The Shark

Gonna be trying to do some cleaning up around here over the next few weeks.  I'm going back to the studio to finish everything up this Friday!  In the meantime, gotta make everything look nice and consistent so I can effectively try to promote this record.  Being an independent artist is like being a record label and an artist all at the same time so I'm grateful to my Sphere Music Group family for helping me keep things together!  I probably won't have much else to say here from now until the album is out so now you can begin to wait anxiously if you like...  The Shark is coming!

Layover

So everything is pretty much done, the usually eternal mixing process cut short by my desire to just really try to focus on the basic elements of each song and make sure they are heard. The rest is just icing on an otherwise well crafted cake and I want it to be able to speak for itself. Too much mixing might result in it sounding stiff and inorganic.

I can't believe I forgot to record vocals for a song so I'm gonna have to go back to the studio to get that done this week and also to get my friend Sean's guitar parts recorded as well. It won't take long to do and once done, those elements can be easily added to what is mixed down on those songs so far. But it's a matter of scheduling the time.

So I feel like I've been talking about nothing but me me me all the time on here lately so I'll take this time to talk about a couple friends of mine that have projects out or coming out soon as well.

First up, Wrex Washington put out a project a couple weeks ago called The 22nd. It's a banging 8 track ep filled with Wrex's introspective lyrical stylings combined with a cool confident flow that anyone should be able to get down to.

Next we have A-Roy's new album Commencement coming out, a debut for the rapper if you don't count his rough draft ep or exercises in style mixtape. I think a lot of people are gonna be surprised by this one when it drops tomorrow.

Later this fall, Dru B Shinin drops a mixtape and a new album that I know everyone should be looking forward to. Check out his past work here as always.
Look out for sphere music group this fall, we've got some big things happening coming up and it would be a shame for you to miss out!

The final countdown

Well, this is it. All features and guest musicians are arranged, all songs are written and demo'd, the recording sessions are planned and scheduled. Rehearsing with EyeJay Thursday to get the drums down and then after this weekend, if I don't have a full album recorded, it won't be for lack of trying.

No turning back now!

So I don't know about you

but working to produce creative content is one of the most fulfilling forms of work I know besides good hard labor. The work I do on an every day basis I don't really care for all that much. It's interesting enough to do for money...

There isn't enough joy in life lately, or ever really. There is always too much despair.

I've been reading a lot lately, or at least a lot compared to where I'd been for the last few years which was nothing. I used to love reading but nowadays the tired excuse "I don't have the time" seems to suddenly have the energy to produce itself with a surprising regularity. I've been working on things instead which is good but stressful. I don't think I'm getting enough sleep so I guess here's where we find out can I crack it or just crack? I think I'm doing fine though. Anyways, fine enough to sit here wasting time blogging instead of working! Oh god, where am I?

I have a show on February 11th with my band Not Equal. It's going to be really awesome. Having a show scheduled is a galvanizing feeling. I feel like I can conquer anything! The next day though who knows. It's this kind of uncertainty, like walking over the edge of a cliff with your eyes closed. Is there a bottom or will you just fall forever?

I'm looking forwad to playing shows because to me I guess that is the reason for doing what you're doing. Being in a band and not getting gigs is pointless or, at least it can feel that way. What's the point of playing or writing songs if you're not going to find some way to share them with people? I don't even care if people love us but I'm going to try my best to get them to. Fame is unimportant but success I guess by my own definition is important.

Things happen, slowly but surely. It's hard to remember to just breathe sometimes and experience one moment to the next.

The War of Art

I just read through the war of art by Steven Pressfield in one sitting. An hour even. I think that if I am capable of this, you are too and if you have ever had a feeling that you were not doing what you should be doing with your life, you are doing yourself a disservice by not reading this book and learning why.

For real.

Resistance killed my push up test. Along with everything else I have ever truly wanted to do in life. I feel like I have finally been given a weapon in a war I didn't even know I was fighting.

Even within part three, for all it's posturing about angels and God as the source of creativity in all human beings, there was a wealth of information about how failure is in a way ingrained within our dna and within the social constructs that we have evolved as human beings. Are you your Ego or your Self? Are you the lone coyote with dominion over all that your will encompasses or the pack dog begging for scraps from the alpha dog and growling at those who would try to take your barely earned scraps away? Point being, it's a great book, beginning to end. I hate religion but thankfully the spirituality that Pressfield espouses never resorts to doctrine or religion. So go read it.

Divine Salvation

So, if you have never heard of Salvia, you probably don't have any friends that do drugs or spend time online researching naturally occurring chemicals with hallucinogenic properties. So, it's a good thing you read this blog! Now then, to start with, let me give you a little background. I'm not really into drugs, especially chemically manufactured ones because of the additives and risks associated, plus none of them really sound like that much fun. I like the idea of recreational drugs, I do drink alcohol and... well, that's really as far as I'm willing to go on the internet. I was first introduced to Salvia by a friend who had been introduced to it by another friend... ahh the cycle of illicit substances, how it perpetuates itself. At any rate, he brought some over to try and also told me numerous accounts from other people of their experiences with it. Going into it, I knew the following:

It has different sort of effects on people in terms of what the actual hallucination experience is like.

It's really expensive and difficult to smoke, requiring that you really burn it for a while and hold as much smoke in your lungs as you can for as long as possible.

It only lasts for 5 minutes.

So it sounds like a great hallucinogen to try out right? No real side effects, you trip for a short amount of time and come back pretty quickly... So I did. My friend pinched a small amount into a bowl and I tried it. At the risk of ruining the suspense, my experience was not very exciting the first time, though it was fascinating in that it was unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. Upon exhaling, I immediately became overcome by this pleasant cooling sensation and the room seemed to darken and become more quiet. Like I was in a cave or something. I felt like I was sinking into the floor a little and my first reaction was to open my mouth and try to speak, only to find that I had apparently lost control of my mouth and/or vocal chords and as such sounded to my ears much like this retarded kid who used to go to school with me. I decided this was hilarious and proceeded to start laughing uncontrollably at my inability to coherently form words and the whole time I was pretty cognizant of the people around me and was able to speak with them. The whole experience probably did only last 5 minutes, leaving me with a mild sense of euphoria and a wonder that other people had had such amazing experiences. I decided it simply must not be for me and as it is too expensive for me to want to buy, wrote it off entirely as a novelty drug and not one that necessarily provided recreational benefits the way that *ahem* alcohol does.

Now we enter phase 2 of the clinical trial of Salvia's effects on the human mind. Another different friend of mine apparently on a whim decided to buy some salvia. I remember him relating to me his experiences when he tried it which are pretty humorous actually. I'll have to get him to write them down or see if he's posted them online anywhere. He claims there's a whole section of Something Awful forums dedicated to people posting their experiences... I don't really go there though myself unless a humorous link finds it's way to me so I don't know. So upon hearing his accounting of the events that took place after he tried it, and after he offered to let me try some myself, I decided to take it upon myself to actually have a decent experience with the drug. I even did some research about it online just to see if anyone else had written about it in any scholarly manner and the best I could come up with was the aforementioned wikipedia article and vague references to a chemical that happens to be a selective Kappa opioid receptor agonist. This didn't really make a whole lot of sense to me, not having any idea what a kappa opioid receptor is or does and further research yielded not very much information. At any rate, nothing mentioned any dangers whatsoever, giving a top hallucination time of 15 minutes. This I guess is an average and why it is so short, I don't know. At any rate, so I'm still not terribly keen on trying it out but at the same time I am thinking the worst that could happen is it would just be yet another disenchanting experience like the first one. So, I got over to my friend's place and after watching another friend of mine try it, and react fairly mildly, I thought "oh well it'll be cool to just have that feeling again..." I couldn't get over this nagging anxiety though as I was about to take my turn at it. It was that feeling of anticipation and I couldn't seem to make myself relax so I though well, if I'm going to do it at all I may as well get it over with. The thing is, maybe the mindset you approach it with affects it somehow. I don't know. But I had myself a nice little bowl's worth and proceed to light it and inhale, making sure the entire thing caught before removing the flame. I inhaled for as long as I could, not bothering to keep time (it may not have mattered anyways) and when I was done, held my breath, set the pipe down and exhaled. I sat there for a moment thinking to myself and wondering when the tell tale signs of different feeling would emerge and I was vaguely aware of others sitting around me. I could feel a tingling sensation begin within the center of my body that began to rise up within me. I sort of tried to concentrate on it but it was almost like trying to scoop up water off of pavement with a bucket. I suddenly came to and realized I had been sitting in that spot for years. Or I thought I had at least. I suddenly could no longer remember who I was or where I was or what had even happened. All I knew for sure is that something was stuck in the back of my throat or had somehow driven it's way into my brain. I felt like a plant had been ripped out roots and all or my brain had flipped upside down maybe. My mouth kept opening wider and wider until suddenly I realized that reality itself was spilling forth in steady bands of nostalgic and passive primary colors. The entire world was just sort of issuing forth and there was nothing for my mind to focus on. I didn't even have a mind as far as I knew. I rolled off the couch and suddenly was standing up in the middle of the room when I realized something was horribly wrong with my brain. I had no idea what just occurred but I need to get it our or fix it and I kept trying to explain to whatever apparitions I could focus on in front of me and tell them that my brain was broken and to please fix it. However they couldn't do anything for me so I proceeded to try and leave as best as possible. I felt like when I moved I was moving through reality the way a character in a flip book animation does. one frame at a time that somehow I was able to focus on individual moments but not connect them together or construct them into an artificially seamless reality. I tried as hard as possible to leave and get away, knowing somehow that this feeling wasn't right and had to be ejected but I didn't know what it would result in. I was afraid that the only alternative to my present state of existence was death. I had to leave! Everything unseen was infinite blackness. Everything was sideways and inside out all at the same time and I still was missing my lower jaw and incapable of coherent thought. Next thing I knew, I was trying to show my friends how all I had to do was reach down and grab the concrete outside and it would simply peel away revealing to them all that the surfaces that we see are simply a result of clipping and that if you peel away and look from the other side, you see that nothing actually exists there at all. It's just a collection of points and molecules. Like a video game graphics engine rendering polygons on one side only, reality was falling apart. I think it was around this time I finally started to come down. But before I actually regained full sense of my faculties, I know I was overcome by intense and primal fear that resulted in me violently punching someone who tried to tell me that the bare scraps of reality I was able to grab hold of weren't even real. It even took me a while before I remembered who was even around me and had to ask one of the people in the apartment who all was there. I gradually came back to a normal way of reconstructing reality but the palpable sense of terror and anguish that resulted from the condition didn't ever really leave.

I was amazed at how the experience left me that much more aware of some of the senses that are talked about in terms of how we perceive the world. The most affected were vision and my sense of proprioception. I couldn't figure out how I related to my body anymore and how I was interpreting reality since my eyes were worthless. I could hear okay but not process what was being said and I felt like I had shrank within myself or actually had removed myself from my body. I could feel palpably how reality stopped at the surface of my eyes and body and how I fit into it and I thought that as I was coming down it felt as if I was fitting myself back into my body like a glove or something.

It was like I was wearing a suit and somebody came along and bumped me really hard so that the suit got all messed up and pushed around and the eyeholes were no longer where they were supposed to be and the head was loose and flapping around in addition to there being excess where there shouldn't be. I really thought I was dying. It was simultaneously the most wonderful and terrifying thing I will never do again but am really glad to have experienced.

So now there you have it. If you've never done it, I'm not gonna recommend it. But I'll leave you with a little free-associative writing I did the night of while it was still wearing off.

"At first, nothing, as my mind slowly emptied out like someone opened a sieve in my brain.
everything just left.
It was like going insane
everything spinning upwards blue yellow and red lines
the couch rolling me up
the giant tongue of reality
licking me up from the ground
I had to get out away
the needle of reality
shoved up through the bottom of my brain
resting on the blade of a knife
no, my spine.
every step a risk of slipping
shredding to a thousand pieces
trying to grab hold of them all
explaining
to hold them out and show everyone
look! my brain is falling out!
disintegrating to pieces
my mouth is unhinging, I can't speak!
I can't explain anything
I reach out I have a hand
and it is capable
I have (can)
ripping through reality
like a sheet of paper
everything ink smearing across a page
I can't
I feel again.
for a second before I am devoured again,
nothing is actually real at all
My brain lost the ability to project meaning
to project my self.
it was just a hunk of meat and flesh."

So I guess you could say I dared to experiment with reality and see if there truly is such a thing as objectivity at all. The answer is terrifyingly, no. Looking through the empty blackness of the abyss, I saw not God, but... nothing.

Critical Thinking: What is a kappa opioid receptor? Perhaps insights into this drug's unique effects upon it could lead to a greater understanding of how the human brain constructs ideas such as ego and the self and gives us the capability to project them onto the outside world?

nobody fucks with the truth

Some things you will see in this blog:
(coming soon!)

uneducated, philosophical pseudo-scientific ramblings
poetry?
stuff that's more enlightening than what you'll find here.
discussion and ramblings that may intersect with what you'll find here
maybe some stuff about writing
maybe some musical stuff
maybe nothing at all! piss off!

Some things you will not see in this blog:

Intelligent Design

Intellectual Dishonesty

IDiocy

if you are capable of looking at the universe and seeing intelligence in its so called design, that calls into question your definition of intelligence.


So welcome one and all! If you are here by invitation please move to the back so I can address the ones who got here through the magic of the interweb.

Humanity is like a seething leviathan. Separate we are unique and odd individuals. Lonely even... Together, we form like voltron into a not so cooperative species where the individual parts are no longer discernible from the whole. A thriving and bountiful species of groups, sub-groups, categories and... individuals? This will become my outlet for the things that I discover and learn and read about.

It's pretty cool to be alive.