New cousin.

Made this today. Click for the bigger version.

Hidden gold.

Remember that swing band I used to play in?

Don't make fun of us too much (4.6mb MP3).

Found some other old recordings of mine, too. I'll be cleaning 'em up and throwing them on the Web soon.

I'm a player?

Today, I found out that I have arrived (92k .mp3).

Rep. Barrow's press secretary didn't know how he knew today was my birthday. Freaky.

Haiku

The wind must die down.
The ice becomes the water.
All must be fluid.

........................................

I showed the cops where
Dad touched me using their dolls.
Those were the good days.

........................................

Come down later and
Set hobos on fire with me.
We can watch them burn.

........................................

Children are afraid
Of the dark and often cry.
That’s when to touch them.

........................................

The old Indian
Sang a song of creation.
I gave him smallpox.

........................................

I had a hammer.
I hammered in the morning.
My sister is dead.

........................................

If cancer is nice
And AIDS a gift from above,
Then my life is great.

Two things...

Sorry about the long time since a Jake post here. Life's been real busy, what with editing Connect Statesboro (don't judge me by the site, I have almost nothing to do with it) and playing in County Line.

Here's what's up in my life.

1) Got a haircut.

2) I apologize, since I try to refrain from such language on-line nowadays, but this is fucking brilliant. It's by far the best album I've heard this year. Give it a shot.

The future looks bright?

The older I get, I find myself with things on my mind that I never would have conceived of ten years ago. True, I’m not old enough to have problems that are too big. My friends haven’t started to die off, and barring any kind of accident or act of violence, won’t for a couple more decades. But there are still things that get me a little worried, things that remind me that I too am getting older, and as my age progresses, that my body, society and nature will only let me down.

Like the cyst on my tailbone that fills with blood and puss every so often and swells to such painful proportions that I’ve had to get it lanced twice at the emergency room. When I first got it towards the end of college, I was concerned. I thought maybe I was getting cancer or maybe that I had developed some rare bone disease that was manifesting itself just inches above my ass. It turned out to be neither neither, just a cyst that’s not really rare because it plagues a lot of men, but not enough men to be common knowledge. After all, my dad did a pretty good job of letting me know what the future of being a man held, and what it meant in particular for man with the Brennaman name, and cyst above my ass was not one of them. But I deal with it.

However, what replaced the fear of the cyst being cancer or a bone disease was a constant fear of the cyst not draining on its own. Being lanced twice now, the cyst has proven to be more resilient than I first thought. There was a year long interval between the lances and after each one, the cyst slowly filled back up. The cyst hurts. When it fills, it hurts to sit, to walk, to lie on my back, to make any sudden movements or to even sneeze. Most of the time when the cyst fills, it’s been self draining. Nasty to be sure, but rarely is a trip to the hospital required.

But after two lancings I’m in a constant state of semi-fear that every time I feel a little swelling on the back side that this will be the time that I’ll have to go back to the hospital. I’m 26-years-old, and like an old man doing a mental check list every time a new ache shows up, I too wonder if this will be the day that I’m back at the hospital, ass in the air, waiting for a doctor to plunge a knife into my tailbone, only to refill it with several inches worth of gauze that I will have to pull out in a week’s time.

I’m also at that age where the future matters more than ever. It’s the number 30 that’s to blame. It’s a scary number that makes it official that, by all rights, you are no longer a child. In your 20s, you can still get away with being childish, indecisive and immature. In your 30s, the rules change and society says it’s time to get your shit together. A career needs to be settled on, or at least be in the process of beginning and people don’t really appreciate a 30-year-old man child. Or, at least, so I’m told.

30 is a scary age in that life, as society presents it, should be the time we’re finally settling down. Dreams and goals should be reevaluated, the dead weight cast aside in favor of a mortgage payment, children and well manicured front lawns.

I don’t want that, and so 30 can get lost. Yet, like a crazy mother-in-law, it refuses to. Like the cyst on my tailbone, that magic number creeps into my consciousness every now and again, letting me know that every day, it’s closer and closer. I try to laugh at 30. I tell it that I’m still more than three years away, to which 30 snickers while pointing to the last decade of my life and how that has sped by and at warp 9.9, that the times I thought would never end not only ended, but are rotting away in the grave yard of my memory.

And the big bang of life keeps everything expanding ever farther out. Friends that were a tight, luminous cluster are now speeding away from each other faster every year. People that were always going to be by your side call less and less, if at all, and you know, deep down, that that last time you were all together three years ago was the last time all of you will be in the same room ever again.

I’m like everyone else, though. I do my best not to think about things like that too often and go to my job, sit at my desk and make nice with the co-workers. I pretend that a few of them are my pals, but co-workers can never really be your friend, not like your old ones at least. How can they be? They never “knew you when,” and in the end, everyone that shares the carpet with you in your office is looking out for number one. Sure, you all complain about management at lunch, and promises are made about united fronts and “if you go I go,” but when the shit goes down, and it always does, those pacts all fall a part.

Change really is constant. Life is never the same and friends and family all go away.

But my cyst won’t. My cyst, like a bad marriage, will hold. No matter what happens in my life, my cyst will still be there, steadily filling with blood and puss, showing up when I least expect it. I could have it removed, but all the doctors have said chances are it’ll just come right back. So I’ve come to quietly appreciate it as my one constant. When everyone else is long gone, and I’m alone, sitting on the porch of the retirement home, it’ll be just me and the cyst, looking back at what life once was.

Better than you?

In the time that I've been blogging, I’ve noticed that, like every other geekly pursuit (and yes it is a geekly pursuit no matter how you try and dress it up) lines have been drawn in the digital sand as to what constitutes good blogs.

Simple fact #1: Not everyone enjoys what I write about or how I do it. Doesn't hurt my feelings. I've been a real writer for sometime now and the first lesson you learn is that no matter how good you think your stuff is, someone out there is going to think an autistic kid with a pack of crayons could have done better.

So, I think it would only be fair to talk about those blogs that just escape me. The blogs that I read and say "you gotta be kidding me." Keep in mind I'm not so pretentious as to think that they're style is the wrong way, just that I feel like making fun of someone this morning and they drew the short straw. These people are funny in how serious they take blogging

I call these jaspers "I really want to work for Newsweek" bloggers, and I blame them on Wolf Blitzer. For the past few years, the mainstream media has been giving a ridiculous amount of attention to the these people, and that attention only serves as validation to the these kids. The wannabe Newsweek writers seem to have come under the assumption that they're real reporters, or worse, columnists. Writing about you particular political viewpoints is one thing, but actually believing that you are Spider Jerusalem is just delusional. What's worse about these kids is that they think that their particular style of blogging is the only relevant and meaningful way to blog. They criticize others whose blogs they find to be too much like "diaries," as if ranting about state politics is any different.

Not every person who writes about politics falls under this category though. Just the ones who honestly believe that they are on par with Maureen Dowd, Cal Thomas, and hundred other blowhards. Commenting on politics is fun for the whole family and I enjoy a good political rant. But the ones that think that their readership numbers in the millions are just annoying. While there are exceptions (there always are) most political bloggers are just like the rest of us: The only people reading what they have to say are their friends and the occasional troll that stumbles across their work.

These are an arrogant bunch not because of the content of their blogs, but because of how they look down their noses at people who use FREE blogs to write about the goings on in their lives or whatever bloggers decide to use the FREE blogs to write about.

Of course there are subsets of folks like this. There's the "I wanna be a columnist for Sports Illustrated," the "I think I'm Peter Travers" and the "Can I be the next Pat Robertson" folks.

I like my blogs to be like my friends: Unique with an independent voice. If someone wants to write about their new job, that's fine. If all they want to do is make inside jokes to their friends, great. I don't have to read it, but there is something fun about getting to peak into a total strangers life and what they're doing day to day.

But pretentious bullshit? That I can do without.

And now a Joe Ben Deal update...

Yes, our old friend, Joe Ben is still living it up in New York and look, is that Kathy Lee Gifford on his arm? Why yes, yes it is.

We all knew that Joe Ben would fall into bad things, what with him being so nice and all, but this is just horrible...