Went into the Seagrass

Graciousness and Thanks: A Beginning

Many great and glorious triumphant shout-outs to the individual who commented on my blog post below. Firstly, thank you just for laying your eyes on this blog. What I am trying to do here - as you may have noticed! - is to document the artistic lifestyle and all its attendant unprettiness. What you have just witnessed is part and partial of this. Not everything in this pursuit will be dripping with daisy-chains and sunbeams and little monkey-hearts dotted with rainbows. No, only a naive person or a lower life-form would even begin to ponder it in this way. Instead, know this: Art is a painful thing to manufacture. As I have said before: to make art one must reach into his nether-regions and using brute force extract a giant chunk. That is art. That is the artist's life. In keeping with that. Later today I will be release another video bit. I want you to stay tuned. I really really do.

Woe & Darkness: The Sadness has Arrived

Well, I called that, didn't I? I knew last night as I was putting the finishing touches on "i ain't even playin'!" that there would be a massive type of emotional repercussion. That repercussion has washed ashore with such volume as to make it hard for me to breathe. This has multiple points of intersection that needs addressing but the place where I would even begin is fuzzy and hard to see.

Point one: wherein I sign up for Twitter and get a Twitter account (I know, I know!) yesterday. I presumed this would steer a massive populace to the blog but it has not. All I have managed to do was infuriate and stupefy a gentleman whose blog I had read. I found him on the Twitter application and added him and he wondered "who the hell I was"?!

Point two: wherein I wonder why I don't have more friends on Twitter or elsewhere?

Point three: wherein I sign up for an application called Feedburner which will provide the metrics and page-views of my blog. This is a tool for the nascent and eruptive blogger to tell how his work is being received by the general population at large. Well, color me ignorant and sad like a chicken, but I signed up expecting to see, say, tens of thousands of page-views. I did not see that reflected in the numbers. In fact, the number was in the low 20's. My grief was compounded by my sturdy realization that I and I alone was the only person repeatedly reading and scanning and enjoying my own blog!!! Like the worm in the tequila bottle, over and over.

Point four: wherein I go onto my Youtube page and see how many times my videos have been viewed. Again, color me naive like a bag of coins but I was expecting thousands and some of my videos have been watched less than 10 times!! Most likely just by me!!! Can you imagine the heavy thumping ache that pounds my beating heart?????

Point five: wherein I re-watch my video for "i ain't even playin'!" and I find it tortured and unwatchable, like the wail of some lost dingo on the prairie. Yes, the intent is there, but the execution falls flat and my final improvisatory "Boo-ya!", while well-intentioned, appears to undermine the central thesis of the song in the first place.

Point six: wherein I find a hole to crawl into. Sadness! Despair!

i ain't even playin'!

Happy today (for a change!)

Greetings gentle reader. It is the Sunday night after a most productive weekend. Had the grand misfortune of running into Ron Mealman (or "Fat Ron", as he prefers) out in the parking lot on Saturday but that was a momentary event and henceforth one that I was able to shake afterward with little trouble. Can I alert you to the notion that I did some good and active creative songwriting this weekend?? Well I did. Now granted the song that I am about to post may not be the cutting edge of monumentality but there is a certain heft and force to it that finds me, your gentle host, writing at the edge of his limits, pushing boundaries. And damn! If that don't feel right, then what else can??? I'm sure some of this will wear off in the morning but right now, I feel so good my friends, so deliciously good!

Random Assortment of Hodge-Podgery: Thoughts

Those of you attuned to the Taffy frequency may have noticed a new permutation and iteration of my creative output in the form of a new song, Wasteland: A Fevered LoveDream. What can I say ya'll? It arrived in my head yesterday afternoon and I delivered it to you shortly thereafter. It spattered out of me like so many gallons of turkey chili. I was a mere vessel, you see. I was the Universe's instrument. I was like the man on horseback, galloping across some dystopian mindscape where a night can last for weeks and the food is a watery gruel unsuitable for bathing, much less eating. Which is another way of saying: I didn't ask for this assignment. But I will accept the challenge. Oh yes sir.

Drumroll: This is a song where I take risks. Big risks. Mammoth and chunky, often unpretty, risks. In Wasteland: A Fevered LoveDream the narrator (or, gentle reader: yours truly) wails for lost love. This is something we all can relate to. Everyone has felt the white-hot electric shock of burning and unrequited affectation. There is no sensation similar.

Wasteland: A Fevered LoveDream

Sunbursting!

Good afternooniest of afternoons to you ladies & gents. I am scribbling these notes tucked safely between the warming teats of my day job. (Are you sick of my moanings about such yet?) where a typical post-mania pre-going home lull has descended across the office like so much black foam. People shuffle in and out of the kitchen, carrying cans of carbonated sludge in their giant meat-claws, sighing, breathing too heavy, pretending to do actual work of importance, nattering, muttering, coughing and on occassion, wheezing. Generally I pay little heed to these people (and they to me) but when the black foam rains down I find myself oozing into a sort of sadness for their little lives. My heart rips open and out pours a river of compassion. How lonely! How Sad! Also, at times like this I become exceedingly glad that I am me. Meaning, I have a way out. Meaning, my songs are like shovels that make underground tunnels and that burrow. My future sits before me like a brilliant orange magnet, pulling me out of this prison of doom and despair. When I think like this sometimes I break into wide smiles, sometimes the air tastes crisper. My co-workers have, more than once, looked over and muttered "what are you smiling about"? To which, what can I do? To which I want to tell them that I have my future firmly in my hand and I am stroking it gently. Only a matter of time my sweet, I whisper, only a matter of time.

Staying with that level of confidence for a moment let me offer you this: I know that I am currently alone and without a female mate. And while it eats at me sometimes, grinding through my guts, I have to say it doesn't bother me one iota. The glory will come and with it will come the fawning admirers. This is just the way this one is going to go down. All things for a reason.

Ah, everyone is shutting computers down, leaving early to hear the President speak. Me too. Signing off

Sunburst

Droppings & Leavings

Ah, sweet madness, this life! I am here at work (ugh!) on a Friday - thank you merciful gods - counting down until I can go home and wrap my self in the sweet membrane of my solitariness. I've watched the Cuddle Me Ferocious video a handful of times and I always feel exposed, like a leopard out in the forest or something. Did I do too much or did I not do enough? It's a riddle without an answer. You must embrace this when you bathe in art. It's the only way!

Yesterday one of my co-workers (Steve Coggins, Accounts) happened by my desk as I was watching my own self singing. "What the hell are you watching?" he shrieked, which surprised me. I quickly minimized the screen and said "Oh, ha ha. I don't know. Just messing around". His face turned to stone and he said "Not on the internet I hope. On company time? That would be time theft". He stared me down. We were like two mudslingers at the OK Corral and a tumbleweed blew through us. This is it, I thought. I am now fired. Then his face changed and he started laughing "Oh, ha ha ha, I had you McKittrick! I had you! You think I care what you do? I'm on Facebook all day long". Yes, he had me. Whew, I exhaled a big one. I revealed to him that it was me singing. He couldn't believe it and had me send him the link. At the end of the day he swang by my desk again. I was a little nervous and shy about it and he could tell so he said "Hey my man. I have never heard anything quite like that. Ever." Which I took as the compliment he meant it to be. So that was good.

Cuddle Me Ferocious

new song!!!!

Alright people, how about a blast of sunshine: I awoke this AM with some new lyrics bouncing in my brain like so many pinballs! Just a verse and a chorus so far but man if that doesn't taste like the sweetest nectar from a juice-dripping nectarine! The music is still being hammered out and when it arrives you can better believe that I will post me singing it. Drink up:

Cuddle Me Ferocious

Well it's true that I ain't made like most guys babe
And it 's true that the rain bleeds into puddles
And it's true that most guys just want to bang your drum babe
But I prefer to defer lust to cuddles.

Cuddle me once
Cuddle me twice
Cuddle me un-atrocious
Cuddle me queen
Cuddle me lean and mean
Cuddle me ferocious

status check: alive and living

I recognize the inherent oddity in announcing this to you and myself but here goes: Taffy has been MIA for a few days. I entered a type of mind-swirl, bogged down by despair and good weather, which caused me to stray from the computer. Some things in life cannot be enjoyed with a computer and that's a fact. Things convene in one place and then present you with nuggets of contradiction. Think about that for a second.

Alright, I'm stalling. Out with it Taffy: I went for a walk down by the river the other day. It was glorious and happy with sunshine and goodwill but the path was strewn with diet sprite cans and beef jerky wrappers. Who could be in this world, this fine and sunburst world, and litter? It's unanswerable I know but it's a question that I refuse to stop provoking. Ah, I'm stalling again. Here it is: I am alone. I walked on this path and I am alone. I have so much love to give the ladies of this town but none of them, apparently, are interested. This is like an icepick to the face, or say being trampled by feral barn-rats. Which is to say, it hurts. A man with so much love and creativity to give with no receptacle is an aching gentleman. All I want is for a lovely creature to sit with me under a sprawling oak or a knotty pine on the sunniest of days, listening as I strum the guitar for her, as she feeds me fresh strawberries from the basket we've just picked. I want to be stroked and held and told that I am fantastic, like no other person or thing out there. That's it. Is that so much to ask?

This is all by way of saying that I have been marinating in these juices for the last several days. That is where I have been. Part of me knows this is crazy, all artists ache for a noble companion to shepherd. And another part of me just aches.
Sigh.

An ill gentleman arrives in your sights.

Yes friends, Taffy has been prostrate on the couch for two straight days, reduced to drinking fluids and watching talk shows, energy sapped, defenses down while his guitar and notebook mock him from the corner, leaning against the wall. The upside of this is - need I even say it - not being at work. Every moment away from there is a moment that I savor, much like a ravenous carnivore diving into a plate of lunchmeats with a sort of carnal abandon. I am coughy. I am sneezy. I am exhausted. But I am not entering data at work. So there is that, at long last. The flip side of that goodness is that my supervisor, under the paper-mache thin guise of 'checking up on my employee' has phoned here every couple hours to see how I "am doing". I want to scream into the phone "Leave me be!" but I haven't the strength to even pick the phone up so instead I scream it inwardly, as if to my own self.

Had a rather interesting event transpire yesterday though. Since I had the day to myself and further since I am - look away ladies - on day 3 of no clean underwear, I decided that the time had come to arrive to do some laundering. I grabbed fistfuls of dirty underthings and t-shirts, stuffed them in a giant potato-sack and toted them across the street to "Tucker's Laundry". I walked in and to my great surprise and horror, with whom did I see, but the tiny rat-like tenant of apartment 8 putting items into a washer. Yes, this the very soul who agonized me last week by his careless and inconsiderate partying but whose terrorizing deeds also aided my birthing of a new song (see below, Dark Monsters in the Complex). My initial instinct was to run across the street, back to from whence I came but it was too late. He spotted me and waved me over.
"Hey Bro" he muttered, with a sort of sick satisfaction. "Don't you live in the C"?
Assuming this was some putrid bastardization of the Regency Towers, our shared residence, I nodded glumly.
"Sweet ass digs, don't you think? he asked. I wasn't certain how to respond, if at all, so I began to extract items from my potato bag and insert them into the round slot in a vacant laundry machine. My head was spinning, urging me onward to the arena where I'd just say something to him. Anything to take him down a peg. What came out was this:
"Not working today then?".
This caused him to cackle hideously, like some underwater garden creature. I could see the sharp uneven canine teeth protruding from his gums.
"Naw Bro. I don't need to work. Work is for fools".
It took a second to realize he wasn't kidding and then a slow lazy burn began to gurgle in my stomach. This is the exact embodiement of everything that is wrong with the current situation in my life.
"Oh" I said "And why is that"? I asked this
"My dad has so much money bro. I am set up. Once I hit twenty-five it is all mine". And he continued to cackle, like some evil witch or some plaster of paris she-beast. And my nightmare continued. Jets of white-hot anger blasted across my face like a wave of unhappiness. The garden rat stuck out his hand.
"I'm Ron Mealman".
His hand was dainty. And moist. But I stuck mine out anyway and shook it, wondering how quickly I could get to a sink.
"Mealman?"
"Yeah, but you can call me Fat Ron". As if to address the silence he anticipated coming from me, he added "Cause I roll 'em fat". He gave me a wink as he said this as if I was suddenly a part of his conspiracy to do bad and wage annoying parties. Then he said: "What's your name bro?"
And normally I might pause here or get self-concious or something but I looked him dead in his little rat eye and said immediately:
"Taffy. But you can call me Sunburst".
His eyes were confused and frozen, so I said
"Cause sunshine ain't a bad thing".
My heart was suddenly thumping, not able to believe that I just said my new name out loud. He looked at me as if I were wearing a shirt made of lettuce fronds. Then he said: "Your first name is Taffy?"
He was a baffled mule, one of lesser intelligence, and I was the one cackling, laughing on the inside, so hard it hurt. HA! I thought: HA!

oh my dear sweet god

Back in the knife-sharp clutches of this abysmal joke of a day job. A few minutes in and I knew I was in trouble as my supervisor, who shall remain unnamed lest she one day stumble across this site, is using a cane today because this weekend she slipped and fell onto "the concrete ribbon of sidewalk that they never maintain" at her condominium. She didn't add the part about how she's on muscle relaxers and how that was probably the main contributing factor to her errant foot-fall. It is only Monday and I am in a hellish dungeon, a circle of hell that no one can know with the intensity that I do. This will sound extreme to some ears but let me announce it anyways, as it is a firm belief: The Artist should not have a day job. Let me say that again, lest your eye drift past that and on to other things: The Artist should not have a day job. The reason for this is thusly: The Artist already has a job, and that is presenting his gifts to the world in whatever form, in my case a sonic form. Others paint, some dance, some write, some act, whatever. The point I am summoning is that to create is a job; to reach into one's own nether-regions and extract a chunk of art is no small feat. It is, in fact, a feat of epic proportions. Am I really meant to sit here and endure mundane tales and insights from my co-workers? Am I really meant to sit here and "access/input data in the database?"! It is practically a felony crime to have one who creates stuck in an environment where he cannot create. (In fact he can hardly even get onto the internet because his supervisor keeps hovering and clucking nearby). Some things in this world are ephemeral and girded with starlight and moonbeam. This is the realm where I aim to hover.

On the "Sunburst' appellation

I've had a couple emails already asking me "Why do you call yourself "Sunburst"?". This is a fair question and I'll grant you that. No one at my day job really is aware that I've dubbed myself that yet but it's only been a couple weeks. Put it this way, I am rebranding myself as a beacon. A shimmering light in these troubled and punishing times of harrowment. A whisper that is written on the wind or as the great Bob Dylan has suggested "My love she speaks like silence". Think on that for a second. My point being: there is an abundance of darkness in this world. It's filled with bad people and thugs and and those who live in apartment complexes and those who shop at walmart and eat doritos and those who have not yet realized that we are all one. Yes, I said that and yes I believe it. We are all interconnected beings, like a spiderweb of magnificence. This is why we need a beacon of light at this point in time. If I can make people laugh with my comedy then I am injecting them with brilliant bursts of sunbeam. If people enjoy my little songs then so be it. If that brings them more pleasure and relief than anything out there at all then I have done my job.

Dark Monsters in the Complex

Here's me this morning doing a version of the song! Yahoo! I am up and running people!!

A couple things: the stupid batteries were about to run low so not only did I have to rush the song - it should be steadier and smoother - I also had to make it choppier, if you follow that. Still, it kind of captures the sensations and other things I was feeling two nights ago. You'll notice how low my voice gets at the very end when I intone "we like to rock". That is intentional (as it's meant to be in the voice of those barbarians in Unit 8). Also I had do a sort of whisper-singing which meant to imply that I couldn't go full-volume. The walls are thin here and I try to honor that my neighbors may not desire to hear me or my process. I for one try to be respectful around here!

I have errands to run, so I should go. I need new batteries for this POS camera and new guitar strings. I feel like this song is the tip of the iceberg and I am just getting started and ready to go!!

your first look at the mind at work

Okay, so all that madness last night at the apartment complex got me going and so this morning I was strumming quietly and I stumbled across a gentle shuffle in e minor while words were rolling and flowing in my head. Nothing formal came of it but it was all there, bouncing and bounding. Naturally, I had to abort any progress to go to the unnameable day job. Well all day long the e minor shuffle was there and the words were there, sort of quietly pulsating. I just forwarded my phone and ran to the outdoor break area and sat at the picnic table (despite the fact that it is currently raining!) with my notebook, scrawling all this down like a fevered madman. I may just have something here. Drum roll...Here's the first couple stanza's and the chorus.

Please let me know what you think of this. i'm going to work on this tonight to get it firmed up (note: some lyrics I know are bad, just place-holders and the title is just a working title) and, should my resolve stiffen, play it at an open mic night. if nothing else though, I'll record a video of me playing and put up here.

Dark Monsters in the Complex

em........................bm ................................a
a tapestry of muddled sound comes whistling
bm ..............................em
down on puddled ground,
c ......dm........ bm..... am/a ........em
like rain it comes, it drops, it falls.

em ......................bm .............................a
you're all down there, thinking you're all that.
bm .........................................................em
but here's some news for you, neighbor, you
c ..........dm ..........bm ............am/a ..........em
ain't so neighborly, are you? well are you?!
b7.......... a......... a7
when you shriek:

em ..................................................c
we're rockin' it, we're rockin' it 2x
em ........................a ........c .....................em
we're out here rockin' cuz we like to rock.

jumbled friday morning thoughts

Last night was not a good night. I left the stinking carcass of the day job - about which the less said the better but let me merely opine that an incompetent supervisor on muscle relaxers does not a good day make - and encountered immediate unpleasantness in the form of traffic in every shape and every direction. [Question: Why are they always building things on the very street I happen to need to take? The orange cones and red lights and some person with a hard-hat and a beard holding a "slow sign"? Madness.] I worked my way to the local grocers to purchase something with which to consume for dinner. It all lay before me so simply, what I wanted: a nice quiet dinner of noodles and bread, a beer or three, and some creative time with which to work on new songs. After collecting my required items I entered the Rapid Check Line. I waited for frustrating duration while an old lady with a long white scraggle-hair on her chin ruminated out loud about mustards. The clerk, a buffoon in a green apron sadly, smiled and engaged with the old lady even though I was standing there, clearly in a hurry.(After all, it is called the express lane! Hello!?) I coughed into my fist thinking it might accelerate matters. But no, an analysis of stone-ground versus dijon versus Irish mustard unfolded before me. Fascinating. Not.

I pulled into parking lot of the apartment complex that I call home (8 units) and found that the creepy neighbors on the end who seem to think they're still in freshman year at the community college thought it might be fun to have a party - for what occasion I know not - and blast house music at eardrum-shattering volumes despite it being a Thursday and that some people around here need to work in the morning. Whooping and hollering and thumping basslines are the bean of my existence. This thumping and revelry continued as I prepared my noodles in the kitchen, as I consumed them at the table, and, most disturbingly, as I grabbed my guitar and began to strum. I couldn't even hear my own strumming! I didn't get to work on my new song ideas. In fact I hardly slept. Ugh.

**is this thing on??**

Believe it or not, here I am. I swore I would never have "a blog" or be one of those people who "has a blog" but the rising tide of the current culture has come for me and a tidal wave of it just crashed down and washed me ashore. So, without further fanfare, here I am! There are trumpets in the distance, heralding my arrival. My horse-drawn carriage is pulling up alongside you and the door is swinging open and I am inside, waving you in. Won't you come along on this journey with me? It may not always be pretty but I guarantee you that it will be interesting.

I intend to use this "blog" (sorry, still getting used to that word!) as a living breathing document of my progression into the twin frontiers of my ambitions: stand-up comedy, music. There is nothing I want more to do with my life than be a stand-up comic, except of course to be a musician. Maybe I can be both? (I know that is not realistic but the road to oblivion is littered with the bodies of those who went before and tried and failed.) I intend to upload my songs here, my works-in-progress, my comedic bits for you to judge. I will pull back the thin veneer-like membrane that covers the artistic process and lay it all out on a sterile laboratory table, like so many bits of viscera. Here I am, this is me.