lowquality.net

1. Last night I intended to go jam with my pal Tripp at a shady storage building in Wards Corner and because of some confusion with pad locks and keys, we ended up at someone’s house in Virginia Beach at the most ridiculous home studio I have ever seen. It was as big or bigger than some legit commercial studios I have been in and every damn thing you’d expect to find in one. Crazy.One of my reason for wanting to get together with Tripp was an excuse to crank the AG 500 up with both of my cabinets and mess with it a little to get some different sounds (which I haven’t had the opportunity to do because I have only been using it at gigs and don’t have much of an opportunity to experiment with it at full volume). So instead of doing this in a rattling storage building, I got to do it in a more harmonically-friendly environment. This fucking amp is so awesome for a 26lbs. flyweight head. I got the distortion channel dialed in perfect right now, but it really needs to be cranked to get the right amount of “good” feedback. So freaking fun.
2. May have another gig with Billy Thompson coming up. I love playing with Billy, so I am super stoked. Will keep everyone posted about that.
3. Luke told me yesterday that he and Sarah are pregnant!
4. Going to Richmond this weekend to hang out with Kab Kids. I expect to be drunk-tweeting much of the hangout session. Also expect to sneak away at some point and hit Plan 9 for some tunes.
5. It’s retarded to love a grocery store this much, but I am so fucking glad we have a Trader Joe’s in Hampton Roads now. I could go there every day. I never get sick of it.

I know. I know.

Kim and I found this about a year ago and after almost that much time has passed we occasionally still catch ourselves singing it in our heads so we promised to never mention it again… but then it comes up in conversation and we get the hook stuck on “Repeat One” and we have to go back to rehab. My buddy DJ Cornbread discovered this for the first time yesterday and posted it to his Facebook.. thus cursing me to relive and sing this damned miserable excuse for a song in my head for the remainder of Eternity.

But, first, some thoughts:

1) No real woman who suspects her man is cheating wants to smell his dick. Period.

2) Any man who is knowingly dating / married to a woman crazy enough to request / write a song about the smelling of an unfaithful lover’s penis would be a fool to not shower and scrub himself mercilessly before leaving the hotel.

3) Despite being recorded before Barack Obama took office, this song single-handedly negates the coming of an age where an African-American can become President of the United States of America. It’s like he didn’t really win the election. It’s a relationship not unlike Christ dying for our sins, except with the opposite effect. This song forgives grace and innocence. If King were alive he’d turn the fire hoses on the crowds himself.

Second only to “not having to drive a car” I envy the convenient close-proximity of quality corporate food chains like Au Bon Pain that  Boston– or any major city– has to offer. (And that IS the rub when living in a major city: you want to wage wanton protest against corporate chains because you have local alternatives worth protecting– and you should protect them– but in cultural vacuums like Hampton Roads, Virginia we welcome Chipotle with open arms and don’t care if it puts a QDoba or Moe’s out of business. The irony is that you guys in the big cities still have so many more of these corporate chains than we do and, such as the case of Au Bon Pain, you forget how good some of them really are because they create the baseline of quality in your locale. I mean, I doubt anyone down here would even know what a Peet’s Coffee was, let alone Espresso Royale,)

Yeah, this is the post where Justin gushes over a chain restaurant.

I admit that it’s completely superficial, but a man like me needs an almond croissant from time to time, and when he lives in a shitty town like Norfolk, VA he knows he’s gonna end up driving for 30 minutes and paying too much at a mediocre pretentious hole-in-the-wall where the owner has some kind of inflated self-image as Ambassador of Food Culture to Hampton Roads because “he went to France once.”

Who cares? All I know is that an ABP almond croissant would be affordable and of decent quality by comparison to the current options in my neighborhood and I wouldn’t shed a tear if they opened one right over here on the dirty side of 21st street. Or, even, better.. next door to Local Heroes.

Au Bon Pain would blow the doors off of Panera Bread and 75% of the half-assed local “bistros.”

I know dick about electrical systems. Please advise.

When Kim and I moved into our apartment last May we knew that living in an older building was going to have some idiosyncracies that we’d not experienced in the past. The primary one for us has been that, especially during the summer when we have the AC units cranking, we are replacing our fuses quite often.

Last night we came home to a dark apartment well beyond the reasonable hour of being able to run to the hardware store to buy fuses (we have the round plug style fuses and I wasn’t about to go out at 3AM only to discover that Harris Teeter didn’t carry them). So we slept in a sweltering apartment all night and I woke up at the buttcrack of dawn and drove to Lowe’s to get some fuses.

Up until this moment, I’ve been replacing “like with like” without really knowing if the previous tenants knew what the hell they were doing. The orange 20 amp fuses at the top go to the kitchen and run the fridge (and something else, I don’t know what) and the rest are 15 amp fuses. For some reason I didn’t think to read the plate on the left because A) it contained a diagram that makes no sense to me and B) it seemed too old to be relevant to my interests. So I continued to blissfully replace 15 amp fuses with 15 amp fuses (this time I bought the Heavy duty versions) and 20-amp fuses with 20 amp fuses. Well today Kim points out that that the diagram says “30 Amp. Main”. I don’t know if that means that the main circuit is 30 amps, if the diagram is poorly designed and “30 Amp” is a separate idea from “Main,” which is referring to the diagram itself (possibly meaning that all of these circuits are 30 amps and the sign is telling me what kind of fuses to use), or some other interpretation of the facts presented on this sign which was made in the age before litigation. There was one occasion where the maintenance guy replaced a 15 amp fuse with a 20 amp fuse and I wasn’t sure if that was just some kind of shady, cheapskate slumlord thing to do or if 20 amp fuses were a perfectly ok thing to use. I have since replaced that fuse for safety’s sake because I didn’t want to die in a fire.

I really hope Ozzy is the first one to respond to this post.

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I can’t find my hat and I’m a freaking wreck over it. I know there are real problems in the world but I’ll be damned if they matter to me so long as I lost my hat. Back in 2005 I had expressed to Kim, who I’d only been dating for about a year or so, that I wanted to start wearing “an old man hat.” My reasons were simple: one, I thought a hat would be a good way to manage my otherwise unmanageable hair and, two, I hate the idea of wearing a ball cap so I figured a tweed cap would fit my grouchy old man personality. Also, there was a picture of me when I was kid dressed in a suit with a brown cap on my head and I thought it was funny and said something like “this is a place I’d like to get back to.”

That Christmas Kim gave me a hat she ordered online from a store in Scotland and it couldn’t have been more awesome. I think I’ve worn it nearly every day since then, rarely taking a break from having it on my head. It had become one my most cherished possessions… this dumb old man hat. Sometime around 2007, I started seeing these style of hats everywhere, I was ahead of the trend by a year and some change. Normally, being resistant to fads I could have been expected to toss it in the closet somewhere, but that didn’t happen. I was expecting to keep this stupid hat for years to come.

Now I have no idea where the hell it is. I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find it. Kim keeps saying we can get me a new one, and I have even found some nice places that hand tailor tweed caps to order but I honestly just want my hat back. I’m like a little kid whose security blanket has been snatched away. I’m like Linus going through the DTs, my head spinning, getting dizzy and sick and unable to function as a normal human being.

I really would love for them to come stateside, but if they never do I am just glad that they are doing something.

It isn’t typically my style to hotlink webcomics but if this isn’t just the perfect expression of how I, and so many of my friends, view their love-hate-love relationship with the internet.

I only tend to blog when things are wrong or when I am feeling snarky and that’s just not the way it should be.

Ten things:

1. Turning 30 is the best thing to ever happen to my 20’s.
2. Marrying Kim was one of my more intelligent decisions.
3. My weight is still in the mid 220’s.
4. While I feel like my creative input could have been stronger for the final product, I am excited to have helped create an album with Brett and I am really thrilled that people are listening to it.
5. I have been a gigging fool so far this Summer and I love it. Played a couple of shows with Billy Thompson who is a fabulous guitarist and band leader and a really great guy. Probably have some more with him later, doing a gig this weekend with my pal Geoff Logan, and I sense more and more on the horizon.
6. Because I have been getting paid for these shows I am feeling like the new bass amp will be have more than 1/2 way paid for itself before the Fall (and that is a highly conservative estimation, it may pay for itself completely if this momentum keeps up).
7. The Kabuti is always a good time.
8. Greg at Local Heroes has got me hooked on a comic called 100 Bullets and I freaking love it. Look it up but don’t read too much, Wikipedia explains the whole twisted scenario and it will ruin it for you if you read it all there.
9. Work could be better, but things are looking up for the company. I don’t know if its a blessing or a curse. I guess its a blessing for the moment.
10. Joe’s new camera is outta control and its exciting when he uploads photos one at a time because I know he’s hoarding some good shots.

Men of Letters is an unusual project I’ve been working on with my friend Brett Miller. The original intent was to create creative, versatile music that could be used in a commercial setting (video games, film, TV, etc.) but I think it went a bit beyond our original intentions.

This is very different stuff for both Brett and myself and we’re excited to be making music that is so drastically different from what we are both typically comfortable with. Please check it out.

Furthermore, I am super excited to be using bandcamp.com which has got to be one of the coolest new websites for self-promoting musicians ever. You are welcome to listen to the entire album using this applet or click download to obtain mega high-quality versions of the songs (including lossless file formats such as wav, aiff and flac!) For the time being we are not requiring a minimum payment for the album, we just ask that you pay us what you think the music is worth.Thank so much!

P.S. It should reiterated that the album can be downloaded for free since we set the minimum to $0. Really, we would like to know people like the album enough to download it and listen to it in the first place, but if you want to throw us $5 for it, we won’t stop you.

However, Joe gave us a picture to use as the cover and he still gave us $10 for the album.

http://menofletters.bandcamp.com

Just sayin’

Getting home at 4AM because you’ve been out playing music with awesome musicians and eating diner food with your best friends is really all I ever want to do with my life.