2009 Goals #4: Get Rich (Or Try Dying)

If the economic collapse of America has taught me anything, now that it’s finally seeking it’s creepy tentacles into my life, it’s that I’ve got to get rich, or at the very least less broke. I hate painting houses for the most part, unless I get hired to do wacky 17-color accent wall faux finish oddballing stuff, but that doesn’t raise up too often. Mostly I make white things whiter, and easier to scrub with a sponge. But I am bucking up, and have decided to be more professional this year, not really in the work I do but in my business outlook. I’ve set a monthly goal for net billing for the first three months, with the plan of adjusting upwards every quarter of the year as we move on. Then again, I’ve got to start taking Wednesdays off to chill with the kids so the wife can teach at this herbal clinic, which is good for her life’s desires long-term, but damn, she’ll make $75 and I’ll leave $200 on the table. But I’ll get to kick it with my kids, and will have to take the oldest two to ballet, which is always fun. Except that shit is $136 a month, which is far above what I should be paying for something that doesn’t put food in my belly or drive me to work.
But I guess that’s the point, to move beyond my bullshit, which has moved beyond my parents’ bullshit. My middle kid is only 5, and already halfway through her first full year of ballet school. I hate to be all Tiger Woods dad on my ovaried sperm grown into humans, but hey man, when I was five, I was smashing Matchbox cars with cinderblocks and hammers so I could recreate Dukes of Hazzard and Chips accidents in the backyard. I want better for my kids. (Of course, I did show them how to smash up Matchbox cars with a cinderblock to pretend there had been an accident in the sandbox and have ambulances and cop cars show up... the key is to have two copies of the same car so you can smash up one, keep it behind your back, pretend the good one has an accident, and then pull the switcheroo and pretend you didn’t see yourself do it.)
So yeah, lottery salvation hasn’t been giving me shit for a long ass minute, so I guess I’m just gonna have to, you know, work and all, like some dumbass. This of course means I’ll never be rich because rich people don’t work, they just rip motherfuckers off. (I am full of ridiculous stereotypes about how the wealthy have become wealthy. My father was an alcoholic chain saw mechanic with a 7th grade education, but had read enough books in his own adult time to understand how to put together a good conspiracy philosophy.)

2009 Goals #5: Accumulate More Critters

My last goat has been dead for a while now, yet all I have hanging around the house are my daughters' cats (plus the stray one living under the trash shed). It's time to tear up some shit with retarded animals. And being a housepainter, I have lots of free brain time to think about stupid shit. So here is what I'd like to get, sectioning off our pasture into separate segments, and starting to cultivate some hawthorn bushes as hedges... A) more goats, preferably useless ones like I used to have, banded dehorned male goats, and I will want to give them evil named but they will get goofy girl names from my family, B) a pig, who will not get a name, because he will straight up be for eating later in the year, although I hear it is better to get pigs in pairs or they get depressed and unhappy, and the last thing I want inside my homegrown slabs of bacon is the energy of depression (this is why cheap pork products are so unhealthy for humans, not the meat itself but the molecular energy contained therein, due to creeping living standards of agribusiness pork farms, as well as the robotic slaughterhouse technology they use nowadays, where most pigs are genetically designed to be the exact same fucking size and shape, so the robot knives don't have to be tinkered with), C) a couple mutt dogs, because it's time to have some fucking dogs again, hopefully going to the SPCA for my birthday next month, and I had told my wife I wanted a yellow lab mix of some sort who I would name Ric Flair, but we'd make it one word to say fast like Ricflair, "C'mere Ricflair, sit Ricflair," and obviously for the other dog I'd like a hound dog mutt named Manson, because everybody needs a dog named Manson, although I guess that stupid Ben Stiller sketch from his stupid sketch show kinda makes that seem kinda gay, D) the wife and kids have wanted burros for a while, and I figure I try to emulate the Mexican man's chronic laziness and overpopulation of the world, so I might as well have some burros, and being we are retarded as a family unit and not just on my own, me and the wife thought it good to named them Manhattan, Staten, Brooklyn, Queensbridge, and Boogie Down, so that we'd have the five burros - a stupid pun, yes, but if we actually had five living creatures grazing lazily on our property to carry the stupid pun out to full effect, I guess that would make it beyond simply a stupid pun and something remarkably over-the-top stupid that I could be proud to explain uncomfortably to my mother, and E) a white tiger on a leash that eventually I run away with to live underneath a rock overhang in the Blue Ridge mountains, idly scribbling drunken ramblings into the rocks with old railroad spikes.

2009 Goals #6: Drink More Growlers

In case you ain't know, growlers are those big jug-like bottles of beer that more drunkerly smaller brewers make. I have decided to drink more of those this year, for a multitude of reasons. First off, hopefully me and the wife will jump back into homebrewing pretty heavily, and filling growlers with five gallons of homemade alcohol tends to go faster than filling 22 ounce bottles, although I'm not sure how the twist cap would help the bottle fermentation. But secondly, drinking something called "growler" seems like a good thing to put myself behind. Just saying sounds like a good drunk, walking the railroad tracks by the river and trying to figure out if you really know what stars you think you know you are looking at, but there's no way to check because you're just out there, so you figure fuck it.
There was a growler at one of the fancy beer stores when I went the other day, but it was like $13 for it, and I didn't feel like justifying that to myself. I think one of the local brewery places, which doesn't even sell their shit at stores, sells carry off growlers at their bar spot which is where you can usually only get their swill. I think a lot of our homebrew shit actually indirectly came from there through a friend of my wife's. Perhaps I shall try them for growler action. The worst that can happen is they'll say no, I can steal some empties from behind their building, and fill them with my own beer. I've got a pumpkin beer recipe I want to try, and I also want to try it with butternut squash. I've never heard of butternut beer, and there's probably a good reason for that, but I've never been one much for good reasoning.

2009 Goals #7: Learn the Banjo

I was growed up in a little shithole town called Meherrin, Virginia, which is a nasty grocery store, a post office, an SPCA, and a mom-and-pop greasy spoon. There is a nice slate sign going into town the one way that says "Welcome to Meherrin, the home of Roy Clark," and it has a banjo on the stone. It is our claim to fame. It has been my goal to one day have my name etched on there too, but let's be serious, that shit ain't gonna happen.
Anyways, I've been doing the rapping musics with a few people the past few years, namely with my man PSY/OPS nearby, and then with my boy Boogie Brown who I've done music with off and on for a long ass time. But Brown is married now, and already lived like 3 hours away, but us both being married you might as well triple that distance. And PSY/OPS has been maladied with physical ailments, and it seems like he might be bored. I know I am. I have gotten pretty tired of writing rap lyrics, as even if you try to work a storytelling angle, it's just so fucking played out and done before. And then there's 300,000 aspiring clever MCs just with a simple myspace search, and everybody is the realest thing ever that is most amazing and cunning with the linguistics and blah blah blah... it's just so boring. I find myself listening to Jim Croce or Steve Earle or stuff like that more than any hip hop that comes out. And I find myself wanting to write retarded shit within the confines of actual instrumental music, as opposed to the blip bloops of standard hip hop. You can really hear the difference in music now that we're deep into the digital age, where everybody has a home studio. It is no coincidence that the last real wave of grimy hip hop beats came in the early '90s when people were still using hardware samplers like the Ensoniq EPS 16-plus. Now that it's all moved to inside the robot boxes, a lot of that grime is gone too, and everything's too polished to be grimy, which sucks because most everything in my life is covered with a layer of grime, including my offspring and my eyeglasses, which are scratched up to where only looking straight ahead gives me a clear view, and there's a bleached out dot on the lens of the right eye even straight ahead. So I've kind of given up on the hip hop music really being pleasurable.
Bring in the banjo. I, as much as anybody else, hate dudes that pick a guitar fireside or bang on a drum the same pseudo-African rhythm for 3 hours straight. I tried to learn guitar when I was about 12 or so, but learning chords on an acoustic guitar wasn't taking me to Cliff Burton status fast enough, so I bailed. But I am older now, and a smart enough guy that I can be taught new shit, even teach myself when halfway motivated. So I figured it was time to learn an instrument, which ultimately I hope to complement with retarded songs about back woods drunkards, crackheads on Greyhound buses, people wrecking cars for leisure, just good general rural miscreant nonsense, because I'm glad to make up rhyming stories of such things. And as I thought about what instrument to play, it came down to two things - the banjo and the lute. I thought about a lute because that's some seriously old school bullshit, and plus me and the ol' lady been watching The Tudors on DVDs, but I also quickly remembered about those renaissance fairs and the type of people they draw, drinking ale out of horns and wearing druid amulets and shit like that. I'm not ready to jump into that mix, hoping to making music, even if I never share it with the rest of the world, that the type of guy who has a long grey beard and ponytail and spends Saturday afternoon riding around on a lawn mower with no shirt on would appreciate. So it was the banjo, which, to be fair, is the most speed metal-like redneck instrument you can find.
I was talking to a dude on New Year's Eve about all this as we got drunk on Polish beers, and he's a regular musician (meaning he doesn't need computers to make music), and he was telling me about how you had to practice your finger rolls all the time and that was the key. I found this disturbing as I have enough creative clutter fighting for every spare moment of my brain while the body is in transit between obligations. I also, without really knowing, know that ultimate banjo dork guys play with both hands using all sorts of finger wackiness. I would say at this point in my life, my physical body is gimpy at best, and that's as a whole. When you get down to tiny specific parts, that might be a lot to ask of me. But if I can find a good shitty starter banjo for under $100 (and I can find $100 as well), then I'm gonna give it a shot motherfucker. What else am I gonna do? Sit around and wait for people who make beats on distraction-heavy computer screens get around to letting me do more boring assed lyrics over top of beats that aren't what I'd want ultimately but I don't know how to do that shit and can't explain what I hear in my head well enough for others to do?

(7s) 2009 Goals: Intro

I don't make new year resolutions, because shit like that is like swearing off alcohol while hungover - you are going to abandon it, and once abandoned you are done with it. Instead, I try to toss into my head little goals for this new year, rather than resolutions, so that if I fail, which I tend to do, I don't have to jettison the whole process and pretend it never happened, adding to my overall sense that I never finish a fucking thing I start, my life full of half-assed attempts to accomplish things beyond the abilities given to me by my upbringing and allowed by my retarded brain.
Speaking of retarded, this is the first post in my attempt to do a 7-list each week this year, so I guess it would be obvious I will be talking upon personal goals for the 2009 calendar cycle of boxes on the wall. If it's not obvious, let me tell you, that's what I'm gonna do this week. Pretend you care.