I get headaches pretty often. Several times a week. They are painful, but normally just a minor inconvenience, akin to having a fish-hook imbedded in your temple on 20 pound test-line with a 1oz lead weight on the end. (For you metric users out there, we are talking about a 9kg test line and a 30 gram weight. Normally used for fishing, a 9kg test line is supposed to be able to successfully seduce a 9kg catfish into producing its rare and beautiful mating call. “Mrowr! Mrowr! Uuuuhhhhrrr….Mrowr!” This is a common sound in my neighborhood, where there are often 1-3cm deep pools of standing water for at least two hours after a rainstorm.)
     When afflicted, my head droops. People ask me, “Joe, why is your head crooked,” and I answer, “Uuuuhhhhrrr….Mrowr.”
     Once in a while, however, what is a minor inconvenience escalates to a debilitating affliction that robs me of several hours of life.
     This happened yesterday. You may have noticed that I posted some stuff early in the morning. That was when the headache was still at “annoying” level. It successfully robbed me of some of my funny, and now that I look at my crappy HairBand=PopCountry post sans-painfog, I don’t think that it is salvageable, even through my normal manic revisionism. (The Popcorn In The Head story probably got four rounds of edits before it assumed its current pace and proportions) But other than that, it didn’t stop me from proceeding to work.
     As I arrived at my office, there seemed to be two fish-hooks in both temples, 60 grams of weight or more on the end of the line, and God apparently turned up the brightness knob on the sun to “blinding, even indirectly.” A small invisible monkey had taken up residence on my left shoulder and was systematically plucking hairs from my head while screeching in my ear something about a time-share in the Florida keys.
     By the time I arrived to attend a meeting at the auction store (11:00am), my hands shook, my eyes were drooping, I couldn’t sit up straight, and had to go for a lie-down. Some time later, I lost my breakfast. Not sure where it is now, but in the condition it was the last time I saw it, I’m pretty sure I can do without. Dry heaves followed, and then an exhausted sleep for four hours.
     Migraines. What you gonna do about them, huh? They have some medicines out now, but most of them have harmful side effects like liver and cheese cravings, seeing blue lights where there are only azure lights, heartbreak, tennis elbows, tennis balls, seizures, seizures of foreign assets, the list goes on; anyway, none of them work better than a nap and some Excedrin (Excedrin is an aspirin / caffeine tablet common in the USA, normally used for boring fasionable holes in your stomach lining.)
     So I lost a few hours. Later, my daughter ate dinner at McDonalds (a reward for being good at the zoo with her little cadre of pre-schoolers) and brought home this, my salvation.
     As soon as I saw him, I realized that he could become my boon, my companion, my mascot, my headache deflector. Just look at the handsome design!

I have dubbed him “Arlington McAntipain” and I have begun his training. As soon as he sences the approach of the headache, he’ll get me a pair of sunglasses, an excedrin, a pillow, and he’ll call all my appointments and make excuses for me. Unfortunately, my new friend is partially water soluble. Our companionship will end the day I give him a bath, and I shall then weep. Until then, it looks like his only problem is a weak ankle. I’ll take him to a sports doctor and see what he can do.
-more later.

At first, this land seemed so peaceful; so filled with plenty.
But then the rains came.

Its another 8-bit arrangement from many moons ago. In fact, its the first piece I’d ever put into a computer. Only 1 minute long! dream

Pop country music sucks.
     There, I said it. Not really going out on a limb, but I feel as if I’m taking at least a slight risk making such a judgemental statement.
     Some ass in a stetson, already angry because there’s no naked women on this page (not counting Milla Jovovich), with his pants around his ankles, a bottle in one hand and his johnson in the other, is even now spitting a mouthfull of Milwaukee’s finest all over his monitor and cursing me for questioning the quality of his chosen musical pursuit.
     Sorry, Marlboro man, but pop country is musically boring, with songs that are virtually indistinguishable from one another, seem to always center on drinking, sexual bravado or sappy Hallmark Card sentimentality, and with an audience so white I gotta wear shades.

     But whilst watching a bit of CMT (Country Music Television, for those without American cable TV), I began having a strange feeling of deja-suck-vu. This suckiness happened to me before, didn’t it? I really think I’ve had this much suck on my TV once before…

     I hereby posit that the current despicable pop-country music crop is socially equivalent to the pop-rock of the late 1980′s.
     The same quality white-trash girlies throw themselves at the men, the same level of sexual bravado and hard-drinking is sung about and lived by the artists. The same trite, contrived songs are popularized and are often based on a single clever phrase or pun. (She’s My Cherry Pie = It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere)
     There’s a few differences, and I’ve tried to provide you with an equivalence chart here. Please tell me if I’ve missed anything.

Not sure how to equate the mandatory goatee/mustache on the country men to a similar feature of the late eighties.
Well, that’s it for now!

Disclaimer: I actually like OLD country. Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson. They don’t suck. Toby Keith, Garth Brooks, Shania Twain; they suck!

This week’s performances are up.
This time we have a two minute piano improv set on the theme from “Make Me Leave.”

We also have a three minute performance of one of my least memorable pieces, “Two.”

Both are MP3 files.
Please leave feedback, as I am still tweaking the Music Blog as well as the recording mix.

     True story: I was at the mall, and as a result of a bet I had consumed two liters of diet cola laced with soy sauce. On the way to the bathroom I was preceded by two college age girls immediately in front of me. We had just come in sight of the bathroom doors when they stopped, and one addressed the other:
     “Oh, it looks like they’re all handicapped.”
     As one, the two turned and walked back the way they came, sparing me only a puzzled glance as they saw me bite my lower lip hard, at once releasing torrents of blood and letting loose the sad, quiet noise that typically accompanies the death of one’s faith in the next generation.
     I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt, and think that perhaps they were scouting out the johns for a crippled friend with a full bladder.
     Hell, I would actually be relieved to find out that they were part of a Neo-Nazi group hell-bent on slaughtering any women who allow their bare bottoms to touch toilettes sullied by genetically inferior specimens. But no, I really think that the most plausible explanation is that they are just very, very stupid indeed.
     But sometimes smart people do stupid things, too. Like yesterday when an otherwise intelligent legal administrator sent me this email: “We cannot send any outgoing e-mails – they all fail. Please fix. Thanks”
Think about it: she sent this via Email. I received this message exactly two minutes after fixing the email server.
More excusable, perhaps, is when people do dumb things because they are tiny, cute, and very young. Like what Sammy did on Friday.

     I love it when people turn perfectly serviceable statements into vague questions that don’t deserve answers.
     “Hi, this is Christine, from Eastgate Early Learning Center?” came the voice on the phone.
     “Yes,” I replied, “you are.”
     “Um. Right. Sam has an unpopped kernel of popcorn stuck in her nose, and we can’t get it out.”
     This is no joke. Don’t you dare laugh, either! It was already 4:30, so I told the girl that Heather would take care of it when she picked Sammy up, which usually happened around 5:00.
     “Until then,” I advised, “keep any microwave generating devices such as cell phones away from my daughter or I will fucking sue your ass into the ground.”
     “What?”
     “So help me, if that kernel pops and damages her brain-meats –wait, was this Pop-Secret or Orville Reddenbacher?”
     “I, uh… Gordon Food Service brand, I think. Why?”
     “Thank God,” I responded, “It’s probably safe. Chances are, it’s an unpoppable clinker.”
     “Oh, good.” She sounded relieved.
     “At least, you’d better hope it is.”

     I was, at that time, in my store along with my employees, plotting out the details of a pending full scale assault on a neighboring “Espresso House” when I got that call. I explained to them the current situation.
     What followed was a full-on confessional, whereby each person present told their personal tragic stories of foreign objects lodged in various orifices. Sortof like Canterbury Tales, but with more…foreign objects lodged in various orifices.
     My tale was of a wadded straw wrapper in the ear canal at age 5. It unravelled as they pulled it free, and its unique wax encrusted visage caused the doctor to misdiagnose it as a worm until he disected it and found the mysterious glyphs reading “Burger King, (C) 1977″.
     Jason’s story was pretty repulsive: a lump of sponge in the nose at age 4 which putrified and caused everyone to wonder why lil’ Jason smelled of death until it was finally discovered by an enterprising pediatrician. Jason then volunteered that his father, who suffers from a freakishly deformed ear-canal which must be cleaned with a coke spoon every six months, once waited eight months between cleanings and his ear wax ultimately rotted and then smelled strikingly similar to peanut butter cups. Mmmm… I love ear wax.
     Mike’s youthful ordeal was, by far, the most disturbing. After complaining for a week that he was periodically hearing thumping noises, it was discovered that he had a conjoined twin growing in his ear canal which had openned up a Notary Public and was engaging in sloppy record keeping. Alright, that’s not true. It was actually a spider. The thumping was the noise a spider makes when spinning a web, I suppose. Which is worse, really? I mean, everyone could use a Notary Public in the family, right?

     Heather soon called and told me that she had already been to urgent care, where a nice middle eastern man did his best, but couldn’t pick my daughter’s nose. She was now heading to the emergency room at St John’s Hospital in Warren. I arrived shortly thereafter and accompanied Sam into the bowels of the medical establishment.
     Sam charmed the crap out of everyone and everything, including a bullet riddled corpse she discovered strapped to a gurney, which mustered up all of it’s remaining chi, reanimated itself, lurched upright and pinched Sam’s cute little cheeks, saying, “Awrrrgh!” Touching, really, but I made that up.
     The ER docs then take a crack at getting the Seed of the Corn of Popping (+5 against the undead!) from out of her nasal passage, but failed, making me and Sam cry. They summon a specialist, for whom we must then wait. Hours pass, and Sam becomes noticeably less charming. I took some pictures (click for larger versions):

     The specialist, when he came, donned a miner’s helmet and went to work. We wrapped Sam like a tamale and then Heather, I, “Muscular Male Nurse” and “Craggy Old Female Nurse” worked together to hold down her squirming, kicking form as our new doctor friend went spelunking through Sam’s sinuses.
     Sam screamed herself hoarse, and then started trying to talk her way out of the pridicament. She said, in no particular order:

• I need my sandals on!
• I’m hot!
• I have to go poddy!
• I want to give daddy a hug!
  • (I almost cried when she said that)
• I have a secret! I want to tell Mommy the secret! In private!
• I’m choking!
• there is no popcorn kernel! (that’s right, Neo.)
• I have an explosive device strapped to my chest and I’ll set it off if you don’t give in to my demands as follows: free passage home, two Barbie dolls, a My Little Pony VHS tape and a liter of Kool-Aid.

     Sam lay flat, with her right nostril spread wide by the doctor’s spreader-tool-thingy. He reached into her head with his amazing assortment of scarey little grabby tools and nose spreader.
     “Don’t touch the sides, Doc!” I yelled, “BZZZZZZZ!”
     Something tells me he lost his sence of humor in the war.
     Anyway, it seemed to go on forever, but soon Sam was tearfully hugging mommy and I was in possession of a plump, unpopped, food-service grade kernel of popcorn coated with just a hint of blood and mucus. It was almost midnight.
     When asked why she shoved the corn up her nose, Sam’s answer was, “I did it to show faith!”
     Holy Moses in a pork-pie, a metaphysical statement of cause?!? “What do you mean, Sam? Faith in what?”
     “She said I couldn’t put popcorn in my nose.”
Oh, Faith was just another girl. Wouldn’t Sam Kinnison be disapointed?

Excerpt:
The IR port works great. Its a little too sensitive, however, because its always trying to make new friends wherever I go.
“Would you like to transfer files to computer ‘Joe’s Treo’?”
No. I would not.
“Would you like to transfer files to computer ‘DELL45-FORD’?”
No. Shut up.
“Are you angry at me?”
No. Just shut up and let me drink my damn coffee.

Click Here For The Review

Not really new, this is an essay on cloning. Its about four years old, but I’ve never published it. Kinda boring, really, but it fits the purpose of the essay blog.

     A consortium of Arabic-speaking doctors and the curators of the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, have just announced that the legendary 1957 Oscar Meijer Weiner-Mobile will be taken out of mothballs and returned to service as a combat ambulance in the Palestinian occupied territories as early as August 1, just in time for the planned unilateral pull-back from the Gaza strip.
     One of the many challenges medical professionals in the occupied territories face, besides chronic shortages of bandages, medicine, aneasthetic, water, bedding, soap and ball-point pens, is the constant threat of bombardment by Isreali forces who view any vehicle being driven by non-Isrealis as an immediate threat to the well-being of their elderly aunt Barb.
     ”The undeniable wholesome goodness of the all-beef, and very Kosher, Oscar Meijer Wiener Mobile should give their trigger fingers pause. How could a Kosher Weiner be a threat to aunt Barb?” – Pete Bucephalis, author, “Weiner’s Line”
     Sources close to the story state that no decision has been made on wether or not they will stencil the distinctive logo of the Red Crescent Society on the car. Its a good possibility that such a move will prove threatening to the Isreali’s aunt Barb.

A very early 8-bit piece called “Inurys” is up.
I’m planning on posting live performances on Saturdays, and arranged pieces on Tuesday or Wednesday from now on.
http://SafeTunes.blogspot.com