On Suicidal Tendencies

Let's be clear, I'm keeping this conversation far away from actual self-destructive impulses. It's more in the vein of the vintage LA Skate Punk above. Or, possibly in even closer parallel, if you're a pop-alt fan, maybe you'd prefer Motion City Soundtrack's "Let's Get Fucked Up and Die."

It's just recognizing the poetry of a satisfying ending in a well-told life story. As much as it might seem sad for a few years, how awesome would it be to die an old man, exactly on your birthday? It's so … even. People would be amazed after passively, accidentally passing by the tomb stone. A person at one funeral, unsure of what to do or how to feel, or how to act so as to not seem like he is unsure of what to do or how to feel, might notice it, and find a simple joy or even enlightenment in a miraculously improbable set of dates scrawled into my adjacent limestone marker.

Or perhaps I just mean that desire when looking out over a perilous height and sense the almost overwhelming impulse to jump (High Place Anxiety). Again, not in the truthful sense. I frequently consider jumping in front of a moving bus or some other such decidedly fatal notion. So long as it still seems a gross overreaction and ineffectual solution to any predicament, I can rest assured that I am safe, mostly sane, and still at least desirous of continued living.

More simplistically, today I felt a slight impulse to not post a blog update, in fact to never post again.

Because I had 1,221 entries already posted, and that's such a nice, linear palindrome.

Again, it's the bus. Obviously I'm posting something, likely something half-assed and weak, since I tend to write around midnight. However, the facts that I wish to continue my blog, to earn revenue from it, hell, just to continue an uninterrupted line of over one thousand blog posts all still seem pretty reasonable.

So you get another post about digital career suicide. And some fun music.

On Motion City Soundtrack

I really enjoy listening to music by the band Motion City Soundtrack.

It's very poppy, electric, high-energy sonics mixed with the incredibly depressed, vibrant lyrics of a brilliant drunkard. Basically, I imagine it's something like what you would get if you were to give Morrissey a case of Red Bull and an English degree.

But the funny thing is I only ever end up listening to half their music.

I don't mean collectively, I mean that on each of their four albums I religiously play only one half before getting bored/busy/distracted.

It's weird that this is so consistent, true, but it's weirder still that they're not all the same halves.

Of their debut album "I Am the Movie" I only ever really play the first track. I am familiar with many of the other ones, but this is not an album I typically listen too. If you were to pick which part of the album I am most familiar with, it would be the middle half.

Their second album (and my favorite) "Commit This to Memory" I thoroughly enjoy almost all of. Unfortunately, the time in my life I listened to this album fairly non-stop was also a period where I was walking quite a bit and on a fixed schedule. The result was I would play the slightly happier first songs as I walked out the door and generally stop listenning at some point though the day before the second half of the disc. Even though my favorite MCS song is on the second half here, I usually just skipped to it when I was in the mood and then start over. I liked the first half best, though to be fair if you replaced the last two track with the couple I like from "I Am the Movie" I probably would have a full album.

"Even If It Kills Me" was released in 2007 and I'm not sure I've ever listened passed the first half. Their are a few good bits but nothing very astounding.

However the new album "My Dinosaur Life" is pretty hilarious. The brilliant lyrics are back without feeling to stilted. It's a less forced album and, again, I could do without most of the middle half. I have the deluxe edition with iTunes exclusive track and bonus disc, so I've stopped listening to pretty much the entire first half of the album. Now I start at the end, finish it and then go straight into the bonus acoustic versions of the first tracks I did like.

Essentially, I like Motion City Soundtrack up, down, inside and around the edges.

But if you put on an entire album I might shoot myself.