random thoughts

I for one was pretty excited about health-care passage last week. You may recall a little bit of germaine info: Taffy McKittrick is a mothereffing artist! And artists need healthcare! In all seriousness it means that I can one day soon - or at least by 2014 - quit this stinking, festering blowhole of a day job, wherein I continue to suffer the indignities that come tied with filing, re-ordering, stocking supplies and the malaise disproportionate to my general well-being and thought streams. In short, I don't like my day job. You read this blog alot so you know this. But I like it even less after healthcare passed and so now I am forced in the break room to listen to Ed McGurkle and Timmy Sparks bleat about teabagging and socialism and how this country is going down the tubes. btw Ed and Timmy are real dumb

Punched in Face: Depression-Fist

Hello dear one(s). Again, we find myself at the edge of a junction and an intersection where I am drinking full pint glasses of Depression, letting it course through my body's arteries and veins and then once it has been processed and excreted I drink yet another pint glass down, straight no chaser. Why does the Depression-Fist hold such sway over me and have such powerful punches? Let's explore it in the following way: I am an artist. With a mother-effing day job. These two things should not exist in the same sentence, much less two sentences back to back, and yet there it is. There you have it. How can the world have somehow not gotten the summons that I-am-creating-art-down-here-so-I-get-a-free-pass!?!? This un-realization sometimes brings me to the brink of anger which mutates and gets transformed into Depression. As if that weren't bad enough (it is Taffy, i hear you all screaming, it is!) then we must explore and penetrate the deeper indignities and daily machinations of said day-job, wherein I - your hero - finds himself engaged in meaningless banter about office reorganizations, the best hue of file folder, the range of tastes in a corporately-processed yogurt, something called Lady Gaga, and, most punitively, the best new show on tv featuring a gang of models who pretend to go on a reality cooking show and design shoes for an ox-merchant. Whatever!! I cannot be bothered by it, by any of it.

Hey Universe: Listen up!:
I am a mother-effing artist! With a mother-effing day job!!

Carnival of Horrors: The Party I Attended

I am an artist so it goes with out saying that sometimes I do'nt want to be around other peoples, (not that there's anything wrong with that!). Sometimes the Artist needs to sit at home and marinate in his own juices, creatively speaking, and not worry about the vagaries of inter-personal annoyances (ie hygenie, ie politeness, ie diction) or how much small-talk you can spew out in a quarter of an hour. Sometimes the Artist needs to just sit and eat burritos and have a beer or three and play around on his guitar, taking firm note of what may (or may not) plop out. Okay, where am I going with all this? Look no further than the next paragraph.

I went to a party last night that I could not get out of. I don't want to name names or be specific because the many people who read this blog regularly will be able to discover which party I meant but let me just call it "Sandra's" Party. "Sandra" is a person that I know, maybe thru work or maybe not, and "she" decided to throw a party for "her" cousin "Rudolf" last night. There was no way I could squirm away. My whole point being, the Artist doesn't want to go to parties in the first place but when forced the Artist will attend (if only for free food and alcohol) and then slip out the back. Well, the Artist found himself cornered in the kitchen, between the fridge and the table, away from the alcohol while "Rudolf" yammered away ceaselessly about French Movies. Sorry French Cinema. Are you effin' kidding me!?

"Rudolf" apparently considers "himself" a nascent screenwriter/director which is all fine except that "he" has a habit - birthed from his ambitions no doubt - of tieing every possible bit of conversation into a film reference. Herein and hereforth follow some examples to putrefy and turn your stomach:
Me: Good party, eh?
"Rudolf": Eh, yeah like a Rohmer film by way of Assayas.
Me: Okay...So..."Rudolf" how do you like it here?
"Rudolf": Ah, you know. I feel a little like Antoine Doinel in "Bed & Board"
Me: Oh. Actually I don't know what that is --
"Rudolf": You don't!!? Oh My God!! You have to immediately - like tonight! - go onto netflix and put all the Antoine Doinel's in your queue. They are so mother-effing awesome!! Oh My God!!
Me: Huh. I'll have to check that out.
"Rudolf": You know what Godard said to Melville about "checking things out", right?
Me: No.
"Rudolf": This was back in the "weekend" days, oh wait, it wasn't Melville it was his DP Raoul Coutard...

And on and on and so forth and so forth. One of those people who only talks about himself and has no consideration of other people's feelings and thoughts and Artistry. never once was I asked what I did or about the songs I've written or which songs I think are my best, only if I've seen this or that and do I get the Truffaut reference in "Jules & Jim" and where do I rate Agnes Varda and which Godard heroine is most unlike the others and yammer yammer blah blah madness!!!

At long last I was able to squeeze out the back door, pretending to run to the car for just a second, a bottle of wine under my arm (my due, methinks!) and I made it safely home and am now working on a new song about this horror-show party which I will most certainly share with you when it comes.

Thank You: A Thursday's Whispers

Hello Team! It is your humblest of humble Taffy Sunburst McKittrick here and I want to go ahead and inform you that I am missing the parameter of the datapoint. Ha, you probably don't know what that would mean. How could you because you don't work at a putrid day job like me or with me. I rolled in this morning and grabbed a cup of Maxwell House (that's all they brew here!) and sat down at the computer. I began tinkering and fingering the database, that's my job after all, and guess what: go on guess: I spilled my cup of coffee on the keyboard. Ugh!! It's times like this that I want to climb in my van and pull up to a street corner and ask the beautiful-est woman on that corner to climb in and run away with me. To a place where pony's gallop and billygoats graze and the sun blasts away. Enough of this madness!!!

OMG! OMG! OM MF'ing G!

My day job is among the more challenging portions of a human being's day. I cannot take coming here and working here and breathing the same air as these people, some of whom are putrid in both a stereotypical and also empirical manner. I don't enjoy putrid people; I'll go ahead and be upfront with you about that. My supervisor in particular is a person addicted to pain-killers. This incorporates a lot of questionable judgement calls regarding all sorts of items from the high-level to the medium range and also the banal. Can I share with you that I am an artist and - yes, I know, I know, I am lucky to have a job in this button-hole economy - I don't want to have to go to work. I need to be laying in bed still with the dreamy state of dreamtime floating around my head like so many fat cherubs. This is the obligation that society has to pay to the artist: not making them work!

Sweet Wednesday Blessings

Hello to you! I am typing these lines on the sly at my place of employ but I am so giddy with wavering excitement that should my boss trundle over I might just look that boss in the eye and say "yeah, I'm on the internet, what of it? You're on painkillers, I'm on the internet. Fair?" I don't know if I'd have that A-game at my disposal when it came time to put up or shut up but I've chosen to share with you that bit inside my head. Why you ask? Well, I have no answer.

One possible reason that I am bubbling and burbling with excitement is that I now have several friends on Facebook! It is quite wonderful. One of them appears to be a dog but I am not yet facile enough with the interface to determine if it is an actual dog with an account or someone feigning dog-ness in an effort to spread comedy around the internet like so much thick mayonnaise. A benefit of this Facebook deal: my music is now out there in the world! It is being evaluated and loved. I cannot tell you what this does to my insides. Or rather, I won't (tee-hee).

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!

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.

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

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.

**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.