The latest absurity to come out of the White House is that it is somehow treasonous for the New York Times to report that we've been monitoring financial transactions to try and catch terrorists. What the fuck? Don't they think that, maybe, the terrorists are cognizant of the fact that we're tracking them in any way that we can, legal or not? Give me a fucking break! Plus, our government mentioned this as one possibility way back in 2002. It was public domain then. Why is it some big damn secret now? Am I missing something?

What's even more frustrating is that the Democrats continue to lack the spine to stand up to the GOP blueprint (see Feinstein cow-towing to the Flag Burning Amendment nut jobs). They do not have much of a vision because they can't agree. And so you have armies and legions of mindless platitudes marching across the teleprompter in search of a point. Gone are the days when Clinton methodically pointed out that trickle-down economics (and how Bush learned from that playbook, repeating one's own coined terms for things like Supply Side) doesn't work except in a vacuum.

Sigh.

Howard Dean acted like Jon Stewart (and the studio audience) should have been awestruck by his door-to-door campaign when he appeared on the Daily Show last month. Stewart said "So the Democrats are now as powerful as some of the Jehovah's Witnesses." And when Stewart asked him what the Democrats planned to do differently than the Bush administration and the GOP, Dean said "Aha! I thought you might ask this." And he pulls out a door hanger, the kind that Chinese restaurants and pizza joints from the neighborhood litter your front porch with and says, I shit you not: "You hang this over the doorknob if nobody's home" as if this was some earth shaking new concept that no one's ever heard before. And when Stewart said "You are SO not going to win in November," my heart sank, because he's right.

The people (some homo sapiens, many more homo erectus) that voted for Bush will always show up to the polls. People with common sense are spooked because they don't think that Democrats can do anything better except raise their taxes for everything. The Dems need to figure out a dumbed down way to cut through that bullshit.

George Lakoff's excellent Don't Think of an Elephant is the closest we get, but even that falls short of articulating the vision. Lakoff points out how to present the message, and even hints at some what the message should be, but there's not a lot of meat and potatoes. Before we know it, we'll wake up one morning and realize that we're looking at the kind of inequality we saw in the 19th Century.

The one bright spot, with that in mind, is Warren Buffet's astonishing announcement earlier in the week. I can only hope that is some kind of a leading indicator for what ended up happening as a result of the "robber baron" era of the late 19th. The only solace I take is that our time is not unlike the turn of the last century.

We're about due for strong, articulate leadership that can bring us back to an era of common sense progressivism. Take T.R., who would have been a Democrat in a different age, we won't like everything he (probably not she yet) will say, but if you agree that the right to life means basic healthcare for all people, not saving a zygote in a test tube; if the right to liberty is best sought by scientific analysis of the problems of our time by coming up with hypotheses based on facts and observations, where we then come to conclusions, not blind faith and superstition where you come to the table with an all-encompassing, preconceived belief that you then pick and choose whatever facts, true or not, fit that theory; and the pursuit of happiness means to stop letting the powerful consolidate their power and instead take common sense measures to level the playing field so that everyone has at least a basic opportunity to get ahead, or even stay afloat--in other words, if you want the middle class to survive, and to finish the job that the civil rights movement started, then we need someone like a T.R to present a blunt version of the aforementioned before it's too late. Consider this draft one, with more to come.

It's hot as a mother up in here. Right now, at almost 8pm, it's still about 87 degrees. Tomorrow the high in Santa Clara is 96. And it's not a dry heat. Folks in No-Cal are not accustomed to this. At least there aren't that many mosquitoes.

We have the guru in development visiting work this week from the London office and offering some great insight into the operation of our products, and it's helped me make some strides in my conceptual framework about a lot of things. Well, he arrived today and we had a good four hour session. Tremendously helpful.

Other than that, an A's/Giants game happens on Sat. and we'll just try and beat the heat. Here's a nice picture of our upstairs room, including the desk where I'm typing this. Oh, and K's at the desk with aforementioned (from previous entry) cat, Boo.

Summer's setting in. The Out of the Darnkess walk for Suicide Awareness and Prevention is a little over a month away. K & I haven't been doing as many "practice" walks of late, but we'll get there. While 20 miles is no slouch, I'm not too worried about it. Legs will be sore regardless of what we do. I'm $70 shy of my $1000 goal. Wanna donate?

Margo, my mother in law, is away for a month in Australia on a Fulbright scholarship. I helped her set up a blogger page last week. Check it out.

The tech job's going okay. One of my coworkers was just promoted to Sales Engineer, and we had quite a bender in his honor at the Slow Club Thursday night. We were all hurting yesterday.....whoa....my cat just hopped up right in front of the screen. Needy little bugger, eh? Anyway, all's humming along there. I think I'd be more comfortable if I had a little more knowledge of network admin and a better conceptual grasp of group policy and third party application deployment methodologies. But whenever I get a free moment at work to study up on all of that, I get distracted and start random surfing.

Chris and his buddy John from Hudson Bell took a swing down here in the SC last night to pick up the Tascam MSR-16, and to sit down for some of my famous BBQ chicken. Well, famous to some.

The takeaway both Chris and I got from the Bye Bye Blackbirds' sessions is that the drums sound better (at least) if you first track them to analog tape and then move them over to Protools, DP or whatever digital environment you're recording/overdubbing/editing in, even if the tape is only 1/2" at 15ips. As a return favor for all of the work Chris put in (saved my ass, really), it's the least I can do. It was nice to meet John as well.

In this interim time (the next few months) I can now be forced to get the G4 and my stolen copy of DP running. I've got what I believe to be the right A/D converter, so it's now a matter of buying a flatscreen monitor, a rack mount for all the free gear I obtained, and maybe a patch bay. Wish me luck.

Speaking of the Bye Bye Blackbirds, it's finally in the hands of John Golden Mastering, so my work is almost done there. I've also rehearsed with them two times thus far with my solo material. I was slated to go again last night, but I was just too wiped after a long, hard week.

Time passes quickly these days. I've now been at my new company for three months and I still don't know fuck-all, but I'll get there. Won't you please donate to the Out of the Darkness walk for suicide awareness? It's happening on July 22-23 and then K & I head to Rochester for her brother's wedding. There will be no show to raise funds for the event, a minor disappointment but I'm just not ready to get back out onstage.

The Bye Bye Blackbirds' project is done except for mastering, which I'm shipping off to John Golden this week. I've enlisted them to be my backing band for a few songs I've had in my notebook for a while. Some originated ten, even fifteen years ago. The interesting thing about them is that they were prescient, when I began writing them, about my life as it exists today...as if I knew how I'd feel as a 36 year old. Or maybe they are merely self fulfulling prophecies. At any rate, there will be a record of these songs at some point, I just am not sure when.

Thanks to my good friend Aaron, I've acquired a bit of gear, among them a MOTU A/D converter of the era that my G4 is from. Got Digital Performer from Eli. I've been waiting on getting a flat screen monitor for that. Also, a 24 channel X4 X4 Mackie mixing console...a bit tweaky but a definite improvement over the clunky old 16 track Fostex. That Fostex I used for HWS and When Your Heartstrings Break, so it did its job. But it's time to move on. Eventually I'll get a Soundcraft or a board with better pres. All in due time. I'm not made of money. The main reason I'm not doing much in the line of music is because I have to work to pay off old debts. By this time next year we should be getting close. And then...I should hopefully be done decompressing from all that is music.

Back from London, and this is my first real weekend in two weeks. I've been awash in technical jargon for about a month now, attempting to prepare to support products with lots of differing feature options, builds, needy customers and the like. I came in with a patchy desktop software background but with an aptitude to learn quickly. I think I'm doing that, but it will take time before I'll be able to help everybody efficiently. That's how it goes. You can either hire someone who's exactly qualified, or overqualified, at that very moment and thus will more likely move on quickly, or hire someone who will grow into the job and stick around a while longer. So...I'm still in Customer/Technical Support, but I'm still learning new things. And the pay's a lot better.

The gents in the Blackbirds are getting antsy to finish mixing and the project, and I can't blame them. I've been a bit slow...but I think the end result will be worth the wait. Chris and I begin mixing as it stands now on April 8th, and should wrap up mid-month. I was floored when they presented me with a couple of Event near field monitors at the end of recording last month for my home studio. Somehow I feel unworthy. But life has intervened on more than one occasion throughout the project. First, there was a tape machine problem. Next, K & I moved to the South Bay. Next came the holidays, and then Chris went on tour. Now I've started a new day job and am getting up to speed. I know an EP shouldn't take this long normally, but on the other hand, better to do it right than rush it out there. And I never said I was an experienced pro.

On a related musical note, K & I are participating in a Walk for Suicide awareness (out of the darkness overnight) in July, and the thought is now that we may put on a benefit show in SF in a (for now) undisclosed location (til things are finalized). I've got a wishlist of acts for the musical portion, and it's likely I'll come out of retirement to play a few of my own tunes and see how they go. This will likely be some time in June. I need to wire up my Epiphone Hummingbird acoustic with the best set of pickups I can find. If I'm to go back up onstage, I don't want anything to be half-assed. I'm enlisting the Blackbirds to be "the Band" to my Dylan. Or something like that. And should the others give the ok, I'll begin the announcement process.

I'm off to London today in a few hours, for a week of training for my new job. I'm excited; haven't been to the UK since 8/31/01, Beulah's final tour over there. How much has changed since we were treated like royalty by the nice people in the small town of Resolven, Wales. For those who don't know the story, when Beulah was beginning to take off, we signed a licensing deal to a small label based in Oxford called Shifty Disco records, who soon brought us over to the UK to play a few clubs, mostly in Oxford, London, Manchester and so on. In 2000, one of our Oxford shows was attended by quite a large group of fans (that word would turn out to be quite an understatement) who had chartered a bus there all the way from tiny Resolven, Wales, a four hour drive. Between songs they were chanting our names like we they were singing songs at a soccer match. Later, when we went for a curry (as the English put it), some of the kids from Resolven spotted us and all poured into the Indian restaurant, and proceeded to start singing the entire Beach Boys' Pet Sounds record a cappella and then a few Beulah songs from "When Your Heartstrings Break" (better than we could, I might add). At one point one guy picked up a recipe book and started reading dramatically from it and it was really quite compelling.

Fast forward a year or so. The beginning blurb in "Coast is Never Clear" paid homage to them, and then Shifty had an idea for the "Coast" record release: Rent out the Miners Welfare hall in Resolven itself, and put on a record release party there. As we crossed into Wales, past Cardiff and started the uphill journey to Resolven, we were all struck by how beautiful the country was. It sort of reminded us of California’s redwood forests, but with 12th Century castles perched atop the hills along the horizon. When we arrived in Resolven, a town of about 2,000 people or so, it was clear that word had gotten around because everyone knew who we were. I was not surprised by this, having been born in a town of similar size in Wisconsin. For better or worse, word gets around fast. Everybody knows everybody.

We were treated very, very well from the moment we arrived. The Mayor and his wife were extremely hospitable. He told us old stories about the mines in the town, wishing they were still open and that he would “go back to work there the next day” if he could. She made us sandwiches, drinks, basically waited on us and seemed somewhat put off when we thanked her as if she wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary!

The night before the gig, we stayed in Neath after a BBC radio session in Cardiff. Things got a little rowdy and I’m surprised we didn’t get kicked out. There was a karaoke bar across the street from the hotel and the guys from Resolven band El Goodo (some of whom were singing a cappella that night back in Oxford) and a bunch of their friends came by to whoop it up. At the end of the night, we were all a little soused and the El Goodo guys started towards the mike to sing Elvis songs like “Suspicious Minds” by getting a running start and sliding across the bar room floor flat on their bellies.

The gig in Resolven was a good one, but I remember the night more for what happened afterwards. First, we went to the pub after hours. UK law stated at the time that pubs close by 11pm. Well, I don’t suppose the Home Secretary would have gotten a tip that the pub in Resolven stayed open on our behalf long past that. We figured we’d be sneaking in to have a quiet pint with a few of our closest confidantes whom we’d written back and forth with since the Oxford show. When we opened the door into the pub, it seemed like everyone in town was packed in there and they cheered like we were the home team coming back to town as League Champions. Buying our own drinks was certainly not an option. Laughing heartily while a number of different people stood up on the bar tables to tell tall tales and pay a tribute to each Beulah member, past and present, certainly was!

We had a full European tour, including a few more UK dates planned for late October, early November, but it was not to be. September 11th was less than two weeks later and, as it turned out, we would not play a show in England or Wales ever again. I’ll always remember the experience at Resolven, Wales on August 31st, 2001 as the final, triumphant personal high point from a now bygone era in the history of the world.

Anyway, I don't think I'll make the trip up to Wales this time. I'll be getting to know London a bit better. But my wife and I do plan on a trip over there in 2007, to Ireland, England and Wales. I will no doubt look up Resolven then. For now, it's cheers.