77 Wars

after a week of training, my timed mile is about 9 minutes. stephen and i were out this morning and we did about 3.6 miles of running/walking around the echo park lake. more walking than running at this point. we’re no experts but we try to stretch as much as possible before and after running first thing in the morning. we’re working our abs a little and i’ve been doing some push-ups and pull-ups. after reading some articles on training to run, i am glad to know that no weights are necessary. body weight is all that is needed. though, a medicine ball (weighted ball) can also add additional strength to regular training. my goal is to be able to do 5 rounds of: 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups and 15 squats within 20 minutes. it’s f**kin hard to do! so far i can only do 2 pull-ups in a row (a pull-up is with your palms facing away from you, a chin-up is with your palms facing you… YES, they are two different things), so i have been doing them throughout the day whenever i walk under my pull-up bar. we took pictures this morning of our flabbiness so that we can document our physical progress. i’ll let you guys know when the pictures are up, but i gotta warn you… it ain’t pretty.

…and there were many acts of petty brutality, for shanghai was an occupied city and soldiers are men at their most beastly.

well, this shark faced fast walking business chick shoulder checks me as we walk by on the street. i turned around expecting to exchange glances and give her the “what the f***?” combo of confused face, shoulders raised and palms turned out, but she was steadfastly walking with no discernible change of demeanor. what a complete bitch, i thought. but whatever. this was the day i expected when i left the house.

when i was in high school and i read slaughterhouse-five, i figured out that i could read something other than stephen king books. that there was merit, somewhere, in this whole idea of learning and experience. that the people who organize things don’t necessarily know anything about, well, anything.

maybe it’s because i’m feeling older, but i realize that, especially as a guy who reads and watches a lot of wwII stuff, that pieces of our world, or our connections to them, are constantly disappearing. it’s not a time for me to be sad about these things, but to embrace them while they are here and remember that we’re all going to die. my girfriend’s grandfather told me about how he had to hide in the mountains in southern france during the nazi occupation, and who’s gonna tell our kids about all that stuff? no one will be here to do it in person…

shit, i’m rambling, pointlessly, but i’m sad that another great writer is dead. though, it was good to know we were walking around on the same planet for awhile.

i’ve been obsessed with this record for a really long time. the self titled jesu album. this is the music i would play in a church if i had a church. yes… nothing lasts, but we get to live lives that make all this nothing seem so huge and wonderful. maybe i should start a religion… somehow based on metal/post-metal/doom records. i know ben would show up. i guess it would ultimately end up not being a religion so much as ben and i hanging out listening to records. sometimes smoking flavored tobaccos from his hookah and drinking some beers. maybe it should be a cult then? can we talk about hockey in a real cult?

well i just found this…
http://www.blackplague.org/cult/

anyways… my original posting was just these lyrics from jesu (justin k broaderick)
—

And all the stones I’ve thrown,
they come back twice as strong.
And all the stones I’ve thrown,
they tell me nothing lasts.

And all stones you’ve thrown, they come from your highest throne.
Pass them on to me below,
they remind me nothing lasts

Nothing

2235 Sunset Blvd. Echo Park Los Angeles 90026 (213)413-1115

antimarket .com

owned and operated by john q., echo park’s anti-market is a great local motorcycle shop. i stop in all the time to say hello to the guys and talk bikes mostly. they fix and sell almost anything with two wheels and a motor. john, greg, rich and tony are the guys i see there everyday and they have helped me fix stuff plenty of times without trying to swindle me. if you’re in a hurry, it may not be the best place to go, but if you have a little time, they’ll get it done right and at a reasonable cost. john also manufactures moto-denim that you’ll see for sale in the shop. i have no experience with his gear, but it looks well made. pretty much anything you’d need for your bike is around… helmets, jackets, full-suits, gloves, knives and fuel filters. sometimes they’ll have drive chains and they’ve always got a pretty interesting selection of t-shirts. if you’re in los angeles, check it out, it’s great having a place like this right down the street.

i was just on the helmet page looking for a song, but all they’ve got up is songs from their new album. i had hope for a moment. i know they started sucking a whole lotta ass years ago when page hamilton left the band, but this is the new record and he’s come back. i used to love those guys and i still have some early records, they were all really good until hamilton left, so i gave it a chance…

what a bunch of f**king bullshit. cock-knockery if i’ve ever heard it. one song was called ‘money shot’ and maybe it was about a time when they were taking money shots across the face. who knows. but what summed it all up was the the last song…

swallow everything.

aptly titled. yes, just like when metallica released ‘load’. not that it wasn’t alluded to by their terrible black album, but hey, we were talking about helmet… what happened? they sound like some usc kids trying to be what they thought would be a better version of helmet. no details needed really, i mean if you want to, go to their page and witness it. as ben might say… it just suuuuh uhhhhh uhhh ucks.

but let us leave on a positive note…

i’ve been listening to a lot of chokebore lately and chokebore is f**kin’ good.

i had written this on 16 december, 2006:

man, i was out riding my motorcycle on some errands this morning/afternoon and when i was in little tokyo it started raining a little and i was thinking, whatever, a little rain, kind of nice because i like the rain. i was watching people run and hide from the water. like most everyone, they are idiots. unlike me, because i am a genius. so i get my gear on and start riding home which is only about two miles. starts raining harder, no big deal. starts raining really hard. interesting. i didn’t get worried or frustrated or anything like that, but at about 40mph going north on beaudry, i noticed that a river of water was pouring down the front of my jacket into my crotch. it felt as though i were pissing myself, only with cold water. it started to feel like my manhood was trying to invert itself to keep warm. anyways, it’s good to be home again. in a clean pair of boxers with the heat way up listening to built to spill’s ‘you in reverse’. good times. good times.

photo nick romaniak

who would think a really great day starts with ones self climbing out of a scotch flavored hole in the earth to find his girlfriend suffering from a pretty nasty case of food poisoning? i suppose a great benefit to me was that i didn’t really think about how shitty i felt until sometime in the late morning or afternoon.

fanny and i were out last night. we had the gig over at the redwood. it was either something there or sushi she ate for lunch. anyways. not good. very not good. we ran out of water this morning and so i went to get water and also got vitamin water, orange juice and bubbly water. and since it was friday i moved the cars and bike to avoid even more parking tickets. for a while i thought we might have to go to the hospital. fanny’s mom suggested grapefruit seed extract, which i didn’t think of, but have in the house. that shit is pretty awesome.

anyways, fanny started feeling better after hours of being really sick and i went to the video store for us so we could watch some movies when she started feeling ok, or minimally nauseas is what the status seemed to be later. also while fanny was sleeping at home, i saw todd at the record store and went into masa for some fresh bread. it was chilly out on the bike.  i thought about how much i love it here in echo park.

it was nice to get home to a warm house and fanny doesn’t believe me, but she’s beautiful even when she’s violently ill. so, aside from the many short, indoor trips to be sick, we spent the rest of the day laying in bed, taking naps and recovering from our respective poisons. we watched ‘you, me and dupree’ which was entertaining because, even though he annoys the shit out of a lot of people, owen wilson is actually really fuckin funny. fanny made a good point… thanks wes anderson, for making movies with people in these roles that sort of redefined some of them. at least to us. i mean, i always thought wilson was an idiot until i saw the tenenbaums. and anderson’s movies reminded me of how much bill murray was and still is awesome (i still need to buy stripes on dvd).

then i went to trader joes and got yogurt and other stuff that would be good for my poor sick girlfriend. when i got home, we ate a little, fanny felt way better and we watched ‘the 40 year old virgin’. hilarious. and i think both the movies we watched were by the same people. it’s great to be with someone who likes to watch stupid movies too. although, we watched some movie called ‘winter passing’ the other day and that movie suck suck SUCKED. i think we wanted to watch it because will farell is in it. don’t EVER watch that movie. it’s like some lady from santa barbara tried to write an ‘edgy’ and ‘dark’ film, but it turns out there is nothing to the movie, even will farell is pretty boring in it. here is the entire movie summed up into one or two run-on sentences…

girl moves to nyc from bfe to be an actress on broadway while doing a lot of coke and being a f***in slut, then goes home to find out her mothers death was really a suicide while her alcoholic, novelist father (played by ed harris who is entirely unbelievable in his part) is banging some 20 year old british chick who cuts his chicken up into small pieces for him, will farell bodyguards his house because harris is famous and fans come knocking at the door, the girl and father have a shitty relationship that is reconciled by some bullshit and while she is home in michigan she helps farell to be more confident and she turns out to be a hero! and then goes home and ends up being successful because she isn’t a cock craving, coke snorting slut anymore because she made up with her father and ends up getting together with the nice guy she didn’t give a f*** about before. but, when you watch the movie, it takes almost 2 hours to watch all of that painfully spill out like a river of fecal matter from the asses of baboons. actually, i think my version is way f***in better and free and quick as well. we decided not to watch it anymore at some point, but i suggested watching the rest of it on fast forward so we could see what happened, so it didn’t really steal too much time from our lives, but that was not today.

anyways we haven’t just layed around and talked all day for a while, so it was fun and we got plenty of naps and it’s good to see her not be in pain anymore. it was like going on little missions to bring stuff home because everything is so close by. we should spend more days doing this kind of stuff, but only without hangovers and food poisoning. jim and michelle got it right… “living together is like being at camp”. it’s fun, even though we want to strangle each other sometimes, we don’t strangle each other and we keep each other warm.

…like christmas and thanksgiving…

but it’s all over and it feels great. that time between thanksgiving and christmas is the eye of a storm where the second part is the worst. i love hanging out with family (mine, fanny’s, ben’s, nick’s…etc), but the holidays kind of place an emphasis on being a huge pain in everyones ass and it makes people all weird and stressed out. i got some cool stuff though. i’ve been anti buying gifts for so long, but this year i got caught up in it and it was nice to get some stuff.

i got SO MANY records from fanny, ben, nick and christina, jason and fanny’s dad. i’m so excited about it. i have all this new music to listen to. stephen birdsong is going to teach me how to edit digital video. i’m gonna learn french. i turned frickin 30. fanny and i got each other presents that were so appreciated by the other, it was cool. stephen also got me this awesome japanese kitchen knife that’s so sharp it shaved the goddamned hair right off my arm. fanny didn’t seem to like that part because she worries about me, which is very sweet. i got at least a gallon of scotch and shannon got me an r2d2 pinata and a crapload of star wars decorations. i broke a picture frame at the bar when i swung at it and i was remembered for having such a violent swing. that was great. i’m broke as hell but it’s alright, fanny’s making us some soup and bread and cheese so we can sit in bed and watch band of brothers.

so far, being 30 is pretty great.

photo nick kapp