Yearly Archives: 2007

In Her Prayers

Every now and then, Louise let’s me know that she’s pray­ing for me. For my health. For my suc­cess.

She real­ly believes in the pow­er of prayer. It’s healed her fam­i­ly, it’s giv­en her guid­ance, it’s pro­vid­ed her with the strength that she needs. She’s one of the few Christian’s whose faith I respect1.

It’s a nice feel­ing to be in some­one’s prayers, and she does this even though I’m not Christian myself.

Normally, I’m a skep­tic about these things.

Which makes it dif­fi­cult to deny how it’s late­ly been work­ing.

  1. In most of my expe­ri­ence, it’s as Nietzsche said; “The Christian resolve to find the world evil and ugly, has made the world evil and ugly.” [↩]

Present for the 27th

Eric, who used to work with me, intro­duced me to Brant Bjork, and ston­er rock in gen­er­al, about two years ago. It’s a genre that explores delight­ful rep­e­ti­tion, where vari­a­tions are sub­tle, but pow­er­ful­ly psy­che­del­ic.

[I]t is cer­tain­ly accept­ed that the effects of mar­i­jua­na and the often low or psy­che­del­ic riffs of ston­er rock com­ple­ment each oth­er.

—Wikipedia, Stoner rock

I liken the idea to Plastikman’s debut album, Sheet One. Though of a dif­fer­ent genre — trance — it fea­tures a per­fo­rat­ed album cov­er, an homage to acid tab art, for which the LSD enhances the details of every sin­gle min­i­mal­is­tic beat (so I’m told).

While I’ve enjoyed Queens of the Stone Age, who are con­sid­ered to be influ­enced by the ston­er rock move­ment (indeed, Josh Homme and Brant Bjork formed pio­neer­ing band Kyuss while in high school), the sound is a lit­tle more com­mer­cial, less dron­ing.

After I heard a few songs by Brant Bjork, I was hooked. I nev­er asso­ci­at­ed it with a mem­o­ry, which is what I do with almost all my songs, but it was good enough that I did­n’t have to.

At Thanksgiving, dur­ing one of my trips through the mall with Andrew and Alex, I resumed my search for Brant Bjork’s solo album by the name of Jalamanta. It was a big­ger city, a big­ger place…maybe I’d have a bet­ter luck. Unfortunately, every music store gave me the same answer; it was an album they did­n’t keep reg­u­lar­ly in stock.

Alex asked me what I was look­ing for, the name of the album and artist, and I did­n’t think any­thing of it.

Thumbnail: Brant Bjork

Yesterday, I found a pack­age in the mail. Fragile — CD, it said. Inside was the Brant Bjork CD I’ve been look­ing for, which they found at an inde­pen­dent music store. Along with the CD was a card made from my Pollen Junkie pho­to (which was tak­en in their gar­den), with a mes­sage writ­ten on the back.

And as great as it is to final­ly hear the songs I’ve been miss­ing, as nice as it is to have an orig­i­nal release, it’s noth­ing com­pared to the thought­ful­ness, the effort they made to find me exact­ly what I was look­ing for.

Update: Julie bought me a lucky bam­boo plant, along with a vase filled with dec­o­ra­tive rocks and a cute hand-drawn card. Very, very nice! Definitely an effort spent acquir­ing all these things, and much appre­ci­at­ed.

Privy To All The New Shit

I’ve been in the strangest mood late­ly. Killing my Top Rated playlist every­where I go, yet I skip through 90% of the songs, try­ing to find the right one. Talking to myself. Replaying con­ver­sa­tions in my head.

I don’t quite feel at one with the Tao. I’ve been let­ting small things get to me. It’s as if I’m falling back into my old destruc­tive habits, but upon real­iz­ing this, I fight against it. The strug­gle, when observed objec­tive­ly, is quite amus­ing.

These are excit­ing times. Along with the excite­ment comes ner­vous­ness. It’s turned me into a jum­ble of emo­tions, bit­ter­sweet, and unlike any­thing I’ve ever expe­ri­enced before.

Wish I could do some­thing with this feel­ing.

Trolley's B-Day '07

Thumbnail: Rock 'N Bowl alley 
Thumbnail: Aaron and Karen 
Thumbnail: My shoes in blacklight 
Thumbnail: The girls bowl 
Thumbnail: Making a wish 

Since he’s nev­er been bowl­ing before, we decid­ed to go for Trolley’s 30th.

Rock ‘N Bowl is an inter­est­ing phen­emo­nen. Aaron thinks it’s for the 14-year-olds to get all hooched up and feel like they’re going club­bing. Didn’t stop us — Trolley includ­ed — from get­ting card­ed at our table when pitch­ers.

Five-pin is hard­er than I remem­ber. Maybe because I was try­ing to spin every­thing, so it would either hit the left pins, or com­plete­ly gut­ter on the right when I tried to adjust. For our two teams, it was a pret­ty close match through the night.

For the pho­tographs, I tried to play around with light set­tings. 2nd-cur­tain-sync would­n’t work for me, and I did­n’t real­ize that there’s a set­ting for it on the 580EX flash which over­rides cam­era set­tings. As a result, the pic­tures are most­ly flash-less to cap­ture the mood of the wild­ly swing­ing light.

The next day, I dis­cov­ered that I some­how pulled my left glute and right groin mus­cles. A gen­tle reminder on Trolley’s birth­day that we’re all get­ting old­er.