I am hurt and upset to a degree that I cannot rightly assess. I am also certain that I deserve it.

Regardless of whether or not that’s true, I’ll deal with it.

Most critically, I’m not cool with some of what I said when I was high on MDA the other night. It makes me honest and genuine to a degree that I can’t usually achieve on my own. But I have since realized that, even wrapped in an unnatural blanket of well-being, I am still more than comfortable lying to myself.

In the case of friends versus lovers, I tend to agree with you, there shouldn’t necessarily be any particular reason that a future romance trumps a current friendship. But I absolutely cannot guarantee this will not happen with us.

I know this from having guaranteed such things before, only to get bitchslapped into that exact situation by the very person I guaranteed. I had sort of assumed a reciprocity clause was implied, and that was my mistake. But let’s face it, I was never going to enforce it anyway. Even if at some point I was actually naive enough to believe I could.

But I survived. Maybe even grew a little.

And you know what? I get it. I’ve had plenty of friends get involved in relationships where, as a direct consequence of said relationships, I interacted with them less. I might see them less, but we’re not lesser friends for it. This, I suspect, is likely a result of us not placing arbitrary parameters around our friendships with regard to how the other relationships in our lives are permitted to affect our friendships.

People drift apart.

Sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. Most often, it’s a mixture of both.

They go home. They leave home. They get jobs with NASA. They find God. They get curbstomped in the McDonald’s drive-thru. They acquire dementia. Or an all-consuming passion for back country kayaking.

It really doesn’t matter how it happens. It’s just likely to happen.

Cohesive attractions. Covalent bonds. Strong interactions.

We are all a series of relationships drifting through space. And, at times, we’re fortunate enough to drift together.

I suppose the underlying theme of this project is frustration. Not so much with myself, or any one person or thing in particular, but with the contiguous futility of days that blur into weeks fading into months decaying into years eroding, it feels, a life.

NiT GriT – Euthanizing A Dream

I have given serious thought, both practically and theoretically, to giving up. Dwelling on the former for any length of time almost necessarily precipitates the consideration of the latter. Leastways in my brain.

While, for the sake of brevity, I must leave this as an extraordinarily abstract concept, I will posit the highly-disputable premise that most of us have some notion of what constitutes tangible success, and how it is we are supposed to go about achieving it. It’s the amorphous American dream that you can and should have. If you don’t, the only problem is you.

All it takes is a little elbow grease. Good ol’ perseverance. Never give up. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Although it’s not entirely clear if his maxim can be applied to this specific context, I am inclined to believe that Yoda would present a definite argument to the contrary.

There is no try.

Which is probably not so much to say that trying is impossible, or even an entirely erroneous endeavour, but that it’s not a place in which we can live. There is a hearty amount of robust wisdom in recognizing when we do not rather than do.

The fact of the matter is that while we’re trying we’re not doing.

Or so I recall Brad Goodman saying at a seminar in Springfield many years ago.

But regardless of who said what, it has been my observation that, in an effort to get serious about my life, I’ve tended to shutter all those things that make my life my life.

Recently, I’ve been throwing around my resume a lot more. It’s an exercise that, despite my current tone, I take seriously. I invest more than just time and effort into every application I make. As one might be expected to do when chasing a livelihood, I invest myself. I invest my hopes and dreams that tomorrow might be better than today. So it’s not at all lightly that I am able to dismiss those genuine aspirations as, to say the least, misguided. Especially since, in accordance with our mores, these actions are prioritized above such things as the writing I am doing right this instant. It is (at least a large part of) why my last post was dated June 5^th.

My longstanding orbit around this uncomfortable paradigm has begun to decay with accelerating haste. And truthfully, I find myself in a problematic situation where I can no longer even guess at workable, let alone ideal, solutions.

All I have to go on is the reality that the very best of my grown-up efforts have resulted in nothing, while this frivolous foray of fancy is at least something.

Bambu – Just(Us) (Knorsq Remix)

If you produce music, and you distribute it on the internet, name and tag your files.

I’m tempted to get really mad about this and scream in all caps, but really, if you’re an artist and you’re doing this it’s not anger that I feel for you, it’s sympathy bordering on pity.

You have just invested a considerable amount of time and energy expressing the deepest stirrings of your soul. You want people to hear it and, presumably, know where it came from.

If you’ve ever posted a stellar composition to soundcloud as a free download, but labelled it “Track 1.mp3” and not included any metadata in the file, you should know that I might be writing about how great that track was. Except that I only know it as Track 1 and have no idea how I would go about sharing it with the world.

This one time, I heard this awesome music. No idea what it was. But trust me, it was great. I guess you just had to be there. Drunk on the internet at 4 in the morning on a Tuesday saving everything I could click my grubby little mouse on.

If you’re using a format like mp3, tag the shit out of that motherfucker. ID3v1 and ID3v2. Plaster it with links. Multiple links. If you’re a DJ and you’re releasing a mix, put the tracklisting in the comments.

Ideally, I want to see an artist name and song title in the file name. And you can go ahead and add more shit in there if you like. Fuck any anal retentive filenaming style vanguard who tells you differently. You’re giving away your work for free. Make it identifiable.

This is especially critical if you’re distributing wavs. At the very least I need some words I can google without needing to go through more than, say, 20 pages of hits.

I like music, and chances are good that I like your music. I don’t mind if it’s hard to find because it has a generic name like “Jim – Crunk.mp3”. I can listen to 50 tracks with that exact same label. I am, however, physically incapable of sorting through every Track 1 on the internet. So meet me half way.

Until then, I’ll be out here googling random words that I think might relate to whatever the hell it is I’m listening to now.

Heist—who made the absolutely-insane I Need Killers drumstep track that sampled James Avery as Shredder, and was also featured in Pendulum’s off-the-chain 2010 Essential Mix—has released a free download called Pray for Japan.

Heist – Pray For Japan

While you can download it for free, Heist has donated his time and considerable skill in the hopes that in exchange for the track you will donate a couple bucks/pounds to The British Red Cross Society’s relief effort for quake-stricken Japan.

So don’t be a dick.

Our fine friends in Japan need our help. And you want that Heist track.

Additionally, Beatport is donating 100% of today’s net proceeds to The Mile High Chapter of the American Red Cross’s Japanese Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami Relief.

So fill yer boots.

Maybe grab some more Heist. Like this one:

Document One – Forgive Me (Heist Drumstep Remix)

While I was reviewing some of my correspondences, I came upon this draft email that I composed to myself in a brief moment while I was in Victoria last August. I want to say I was wearing shorts and sandals and a t-shirt with something cool printed on the front. But the fact of the matter is that I had pried myself away from my vacation to write a test in a desperate bid for a communications job, so I was probably wearing jeans and a hoodie. And panic, which I gushed out in my prosaic approximation of poetry.

August on Vancouver Island is too good to be true, and I guess I knew that all too well:

You know it’s coming.

It’s going to be January soon enough. No, January has been uncommonly warm for the past couple years. There’s a bright period that feels almost like spring. It’s gonna be February. February is when the real cold comes. When the hope that March will bring an early spring is condensed into a black jewel of desperation by the sheer weight—the unfathomable pressure—of the soulscarring cold.

The seeped-in feeling of feelinglessness. Locked-in. Snowed-in. Tractionless. Pointlessness.

The lifeblood of the earth turned to dust and cast to the ground. Burying us.

In retrospect, I should have spent the morning at the park.

Thank you, Charlie Sheen, for providing us with a supremely germane example of how hopelessly-flawed modern drug prohibition policies are.

You see, through some of my various adventures, I have met a number of individuals who are not unfamiliar with some of the less frequently practiced ways in which one might enjoy his or herself. Some of these people have chosen to exalt Sheen as their champion. And, as a free-minded libertarian, I was initially inclined to sympathize with that sentiment. To the extent that I went ahead and liked the following facebook status:

Charlie Sheen says he won’t give up his wild life… great man.

But then I thought about it for a second.

Hasn’t Sheen engaged in some manner of physical brutality against his fellow human beings?

According to Wikipedia, he certainly has. Wrapped up in a whole bunch of speculative conjecture on the extent of Sheen’s more questionable and violent conduct, we see that he straight up plead guilty to misdemeanor assault.

That’s not cool.

Rather than quietly unlike the aforementioned status, I set about composing a comment that would qualify my affinity for Sheen’s hubris. The initial attempt went something like:

But I can’t condone his violence against women.

But then I thought about that for a second.

Was it really a sufficient sanction against such conduct?

Notwithstanding my predilection for employing litotes as a means of sounding even-handed when I am anything but, I rolled out a fortified statement devoid of ambiguity that read thusly:

Although I unequivocally condemn his violence against women.

That’s right, Charlie. You can start crying now, you remorseless bastard.

And policymakers, this is where you can start paying attention. Did you happen to notice how I differentiated between condemning something and not condoning it? Doing one of those things, it turns out, is not tantamount to doing the other. It’s completely possible to reserve condemnation of an act without implicitly condoning it.

Even though I’m not entirely sure exactly what bagging seven-gram rocks entails, I’m pretty sure it’s nobody’s business but the bagger’s. It’s not an activity we need to condemn or condone.

Unlike domestic violence, which we are shamefully all too happy to acquit.

I’m happy to hear that Britney’s still rocking the wobble. Whether or not she ever intentionally referenced dubstep in the past, she’s picked up that gauntlet like a true champion. Now, some serious popstep.

The xx – Shelter (HULK Remix)

HULK, the adamantine duo of Claw and Richie August, have been hanging out at the top of my playlist for a good six months now. You should listen to their remix of The xx’s Shelter as much as possible, because it becomes a free download at 10,000 plays. And I want that download. (ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!)

When the weather’s warmer, I make a habit of muttering into a voice recorder under the cover of darkness along the margins of suburbia as it bleeds into the wilds of the Canadian north. I discuss things like used vehicle sales practices and paragraph spacing with Mister Peepers, my ornithological confidant. We once discussed HULK.

If I recall correctly, this topic resulted in an unusual amount of hooting from Peepers, presumably because he—for once—agreed with my statement that HULK fucking rules. The stealthy raptor, you have to understand, is a hard-line anarchist who rarely entertains my ruminations as he disagrees with their socialist leanings on a deeply fundamental level.

But I guess all free-willed radicals love a dope bassline.

When I happen to be conducting my significant and considerable business in a public space that demands I observe a pregnant woman, I am overcome with a barely-controllable urge to point in her general direction and exclaim, “she had sex!”

But then I consider that I haven’t eliminated other possible explanations for her condition. And I wouldn’t want to look foolish.

Today, somebody asked me for change. Even though I didn’t have any, that somebody gave me a hug.

This happened. For real.

Being fantastically broke is not without it’s advantages. I’m inclined to watch all the really good television everyone’s always raving about. But it would promise to get me through the day, not invite me to look forward to the next.

Last night I dreamt I had the balls to stand up to my father, a nomadic chieftain of the Central Asian steppe. He disowned me with a tear, a wave of his hand and a whistle that sounded like a soaring eagle or a falling bomb.

This evening my father and I discussed groundbreaking astronomy with alarming accuracy over beef stroganoff. I left out the part where I don’t have his rent money.

He didn’t ask about it. Dinner was good.