DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Open letter to moveon.org:
Four years of work, multiple emails per day to supporters, dozens of print and television commercials created, and tens of millions of dollars spent, and this is the best you can do?

Open letter to John Kerry:
Just when I was getting ready to give up hope, you gave it up for me. Thanks a bunch.

Open letter to George W. Bush:
I must have missed whatever your party has been slipping into the water supply. Where do I go to become happy and docile and self-satisfied? Also, please send me one of those nifty Orange Alert signs so I can be ever-watchful in my own home of possible terrorist activity. PS. All that stuff about global warming is just hokum.

I used to consider myself apolitical. I was Republican by default, having been raised in a household where the word “Democrat” was frequently heard at dinner, immediately following the word “goddamn!” But I had an aversion to news. I didn’t educate myself about issues, and I felt strongly apathetic about the political process. I voted in the big elections, but only because that gave me the right to complain later.

George W. Bush changed all that. The past four years have provided a crash course in the danger of apathy.

For that, and only that, I thank President Bush. He made me realise what I care about. I have watched, and to a tiny degree documented the assaults on the environment by this administration, and I realized that what strikes me as common sense — “don’t poison yourself” — is remarkably uncommon in the White House.

I’ve paid a price for this education. To date, it’s cost me a sense of humor. And a couple hundred dollars in political contributions.

Last week, my senses hit overload. Whereas a few weeks ago I hung on every word, every fake smile, every grimace of the debates, now I can’t even bear to see a newspaper headline. I have pre-election anxiety. Every time someone mentions Diebold or Florida or the GOP, my stomach lurches. I feel like I’m sitting in the lobby of the oral surgeon’s office, waiting for my name to be called.

The Daily Show is getting lots of mileage from its Indecision 2004 joke. The Onion is running a piece on the Countdown to the Recount. Meanwhile, my stomach is doing (wait for it…) flip-flops.

I remember thinking, late in November 2000, that they should just give Bush the victory rather than dragging out the counterclaims. “It’s dangerous to not have a winner yet,” I thought, and “the rest of the world must think we’re incompetent. And anyway, how bad could he be?”

…when you receive junk mail from the Neptune Society.

Lightning storm in the clouds over Rohnert Park.

November will be all about the music.

I spent Saturday rigging up all my recording gear, old and new, in the band’s rehearsal space. Ten mics, a mixing board, a small rack of effects, a laptop, a second monitor, and about 1000 feet of cable made for an impressive mess. I really enjoyed setting it up, so much so that Sunday I tore it down and brought it all home. I realized that getting good tones and consistent recordings will require leaving the gear in place for a couple weeks, and that’s not practical in a construction shop with a leaky roof and broken windows and daily foot traffic from the crew.

As of Monday morning, I’d taken over the spare bedroom, and was consistently getting the worst kick and snare sounds I’ve ever heard. I’m trying to do some inline compression, and of the five control knobs on each channel I knew how to use only one.

Tuesday morning, reviewing the owner’s manual for the mixer, I learned that my gain-setting procedure resulted in a signal that was too hot — not clipping, but distorted in other ways; for example, the mic inside the kick drum was clearly picking up the scraping sound of the damping materials against the batter head.

Tonight I made a mental breakthrough in understanding the compressor, and began getting decent sounds. Unfortunately this happened at about 10:15 PM, too late to really enjoy them (e.g. by indulging my Neil Peart fantasy one more time).

There is more studio-blogging to come…