spacematic.net

I’m trying to keep my word that I’d put up creative stuff here. Here’s my first delivery. A piece of music called “A Midnight Fever Dream of His Most High Honor the Disconsolate General: A Heartworming Dirge of Unimaginable Melancholy For the Sake of Making You Feel Worse About Something Than You Probably Should.” There’s definitely some groovy moping potential to this piece.

So why do I write stuff like this? Well, it’s not all like this. I like all sorts of music, and when I set out to do this one, I decided to arrange for instruments I’ve never worked with before, with guitar eventually taking the spotlight, of course. But this was a fun musical exercise and an opportunity for me to try something odd and interesting. As a disclaimer: The music on this site is not necessarily written and posted for commercial appeal. If I were really serious about it all, I’d have this stuff tracked, mixed, utterly dominated and signed off on by professionals. Instead of all that, what you’ll see here are my favorite musical noodlings.

The term “High End Audio Artifacts” refers to the strangeness that creeps in when one compresses digital music files. All musical postings here will have a “High-End Audio Artifacts” title. Take a listen:

Click Here to Listen or Download!

And here’s the legal stuff:

A Midnight Fever Dream of His Most High Honor the Disconsolate General by Mike Griffin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.spacematic.net.

People have been giving me a particular and peculiarly consistent nugget of advice for a long time now. They say “Go out and see a thing or two! You’re all cooped-up in that damned schoolhouse, and the world’s pretty big. And no, it doesn’t really matter where you go, as long as you’ve never been there before. For Godsakes, get out there!”

So when a friend of mine called me about a month and a half ago with the unique proposition of seeing Porcupine Tree in Los Angeles, I quickly said yes. For those of you who don’t know, snappy acceptance of such an offer is of late, at least, uncharacteristic of me. I used to be far more adventurous than I am now. I don’t know exactly what triggered the shift, but somewhere around the thirty-year mark, I stopped seeking “newness.”

It’s not that I didn’t want to have any fun – quite the contrary. My decision to move to Little Five Points was one  based on the idea of having a base of operations for the entertainment of my closest friends. After all, L5P had been a favorite haunt of mine since the Mid-Nineties, when my band, The Well Drinkers, practiced in a warehouse called “The Black Box” off Krog Street. We used to pay a couple hundred dollars per month for the pleasure of having a stuffy little room to shatter our eardrums in. That very same warehouse now houses “Kevin Rathbun Steak,” and you’ll be lucky if you get out of there for the same couple hundred dollars in a single night. I must admit, however, that Rathbun serves up a damned spectacular steak. If you’re in the neighborhood and have the appropriate carnivorous cravings, it’s the place to go. I recommend that you dip your chosen cow in truffle butter. It’s like sin drenched in extravagance. Sure, the guilt’s there. But what delicious guilt it is.

In 2004, I moved back from Destin, Florida and set up my base of operations atop the hill across from Variety Playhouse – old Bass High School. Dad’s high school football team used to play these guys back in the day, and I was now living in their auditorium. Strange days, indeed! Stranger, still, that my friends who I so wished to entertain in this little party district were rapidly (not to mention, prematurely) slowing down. They just didn’t want to leave the house anymore. When I invited the old band and other friends down this way, they greeted the proposition with the same anxiety one would a visit to the dentist. This , of course, made me sad. Such friendships became remarkably one-sided, with me trekking always into the ‘burbs to visit the people I knew and loved. Whenever I did, all they wanted to do is drink until closing time and cab it back to the house, where it was recommended that I stay the night. This was the point at which I realized I had less and less in common with those who I once considered my best friends. Without the music to hold things together, old bonds wore thin and eventually broke.

I dedicated the next couple of years to making new friends in the neighborhood I now called Home. Item number one on the agenda was to procure a critter. I found Allie, a Cairn Terrier, and it was through her that I was introduced to a neighborhood of like-minded dog people and others who were either dog-tolerant or at least ambivalent. Regardless, the dog got me outside and on the street, and this was a boon to the recovery of my social life. But as time moved on, I found myself driving less, and I was content with the conveniences only city living could afford. The trouble with such contentment is that you risk drawing ever tighter boundary lines around your world, until you exist almost entirely within a ten block radius. God forbid you find gainful employment within the same damned building… if such a thing happens, as it happened with me, it’s nearly all over.

So when Steve called me, I quickly accepted. Yet,  I had to fight my instincts not to go. There were a million reasons to stay at home, including work. But hell, it had been two years since I had even been to the beach. Aside from that, I had only taken a couple sick days, and then another couple to attend my grandmother’s funeral. It was time I took some kind of vacation.

And what a vacation it turned out to be! Steve introduced me to some great friends, we got to hang out in recording studio houses and eat 7-11 breakfast sandwiches in Beverly Hills. His friend got us after-show passes at Porcupine Tree, where I caught glimpses of people I admired, and even got to wave and give sheepish hellos to a couple of honest-to-God legends. It all sounds silly, I know, but it was a blast. I got to walk down Hollywood Boulevard, eat at the In & Out Burger,  find myself up to no good in Tijuana, stick my toes in the Pacific in Malibu and take pictures of the wildlife on the Santa Monica Pier. All of this (and much, much more) happened in only four days.

It all made me hungry to… I don’t know… DO SOMETHING. I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. I have a great life, I have even better friends, and I have an interesting tech job where I’m constantly challenged to develop creative solutions to complex problems. But something about this little trip woke me up, made me ambitious and got me working on this crazy web site again. Is it hubris? Perhaps megalomania? A little too much love of  watching myself tap-tap-tap on a keyboard? I’ll admit to at least some symptoms of all those maladies. But what’s wrong with wanting to express yourself? And what’s wrong with hoping that someone might actually want to read it? I’ve been down on myself for far too long.

For now, I find myself two Chimay Blues deep into a rambling blog entry at Corner Tavern, with less than ten minutes to go for September 28th, 2009. Is it time well spent? I’m not sure it even matters. What I do know is that I took some time to do something I enjoy. That’s what this site is for – all the stuff I like. So I might hint at putting up entries of music and short stories, as I used to do here, but something tells me that I might be a little more serious about such things going forward. Time to think a little more about that, and then do something about it. Good God, I salute you if you made it this far. Thanks for listening.  –mike

Oh! Will the gods show no mercy on me? I’ve had one hell of a week. As you may or may not know, the website has been undergoing some drastic code and cosmetic changes as of late. I mistakenly thought that I needed some kind of content management front end for features other than the Electro-Journal. I auditioned several PHP content management solutions, only to find them a little too demanding or a little too limiting for my taste.
After much deliberation, I decided that this, the spacematic Digital Electro-Journal should be the front page! Brilliant. Why wasn’t I happy with this solution in the first place? Probably because I got too big for my britches and thought that blogs aren’t really sites, but rather popular components of larger networks of essays, bulletin boards, movie features and on and on. Too big for my britches, indeed! SDEJ is the reason people come to this site in the first place. No need to get all complex and make people search out content in a complex manglement system. The platform I’m using, Movable Type, is plenty powerful enough to deliver the information I need. Not to mention, I’ve dolled up this template somethin’ sexy! So for once, my better judgment kicked in, only to be squished by my stupidity and impatience.
You see, I was in a big hurry to get this over with and remove the current installation from the former “spacematic.net/journal” directory and migrate it over to the domain name; no back-slashes, no “journal” to qualify its existence. All should have gone well. Eh. All didn’t. I ended up losing my entries. I had to go to Google to find cached versions of my pages just so I could copy and paste the text back into Movable Type. As you can see, some entries were saved and some weren’t. With all this woe going around, don’t allow me to mislead you. THIS WAS NOT MOVABLE TYPE’S FAULT. This was a user error issue. This was a dunce-cap moment on a grand scale. The whole class watched as Ms. Dontyaknowbetter grabbed me by the ear and twisted until I rose from out of my seat. They all laughed as I was crowned King of Duns Men and given a corner of the classroom to rule from a stool.
Which brings me to today. I finally got the saved entries back up. My profile page and the Monkeytronic Museum should be back again in short order. The only pain I now feel is a residual sting due to the loss of two very long essays of which I was very proud. I thought today wouldn’t be a day for writing. I thought I would give the Journal a rest. So I opted to brew some tea. After about ten minutes of watching tea brew, I realized that I was bored. So I took Miss Allison out for a walk. That’s her in the picture above.
Watching a small dog walk down a busy street is some real fun. Their responses to people, their apprehension of holes in the sidewalk… just what’s going on in that little head? I know one thing for sure. Pigeons are the enemy. Pigeons must be prevented from flying. Pigeons must die. And so should the four-wheeled pink and blue rolling beasts that capture babies, known to you and me as strollers.
The best thing about Allie is that she’s never met a stranger. She can reliably coax a smile from the face of a passing pedestrian. Those who do not smile obviously prevent the creeping grin consciously, and with great effort. They are the bastards; they live in a world so gray and callous that smiling at a little dog carries the penalty of castration. Brian Warner is watching you Goths, Townies, sundry Poseurs! Let’s just face it, a little dog smiles at you – you can’t help but smile back. It’s not a social faux-pas. It’s not a put-on. I think the reaction is caused somewhere in the amygdala, hard-wired. You can’t do much about it unless you choose to clench your ass cheeks until you’re in dire hemorrhoidal pain. Thankfully those who do this are few, otherwise I would start to feel like a jerk for unleashing the cause of ass-clenching epidemics on the streets of Atlanta. Vampire and Suicide Girl wannabe’s aside, walking with Allie is a hoot and a half. And so when I returned from our walk, I was in a much better mood.
And Viola! A new entry for today. That’s how I leave it for now, folks. More to report later. –mike

So now we have almost everything in place at the new home of spacematic.net and soon it will again be business as usual. Fine by me – I’m done with all this fancy HTML and XML and CSS and whatever else haunts me in my sparse dreams when I finally get rest. But it’s best to work on these things from the ground up and learn the language of the interweb, lest I be swindled by ne’er-do-wells wishing to rip me off for something I can do myself. It’s all about discipline, I guess. Tired of my rambling for today? Good. So am I.
In parting, rest assured that the site has not been abandoned. It’s just that I have to get all this technical crap out of the way so I can go back to the actual writing. Still a work in progress. Moving’s always a bitch, whether in the real world or on the web. See ya later! –Mike

It is both an honor and a beverage to be blogging to you again. I have to give a little nod and plug to the people who made it possible for me to maintain my posts from the beach. There’s a cool little Internet café called “Phil & Lynn’s Place.” Here’s the URL: http://www.philandlynnsplace.com. Something like this has been sorely missing on the West end of the beach. Hell, it’s just been missing from the area. Thanks, guys! If you find yourself down here with a laptop and no place to go WiFi, go here. It has a very home-like atmosphere, while also providing really good Kona and several new Dell workstations for those who don’t have a machine of their own.
I got a lot of work done yesterday. I spent my first few hours holed up in the Panama City Public Library, checking out ancient newspapers and books too fragile to be in visitors’ hands. The upstairs “Local History” section is small, but packed with all kinds of records, including family histories and plats of land that have exchanged hands over the years. I also learned a great deal about the ancient history of the area. Maybe it’s not fun for everyone. But for me, it’s like being a kid in a candy store.
After research, I thought it would be a great day for photography. I drove down to Seaside, where to my surprise, I found a Jittery Joe’s. Damn. Of all the places. For those of you who ever lived in Athens, I believe this to be the only franchised store outside Clarke County. And it’s not just Joe’s in name. It also has Jittery Joe’s Coffee!! Woo-hoo. The atmosphere is markedly different than the dingy, dark retro hall that used to sit next to the Engine Room; but when you’re at the beach, how can you really complain, silly? Cool is cool, no matter how you slice it.
I notice that a few of you have decided to download my tunes. I’ve already received emails regarding people’s desire to know what I’m singing on “Because Of You.” Here you go:

spacematic
“Because Of You”
�2002-2005 Jon Michael Griffin

“Beneath the burning ferrite winged heels of speed,
A whirling, twirling bastard burns and flares and breathes.
The first of daughters’ acid cotton candy shines,
Her little neighbor sister’s radio sounds all right.
Chorus:
“Because of you we cannot break the chain,
(We move in circles)
Because of you we travel circles.
Because of you we know the difference between darkest nights,
(Thank God We’re Here)
You make the morning see the day.
“Marvin’s face is red ’cause he isn’t even real,
‘My God, it’s full of stars’ and crazy cult appeal.
We drive our cars by its name,
It sounds like such a bad thing,
The King of the Deep’s far out, hey he’s beat!
Rocky’s knocked right out in eight!
Chorus, Bridge…
Chorus:
Because of you we cannot break the chain,
(we travel circles)
Because of you we travel circles.
Because of you we know the difference between darkest nights,
(thank God we’re here)
You make the morning see the day.
Because of you it all begins and ends,
It returns and sends, it totally depends,
You make the pagans pray and in the Northern Lights,
You even burn at night.”
There.
A few people have ventured to guess that this song is about God. Sorry, no cigar. Keep working on it. Although the choruses sound conspicuously reverent, you’re off the mark. Of course, God makes an apearance in the song, and of that I’m certainly not ashamed, but you guys gotta give this one another crack to figure out what the heck my caterwauling shrieks mean.
In a passing nod to the news today, Prince Harry better get his act together. As much as Americans hate Nazis, the Brits should hate them even worse. After all, they got the tar bombed out of them by those goose-stepping eugenics freaks. Now they’ve got an heir to the crown clowning around in one of their precious little outfits. I know Harry’s just being an adorable buffoon, but that modern English gentleman stereotype is starting to get old. The world already has a Hugh Grant. We’re trying to ignore him. Why the Hell do Americans even care about the Royals? That’s like a three-ring circus stopping in its tracks to watch Yakov Smirnoff. Okay that’s low. Yakov’s mural at Ground Zero was truly touching. But I can hate Gallagher all I want. So strike “Mr. …In Russia,…” and replace him with that melon-smashing goon. Go back to the Eighties and stay off my TV! –Mike

As I posted yesterday, I’m off to the little beach house in Sunnyside to do research on the book. The new iBook will be coming along with me. I was itching for something new ever since Strong Bad got his new Lappy 486. I was jealous. This was my first big Apple Store retail purchase, so I entered the boutique looking like a vagrant. I was unshaven, untucked and slack-jawed. For the first few minutes, nobody bothered me. Exactly what I wanted. Then I lingered by the product I was ready to buy. Two or three sales people passed by, probably assuming that I was a tire-kicking XP junkie looking for a benchmark performance debate.
After about ten more minutes surfing the MacWorld website, a curious sales associate approached me. I don’t know, maybe he thought I was a secret shopper, or something worse. He asked if I needed anything in an offhand ‘working my way around the store’ patrolling way.
“Yeah. Since these were most recently revised in mid-October, is there any chance that Jobs will release a new version with a discernable speed bump next week at the Expo?”
“Well sir, I’m not allowed to comment on that, although what you say certainly sounds as though it comes from some experience with the product line.”
Apple has their associates trained well, that’s for sure. With all the lawsuits over trade secrets what-not, I don’t really blame them. The associate looked like he smelled a fish.
“Okay, I’ll buy this then.” I knew it was what I wanted. I only went into the boutique because I didn’t want to wait the two days for it to ship to my door. I wanted my new little traveling companion immediately. The associate’s eyes bugged at my declaration. Then he bit his lip and held up a finger. He sold me the Apple Care package to go with it and then hopped into the back to get my prize. Probably his easiest sale that day.
Mom got the old clamshell G3 with the permadead battery. Computer newbies like her seem to be more keen on trackpads than mice. For some reason, they seem friendlier. Perhaps they’re more intuitive. She had my old PowerMac 6400 desktop with a dusty one-button mouse for years. It just sat there in all its beige sadness, wondering if anyone was ever going to turn it on again. No one ever did.
So on the road I go, with my first functional laptop in years. I’ll try blogging from the road, if I can find free WiFi. Of course, there’s always Starbucks. There’s just something slightly glossy and ripoff-ish about that whole T-Mobile pay service they have. Atlanta’s pretty good when it comes to Wi-Fi. They have a slew of free hotspots in neighborhood coffee shops and other businesses.
The weather in Florida looks like it might be nice. Pity I’ll be in a library for most of Tuesday. Then I’m off to a historical society or two, followed by a visit to Grayton Beach State Park late Wednesday. Thursday afternoon, I’ll be in a tiny town called Bonifay to visit my grandmother. There is a Scrabble grudge that must be settled. This time around, she will attempt to upset my previous three game winning streak. Thursday and Friday, expect nothing from the blog.
For those of you who bookmark the blog only, I have a special treat. If you click “Back To Spacematic” in the sidebar, you will notice that I published some tunes to the front page. Listening to them and grabbing them for your own clandestine auditory habits is as easy as following the instructions next to the file links. Right-Click to “Save As.” In the case of the AAC file formats, they will download as .sit (Stuffit) files. Browsers have difficulty recognizing AAC and M4a formats. Both MSIE and Safari tried to render the files as html pages, and they weren’t pretty. So stuffing them was the best option. The mp3’s are pretty straightforward and should play in the browser if you fail to right-click and save.
Wow. New music on spacematic.net. What’s this world coming to? I’ll try to figure that out on the drive to and fro. If you don’t hear from me for the remainder of the week, have a good one. Enjoy the tunes. –Mike

So I finally got to #100. That’s a hell of a lot of writing about absolutely nothing. I’m going to take this pseudo-monumental opportunity to divulge part of my secret plan to you all. In the coming months, I will post a smattering of entries regarding progress on my manuscript “The Symphony Of Irrelevance.” If you’re so inclined to read about my tribulations and renoberations regarding this topic, you will find each vignette regarding such matters as “Cadences Of Absurdity.”
“Symphony” is a project I started in late 1995, and it has plagued me ever since. Progress in college suffered for this little demon of mine, and after two years of coffee, cigarettes and periodic isolation I emerged with a working (although sophomoric) story arc. In the years 1998 and 1999, I was sidetracked by varying degrees of personal grief combined with the distraction of having to decide what I wanted to do for a living. Then in 1999, I was distracted by the promise of new media and music.
In 2001, I was afforded the unique opportunity of both lots of money and time. From then up until now, I have pursued music, Web endeavors and historical research on the panhandle of Florida. I have learned a lot. For myself, I have learned that music is a collaborative effort, best enjoyed when writing with others. I believe that my chances for finding another band like “The Well Drinkers” to enjoy such collaboration with are waning fast. So I’ve had to re-think where best to put my talents in order to make them work for me in the context of solo projects. I came to the conclusion that writing is where it’s at. Writing is something I excel at alone. So I’m approaching “Symphony” again, in hopes of setting a blueline date of Mid-June 2005.
Of course, the blog will continue, as it provides me daily inspiration and disciplines me to some extent. spacematic.net forces me to write everyday. For those of you who enjoy my music, I assure you, I haven’t given up on that. I’m just pushing it to the back so this damn book can finally see the light of day.
This revelation didn’t come easily. I think that my friend Jarred and his mom were the straws that broke this camel’s back. At our yearly “Bucket Shop” affair, an event comprised of a great number of friends who choose to gather and catch up on the year, Marianne bluntly attacked and cornered me with “Why the Hell isn’t your damn book in the stores? What are you doing that’s so much more important than that?” When I couldn’t think of anything, I began to consider the real possibility of getting this book out of my system once and for all. It has been nagging me for nearly a decade now. That’s a long time to simply sit on things. Jarred and his mom were both given manuscripts upon completion of the original work in ‘97. They actually took the time to mark and edit, and most importantly read the story. They believed in it. Why didn’t I? I think it’s because a couple of the characters parallel real-life friendships that fell apart ingloriously. I tied my real-world sense of defeatism to the text. That was my mistake.
I rewarded the renewed effort to make amends to “Symphony” by purchasing a new iBook. This week, I will be carrying it to Florida to do a tad bit more research on the area. If blog entries are sparse, it will only be due to the fact that I can’t find an appropriate WiFi hotspot to connect to.
To those who are fearing the blog will change focus and become some sort of consistent introspection on the mind of a starving artist, rest assured. I’m no more willing to let you in on the daily troubles of my writing than an accountant is to screaming about budget woes in a a bar. I’ll report on the book when there’s significant progress or when there’s a clip or two I’d like to share. Most days at spacematic.net will proceed as they always have, with silly and over-analytical essays about the world from my perspective. Get thee behind me, Satan! I’m gonna finish this damn thing if it kills me. –Mike

If you’ve kept up with me this far and held out hope that spacematic.net’s not dead, then you know July is pretty much forfeit – crap, dead, poo, common detritus – and I make no apologies. July was a creative dead zone for me, reserved for the type of fun remembered from grade school summer breaks and two year workforce sabbaticals… wait. That’s me right now! What the hell else do I do? I can’t really go into details. All you need to know is that I’m back now and not all of this pitiful website neglect was my fault.
If you’re a decent and normal human being, my absence on the web will not have made too great an impact on your day-to-day life. If it has, let me be a good virtual friend and extend my virtual sympathies.
Now on to explanations. First off was a week-long visit to my grandmother in FL. Then there was a wedding in Charleston, SC. Glenn and Jo finally got married after nine years of vapor-locking old fogies and keeping friends mumbling low wagers on a likelihood of vows ever being exchanged. And I’ve got all the gory, silly and drunken details. In fact, that’s my next order of business. Get the photos up and captioned for the delight and amusement of all. Yet more incriminating evidence against the questionable lifestyle choices of Mr. Steve Tatum. (To any relatives doing subversive intelligence work on the history or overall worth of Mr. Tatum, keep in mind he is a fine young man and a pillar of the community. He is a rock.) Aside from all the traveling, my hosting service experienced a massive Denial of Service attack, rendering any access by you or me impossible. It was a nailbiting few days as this attack raged on through the code… I was all but certain that my log entries had been belched out the servers, all my hard work lost forever. As soon as everything went back to normal, I was quick to do a backup. As my last defense, I must say that in retrospect I’ve written a lot of crap over the past few months. You can’t expect me to be that creative and not hit a dry spell every so often, right?
Whew. Now that all of this is out of the way, I’m back on the web for a while to come. Visit! Enjoy! Listen to me gripe and moan over life’s trivial perturbances. That’s really a word. I’m almost certain I’m not using it correctly, but you get the idea. Back to work for me. See you tomorrow! –Mike

As I have stated before, you cannot start a weblog without being a little narcissistic. I started this project to make my opinion known. But as with all things done for public viewership, my real intention was to start discussion about what I blog with strangers. In walks a stranger who’s stranger than I could have ever imagined… Izquierda Enrique Quantum. He has single-handedly revitalized the message board, starting with a post declaring me to be the true “Zorro The Gay Wav.” Go read the posts, for Izquierda is a master of his/her craft, though I cannot quite put my finger on what that craft is. I know it involves mischief, and that’s good enough. I fear there will be more from this mysterious respondant. I fear it like a fox. Go ahead, Izquierda. Do your thing. Inform us. –Mike

Like the title says, people: Happy Cinco De Mayo! Hope you have a good one. I myself don’t celebrate this holiday with as much fervor as, say – Saint Patrick’s Day, New Year’s Eve, Halloween, Arbor Day or Having A Really Really Good Day. I’m content to do some leisurely grocery shopping, watch a little tee vee, read up on the news and settle down with a light dinner and a nice, tall glass of Scotch Whiskey. Why Scotch? I’m really not sure. I know it helps me get to sleep. Problem is, it also helps me STAY asleep. Bad tradeoff for an otherwise stellar payoff.
Once more, like the title says: my first complaints have come to light. It seems that I had posted a picture a couple weeks ago that raised the ire of a person or two. I’ll forego the particulars of the picture, saying only that it was a tiny bit provocative… but not by the standards of what’s on television most nights. The only problem with the complaints was that I never heard them from the source! I heard them whispered in corners by third party sources who swore they would have their sex removed from them in the most horrible fashion one could ever imagine if the information leaked out. I really don’t enjoy trying to be mean, and I certainly don’t like to be the cause of unnecessary mental anguish. I DO enjoy good-natured persiflage now and then, however. But the merriment that I thought would be to the delight of all involved ended up making me look like a ravenous, insensitive shutter-thug. In coming days, I guess I’ll post an “Image Policy.” The jist of it will be that if you are in a picture you don’t want published and see it on my site, lemme know. It will come down. Additionally, if you say “no web pics this time,” I’ll oblige. I certainly don’t want people freaking out. I just want people to have fun. And if it’s not fun for you guys, it’s not fun for me. But somebody has to tell me something, or else I’ll never know! As for the current picture in question, it’s down, never to grace this site’s pages again. Adios, silly little picture!
–Mike