Iron Clad... tales of an early 21st Century man

After about a 3 year hiatus I decided to revive my blog. Let's see if I have enough to say to keep regular updates going.

Anyway if you know me you know that I'm into a genre of music called "Fuzz Rock". To put it simply Fuzz Rock can be described 60's- and 70's style low-fidelity, "fuzzy", riff-heavy rock & roll. Key elements include instrumentals, space-noise, guitar solos and riffage. It is also often referred to as "Stoner Rock" because of the psychedelic element of it, but as someone who doesn't use drugs, I don't like that name.

I discovered Novadriver about a week ago and it was love at first play. These guys get it. Prepare to be taken to a world where the Chevy Nova and the Supernova merge as one cosmic entity. Strap into the spaceship and let yourself go for interstellar travel. About 90% of their songs are about space, intergalactic travel and planets. The other 10% is about cars, instrumentals and violence ("How much money you got? I'm gonna roll ya!"). There is no pretense, just hard and heavy rock and roll, like it's still the 1970s. Think of a modern version of Hawkwind with a heavier sound.




Anyway, check out www.myspace.com/novadriver to sample 4 songs. If you like what you hear hit up their record company, Small Stone records and buy their 2 CDs.

Labels: rock nova driver heavy riff

I can only laugh as my first paycheck has been Direct Deposited into someone else's account.

"Hey this is Barry at the Employee Service Center. We found the problem. The day you were hired, there were 2 other new hires, and somehow their bank information got put into your screen... so, we will see what we can do to cut you a check today."

Yeah. Nice one. I feel bad for Barry. I want to punch the lights out of the idiot who got MY money DD'd into someone else's account.

HOW COULD YOU BE SO DUMB?

It's not like I have a common name that you could get it confused with someone else's last name. I mean, look at this data from census.gov:

NAME (last)	%FREQ	CUMM FREQ	RANK
*deleted*	0.000	90.398	87903

That basically means my last name is the 87,903rd most popular name in the US. I am in the 90th percentile of commonality of last names

Labels: direct deposit

So I moved down to Austin TX and if all goes well here I should have a job pretty soon too. On the 17 hour drive down I had time to think about a lot of things that I would have wanted to put in my blog. Unfortunately I forgot them all. Current insights:

-My car fucking rocks
-Whataburger rules
-6th street is pretty damn sweet
-The fact that Clutch has put out 3 CDs in less than a year is way cool as well

Benjamin -

Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

Shipping Address
================
Benjamin *******
***************
Indianapolis, IN
Email: ben*********@*********

Qty Description Price Total
=== =========== ===== =====
1 ANTHROPHOBIA: hard by design $8.00 $8.00
1 EASTCIDE: eastcide $13.00 $13.00

Sub Total $21.00
Shipping $3.85
Grand Total $24.85



Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make
sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that
money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Wednesday, April 28th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year". We're all
exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

So I pick up my mail yesterday and find this letter addressed to me:

Dear Ben,

Guess who I am. I'm you from 10 years ago. Do you remember this letter[?] I am in 6th grade now with Mr. [deleted]. I will graduate 6th grade in 3 1/2 days. I want to be involved in technology [and] go to M.I.T. Right now the biggest electronic breakthroughs are laptops and video phones, there is still no cure for AIDS. I will graduate soon, it is important to me.

I hope you are still doing goal keeper in soccer, catcher in baseball[,] gymnastics, and role-playing games. I know how tough it must be now you have college, a home, maybe a car, job and money too.

To me now, what is important is trying hard and pushing the limits, everyday is a quest for gusto. Do your best. It will pay off. Remember this every second of every day.

Sincerely Yourself,
Ben [deleted]

[written circa June, 1993 in crappy cursive handwriting]

Very amusing. It was more like 11 years, but who's counting.

Why is it that when I'm on a flight somewhere and there's a hot girl sitting next to me I never have the nerve to strike up a conversation? It's not like I'm ever going to see her again. It should be really good target pratice... but I always wuss out because I don't want to be "that weird guy".

So today finally after an hour of obvious tension she started talking to me. I thought we hit it off. But then the flight landed a few minutes later and I talked with her on the way to the baggage claim but then we had to go. Stupid stupid stupid. Somebody shoot me.

EDIT: I just realized this happened TWICE over thanksgiving break! There was another girl that I balked on starting a conversation with who started talking to me. Had I started earlier maybe I coulda made something out of it... or something. Yeah, I suck.