I don't know where I'm goin'

But I sure know where I've been.
Hangin' on the promises of yesterday
But I've made up my mind
I ain't wastin' no more time
'cause here I go again
Here I go again

I haven't been posting for a while. I'm even late with my "Comments on the Japanese Grand Prix." Life hasn't been so good lately. Being a single parent is hard enough. Being a disabled single parent is bad. Being a disabled single parent on a fixed income where you're forced to work a part-time job in order to pay the rent and buy food sucks. Now, to top it all off, I might lose the part-time job. I've been so bad lately with the symptoms of the FM that I've missed a ton of work. I'm on a 30 day "probation" now. If I lose the part-time gig I can't live on the disability check at all. No house, and they take away my kid. His mom is "between dwellings" so that's a bit of a difficulty. It's not very sunny here these days.

Since you've been gone
Since you've been gone
I'm outta my head, can't take it
Could I be wrong
But since you've been gone
You cast a spell so break it

I ran across this site called imode the other day. It's really very lame and mostly seems to be used by AOL'ers, kids and IM'ers but I thought what the hell and signed up. It's free anyway. You can put up a smiley to show what your mood is. The cool thing is that it will use all the moods to make an aggregated mood for the Internet. Looks like this -

The Current mood of the Internet is .

At least it was when I typed this.

My moods have been rather dark so far. Wonder why...

Doctor doctor, please
Oh, the mess I'm in
Doctor doctor, please,
oh, the mess I'm in

Right at this exact moment iTunes is playing "2 Minutes to Midnight" by Iron Maiden. I'm really glad I got to live through the heyday of Heavy Metal. We were all living in Germany then so it wasn't like it was here with the hair and the glam and stuff. It was barebones, no-holds-barred, shred your face mayhem. $DEITY it was glorious. Heh, how Klingon of me to say that. But it was. I lived from about 17 to 25 in mind thrashing happiness. Hell, even when I was unhappy I was still happy. You know all those old guys who talk about the glory days? It's true. When you get to a certain time in life you realize what a great thing youth is. I'm going to try to do everything I can so that my son can have a life as wondrous and grand and humbling and driving as I did. 'Course a lot of that will depend on the coming US elections. Speaking of which...

If ever there was a time when "None of the above" should be on the ballot this is it. I know people out there who are very adamant about being either for one of the guys or against the same guy. I can't honestly, in good conscious, vote for either of them. But then I either have to not vote or vote for one of the fools running on various independent platforms. Either way it's a wasted vote. Sometimes it's not worth it but I will vote. I probably won't know who I'll vote for until I actually pull the leaver, but I'll vote. I mean, I am a USian after all.

The boys are back in town
The boys are back in town
The boys are back in town
The boys are back in town

Things goin' on

Another 4am update.

My son is having trouble sleeping. He's having nightmares and the crickets are to loud. I wish I could exterminate every cricket within hearing range. Normally I am very, "Don't kill it", with bugs and other living things. It's the almost Buddhist in me. But crickets are a different story. They should all die, no exceptions. Well, maybe Jiminy Cricket, but all the rest are flamebait. Anyway, he's not getting much sleep. I put on an album (CD for you under 30 crowd) to drown out the noise and help relax him. He likes it and it does seem to work.

But he's also having some nightmares from watching Terminator and T2. He'd already seen T3 but not the first two so this morning he watched a double feature over at Grandma's house. He'd spent the night there on a sleep-over and had a great time. But between the crickets and the bad dreams he's been waking up (2 times so far) and waking me up as well.

The first time he woke up I came into the computer room to see if there was anything in my iTunes library that we could listen to but he nix'ed everything. Then he saw the playlist that had only one 20 second song in it. It was my first experiment with GarageBand. I showed him what it was and we ended up making a 30 second piece that's really pretty good. He helped me select all the tracks and was the one who wanted three guitars in it. Maybe we can fill it in more over the weekend.

The second time he woke up I put on his album again and said I'd come lay down with him after I answered a little email. I can usually get away with this one as he falls asleep and I can just go straight to bed. I just stopped here for a quick sec... I shoulda known better.

There's more going on in life but my brain is fried right now. Most of it is the same $#it over and over. One thing I do have to do this weekend is fix the laptop from work. I totally hosed it on Thursday and spent Friday trying to recover it. I got almost everything working except X. The change from XFree to Xorg is a bit to tricky for me to do manually. I'll just blow everything off and reinstall from scratch. It's a Dell laptop <subliminal message>Dell Sucks!</subliminal message> but despite that fact it works fairly nicely.

$DEITY I'm tired! The sun is coming up. Man, I really wish I had a girlfriend or wife so much. I wouldn't be sitting here typing this bullshit if I did. I'd be in bed sleeping with her in my arms. It's the holding and hugging and kissing I miss the most.

Music lost in a box

Many years ago, actually 22 years to be specific, I picked up an inexpensive (not cheap) electric guitar and started playing. Things evolved and within 5 years me, my two brothers and my sister had our own band and were playing gigs on Army bases and in German clubs. We were a variety rock band, playing anything from Journey and Pat Benatar to the Scorpions and Black Sabbath. We had also gone into the studio and cut a tape of 10 original songs. We weren't The Next Big Thing<tm> but we weren't bad. Once moving to the States in '88 I didn't have much time to play, but I always figured I'd just pick it back up when life settled down. Well, life never settled down. Marriage, serious career, baby boy... Then in the mid-90's I got Fibromyalgia and playing the guitar became a permanent part of my past.

Fast forward a couplea years and I'm with my brother in a music store. He's working hard to get back into playing, he's a drummer and plays guitar, and trying to work on being a singer. While at the store with him I saw a nice blues harmonica. It hit me, I could play this. So I got one, in the key of G, and started to mess around with it. Mostly I did blues riffs and wild ass improv solos. It was fun and I like it. I'm not worried about being good or anything, just want to keep music in my life. After a while I got more harps; A, C, D and E. Five harmonicas and about $45 each. But it was well worth it.

In the summer of 2003 I moved from the apartment I was in into a house. When the movers came I had done absolutely nothing to get ready. I was pretty much in bed for the days preceding and the day of the move. With the help of my mom they packed everything up and moved me. Lots of stuff ended up randomly packed with lots of other stuff. I still haven't emptied all the boxes but, as you probably guessed, I can't find the harmonicas. That's $225 worth of musical instruments sitting somewhere in a box. Knowing my luck they are in the garage getting all rusted and corroded. Spent a couple of hours today digging through the boxed in there looking for some sign of them. No luck.

Lately I have been thinking of buying one or two again. If I get a G and an E (and maybe a C) I should be covered for the most part if there ever comes a chance to play with my brother or anyone else. Maybe I'll swing by there tomorrow and see what they have in stock.