Creative Psychosis

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 [...]

** M. Sahm **
As the more casual fan of the Somrod duo when it comes to R.E.M., I was not disappointed in the least bit by last night’s show. It was high octane for most of the show, and I only sat down for 2 of the 27 songs (Houston and Let Me In). With [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

With S.Rod being a R.E.M. fan of a high degree, we traveled into the city today to visit an independent bookstore that was holding a book signing for the new R.E.M. photo book, Hello.
Signing the book was the photographer David Belisle and lead singer Michael Stipe.
It was a good decision to head in, as [...]

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, [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

As many people know who have crossed my path over the last year, my labor of love has been the ongoing renovation of the basement in the Somrod Townhouse. We finally crossed one of the major hurdles in the project today: we have built all of the soffits and chases. You have no idea what [...]

I may as well confess that the only other living organism in the Somrod household has officially kicked the bucket. Yes, I am referring to our lime tree, which was highlighted in previous posts here and here, in better days obviously.
After we moved out of our apartment, the lime tree just never adapted to life [...]

As some of you may recall, my purchase of an iPhone for S.Rod and I was not well timed. It happens. While rumors of the 3G iPhone released are pretty verified at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, I’m not really that bummed about it. I’ve had my iPhone for 5 months now, and am [...]

It’s not going to be easy. Five days into my June renaissance, and I have not been able to write the more in-depth blog posts that I wanted to. Each night, I’m sitting here at 11pm pushing the envelope to make my goal, yet knowing that my writing procedure is slow and can never develop [...]

I’m constantly thinking of ideas and inventions that I would like to see developed and marketed. Many of them are in my various notebooks, in the hope they will one day be thrust into reality. Maybe.
But many other ideas are well beyond my scope of reality, since I am but a humble creative person with [...]

* A literary passage *
There were days for us all where the lust of addicts made perfect sense. Where a man could indulge without a shred of restraint and love every succulent second, knowing full well that morality and conscience had been thrown to the roadside.
Those were the days when a man could walk [...]