Goings On and On and on

On Religion

God is like my grandpa in Cleveland. I know he's out there, and even though I never hear from him, I am pretty sure he still loves me.

If the God of the Bible is real, he sure doesn't seem to understand people very well. I mean, ok so he sacrificed his perfect son for all of man kind -- two thousand years ago. And I'm supposed to feel the same about it, that the people who actually witnessed this happening did? That's like saying, "Your great great grandpa loved you so much, that he gave his son a car long before you were ever born. Of course you don't get to see the car, or drive it or anything, but I wrote a book all about it. So you should totally understand how much great great grandpa loves you."

I understand the Bible is written by story tellers. Some of them were better than others. But I still have a problem with so many of the stories not making a lick of sense. For instance in Genesis, Jacob is in the middle of this trip, sort of a redemption story, and it's pretty good. But there is one part that throws me. One night when Jacob is walking along the river, he meets an angel and then he wrestles with the angel all night long, and in the morning, the angel pokes his hip and turns it, basically giving Jacob a painful hip and a limp for the rest of his life. I've read this story a bunch of times and I always hope that somehow later on in the story this will all be explained, but it never happens. They even bring it up later in the Bible in Hosea, but they basically just clarify that the crazy wrestling angel was Michael.
So I don't know about you, but let's say I meet an angel when I'm out walking around. I don't think my first instinct would be to tackle him and try to wrestle him into submission. And there are many reasons for this, first of all, I'm pretty sure that most, if not all celestial beings could kick my ass. Second, I think angels probably have a lot of cool stories, and I'd want to hear those stories, which are hard to listen to when you're trying to put a cherub in an arm-bar.
Ok, and they wrestled all night? All night? Really? Because I've wrestled for five minutes before and I was exhausted for the rest of the day, and I think I'm in pretty good shape. And here's the kicker; I was wrestling a person, not one of the heavenly host.
And the coup de grace here is that after the angel gets bored of rolling around in the dirt with Jacob he just pokes him in the hip with his finger "turning it," which I guess means he dislocated it. I've never dislocated my hip before, but I've had patients who have, and that looks painful as hell. What was the angel trying to prove here? Is it like when I used to arm wrestle my dad and he would pretend to struggle for a little while and then just as my confidence was beginning to build, he would slam my arm down? The angel sounds like kind of a dick here.
In the grand scheme of story telling, this seems pretty far fetched and worthless info. Because as near as I can tell, none of this had any real impact on Jacob. After this passage he pretty much goes back to what he was doing. I'm sure he had to limp there though.

Don't even get me started on Moses.

On Medicine

People like to think Doctor's know everything. Doctors do know a lot, but all that schooling is pretty much just to make them better at guessing. Did you know that modern medicine still doesn't know why we need to sleep? They know a lot about what happens when we do sleep, but there isn't a good explanation why those things don't just naturally happen as we go through our day. Right now the way that we explain how muscles work is till considered a "theory," we're not even sure about that! It wasn't that long ago that people actually figured out what germs were. All I'm saying is that the learning curve is pretty steep when it comes to our bodies and doctors are still figuring out things all the time. But try not to be so shocked when you go to the hospital and the doctor gives you a long list of things that might be wrong with you, instead of just telling you what you have. He's just guessing.

On Pets

Pets to me are like homeless people. I'm not mean to them or anything, but I just don't want them in my house touching my stuff.

On Book Titles

The other day I noticed a book Crazy for the Storm. I read the insert and it is indeed a story about a guy was involved in a storm. The book title really bothered me though. Couldn't they have called it Storm Crazy, or Trapped on Storm Mountain, or Crazy because of the Storm? I haven't read this book yet, so maybe it gets clarified somewhere in there, but I doubt it.
I read this other book not that long ago called White Teeth. It was a good book, but nevertheless it had nothing to do with white teeth. In fact I don't think teeth were ever even mentioned in it. It was a story about two families in wartime London. No teeth talk, at all.
So I came up with this theory that maybe all the good book titles have been taken, and since you can't really write a book and call it War and Peace, or Gone with the Wind and hope nobody notices that you've ripped off a classic, authors have been reduced to what horse trainers do with race horses. Since horse's names are registered, and you can't register the same name twice, all the normal names like Jared, and Snowball got used up in like five minutes, so now horse people come up with crazy names like Captain Sunshine of the Forgotten Ape People. Which would be both an awesome book and an awesome horse name.

Buttrock... Literally

Let's take a look at the last few albums I've purchased (editor's note "purchased" should have those sarcastic little quote marks - there that's better)

This is Stereoside's album So Long. It's pretty good. Nice Cover. Classy.

This is Tantric's The End Begins. It's ok, there's a really good song called The One on it.

This is Saving Abel's self titled album. It's also pretty good. I can also respect their taste in cover art.

I'm sure this says something about me. I wonder what that could be.

Bridges Week 10 - Fernando Revealed

General Recap

This was another week full of laziness on my part. I didn't go to the gym, and I was all over the place on my diet. My workout buddy Tim is coming back from a business trip and I told him that we are taking "before" pictures again. So those will be posted this weekend, or Monday at the latest. (Editor's note: I guess Tuesday at the latest)
I have been struggling with feeling sorry for myself, especially since I got "laid off" at work. I guess I can explain that a little. The small company I work for is really struggling, partly because of the economy and also partly just because we've hung our balls out there on some risky business decisions that aren't paying off like we'd hoped. My boss approached me and we'd talked about the status of the company and whether or not there were going to be layoffs. After we talked I spent the whole night thinking about it, and everything else going on in my life. By the end of the week I was obsessing about it nonstop so I took a meeting with the boss. I told him basically that I really love this company and that I want to see it survive. I know who we can live without, and still survive and unfortunately I'm one of those people. At first he was incredulous, but I finished by telling him that I was so financially abysmal right now, that even getting laid off wouldn't really make it any worse. So on Monday he called a couple of us into a meeting and let us go. Even thought I knew it was coming it still stung. I know it must have been a thousand times worse for the other guys who still have families to feed. So now I'm sort of a volunteer at work for the time being. I told the boss I would hang around for a month or so, and if they don't rehire me, I would move on.
I've been sleeping at weird times, and not sleeping at night, which isn't helping any part of my life. I'm still riding my bike to work which is probably the best part of my day. I got some good tunes to rock out to along the way:
Motley Crue's new one
Sabastian Bach's (of Skid Row fame) solo album (feat. Axl Rose, hell yeah!)
Sixx AM, Nikki Sixx's (of Motley Crue) new band.
So by the time I make it home, I'm usually all jacked up on buttrock. Then like twenty minutes later I go to bed.

Bridges Week 10

Todd shifts the focus on Fernando. Fernando is this quiet guy who's been coming to class pretty faithfully. When he does offer something to the class, which is rare, he is well spoken although obviously sorrowful. Tonight he actually offered up that he'd been having some problems with his family and that his son has disowned him. When Todd asked him why, he said he didn't really know. Todd was waiting to pounce on this like a lion on an short-sighted gizalle with obesity issues because he jumped up and said "You don't know why your son won't talk to you? Well let's get this figured out." Then he whipped out his pen and began to write on the whiteboard. I am learning very quickly to fear this pen.
We spent the next hour or so talking about everything that Fernando ever did wrong. Whether his son knew about it or not. I have to hand it to him, Fernando was a trooper, he admitted to things, and didn't make excuses for the most part. With every new confession Todd would try to ease the sting a little bit by telling him that it hurt now, but it was going to feel so much better afterward. He would always punctuate this by referring back to Orge (who'd gone through this type of interrogation the week before) and saying "Right Ogre?" To which, he'd always grunt out a hesitant "Yeah." He must've said "yeah" and nothing else, twelve or thirteen times that night.
So that's pretty much it. I'm not going to tell you all the stuff Fernando fessed up to, but it's fair to say that he was a pretty messed up dude and it seems like he's really trying to put his life back together.
He did say that his son told him that he never wanted to be like him. I really can't think of any single thing that somebody could say to another that is more painful than that.

Abuse Clarified

Along the lines of what Fernando went through, I feel like I the need to clarify. I figure the people that read my blog are probably not as familiar with "abuse" as somebody who's had the forced education that I have.
This is the abuse wheel, we have like ten of these posted up all over Bridges.

So if you're like me, the first time you look at this, you're like, whoa those a pretty severe. Once you read "Forcing her to have sex with others" it's pretty much seared into your brain and it's hard to see anything beyond those big bold awful letters.. But if you've been staring at this circle of awfulness day after day, you start to see the rest of it. Those little last sentances in the descriptions sometimes hit a little too close to home.
Everything here elicits images of evil, but stare long enough and you start to see the subtleties. The Devil is in the details here. When I examine myself and look at this wheel I wince when I remember where I've danced on some lines, and completely crossed others, especially in the Abusing Her Feelings piece of the pie.
I say this because I feel like if I admit that this has been a presence, it will further ensure that nothing on the Power & Control chart will ever have a place in my life again.

Rant - Solo Acts

I've been feeling bad about my last post. Feeling sorry for myself isn't going to win me any blogging awards. Do they even have blog awards? Oh man, now I really want one.

So here's the deal, when you're the lead singer in a successful band, why do you need to go solo? This drives me crazy, I mean lead singers get all the attention anyways. It's hard enough to make it as a musician. I mean, let's say you're the bassist for some marginal band out there, like Maroon 5, you've finally achieved your dream, you're making some money, your stupid band is all over the radio, sure your metrosexual lead singer gets all the magazine covers and groupie action, but hey you're famous-ish, so it's cool right? So one day after your stripper girlfriend drops you off at band practice you get to hear that the talentless douchebag you called a lead singer is leaving the band to do a Solo Album. You spent years locked in your bedroom alone learning scales and studying chord progressions, and learn how to look cool when you smoke. This guy was lead in his high school's production of Brigadoon and now he thinks he's freakin' John Lennon. So now he's like, "Hey thanks for making me famous. Fuck you."
Here's a few bullets to drive my point home:
No Doubt really wasn't that great of a band, but hey they had a certain level of charisma, and their songs were catchy. Then this...

-Really Gwen? Your band was holding you back from what? From making crappy hip-hop with guest rappers? I am sure the four faceless rubes that spent years touring with you when you were nobodies wouldn't have had a problem making "wee-ooh wee-ooh" songs with you if that kept the paychecks rolling in.
But no, we get two solo albums from Gwen Stefani, who is cute, but come on, let's admit it: not all that great. At anything. Especially loyalty.


This one absolutely KILLS me!
For god's sake, it's called the Dave Matthews Band, and you had to go solo?! What is it that you had to do as just plain old Dave Matthews, that the Dave Matthews Band wouldn't let you do?
Maybe that really buff guy in DMB who plays the violin was just getting too much attention and Dave had enough. He sure got his revenge when he released this solo album--that nobody bought, or heard, or cared about.
If you bought this album, and you're not directly related to Dave himself, I hate you.

I know there are bunch of great examples of this that I haven't already thought of, if anyone read this blog I would encourage you to fill me on some that I'm missing. I also know that this is a stupid thing to get all fired up about, but it's probably due to jealousy and the fact that I'm a successful musician in the body of a rhythm-deprived guitar hero hack.

Sunday Afternoon Rant

Here is a short list of bands that I am totally over:

• Red Hot Chili Peppers - I do not believe it is possible for a band to be more overplayed. I am pretty sure that every radio station plays a RHCP song every at least every six minutes, whether it's a rock station, pop, hard rock, alternative, Mexican, Opera, Salsa, NPR whatever, they're all playing Californication right this second.
  
• Metallica - Yes, yes, I know: if you like hard music you have to like Metallica. And even if you don't like hard music you have to respect Metallica. Well, I know it makes me an idiot in the eyes of most of the world, but I'm over Metallica. They did their thing, it was all cool when Enter Sandman beat out Bryan Adam's Everything I Do song that was playing every five seconds on every radio station that summer I turned 14, but hey, I'm almost 30, and I've decided that Metallica is no longer relavent. I can hear you know "What about Ride the Lightning?" Yes, even Ride the Lighting, let's move on.
• Sublime - This isn't new. I've been over Sublime since day one. My brother came back from a summer in California when we were in high school, where he'd "discovered" this awesome band called Sublime. I was like, all right let's hear it! Which was quickly followed by a "this is it, this is pretty weak" That's how I still feel.

Ok, considering my often admitted to affinity for such bands as Linkin Park, Nickelback and other catchy over-produced crap rock, I know that I am in no position to be critiquing music, but hey this is my blog, so I can rip on any number of people with far superior talent than me that I choose.