Recently the asinine notion has made it’s way into many people’s minds that music sucks today. I feel that they couldn’t be more wrong.

Unless of course they made this statement; “Music was way better back in the sixties and seventies with the likes of the Beatles and Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix and The Meters and Zepplin.” or “The baroque period was the greatest time for music writing.” Horse doody I say. I do not want to detract from any of those bands or baroqueial periods, in fact I love them.

I love music.

We still have all that music. It hasn’t gone away because Built to Spill writes rock songs in minor keys or because Nintendo-ized sounds can take the place of a string section. If Beethoven had a room full of sound equipment and a Japanese friend, he would be M83.

I do however see a problem with todays music scene, the fact that there is too much good music out there. The big record labels are a herd of bickering jackasses groping blindly in a glittering blackness.

What we must do is search out those rare but numerous jems, gleaned from the cusp of doom, and shout about them from the mp3 blog rooftops and anyplace else there are ears to hear.

HERE THEY ARE!

Music is better than ever, not to mention the fact that we can listen to a little Curtis Mayfield or Albinoni whenever Modest Mouse feels too forced.

Now everyone can agree that wall paper was better in the ’70s.

I hope the poker craze is finally over. I haven’t seen a boring Texas Hold’em tournament in months. It might be because I don’t have cable and don’t watch TV but I hear things. I have my rear to the grapevine. It was told to me that gambling was becoming a problem among younsters because of all the coverage poker has been getting. But there are a few things that poker can teach us. Although I doubt those youngsters with gambling problems learn anything. How can someone claim to understand Kant and like Dave Mathews Band and Phish… I digress but shall revisit judgements of taste shortly.

The first thing poker should teach kids is that you don’t do dumb things. Like steal peoples bandwidth. You can rely on a strategy of doing dumb things and hoping for the best and it’ll sometimes work out and you’ll feel like a genius for a while, but don’t kid yourself. Doing dumb things is a policy that will cost you your shorts in the long run.

The wizards you see at the final tables in the poker tournaments on television often say dumb things and they sometimes surely look like they’re doing dumb things, like betting their entire pile on a lousy pair of fours; but what you don’t see is that they’ve just spent a grueling and monotonous couple of weeks doing thousands of smart things. They’ve been folding a mind-numbing series of bad cards into the muck, and they’ve done a great heap of mental math and of course they’ve bullied a lot of lousy hands into winners against uncertain and even frightened opponents. And they’ve gotten away with it.

So the second behavior the game teaches is that if you absolutely must do dumb things you must do them with great enthusiasm, at the right time and against the right opposition.

Which leads us to the third fundamental truth, which is that you must avoid situations where someone else can intimidate you by enthusiastically doing dumb things in your presence. This all applies to everyday life. Poker just illustrates it more concisely.

Now back to judgements of taste: The young people think that idiotically stupid lyrics represent their own thoughts because they sound deep. But they wouldn’t want to understand even if they could; although they would copy and paste the lyrics as their own words and use vocabulary stifling acronyms like OMWTF.

It is an utter lie and there is no other way to describe it. But the young people think they understand it. It’s on the blogosphere. But they are full of garbage; they’re in a garbage pit. And they’re dumb.

So the first rule is that you don’t be dumb, and the second rule is that if you do do it, do it with enthusiasm. Since you are violating the first rule but following the second, it is now up to you to practice the third, which means you stop stealing my bandwidth.

I used to write non-stop, draw when I did stop, and between the two, try to learn as much as possible. Lately I have done none of those three things. I feel like I owe my readership something. For some reason my monthly hits are reaching into the tens of thousands and I feel like I should do something special for all of you. So I made myself a rootbeerfloat. Then I finally wrote an about page and put a picture of myself on there so all my visitors from the Russian federation can be amazed by vest wearing skills. Also they can read my story spewing skills as follows:

Spring here is a dream that visits the whistful and torments the insane. Once upon a once, it snowed on the fourth of July.

It was a breezy day. Cool for July, not cool for a ninja. I went to the neighborhood 4th party just to see how many hotdogs I could eat and if there were any cute girls who liked guys who could eat 11 hot dogs. Luckily for me, my neighborhood was fraught (past tense of fraughten) with hotdogs and girls who like guys who can eat them. One of them, Katy, gave me a look after dog #4 and I knew it was on. So on and so-on.

I got a hot dog and some fritos and went over to sit next to her on the lawn. The kids were organizing a water attack on a grumpy grown-up, the ladies were discussing Chaucer and the differences between middle english poetry and the budding hip hop scene and Margeret’s potato salad. The men were burning the hotdogs, yelling at some toddlers, and breaking down the chemical properties of styrafoam to awe the impressionable old folks. But none of this mattered, Katy and I were going to meet where the trees thicken and the sky grows dark under the branches of the mighty cottonwoods. It was there that we were going to smooch our faces off.

We decided to go seperately as to be inconspicuos as possible. As I left to go meet her, I took a bite of my fifth dog and noticed a white flake melt slowly in my ketchup. I looked around and beheld the second most beautiful thing I have ever seen. The sun was charring the sky into a warped 70’s wallpaper and all around me fell great flakes of snow.

The snow melted instantaneously as they hit my plate and my fritos. I twirled around in slow motion like a character in a Peter Jackson movie. From somewhere distant the public radio station blared from a Datsun. As the snow fell on my dog, the sound from the song fell on my ear. It was Airbag by Radiohead. The initial feedback guitar and the subtle lead riff galloping over it. The modest drum beat and the ethereal lyrics almost knocked the hotdog out of my hand. Luckily I came to my senses and hurriedly shoved it in my mouth. I ran over to the dumpy yellow Datsun and sat transfixed on the curb. The snow let up and stopped as the final blip blip blip faded from the speakers.

I sat there for a good ten minutes not hearing anything or seeing anything or eating anything. The sound of the song echoed through my head like everything echoes through the head of a Tom Hanks fan. I couldn’t comprehend its depth. When I finally came to, I knew that was the greatest piece of music I would ever experience. I ran back to the party.

No one had seen the snow. “It was probably just cotton from the cottonwoods,” they said. Nobody had heard the music. “It was probably a dog induced listening of Pearl Jam,” they chortled.

Were they deaf? Were they blind? Were they just stupider than me? That is when I realized that I was meant to be a music prophet.

The prospect both scared and humbled me, like a surrealist turned into an ant and then unable to lift ten times his body weight and being made fun of by the cool ants, and made me tired. I didn’t want that kind of responsibility. I am too weak a person. I knew I had to make a decision. So I ran away. I think I will leave the prophesying to real prophets.

I don’t know what happened to Katy. I think she is still sitting there under that tree…

Here is my brilliant solution to the immigration issue.

The fence being built on the southern border of the United States should be like the deer fences that force deer through holes at deer crossing sites. The hole in the US fence should funnel would-be-illegals into the state of New Mexico. There they would be admitted into a testing program that pitted their intelligence and strength against robots and ninjas and those who survive are admitted freely and legally into US society.

Also, New Mexico will be renamed “Purgatory.”

Whatever your english teacher taught you about run on sentences is wrong. In fact your teacher was a moron. Take a lesson from my mentor James Joyce

He felt the deathchill touch the extremities and creep onward towards the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes, the bright centers of the brain brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the last sweat oozing upon the skin, the powerlessness of the dying limbs, the speech thickening and wandering and failing the heart throbbing faintly and more faintly, all but vanquished, the breath, the poor breath, the poor helpless human spirit, sobbing and sighing, gurgling and rattling in the throat. No help! No help!

-From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.