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I don’t believe in fate or anything like that. Coincidence is exactly that - a chance occurance of something that relates to something you already know or have experienced. The human brain is designed to look for patterns, so when we see something, our brain searches for similar experiences and if it finds one close enough, we get that warm sense of familiarity that makes us feel comfortable. All of which makes the next bit sound like I’m completely condradicting myself. Ah well.
A few years ago, towards the end of 2004, I started a band. I actually think we were quite good, though the whole thing was a bit of a disaster. Strangely though, it ended up being a fairly important event in my life:
- It led to me starting my current band, which I think is probably the peak my musical creativeness will ever reach (and is one of the most fun bands I’ve played in), and also provided a lot of the lyrical inspiration,
- I met the bassist, who is now one of my best friends (and is also in my current band),
- I met a girl who is… well, a total nut to be honest. I became very good friends with her, then stopped talking to her for nearly 3 years, and at the beginning of this year rekindled my friendship with her,
- I stopped talking to the rhythm guitarist, who was at the time one of my best friends, but then made the mistake of thinking he was smarter than me and carelessly lied to me about said girl. I literally haven’t spoken to him since January ‘05 (though oddly he nearly ended up recording drums for Irukandji),
Anyway, when I first started up this band with the singer I did some artwork for it, including prospective website layouts. The one that me and the singer liked best in the end was pretty simple, but I still like the idea (to the point where I’m tempted to use if again).
It was a basically a comp. of a white butterfly (actually two photos of the butterfly stuck together to get both whings, so it looked kinda disjointed in a good way), on a red background that was covered in scratches/chips/dirt. I dres all the scratches on this thign by hand, it tooks ages but the effect was cool.
So how does all this link to the epiphany thing? Well, the other day I was tired of having ranted at my computer all day, and as it was broken I had no internet or TV, so I went downstairs and turned the telly on down there whilst I cooked some food. I sat down to eat, and out of the blue I suddenly thought to myself “the walls in here are exactly the same colour as the artwork I did for that band”. It was pretty odd - I haven’t thought about that band for ages, and to be honest I probably couldn’t have even remembered what the artwork was if someone had asked me.
You know what happened then? At 10pm, on a wet day, with all the windows closed, this huge white butterfly appears out of nowhere. I swatted at it a few times, as it merrily danced around my head. Then it flew straight at the wall in front of me, and plonked itself down, flattening it’s wings down. It was almost a perfect replica of that artwork, and it looked incredible. Beautiful even. I raced to my room to grab my camera, but I didn’t manage to get a picture - when I got back down, the butterfly had disappeared.
Mad stuff. Does it mean anything? Of course not, but I do now feel inspired to get back to doing artwork. I miss it. Oddly enough, the last proper drawing I did was of the singer in that band. If I could find a model I’d be doing the Orchid Fixation stuff right now, but I’m failing so far. If nothing else, it did give me that warm feeling inside.
In a perfect microcosmic example of modern society, yesterday I was really angry about something and was going to facelessly write all about it on the interwebs… but I’ve completely forgotten what it was. Which also makes me angry. Still, I’m not going to rant about my own stupidity making me angry - mostly because that be stupid, which would make me angry, which would start a cycle that would wreck my week…
So, what’s going on in my world? Sadly, not much. Mostly due to my computer being fucked again. Despite reinstalling Windows from sratch, it hasn’t properly recovered, andnow has some nasty malware t’ing hiding in it’s depths waiting to steal my identity and potentially birth little foreign mes with big-ass drug habits or some such. I tried to repair it again, but my WIndows CD still refuses to function properly so once again I’m left with a half-repaired version of Windows that I can’t boot into. So, I’m giving in, and I’m going to format the drive and start again. The only problem is I don’t have enough space to copy off all the stuff on it that I want/need (I have 100Gbs worth of music projects - nearly 30Gb of it is Orchid Fixation’s CD…).
All of this means I’m currently using my shoddy back up version of Windows, which has no software installed and is really really boring. I was stuck with IE6, and my internet connection is being so shite I couldn’t be bothered trying to download Firefox (IE6 doesn’t let you resume downlaods, so if my connection went I’d have to start again - and FF is quite big), so I went for Opera, which I don’t really like. I also now don’t have my dictionary plugin, witch well explane ole mye speling mestaikes. Boo, hiss, and so on. I didn’t even have sound until 4:26am, it were reet ‘orrible. It also means I can’t do any of the stuff I need to do - mixing two CDs, doing the Orchid Fixation artwork, sorting out the Too Dark website… grr.
On the music front; my last act on my old Windows was to try and get a verions of ‘Epitaph’ to Ben - only to find the original project file is screwed. I had to export each track (64 in total, thanks to my stupid 3-mic approach), import them all to a new project, and then clean them up a bit. Oddly enough, I didn’t put any effects on anything (bar an amp sim/impulse on Dan’s solo), I just altered the levels a bit, and it already sounds better than half the demos in Norwich. Whether that means everyone else is shit or I’m really good I’m not sure I’m qualified to say . My gut instinct is somewhere between the two though.
In other news: my new housemate is a weirdo. Seriously. As a mildy brain damaged, drug-fuzzed memory-hole part-time nut case that barely sleeps, I feel I’m in a great position to judge, and I give her a good 8.5 on the odd-o-meter.
She moved in last Tuesday, and since then I’ve seen her maybe three times. She never really says anything, just greetings and salutations, and occassionally she blurts out something completely off-topic and benign. She doesn’t have anything in her room; no TV, no computer or laptop, no stereo, no books… I haven’t even seen any clothes. And I know all this because she never shuts the door to her room - even when she’s in there doing whatever she does, she leaves the door wide open. A couple of times I’ve wondered out of my room whilsting and making silly noises to myself (as I’m realising I do quite a lot), and my instinct is to look in her room on my way past, just because the door’s open - and she’s in there, on the bed, just doing nothing. It’s creepy.
On the plus side, I’m enjoying myself by playing a strange and possibly mean game - for no apparent reason, I’m adding an air of sexual tension on the rare occassions I do see her. I’m not entirely sure why, but I’m finding it very funny to make thinly veiled and extremely suggestive remarks and things. I think maybe I need a hobby.
But yeah, she’s definitely a weirdo.
Shit happens. I am well aware of this, for it has happened to both me and the people I know on many an occassion. So when something rubbish happens, I generally go “bah, that’s a bit rubbish” and then move on to something less rubbish. I don’t dwell on things - my attention span isn’t long enou:-
What am I getting at with my unnecessarily wordy ramblings? My ex- is currently selling off a bunch of CDs (presumably to help The Cause buy more sticks for immigrant beatings or something). Normally I wouldn’t give a fuck - however, I had a quick read of the list and I see at least 15 of my CDs there. CDs she told me she didn’t have; CDs I looked for in her house and couldn’t find.
This is mildy irritating for several reasons: Firstly, it’s another lie to add to the ever-growing list. Secondly, it’s mind-blowing to think that she probably took the time to hide some of them when I was picking my stuff up - they weren’t in her CD racks, they weren’t in mine, and they weren’t anywhere near the stereo, and there isn’t really anywhere else they would logically have ended up had they casually been moved. Thirdly… well I can’t think of a third, but it’s still just as annoying with the first two.
That’s at least £150 worth of my stuff, a couple of which are out of print/special editions that I won’t be able to replace. One of them has sentimental value for reasons I can’t be bothered to explain. It’s given a whole extra level of annoyance by virute of the fact that I’m also missing almost a dozen DVDs (again, some of which I won’t be able to replace, and most of which are foreign and therefore expensive), which she claims she didn’t have… that’s another £150.
The stupid thing is, I’m not even annoyed at her particularly. I’m annoyed at myself. I left a lot of stuff at that house when I moved out. I don’t care, it’s just stuff - for the most part it doesn’t mean anything. What annoys me is that when I saw she was selling off CDs, I knew that all the ones I was missing would be there - but I still checked just to prove myself right. That’s very unlike me. I’m not materialistic, I’m not petty (about things like this at least), and I don’t dwell on things.
Grr.
… I got stuck listening to one of my housemates talk (read: lie badly) about having a threesome earlier, and I’ve finally had enough of the terrible grammar people use in association with said act. So, just for you, here are some helpful hints:
If you have sex with two other people at once, you HAVE NOT partaken in a Ménage à trois. In fact, you can’t have a Ménage à trois full-stop. Ménage à trois means “house of three”, and refers to three people in a relationship; i.e. all living together and all sleeping together. You are part of a ménage à trois, you don’t have one (unless you Top three subs who are in a mutual relationship… but that’ll just complicate things so forget it). Using ménage à trois to mean three people having sex is a modern usage that is wrong.
If you really must use a French term for three people jumping bones, the correct phrase is ‘Plan à trois’. Or, possibly more appropriate in most cases, ‘Troilism’ (often written as Triolism in English because it fits our pronunciation better) - which means watching your partner get fucked by someone else…
As a small sidenote, threesome means “a group of three people”. It’s only in modern times that this has become synonomous with three people hauling ashes, but it is a widely accepted use. You can use this one in any context you want, and best of all it’s English so you don’t look like a cunt. S’all good.
It’s too damn hot. Even outside in the shade of the garden it’s too warm for me - but in my room, with it’s one stupid tiny window and computer currently running most of the time, it’s unbearable… I’m sitting here, half-nekkid, doing NOTHING and sweating. Ugh. Fortunately, blasting Unsane very loudly into my face is helping a bit. They were made for this kind of uncomfortable, uneasy scenario.
As for the small truth… well, some people aren’t going to like this, but there we go.
I’ve had a couple of people this week tell me that their current partner is “the one”; their “soul mate” and so on. Well here’s some news for you: you’re wrong. You are completely deluded. The truth of it is this: You are not that special. You are not unique enough that only one other person on the planet gets you. The number of people on Earth is rapidly approaching 7 billion. That’s 7,000,000,000 people. And you think only one of them shares your interests and loves. Do you realize how pretentious that is? How insanely naive you sound?
Here’s the thing. The aforementioned people who told me of their statistically remarkable feat both made their discoveries in their home town. 7 billion people in the world, and the singular one that was deisgned as the final piece of your puzzle lives in the same town as you. All those people, spread across hundreds of thousands of towns and cities, in innumerable countries, and they live right in your back yard. Better still, they go to the same club as you to get drunk. Fuck, if you’re that lucky, here’s a £1 - go buy me a lottery ticket. The fact is, virtually everyone goes out with people from their own town - you know, what with being a couple ideally involving spending time together, it makes sense. I know a couple of people who met their partners in different towns; in fact me and my ex- met were living 170 miles apart when we met.
I’ve got an old school friend who met his wife in the US whilst he was still living here. That’s the furthest afield relationship I personally know - but it’s not like he made a huge effort to trawl the world for the perfect woman; they met on the internet completely by chance.
But if there was only one person for you, the chances they live right near you are pretty sllim. Of course you could narrow down the variables - say, your ideal partner would probably speak the same language as you, so you could maybe cut out a lot of countries etc. - but still, we’re talking pretty big odds here. If you wanted to find The One, surely you’d want to look a bit harder than getting plastered at your local and bumping into them. Even if they did live next door to you, there should be some kind of Indiana Jones-style search through the wilderness first - just so you’re completely sure. And to add some dramatic tension of course.
The thing I really don’t get is why you’d want to think like that. Why would you want to narrow yourself down so much? Why limit yourself? It’s the ultimate all-eggs-in-one-basket scenario: if you actually really did meet the only perfect match for you and it went wrong, you’d be completely fucked. “Well, that’s my one shot at true happiness gone - I’m off to take a shitload of paracetamol and a couple of litres of whiskey before kissing my shotgun on the railway tracks…”. That seems really stupid to me.
I don’t want to think like that. I like to think that I’m an interesting enough person that there’s actually lots of similarly interesting girls out there that I could happily spend my life with (this is pretty much my main argument for polyamory too, but I’ll leave that for another time). Hell, I prefer girls that aren’t exactly like me and aren’t a perfect match, because the friction that different opinions cause is what makes life interesting. I’ve done the whole meek and mild, agrees-with-everything girlfriend thing now, and it was fucking awful and dull. Give me an imperfect match any day.
So, blissfully happy people: shut the fuck up. You haven’t got the perfect partner, you’ve got someone who is close enough to the centre of the Bell curve of acceptability for you that you’re willing to settle. You’ve got someone statistically viable. And that’s plenty good enough.
I’d written out a huge entry, partly about my computer being fucked, and then it crashed… fuck it.
So yeah - I’ve had to do a clean install of Windows for the first time in 8-9 years. It hurts… I have so many little programs and odd settings that I can’t find now. I’m also having to try and find all my VSTs etc. (around 600 in total), which is a fucking nightmare. My computer is still being glitchy too - something isn’t right with it, but I have no idea what.
On the plus side, it’s been quite a good week. I spent 5 hours catching up with Dan on Tuesday, then saw him Wednesday too. And yesterday, the unprobable happened…
That’s right motherfuckers, Orchid Fixation had a practise! It went pretty well all things considered - sloppy to start with, but the three of us just click and by the end of it we were sounding pretty good.
We worked out that we’ve been together for 4 years now - by my reckoning we’ve had maybe 25 practise total in that time, but we’ve written 15 songs and recorded two CDs. We’re actually a weirdly productive band when we’re all in the same county…. We even started working on a new song, which went pretty well.
It’s also encouraged me to get on with the CD - as soon as all my shit is sorted (stupid computer bastard…). And I’ve got 3 or 4 songs I want to demo for the next CD.
In other news… new housemate this week. It’s a girl, thank god - no offence to Dan and Tom, but girls are far better to live with. I think I’m going to be doing the tour or something - I have her keys, and I’ll be the only one around when she moves in. I haven’t met her yet, so it could be interesting!
Irukandji - ‘Cities’: Recorded by Sam Reece at our last rehearsal. This time I actually move at one point… possibly…
Irukandji - ‘To Slay A Saviour’: Recorded by Sam Reece at our last rehearsal. I’m the one that DOESN’T MOVE AT ALL. Seriously, not one part of me moves… it’s kinda creepy…
