Well that's somebody I haven't thought of in a while

Guest starring Shay Carl Butler.

Thank You Hater

1895.8333333333333333...

My birthday week (last week) was supposed to be a low-key affair where I got lots of personal maintenance done by taking the first week off I've had in who knows how long to do things like car stuff and dentist stuff and eye stuff.  Instead, on my birthday, one week ago, I woke up with the nastiest chest cold and coughed my throat raw until I sounded like a Skeksis.

Luckily some medicating helped me get a handle on it and this past Monday I had a short chat with my boss that floored me and pretty much confirmed that they want to keep me long term.  So I guess I will stop looking at those Indeed.com emails, unless I see something really interesting.

In the meantime, instead of making a living doing sex and fart jokes, I will make a living scaring the bejeezus out of hundreds of thousands of strangers.  Except for tonight's episode.  I'm not sure what to do with this one.

That hasn't stopped me yet.

Midsommar

Well I did not die and didn't have much of a panic attack (relative to other ones I've had) and actually in the end had a good time in Sweden, but for now I am too tired to write about it.  Plus I have work to do.

Goodbye, I'm an asshole

Well this is it.  Twenty four hours until I embark to Sweden.  It's a United flight all the way there and back, with a layover in Newark, so if a United flight to or from Stockholm goes missing I am probably shark food.

I've been pretty upset with a tangent of society, many of whom I am friends with, who claim to be Christians, but only cherry-pick the Bible.  Or ignore it completely when it stands in the way of gaining political or economic power.  Or just use it to feel superior to everybody else.  You know, just like Jesus preached to.  Fake Christians, those with fair-weather faith.  But if I wrote that post right now I would be depressed, it can wait.

The Galaxy Song

So in advance of my trip to Sweden, I received a surprise in the mail... my new phone, a Galaxy S10+.  And a new phone line, for that matter.  I may wind up just dumping my old Dayton line and using this one as my primary.  Why not?  I barely use my phone anyway, aside from calling home.  This would be like a raise.

I also got a laptop from work... although not yet the software I'd need to use it for my job.  Luckily, I found a loophole in installation of my DAW and installed an older version of the program.  I can travel anywhere and put together a show, then transfer the files to my actual current DAW and up upgrades the session and then I *can* add the plug-ins I am licensed to use.

I will ask if they simply haven't gotten around to buying those (inexpensive) plug-ins, since I was supposed to have this phone months ago, perhaps those are somewhere out in the ether too, waiting for me to find them.

The main excitement about having this phone is just that I can take incredible photos during my trip to Stockholm, of which there are many to have.  We're apparently going to do a canal tour and perhaps go to the ABBA museum, which I am not that into except that it would make many of my gayer friends jealous.

Of course I am not that good at taking photos.  They're mediocre.  I will enlist my brother's help in the meantime to learn some tricks, hopefully, since that kind of photography is literally what he does for a living.

Right now I am ripping another rental DVD, which will finally fill up my 256GB USB stick with most of my favorite movies, so I will be ready for flying across the Atlantic and will not really have to talk to people next to me.  I am mostly taking redeye flights anyway, so hopefully it will not be that full anyway.

showthenfraud

OK. 

Enjoy that.

Keep huffing and pretending you're not.

Swedish fish

As it gets closer to the departure, I have begun to get anxiety about the trip, for no reason aside from general mental illness (severe anxiety).  I have already begun the dreams where my trip is fucked up somehow or I fucked up and got on the wrong flight or I get there and it turns out nobody in the company likes me or that they force me to do workshops, which it appears three hours of which is scheduled for Wednesday.

The trailer for Midsommar did not help my anxiety much.  

But I guess I will just avoid drinking tea.

I am going to have to go shopping for nicer shirts, and I knew enough already to do research and figure out what kind of adapter I needed to juice up my company laptop when I get there.  Reminder to self:  delete your browser history before the trip.

Swedish concert choices

It looks like I could end my business trip to Stockholm by seeing Rammstein in concert.

I've never been a huge fan, but I've never really disliked them.  So I am thinking about that.

Still seems unreal that I am going to do this.

I have no funny titles for posts about Sweden

So, yeah, it looks like I will be traveling to Stockholm in August.

I am nervous, because I have extreme anxiety about everything.  And I know I joked about it, but what if they really do have discounts at Ikea?  Or if I get there and the remaining members of Katzenjammer perform?

So now, I have to do something I never really thought I would do... apply for a passport.

Hopefully I won't need extra vaccinations.

So I work here now

So, yeah, I now work for the largest music streaming company in the world.  Apple Music only recently caught up with them in the States, but world-wide, they are the largest.  And as opposed to other company purchases, looking at you radio, nobody got let go.  And it doesn't feel like we will be, either.

Hopefully this is the beginning of a good thing.

Pure insanity

I won't go into many details, because for all I know the Swedish have a team of Seal agents to take out loudmouths, but the health and lifestyle benefits for Spotify are insane.  At least, they seem so to an American.  I think my time off has actually doubled.  If I did have a kid, even as a father, EVEN AS ADOPTION, I get guaranteed time off (six months!) and also a guarantee that my job will still be there after.  And then there's the orientation in Sweden, which I have to assume was an auditory hallucination from me being awake at a time when I was supposed to be deep deep asleep.

And those are not even close to the best bits.

The big thing, I believe, is growth.  I've already gotten a raise, but given this company's rep, I expect I will get more.  And advancement will probably be coming.

I should sell these longboxes of comics, I think.

So this happened

My company was bought by Spotify and so now I work for Spotify and they are a Swedish company and apparently I will attend employee orientation in Stockholm later this year.

Also I have learned I have a fetish for Scandinavian men.

Big Time

I always liked this song more than "Sledgehammer," it was just more fun, but it was the closest I could get to a title that was similar to "Full Time" and tie it into something unrelated, so there we go and here we are.

After two years of working for this company freelance, they are taking the gamble and making me full-time, with health benefits, as of this past Monday.

No, it isn't radio imaging, which I did for twenty years and nearly got back into when Tampa was calling my old bosses for references (they eventually went with a service... bleah).  It's for a podcasting company in LA.  I've never met anybody I work for aside from on Facebook, so for all I know I could be laundering Russian money with my paychecks.  But now I am full time, and can finally get lots of stuff I've had to put off done... like a new MRI to see if I can go down on my Kepra doseage!  And vision and dental, wish I could have waited with this one molar but it was not savable anyway.

I'll probably still keep a lookout for imaging jobs, but honestly, if I wanted to move I could move back to Texas and live on my new salary (which was a significant raise), because I have before.  It wasn't fun, but cutting out comics and eating out can really work wonders for a guy on a budget.  Plus, maybe Blowjob Pete still lives there, he was a fun guy.

Anyway, life is good right now and I am planning a vacation with my brother in NYC in the summer, but right now it is time to watch Schitt's Creek.

Now spit!

I also thought of calling this post "And nothing but the tooth" but then when cleaning the hole a leftover sliver of enamel popped out.  They said it was likely to happen, but still it was a shock.  Still, I opted to quote the last line of "Dentist!" from Little Shop of Horrors, because the song accurately depicts what a tooth extraction looks and feels like, except it's not funny at all.

About twenty something years ago, I had to have one of my farthest-back molars removed.  My wisdom teeth were bullies coming in, and one of them basically raped that molar and cracked it, popping the filling it had out and leaving it exposed when my operation was done.

Needless to say, after a few months of being exposed, the tooth began complaining loudly, so I went to the doctor to see if there were any options to save it, since I knew it was damaged beyond a simple filling could fix.  That's when he started telling me about what all was involved with getting a crown (which I could not afford at the time, not even with Dad's insurance) and also what would be involved with a bridge for a back molar.  After about fifteen minutes of technical instruction, I held my hand up and asked if we could just pull it instead.

The dentist (Dr. Thompson, whose practice was in a small office in the building my Dad's Western Auto used to also reside in) didn't pause, because he knew my family's money situation and probably saw from the start that that was the likely and best course of action.  He doped up my jaw, took what looked like a small rubber mallet and a smaller metal awl when I was numbed, and literally gave two taps on what felt like the side of the tooth and it came out easier than a soft turd.

I thought THAT was what tooth extraction was like.  This does not appear to be the case, at least, not if it's not your farthest back molar, I guess.  This one was the next to last molar, and I am thinking I am thankful it was in my lower jaw and not upper.

This petite little sweet doctor I went to see, who said she'd stayed in my hometown while going to college and knew Dr, Thompson, assaulted my mouth like it was full of gold and she was a 49er.  It turns out it does look a lot like the Dentist song, and when they come at you with those pliers, YOU ARE NOT WANTING TO LAUGH.  How do they loosen the tooth?  BY FORCE.  Yanking back and forth and back and forth until you hear and feel bone snapping in your jaw, which is nauseating without having pain, it turns out.  I did break out into a sweat at one point and wonder if perhaps she was in fact from Krypton.

She'd told me before what had probably happened... I injured or cracked the tooth sometime after the filling, and that allowed decay to get under the filling, until the filling popped out and left me with a cratered nothing that only my attention to that area of my teeth during cleaning kept from hurting this far.  It had to come out regardless, and it is now out.

My intention was to eventually look into getting a bridge (because an implant costs as much as a good used car) but that can wait until after the new year when I have dental insurance again.  Or maybe not even then.  It doesn't seem that bad, honestly, aside from the hole.

That will fill in, given time.

Grab'em by the Puss N' Boots

Okay well this was weird.

One of my audio dramas deals with the real, original versions of fairy tales.  Not my favorite, I'd rather do the crime ones.  Anyway, so neither of my brothers' dogs have ever paid attention at recorded dog barks... or recorded animal noises in general.  With Leo, I assume it's because he's too smart, with Barbarella… well, once in a while her ears will perk up, but usually she ignores it too.

Imagine my surprise when I am piecing together the true fable of the above cat's namesake and I start delving into my cat sound effects and Zoey comes upstairs.  Her coming upstairs is not unusual, as that's where the litter box is, but her just sitting and watching me produce is very weird.  Which she was doing.  

"What?" I said when I noticed.  She responded immediately with a pathetic mew.

And then she wouldn't leave.  This is not normal behavior for her.  Usually she just notices me when the food has run out.  Now while I'm using all these purrrrs and yelps and mews and hisses, she can't get enough of me.

Do cats have a language?  Did she think I was making these noises?  Oh shit!  What if these cats were talking about killing the guy who recorded them, does Zoey now think I need an assisted suicide?  I'm lucky Rosie wasn't in the house, she'd have probably readied a hypo of furniture polish for me.

Eventually she seemed to go away, as I used fewer cat effects, and I cleaned up and was getting up to leave when I hear her deep purring beneath the desk.  I looked and she was laid out like a right strumpet, like Rose in the Titanic movie all naked for Leo DeCaprio.  

I want you to draw me like one of your French cats, Ken.  Wearing this.  Wearing only this.  Meaning her butt-hole, which I could see.

I got up to leave and I get to the door and meow! I turn around and she's following me!  Does she think I can talk cat or something?  Does she think I am some kind of cat god now?  I AM BAST-ET OF EGYPT AND I AM BACK FROM THE DEAD TO LICK BUTT-HOLES AND SUE NEIL GAIMAN FOR LIBEL.  AND I'M ALL OUT OF BUTT-HOLES.

Eventually I tricked her to go outside.  Now I am worried that I am trapped in a poorly written fiction where a guy learns how to speak cat and it turns out all they talk about is who's got the FIV and old boyfriends and of course licking butt-holes, and that's all I'll hear the rest of my life.

Murder by Design

So Shea still weighs on me.  But first my hometown.

My home used to be quaint.  Lots of local stores, pushing, let's be honest, shit and cheap products, but small town folk are okay with that.  But lately everything that used to be "local" (I hate to League of Gentlemen here) has become bland.  Where there was one yard sale store for years, they seem to make up most of the littered husks of abandoned government buildings and failed music stores.  They espouse names like "Antiques of Mystique" or "Vintage Grabs."

For one.  "Antique" and "vintage" are not always synonymous with "old" and "used."  I am pretty sure those polyester neon green stretch pants are only considered vintage if Tim Burton uses them for costume design in one of his quirky movies.

I can't help but feel this town is on the edge of death, but it will probably outlive me.  It may not be all that pretty, but it will still be here when they put me in the ground, probably in those neon green pants.  Just not much longer, I am afraid.  The death rattle has been vocal for a long time, and these yard sale stores propagating all over like overly-fertile rabbits coupling is one of the final death pangs.

The same was the case with Shea.  It was obvious something was killing her... not to be dramatic.  Her life was collapsing.   She kept crying out for help.  She never got it.

In her case, I am not sure it would have mattered.  Because when you have depression, as she clearly did, there are people who can't see it.   They have been depressed before, but they don't understand the difference between being depressed and suffering from depression.  These are unfortunately the people you need to see it the most. But they rarely seem to be able to see.

In the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, specifically ep six, one of the main characters gets hidden for a while by a ghost.  She's standing in the middle of a common room, screaming for a long time, and nobody can see her.  That's a perfect analogy for depression.

Shea was screaming for somebody to notice how badly she was suffering for the longest time.  Occasionally, when she would talk about losing her mom or possibly her house, overly peppy idiots would reply with "You got this girl!  Now go get'em!"  and other useless phrases like that.  Then when she killed herself, they were shocked.  And eventually, angry and pissed off.

"How could she be so selfish?" a couple of these Pollyannaddicts asked.  Seriously?  How often did she obviously cry out for help?  How often did YOUR own selfishness make you ignore all the warning signs, the nonsensical chats at night fueled by Ambien, or her posts that ended with "Please don't reply, I am not looking for sympathy"?  Honestly, do these Up With People Holly Hobbies ever see a world beyond the rose tinted glasses they think they can force everybody else to look through if we just "get positive!?"

Shea didn't die because she was selfish.  She died from a variety of things, such as being ignored when she needed help or direction, but she wasn't selfish.  Not in that way.

If somebody is hurting themselves constantly, the best way to help is not to ignore the situation and hope it gets better if you just give a disapproving scowl or a rude rebuttal.  Here, try this:  "Hey, I know you are having a tough time.  I'm worried about you.  I want you to get better.  Please let me help."

In all my trials with depression, nobody ever said that to me.  I am lucky to still be alive.  In fact, because of what I went through, my life has gotten better, but I still live in fear.  The males in my father's side are prone to strokes, and I've already had one.  My phone is always charged and I am an expert at dialing with my left hand in case of another.  I have an emergency message that will text my family if anything happens (assuming I can reach the phone, which is always with me).  And I have somebody in my life who actually, if I fuck up, asks me not to fuck up again... no shame, just worry for myself and others.

What I don't have in my life anymore are people who think I am not worth investing time or energy in, or who are too ashamed of me to keep me in their life.  I've gone thirty-plus years with those kind of relationships, I know now that I can't live with them.

The problem is, Shea couldn't get to my point of view.  I still don't know how she killed herself, and I don't want to know.  Out of respect for the girl I was friends with, and just a little bit of not wanting to get any ideas.

Shea

The story of why Shea stopped talking to me twenty years ago and why we never saw each other again:

It was about twenty years ago this very week that I saw Shea last.  I was leaving Lexington for Portland, Oregon, and KKRZ and the new title of Imaging Director, back when people actually did that job and not shipped out poorly-written copy by overworked programmers to cut-and-paste production houses (I interviewed with some of them, that was their term, not mine).  Back when being creative actually got you paid, even if all you created were a succession of fart jokes.

I had the idea that maybe I could use Shea as one of my stations' voices, as we hadn't yet settled on all of them, and I sent her some copy and in a week received an old-timey reel in the mail.  It was just for two promos, but it was fifteen minutes of Shea riffing on my scripts and being hysterical about it.  I'd post the audio if I had it handy, but it did air, at least until we got complaints for the Dr. Laura one.

Things just weren't going to work out, though, because Shea didn't have access to ISDN, and I needed somebody I could count on every day, not every week.  I relayed this regretful information to Shea, who was silent on the matter, to me, anyway.

One week I came in for vacation and came up to the old station on the weekend to use the internet, probably for porn.  I was in my old continuity room and Deke walked by and mentioned Shea was on the air.  I said, cool, tell her I'll come downstairs and visit when I was done with whatever filth I was donwloading.

In a few minutes, from all the way up in the continuity office, I heard Shea scream a cacophony of invective and cursing at my possible presence that I wouldn't have been shocked to learn that some of the words manifested phyiscal form and slithered off into the record vault, still alive today in that old building eager to feast upon the souls of an unwary intern.  She apparently was not happy that I couldn't hire her, for no fault of her or my own.

I quietly slipped out and went back to Portland.

Years later, after social media got going, I did hook up with Shea again, at least online.  Karyn and I tried constantly to get her to meet us for sushi, but she never would.  That's just the way of Shea, I would think.  As the avoidance wore on, I began to suspect there was more to the story that I could not see.  I recognized signs, like avoiding friends and not responding to messages.  These are not the signs of somebody having a good time in life, and I've got through my share of them.  I thought maybe she might also have bad depression like I had, and I think she did.  

I never got to see her again, and now it is too late.  I never got to apologize for... whatever, I'm not sure what I would have said, and now it is too late.  And I can still listen to the poorly produced promos I did with her voice and say, I'd hire her if I had a full time gig, and I can't because now it is too late.  Her voice is silenced.

The memories of Shea will always be ones we cherish when we come across her photos, or old airchecks, and we can laugh and remember what we were and who we thought she was, and that she was a tough old girl who let her mouth get her into trouble nearly as much as it got her into the spotlight, and that's all that's left.  An empty spotlight on a stage we wish she was still on.

RIP Shea Baker, 10/08/2018

Retired

Not a surprise, but my old boss from Boston is leaving his post, which I knew because I saw the ad for his replacement months ago.  What IS a surprise is that he is leaving the company altogether, which is good news for me, as now I am not so scared to apply to positions within the company.

It's not that I felt he was a bad or an evil boss, but he did turn out to be... very Boston.  Or I guess I could say, very Northeastern, since there was quite a bit of NYC sass in him.  Yes, that would be a more accurate description, as he had a lot of Trump's ego about him.  I remember him berating the promotions guy one time, about whether or not a vendor was going to give us free soft drinks for our VIP tent at a concert we were putting on.  "DO THEY KNOW WHO I AM?" he bellowed, incredulous that he was not getting exactly what he wanted.  You know.  Free pop.

Yes, they did know who he was, and that's why they never wanted to deal with him.  

I shortly realized after accepting the job and starting it that I'd been lied to... I could not use character voices (not even my own voice), I could not do comedy skits, and I had practically no equipment in my "studio" aside from an aging Protools unit... no cable, no services to gather sound clips, no way to pull them myself... nothing.  I was to be the morning guy, the midday guy, the afternoon guy and the night guy on a station that had no actual personalities to speak of.  I am surprised that I lasted as long as I did.

While I've been hesitant to apply to this company in the past, I definitely will now.  He is the kind of guy who would sing your praises in a backhanded way, which corresponds to most of Boston to be honest.  "Sure, he's good, but he's apt to have a heart attack soon as much as he weighs."  That kind of thing. Not out of vindictiveness, just it's a very Boston attitude.

The good news for his station is their ratings can only go up from here.

I would walk 500 miles

I actually miss SF specifically for the walking.  And the subway.  I walked far more than I ever thought I would in my general life there, and the T was sometimes quite trippy.

The street musicians were incredible.  Very soulful.  Always black, what, no whites or latinos do street music?  The best was one guy on acoustic guitar and his buddy with plastic drums that had accents of glass liquor bottles to do (what I assume was) the cymbal bits from "Sinnerman,"  I gave that guy the only bill I had in my wallet, which was a ten, I think.  I wished it was a twenty.

I am currently without wheels because my transmission decided to literally shit the bed.  I could make a fucking soap opera out of the story, it's practically Passions without the midget.  And it's going to cost me 2000 bucks and keep me from applying for jobs I need to apply for because, thanks to the GOP, the okay-Obamacare health insurance is now junk.

I guess I could also just cross my fingers, hey GOP mebbe if some of these ladies just crossed their legs they'd not be so uppity amirite?

So I am out 2000.  But I got 100% on PS4's Spider-Man so that's cool.