Saying good bye and good riddance to 40.

I only have a few days left before I turn 41. 40 has been the worst age ever. I've spent most of the year broke, broken, and alone. The only reason I'm still working at 'Steel Johnson' is because I'm too lazy to look for work, and I don't want to have to take a pay cut. Voluntary Time Off has been offered frequently, and I hate that place so much that it's hard to resist. Plus, while I accrue a good amount of vacation time now, the majority of it goes toward covering the VTO. I've been thinking lately that it might be worth taking a cut of a couple of dollars if I can get an eight-hour-a-day job, and can actually get forty hours in every week. So, I really should update my resume and start a job search.

I mentioned in my "Labor Day 2007" post that I've realized that I will always be a social reject. I really only hear from one person who isn't my roommate or family anymore. I spend entirely too much time wondering where I fucked up with some people. My theme song to this past year seems to be "Do You Still Love Me?" by Ryan Adams. What's funny about that is that a Facebook friend who I never met unfriended me pretty soon after I posted the video to that song. I figure it was because I didn't have a response to his comment about that being one of his favorite albums at the moment.

I actually unfriended one person that I was really good friends with 20+ years ago, since she made it clear that she really had no interest in hanging out with anyone outside her current circle of friends. She may have been under the impression that I wanted to date her, which wasn't the case. I just wanted to reconnect. I think she also forgot how much fun I can be to hang out with.

I figure that my whining about Depression might turn people off, but oh well. Maybe I'd be less depressed if I got to hang out with friends on a semi-regular basis, like I did back in 2014. I can't help but wonder though how many people I hung out with then really even care to hang out with me anymore, or if they just hung out with me because the structure of Louisville Mojo events meant that they HAD to hang out with me. It seems like my social life in Louisville is directly related to the health of the Louisville Mojo site. It's pretty much been brain dead for well over a year now, so I guess my social life will also be brain dead for the foreseeable future.

I don't know if I've mentioned my dealings with the IRS during the past couple of years, but I'm still fucking dealing with them. If I had known that some fuckhead was going to use my social security number to attempt to file taxes, I wouldn't have moved out of my mom and dad's place two years ago, thus eliminating the dire need for my tax refund.

Going to the Forecastle Festival this year was probably a mistake, but damn it, I didn't know if or when I was going to get the chance see LCD Soundsystem, who are my favorite band of the 21st Century, again. Having no one to meet up and hang out with sucked, and barely having the money to eat or drink anything sucked even more. LCD Soundsystem were great by the way, I just wish the rest of my experience that day came anywhere close to when I went in 2014 to see The Replacements. Seriously, I was so happy to be seeing The Replacements with my two favorite people that if either a ten ton truck or a double decker bus appeared out of nowhere and ran over me, I would've died happy.

I can really only remember two good things happening this year:

1. Getting to see Tears For Fears.
2. Getting to hang out with my brother for the first time in over two and a half years, and seeing U2 with him in Louisville. I wish I could've visited Austin as well.

I have no hope that 41 will be better than 40, but it could be.

Two Jacksons and a Prince

There have been a couple of CDs that I've had a lot of fun listening to in the car recently. One was Janet Jackson's "Design Of A Decade: 1986-1996", the other was Michael Jackson's "Dangerous". I think I bought "Design Of A Decade"when the old FYE in Mall St. Matthews in Louisville was going out of business, and I chose it over a more comprehensive compilation since I figured it would be less of a Loudness War victim, having come out in 1996. I was mostly correct. Using the Dynamic Range Meter, the majority of tracks rate a DR8 or 9, which is acceptably loud. Only two tracks rank lower, "Black Cat" at DR6, and "Rhythm Nation" at DR7. I'd prefer the loudest track to be DR8, but since most tracks are 8 or 9 and "Black Cat" is *supposed* to be loud, I don't mind two tracks being lower than 8. What usually isn't mentioned when talking about the early days of the Loudness War is that before 1994, DR8 was at the extreme end of the spectrum. 1995, which most people consider the beginning of the Loudness War, was when DR8 started becoming the average, rather than the extreme. While "Design Of A Decade" could've been more dynamic, we're lucky that it didn't get a good squashing.

A case could be made that the Loudness War actually started in 1991 with the increasingly frequent use of peak limiting, though it was pretty tastefully done at that time. Michael Jackson's albums were so well recorded that it would take some real effort to make them sound bad, no matter how much you compress them. I don't mind having remasters of some of his earlier albums, but for "Dangerous", I really wanted that 1991 sound. I finally got my hands on a 1991 copy, and sound-wise it does not disappoint. The Teddy Riley produced tracks are almost entirely synths and drum machines, but the drum sounds really have some impact to them. I really wish that people making synth-leaning Urban music would use the production and mix as a template for how to record or mix their music.

While those two CDs were fun, I feel like I must express my disappointment at Prince's "Purple Rain" remaster. The 3 CD/1 DVD expanded edition is worth having for the bonus tracks and the concert video, but the remaster of the original album is extremely underwhelming, which is why I have no intention of parting with my original CD. "Let's Go Crazy" is the worst victim, and at DR5 it's a good example of why songs should generally be no louder than DR8, even though it gets so loud towards the end on the original CD that it probably shouldn't be compressed at all. Oh well.

Labor Day 2007

2007 started off promising, but failed to live up to the expectations that 2004 and 2005 promised. I'm thinking now about Labor Day at this time ten years ago. Some of my mom's meds were failing, and she wasn't in great mental shape, so we had to put her in the hospital. One of the symptoms was that she kept falling down. She fell down while she was at the hospital, so the mental hospital transferred her to a regular hospital. My father, sister, brother-in-law, and I went to visit her. I seem to remember people at the hospital trying to ask some questions about my mom's mental history. My sister, being the oldest child, was best equipped to answer these questions, but as you might remember, she had Multiple Sclerosis, and her memory seemed to be going at this point, so she wasn't good for answering the questions. Later on, I went to a coffee shop, and remember being really lonely.

My mom got better, really only getting mentally sick one time after that in 2010. Everything else seemed to go downhill after that though, especially when my sister had her seizure at the end of November, eventually leading to her death on January 1st, 2009. 2007 was pretty terrible, but I did at least have a job that I kind of liked, and I liked most of the people that I worked with.

It's 2017, and here I am, sitting at a coffee shop, lonely. I realized when I turned 40 last year that I will always and forever be a social reject. I've discovered recently that dying from loneliness is an actual thing. And while I like some of my coworkers, I hate my job. Not to mention that I carry some spite for some of the people who get to work in my old department, mostly because I'm there when they get there, and I'm still there when they leave. I applaud anyone who left or got canned from that department and managed to move on, because I'm still having trouble figuring out where to go work-wise from here.

A quick one...

Wow, it's been over a year since I last posted. Not for lack of trying, I have about five entries that are in draft mode.

In a nutshell, 2016 was the worst year ever, and I'm not sure if 2017 will be any better or worse. I may go into details some other time.

One of the things that's made life really suck is that my roommate still isn't working, almost two years after she got evicted. But I think the less I say about that, the better. She really needs some help, but I'm not qualified to give it to her, especially when I should be looking for a new job myself, or maybe schooling.

I'm so fucked up* that I'm even tired of music. I've also realized that my music collecting ambitions are unrealistic compared to my lifestyle, so I'm ripping a lot of my CDs to FLAC files, and hoping to get those CDs off my chest.  I definitely want to keep a lot of my favorite CDs, but my goal is to be able to downsize my stuff to the point where I can just get up and relocate to another part of the country, or maybe even out of the country. I don't think I can afford to live the American lifestyle much longer.

(*By "fucked up", I mean in a depressed and scatterbrained sort of way, not a "fucked up on drugs and alcohol" kind of way.)