Milwaukee is suffering from a lack of worthwhile venues to play at. Recently the local punk rock/indie rock/post rock venue, The Globe, shut it’s doors. Cops busted in before a Small Brown Bike show and decided the place was a fire hazard and too rundown to keep open. There are some kids doing basement shows and some kids who are trying to get this other venue going, but that’s all emo driven bullshit that isn’t worth supporting.

My friends and I were driving around in a state of boredom when we found a building near Miller Park. This old complex is a rundown shit hole without skin, but it has a nice strong skeleton that makes up for it. The walls that remain attached to that skeleton are all dressed up with graffiti, and the broken windows shine. But the key to this treasure of industrial hell is that some how this place still has working power.

The term guerilla rock has been jumping around in my brain for a while, and I think it’s a great concept: move your equipment to a random location, plug in, and go crazy. When I found this place I just knew I had to do something with it, and guerilla rock had finally beaten me into submission.

Me and my buddies pooled 400 bucks together and went out to buy some cheap equipment that we knew we’d never see again. We also got a friend that we hate to loan us his huge amps and some extra cords. What an idiot.

We made some fliers and threw them around town. The fliers indicated that people who are into music should meet at the building around ten o’clock on June 28th for a real musical feast. We hoped that at least ten people would show up.

More people came than I expected. There were at least forty people there that we didn’t know, which I think comes from the great street team efforts, and then fifteen friends that we had asked to come. So the total was somewhere around fifty-five people, all of whom, I’m sure, are very happy that they ended up coming.

Around half past ten we took up our instruments and busted into our one and only song that we’d play that night; actually, it wasn’t one song, it was all of our songs strung together without breaks in between. When we started playing we went completely insane with intensity that could only be rivaled by The Boredoms, or perhaps At The Drive-In when they were in their prime.

The people who were there caught on when we started jumping off the walls, and they went completely crazy too. Usually people at Milwaukee shows are overly self-conscious about things like moving their bodies around, and dancing, or feeling the music or anything like that. But tonight things just clicked and everyone went insane with each other. It was beautiful.

After playing nonstop for twenty minutes or so we started trashing our equipment that we had brought, and a lot of the building too. Everyone went for it and helped out to completely destroy everything, as a big, unified group. It was magnificent.

I’ll never understand how the cops never arrived, and I’ll never know how so many people showed up at that building tonight. But what I do know is that something like this will definitely happen again...soon. And I encourage everyone who isn’t happy with their music scene to set something up by themselves. Because chances are people will eat it up.

It's personal, now.

After having been at a Men in Action meeting last night where we learn everything from the mindset to dressing for success, the mission we have upon us is getting personal.

This is all I have. This and the woman that I love and have committed myself to make a life with. And the car I am trying so desperately to keep so that I can look forward to even more dreams being realized. I am now obsessed with my next goal, because when I reach it, I know that everything else will be achieved.

Our group has come to a conclusion that no one else will be doing what we're doing. We can orchestrate this to a point where we put in 10,000 people within the next few years, and by then, we'll be extremely wealthy in all aspects and be able to spread this wealth to anyone who wants it.

This business isn't where we can dilly-dally and to make as another hobby. Most of us want to replace our jobs with this. In a way, I already have.

I don't understand why people forgo into becoming an entrepeneur and stay in the employee quadrant in the Cashflow Quadrant. People need to get out of their comfort zone and to make something of themselves!

Our mission now is to give the gift of opportunity in teaching people how to have their own home-based business so that the rat race will only become a memory.

So it's over.

I'm torn, E2, with how honest I should be to you. I think it's time to clear the air, and I suppose this sort of thing does impact on E2 as a whole.

Today, the Bristol Noder flat is no more. The Debutante has squeezed her stuff into the car and left. elem_125 arrived briefly to shuffle things about and disappeared too. Heschelian is long-gone.

It was like a family; we ate together almost every night, shopped together (online), shared washing and cleaning, discussed philosophy, religion and all the silly things that make life worthwhile. We got to know the local shops, and they knew us, so we could go into the Oddbins and ask what they recommended. We drank a fair amount, and all took our turns to be the inebriated one.

We had our little landmarks too. The first friday night meal together, the first weekly 'Ale night' at our local, the completion of our home network, our crossing swords with political opponents, our watching The Simpsons, our first tentative encounters with other Bristol-based noders.

But there were five of us living here this year, not four. That I have no username for my other flatmate is awkward, as I have no good way of referring to her. And that's part of the problem. Early on, she started spending more time in her room, she reacted badly to trivial comments and wouldn't emerge (except to go to University) for a day, two days, even four days. Then once it became a week, two weeks, and ultimately about a month.

When she eventually emerged, she no longer ate or shopped with us, and kept herself separate. And I've always wondered whether E2 is partly to do with that, whether it was a wedge that drove us apart. We picked up the shared language of this place and transferred it into everyday life in quite a dramatic way. We could rant about Butterfinger McFlurry and share interesting writeups over dinner. We would say "Don't make shit up" and "Your ideas are intriguing to me...", and joke about soy. She couldn't. It made the four of us closer, but the five of us more distant.

I enjoyed this year a little too much; I was too comfortable, and comfort stops you being able to do new things. I didn't keep in contact with enough of my other friends, not nearly as much as I should have.

The year has gone all too quickly, and for the last four weeks or so, it's been only me and the Debutante here. I've grown accustomed to being woken in the morning, making strong Ceylon tea with milk in the evenings, watching Spooks on a Monday, having my shirts ironed and doing the meat washing up.

But it's more than that. I know her better now than I ever thought possible. I also know myself a hell of a lot better, too. I've gained a deeper understanding into things I had thought I understood perfectly. I fell in love, but it took me a long time to figure out who or what I'd fallen in love with. In fact, it's only now I can begin to get it. It wasn't a person, or a feeling, or a situation, but rather a person in a certain setting, accompanied by a certain feeling. It was a selfish indulgence of my own. And it was an illusion. Once you know how the trick was done, the magic show is never the same.

Person, setting and feeling can never come back together again. The illusion is utterly dissipated and I sit - with a grin on my face - whole and not broken, finally able to look forwards again. I'd almost forgotten how. The whole year has been so fun, so pleasurable, so comfortable that I didn't really look forward at all. Now I am, to strengthening old friendships and making new ones, to doing exciting things. And as an added bonus, I get to keep what I've gained along the way. No, those things are private. But it's important you know they are there. I am a better person for this year, and for this month.

Heschelian, the Debutante and my other flatmate have finished and will find new paths. My love to them, and my deepest hopes. elem_125 and I stay here -- same house, different flat. My room is 6 inches wider than before. We will have four new housemates; it won't be long until we have them noding.

At the time of posting, we have contributed 170 writeups to the database -- 171 if you count the Judaism metanode. We have gained 4709xp. We give, we take, that's how the community works. You, noders, are a part of our lives. All of you.

I just got floored by something I wasn't at all expecting.

I picked up the Deep Space Nine season 1 box set (used and on the cheap, by the way - Paramount's insane if they think anyone's going to spend $150 for the damn things new). I sat down, popped in the first disc and sat back to watch.

A little background: I was a addicted to Next Gen when I was a kid; I had the technical manual, the encyclopedia and most of the novels (which I see now, from my vastly more literate perspective, were uniformly horrible). I had built and painted the models. I got into debates over the ideal shape the perfect spacecraft would be; the guy I was arguing with favored a sphere; I countered with a dodecahedron because of the extra structual stability and resilience to torpedo attacks.

Sitting in a movie theatre watching Star Trek: Generations, I watched the Enterprise D's saucer section belly flop onto the surface of some alien planet with tears streaking down my face. It was like watching a portion of my childhood implode.

But at the same time I didn't think it was real: I've only ever been to one convention and the other people's fandom there scared me. I can't quote episodes line by line. I don't speak Klingon. What interested me was the ship design, the pseudo-science (back when it was more scence than pseudo) and the histories, the feeling of being immersed in an alternate universe.

And then I got to middle school, discovered girls and music and forgot that I knew this stuff (though every once in awhile I'd get into a trek conversation and realize how much of my brain this stuff still eats up). I held only a passing interest in Deep Space Nine and pretty much ignored Voyager.




I picked up this Deep Space Nine box set because my girlfriend had just left New York City for a ten week internship at Stanford. I felt I needed something to fill the now much emptier evenings, something new but comfortable, familiar but unexpected.

So I'm sitting on the futon watching episode one. It opens with Sisko's perspective of Wolf 359, the battle against the Borg led by the recently assimilated Captain Picard. It doesn't really matter what the episode was about, the point is that I start to cry. I don't cry, ever, but for whatever reason my eyes gush and I sob like a three-year-old. Maybe it's because I've returned to a place so familiar I cannot possibly believe I've been away from it for all these years. Maybe it's because I had tried so fucking hard not to be a geek until I met my girlfriend, the epitome of physics nerd with a passion for Russian fiction, the girl I love so much because she sees right through me and likes what she sees, that I forgot how much fun it was to just buckle down, forget about what the rest of the world thinks about what you're doing and enjoy yourself.

Quite a few (they have yet to release a list) of my high school classmates are no longer alive.

Last night there was a party in Lincoln Park, Chicago. There were just too many people on the porch at the time, and with the weight it collapsed, falling several floors.

In total 12 people died (i believe... need to check the stats) and many many more were injured.

Among the dead was Sam Farmer, who was a bit of a fratty jackass, but nonetheless pleasant to me and in several classes. Although our relationship was nothing more than copying each others homework and occasionally getting high, it is really a shock.

May they rest in peace.

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