Baby,
I promise you that I will always be the things that made you fall in love with me: honest and transparent, funny and witty, open-minded and creative, adoring.
I promise you i will never stop pampering and courting you.
I promise you will always be my muse, and I will draw daily inspiration from you.  I promise to return the favor by trying to inspire you daily.
I promise to work on being a better husband: to talk to you, to tell you what I’m feeling, and to engage in continual self-evaluation.
I promise to prioritize us, without sacrificing you or me.  I promise to always make room for us in my life, and to make sure you know when I think we need to adjust to get to the right level of us in both of our lives.
I promise to try to love the things about you that are just in your nature, such as the telltale hair monster left behind everywhere you’ve been.
I promise to make a fuss over you when you’re sick, to love you and support you and take your side when you’ve had a bad day.  I promise to listen to you tell me about your bad day and to refrain from giving you unsolicited solutions.
I promise that I will do my best to learn how we are as one, and to take into account how my mood and actions affect you.
I promise to try to recover quickly from disagreements.  I promise to do my best to stay on the high road.  And I promise to forgive and forget mistakes said and done in the heat of the moment.
I promise to be stubbornly filled with determined, creative solutions to the most gridlocked, vexing situations we encounter
I promise you that I will help you and support you to achieve your dreams.  And I promise that, with your support, I will pursue my mine as well.  I promise never to stop taking new risks and adventures with you.
I promise you physical, emotional, and mental fidelity.  I promise that you will always be my baby that i adore completely with my mind, body, and soul, and i promise to trust that you adore me as well.
I promise to be vigilant in never letting you forget that you are the most wonderful, most beautiful woman in the world.  i promise to set the husband you, as the most wonderful, beautiful woman in the world, deserve, as the impossible ideal i will strive to be.
I promise to help our marriage embrace, not suffer, change big and small, and to give us room to work through changes and all that come with them.  I promise to emphasize fun and presence over precaution and safety more than is in my background, and I promise to never be hung-over on Mother’s Day.
And above all, baby, I promise to be always on your team.  And I will do my best to make our team the envy of every other team at the party of life.

Today’s numbers:
p/r/f
.688/.635/.660
.802/.740/.770

An improvement of over .100 in f-score.  Suck it, Science, I’m kicking your ass.

As an amusing aside, it looks certain that we will break a major record tomorrow…the latest in the season that the Sea-Tac maximum temperature has not hit 75F! The record is June 9…and there is virtually no chance we will get that high tomorrow.

amusing.

everybody who lives here is a wasted life.

they all convince themselves that it’s nice, but they’re just better at fooling themselves than i am.  and i’ve tried.

you’re protesting, but you hear that voice in your head that tells you that seattle just sucks all the life and soul out of you.

when you travel to other places there’s so much more of a care free attitude toward life that comes with being able to wear short sleeves every so often.

but here your soul just gets sucked away as your  mind becomes a sanitarium of circuitous pathways inverting reality and convincing you that your life is worth living.

it’s not.

if i still live here in five years, kill me, because i’ll already be dead inside, my soul having long since been sucked into nothingness, smothered by the vast sea of despair that is seattle.

we should have left it to canada.  then maybe i’d still have a desire to live.

On second thought, given the local statistics, it really is more jump off a bridge weather.

Still, I’d prefer some light and heat at the end.

Oh, and I have a two-month old kid and we’re trying to move this summer (though so far that last thing is completely owned by My Baby, which is freaking amazing considering she’s carrying the bulk of that kid thing, too).

By now you recognize this as one of those all-too-frequent I’m-going-away-for-a-while posts.  I hate these.  It’s like admitting failure.  But hopefully when you hear from me next I’ll be done with my academic career, have my feet under me on my current job, and have a new job lined up.  Because I still have three J-mez CD’s to get through along with about 12 of my own.  Plus Mike Patton put out an album a few weeks ago and Melvins’ new one is out tomorrow.  So you know I’ll be back.

No, what nobody ever tells you is  that when your child is precariously balanced between sleep and awake and any movement at all, including the brief absence of one hand, will send him as far away from Sleep Land as possible, your nose, eyebrows, and/or ears will itch like you’ve never felt an itch before.  It’s like if a herd of mosquitoes flew through poison oak to bite you and you just have to sit there and take it.

That’s what nobody tells you about parenthood.

This is the sweet spot…right where you want to be.  This is the perfect balance between dance hall rhythms and sounds, kickin’ melodies, and experimental glitch work.

Mouse On Mars, a duo from Dusseldorf, has been at it since 1993, so it’s no surprise that their 2006 release puts them leagues ahead of anybody else trying to do this kind of experimental dance-inspired music.  Hell, this album is so good it puts them leagues ahead of just about anybody doing either experimental or dance music, much less just those doing a combination of the two.

Somebody, it might have been Beckers, told me about some study once that revealed that most people like the music they do based on the timbre of it more than any other quality.  I don’t have a problem believing that, given my anecdotal observations of the world and their inferior (to mine, natch), illogical, and, quite frankly, wrong musical tastes.  But it must be a tendency and not an absolute because if it were an absolute, Mouse On Mars, with their scrumptious, sensual sound, would be the biggest band on Earth.  Still, it’s not hard to tell where these guys aren’t the most accessible band.  This album was released on Ipecac, after all, and that pretty much entails chaos and sour sounds.

Otto Von Schirach kept his grooves going longer than Fantômas did before exploding them into blips, and Mouse On Mars keeps theirs going even longer, fully engaging your butt and your heart before pulling your head in the game, taking you from rump shaking to beard scratching and back again throughout the course of a song and the disc.  And, yeah, like most electronic dance music, there are times when things get a bit repetitive, but, again, the sound is so warm and erotic that you just sink into the trance like a nap in the park on that first really warm spring day.

The real standouts are at the start of the disc.  “Chartnok,” “I Go Ego Why Go We Go,” and “Düül” are all amazing.  “Inocular – B” is like a lonesome didgeridoo in the outback played against a thumping, crowded club beat, which sounds like the most cheesy thing ever, but, as I’ve said, the sound is so gorgeous it somehow works.  “Skik”  could have been a great 8-bit video game song, which is a brilliant reaction to the Nintendo generation turning their favorite game music into guitar-driven rock.  Even “One Day, Not Today,” which is almost without structure, is incredibly listenable, with its muted glitches strangely comforting you the way the distance of the world does during the Sunday stupids when recovering from a Saturday night done to the fullest.

Honestly, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect combination of dance rhythms, catchy melodies, and experimentation than this.  You’ve got the perfect mix of immediate accessibility with the relistenability of all of the twists and turns of those crazy blips and bloops.  Both of me love this.

Rating:

Mixers: “Chartnok,” “Inocular – B,” “Bertney,” “Retphase – A,” “Retphase – B,” “Retphase – C,” “Retphase – D,” “Retphase – E,” “Retphase – F,” “Retphase – G,” “Retphase – H,” “Retphase – K”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Bob Mould (The Last Dog And Pony Show) and Mozart (Le Nozze Di Figaro, London Philharmonic Orchestra, cond. Georg Solti)