** a bit of late night prose from M.Sahm **

There are words that lick the frosting off of your cupcake fucking world. Words that throw golden gates into the bridge of your nose. Words that rock the pants out of themselves.

There are words neatly laid across the ironing board, pressed and steamed so you may present them on yourself to your world of one. Your suit of cashmere lies, ready to assume a fashionable persona that may or may not be who you once were. As you walk in public, words begin to fall off and others pick them up.

So the word on the street is that you have caught the Twitter disease and no longer think in streaming madman thought processes, but rather in 140 character tweets. The word is that you can no longer be the happy clichéd doorframe that everyone wanted you to walk through.

It has been widely believed that you should check with your doctor to see if you qualify for a pharmaceutical to make you a whole egg again. Who needs horses and king’s men if only chemically happy words will put you back together again?

Who needs anything anymore? You don’t. You only need 140 characters. You only need amusing mottos of self loathing. That’s what you need. You need instant oatmeal memory. Popcorn paragraphs. A grand old basket of superfried clever rings.

You are fast food function key, baby. You make a respectable dent in a noisy metropolis machine. You burn headbanger hot, blow the fuckgasm up, blast the head off of a photo of yourself at half speed.  Whatever anything gets your 140 characters, who really cares.

There are words that show you who you could have been, words that melt away your candle wax face, your cotton candy eyes that got wisked away by the valley birds, your sugar in the dead wind.

There are words that prove you may still have a chance, a blind hope, a vibrating fist in the sand. But no. You don’t need any of that. You only need characters. Characters that support you. And characters that leave you somehow and strangely.

Silent.

1. First random song of the AM: “Miserlou”, the opening song to Pulp Fiction. I guess that means I should go rob a diner now?

2. Someone on my train is eating bacon. This type of inconsiderate behavior should be outlawed and… PLEASE PLEASE share some of your bacon!!

3. Of course, too much giving in to bacon will lead you to the fat side of the Force.

4. In lighter news, the man across the aisle is wearing a really ugly tie, mostly bald, and makes me look skinny. Ah, that made me feel better.

5. My sister @bethcardwell is retiring from her day job of 14 yrs today to do her photography FT. I’m so proud that I couldn’t be more jealous.

6. It’s refreshing when you see someone chase their dreams. Of course, most times, they have to be a little cuckoo. But very refreshing to see.

7. Somewhere along the line, all of us will have to choose between what we want to do and what we have to do. There’s no way around this.

8. I personally want to drink beer, eat bacon, and make psychedelic art. But I suppose I have to do something more constructive. Sigh.

9. I could lie & tell you that you’ll be maximizing your weekend, but the universe knows better and you’ll be back to the grind soon enough.

10. This morning’s SomBlock is sponsored by the last Red Bull in the fridge, because like Rambo said to the Big Bad Wolf, “Your ass is mine!”

*** Every weekday from 8-9am while traveling from Stamford to Manhattan, Mark Sahm writes a block of thoughts on his Twitter account (@Somrod) via his iPhone.***

It’s always a difficult task waiting for a payoff on a big investment that you aren’t certain will come. But this time, it did and we couldn’t be happier.

As chronicled back in June, I knew the Mac Pro model I wanted to buy would eventually get discounted once they introduced newer models. Did I figure that it would take nine months for Apple to update? Hell no! (Although it did allow more time to save up.) But when Apple updated their Mac Pro line on Monday, the kicker suddenly became: Read more…

We’re driving away from that ol’ town called 2008 today… and flooring it like Hell is breaking loose!

So what if it wasn’t a banner year for us? We still got a lot of little things accomplished (updated our websites, finally finished our basement renovations, did 4 podcasts, and regenerated S.Rod’s spine!). It just was not the BIG things we’ve been planning for so long, those projects that we like to call “life-redeeming”.

But we will choose to be optimistic in our prognostication for 2009, because well, what the hell— what do we have to lose for trying? Nothing. But our adage is NOT to make resolutions. After all, resolutions are for people that give up in 40 days or less, because aerobics are actually kind of hard.

Instead, we’re going to make “Goals That Must Be Accomplished Immediately”. This is also known as the self-fulfilling prophecy, a cherished relic in the Somrod household, and something that we have in our targeting computer for 2009.

And thus, tonight we drink away that bad taste in our mouth that 2008 left (”That didn’t taste like chicken”) and tomorrow, we unwrap the clean slate and begin the plotting and scheming again… what? What’s that you say? Unwrapping was last week? Oh well. Cheers and enjoy!

People think I’m out of my mind to have a daily commute that balloons to as much as 4 hours. I agree that it’s crazy to do it, but I’m not out of my mind. The truth is, some of it is my fault, while most of it was imposed on me. Here was how it started:

The Original Commute: M. Sahm takes a 37 minute Metro-North train from Westchester to NYC. At the end of his work day, he takes another 37 minute trip, and is home by 7pm. With 20 minutes of walking included, total daily commute time is 1 hour and 34 minutes.

Alteration #1: Sahm and S.Rod cannot find a house within their budget in Westchester, or an affordable condo with enough space to grow and expand their home-based business. So they decide to buy a townhouse in Connecticut, 15 minutes north of where they lived in NY. Read more…

As you may have read the other week, we will be seeing Wilco on the second night of Lollapalooza. While it pains me to have to miss Rage, I know that Wilco will put on a show that is more relevant to S.Rod and I in our present states. Eighteen year old Mark is turning in his grave though. So be it.

One trump card that Wilco has over Rage is that Wilco is one of those bands who are really ready to play anything at anytime. A lot of bands nowadays will have 10-15 songs, but Wilco has at least 60. To further exemplify this, Wilco has created a page on their site, where fans can dictate some of what gets played at each show. I chose “I’m The Man Who Loves You”. S.Rod chose “Shake It Off”. We are crossing our fingers that both get played . Cheers.

With less than a month to go until S.Rod and I journey to Chiacgo for the Lollapalooza music festival, we have been scouring the Somrod music archives for songs we expect to hear. Since I have seen Radiohead three times now, I’m not too worried about hearing songs and so on— I just know that they play a phenomenal live set, and even the songs that I am not always as fond of on the CDs (i.e. Sail to the Moon, Wolf At the Door, and Like Spinning Plates) were reworked for the live performance, and those fine British gents tear it up. It gets me psyched up just to think of how absolutely good they play, and some of the recent sets have been killer.

That being said, I do have my worries about some of the new material from In Rainbows that they have been playing, and shall play. On the whole, the new album is a great listen, definitely better than Pablo Honey or Amnesiac in terms of the RH canon. But, as with many albums, IR has a few songs that feel like filler— usually a non-existent thing with RH, since they spend so much time crafting their albums.

Of course, I have a theory of why this was done— at the same time that Radiohead was practically giving away In Rainbows online, they were also selling a limited edition box set version of the album, which had a second bonus disc of material, as well as some fancy non-essential packaging.

Naturally, I plunked down my dollars-to-pounds conversion, and found out that the 2nd disc had a lot of great “B-sides”. Or were they? To me, some of these songs were so good, it confused me why RH wouldn’t have included them on the main disc. Then I thought about the financial difference between giving away a disc for “pay what you like” and selling a box set for $80. Yes, money talks, even to those without a label taking 50% (or more). Were the 2nd disc on the box set to have sucked, then all of the fans who bought it would have not been given that limited edition treat.

All the same, this does not make sense for Radiohead to be playing ‘House of Cards’ or ‘Reckoner’ in a live set when they could be playing (A) some of the great material from the 2nd disc, or (B) anything else from their impressive catalog. I can only hope they get these songs out of their system by the time they get to Chicago on August 1. Please.

Thus, in my imaginary world, I will pretend that Radiohead decided to release only one album for In Rainbows (followed up months later by a limited edition six-song EP that was sold in the UK, Japan, and Amazon only).

Radiohead – In Rainbows (Sahm’s Non-Box Set Arrangement)

1. “15 Step” – 3:57
2. “Bodysnatchers” – 4:02
3. “Nude” – 4:15
4. “Down Is the New Up” – 4:59
5. “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” – 5:18
6. “Last Flowers To The Hospital” – 4:27
7. “All I Need” – 3:48
8. “Bangers + Mash” – 3:20
9. “Faust Arp” – 2:09
10.  ”Up on the Ladder” – 4:17
11. “Jigsaw Falling into Place” – 4:08
12. “Videotape” – 4:39

Limited Edition EP

1. “MK 1″ – 1:04
2. “Reckoner” – 4:50
3. “Go Slowly” – 3:48
4. “MK 2″ – 0:53
5. “House of Cards” – 5:28
6. “4 Minute Warning” – 4:06

All rearrangements aside, Radiohead is still the band that I have the most respect for, and even their worst songs are better than many bands’ best ones. So it’s all relative. But what would the Internet be without some alternate possibilities? Cheers.

When you must choose between two great bands—one from your past against one from your present—there is bound to be regret in your future.

I’m sure the line above is paraphrasing a famous quote from somewhere (even if Google is not showing me one), but it accurately describes my situation when I attend the 2008 Lollapalooza music festival. My wife and I will be making the journey from New York to Chicago to see the festival on August 1-3, in what would best be described as the culmination point of my favorite bands ever— Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine and Wilco.

The only problem is that Lollapalooza is three nights, not four. Thus, when the scheduling was released last week, I was distraught to discover that Wilco and Rage Against The Machine are playing on opposing stages at the same exact time.

Suddenly, my dream festival has hit a snag— I’m forced to choose between seeing only one of two of my favorite bands ever. I cannot stress enough what a terrible example this is of scheduling on the part of the Lollapalooza promoters. I mean, the following night has Nine Inch Nails playing at the same time as Kanye West, which makes sense since they have very different music.

But Wilco and Rage are both rock bands. Granted of course, they are totally different genres of rock, but rock nevertheless. I don’t think that they are polar opposites like Kanye and NIN are. I’m sure I am not the only person who is disappointed about this scheduling. Sure, the beauty of music festivals is that there is a plethora of music to see and experience, and much of it is going on at the same time. But to have two rock headliners on stage simultaneously seems to defy logic. Why can’t one of these bands be moved up to an earlier time slot in the day?

For me, the complications run deep, as both bands are known for their live performances: Wilco with their instrumentation and execution, and Rage with their sonic assault and raw energy. This likely will be a stellar performance by both bands as Rage is in the midst of a comeback, and Wilco will be playing in their hometown of Chicago, where the festival is being held this year.

A good tiebreaker would be to see the band I haven’t seen live before, but I have with both: Rage in 1997, Wilco in 2004. Both bands’ music served me well as the soundtrack at different junctures in my life, and it pains me to have to choose in what should be a momentous festival for me. So who do I go see?

Before I share my final decision below in the comments section, I want to see what all of you out there in the blogosphere think. If you were me on the evening of August 2, 2008, would you go see Rage Against The Machine or go see Wilco?

Thanks for reading and (hopefully) commenting. Cheers.

Seventeen days ago, I set a goal to find the Writer-Self.

Okay, well, I really set a goal to blog every day this month. But this was to shake off the rust in finding that self.

But you know, that self wasn’t as lost as I thought. I wasn’t as rusty as I expected to be. Experiment over. Now I have to start pushing the quota, and get this thing done.

Never give up, never ever give up. Cheers.

Even though I’ve had my own websites for more than eight years now, I’ve gone through many name changes for my primary site. The most difficult was the one that we just transitioned in March: going from Magic Junk to Somrod Creative.

Magic Junk had built up a pretty fair amount of traffic, but the name itself was not indicative of where we wanted to go with our goals. Additionally, I started the idea for the site long before I met S.Rod. But since she is my partner in all of this, I wanted to make sure the new name included us both.

But Magic Junk had a history with me, so it was hard to let go. I stretched it out much longer than I should have. What I needed, it turned out, was someone who is a well-known business writer to tell me to move on with the site name. So, on a whim, I wrote to Guy Kawasaki (author of The Art of the Start and Rules For Revolutionaries ) and asked him what he thought of Magic Junk. I figured if he saw some good in it, then I would keep it.

To my surprise, on 12/10/06, he actually wrote me back:

Mark,
Honestly, “junk” for me has too many negative connotations. I wouldn’t use it in a name. Thanks for your message.
Guy

That settled it for me. So, after brainstorming over domain names for a few months, and finding many of my favorites were being cybersquatted, I took the name from what S.Rod would often refer to ‘us’ as: Team Sahmrod. Given that half of the people I meet cannot pronounce Sahm correctly, I switched out the ‘ah’ for an ‘o’ (I just made you make funny noises in your head!) and Somrod was born. Sure it took us a year and a half, but we have a lot of fantastic excuses.

So far, I’m really happy we made the name change (other than having to reintroduce traffic), and we still kept MJ around for Magic Junk Radio. Sometimes change is good. Cheers.

As you may have guessed from the title, today was yet another day in the basement. We’re still trying to finish all of the odds and ends that I left at the end of last fall. Luckily, this was perfectly fine with us, since it was muggy for most of the day. Then after dinner, there was a huge thunderstorm. Yeah, I’ll take the cool and dry basement, thank you.

While I was working on aligning the framing for the three doors (two to the HVAC room and 1 closet), S.Rod was measuring and cutting pieces of drywall for the soffits. Then I would stop and hang the pieces of drywall. In addition, since all of the areas have something under construction, everything is displaced— as we got to each area, we have to move all of the things out of the way.

Despite working all day on this, we still have more to do. This is why contractors have crews to do this type of crap, and while other ones take months to do it. To complicate things, we have afternoon plans tomorrow (albeit one-of-a-kind plans) , so it will only leave the morning to get things done. Hopefully, we can get an early start and bang a lot of the pieces out.

Nevertheles, this project has lingered on for too long. I’m beginning to worry that my time and effort are catching up with what I could have just spent to have someone else do it last summer. Hopefully not though. Cheers.

And here I thought that no one in their right mind would ever want to be Mark Sahm.

I got a letter from my credit card company today with a new card attached that had a new account number. I had not lost my card, and it wasn’t up for renewal until next year, so I knew something had to be up.

It turns out that there was a “merchant database compromise” and my old account number “may have been illegally obtained”. While I’m glad this was caught before an order for SW replicas and blow-up dolls showed up on my statement, I would like to know who the merchant was that dropped the ball and make sure I don’t give them my business. Or was this a clever way for the credit card company to say it was them who fucked up?

I guess I will probably never know. What I do know is that all of the things I have auto-linked to that old account number have to be updated now, and that’s a real pain in the ass. But I suppose this is better than knowing there is another Mark Sahm running around out there with the illegal power to buy a kitchen’s worth of new appliances. Cheers.

In April, I flirted with the idea to dust off a ‘failed’ project. Then I got discouraged because it seemed like too much work to take on at the time.

In May, I had a conversation with someone about him picking up a failed project of his and trying again; that he may as well do it, because what the hell did he have to lose?

In June, I decided to take my own advice, with a little help from my old self.  In other words, the rumors of the 2nd Novel’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Of course, I’ve made way too promises over the course of this novel’s existence to even say that I will definitely finish it.

But again, I’m going to try. What the hell do I have to lose? Cheers.

I mentioned the other day that I really need to replace my 2001 G4, as my program usage is extremely limited by the slow processor. I was hoping that Apple would update the Mac Pro this week, so I could pick up one of the current ones in a closeout sale. But they did not update it… yet. So being the budget minded homeowner that I am, I shall patiently wait for the updates to come. This way, it’s less damage to the Somrod savings.

In the meantime, I may as well write down the configuration that the future me will be purchasing. Hopefully I can check back and see how much I saved by waiting, instead of buying something now.

Sahm’s Mac Pro Specifications 6/11/08 – Price on Apple Store: $3,549.00

• Processor: Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-Core)
• RAM: 4GB (4×1GB)
• None
• Hard Drive: 320GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
• None
• None
• None
• Graphic Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB
• Two 16x SuperDrives

I think the clutch is stuck. It won’t shift into gear. This was supposed to be fixed a long time ago. But it’s not. This is what I get for depending on others.

So here I am in the dead of winter, stuck at the end of the driveway, where the melted snow collects. I’m sitting and shivering in a car that was supposed to hug curves, kick up leaves in its wake, and have people turn their head in jealousy. But it’s not.

It could be the alternator, but I’m sure the clutch has got to be stuck. I don’t know how to fix either of them. And I’m getting colder the longer I sit here.

Before I started writing this blog post, I opened a new track in GarageBand and began remixing for thirty minutes straight. This was done without listening to more than the first 15 seconds of the song. In other words, I was remixing blind. Just switching instruments, adjusting effects, turning digital “knobs” and so on.

At the point that the thirty minutes ended, I rendered the track and waited to hear what would play… there was some good and some bad. But this was to be expected, as I would never believe that even the best of random remixing could net you a winner on the first pass. At least, not if you wanted it to sound “different”.

No, the point was that in thirty minutes, I could change something that I knew well into something completely different. By that accord, could I spontaneously change my life into something completely different in thirty minutes? The old cliché goes that your life could change in a second, from things like a car accident or a lottery win. But while you may have chosen to drive that day or play your numbers, the determinant of the rapid change was external forces beyond your control. I’m more interested in the rapid change that you can institute by yourself.
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