Where do I begin? I’ve been losing blogging momentum over the last few months. Sometimes I have an idea, but I don’t get around to it in time and then the inspiration is lost. I’ve been a lot busier playing music lately. My roommate has been making electronic music and I’ve been playing guitar with him. There was another guitar player at first but he went to Chile. There’s been a guy with other electronics too that played a gig with us, but hasn’t practiced much with us since. We had a female singer/hula hooper but maybe its best if she sticks with the hula hoop. Me and my roommate played a house party in the Bronx, it was my first visit there. We rented a Zip Car and got to the Bronx no problem. Once we were there we got lost and drove around in circles, got stuck on a bridge that took us back over to Manhattan, and eventually got to the party where a lot of Dominicans wanted to hear Salsa and Bachata, not the crazy eclectic mix of beats and noise that we call Electro Monster Punk.
So yeah that’s been taking up my time. And since I don’t get paid for this, it’s easy to lose focus when I have an actual job and am dedicating lots of time to practicing music, which I also am not getting paid for. I know there are a few faithful readers out there, and looking the other day at my stats, I guess there’s the random people who somehow find this, so I’m not giving up completely, I just think it will be a while before I hit 100 posts, where a few months back I thought I could get there by the end of the year.
A few weeks back I actually had my first visitor to New York. My cousin’s husband got a new job and showed up for a few days of training. I met up with him one night when he and a few of his fellow trainees wanted to see Times Square. We went out for a few drinks and I got to know him a little better. I had only met him during the weekend of his wedding, but he knows my mom and my grandpa, so he’s family. It was his first trip to New York, coming from California. He even took the subway back downtown to his hotel, which is part of the New York experience everyone has to do at least once. Way to go Tyson.
So that’s been life in a nutshell, minus the quirky observations. I’m just trying to make it through to 2013, but there’s still this whole issue of the Mayan apocalypse. First of all, it’s been about four years that I’ve been hearing about this, so it’s about time that it passes and we can all move on with the reality of life instead speculative bullshit based on misinterpretation of ancient writings. Here’s my theory about all of this: nobody can predict the future. I know Nostradamus is credited with predicting Hitler and some other things throughout history, but he was also wrong too, so maybe we can all make a list of one hundred things and if one or two are right we can point to those instances and say, “Told you so!”, while ignoring where we were completely wrong.
Remember Y2K? Everyone was led to believe computers would malfunction or some Skynet scenario where the computers overthrew humanity was going to happen. I was working as a bartender on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood and we were so overstaffed for New Year’s Eve 1999/2000 but we were dead that night. Everywhere was dead that night, everybody stayed home in fear. Then the next night, when everyone realized the earth was still turning and their microwave didn’t try and cook them, they all went out in force and we were super busy. Of course less than two years later 9/11 happened and caught everyone off guard. And I hate to say it but that’s how it’s always going to happen. The worst things to occur in the following decade have been natural disasters like the tsunami in Thailand, the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, hurricane Sandy in New York, blizzards, floods, earthquakes, and the all too frequent mass shootings that have been happening lately.
Me and my friends had joked about apocalypse preparedness, which I wrote about right before Sandy came to New York. And while it was slightly tongue in cheek, it is important to be a little prepared for times of hardship. The key is to remember that in many cases it won’t announce itself until it’s too late for you to do anything but duck, or run. To steal a line from the Grateful Dead – “When life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door.”
But it’s easy to get caught up wondering how it all ends, because its an extension beyond one’s own self, and after all death doesn’t discriminate. We wonder if we will live long lives, accomplish our goals, be remembered well, or even be remembered at all. The thought of the end to civilization means even the greatest and most celebrated people will be meaningless. It’s selfish and ego based, but then again we’re all human so it probably affects us to some degree.
Will things change? Will we all go at once? Suffer slowly? Or just make it through the weekend unscathed and realize that we still have to go to work, pay the bills, and spend Christmas with the in-laws trying to avoid getting stuck in conversations about religion, politics, or gun control.
Here’s a classic from the 90’s, be sure to make it to the end when Perry Farrell starts going off about aliens and crop circles and the year 2000. Uh, yeah right dude.
lostnnyc 