B-Sides and Hidden Tracks

  Now I know both of these terms are outdated because there is no b-side of itunes and no hidden tracks for that matter.  When I was in high school, it was a hobby of mine to search for hidden tracks on CDs.  That was the band's chance to let their hair down and just be themselves.  Sometimes, it was my favorite track on the album.  I have a playlist on my MP3 player that is comprised entirely of hidden tracks.
  Bands often had a lot of fun with their hidden tracks.  Tool had some sort of poem recited at the end of their Undertow album.  Nirvana had their Endless Nameless, in which Kurt smashes his guitar audibly. Aaron of Staind performed an unnamed song at the end of their Dysfunction album which was just him and a guitar.  Before he starts the song, you can hear him set up a chair, take a drink and light up a cigarette.  At the end of MateFeedKillRepeat, Slipknot perform an unnamed live song that sounds like it was recorded in a bar or a restaurant.  Mushroomhead did a cover of Crazy by Seal on a hidden track on their album, XIII.  Strangely enough, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes also did a cover of Crazy that year.
  Speaking of Me First, here's a funny thing I noticed.  This takes some setting up.  At the end of NOFX's album, Punk In Drublic, there was a track where the singer was having trouble finding the note that starts the chorus of the song "Perfect Government".  As you may know, Fat Mike is in both NOFX and Me First.  He decided it would be funny to mock that hidden track as an intro to "Blowing In The Wind" as covered by Me First on their Blowin' In The Wind album.  It's hilarious!
  In the past, many bands would put out an album or b-sides, rarities and previously unreleased tracks.  One thing I've noticed is that that was often my favorite album of theirs.  Here's a list of what I mean:
-Pearl Jam: Lost Dogs
-Nirvana: Incesticide
-Blind Melon: Nico
-Smashing Pumpkins: Pisces Iscariot
  That's just to name a few.  I think that often, bands put out the songs that are the most polished and catchy for their albums.  It's the songs they only do live or weren't deemed to be good enough to include on an album that often show you a more personal side of them.  That's what I love about them.  I like to know that a band I admire, who has made it huge, is really just like me behind the curtains.  It makes me feel as if I can achieve my dreams.
  On a related note, just not about music, my favorite Far Side compilation is where Gary Larson reveals some of the inspirations for his cartoons, his humble beginnings, some rejected ideas, as well as some sketches that never got developed into cartoons.  It gives me a glimpse into his head.  I guess that's kinda what I'm doing with this blog.  It's as much for me as it is for anyone else.  I'm trying to get out what's in my head to attempt to make sense of my rambling thoughts.  If I can set things in order, maybe my writing can be more cohesive and concise.
  I don't even know what I'm doing on a day to day basis, but when I go back and read my blogs, I can recognize patterns in my thought processes.  I have cycles rolling around in my head, alternating between cynical, philosophical, spiritual, thoughtful, mean, happy, angry, depressed, whiny and so forth.  I'm sure you can point out which mood I've been in when I was writing which blog.  Writing really is like therapy for me. My only hope is that people out there can see a bit of themselves in my incoherent ramblings.

From Within

  When I was a kid, the movie Dumbo made me cry during the scene when, in spite of losing his magic feather, Dumbo finds it in himself to fly.  I never knew why it made me cry.  Years later I heard a song by NOFX from their Punk In Drublic album, called "Happy Guy".  It's a song about a man who is an avid church goer.  In it are the lines, "His hopes may be false, but his happiness is real.  Don't try to judge him.  He's just a man."
  Over the years there have been two particular events I will talk about here that have brought a great deal of emotional scarring to my life.  My favorite childhood memories revolve around going to my aunt's house every summer in Tucson, Arizona.  She was so loving and kind.  I was so happy.  The first event occurred when I turned 18 and went to see her.  She revealed to me her true character.  She is a shallow, crude, crass, rich and snobby woman.  She acted the way she did when I was growing up because she had always envied my mother for having such a lovely family.  She wanted me to prefer being with her.  And I did.  At that moment, I felt so low and used.  It felt like everything I grew up to believe in was a lie.
  Not too long after that, I joined a church.  Over the course of seven years, I learned a lot about faith.  Many people were amazed at the amount of faith I had.  Along the way, I started to notice hypocrisies and inconsistencies between what I was learning and what I was seeing with my own eyes.  I decided to leave the church and I was shunned.  They said I had "fallen away from God."  This shattered my faith and filled me with self-loathing and bitterness toward God.
  Then today, I had a conversation with my wife about Christ and the fact that he never actually healed anyone.  He always made it a point to tell them that it was their faith that healed them.  From this I looked back at Dumbo's feather and the Happy Guy and I realized that nothing had been taken away from me because nothing was ever given to me.  My aunt didn't give me happiness.  That came from within me.  The church didn't give me faith.  That too came from within myself.  So I never lost those things.  They've always been just below the surface of my anger and low self-esteem.  My wife always keeps me on the right path!
  Coming to those realizations made me remember a scene in my Nocent books in which a character who has ADHD falls into a coma after a run in with a zombie.  His father is able to communicate with him through a psychic medium.  The boy, Alex, is no longer stuck within his physical brain.  His spirit self has easy access to all his memories and a wealth of knowledge that he doesn't get to use while he's in the flesh.  This awareness of his hidden intelligence helps him to believe in himself more when he awakens from his coma. So in a way, it was never his brain that limited him, it was his lack of belief in himself.
  The Dalai Lama in his book, The Universe In A Single Atom, says Buddhism teaches that Enlightenment is the reaching of total awareness and focusing of attention.  ADD is the lack of focus of attention.  I know because I, myself have ADD.  If I am to believe what Buddha says, I can achieve focus through meditation. Right now, I take my Strattera, but maybe that's my new magic feather.