taylor swift

Like Straightening Trumpets Delayed

            I’ve delayed posting a new short story that I promised last week. I hope you’ll understand. It was one of those, “I didn’t get what I was doing until last minute!” kind of situations.

            So, another draft is needed.

            No new release date, yet, but it’s coming. Just needs some more time.

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Shake, Shake, Shake It Off

            Here’s a weird memory:

            When I was six or seven, I noticed something unusual when I urinated. Sometimes, for no particular reason, alongside the yellowed stream that splashed into the toilet bowl, a few droplets would trickle onto my hands as well. I was sharp as a six-year-old, so there was only one logical conclusion: there was a miniature hole on the underside of my urethra and some of the pee escaped through it onto my hands.

            Oh, don’t worry—this was disgusting to me, too, and I wanted answers.

            This happened frequently enough that I sought a second opinion. I told my parents about this seepage, this invisible aberration that caused warm liquid to splash over my hands and pantlegs every so often—quite the inconvenience. I don’t remember their initial reactions (I’m an adult now, so I can’t imagine it was some degree of skepticism), but they eventually said to me, lovingly, “Well, tell us if it happens again and we’ll take a look.”

            Flashforward a week later and I sounded the alarm that it was happening again. My dad knocked on the door, entered the bathroom, and observed (somewhere along the spectrum of chagrin) that, indeed, a small trickle of urine escaped onto my hands, but ONLY towards the conclusion of my urination.

            The diagnosis:

“Do you shake it off when you’re done?”

“Why would I do that?”

            Twenty-five years later and there hasn’t been a similar recurrence, which leads me to believe the miniature hole in my urethra healed as I grew older.

            Either that, or a Taylor Swift song had far greater ramifications for an anatomically confused 6-year-old boy than I ever realized.

            Anyway, if there was ever a moral to this story, it’s this: if you’re new to the website and this is the first thing you’ve read…

            Welcome! It’s so nice you stopped by!

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Vulfpeck – Madison Square Garden – September 28, 2019

            I liked this band before, but upon listening to Vulfpeck’s Madison Square Garden performance on YouTube, I’m a much bigger fan. Great live bands do that—outside the recording studio, the energy is tripled, reverberating through the crowd as sound waves do through air molecules, literally creating a vibe (get it: vibration). In my brief two summers of being a stagehand for live bands, being part of many shows and watching crowds come alive, Vulfpeck is among the best.

            Particularly, there’s a section in the video (that I’ll link below) called “Christmas in L.A.” that is manically silly and beautiful. In the way Freddy Mercury belted operatic sing-alongs to stadiums, so, too, did Vulfpack reach a crowd.

            It’s one of those performances that you wished you were there for, like Live AID or the prime-time performances at the Reading Music Festival in the UK.

            More than that, it’s a glimpse into a world that I hope still exists on the other side of COVID, when we can visit again, when the world is ready.

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Monster Hunter Rise Demo Version 2

            If you haven’t guessed what the aesthetic of this website is referencing, it’s an upcoming Nintendo Switch release: Monster Hunter Rise. An updated demo launched on the Nintendo eShop this past week, complete with a tediously difficult quest to defeat Magnamalo, the main monster of the game. You have 15-minutes to defeat an overly tuned monster that will wipe out nearly all of your 30-credited attempts. I couldn’t beat him, even with multiple weapon types and masterful party members.

            That said, performance on Nintendo Switch is a little rough. The frame rate is a problem, making reactions delayed and all the harder to execute. The game launches for PC in 2022 and I’m hoping many of these issues are resolved once the game is running on better hardware.

            Still, the additions of better and freer movement and new attack loadouts are the most radical and needed changes to the series in over a decade. If this is the direction of the Monster Hunter series going forward, it’s bound to be an exciting hunt when Monster Hunter World 2 is inevitably announced.

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Wishing everyone as well as they can be. You’re not alone out there,