Unorthodox Urban Rooftop Beekeeper

About Me

This is where, if I were a tru My$p4c3 ux0r, I w0uld li3k, t0t4lly wr1t3 4b0ut h0w gn4rk1ll3r I 4m us1ng h4wes0m3 gr4mm4rx0rz, d00d! Wutz?
Seriously, fuck that shit. And fuck you too if you write like that and think it's cool.
If I told you half the things I've done, you wouldn't believe it. Not bragging, just saying.
These days, I read poetry. I try to understand parts of Buddhism. I drink coffee for fun. I watch squirrels and bunnies every chance I get. I do yoga in parks while I hang out with a hyper kid who needs to burn off energy.
I'm trying to be a good role model for a little girl who's six years old and it's weird to me - I never thought I'd be any kind of a father, just a caretaker for foster / adopted kids. I struggle with it every day, but I feel like I'm doing about as well as anyone does.
I know that my patience with her is growing. That hit me the other day when the temperature was dropping and wind chill was picking up and she was still standing in the parking lot staring vacantly into space while I was trying to get inside with the pizza. It took me a minute or so before I heard her trying to whistle ... and then I realized she was trying to talk to the birds across the parking lot.
Sometimes, life gives you a gift. It's best to stand in the presence of it and appreciate the moment.When I'm not doing yoga or physical therapy, I'm usually writing at Furious Seasons or Punk Rock Academy .

My Interests

Music (all of it - country, classical, hip hop, punk, indie, you name it - seriously). Reading. Punk rock road trips. Baseball. Watching movies. Yoga. Small batch bourbon. Beer. Transformational change. Graphic design. Art. Learning how to quilt. Hot chocolate.

I'd like to meet:

Howard Zinn. Hakim Bey. Raoul Vaneigem. Mark Helprin. Jeanette Winterson. Neil Gaiman. Ken Knabb. Germaine Greer. Peter Guralnick. Pema Chodron. Alan Moore. Milan Kundera. Greil Marcus. Grant Morrison. Garth Ennis. Samuel L. Jackson. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Emma Goldman, John Steinbeck, Albert Camus, Joe Strummer and Nelson Algren if they weren't dead. Bicycle messengers, punks and art school dropouts.

Music:

The Clash. D4. The Weakerthans. Richard Thompson. Woody Guthrie. Erik Satie. Arvo Part. Sage Francis. Azure Ray / Maria Taylor / Orenda Fink. AN / GUTG. Some Girls. The Bars / Hope Con. The Explosion. Strike Anywhere. Aesop Rock. The Hold Steady. Bloc Party. Screaming Fat Rat. Candy Staton. In Flames. At The Gates. Husker Du. Leonard Cohen. Converge. Ted Leo. Motorhead. Pavement / Preston School Of Industry. Jawbreaker / Jets To Brazil. tiltWheel. Tori Cobras. A.M. Vibe. Furious IV. Philip Glass. Steve Reich. Bettye Swann. John Zorn / Naked City. Isis. Iannis Xenakis. Crooked Fingers. Naked Raygun / Pegboy / The Bomb. Ornette Coleman. Charlie Parker. Children Of Bodom. Willie Hightower. X. M83. Chet Baker. Otis Redding. Das Oath. John Coltrane. Art Blakey. Sigur Ros. Godspeed You Black Emperor!. Explosions In The Sky. Fugazi. Crooked Fingers. Lucero. Red Sparowes. Fennesz. Broken Social Scene. Turbonegro. Wilco. Communique. Knapsack / Jealous Sound. Isan. Figurine. Wintersun. Belong (and pretty much anything else on Carpark). Desmond Dekker. Ivy. Karen Dalton. Loscil (and pretty much anything else on Kranky). Nina Simone. Mayhem. Quantic. Paw. Opeth. Rachel's. Saint Etienne. Sharon Jones And The Dap-Kings. Tarentel. The Detroit Cobras. The Waco Brothers. And The Dirtbombs' "Ultraglide In Black" is the shit.

Movies:

Time to do this list for real, in no particular order:

The Big Lebowski / O Brother, Where Art Thou? (along with most of the other Coen Brothers movies). Fight Club. American Beauty. Pretty much any Kurosawa flick (but especially Sanjuro, The Hidden Fortress and The Seven Samurai). Unforgiven (arguably the best Western ever made). The Magnificent Seven. Magnolia (P.T. Anderson isn't too bad of a filmmaker). Almost anything directed by Frank Capra (but especially Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and Mr. Deeds Goes To Town). Pretty much any screwball comedy by Howard Hawks (esp. Bringing Up Baby). Rushmore / The Royal Tenenbaums. SLC Punk. Snatch. Office Space. Almost Famous. Spinal Tap. Thelma & Louise. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon / Hero / House Of Flying Daggers. Pleasantville. High Fidelity / Grosse Pointe Blank. Amelie. The Usual Suspects. Almost any Terry Gilliam movie (esp. The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen).

Television:

Since I went on disability, I started watching TV again. Currently on my DVR list: The 4400, Monk, Psych, Eureka, Metalocalypse, The Dresden Files, Burn Notice, Battlestar Galactica, TNA Wrestling (seriously - it's the best wrestling programming on TV right now) and House.

I also recommend Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, The Adventures Of Brisco County Jr., Samurai Jack, My So-Called Life and Firefly for TV shows on DVD.

Save the cheerleader, save the world.

Books:

Too many to list. Howard Zinn is a great place to start. Hakim Bey. Sinclair Lewis. John Steinbeck. Wallace Stegner. CrimethInc. Emma Goldman. Nelson Algren. Albert Camus. Simone de Beauvoir. Thomas Frank. Germaine Greer. Fritjof Capra. Italo Calvino. Mark Helprin. Pema Chodron. Guy Debord. Raoul Vaneigem. Jeanette Winterson. Anything that expands human possibility or the limited boundaries of our commercialized and commodified imaginations and dreams.

Heroes:

I'm working on being my own hero. Until then, I have my friends to show me examples of heroism.

My Blog

A Blog Of Quizzes

Hey, why not? It's early and I'm bored.Your Linguistic Profile:70% General American English15% Yankee10% Upper Midwestern0% Dixie0% MidwesternWhat Kind of American English Do You Speak?You Are Guinnes...
Posted by Unorthodox Urban Rooftop Beekeeper on Sun, 24 Sep 2006 05:14:00 PST

A moment of random weirdness.

I must have been drunk when I did this, because I'm pretty sure I don't speak whatever language it is. Translation, anyone? (And by anyone, I really mean Hanae.)http://freeweb.deltha.hu/tamashc.hardco...
Posted by Unorthodox Urban Rooftop Beekeeper on Mon, 03 Jul 2006 03:52:00 PST

Saint Etienne.

Tomorrow, after being a fan of Saint Etienne for over 15 years, after taking shit from meatheads who objected to me playing them on college radio, searching for limited edition and bonus editions, I w...
Posted by Unorthodox Urban Rooftop Beekeeper on Wed, 15 Feb 2006 04:52:00 PST

Who Wants To Start A Black Metal Band?

I've got the name - Cryptophagic Necrogasm. Y'all know how boss that would look when spelled out using inverted crucifixes and sickles and swords and shit. We could totally play songs with titles lik...
Posted by Unorthodox Urban Rooftop Beekeeper on Sat, 11 Feb 2006 08:03:00 PST

Holy crap.

This motherfucker is fast as hell. Commencing installs. Expect to hear from me in a few days when all this is done.
Posted by Unorthodox Urban Rooftop Beekeeper on Sun, 18 Dec 2005 02:45:00 PST

Fixing computer problems ...

Well now. That's one way to fix a problem. I took my primary computer to the shop today (I'm working on a backup system) since I was still having significant problems. About an hour's worth of trouble...
Posted by Unorthodox Urban Rooftop Beekeeper on Sun, 18 Dec 2005 05:49:00 PST

The system is down ...

I'm taking my main workstation into the shop in a few moments. Something is wrong with it - my gut check is that an outage zorched something and that's causing the problems because my second stick of ...
Posted by Unorthodox Urban Rooftop Beekeeper on Sat, 17 Dec 2005 10:59:00 PST

The day before vacay.

I'm up late tonight for no particular reason. Maybe Jane's chronic insomnia is contagious, even though I've never met her face to face.Right now, I just don't much feel like being asleep.Besides, "Tom...
Posted by Unorthodox Urban Rooftop Beekeeper on Fri, 16 Dec 2005 11:00:00 PST

Oh, and in totally other news ...

The stents are out. Blood-encrusted pieces of plastic no longer infest my nose. Yes, it hurt. Yes, having the stitches pulled sucked. You have a 3.5 mm tube shoved into a 1 mm aperture, let it sit th...
Posted by Unorthodox Urban Rooftop Beekeeper on Fri, 19 Aug 2005 05:32:00 PST

Hate mail comes in August.

Seriously. It's like Jill (Pipe`, you remember her - the girl you almost took out in front of the Casbah?) never dropped off the face of the planet. In fact, considering this sounds exactly like her (...
Posted by Unorthodox Urban Rooftop Beekeeper on Fri, 19 Aug 2005 05:29:00 PST