October 14th, 2004
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Bad work offset by unbelievable music
Things are kind of broken right now. Well, not broken, it’s more like, watching a NASCAR race with the leader cooking around Daytona at 160 mph on two blown out tires: for the most part, things keep zipping by and it’s all pretty boring, but from time to time your eyes come into focus on the actual car and you’re like, “How the hell is he still moving?”
I got less than five hours sleep last night, and sat at my desk under the loft for a full fifteen minutes after waking up, literally arguing with myself about the rationality of getting up at this time again. But I think I was so exhausted at that point that I didn’t have the strength to get back up into bed, so after the groggy anger wore off I took a shower and got to work at eight. Fourteen hours later, I wasn’t really surprised that I didn’t leave at 6:30 like I swore I would. At 9:23 it took all six of my jets to run and catch the next train home, avoiding an excruciating twenty minute wait. Anyway, I swear (again) that I will go home at 6:30 tomorrow. If I can get something done other than core data structure redesigns thanks to changing specs and breaks in the communication line. Whatever.
I have my beer (which I tell myself saves my sanity), and uh… oh yeah, I said things were broken. When I say things of course I mean Parasite Eve 2 (as I knew deep down all along), and I cannot finish the game, much like Johnny, thanks to a seemingly flawless looking CD that just can’t load past a certain point. Of course there is no chance Square is going to give me another one since I bought it as a gift from my mother at a Circuit City in Virginia in 2000 (even though it really is the publisher’s responsibility to cover faulty discs). I’d ask my friends at Square-Enix, but I know the answer I’d get, something along the lines of the US and Japanese branches not being related hardly at all in terms of employees getting product for whatever reason. We can’t even get any more copies of Gitaroo Man. So, the upshot is I’m mildly pissed and not knowing what to do as I really don’t have the energy to start another game now. And I’m all out of Next Gen and Chobits episodes to watch, so it’s really a scavenging hunt to find something else to finish (if only I had Quantum Leap on DVD).
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In other, more positive news I listened to Rabbit in the Moon today at work and it gave me wings. I don’t think I would have finished as early [ha..ha..] as I did without it. Seventy-five percent of the tracks on FlooriD.A. are decent. Actually, they’re so incredibly decent that you end up playing them all like 2.4 times each, which accumulates to more than an EP’s worth of jive (if you’re willing to fiddle with the audio player).
Rabbit in the Moon sprung from the great, invincible titan of my electronic birth that is Humate, and it grew at a time when I really needed the music. Fortunately RITM was so much more than a quiet companion. In fact it turbo-charged my mitochondria and kicked my synapses into generating such an intense recoil that I swear I lived three years in the period of fourteen weeks.
When you have a chance, listen to the “Handled with Care”, and “AK 1200′s Epic Lounge” mixes. If you are like me, you will gradually grow a stencil across the nerves in your brain, and every blink of the eye will overlay another hollow scene of gazing up at meticulously shorn trees brushing the sky between the interstate north and southbound lanes. There are pictures in my mind so tangible and fixed that from them I could master a photograph by hand, and you may stare motionless and tranquil, in awe of the incalculable detail. These pieces go hand in hand with Hybrid‘s “Finished Symphony“, as they will undoubtedly become subjects of my filmmaking at some further point in my career. But those stories are for another day.
