I have been reading this blog I found today for about 5 hours now, and something the guy said really hit on the hardest part about writing for me. He said “blogging can really alternate between being a chore and being fun.” It’s not just blogging, which I feel is done primarily for the (desired) enjoyment of other people, but also straight-up personal stuff as well. I wouldn’t consider writing to be a chore unless it’s some lame thing I need to do for class, but it definitely becomes a sort of burden at times. When I am writing, it’s great. When I feel like I’m on a roll, my flow is good, and I can get my ideas out, I’m totally Zen. But when I can’t get down to it, I feel mentally constipated. It’s all building up in there, it’s practically marching to the gate, but it’s stuck. Maybe a little something comes out, like a few adjectives on a scrap of paper, or a fragmented rambling in a Word document, but it’s more frustrating than satisfying.

My left pinky twitches to the shift key as I make it halfway to starting a new sentence. My right ring finger lands on the backspace button to erase some ill-begun thought or sloppily-arranged sentence. My thumbs dance on the space bar in an impatient routine. My brain acts as a child’s hand grabbing at fireflies in the night air, always reaching, but mostly missing the words I want to use completely, or crushing them in the haste of catching them. All this makes me understand why poets and authors are often accused of being broody or morose– it’s because they’re pissed they can’t write. Because when I’d rather scratch at the peeling sunburn on my back than pound away on my keyboard, I’m not a happy camper. Because I know there’s this great well of inspiration in my mind, but every time I lower the bucket to pull some of it up, the rope’s always too short. Writing is only not fun when I can’t seem to do it.

But for all my frustration and impotence, at least I know when to give up. And that “when”, my friends, is right now. I think I’ll go have a beer.

Some asshole brutally wrecked our snowman. And while we had no hard proof leading to the identities of the culprits, circumstantial evidence threw heavy suspicion upon our neighbors’ teenage son. A 16 year-old and his friend got their rocks off kicking over a snowman. This kid’s been a little bastard since birth, and my brother and I have been around to see him grow into a superbly malicious young man. Even our mother– a typically forgiving woman– has on several occasions referred to him as the “devil’s son”. Back in the day I would just grab him, throw him into the shrubs separating our houses, and call it good. But we’re adults now. Revenge won’t be as simple as a whitewash or wedgie this time.

This means war.

And while I realize that by choosing to retaliate I will be sinking to his level, but I’m ok with that. I’m going to one-up that turd. It’ll be so deliciously ironic. He’s going to help me build a new snowman. At least that’s going to be the premise for a story I’m working on.

For anybody who isn’t familiar with Edgar Allen Poe or his story “The Cask of Amontillado”, I’ll summarize it for you. Narrator was fucked over by victim one too many times and the narrator decides to build a brick-and-mortar wall closing the victim inside a seldom-visited hall as his revenge. I’m going to get medieval on this kid’s ass and build a snowman around him. I’ll be binding his ankles together once I force him to sit cross-legged and tying his wrists together behind his back.  I’m not sure what method I’ll employ to make sure he doesn’t wiggle around while I’m hard at work, but rest assured it’ll keep that punk scared into submission. The whole creative process will be very cathartic for me. I’ll be a better person once he’s frozen solid and lost until spring when the snow melts.

Although I can’t promise I won’t shoot out his window with my BB gun or abduct him and leave him naked in Quebec with a French-English dictionary.

Because I understand that mentioning a moment of fear I experienced when I was sure I was wearing nothing flame retardant to inhibit the fiery mess I’d make if I happened to explode from rage when I witnessed four men bouncing and lip syncing to “Hot and Cold” will do little to bring about sympathy, I will attempt to persuade you all that Katy Perry is bad by employing a strategy that will both rouse emotions and appeal to evidence.

Point 1: Katy Perry offers nothing unique to the musical world.

A relatively rational individual who has listened to Ms. Perry’s music for any length of time will come upon two conclusions: the songs are catchy as genital herpes and the lyrics bring to mind a dump truck full of stale mixed metaphors covered in smelly cliches. Her big hit songs include such lyrical gems as “I kissed a girl, and I liked it”, “you’re so gay and you don’t even like boys”, and the entirety of the chorus for “Hot and Cold”. Hooray, Katy! You kissed a girl like so many drunk chicks before you in an attempt to explore your sexuality and test the limits of your relationship! How we laud you and your open-mindedness! News flash: I don’t fucking care, and that’s mostly because that song was done 13 years ago way more impressively by someone more talented than you times infinity. And how can a guy be gay if he doesn’t like boys? I know you’re not aware of the more old-fashioned usage of the word, so are you using “gay” as an insult? How urbane. And could you please be more creative than “hot and cold”, “yes and no”, “up and down”? I know your manager probably informed you that your core audience would be 15 year-old girls and boys of varying levels of intelligence, but I doubt he said “your songs can only be as smart as your dumbest fan.”

Point 2: There is nothing extraordinary about her music.

I think it would be safe to say that her two biggest draws are her infectiously catchy melodies and the shock value of “going there”. Her songs are frequently stuck in my head, I’ll give her that. I’d also give her a kick to the tits if I had the chance for believing for even a New York minute that she’s unique and groundbreaking in any way. Oh, my! She’s not even bothering to mask her messages with symbolism or allusions! What will we do with this bare-bones barrage? Um, we could always take the lack of extra effort to conceal for what it is: an inability to craft thoughtful phrases due to a weak literary imagination. It’s so tired to be bold these days. We’ve had blatant and wild since the ’60′s back when it really was shocking, so if you want to be someone today you’ve really gotta bring it. Does she bring it? No. I’d rather have to research the meanings of lyrics to get the full understanding than begin the process of wading out into the wordy waters only to realize I’m standing in a puddle. I’ve been sensing a downward spiral in popular music in the past few years, and in the same way I doubt humans today are the pinnacle of evolution, I also doubt Katy Perry will mark the end of pop’s devolution. That frightens me deeply.

Point 3: I have too much in common with Katy Perry to not hate her.

Katy Perry is female. I am female. Instant connection. I have no desire to transition in order to escape this gender commonality with her, but nor would I three-move check-mate the males of this world into death by shame by coercing her to have a gender identity epiphany and transition herself. I also wouldn’t dare to slide her over into the androgynous category as mentioned by Aristophanes since I consider the modern application of androgyny to be quite attractive. Unfortunately, the only solution might be to make Katy Perry a former member of the human race. She’s a blight on humanity and we must act swiftly and without mercy. Immediate excommunication.

I have more points, but I grow weary of reining in my fury in order to present hard-hitting facts to further discredit this musical scam artist. If there is anybody brave enough to rebut me, please bring it on. I do so love a debate, and I feel confident that I could verbally decapitate an opponent in this battle. In the same way that we cannot help with whom we fall in love, we likewise cannot help what we find to be an auditory pleasure. So long as the affection for Ms. Perry and her stupid-ass songs is only skin-deep, I am confident I can remain friends with anyone who does not 100% agree with me on this.

The plan for last night was for me and my friend to drive to Boston, find the theater where the concert would be, park nearby, walk to the theater, enjoy the show, walk back, drive home.

What actually happened was we were a late getting on the road, I missed one bloody sign (or did I just fall victim to a recent sign-stealing crime and miss it because there was not one there?), and pulled over to get directions. The woman was very helpful and wrote stuff out for me. What she could not help me with was the utter lack of signs that would make me feel like I was even remotely in the right area. So I pulled over again and headed back in the exact direction I had come from to get to where I needed to go. So then the haphazard directions which I was then cursing caused me to wind all the way around crazy streets to that this landmark would be on the correct side of us. To make what will be a long story a little shorter, the road we needed to be on magically appeared, I turned around to find parking, we found it, and celebrated. Smoke if you got ‘em. We left at about 6 and it was 8:30 when we left the car.

Then we started walking. We assumed getting directions on foot would be easier than while driving, but we were incorrect. We walked down blocks, doubled back, looped around, asked for directions, went back the way we came, asked again, turned corners, searched for our street signs, asked for directions twice more, and finally found where we needed to be (which was going to be on our right according to the last guy we asked, but it was really on the left). The concert started at 8 and it was 9:30 when we walked in.

The show, at least what we saw of it, was good. Dir en Grey are good performers, so that was a treat. Some ornery skeez with boots that her calves were trying to escape from kept standing in the middle of the aisle with her scraggly-haired boyfriend and appeared to be ready to fight with one of the show staff. I wanted to see that happen. It’s not fucking hard to move back into where you were, you whore. Stop acting like the universe is wronging you. Ps you look like a wad of hamburger balanced on two toothpicks.

The show ended and we left without merch. I said I’d give my brother and his friend (my friend’s ex– kind of awkward) a ride home. Given that we had gone through so much shit to just finally arrive at the theater, it was perfectly understandable that we had a hard time getting to the car. Cut to us finding the car in a location I never would have even guessed to check almost two hours later. I couldn’t have gotten back to the theater from there if I tried.

Luckily, my brother has come into his own as a navigator and we managed to finagle a viable route onto the highway. I cannot drive and work a map at the same time, so I was glad to have him in the backseat soothing me with his confidence and optimism. The drive home was easy enough. I was exhausted and kept driving just to keep us going. I was planning on driving to the video game store and pick up the World of Warcraft expansion, but I missed the exit and even taking the next possible ones every time threw us out way far away. So I said “Fuck you!” and angrily drove back into town to drop off our friends. We got home around 3 and I promptly passed out like an alkie on St. Paddy’s day.

Oh, and you wanna know one of the worst parts of last night? The part that really made me feel like extracting my brain through my anus with a rusty fishing hook?

I had a Katy Perry song stuck in my head almost the whole night.

Since most of us in the United States of America speak English, it’s only fair that the majority rules and everybody should speak the same language. Never mind that it’s only easy for us to tell others to do it because we’ve been speaking it since our youth. We’re trying to unite the country under one flag and one tongue (until Spanish eventually punches us in our boca and tells us to callate).

But let’s think about this for a minute. Is it really so fair to ask everyone else to learn this ass-backwards, inconsistent, and irregular language? Anybody that really takes time to consider how English works can see how confusing it must be for a non-native speaker to keep up. Hell, I’ve been speaking English since my beginning and I still get hung up here and there.

Some Examples:

Drink, drank, drunk: Drink is a verb in the present, drank is a verb in past tense, and drunk is a state of being. Example: I saw her drink. I watched as she drank. She became drunk.

Hang, hung, hanged: To hang is to dangle, to be hung is to be well endowed, and to be hanged is to be killed via dangling from one’s neck. Example: They wanted to see him hang. He was well-hung. He was hanged for it.

Freeze and squeeze are spelled similarly, but share little in the way of similarities during conjugation. Water can freeze. Water freezes. Water becomes frozen. You can squeeze an orange. She squeezes the orange. The orange has been squeezed.

We have homonyms and homophones, too. For example, you might want to read a book that a friend read. Or you could write about the right way to skin a cat. Or you could be bare-chested and hunt bears because you have a constitutional right to bear arms and your bare arms. Things could get messy pretty quickly.

Or if you want to give directions to someone and they ask something like “So I turn left here?” and you say “Right.”

“So I turn right?”

“No, you were correct. Turn left.”

I tentatively agree with people when they get all flustered and argue that people who live in America should speak English, but I also think we shouldn’t be so high and mighty and force immigrants to anglicize their names just so we can pronounce them.

I’d rather speak Spanish anyway.

You meet each other in front of a public place. A restaurant, maybe. You greet her with a smile, and she smiles back. You make clumsy small talk before holding the door open for her as the two of you head inside. You both take time to deliberate and eventually place your orders. You lead her over to the quiet booth in the corner and wrack your brain for a topic so you can begin your get-to-know-yous.  Once you start the ball rolling, you realize things are going well– very well, actually. You let her do most of the talking, but that’s fine since you find yourself becoming more and more infatuated as the minutes pass. She’s saying all the right things, she’s letting you know she’s intelligent, and you’re all too bummed to hear her say “Well I’ve had a wonderful time, but I have to get going now.” Since things went so well, you set up a second date right there.

After a few days pass, it’s time to meet again. You grab your orders and head to the same corner booth, but this time you notice something is different. Not soon after she opens her mouth to speak, you wonder how the hell you could have found this woman attractive or interesting. Everything she says annoys the crap out of you, and you eventually make some excuse– first to yourself and then to her– about how you have to leave. You left the iron on. As you grab your things and make for the door, you wonder what could’ve made you believe you and this stranger had anything in common.

Let me tell you about the relationship I had with Natasha Bedingfield.

About 4 years ago, her single “These Words” came out. I found myself to be impressed with both the lyrics and the melody, which was catchy without being stuck in my head all the time. This song had me thinking to myself “Neat! An artist that couples pop sensibility with a semblance of intelligence!” She knew not only what a chord was, but what the progression in her song was. She dropped names like Byron, Shelley, and Keats. She admitted that she had trouble finding that “killer hook” that would make her song a hit. She even correctly used the word “hyperbole”. So I, along with everybody else in America, obligingly listened to “These Words” for about a year or however long it was on the charts.

And then we went on a second date. “Unwritten” wasn’t that bad. I thought “Meh. It kind of wears on me. It’s less smart.” This one seemed to stick around even longer, so I could feel my frustration mount.

This should have been a 2-date deal. I hadn’t asked her to call me and hadn’t told her I’d call her. She just showed up. This time she had with her a “Pocketful of Sunshine”. I was revolted. I was irritated. I resisted the urge to claw the ears of not only myself, but of everyone around me. Her faux hip-hop beats and dancehall tempo only succeeded in enraging me more. I’ve heard this superproduced musical illegitimacy on the radio perhaps twice, but the threat of having to endure approximately 4 minutes of aural torture has caused me to fear the exposure of a pop rock station for any length of time exceeding the commercials. Natasha Bedingfield has quite possibly ruined not only my memory of her once intriguing lyrical ability, but any hope of being impressed with her in the future.

Natasha, if you are reading this, please, for the sake of all who love true, honest music in all its forms, remove yourself from your current profession. Unsign yourself. You got yourself signed and damnit you can get yourself unsigned. Do it for us, the people who would have liked you had you shown any real promise. Do it for the children, without whom we may have no hope of good music in the future, and who are at this point impressionable enough to believe you are an honest to God musician.