Hurry Up and Weight

Hurry Up and Weight

(this news item posted on March.11.2006)

Hurry Up:

My life is pretty out of control. I figure I'd go for a while without taking on any major projects and I could start to get caught up on the little things.

No such luck. The deluge of little things is unending and I can't even seem to get the least of them finished. Somehow I am good at getting a whole big intricate and complicated book written, but assign me the task of getting caught up on my email. Sigh. Even breaking it down into small chunks: Get caught up on last week's email. Hopeless.

I saw my friend Christina the other day and she asked me if I was still her friend anymore. Sincerely asked me. I think I owe her an email and a phone call and I haven't been to church to see her in a while.

So. Okay. It kinda sucks that we've come to live in a society where we'll move mountains and marshes to get to work on time, but we have to relegate our friends to "as time permits" status.

I'm really glad there are scheduled friend times in my life like the Housing co-op dinner and the dinner co-op at the Mass Ave community center or I'd probably have no friends that I ever see on a weekly basis.

Humanity can do better than this. What are we waiting for?

weight:

I stopped weighing myself many years ago. The two main reasons for this are: One, I really do believe in all of that stuff I say about weight being a rather unimportant determinant in terms of fitness. All of that stuff about muscle mass density vs. fat tissue density and things like water retention and bone structure make comparing your weight against others or even, sometimes, to what your own weight has been, rather meaningless. The second reason, well, my weight rarely ever changed. I had weighed around 250 pounds for nearly ten years. During that time I had gone through periods where I worked out a lot and got slimmer or became sedentary and put on winter layers or whatever and through it all I would weigh nearly the same.

So I haven't stepped on a scale in the last 5 years or so, and haven't wanted to.

I am suddenly curious.

Yesterday at work it occured to me that when I first started working at my job I used to stand on the deck plates at work and they would reluctantly sink down. Now I stand on the deck plates and they just sorta stay there. I have to stand on them and push against the wall or drive over them with the heavy machinery to get them to go down now.

I dunno. Seems like a clue that my weight may have changed significantly. It's still not like I care a whole ton one way or the other. My fitness level is really good these days. But... it just seems like a relevant piece of data to have. Y'know. Like in case a big bag of bunny rabits is sinking into a river of moltent lava and a group of people are hanging onto the other side of a rope thrown over a tree branch trying to counterweight and pull it back from the brink. You know, and the one fella on the end shouts out "We need at least 240 lbs more for this last little bit of rope we have!" I don't want to go volunteering for something I'm not qualified for, y'know, with a bag of bunnies on the line and all.

I <3 Buffalo!!!

(this news item posted on March.08.2006)

Yesterday was not an especially out of the ordinary day for me. By that I mean in a lot of ways it was my typical day. That's why I love Buffalo so much. So many of my days are so much more interesting/fun/spiffy-keen/entertaining than I generally expect days to be.

Started off, normally enough, waking up to the alarm clock blaring out WHLD, our new progressive radio station that I got to watch as it was born, grew, crawled, and took it's first steps. Spent hurried minutes wiching I wasn't always in such a rush in the morning, wishing I had a few minutes to call into the radio station and say something that would inspire people to think about things or remember something important.

Went to work and packed two and a half trucks full of tires while I rehearsed my new rap song to my captive tire audience. Came home lamenting how cash strapped I was at that particular moment (my wallet, completely empty, my coat pocket reduced to literally pennies).

I wasted a coupld hours with the crazy internet (which is getting to be worse than tv. I don't think we're using this thing right).

I went to the Dinner Co-op. I have already paid way in advance so I didn't have to worry about money. I could just sit down and have a great healthy meal that the awesome people in my community cooked. Lots of great familiar faces, plus, lately there've been old friends that I haven't seen in a long time and new people to meet. PLUS, then as we were standing around waiting for food, my friend Aaron paid me some money he had owed me on one of my books that he bought a few weeks ago. Yay! Don't have to wait for payday to eat or ride over to the money co-op.

So then there's this new Hip Hop assemblage that's forming. The attendance last night was not encouraging, but, whatevs. There are lots of really great people associated with that group and it's gonna do great things. So we were told to bring some Art to share or something and have a go around and present what it is that we do in Hip Hop. So, it was my turn and I asked the good professor Kush B if he wouldn't mind breakin me off one of those beats. And then I KILLT it.

Buffalo has many great beatboxers. It's so awesome to be at a Mass Ave Project open mic and just call up one of my friends and collabo over a funky beat. But Kush is somewhat of a beatboxing institution. He's amazingly amazing in an amazing way. He kept it simple so I could just go all lyrical and what not, but I rank it up there with the time I got to act with Manny Fried or open for Ralph Nader.

Buffalo has all kinds of CRAZYness around every corner. It's a really hard place to live. But it's always worth it at harvest time. Sometime's I can't believe I get to live here. Of all the places I could have been born. Good job mom. Always thinkin.

Photojournal: The Journey to Work

Photojournal: The Journey to Work

(this news item posted on March.01.2006)

This is the scene outside my front door.


At the foot of the stairs is my trusty bike that has transported me more'n a thousand miles in the last couple years. It was a really good gift from a really good friend JimW.


A block away is the High School that I attended 18 to 22 years ago.


A couple miles toward work and I pass this play area for a day care center. The children don't get to play on grass, but at least they have colored the artificial surface green for them, to sort of almost remind them of grass. There is a busy highway that runs behind the playground so that their developing little lungs can get the monoxide that they need. Also there is a busy street that might as well be a highway that I ride my bike on to ensure that they get car exhaust from both directions. Plus there's a boat shop attached to the day care center for bonus random chemicals.


About a half mile later I get to ride along the mighty Niagara River. In previous years the river used to freeze over in the winter. But that hasn't happened for the last few years.


This sprawling industrial fascility is where I work. We cook rubber and mold it into tires and then I throw them into big trucks.


Before I started throwing tires I used to work as a security guard in a little tiny shack (pictured here). A very nice little 8 by 8 cell where I would do 8 hours of time at a time for 8 dollars an hour.

An okay job for a while, but I'm glad not to be doing that any more.

Relations: Audiobooks

Relations: Audiobooks

(this news item posted on February.18.2006)

I would like to start recording Relations so that people can listen to it, and I'm asking for your help.

In October of 1994 I began writing Relations: book 1 - McEmpire. I had just written a book called the Autobiography of Alex Mead: How to Care About Humans which I wanted people to read and be inspired to think about how we could treat each other better. It had that effect on some of the people who read it, but it was available as an ebook only and most people would tell me that they were fans of books on paper and needed to hold a book in their hands to really get into it.

So I put some serious thought into what I wanted to write and commit to paper. I had been researching corporate malfeasance and the tactics and lies of their Public Relations firms for quite a while --reading some very detailed and academic books on the subject-- and I wondered if I could write a story, some fiction that could make all of these problems easily understood and spell out how horrible it all is for human beings and the interconnected web of life.

People who said that they would read a book of mine if I put it on paper were mostly true to their word; I sold a lot more copies of Relations book 1 than I sold of my autobiography eBook. But now I am encountering a new problem. There are so many people that tell me that they are interested in what I've written but they don't have any time to read any book at all.

So I want to record an audiobook. I want people to be able to listen to Relations driving in their car, or online, or in their MP3 player. As the people who've read the two books well know, there are more than 100 characters in these books. So I was really hoping to get a lot of voices in on this thing. I'd really like to take a lot of care in matching voices to characters and make this realistic fiction that much more realistic.

You wanna help? Let me know.

If you have a particular favorite character, especially minor characters, and you believe you sound like them or embody them, please let me know.

If you have an interest in reading but are unfamiliar with that characters and I know what you sound like, let me know.

If you are unfamiliar with the characters, there are free chapters of the book available on the internet at my website
http://www.AMProSoft.com/books

If I don't know what you sound like, feel free to record a voice message and email it to me.

And thank you to the people who have already volunteered to help out on this.

Peace & Love,
-Alex

Beer, Radio & Mutual of Omaha

Beer, Radio & Mutual of Omaha

(this news item posted on February.15.2006)

So, I was all set to get lots of website work done that I've owed everybody for ages... when I was suddenly beseiged by...

Powerful Distractions

Radio:
Two great new radio experiences have just sprung up. Seemingly out of nowhere, though they've both been around for quite some time.

fuuse.com had been without their live stream for quite a while. It's sort of a community and radio station for Unitarian Universalist young adults, so for months and months it's been a radio station without any radio station to it. But suddenly it's back, better than ever, and I've listened to much more of it than I've had time to.

Then, our local "community" type radio station has been taken over, sort of by us, and so now it is a 24 hour Progressive Talk format station with lots more awesome Pacifica programming and a lot of Air America talk show and such. I've listened to more of it than I've had time for.

Beer:
No, I haven't taken up drinking. My 30 years on the wagon continue. My roommate, however, an individual who agreed not to drink in the computer room (but often agrees to things with no intention of honoring his agreements) got bombed and passed out in the computer room. My Rage Aginst the Machine CD sitting in a pool of beer. Beer poured into the computer keyboard so that it no longer works and so that I lost a whole day off completely unable to do any computer work. And then also the carpet still smells like beer and probably will for some time to come making it hard to concentrate.

Yeah. So, that didn't help much.

Work:
And, of course, I've still been working long hours every day trying to get caught up to my out-of-control financial debt nightmare.

Did you ever used to watch Mutual of Omaha. You know, that old nature show where Jim used to get out and wrestle the aligator. I got to be the aligator yesterday at work.

Every once in a great while, some management type guy in a button down blue shirt will lead a tour through the warehouse. Usually work is endless hours of solitude in the back of a dark trailer, so it's really odd when people suddenly appear.

It's also really odd when people start talking about you in the 3rd person when you're right next to them. You begin to feel like an exhibit of sorts.

"See the way he throws those two tires at the same time. Those tires weigh 40 pounds a piece!" (he was mistaken, they were much lighter than that, but it sounded good)

"This particular one used to work in the Guard Shack. Working back here is probably a real step up for him." (Yeah, doubling your income can generally be viewed as a "step up", but a simple way to find out might be to ask him. He actually speaks English in addition to his tire throwing abilities.)

Okay, so now that I've gotten myself a new keyboard and a new day off from work and I've turned the radio off and written a journal entry I think I'm gonna actually get some work done. Wish me luck.