Do we REALLY like the name Gary?

My kid has a new favorite toy. It’s pretty funny. He started walking about a month ago, and with this new level of automotion he’s been able to indulge his previously inaccessible curiosities. The fridge is a big one, so are the drawers in the kitchen. Since his first step, he’s been loving this one particular drawer. It used to hold a sake set and some porcelain dishes for wasabi until they all somehow ended up broken on the floor, now it holds some of his toys. This is okay, because it focuses him a little and gets him playing with his shit instead of playing with the dogfood or the disgusting stuffed cat that Pancho fucks relentlessly (the fuck kitty) or, you know, any of the poison under the sink.
Anyway, what’s in the drawer? His beer.
We got back from this wedding and we suddenly had a thirty pack of Busch light. We bought it because it was cheap, and we wanted to have beer to bribe people with to come hang out with us on the porch of our hotel room after we put the baby down. Well, the reception was right by our room, and the baby monitor signal went that far, so we ended up not hanging in the room or even opening the beer at all. When we got home, I went to put it in the refrigerator and the baby walked over and grabbed one and man, it was love at first sight. Now, when we walk in the door, the first thing he does is run for his drawer and grab his beer. He walks around the house with it…he just carries it everywhere, and it’s dinged up as shit and I gotta say, it’s the funniest fucking thing in the universe. This little dude and his beer. It’s like a teddy bear or a blanket, but it’s a BEER. Someday that beer is going to burst, due to its many dings and constant quick trips to the floor and just hemorrhage all over the baby. That’s gonna be sad. Welcome to dying, baby. That’s how it goes. You drop your buddies enough, they’ll eventually bleed beer all over you until they’re nothing but an empty corpse shell (to borrow a phrase from the late, great Vincent Price) and there you’ll be, stinking of alcohol, super confused and wondering what to do with the body before the cops show up. Welcome to the cycle of life, kid.
Well, there’s still 29 other Busch Lights in the fridge that aren’t going anywhere any time soon. He probably won’t know the difference, right? It’ll be simple, like replacing a kitty or a mommy. Sigh.
What else is going on out there? Anything? I guess Matt Alison is going to start mixing our record this week, which is cool. There’s a funny part of the rough mixes where I sing the phrase “what shit was like…” as part of a bigger, lyrically incredible line (heh) and chris, who sings the line as well, sang “what THIS was like…” The result? It sounds like we’re singing “What JIZZ was like…” Hmmmm….
Well, it’s funny. Although the song itself isn’t actually about jizz and it’s really not that funny either. SO, I think we’re gonna have to change it up a little. I think if we just mix out chris’s sibilant “S” at the end of the word, it’ll be fine. That, or we could reverse it, a la Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels” (radio edit) where they turn the word “joint” into tnoij, which actually sounds a lot like “zhozhe,” but whatever. Look. I told you guys that studio shit was boring.
Uh, I’ve got production meetings all day and I’m….Jesus, this is so dull. What’s going on in the world? I feel like I’ve been completely ensconsed in a dirty diaper/cheese/beer/vodka/homemade pizza timewarp ever since that trip to the North Woods. I’m going to Yahoo real quick. Good god. Nothing. Some shit about Lance Armstrong and some shit about that goddamned dead celebrity. I’m sick of this dumb society.
I was talking about this earlier with my wife, but it’s really amazing that when something like the MJ death comes along, it really highlights what vacuous, pathetic toadies American Journalists are. The way they “interview” the location broadcasters and the way those broadcasters respond smack of the same desperation that grade hungry imbeciles demonstrate in a highschool class. It’s just stupid people assuming that they’re talking to even stupider people and dumbing shit down to a level that would be insulting to even the stupidest person out there. Never mind that this woman has been standing in front of Neverland for 3 days with nothing to say, nevermind that this guy has been asking her the same unanswerables for 3 days. All they can do is chuckle, glance furtively at their producers for signs of encouragement and continue to try to make a name for themselves (at the expense of each other…fuck teamwork entirely) in the world of talking heads, 24 hour news cycles and male bulimia.
These groups of people with communication and broadcasting degrees are the people that decide the spiciness of almost everything that you consume with your brain. This is problematic for 2 reasons: 1. Group thinking almost never leads to good, focused results unless after the group is done ONE person can take all the ideas presented and synthesize the good and ignore the bad. This NEVER happens though, for the very reason I was talking about before. These people are toadies and they are so desperate for approval that they’ll fight tooth and nail for their dumb ideas to be included, regardless of how that effects the result, therefore making it true committee thinking, which is, it’s been proven time and time again, completely useless (this is also what happens in our government, by the way, but it seems like it’s more pandering and euphemism than desperation…but fuck, man. That’s a whole other topic). Reason 2: We’re talking about communications majors, people. That’s the major the football players do so they can coast through school. It’s a college major that involves watching cartoons and pretending that there’s intrinsic truths in Bugs Bunny dressing up as a german frau and serving a stein of urine to Yosimite Sam. Fascinating! Look, full disclosure, I have a bachelor of science in radio tv and film, so I’m not in ANY way trying to dis communications majors…Hell, I’m right there with them, and I LOVED my communications classes, and shit, if I had a communications degree, I’d probably be a lot more qualified to get a job somewhere cool than I am now, but the point remains. These are the people giving you your news, watering down your screenplays, telling people that things are too edgy and don’t play in Iowa and generally jetsetting around and nickel and diming every single writer, artist, director, researcher, musician, scientist or anyone who comes up with something passably unique simply because they have that schoolroom mentality: If my idea goes in there, no matter how stupid it is, I’m validated, and I’ll emerge victorious over my coworkers (who are also for some dumb reason my enemies). It’s frustrating and it’s almost inescapable, and not just in broadcasting or Hollywood either. My wife deals with this bullshit from her clients all day long. They make her change everything from concepts to shades of green arbitrarily with no sense of goal and/or purpose, and she’s in marketing. You’d think that the clients, who make, let’s say soap, just for an example, would let her and her fellow marketers and designers do the job they hired them to do, but alas…committee thinking wins out, because, well, someone’s super stoked about sticking their dick/vagina where it doesn’t belong, and forcing her to work late into the night while I sullenly watch tv…sigh. Yup, you’re fucked, we all are, unless you work for yourself, in which case, good luck making any money. You better have a job at a crappy bar where you can deal with a whole different kind of toady. The service industry toady (manager) who will stop at nothing to make sure the bosses think they’re doing a good job even at the expense of employee happiness/productivity/or actual dedication to service. It's the same dumb shit where people foolishly treat the people they work with as their enemies as opposed to their teammates. Stupid. It's like Mark Twain said, man. "familiarity breeds contempt." So true, Twain. So true. God, I hate that I even know about that. AAAAARGH!!!!!!!! Where’s my baby’s beer?