Lanna was special.  Almost immediately, we were making each other laugh, throwing obscure pop-culture movie quotes back and forth, and amazing each other with the fact that we knew what each other were talking about. It was almost as if we'd known each other for years.  The more time I've spent with her, the more perfect the relationship has seemed.  She's into British comedy, and even knows characters from British television series.  She actually owns music by BT, and she actually knows who Wesley Willis was.  She gets together with friends to play video games.  She likes mustard and hates mayonnaise.  She would have no problem with me calling her a "geek," because I think that's a label with which we're both comfortable and even proud.  She accepts me for the person that I am, and she has a talent for making me feel like one of most wonderful people on earth.  I can't explain our chance meeting with anything less than divine intervention, and I thank God for bringing her into my life.

2) My mum has cancer.
I won't go into #2 much, but on November 4th (election day, ironically), my mum went to the hospital to have a biopsy done for possible lung cancer.  While they were in there, the crack medical staff managed to collapse my mum's lung.  She recovered from that quickly enough, but then soon after had to face the fact that she indeed did have cancer.  Keep in mind that my dad's been dealing with lymphatic cancer for six or seven years, but my grandpa (my mum's dad) was only diagnosed with cancer last year and then died in January.  They've told Mum that her cancer is in its early stages and hopefully they'll be able to stop it.  She's now undergoing radiation treatments and chemotherapy.  Though my parents and I have had our naturally rocky times, she means a lot to me.  If you're the praying type, please pray for her.

By the way, just for fun, think about how much the average cancer researcher or scientist makes in their exhausting efforts to save thousands upon thousands of lives.  Then, think about how much professional football players make for throwing a ball, catching a ball, and running around a field.  Compare those two dollar figures. Pretty hilarious, isn't it?

3) I saw the Dresden Dolls in concert (with the awesome new girlfriend).
Lanna and I saw the Dresden Dolls (an amazing, AMAZING musical duo from Boston that I'm sure I've mentioned here before) on October 10th at the Gypsy Tea Room in Dallas.  We were standing only two rows back from the small stage, only a few feet away from the insanely gorgeous Amanda Palmer and she pounded on her keyboard and belted out such fan favourites as "Good Day," "Half Jack" and "Truce."  (Unfortunately, they didn't perform "Mrs. O," "Glass Slipper," or - insert heavy sigh here - "The Perfect Fit.")  It was a fantastic show and I highly encourage anyone who has the chance to go see them.

4) I DJed another party at the Gypsy. Hooray.
We had another event, which I called "Hallowmania," on Friday, October 29th and Saturday, October 30th at Tulsa's Gypsy Coffee House.  That's right, it was a two-night party, with performances by myself, DJ TMJ, and the local industrial band Axis on both nights.  It wasn't nearly as publicized as Halloween in August or the Mary Kate + Ashley Turn 18 party.  I won't go into many details right now, but even though they had a great turnout, I really didn't enjoy this party as much as the last ones.  Hardly anybody danced and very few people even really acknowledged the music (except for those who decided it was annoying enough to leave and go outside).  There were other problems as well, and overall the experience was so disappointing that I've decided not to do any more DJing for a while.  On the upside, it will give me a bit more time to get back to work on the first album and also straighten out a few other areas of my life.

5) I'd like to thank everyone who didn't vote in November.
I usually don't do any political rants here, and if you don't want to read my political opinions, you can feel free to skip down to item #6.  Otherwise, read the following at your own risk.  I don't expect everyone to agree with my opinions, but I do hope that you'll at least respect my right to them.

I have no problem saying that I voted for John Kerry, even though I figured he'd win anyway.  Heading into November 4th, I was quite sure that John Kerry was going to win the presidential election.  I didn't think he was any real prize, but I knew he was the "lesser of two evils."  I was sure that the American people, by and large, had probably gotten fed up with the lies and deceit of the Bush administration.  I figured that eople were probably sick of sending over good American teenagers to die in a (heh) "post-war" occupation in a region of the world where, even though we had just removed a psychotic and oppresive dictator whose regime had gone so far as to put humans through industrial shredders, the locals did not want us there.  (Hint: If you invade a country to remove an evil dictator, and after you are done, the citizens of that country reward you by telling you to go home, shooting at you, attacking you with suicide bombings, beheading your country's citizens, and setting your people on fire...  my guess is that means they didn't appreciate your help as much as you thought they would.)

Am I glad Saddam's been captured and will (allegedly) eventually face some sort of trial for what he did to his people?  Absolutely.  Am I happy that the Bush administration lied to me and made me believe in the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" so that I would morally support going to war with Iraq?  Absolutely not.  I don't appreciate having some piece of crap multicasting on network TV to feed me blatant lies so I'll stand behind his personal war agenda.  I didn't think that many other Americans appreciated it, either.  I guess I was wrong.  So, the vote went through, and the majority of our country allegedly voted to keep Bush in office, giving him warm, powerful employment for four more years.

If you voted - even if you voted for Bush - thanks.  You did your duty as a citizen.  If, however, you were of legal voting age and physically able to make it to the polls, and you decided not to vote, either because you just didn't feel like it would matter, or because you were sure that Kerry would win anyway, or because you just didn't care about the future of your country, or because you were too disallusioned with America's horribly flawed "your electoral college knows better than you do" approach to electing a president...  If you didn't vote for any of these reasons, then you deserve a whole bucket of dog turds for your support, Jacknuts, because you're as much to blame for this as anybody.  Congratulations.

6) Had problems e-mailing me over the past, oh, year or so?  You're not alone!
I recently found out that, apparently, a LOT of the e-mail that had been sent to me over the last year, year and a half, maybe even more, never made it to me.  Some of the e-mail made it, but a lot didn't.  All the time I would have people telling me, "I sent you this e-mail..." and I would have no clue what they were talking about, and I would just presume that they had just been having a crack-induced hallucination or something.  Then, I recently decided to look into the "JUNK MAIL" folder.  Holy crap!  Apparently a lot of legitimate e-mail messages had been caught by the junk mail filtering system and I was missing tons of messages!  So, I am now checking the Junk Mail folder regularly, and I want to offer my absolutely sincere apologies for anyone who may have e-mailed me and didn't receive a respose for that reason!

7) Some miscellaneous crap.
- I've made sufficient peace with most of the individuals at Club OFF, though I have no plans of doing work with them in the future.

- Lately, I have really started getting back into collecting games for the Atari 2600.

- Great news on the Depeche Mode front:  They're going back to work next month to create a new album.  Let's hope it's better, as a whole, than the last two were.

- While I'm on the subject of Depeche Mode, Mute Records receives my "Corporate AssMonkey Company of the Month Award" for their bang-up job completely bungling the recent Depeche Mode "Remixes 81..04" compilation.  Most of the tracks on the album had already been released a number of times (including older box sets released/re-released within the last year), and a number of the new tracks sucked!  Plus, Mute suckered even more dM fans into buying the deluxe 3-disc edition of the compilation by saying we'd get online access to a number of extremely rare additional tracks, lots of various dM sound samples, and music production files with which fans could do their very own remix of (gasp!) "Enjoy the Silence."  Well, the fans who had already shelled out a good-sized chunk of hard-earned cash for the 3-CD set then found out that we had to pay to get those online "rare" tracks, the sound samples offered were useless little pieces of crap buried inside a hideously clumsy online "sound toy," and as for the "Enjoy the Silence" sound files...  Well, um, apparently Mute deided not to keep their word at all regarding that offer, though I heard that some of the vocal files were offered in some obscure French-only remix contest.  I can still remember when Mute was actually considered an intensely "cool" record company.

- Okay, I'll admit it; the DJ Badger"Corporate Assmonkey Company of the Month Award" doesn't really exist.  But if it did, Mute would have won it.

8) I hate Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.
I hate Paris Hilton with a raging passion.  I hate Nicole Richie even more (and that's saying a lot).  Part of me says, "I wouldn't kick 'em out of bed if they magically appeared there," but a better part of me says "I'd really love to throw them both in the path of an oncoming subway train and listen to them scream as they were turned into gooey rich-girl pulp."  It's not that I'm jealous of their fame or money; I just think they're irritating, rather stupid harpies without a shred of genuine talent.  I just felt like I needed to get that off my chest.  Thank you.

(Note:  In the above instance, by "hate," I actually mean "strongly, strongly, strongly dislike."  Genuine hatred is something that I shouldn't feel for anyone, and thus I reserve it only for a privileged few.)

Happy holidays, everyone.  I can almost guarantee that I'll be putting up another update before Christmas.  Take care!

Badger

"protect me from what i want.
protect me from what i want.
protect me from what i want.
protect me. protect me."
(Placebo, "Protege Moi")