My Core Beliefs

You might want to know about me if you're going to be reading my website. Not the important stuff, like my favorite color (it’s black, pitch black, like my dead, dead heart) or my favorite food (anything that can be deep fried, allowed to cool on a bed of paper towels, and then deep fried again), or my favorite type of music (if there’s a tedious drum solo involving mallets and a gong followed by an even more tedious guitar solo involving lots of hammer-ons and pull-offs, it’s my kind of song), but stupid crap like my guiding principles and beliefs.

Things That I Hate:

Walking: it takes forever to get anywhere. I’m all about maximizing waking minutes (which is why I've been strung out on caffeine for years), so I won’t walk anywhere that I can't get to in three minutes or less. Enough ,already, with the walking.

The Outdoors: It’s too outdoorsy. I’m proud to say that I was one of the first persons to turn against and then denounce nature. Look, there’s a tree! Who gives? Isn't that bird beautiful? Not really, it’s a bird. The wind, it feels nice, no? Yeah, whatever. Can I go back inside now?

Republicans: They should all be taken outside, lined up, and then given a stern talking to. Some of them may still need to be pimp slapped.

The Need for Sleep: I hear that the government is working on some dynamite pills that eliminate the need for sleep so that you can stay awake and coherent for days at a time. I need me some of them pills.

Mortality: It sucks that people die. Death be not proud? Why shouldn't it be proud? Death wins, every time. John Donne must have been one stupid dude.


Things That I Love:

Flute Solos: Yeah, you heard me. Flute. If it’s in a jazzy/jazzyesque song, then I’m down. There’s a great one on Patato Valdes’s “Luz,” a killer one on DJ Cam's “Summer in Paris,” and an Eric Dolphy one on a brutal Coltrane Quartet twenty-seven minute take on “My Favorite Things.”

The Names of Drugs: Think about it: drugs have the coolest sounding names. Would anybody smoke marijuana if it were called marvin? Imagine trying to score. “Uh, yeah, bro, I want the best marvin you got.” “You want marvin, son? My marvin is the best marvin around.” What if crack were called encephalitis? “I was so gone on encephalitis that I slapped a dude, ran over a kid, and then wrecked my car.” See, it’s just not that cool.

Elvin Jones Drum Solos: He’s doing some crazy stuff. Technically speaking, he’s playing polyrhythms. What does that mean? That it sounds like he’s playing a couple of different rhythms with a couple of different time signatures, all at the same time. I can play drums a little bit (I can keep solid time if I really concentrate, but that’s about it; if I try to get fancy, I can completely lost and so far out of time that it's tragic), because I desperately wanted (but failed) to rock, and that’s when I learned how brilliant Mr. Jones was. He has to service all those different rhythms while paying attention to and playing with the world’s greatest ever jazz group. He’s my second favorite musician in the world, right behind John Coltrane, which leads us to…

John Coltrane: He just about kills me. His music is so amazing that it’s hard to believe that a human being actually made it. I remember one time saying to the girl that I was rolling with when I first got into Coltrane that it must hurt to have as much soul as he had. When he’s into one of his long solos, you can actually hear a soul (in the most non-religious sense of soul) and a person in the process of becoming. And I just read that there’s a new album out that’s supposed to be brilliant.

There. Now you know.