Hello, Lovine.com

i woke up late by exactly nine minutes. i didn't make the 10am on-sale for a string of smashing pumpkins shows in SF.

:c

peter: ur lame
patience is a virtue

lovine: your virtue is expendable
your virtue is collated and abused like the millions have done before it
your virtue is used against you to skew your perceptions of what is appropriate, and your perceptions are skewed towards the direction of what the capitalist pigs of america want you to percieve
that shareholder wealth is your wealth
that money will buy you happiness
that the pursuit is noble
that patience is a virtue

Sent at 6:47 PM on Monday
peter: so tacit acknowledgment of this fact always brings me happiness, for i feel no guilt.

lovine: does a clean conscience buy you eternal solace?

peter: perception = reality

lovine: my perception is that you're a peterphile

i'm in memphis, tennessee. my baggage didn't turn up at the carousel last night. it's a monday morning and i have a kick off client meeting in less than two hours, with nothing but the clothes i had on my back last night. unfortunately, jeans and t-shirt don't really fall in the category of business casual. if it's any consolation, i had corky's bbq last night and polished off my plate of ribs. i was also trying to get some sort of collared shirt, albeit one with a corky's logo, but no luck. i haven't flown with northwest in a really long time, so this is a really pleasant experience to start off the project...

when you're hung over, they say the best remedy is to drink some more. the overload of live music over the weekend must've sparked some forgotten addictions that has been lying dangerously dormant in one of my dark corners (at least relatively).

so late this afternoon before i was about to leave the cube farm, i found out that the teddybears had a gig at the el rey on wilshire. no second thoughts, i was going alone if i had to. we caught their last song at coachella and the energy was totally palpable in the tent, and i couldn't let this one pass.

so i took the vespa out to wilshire, which was a pretty nice ride. it probably took almost twice as long compared to being in a car, but riding the vespa is always a different experience - sort of like walking barefoot and allowing your toes to feel the grass, versus running with socks and sneakers. also, no parking fees and struggling to find a spot! it felt good to be out.

and so the teddybears owned the el rey and everyone else that was there. really good stuff, definitely chalked up as a must-see! music is always a pleasant escape from the normalcies of the cube that's waiting for me tomorrow..

the coachella weekend has practically left me in a state of daze. this year was three days of 100 degree heat in the middle of the desert (compared to two-days the previous years), but the important fact is not the struggle of co-existing with 165,000 other people under the scorching heat, but the fact that such an amazing lineup of artists are all playing at the same festival and having the opportunity and blessing to be able to experience it in my third year as it has been with the previous two. even though there were many bands that i would've liked to catch (new pornographers, !!!, tokyo police club, the lemonheads), there are no regrets. highlights for me this year were silversun pickups, anathallo, regina spektor, travis, air, a little dose of the teddybears (cos i'm a punk rocker!), getting trapped in a massive pit of sweat and collective moshing a few feet in front of the stage for kings of leon and arcade fire. it's fun to pretend being like a fish gasping for air above your head, being crushed from all directions and have your girlfriend tell you that her feet aren't touching the ground - literally. spent maybe four hours in that spot without breaking, and finally gave up the space because we wanted to see red hot chili peppers, not die.

as kat used to say, this is 'the woodstock of the now'. each moment will always have a magic of it's own. until next year... there's always so much to look forward to. i am still in a state of shock.

here's a little excerpt from zack dela rocha during 'wake up':

If the same laws were applied to U.S. presidents as were applied to the Nazis after WWII, then every single one of them, every last rich white one of them from Truman on would be hung to death and shot. And this current administration is no exception. It should be hung and tried and shot, as any war criminal should be. For the challenges that we face, they go way beyond administrations, way beyond elections, way beyond every four years of pulling levers, way beyond that. Because this whole rotten system has become so vicious and cruel, that in order to sustain itself, it needs to destroy entire countries and profit from their reconstruction in order to survive. And that's not a system that changes every four years, it's a system that we have to break down, generation after generation after generation after generation...

wake up.

it's 1am the day of our trip, and i'm trying a last minute attempt to hack/mod my canon powershot pro1 to remove the 30 second movie limit to make it run for 3 minutes. basically if i screw it up, my camera will die and turn into a very expensive paperweight. MD5 hashes seem okay. hopefully it'll all work out.

i still haven't started packing. for possibly one of the grandest gigs of the year... coachella, here we come!!!!!!!!!

happy birthday, miss kat. paul <3s you. :)

there's always a little void that i'm looking to fill in the realm of my art, my profession, and all facets shaped by who you are. apart from the choices you make, the detail of your work underlines your reflection. apart from merely existing, you'll need to define yourself. in the same way that economies need sustained growth, our pursuits need to be supplemented by taking risks, and internalizing even more practice. by taking it up a notch, you are allowing yourself to take it up another notch higher...

double disc of black sabbath on a sunday night against an empty house. vinyl would be awesome, but beggars can't be choosers.

we made some paul and kat magnets today and stuck 'em on a few random places..

Greetings, from Paul and Kat.com!

can't wait for the beginning of another weekend. as short as it may be, it's one of the perks after the weeklong doldrums of soul selling. the stakes are high, and we owe it to ourselves to risk a little, wear hearts on our sleeves, and conquer the streets that are littered with bored souls.

america wants you to think that work buys money buys happiness. my bumper sticker thinks fun buys laughter buys life.

and when you're lucky, it's for free too.

lost in the snazzy bits of reality? trying to get cohesive thoughts of reason together to fabricate an escape plan from the grind? the literal dimensions of a cube is at the mercy of the walls you can construct and deconstruct with the gray matter between your ears - space and freedom are relative. an endless faucet drips a primordial soup of incomplete thoughts, half baked feelings, and swirlpool of forgotten emotional baggage on the shoulders of the weary traveler. who stops to smell the flowers but forgot to remind the cat that the world should stop turning at 5:30 so he went home instead. heavy eyelids are my only crime, from a dusty day of cube farming. and so with quiet fingertaps on the keyboard i give the final salute to another day's dollar on the powerful all-american paycheck - thank you for allowing me to succumb to the temptations of greed, false pretensions of power, fast cars hot chicks new guitars, and to live the american dream in my new underwear.

it's weird how much effort it takes to not make sense, when you consciously understand that you probably don't during most of the day.

words of wisdom never came from old men, but in the pockets of silence when our eyes met.