I used to be sad. I thought, wrote and recorded a lot and… that was it.

Then live music beckoned and I became we, and we played at a Festival. Then we decided to continue. We rehearsed, and rehearsed and are now tighter than the tightest thing you can possibly imagine … but mentally stale.

All good things end. I haven’t recorded for me in an age. I’ve become part of the greater we … and I’m becoming sad again.

Oh what to do?

In around fifteen minutes it continues with me (Mike was the 1st, Simon and Ray the 16th). Followed in a week by Mick, then shortly thereafter in early April it’s Dan, then Charlie.
Others follow of course, but this is the intense period and yet again I’m brassic and fed up.

I know there is supposed to be a male menopause, but every year?

So back to working on ‘Sleeper’ which is rather good, getting better, and in dire need of finishing before I get thrown out of Nur Ein for tardiness.

Happy Birthday to me! Gah…

I’ve been thinking about my signature file over at Song Fight, and Tapegerm. It’s a quote from Albert Schweitzer which says “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.” As a concise encapsulation of who I am it’s totally meaningless, and yet so damn spot on at the same time.
Schweitzer also said “The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.” Unfortunately this is also true. Especially when life can be so fucking hard. Day by day it whittles away at our spirit, and bit by bit you see the world not through rose tinted specs, but grey myopic glasses that come complete with embitterment and a cane.
There it is then.

All work and no play makes Nick a very £%$^^&%£^%£!!! pissed off chap.
Fuck. It’s soooo hard working when you don’t want to. See? Here I am blogging. I have the attention span of a mayfly and the discipline of… some other creature with absolutely no discipline.

Except when it comes to music, and I can’t even think about that otherwise I’ll just pick up the guitar and lose another hour.

I could honestly fritter for England.

So the weekend beckons. Long days of frippery… Not. Damn I have to work. And by work I mean work not just sitting in front of the computer playing at work.
This is odd, because my work and my play generally tend to be one and the same. It’s only recently that I’ve come to realise they’re not.
Humph.

Bored, tired, fed up and angsty.

I want… Obviously too much.

Here’s where I am.
Yesterday (Saturday)

Highlight of the year so far: Mental Anguish’s Open Loops Vol 4 arrived in the post! This has my track ‘Mental Anguish’ on it, and is in real terms my first release. Chuffed!

I was supposed to go to Andy’s flat in London and play kit on three tracks for The Little Smokes. I couldn’t ’cause I was working. So I finally go and rehearse with Mick.

The idea was to put a set together and play live. We did. We have seventeen original tracks that sound really good. However we have no gigs because… No one has thought about getting any. Now Mick wants to start recording. I am beginning to feel stale and am starting to begrudge and hate the ‘band’ not least because I’ve written a shed load of new material that is un-recorded.

I haven’t finished any recordings for an age, which I find hideously frustrating, and yet everytime I try to go near the studio I find something better to do, which is generally vegging out to the tube. So do I watch Enterprise or go and record?

Winge over.

I have a printer. She (who wants to work with an it?) is an HP CP1700 oversized A3, and I love her dearly. Infact I love her so much I could wax lyrical for several paragraphs. The only teency problem is that a full set of four cartridges costs nearly £95. But then I rarely need to buy new ones.
A week ago, and with all cartridges at around 40% I switch her on and I get the message ‘Cartridges expired’ scrolling across the screen.
“No” I scream. “wtf!”
Several hours of research later and the truth dawns. It’s true. HP have built a chip into each cartridge and they damn well expire even if they are full. I was miffed. Very miffed, as you can well imagine, unless you happen to work for HP in which case you probably can’t.

Google provided the answer as Google often does. I found a really good thread explaining how to bypass the whole expiry date debacle, as well as an article entitled ‘HP and Corporate Plunder‘ which is well worth a read.

I find the whole built in obsolescence senario very worrying, especially as we (and by we I mean WE) are running out of resources faster than a very fast thing.
—–
The Dragon’s Den is rather an intriguing program on channel four. The basic premise is that a panel of five wealthy entrepreneurs sit (along with a pile of cash which is presumably from the props department) and listen to people pitch their ideas. If it’s a good idea, and they think they’ll make money, they invest.

On the last show they passed on a product called Interflush which saves 45% of the water on every flush of a toilet and instead decided to invest in a new version of the Rubriks cube. Admittedly the chap presenting the interflush was a bit of a dork, but I was just flabbergasted. On the one hand potentially save the planet a huge amount of water and make money, on the other make money with a plastic toy… If only Richard Branson had been there.

There’s a cute article in www.britishspiders.org.uk that starts ‘In Britain it is very unlikely that you will ever be bitten by a spider’ and ends ‘don’t kill them indiscriminately! You are several thousand times more likely to be stung by a bee or wasp than be bitten by a spider in the UK.’

Last night, whilst asleep I was bitten. When I woke up my hand was slightly swollen. It’s got progressively worse during the day, and is presently looking like this:

This is my normal hand (please excuse shoddy pic, but I took it with my ’spidered’ hand). If I cross paths with the beast again, it’s not going to be happy.

Quite apart from the severe itching and the feeling of blobocity on the end of my arm; this is ruining our rehearsal schedule too! I can’t make a fist, let alone play guitar.

Here’s another ‘must read’ article.

The evils of a real life intrude too often. Add to that the lassitude that hits everytime I walk through the door after a day at work and I’m hoping you can see why this site isn’t nearer completion… If you can’t, do I care? Hmm. Probably.
Call back soon.