Marla made the rub, and I made the ribs. It’s my first batch of ribs, so I think I could have done better. But I’m sure cooking them longer would have been the key.

Holy Cats, my Excel is RUSTY. Took me far too long to figure out a MPH equation based on seconds and a distance.

On the plus side: my Exercise Bike Spreadsheet is on point.

Data-Trackers: what kind of data do you capture for your exercise routine?

I’d like for civilization to either crumble so we can start over or begin to advance to something more reasonable than this. Because this is a bunch of crap if you ask me.

I was in a terrible mood, up and down, feeling out of sync, but we finally buckled down and did the holiday decorating. We have a scaled down tree, in an effort to keep things out of reach of the cats, but we got the blow-molds out, and all sorts of other stuff.

The house looks okay. I wish you could improve moods as easily as redecorating.

Well, I’m wide awake again, at what I can only assume is one million o’clock, and it’s very cold. How dumb.

Just a Cat Dad with insomnia.

Well, it must be at least 1 AM, considering how long it’s been dark already, so it’s time for bed.

I made two batches of cookies today: Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip, and Snickerdoodle. Apparently, they are too crispy for Marla, so I guess they’re all mine.

I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night and saw this.

Finished!

My first Thanksgiving dinner. A roasted chicken, roasted vegetables, stuffing, cranberry sauce. I also made a pot of soup with all the leftovers that were in the fridge while I was doing the other stuff.

Now it’s time for Miracle On 34th St.

There was only one band that made consistently great music videos every single time.

MST3K TURKEY DAY MARATHON IS UNDERWAY! DEEP HURTING!

Really, there’s three kinds of guitar players:

1.) Acoustic Only
2.) I use two pedals and one is for tuning
3.) Pedalboard Mania.

I’ve never met a fourth kind.

This used to be next to my favorite record store in Eugene. Are they still going strong, or do they need viagra now, I wonder?

Happy Thanksgiving Eve From Oryx & Crake, happily snuggled into their deluxe penthouse.

Sigh.

I miss being gouged to be entertained.

Who’s streaming what where now, huh?

I made Cranberry Sauce from scratch. I made a lot, actually.

I will sometimes leave the door open while I’m cooking. Sometimes up to 15 minutes at a stretch. My food has never gone bad, and I have never seen an increase in our electric Bill.

I mostly keep it closed. But: it’s worth it to know that no one will ever yell at me to shut a fridge door ever again.

And so I leave it open.

In the interest of following CDC recommendations this year, our annual Thanksgiving show today was replaced by something a bit smaller. There Inches of Pure Pleasure focuses of 3” CD releases, going back over the last decade plus of collecting experimental music. We’re keeping things small for the holidays, here on Mid-Valley Mutations.

https://midvalleymutations.com/2020/11/25/keeping-things-small-for-the-holidays-3-of-pure-pleasure-212/

I baked pies. The filling is from scratch, even. (Well, I didn’t cook and process a pumpkin from scratch, but Martha actually recommends against that, and says using the can isn’t cheating.) Plus there’s enough that can go wrong with the recipe that this is pretty good for my first pies I’ve ever made.

If you are traveling and getting a group of family / friends together for Thanksgiving… thanks for voting for fascism, jerk.

Is everyone ready for a Ravenous / Cannibal The Musical double feature tomorrow?

I have never been fully green.

But, I’ve never been fully red.

My resting state is yellow / orange when there isn’t a fascist president or a pandemic.

The only difference is that if I don’t focus and keep making new art consistently, then I slip into red almost immediately. I have never lost focus or drive; money and time I loose constantly.

I’ve had trouble sleeping as long as I can remember (age 14-ish), so that’s a poor metric. But conversely: no force in the world has ever killed my appetite, even when I’ve been sick. I’m hungry for my next meal while I’m eating. I don’t believe I’m overweight but I could eat all day if I let myself.

And I avoid interactions with co-workers 100% of the time, so that’s a poor metric, too. But all jobs are bullshit anyway so you should avoid them too.

Also: I have felt lost and out of control pretty much since I hit puberty, and I don’t know how anyone can feel otherwise, honestly.

Man, everything is hard.

I want to feel at peace when I wake up in the middle of the night.

It started raining like crazy and I never made Vegetable Korma, but I made it anyway. And I only made up one spice.

I didn’t get to half of my action item list. Maybe I never will?

Marla: I thought of you.

I made a record with Formaldehydra (Dylan Houser) about how I wish the trees would rise up and rid the planet of certain enemies of nature. I’m very proud of this one. Maybe this is something you’d be into?

I baked some biscuits.

My friend Dylan and I teamed up with Barry at gorbielathecuts.com to make a new record of which we’re all really proud. Here’s all the details. Message me if you have any questions. It’s my second record, and I’m really excited to have a 45 available for my 45th birthday.
https://austinrich.org/2020/11/23/formaldehydra-mini-mutations-split-8-lathe-cut-record/

I made something of which I’m quite proud.

I had to go outside briefly. There were cows. Would not recommend.

#OfficeLife was weird, man.

The correct answers were:

Gary Numan’s Cars
The Who
Pentagram
Flipper
Dead Moon
The “Teenline” series of Power Pop compilations
Motörhead
Nomeansno
The Eyes
Cupid Car Club
All Ya’ll’s Band
The Tape-Beatles
Blue Cheer

Thank you for playing.

November Total: 43,056 words

Today’s Count: 2053 Words

22 Day Average: 1957 Words a day.

Words per rest of the days in Nov to hit 50k by the end of the month: 868

I fell down on the job, so to speak, and only got 1000 words, as I had to handle a few errands that ate a big chunk out of my day. But today I was back onto my 2000 words a day goal.

I would have to really fall down on the job to not get to 50K this year, but I have no idea if I will be able to finish this story in that time. This story is just too big.

I baked some brownies, and messed up the peanut butter swirl. So it’s just peanut butter icing, I guess?

This is the perfect cartoon. All others should aspire to this cartoon ideal.

Iron Maiden
or Iron Maiden?

The Feelies
or Big Star?

Dead Milkmen or Dead Kennedys?

The Who or The Rolling Stones?

The Cars or
The Pretenders?

I roasted a whole chicken, and a bunch of vegetables I found in the house. It came out okay.

Both Trump, the pastor who he often turns to / cites as his moral center, and QANON all embrace a tactic from the Gnostics, a religious variant that believed that all “published” sources couldn’t be trusted, and instead, finding your our evidence of the true source of [God, the consiparcy, whatever] is the only way that you can find the truth.

Now that the election is over, the problem we now have is that 8 Chan is now Trump’s Twitter feed, and as Q drops away and the hatred of those kinds of websites goes mainstream, what we are left with is a demagogue who doesn’t trust the truth and a massive evangelical population who all feel burned by the direction America is heading.

Whatever Trump’s TV Talk Show ends up being in February, it will be riddled with the gnostic mindset to help unite anyone on the right who is slightly racist, slightly religious and / or doesn’t trust “the current systems,” but are afraid voice those ideas that directly.

This might be something worth listening to, if you want to get some insight into how 70 Million Americans can believe in actual quackery.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/ancient-heresy-helps-us-understand-qanon-on-the-media

Zing.
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55024888

My second tattoo. Because I can only put a permanent mark on my body unless it’s a permanent joke.

Man the future is stupid.

I’m sorry about yesterday.
I was not at my best.

I feel completely at a loss. It seems unlikely that the world will return to a place where I could even find a way to make money, let alone return to anything like my life before. And with our country so broken, it seems only scarier and more insane moving forward.

I’m too emotionally broken for life like this.

I am feeling crazy emotional today.

I want one of these so bad.

I made chicken soup for the soul of my family stuck at home saving money.

Which I think was a Bone Thugs ‘n’ Harmony song.

I didn’t have any coffee today.

So yeah, I feel a little crazy.

Finished a thing that was taking almost an extra week to finish. WTF? I used to be so young and smart…

Who’s gonna clean the place up?

I made tacos from leftovers in the fridge.

My grandfather kept a pet coyote. I’m sure there’s more to the story, but this photo always amazed me as a kid.

I made a pie.

“You should catch me when I’m living a much more stable life. I’m so much easier to deal with.” – Me to Marla this morning.

I wake up hungry.
It bothers me.

Capitalism is the force that makes you think freezes and lockdowns are terrible. If the money didn’t matter no one would be flipping out.

A gift from a friend.

Time for a rewatch.

Finally got the Thanksgiving stuff up.

Holy cats these guys were cooler than anyone ever was.

My friends, I’m struggling. I haven’t seen most of you in a year or more. I haven’t had very much work in the lasts few years. And while I have made some cool stuff recently that I’m really proud of, holy cats, it is hard when you don’t have a lot of options for the future, or even right now.

I could use some good news, or a pick me up. A dumb video? I don’t know. I’m really feeling low today. What have you got? I need a little something…

Best news story I’ve read in a while! Hooray for GizmoDuck!
https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/Costumed-DuckTales-hero-storms-through-SF-on-15720593.php?IPID=SFGate-HP-CP-Spotlight

I’ve had a dumb morning, and it’s getting harder to hit the word goals every day. In spite of everything:

November Total: 30,005 words

Today’s Count: 1988 Words

15 Day Average: 2000 Words a day.

Words per Day to hit 50k by the end of the month: 1333

At this point in the game, anyone competing in #NANOWRIMO2020 should be at 25k words. There’s 15 days left, and you need 50k to win.

I’m over 3/5th of the way done, so I’m on track for the month. But today was the hardest day so far, and I’m sure that will not change as the month continues. I’m very glad I got this far ahead, this early. I’m gonna need that cushion.

If I wasn’t strangled by the need for money every second of every day maybe I wouldn’t feel so hostile to it.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what life was like when you’ve lost everything, since I was a teen. Two bouts of homelessness, several partners who abandoned me, one miscarriage and one death of a partner, who had left me to drink themselves away.

Lost all my money and most of what I owned once. Bands I loved being in broke up, never to return. Friends disappeared forever, and I still haven’t seen them since, and worse, several have passed on.

All life is impermanence and frustration.

Wear a fucking mask and let’s defeat capitalism, but stop complaining, please? I’m not sure if loosing our dine-in privileges is that big a deal.

I remember a lot of people were suddenly VERY GOOD at staying home when I was on tour.

If that’s what it takes, I’ll go on tour again.

It’s Saturday Night.
Show us your pets!

November Total: 28,017 words

Today’s Count: 1996 Words

14 Day Average: 2001 Words a day.

Per Day Word Goal to hit 50k: 1374.

I just realized that John Frank and Lazlo in ‘Real Genius’ have similar style.

Remember how it could be scary to go to NW punk shows back in the day? Here’s a podcast that addresses the neo-nazi problem in the hardcore scene in the late 80’s / early 90’s. This is probably eerily relevant, as we have to deal with the alt-right in the coming years.
http://itdidhappenherepodcast.com/

Technology blows.

He’s my little snuggle buddy.

I either just re-learned a whole lot of command line tricks that might be useful in the future, or I just pulled a War Games and Joshua is going to ruin the rest of my year.

How in the fuck do I remember command line UNIX instructions after all these years?
What in the actual hell?

Got my flu shot.*

(*less painful than a tattoo)

Why can’t someone just invest a few thousand dollars into my work without any questions about reimbursement or what I will do with it? Is that too ridiculous to ask?

I always wanted to be a video game kid. But past the first NES, which I did not buy myself, and the ColecoVision, which was the family console from before that, I never owned any other game system. Now I sort of understand why.

Total Word Count: 24007. Almost halfway to the goal, and ahead of schedule.

Today’s count: 1993. The year I graduated High School.

12-Day Average: 2001 words a day, my favorite book and movie when I was 17.

This is where it gets hard…

I don’t take as much A/V as I did, but at six months these boys mean the world to me, and I would do almost anything for them.

Oooof. Painful to look at, especially over the last several days, as s lot of counties keep turning orange.

https://globalepidemics.org/key-metrics-for-covid-suppression/

Those first few seconds were okay.

True story: my mom once took us to see Ernest Saves Christmas and I’m not sure any of us really knew anything about Ernest or his films. I don’t remember it being good, either, and I don’t think I saw anything else by Ernest. But his music lives on…

This week, on Mid-Valley Mutations: a special guest DJ set by artist and musician Arvo Zylo, who is no stranger to our program, having delivered personal ghosts stories, a Halloween DJ set, and plenty of albums for us to play on the air, all released by his label, No part of it, which focuses on incredible experimental artists. For this show, I hand Arvo the reigns, and he goes off on his own, delivering a two-hour program of some of his favorite tunes. The fun starts a 3 PM PST (12 AM CET) on Wednesday, so please, tune in!

Now to move on to the next phase of project postcard…

This noise show rules.

Who needs a beat-down?

I’m off to a good start. I’m averaging 2016 words a day, according to my spreadsheet. I like the pace but I think this story is longer than 50,000 words…

Insomnia…

Goal:

Convince every living person that cultural progress for all living people is as, if not more, important than personal progress for oneself.

Also:

Destroy capitalism.

Actions To Take:

?

I’m reminded today that this meme, one year ago, caused one friend to block me and another to unfriend me.

Seems like simpler times.

Lest you think Oregon is just a hippies and stoned Portlandia characters, you should really take a hard look at this map. Essentially, a handful of slightly more liberal cities carried Biden for all of Oregon. But, geographically, Trump carried most of the state. Fortunately, a handful of liberal cities can flip our state blue. But there will be a lot of contention in our state as all of this unfolds.

Yikes.

New seasonal mask that is pretty hella dope.

Hair’s not bad, I guess.

I feel so lazy today. Like, I don’t even know what to do with myself.

When you open a new record, what kind of inserts / information are you looking for with an artist you love?