BANDITOS

Lucky us. Last night some bastards busted two windows out of my car and stole half my cd's, all my textbooks (in a $180 backpack), and all my coats that fit. Yeah, I'm wearing a coat that doesn't go to my wrists, have no music, and all my homework is probably in a dumpster somewhere, but the good news - The idiots didn't pop the trunk and steal my studio equipment, so we are still on for making recordings. The other good news is that, because this has happened before, I took all my cd's out, burned copies of them, and put the copies in the car - about a week ago! Talk about perfect timing! So these guys, in all their wisdom, stole a backpack full of homework, about 50 cd's with a combined value of ten bucks, and a SECURITY OFFICER coat. The only things they stole really suck for me, but they also really suck for them. But they got my trench coat, which I look super hot in, and that's not ideal.

Savage Inequality

SO, I happen to have done a poor job on my second midterm in Social Inequality. I think it's because I spent so much of class listening for good band names and then I answered the short answer questions with a lot of sarcasm, like "masculinity is a horrible disease that ruins the lives of many and causes sociological discrimination." But I did manage to write a song (rough poem, so far) about a film that we watched based on the Ohio public school system. Yay!

Savage Inequality

the suffering inequity

this compromised society

administrative privilege

the world drops its financial sledge

unequal child unnecessary

confound this discrepancy

give this child personal value

shall I esteem her or shall you

can we take away the drama

assist the broken single mama

attention to the potential

the deepening poverty + shifting health

blame them for inadequacy

while they blame the bureaucracy

ignoring their disparity

we upgrade our own facility

will we alleviate

some of the pain

or will we deviate

because we are vain

we condemn them for their behavior

they must become their own savior

we celebrate the right to pray

the right to wealth - the right to betray

the divorce of class becomes absolute

the situation destitute

division of class is pitiful

our unity is integral

the hunger is demoralizing

too bad your jobs are downsizing

accomplishment is seen as nil

environment becomes landfill

the education obsolete

the parenting is incomplete

differences not inherent

they are ignored not ignorant

now that we've been to the moon

perhaps rebuild the ghetto soon

the criminals we can't condone

father in prison child alone

the single mother left distressed

wealthy society unimpressed

if healing we can orchestrate

we'll lift them to a higher state

will we allow the hate

will it remain

why is someone truly great

seen as a stain

we condemn them for their behavior
they must become their own savior
we celebrate the right to pray
the right to wealth - the right to betray
the divorce of class becomes absolute
the situation destitute
division of class is pitiful
our unity is integral

we leave the poor impoverished

we disregard them dead, perished

they are not learned or proficient

their education insufficient

our children suffer atrocity

slide down at high velocity

accustomed to this lack of hope

addicted to this crack and dope

the violence becomes domestic

the violated arrested

above we smirk and categorize

consistent wrongs desensitize

they don't deserve our sympathy

coexisting void of empathy

collapsing rotten moldy buildin'

dilapidating all our children

we condemn them for their behavior
they must become their own savior
we celebrate the right to pray
the right to wealth - the right to betray
the divorce of class becomes absolute
the situation destitute
division of class is pitiful
our unity is integral

Oopsies.

On account of my dumbness, we all jumped the gun, so we get the old "Off-Sides" penalty. A good twelve seconds after publishing that we had a name, I went on to find another band with that same name. Now, being the jerks we are, we actually considered ignoring it and just being a more awesome band than them, but their cd comes out this winter, and they have demos up on their sites (All three of their sites) and they've had thousands of hits, because they're from Chicago, so there will be no chance of people hearing of us first, and due to fear of litigation, we will be taking another look at that list of names. My apologies.

My Uncle just suggested something..."After the Mourning." Hmmm...

In The Mourning

Congratulations to us! After THREE WEEKS of brainstorming for band names, we finally found one! Now, granted, there were usually 2 of us who could agree on any given band name anybody came up with, but getting five guys to agree unanimously on the one word or phrase that will be on every album, every tee-shirt, every sticker, patch or flyer associated with the band FOREVER is a tough thing. And not only do you have to find one evrybody agrees on, you have to find one PRONTO, because you can't make a recording or put on a show or make merchandise or, let's just say set up a MySpace account, or even tell your friends to get the word out about your band - NOTHING - until you have a name.

What's funny is that I was pumping out between one and three pages a day for the first week, and they were really starting to get feeble (Feeble was on the list), but the name everybody perked up to was one of the first dozen. So, maybe stopping with the first page would have been ok? I took the list to practice and had Jake look it over and when he hit that name, he stopped and looked up, like he had an epiphany (Epiphany was also within the first 20 names) about the double meaning and we discussed it for a while. Then I told Ashley about it last night and he stopped me and asked me to repeat the spelling, and when I asked my fiance, she asked if I knew what it meant. And so it goes.

The more time people spend thinking about it, the more they like it. With probably a dozen pages packed with names in a small font, this name is still one of my favorites, because, well, it not only sounds cool, but you can impose some sort of meaning on it, if you want to be deep and stuff.

Now that we've unanimously chosen this name, we can get back to actually working on the music. As anybody in a band knows, if you don't have a name for your band, all you can do is listen for cool words. People will be discussing a Chemistry exam and suddenly you hear some stupid name like "Opposite Reaction" or "Free Radicals" and you have to stop everybody to write it down.

My grades were starting to worry me because all I could do is sit in class and write down cool words that the teachers said. I couldn't remember the meanings of some of the words, but boy did they look cool written out in the shape of a BATMAN logo!

On the bright side, the pages and pages of cool words were not discarded. They will be available for cool song titles, album titles, tour titles, t-shirt designs...


Uncle Jesse
just a bassist,
In The Mourning

Death Race 2000

Right now on campus one cannot go far without encountering something about the war, and especially now that the death toll has reached two thousand, because that’s easier to say than one thousand however many hundred, and like, forty six. There is a tent on campus, Strike for Peace, where they have all sorts of cute little propaganda and sometimes you get to see people outside reading names off. These are the names of fallen soldiers, being treated as victims. I will remain calm. These men are heroes, who volunteered to fight for a cause they believe in. They did not die of liver failure, aids, suicide, obesity, or poverty. These men fought valiantly for a noble cause, and they should not be treated as a senseless tragedy. It is insulting, and they deserve so much better. There. That was me being calm about something I should probably not be able to be calm about. It’s an outrage. Please stop.

Not only is this the lowest casualty rate of any war I’ve ever been in, or seen on TV, or heard old men tell stories about, but we have, with the help of these 2,000 fallen soldiers, forever changed the future of a nation. Iraq is progressing rapidly from tormented poverty, a poverty that you would think was staged if you visited briefly, to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of whatever it is they feel like pursuing. Kudos to us for a job well done. We should be grateful and supportive of our VOLUNTEERS.

Meanwhile…

By the close of business today, 4,000 babies will be put to death for no reason other than being too inconvenient. Come up with as many hypothetical situations as you want. Perhaps you even know of some individual who you feel really HAD to kill a baby. Every day, another 4,000 babies die, and you cannot come up with enough hypothetical excuses to cover that. That is double the death toll from three years of fighting for the FREEDOM of a Middle Eastern nation, and it will happen again tomorrow. THIS is an example of senseless killing over money. The baby would be too expensive. KILL IT! It is not directly related to the war overseas, but I bring it up in the same letter because it should be at the forefront of our minds each day. We should wake up every morning, turn on the news, see the Abortion rate for the day, and ask ourselves why another four thousand children have to die before we get off work today. If a woman kills her child, it makes papers because it is a horrific crime. But this, this is normal and socially acceptable. Why? People want it. They protest IN FAVOR of THIS!

The amusing thing is WHO fights for such a thing. They are the hippies, the vegetarians, the anti-war crowd. They oppose the death penalty. In some cases they are vegans. Among the Abortion Rights group are people who will not eat dairy products because milk is meant to sustain a newborn cow. They ride bikes and use cloth grocery bags. These same people will not eat eggs because those could have the potential to be a baby chicken. Live and let live and harm nothing. They, as we all should, believe all creatures should live together in harmony (I believe this is what started the war – brutal killings in the middle east have to stop, and as the dominant culture in the world, we need to help stop them). This code is a great set of ideals at its heart (similar to Communism), and all things should do their part to uphold this system. But all this harmony comes to its demise when one mentions abortion. The battle cry changes abruptly from “Live and Let Live” to “How DARE YOU tell ME whether I can Kill MY Baby, HATER!”

How can these two ways of thinking coexist in the same brain? How can the burning desire to save the environment and the animals POSSIBLY line up with the justification of infanticide? Perhaps it’s the medical marijuana. The important thing is that no hypothetical situation justifies killing 4,000 babies a day, even if they have weapons of mass destruction.