New Struck By Lightning Music Makes Me Gay

Hello friends.  I thought that I'd take the opportunity this late Friday (it's actually Saturday now that I look at the clock) evening (morning) to check in and clue you in to some news that makes me gay.  This news is as follows:

New Struck By Lightning music is available!

Backstory:

I spent tonight programming drums for a friend of mine's latest black metal endeavor (I don't know what his interest is in black metal, but it runs silent and runs deep, because he's always trying to get something off the ground).  Which is to say, I drank a bunch of beer and got all nostalgic.  Not good nostalgic, either.  Weepy nostalgic.

Let me back up further.

When I was five I met some kid on our first day in kindergarten.  He was just as weird as me, except his parents let him have a gnarly rattail haircut (this was the late 80's, and he had business up front to counteract the party that was going on in the back).  This kid followed me fearlessly back to my house that day without telling his parents where he was going, causing a large panic in the neighborhood.  Eventually, things got ironed out.  But from then on, we set things on fire and got dumb haircuts in tandem.  My mother and his father ended up marrying each other about 13 years subsequent.  Shortly thereafter, he literally dropped dead of congestive heart failure.

It was the worst.

This past Wednesday was the five year anniversary of the day he was unceremoniously felled without warning.  Needless to say, I did the logical thing and transformed myself from "Average Man" into "The World's Drunkest and Most Morose Human" that evening, breaking many of my personal records for drunkenness, including "most consecutive humiliations" and "longest moan."  What an evening!

"So what is this pointless tale getting to?" is the logical question for you to be asking.  Well, I'll tell you.  I've spent all night listening to old punk music (we were punk rockers for a long stretch of our lives), and I've been filling myself with old misanthropic punk music and anger towards the government and D-beat rather than dumping my sadness energy into pursuits like Family Togetherness and Religion and Love, which have proven to be dead ends for even the most lightweight depressive spell.  I've been revisiting old Minor Threat and Guttermouth and Dead Kennedys and (my personal favorite) Bad Religion for the last couple hours.  This does very little but give me a thirst for the crushingest and most D-boner-inducing crust I can find.

To Internets!

As it turns out, Struck by Lightning are finally doing what I always wanted them to do, which is release new music for me to think about when I masturbate.  The new album is going to be called True Predation, and it comes out THIS FUCKING MONTH.  Since I have such an enthusiastic and [gay] deep appreciation for the spectacular crust that Struck by Lightning bring to the table, I thought I should go ahead and alert you to the fact that you'll be able to enjoy a new album soon and some new tracks right now.  That's right!  Go over to Brooklyn Vegan RIGHT FUCKING NOW and listen to two new Struck by Lightning joints, both of which rule with the power of a thousand boner storms.  And a boner storm is a powerful sort of storm.

Seriously, though, go listen.  I've listened to "Funereal" about fifty times tonight, and not only will I not stop crying, but I can't keep my hands off the throbbing, veiney D-boner it has given me.  It almost hurts.

Thanks Metalsucks for cluing me in.  I've been so busy with my other pursuits lately that I might have missed my latest creepy obsession if it weren't for you!  Which is good, because I just got a "Cease and Desist" order from the lawyers that represent the cast of Breaking Bad, and I'm not allowed in Albuquerque anymore.  At least there's no dead period between obsessions!

This time.

File Sharing--Good Riddance

Disclaimer: A lot happened while I took my lengthy hiatus from unsolicited Interhole music criticism and random philosophical waxing.  This is a piece that I meant to write a month or so ago, after the great Mediafire purges were executed, thus putting an end to our way of online Interbung piracy for almost two days.  I know that Mediafire is still up and running, and like you, I'm likely to use it again to find out just how much the newest Black Dahlia Murder album sounds like the old Black Dahlia Murder albums, to which the answer is always "exactly."

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Well, it's finally happened, ladies and gentlemen (I don't know who I'm kidding with that crack about ladies.  No ladies read this stupid blog).  Our fair government, whose wisdom and foresight gave us outstanding institutions like the Department of Motor Vehicles and our public school system, has finally brought about the end of a way of life for us creepy Interhole lurkers.  They swooped in with cudgels and chains and LITERALLY BEAT OUR LIFESTYLE TO DEATH.  It seems that Mediafire has been the subject of a Great Purge, having all pirated and shared music deleted from the site, dealing our scene a death blow and rendering the internet only useful for finding the most disgusting and degrading kinds of pornography imaginable.  It's like the 90's again!  Only our modems are now superpowered, and we can find out in the blink of an eye how disappointed we are with any given celebrity's sextape.  Such an Orwellian concept as a Great Purge seemed impossible in our lifetime, but it seems that our insane government, hell bent on capitalism and arguing rather than adequately educating our young people (or any number of useful services they're actually supposed to be providing) have decided that YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO DOWNLOAD TRAGEDY'S DEMO TAPE WITHOUT PAYING FOR IT.

Does that terrify you?  Are you frightened that you can't just go download the new Decapitated album?  Well, don't be.

I'm here to tell you that file sharing was a plague on our scene, and as for its demise, I have this to say in eulogy: "Good riddance."

I've spent the last couple of months in a musical funk.  It's a major reason why I haven't been updating this blog recently.  I simply haven't been listening to anything new.  Perhaps, in my advancing age, I'm becoming curmudgeonly, my cantankerous nature beginning to take a hold of my life in places where there used to be good-natured teenage frivolity and super lame power metal jamz that my friends and I still bust out when we've crossed the line from "night with bros and beers" to "a bunch of guys decided that having their wives on speaking terms is overrated, so let's get hammered."  And my increasingly visible Angry Old Man persona has taken umbrage with the latest trends in music, from the amazing Technicolor designs utilized by bands whose main fanbases are goofy pubescent boys with giant plugs in their ear lobes and taste in music that is as disingenuous (and irony based) as a reality television wedding to anything involving skinny jeans.

And I always wonder if anybody whose build isn't "Third-World disheveled" realizes that they can't wear skinny jeans?  But I've had delusions about myself, too (which explains why I used to wear sideways baseball caps and the baggiest khaki pants available in order to look like a Real Skateboarder.  Oh the early 90's), so I won't throw stones.

Aside from the obvious Old Man trapping of "not understanding what's cool and hip these days" (read: black metal, doom, any version of noise, and generally anything that college students or younger listen to), I contend that the file sharing revolution that we experienced in the last couple of years was, in fact, a detriment to our scene at large.  I believe that file sharing supports and promotes entitlement among people, our scene, and young people especially.  Think about it: when something is perfectly free and can be accessed infinitely for the price of finding a connection to the Interhole at your local Starbucks or by hitting up a Homeless Hotspot, why should you not just have everything?  Why should you not just have any random album that has been posted in the handy form of a .RAR file, waiting to be unzipped like a slutty woman's leather pants?  I've seen it too many times, when I'm hanging out with someone and the question gets asked.

"Have you heard the new [band] album yet?  It's really good."

"I haven't heard it.  Hold on; we'll listen to it right now.  [Frantic typing at keyboard] You know, I've been thinking of shaving my pubic hair, just getting rid of the whole fucking mess...oh, here it is.  The new [band] album."

Then we're listening to the album.  Sounds good, but the ugly side comes around when the album can't be found immediately or if the file that was shared was corrupted or incomplete.  Then the last sentence goes:

"...I've been thinking of shaving my pubic hair, just getting rid of the whole fucking me...what the fuck?  WHAT THE FUCK?!?  WHY ISN'T THIS ALBUM AVAILABLE?  I WANT TO LISTEN TO IT NOW?!?"

Then, all of a sudden, you realize you've set a dumpster on fire and spray painted "Ron Paul 2012" on the side of a cop car.  Hours have passed!  "What have I done?!?" you think, launching into a soliloquy about how if the new whatever album were only available, the wanton destruction you just perpetrated would have been avoided completely.

The point is, I get annoyed when people think that they're entitled to hear whatever they want whenever they want.  It took me a long time, but I consider it about the same as hearing someone talk about how they're "supposed" to have a great job or a future of power, and it usually comes down to not being denied luxury things, and because they're white and have been told about how special they are all their lives.  But the secret is, they're not special.  I'm not special.  The more I think about it, the more I want to just say that you and I aren't supposed to have anything nice, unless your parents are super rich.  Then you can have all sorts of amazing things for free.

Looking back, that whole section of my argument made very little sense.  But I'm not going to edit it, because this whole shitstorm of an article has taken me forever to complete.

I know what you're saying, too.  You're saying "But with file sharing, you get to listen to whatever you want to whenever you want, and that's a good thing.  Why you gotta be so duuuuuuumb?"  Of course, not long ago I was inclined to agree with your statement of why I'm so duuuuuuumb.  "What do I want to listen to today?" I would ask myself.  Then I'd download anything I wanted off the Interbung and have a listen.  I listened to so much stuff, it made me feel like a real important hotshot music guy, being able to formulate shallow and vacuous opinions about the music that I was superficially enjoying before tossing to the side in favor of more, more, MORE new stuff.  Then I started noticing that all of the stuff I was listening to, though largely enjoyable, was rendering it perfectly impossible for me to remember any detail about virtually anything I listened to.  I think my biggest (read: single legitimate) gripe with file sharing is that it makes music not only endlessly available to everybody, but by extension also endlessly disposable.

I remember when I was about nine years old, I had amassed a small chunk of savings from my meager allowance.  I managed to avoid spending all of my money on Push Up Pops from the unscrupulous ice cream man who used to circulate my neighborhood, especially on allowance day, when he would make two or three passes and take all of the money from the swarm of kids that the annoying "Pop Goes the Weasel" song he had on his loudspeakers would attract.  But I managed some fiscal self control (for the first and probably only time), and managed to get a nice little chunk of money for the sole purpose of buying the new Bad Religion album, which at the time was Stranger than Fiction.  A friend of mine had happened upon it, and I became so entranced by it that nothing would do except that I also have it for myself.  We went to the Sam Goody in the mall one fine Saturday, where I discovered that I didn't have enough money for Stranger than Fiction on compact disc, so I bought it on audio cassette.

It was the most important purchase I ever made.  And the first piece of music I ever bought.

I listened to that tape until cassette players became obsolete and so hard to find that it didn't even matter that, one horrible day, I extracted the cassette from my ancient boombox and it turned to dust and fell through my fingers.  My screams and weeping filled the rooms of my childhood house until my mom told me to stop, she was getting ready for a date and needed me to vacuum the whole house.

The point is this: with music downloading, it's increasingly less common for people to find a piece of music that gets appreciated in the way that it should be.  I'm as guilty of it as anybody, and it's only been until recently, when I decided that I was done getting my piracy on, that I started revisiting music that I remember liking but that I can't remember what I liked about it.  There have been a lot of hidden gems in the mix (Hayaino Daisuki, KEN Mode, Zozobra) that I remember thinking well of but managed to not have any real recollection of.  And for every great piece that I find, I have probably three different albums that were so startling in mediocrity (or generally shittiness) that they will remain in my iTunes until my computer finally collapses like a dying star, and I won't miss any of it for even a second.

If you're like me, you tell everybody about how big a deal music is to you, and you wear goofy shirts that people always make stilted comments on.  Piracy has opened the world to us, while at the same time robbing our music, and our scene, of the opportunity for us to get truly and intimately acquainted with our "favorite" albums.  I'd like to go back to a world where people know the ins and outs of their favorite (or current favorite) albums the way I still know Bad Religion's Stranger than Fiction (which I bought on limited edition red vinyl a few years ago so I could finally stop mourning my dumb tape).

So here's a question: when is the last time an album changed your life?  Did you download it?  What does it take for you to really notice an album rather than just throwing it on the "Things I've Listened To" pile?

I'm Not Quite Dead Yet

Good day to you.

It's been a while since I've updated this little rag of mine, hasn't it?  I guess it's easy to let things slip away when you've been as busy as I've been lately.  Now I know how that guy who wrote "Cat's in the Cradle" felt!

You don't know it, but I can hear you all the way from here.  You're asking "Well, what the fuck have you been DOING, then, Mr. Butthole?"  To which I am wont to reply, "Oh come now, Mr. Butthole is my father; call me Cobra!"  But seriously, there's been so much stuff going on lately, it's been kind of stupid that I haven't updated in so long, and it's been even stupider that I didn't bother to delete the page entirely.  It's not easy being internet famous, even if you're not actually internet famous.  You know what I mean?

First off, I've been spending a bunch of my time taking part in the Living Doorway Fit Club (note that the link only takes you to part three), which is a solitary venture in my case; JGD lives out in Oregon, where I go to visit from time to time, but we don't socialize or ride bikes together on a regular basis.  Or ever.  And since the rest of the world doesn't care about a download blog for people who are in to crusty death metal, it leaves it up to me alone to achieve my fitness goals.  But I have the power!  As a matter of fact, I've been able to tone up and trim down using nothing but ancient Chinese secrets, those ads on the side of Facebook that boast about people who personal trainers hate, and paying people around me to scream at me day and night about how fat I am.  They do it for almost nothing!  Using this method, I've managed to go from flab to fab.  Just look at these pictures if you don't believe me:

Before:

You can tell he's fat because of the slice of candy-covered pizza and the half eaten burrito

And now I look like this!

It's important to only develop your body in parts where it isn't a sex crime to show it off in public.  Otherwise, fitness is useless.

Do I still breath heavily while I eat?  Do I still have a hard time climbing the single set of stairs that lead up to my apartment?  The answer to both is "Fuck yeah!  But look at my arms!"

What takes up most of my time, though, is my relentless, obsessive-to-the-point-of-being-a-mental-patient need to play guitar.  You know how much time it takes to hammer away at scales and arpeggios and tasty licks?  If you're like me, it takes forever, and if they paid you to do it, you'd be able to stay in your bedroom and practice all day even though you don't have a band or any prospect of a band.  I played with a band for a while, though, whose music I didn't much care for.  And you won't either!  Take a look at some videos on a Blogspot I created for the band and feel free to make fun of me in the comments.  Is it in bad taste to post something like this on my blog?  Maybe, but as I have to keep pointing out to the people around me, I'm not a journalist, and as such, journalistic integrity means nothing to me.  You can also hear bad music I've been obsessing over in lieu of writing this blog at my Soundcloud site.  It's all poorly produced and played by Yours Truly, so again, hit the comments and let me know how gay I am.

What I'm trying to say is that I haven't forgotten about you, Interhole Nation.  I've just been busy trying to become the wankiest guitarist with the most absurd set of pythons who ever lived (except for that guy from Brain Drill.  I'll never be that wanky or that bicep heavy, no matter how hard I try).  In fact, I've been steadily squirreling away little nuggets of things to write about, and between the new Meshuggah record, the new Black Breath record, new High on Fire, SXSW, and how monumentally hammered I got on St. Patrick's Day, I've got lots to talk about.  Maybe I'll actually talk about some if it.

But not now.  I'm off now to tempt fate by riding my ancient bike around in the Texas rain, my increasingly beefy guns glistening and flecked with dirt from the asphalt, swallowing lots of bugs (tis the season) whose calories I've had to account for in my increasingly strict diet, which now consists of bugs I accidentally eat while riding my bike and Jameson.  Because I care about my health.

Complete Failure--The Art Gospel of Aggravated Assault

Here in Texas, when you can't think of something to say to somebody, you talk about the weather.  I know this isn't a phenomenon that is specific to this region, but one thing I'm surprised about is how in to the weather people seem to get here.  I'm from California, and our weather-based exchanges are really short and dumb, like this:

Me: "It's (hot/cold/raining/dusty)"

Guy I have nothing in common with but have to acknowledge for some reason: "Yeah."

But out here, in Austin, there's very little crime, and our black people aren't particularly frightening, so people seem to have arbitrarily chosen the weather as something to get well versed in for the purposes of inane small talk.  It's awkward for me, because more and more, I have to have quite long discussions about the weather with people that I would otherwise never talk to.  And talking about the weather is boring!  Our exchanges look like this:

Me: "It's (hot/cold/raining/dusty/crawling with snakes)"

Guy I have nothing in common with but have to acknowledge for some reason: "Have you seen the radar lately?  It looks like there's an Arctic front about to sweep in from the Northwest, and it's bringing sleet and maybe some snow with it!  It won't be as bad as Dallas is going to get, but you know how things are down here, when you're not expecting it to rain, that's when it rains.  Let me show you on my phone (pulls out phone)...

[flash forward 11 minutes]

...and you can see how it almost looks like the pocket of rain in red is going to break apart and miss us, but then it comes right back together and hits us hard.  One time, when my brother lived in Lakeway..."

Me: "Wahhh."

This kind of exchange invariably bums me out, which drives me to my favorite remedy for the doldrums of my painfully mundane existence: brutal, crushing hardcore.

Enter Complete Failure.  Last time we caught up with our hardcore heroes, we were talking about the subject of failure and their 2009 release Heal No Evil.  Well, I can tell you that, being as dynamic and powerful as I am (you can't see it, but I'm kissing my enormous biceps right now), I managed to take failure and squeeze success out of it, even if my success is relative and can only be measured by noting that I haven't driven my car off a bridge yet.  With their latest outing, The Art Gospel of Aggravated Assault, Complete Failure have done the same (though I don't know about the whole driving a car off a bridge thing in relation to the band).

What does Art Gospel have that other albums don't, you might be asking?  Well, for one thing, it's got backwards talking.  For another thing, it's got the "oh God I'm being attacked by an owl" shriek of frontman Joe Mack.  And judging by that agonized screech that Mack produces, I'm guessing we're talking about a Great-Horned Owl attack.  They have such crushing foot strength!  The album also boasts some really impressive drum work from drummer Mike Rosswog, who the Interhole tells me used to be in Circle of Dead Children.  D-boner, activate!  Finally, the riffs of guitarist James Curl evoke the more crushing punk rock aesthetics available to modern man, sounding like a crazed caveman painting naked ladies on the wall of his cave during a peyote-induced mania.  Cavemen used to do that, right?

In short, it's the perfect package for the crusty of discerning taste.

"And what makes them so angry?" you might be asking.  "I'm frightened of these young roustabouts and their guitar music!"

Well, the Interbung tells me that they're from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  I've never been there, but sources deep in the know tell me that the only people who like Pittsburgh and people who spend their time yelling "Go Steelers!" and waving towels over their heads.  They're also usually covered in soot.

I make no secret of the painful, swollen, granite-hard boner I have for crusty, grinding hardcore, and Complete Failure don't hesitate to cradle and stroke my D-boner with the tender care that only crusty, grinding hardcore can provide.  Art Gospel is a towering maelstrom of powerful, ugly hardcore that sates even the most discriminating boners.  If you're looking for a good old-fashioned D-boner extravaganza, why don't you go to their Bandcamp site and listen to the album for free?  Or you can catch up on ComFail news and views at their website.

Blotted Science--The Animation of Entomology

 

Ron Jarzombek is an interesting guy.

Let me back up and say this first: I should have investigated Blotted Science long ago.  However, my busy schedule (drinking) only allows me to listen to so much new music, and since my handwriting is usually perfectly illegible (flawless pencil sketches of dicks doesn't count as handwriting), most of my great ideas that I have after 9 pm are generally unreadable or just plain old forgotten the next day.  I imagine that Blotted Science is written on the back of some pizza box somewhere, thrown away carelessly seconds after I scribbled the words over the Red Baron's face with my wife's brand new eyeliner.

I'm a creature of habit, and I always throw trash away.

But lo, I did not get around to listening to this tome, this priceless piece of technical instrumetal, this delightful treasure until after 2011 wrapped up and yelled "Eat my dick!" over its metaphorical shoulder, marking the end of the days when I could construct a year-end list (I had already finished my year end list anyway, so it wouldn't have made that much of a difference).  But I was looking all year for a tasty piece of technical, non-djent noodling that I could listen to while I jack off, and a great piece finally pops up and I totally balk on listening to it.  What a fool I've been!

My balls are blue and full, and it's all my fault!

So, to reiterate, Ron Jarzombek is an interesting guy.  You see, he seems to be the heavy hitter here in Blotted Science, and since he's a heavy hitter, he only associates himself with other heavy hitters, which is why Alex Webster (I don't have to say he's in Cannibal Corpse, do I?) and Hannes Grossman (Obscura, I think also ex-Necrophagist?) are palling around with him to make very fancy, shreddy, technical music.  And make no mistake; this isn't some kind of deathy, blackened soundscape bullcrap like everybody is doing these days.  Nay, this is music for people like me, who wear monocles when they listen to music, who talk about the preamps that their favorite players use, who watch frets like they were trying to break out of prison AND ONLY WE CAN STOP THEM.

Blotted Science have managed to do something which I've never really seen before, which is to incorporate 12 tone music into their repertoire.  Impressive?  Yes.  But if you're thinking this is the Schoenberg style of 12 tone, with Babbit squares to help map out the retrograde inversion and flesh out tetrachords, you're wrong about that.  In fact, Jarzombek utilizes an interesting (and unorthodox) schematic for the 12 tone method, which he describes on this here video.  Watch the video if you're a remorseless fretwatcher like me, or if you like to see things flashing in a circular to semicircular pattern.  This video has it all!

Better yet, if you want to get a really good idea for what Blotted Science is all about, you should scope out the video for the "A Sting Operation" suite that closes out the EP.  It's almost ten minutes of WTF, complete with ridiculous animations that manage to rival the bafflingly bad cover art for the album.

That's my one complaint about the album, incidentally, is the cover art.  They should really stick to something a little bit less perilous than 3d modeled creepy crawlies; it's just too easy to make look amateurish and laughable.  I imagine that maybe somebody's nephew is a failed artist or something and they had him throw together some CGI spiders so that he can say that he's active.  Which is fine; doing anything other than watch Law and Order is more than I do.

I'm just saying.

The Animation of Entomology is an exciting romp through the land of tech spells and shred fairies; indeed, the album is a foray into the fanciest and most upscale sphere that technical death metal has ever dared approach.  Many bands talk mad shit about 12 tone and being fancy, but I think Blotted Science wins.  And the best part?  It's indicated that Ron Jarzombek lives in San Antonio, which means that I've got to go down there and get my "lurk outside of Ron Jarzombek's house" on!

Because I want to get a shirt.

The Speculation Center: Meshuggah's New Album

This is Monsoon Fucking Cobra, and you just stepped in a big pile of some jerk's speculations about what will happen.  This is The Speculation Center!

[Video montage of me yelling a Colin Powell and slamming my fist on a desk]

Well it seems now that my 2012 Wish List is more of a series of chilling predictions about what is going to happen this year.  It seems that Meshuggah are taking my wish list seriously and have complied with the unspoken part of it, where they finally release a new album.  We've all been waiting for another album since the 1,000th time we listened to Obzen, but it took me writing about what it should be about to get them to finish it.  You're welcome.

So here's what I assume happened: Meshuggah were sitting around the mansion that they for some reason share, perusing their favorite websites as a bonding exercise for the band.  They gather around the huge computer screen of the "Meshug-Puter" for their favorite time of the day, when they get to all read Mouthful of Acid.  Because I'm hilarious and debonaire and stuff.  So Meshuggah reads my Wish List and decides that they should finally finish that album they've had sitting around in order to placate me and avoid provoking my wrath.  Which is an excellent choice, because my wrath is terrifying to men with even the strongest and most unwavering constitutions.

So they very quickly wrote the lyrics for, recorded, mixed and mastered the album after they read that I wanted them to.

Since they haven't released any album artwork or even an album title for the new album (which, as you can see on the official Interbung picture at the top of this, comes out on March 27), I will once again predict that the album will be called Old Horrors, and that it will be a concept album based around the most terrifying piece of cinema created in the 20th century, namely the movie Fire in the Sky.

Oh, God, it's based on a true story, too?!?

 

Dealing head on with the subject of alien abduction and finally unraveling the truth about our extraterrestrial overlords, Meshuggah will be the harbingers of peace between humans and the terrible alien scum, who will provide us with the cures to our myriad diseases and free their human prisoners from their secret uranium mines on Titan (one of the moons of Saturn) as a gesture of goodwill.  I imagine they'll also teach us how to make dogs talk so that we can really know what's going on in their brains.  Wouldn't that be fun?

 

Also, the aliens will look like...I don't know...lobsters.  Yeah, lobsters.

 

But for me, I'll never be able to listen to the album, and I'll go in to hiding once the alien scum descend upon the planet, because there is literally nothing so terrifying as an alien for any reason.  It's been proven by popular culture that they only want to probe and enslave us (until the Meshuggah album teaches them the human emotion they call "love").  And didn't you just read what I wrote about the forced labor camps on Titan, where you mine uranium for them?  That shit should be terrifying you, because it's terrifying the shit out of me.

 

So on March 27, Meshuggah will save us from the lobster-looking extraterrestrial masters that put us into concentration camps orbiting Saturn, but until then, I insist that you all panic, start a fire in a dumpster or two, start hoarding canned food (I suggest Chef Boyardee ravioli.  Delicious!), and buy as many guns as you can, because until the aliens see the light that Meshuggah hold for us all, nobody is safe.  NOBODY IS SAFE!

Announcement: Part One

I assume this is going to be the first of several announcements that I foolishly put out into the interbung to coerce people in a feeble attempt to make my life a little bit easier.  Here it goes:

I was recently in the Golden State, which is California for those of you who don't follow the colorful or ridiculous nicknames given to certain states based upon asinine or unclear characteristics of the state.  I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine, codenamed "Ed" to protect his identity, about the fate of this very blog.  I have recreated it here for you so that you can feel the drama of the situation.

Me: "I'm thinking about shutting down the blog.  Either that or expanding it.  I don't have time to maintain it the way that I would really like to, and I feel like it's got some potential to grow, but I'd need to find some new writers.  I don't think I'll be able to find anyone who is interested."

Ed: "You shouldn't shut it down.  At least try to find somebody else who can help write for it if you feel like you can't put out enough material by yourself.  [Ed runs over a raccoon in his Honda CR-V]  Fuck you, wildlife!"

Me: "I don't know [takes a thoughtful swig from a 64 ounce cup of Mountain Dew that I cleverly mixed with Triple Sec].  I don't see anyone wanting to do this kind of thing.  But maybe I'll try."

Ed: "You should at least try.  And if you can't do anything about it, maybe you can just keep updating it almost never, like you have been for the last few months.  Oh, no!  It's the evil ghost of Abraham Lincoln, come back to life on Truxton Avenue!"

Me: "I'm getting too old for this shit."

[We exchange a meaningful glance, pregnant with the memories of our many years spent as Hetero Life Partners.  The car skids to a halt and we quickly strap on our Proton Packs, preparing, once again, to fight the evil specters that terrorize the fertile Central Valley]

Ed: "Let's show that bastard that stovepipe hats have gone out of style!"

Me: "This is another play he won't see the end of!"

[We fistbump, super bro style]

After we got done busting the ghosts of history's greatest presidents, I realized that Ed might be right; I might be able to find some extra bodies to keep this blog afloat while I play Rage and watch Dexter.  So I'm going to put it out there and hope that somebody is interested.

What I'm looking for is one or two people to jump on and give their unsolicited opinion to people (read: nobody) about heavy metal music for literally no money.  Let me sweeten the pot, though.  Most of the bands that you write about will probably never read your words unless you force them to, which is inadvisable considering the stiff sentences given for kidnapping in the United States.  But sometimes they do, and it's a great opportunity to learn about how little your significant other cares about what you write on the interhole (spoiler alert: the answer is "very, very little").  You can brag about it to hobos or subway perverts or the weirdos at the laundromat.  The world is your oyster!

So basically I'm asking for one or two people to help me try vainly to be funny on the internet for free.

Sound good?  This is what I'd like:

Find my email address.  You should be able to find it somewhere on this stupid page.  Send me links to writing samples proving that you're capable of writing English and that you have the ability to be like funny.  In return, if I like the cut of your jib, we'll come up with a beefy Interweb name for you and start you posting up here.  If you're unfamiliar with the format of this page, here it is: I like to invent things out of thin air and make fun of stuff that I care about.  In other words, journalism has no place here, unless it's funny, like if the dude from Vader got hit in the face by a swan while he was on some kind of Bavarian rollercoaster.  That would be hilarious and also journalism.  But stuff like that also mostly never happens.

Since I assume there won't be anybody who responds to this, rest assured that if you're on the brink of giving it a shot, I'll be checking my email obsessively hoping that you'll at least take a stab at it.  I'm also not holding my breath.

Also, make the subject line say "MOA Potential Writer," and bonus points will be awarded for including references to boners in the body.

Show me what you've got, internets.