I've just finished page fifty-six of my next book! I've got, including the cover, twenty-five pages to go!  I should be done by the end of  Sept. or the beginning of Oct.  I'm really happy with the degree of discipline that I've brought to this book.  That includes my decision to suck it up and redraw six pages.  I figure that I've got twenty to twenty-five work days left on this book.  I don't work more than three or f

In October 2001 I figured out that one of my biggest problems was loneliness.  Based on this revelation in large part, I've given up smoking, drinking, drugs, and the pursuit of unavailable women.  It's surprises me that even working late into the night on my memoirs, as painful as they are to get out, can go a long way in addressing a problem that's so hard to deal with.  Loneliness is so persistent and recalcitrant, obstinate a problem, and some of the solutions that seem like they might help, like reaching out to attractive women in my environment, don't seem to do much good in solving the problem.  Methods I have more control over, like staying busy with art and music or exercising, seem to be the most reliable methods of dealing with this issue.  Methods such as this typically involve me being by myself, so I spend quite a lot of time away from others, but that doesn't seem to matter.

I just wrote what will be the twelfth song of my new record.  I hope to have twelve or maybe thirteen tracks for the record that I plan on recording next May.  I might write one more track and then I'll consider it finished.  I was going to write words to an Insect Sex Act instrumental called "Donkey OD."  I decided against that though.  I figure that such a track would be too different from the other tracks, and also, I could not get with the idea of jamming lyrics into an instrumental song.  I figured that it would sound too forced.

For the thirteenth track, if I do it, I will do a Mississippi John Hurt arrangement of a song idea that I tried years ago, but I didn't like how that song turned out, so I will try it with a new arrangement in another genre.  I didn't like the idea of experimenting too much with the "Donkey OD" song, so we'll see how this next little experiment goes.

The idea is to write all the songs this Summer, rehearse in the Fall, and play open mikes in the Fall/Winter/Spring until I record it in May.  The only open mike I ever played I got kicked out of, so we'll see how it goes.

The songs on this record mostly serve as relief, comic and otherwise, to the heavy stuff that I go over in my books.  The books are only going to get heavier.  I should be putting the very painful events in the next issue into a form that is ready for the inks by the time I record this record next May. 

 I plan on using Cris Burns' studio and engineering skills for this next record, same as the last one.  It's about the only chance that I get to hang out with Cris.  I find that as I get older I have to pay people to be my friend, for a while, more and more.