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Music is The Most Powerful Tool On This Planet- A True Story About How Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" Changed Me

The photo you see above is of George Lamond. You're probably scratching your heads, who the fuck is he? Honestly, I don't know that much about the guy other than that he was once a prominent artist in the whole Dance and Freestyle world of music.

A few weeks back, I wanna say maybe only three weeks ago, I was riding in my man Mex's car, flipping through the stations on the radio, and somehow we came upon KTU 103.5, and this sort of dancy type record was on. The melody sort of caught me off guard and I was like, what is this and why does it sound so familiar to me. It was a remake of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing," which I'd previously heard anyway, but for whatever reason, it wasn't dawning on me that quickly what it was.

Listen here: George Lamond- "Don't Stop Believing"

I got home and I hopped online, googled the track, found out George Lamond was behind the remake, and downloaded it. He's actually out here in staten island, which is even cooler. But anyway, I literally listened to this dance remake of the song over 100 times straight the next day. Then probably another 100 times before the week was out.

Thing is, I don't think I ever really paid attention to the lyrics of the original song, like just what it's saying. And I'm guilty of that completely with all records, I don't even hear words, I just hear melodies and music. I'm weird like that. I'm a musical cat. If I could, I'd just listen to instrumental music all day.

The lyrics go something like this:

Just a small town girl living in a lonely world
She took the midnight train going anywhere
Just a city boy born and raised in South Detroit
He took the midnight train going anywhere

A singer in a smokey room the smell of wine and cheap perfume
For a smile they can share the night.
It goes on and on and on and on

Strangers waiting up down the boulevard.
Their shadows searchin in the night
Streetlight people living just to find emotion
Hiding somewhere in the night

Working hard to get my fill everybody wants a thrill
Payin anything to roll the dice. Just one more time.
Some will win some will lose some were born to sing the blues.
Oh the movie never ends. It goes on and on and on and on...

Don´t stop believing.
Hold on to the feeling.
Streetlight people.


Maybe I'm wack or whatever, for like such a cheesy club tune, or for being late to the Journey party or whatever, I don't give a fuck. Music gets to me when it gets to me and that's it. I finally got this song. I got it.

Playing it so many times, the message sank in 200%. It said to me, Gooch, Paul... whatever... Don't stop believing. Hold on to the feeling. This song is speaking to me. It's talking to a person who's been chasing the feeling since the first taste, which came years ago. I been working hard to get my my thrill through getting my fill. I'll do anything to roll those dice one more time. One more chance at doing something great. At doing something remarkable. Of doing something that most people can't. I'm a street light person. No, I don't come from a small town in the Mid West. But Staten Island might as well be a small town in New York City. It's the same thing. Everyone knows each other. Small town mentality.

I don't come from much. Blue collar family- mother a teacher, father works a city job. Didn't have much money growing up, even though parents provided when they could. But I wanted more, I still want more. I knew back in junior high and high school and then college, there was more to just the average stuff people out here get themselves into. Here, you go to school, you get a decent education, you become a city employee or police officer or firefighter or do some sort of criminal activity, you fuck with a few girls, have a few kids, and you hang with your boys. That's your life.

That's not what I wanted though. I needed that rush, that emotion. That chemical reaction that triggers something in your brain when you accomplish something that more often than not seems unachievable.

But lately, and I would say probably since the end of 2006, I haven't been feeling that emotion much. I've been sort of down about things. I admit it. There, I said it. I've been salty about a whole bunch of stuff, even though I've accomplished a great deal and defied all odds. The fact that I wasn't moving forward and accomplishing even more great things, that's been eating at me. Gnawing at me actually. I feel it inside me, chewing away at my heart, where my passion lies. It was to the point where I thought, man let me go do something else with my life completely. I'm ready to throw it all away. I am.

And even though I've been slowly progressing out of that mind set for the past few months, particularly as I've transformed myself physically during my self-imposed exile from most things industry-related, it really took this simple– almost corny– Journey remake to really change my attitude and make me feel better. It's been reflected in pretty much everything I have done over the past few weeks. From the financial crisis and losing pretty much all my money, to different industry fuckery that is still going on, people beefing about checks and all sorts of dumb shit, and the way I deal with people, my attitude has been relatively positive. I mean, it was kinda positive before, but I just had this whole question in my head about what the fuck I been doing. Just the state of the bizness, makes you wanna get out so bad. It's just... shit is really terrible right now. It makes you wanna leave. And no amount of talking to myself and motivational books was helping me spin it into something that made sense.

I think "Don't Stop Believing" and a BMI royalty check that arrived a day later was like divine intervention. It said, hey man, don't stop. To believe is to live. If I stop, it's a wrap for me.

As I sat courtside at the Knicks game tonight (they got pummeled by The Celtics), with my man Will Roush (who I'ma make into a star, believe it), George Lamond's version of the song came on, sometime in the 4th quarter. The Knicks City Dancers were shooting T-Shirts into the crowd, and I thought of what it must be like to be a Knicks City Dancer. A small town girl, living in a lonely world, took a midnight train going anywhere... and ended up on the world's biggest stage, at Madison Square Garden. And a chill went over me. I haven't gotten a chill like that in a long time. It was goosebumps, literally, for the duration of the song.

Don't stop believing...

Jay-Z+Coldplay= "Jay-Z's The Scientist" DOWNLOAD THIS RIGHT NOW

I confess, I'm late to the whole remixing Jay-Z thing. I wouldn't have even done this had it not been for Mick Boogie reaching out to me last week to let me know he was putting out a Jay-Z/Coldplay mixtape on Monday October 20th. Basically tomorrow.

When he asked me what Coldplay song I was interested in messing with, the first one that came to mind was "The Scientist." When I first heard that tune, years ago, it immediately grabbed me. The piano chords are really beautiful and introspective. It is one of my favorite songs.

I wasn't that motivated to blend it with the Jay-Z song "Allure," because I'm not that crazy about that song. It was one of the weaker tracks on The Black Album if you ask me. And I was never a fan of the hook on that track, particularly Pharrell's singing. It always bothered me.

So I figured let me do away with that hook, get Chris Martin in there to bless Hova with his vocals instead. I also wanted to keep the core piano melody intact, as well as certain aspects of the original song's arrangement, because it really is well done. I didn't wanna bastardize Coldplay's track by chopping it all to hell and making something that just doesn't even make sense on a musical level. What they did worked, and so I wanted to maintain and respect what they did musically. So here we are.

**** DOWNLOAD- "Jay-Z's The Scientist"*******

Feel free to download it, share it, do whatever. If you like it, let me know.

Or listen to it right here

I'm A Hip-Hop Producer, Seriously, What Job Am I Qualified For? Part 1

I've never written about my experiences trying to land jobs before because, well, it just always seemed off limits to me. Plus the whole idea of having a job has always been kind of lame to me. I know, 98% of the world works, so why am I being such a spoiled prick? But let me explain for the 3 of you who actually read this blog.

Ever since I was a little kid, I was always in my own little creative world. While my brother spent his time studying and trying to ace every test he took, occupying his free time with generic things like playing baseball, I was pretty much left on my own, content to play with action figures, draw comic book characters, and make pause-record beats on my father's tape deck. I was multitracking before I even knew what a multitrack was. My father said that I had a great imagination. 

Truth is, I was never really any good at any of the things I tried my hands at. And nobody ever really encouraged me to do these things either, I sort of picked them up on my own. But I kept trying. Playing with action figures, I created my own world in my bedroom. I read a lot of books, I was always into reading, whether it was comics or novels or whatever. In school, teachers were always enamored at my selections for book reports. I never really did all that well on them though. At some point, I ended up in classes for smart kids. I can't remember what the name of the program was, but it was for kids who were a little advanced. By the time I got to junior high, they removed me from that program. My attention had been diverted by hip-hop music, by hanging out with a rough crowd, and just generally being a bad ass. I have no clue why I slid into this sort of behavior. Maybe it was because my mother had left me and my father wasn't supervising me enough. He sort of let me roam free, and while I thank him for that now later in life, I can't help but wonder how things might have been different had he kept a more watchful eye. 

Maybe I was spoiled. Actually, I know I was spoiled. I never asked for anything though. Never. If my father did something for me, it was on his own accord. If he picked me up from basketball practice for want that I not take the bus at a late hour, that was him just being a good parent. That was him doing what he didn't do during those dark years in junior high. 

What he also didn't do was put the onus on me to get a job. Ever. He never really instilled a worker's attitude in me from the standpoint of actually working for someone else. Like, I never felt the need to go out there and get a gig, I always had my house to come back to. My father would take care of me. Typical 80s baby mentality. There was never the push, like my older brother got from my mother, to go out there and make something of myself. 

See, while my brother slaved away at Rickel's selling seasonal items, and even opted not to play Varsity baseball so he could spend more time working, I used basketball as my crutch against not working. I couldn't work, I had to play basketball. My team needed me. I couldn't work, needed to practice, needed to be there for games, needed to be 200% focused. 

The reality was, I was just fucking lazy. I could have worked. I could have made it work. I could have done all the same things I did in high school and still worked. It really wasn't until my senior year, after my basketball season ended and essentially my basketball career ended, when I decided that I needed a job. So I answered a classified ad and got hired at Sears in the Staten Island Mall. 

I worked in the Menswear department, and in general, it was an OK gig. I really didn't have any problems working there except for the fact that Sears was considered really corny at the time, and working in their clothing section was sort of not the place to be.

Often times, while I was at work, I wondered about the people who worked at the store full time. Did they enjoy what they did? They were Sears employees. This was their life. Is this all there was for them? They seemed to be doing alright for themselves. I mean, you get a paycheck, and you support yourself with it, and that counts for something in this world. 

I started college in the Fall of 2000 (wow, 8 years ago), and some time in late September I remember running into issues with working at Sears and going to school. I recall getting home from work late one night, studying for a Math test till the wee hours of the morning and then oversleeping the test. So I created some sort of excuse in my own mind, saying that Sears was affecting my schooling, and that school was the most important thing, so I needed to quit. I needed to quit because I needed the best grades possible. I needed to excel at school. Or so I thought.

I didn't work again for another two years or so. My next job was working as an intern with HRA for the City of New York, which my father hooked up for me. Looking back, my reasoning for taking the gig was probably just because it was there for the taking. It was something to do. The summer before, I literally spent my days like this.

11am-noon: wake up

noon- 3:30pm: fuck around on the internet, mostly on ughh.com's producer forums

3:30- 7:30: go to IS 51 and play basketball

7:30-9:00: come home, relax, eat dinner

9:00-12am: make beats

12am- 2am: chat with fools online, more time wasting on internet

2am-4am: make beats

Repeat next day

All in all, it wasn't a bad life. I was waiting around for school to start up again and I was learning to become a better producer, which is what I had my eyes on becoming in some sort of fantasy land dream sequence. Back then I was into making tracks for the art of it all, for the discovery of new sounds, of new ways to flip things. It was really a more explorative period. I didn't even know how to match a bass note to a sample yet. But it was fun nonetheless. 

In that summer of 2001 though, working at HRA, I was bringing home something like $600 every two weeks, which was good because I was saving for something (get to that later). The program itself was, if I'm not mistaken, 11 weeks long. I remember the experience of working there vividly for a few reasons. One was that everyone who worked there seemed to be very sedative. People were just coasting along, it was like life didn't even exist to them. They went to work, clocked in and clocked out, and that was it. Also, there wasn't any air conditioning in the office. That was brutal. There was no internet either. That was horrifying. I also didn't have much to do. So I was basically sitting there wasting away for 11 weeks straight. I went in early so I could leave early, 7am-3pm. That way I'd be home by 5pm, while there was still some sunlight out, and I could maybe get out and play some ball or at least just do something. 

I feel like my experience working with HRA deeply affected me and my attitude towards working. I was around these people who were literally lifers in the City agency world. They had 20-30 years in the system and were so morbid. The office looked like it was ready to be bulldozed. And there was nothing to do. I remember there being a mid-summer intern get-together, and I felt so out of place there. There were these people in this big conference room, all kids like me, and they were so happy to be working for the City, so happy to be getting this experience on their resume. I remember even getting into some little tift with a kid there, I can't remember specifically what about, but I do recall having to put someone in their place. It was in very poor taste, but I didn't know any better. I had a generally negative attitude by then about the whole experience. A chip on my shoulder, an arrogance almost, like I didn't need HRA, I could do better elsewhere. 

What contributed to this was also the fact that my partner Cue was working in a recording studio down the block. It was called Music Factory Mix Studios, and was owned by Robert Clivilles, who was one of the C's from C&C Music Factory. Cue started as an intern, but within weeks he was running the joint. There were many high profile clients in during that time- DJ Clue, Fabolous, Murder Inc, The Fugees. It was a happening spot, and during my lunch hours I'd go by and check in with Cue. I'd come in my shirt and tie and he'd be in a pair of sweats and a t-shirt. I wasn't jealous of him. I was happy for him. Him being in that situation inspired me so much, because for the first time all these stars were up close in front of me. Everything felt so easy to touch, so tangible. We had our little TMI Productions movement going, and I had this arrogance about the whole situation, how Cue should be in there pushing our material to these artists. I never really digested the whole business protocol, how you don't push your music on clients in a studio, but that's because my arrogance felt like, who cares about clients for a studio, we're talking about making or breaking our lives here. Selling a beat would push us forward. It never happened though. Still, the industry bug bit me. The life he was living, being in the studio 24/7, artists coming in and out, major label budgets within reach, women always around, I wanted that. I wanted in. I needed to get out of HRA and get into the music business, even more so than I had already planned. Now it wasn't an option, it was a necessity. 

I remember this tremendous sense of freedom during that 12th week of summer, when the HRA internship had ended and my days were now free to drive around Staten Island and do whatever it is I felt like doing at the time. In reality, I wasn't doing much except checking in with my mother– who was sick with Cancer– and basically tying up loose ends before college started back up at the end of that week. The point was, I wasn't tied to a desk. I wasn't chained anywhere. I had freedom, I could move. 

That sense of liberation followed me into my junior year of college. By then, we'd (the TMI clan) been doing an open mic event at this place called the Vive Lounge on the southern end of Targee Street. We weren't making a killing on the event, but it was bringing out a decent amount of people, and we were making some dough, and seeing that few hundred dollars being made in night was starting to make my eyes widen more than they already had. Plus people were beginning to know who I was, to know that I was a producer and I had some talent. See, by this time we had our recording studio up and running and we were making some bread. And even though it wasn't being run like a real business, just hustle money to pay Cue's rent with and whatnot, psychologically it had a deep effect on me. It made me pump my chest out a little more. Our debut CD, Statements Volume 1, was completed and it was out, no thanks to my investments in some CD Duplicators, some shrink wrap machines, and basically a bunch of tools that you use to manufacture product with. I was like a little warehouse in my bedroom. It was crazy. 

I sold a few copies online at CDbaby.com, in fact whatever I shipped them sold out within a day or so. I wasn't keeping good accounting tabs on what was being spent on things, and I wasn't even trying to make my money back, so the checks that came just sort of collected dust. In fact, I think I even still have one, I never cashed it. The reviews that came from people online were great, everyone loved it. I'd built a community of friends and supporters over at ughh.com, and they were into the music. Things were good. 

Somewhere around the end of that HRA internship and the beginning of my junior year in college, I told myself that my days of working were over– period. I was never going to have a job. That was it. I was going to be a producer, run my own studio, my own label, and that was going to be my life. I was not going to work for anyone, ever. That would be accepting defeat. That would be my way of allowing "them" to get the best of me, to allow them to make me a drone. I couldn't have that. I would do anything and everything in my power to avoid getting a gig, and make sure that my musical talents were the source of my income. 

Rolando Brown and Josh Satten took me on for management as one of their first clients in the fall of 2002. Their company was called Brown Satten Management. Hey, at least it was a great name. And they had some really cool business cards. 

There was a little weirdness to them managing me as a sole entity because Cue was my partner. But at the time, Cue was so wrapped up working at Music Factory that it looked like I was going to have to go it alone. And I mostly did. Cue was mainly an engineer at this point. He never really had the wherewithal to put aside that couple of dollars he was making as engineer for some sort of greater purpose. It was all about the money, and clients were offering it, so it was a no brainer. I can't hate him for that, even though in the grand scheme of things it was counter productive. 

The Brown Satten situation went bust. I remember Josh spending a lot of time with me back then. He would come over on a Friday night and we'd end up at one of Mex's parties, then somehow someway drive out to Brooklyn so he could build with a promoter. He was driving the VP Records promotional vehicle back then, and that would get him into a lot of clubs. It was sort of an exciting time. We hung out a lot, at least for a few months. He became a good friend, truly what a personal manager is supposed to be. He'd come to the studio when I had sessions, Cue and I would beast on anyone and everyone to come through. Mostly, we were trying to get them to rhyme on my tracks. Mex would bring artists through to rhyme on my tracks as well. But the interest in original music was minimal. This was around the time when mixtapes began to get really big, and all rappers wanted to do was rhyme on instrumentals of tracks that were already out. It was pointless in my opinion, but they needed studio time to do these things, and so Cue ended up making quite a few clients out of our efforts. Eventually, Mex came into play wanting to manage me solo, and Josh felt slighted, and our relationship never really mended after that. If I recall, just a short time later he met a girl, got married, and had children. Go figure. Rolando and I remained cool as hell, there was never any real fallout with him over the situation. 

The thing about all this is, all this wrankling was boosting my ego more and more. The fact that influential people (ok, just people) would take such a heavy interest in managing me, it made me feel good. It made me feel like I had something worthwhile that I was doing. That I had talent. And maybe I did. It was tough to tell, again, because back then all anyone wanted to do was record on other people's beats. I became sort of casualty of the environment I was in, and the artists who were available to me. My ego was bruised, I needed to separate myself from this pack of mixtape rappers. 

While in college though, where I was hammering out a 4.0 damn near every semester, I was a different person altogether. Few people on the faculty knew about my extra curricular activities, but my swagger (god I fucking hate that term) was definitely increasing. I was still very heavily engaged in deep thought and writing, but by this time I was settling in to my major classes, and since these were all Journalism/Media classes, which aren't all that puzzling, things started becoming very routine for me. I wasn't really studying all that much and still managed to get straight A's, or something close to it. I had sort of mastered the art of going to school, it had become pretty straightforward to me. Not boring, definitely not boring. I was very into what I was learning. The only class I can remember being sort of disengaged from was "Principles of Editorial Design," which was a class that taught Photoshop and shit like that, and looking back I'm kicking myself for not paying more attention to that shit. I really have no clue why I tuned it out so much. 

In the Spring of 2003, I had a Magazine Writing class with Frederick Kaufman, and that was a class I really enjoyed, but again, it was sort of routine for me at this point. There was this girl in the class named Simona (who I just found out is married by doing a quick little search on Myspace), she'd always chirp me on my Nextel and ask me to hang out or something. She was pretty hot in my opinion, and took some sort of interest in me, but we never really got to hanging out. I guess I was sort of inexperienced with how to go about things at that point. I was never really good with the casual going out thing either, still not. Those things never really mattered to me. It was in this Magazine Writing class where a lot of issues with me being a journalist started to arise. I never really admitted it to anyone, but this class challenged me a lot in terms of my personality. Intro to Journalism did as well, but this one had me writing an article on Staten Island hip-hop for my final project, and I was interviewing my friends for the article. This was a big issue for me, because I had to pocket this oversized ego I'd grown amongst my peers and become sort of spectator, writing about them when in fact they should have been writing about me. I didn't have some of stories they had, but I was more in the pocket, more the person to be talked to. But here I was writing the article. I was a part of this scene as a creator in my own right but had to write about it. It was tough and made me think about my future. 

And think about it I did. In fact, that's all I did was think about it. I made no effort to get an internship anywhere. I had this internship form for the New York Post sitting on my desk for months and never got around to sending it in. It was clear that I didn't really want to be a journalist. I wanted to be in the music business. I went to the CUNY Media Conference in 2003 in some shmata shirt, a pair of baggy Enyce jeans, and sneakers. I had no style, no presentation, and furthermore, I just wasn't serious about working. For anyone. I just wanted to make tracks, get paid for them, and that be my life.

Though I was concerned about my future post-graduation, when my mother died in June of 2003, it made me put a lot of things in perspective. I really stopped thinking long term, put strategy to the side, and started focusing more on just making something happen. Also at the time, hip-hop was going through a big boom post-50 Cent, so everyone was making mixtapes and there was a lot of energy in the scene. As Phokuss, I put up the money and put out a group mixtape which was essentially just the solo guys from TMI Productions in one group. It was largely new music and got an incredible response from people everywhere. I thought we had something special with the group. These guys were talented, and when they were together they had a lot of chemistry which bled through on the tracks. They were friends and it showed. Of all the things I've been involved with in my life, that group was most special to me. I cherished that movement and the experiences that came along with it so much. I hit the streets with abandon, giving out mixtapes everywhere. Powder and I would come into Ihop at 3 in the morning on a Tuesday and give mixtapes to the people who worked there. We'd hit a diner on Wednesday. Maybe a club on Thursday, and so on throughout the week. It was non-stop grind, day in and day out. Thursday nights we were in front of Hot97 giving mixtapes to Kay Slay, because back then being on his show actually mattered. We would sleep at the studio, on couches, on the floor, wherever we could. 

I was going so hard because I felt like the world was running away from me. Not nearly as much as I feel it now, but this was the beginning of that pit in my stomach, of never having enough time in the day and never doing enough. It was also a time of immense purpose. There was a method to the madness. It some Machavellian the ends justifies the means situation, where I felt like all these sleepless nights would eventually lead to some sort of greener pasture. I define this period as my "out" period, because I was always out at this point. I was always somewhere, doing something. Every night. Every day. There was never a dull moment. I was spending my last remaining dollars, thinking that somehow someway a check would come down on me and make things all better. That was a pipe dream. 

But then it happened. I got a check for "Through My Rearview" from the Freeway/Ice City album, and everything was alright. Although this happened months later, it was the beginning of me sort of flirting with success as a producer in the music business. It was like, hey this could actually happen. I could actually make money from this if I keep going at it. But I also started writing for XXL, and my attention began to get diverted. 

Check back in tomorrow for part 2.

Things That Make Life Great- Mid Day Visits From Parents

I hear a lot of folks my age complain about their parents, like they're some sort of burden to them. That couldn't be any further from the way I feel about my father. That guy rules. The reality is, he and I don't physically talk much, we communicate on blackberry a lot. He'll email, I'll email back, just to keep one another aware of the fact that we're both still breathing. When he emails or calls on the weekend, it really doesn't matter what I have planned, I'll generally cancel what I'm doing to spend some time with him. 

He emailed me earlier today, asking if I was free. I thought he meant for a phone call, so when he replied back to my "not busy" message saying that he was coming over mid-day, I thought wow, does he have off today? He did. It was Columbus Day. When you're self-employed, live alone, and hustling for dollars, it's easy for something like that to slip past you. It wasn't a day off for me. Money, knowledge, and creativity never sleep. 

Some time around 2:30 he arrived, and we got to watching CNBC for what seemed like an hour straight, talking about the market fluctuation and all. Today was a big day on wall street, so we obviously had a lot to talk about. I found myself kind of getting lost in the midst of us just enjoying one another's company. It's father/son thing. In the back of my mind I felt that I had a lot to do, and obviously I did, but something about him being around put me at ease. Kind of like no matter what happened today, I'd get it done somehow. I guess that's what parents do for their kids, make them feel better.

Not that I needed to feel better. I mean, I was all good previously. But still, I really didn't give much of a fuck about anything during that time he was around. Just that conversation was enough for me. And maybe that's saying something, that the simple things like that matter a lot to me these days.  

Social Network These Nuts In Your MOuth

The internet makes me feel less relevant every day. And it's all because of social networking sites. I don't know if it's that people are spending way more time on these things, or if I just spend too little, but it's like if I'm not on Myspace or Facebook or [Insert current social networking site flavor of the moment here] all day long, nobody knows I exist. Unless, of course, I actually happen to pop up somewhere in real life, which is a lot less likely these days, because let's face it, time out and about is time spent not working, which is time spent unproductively, which is essentially just a waste of fucking time.

But seriously, with all these social networks, who can keep up. Beyond that, my business is not in the trafficking of meaningless social relationships with Myspace pages and Facebook pages of people who I don't even know. It's been a few years since these sites came on the scene, and while I admit that I have used these social networking tools for tracking people down for interviews and whatnot, I've found it very hard to conduct any real business with people I meet through these sites. I was making money selling beats to people online back in the year 2000. Back then, I'd post in discussion forums and things of that nature and eventually instant messenger names were exchanged and relationships were built from that point on. I was also in college at the time and in general had less things to do, so I was sitting in front of the computer more. That's not to say I'm not sitting in front of the computer a lot now. But it's different now. There's more pressure to use the time wisely, to NOT be sitting there posting random shit on a discussion board and having meaningless IM conversations. I think that there was even a point somewhere around 2002 when I just swore off the internet altogether in an effort to cure myself of what was then becoming an internet addiction. I thus put a block on instant messenger and stopped posting in online forums and discussion boards. And that's where a lot of my activity online ceased to exist. I've never been able to get back into it. The allure is pretty much gone. I use the internet as a productive tool only. Not a time-wasting one, except when I'm looking at prOnos (which is actually pretty often these days). 

But I have come to grips with the fact that since I don't update my Facebook page 10 times a week, and I haven't changed my Myspace page in years, it's like I don't exist at all. Now I was reading something at Nytimes.com about how employers are spending more time looking at Linkedin.com and sites like that to determine who they hire. Wow. What the fuck have things come to? That sites like Linkedin could be more effective than just mailing a resume. We've officially crossed over. This sucks. 

People are twittering like crazy. Because they want you to know what they are doing at all times. I have no use for Twitter. What am I doing? None of your fucking business playboy. Is there no such thing as a private moment these days? It's ridiculous. It's intrusive. But the fact that you feel sort of left out of the party, that's the worst thing about it. I feel like a guy making bicycles when the rest of the world is driving around in cars. A relic, if you will. Old school. And if I'm not doing something, apparently I'm a complete nothing, a failure. But are people just busy to be busy? Are they actually producing anything in the process? Is there some form of work being done, a contribution to society at large? I don't know the answer to that. I doubt it. And maybe that's the key, to reject all this bullshit and just stick to your guns. My brother spends 0 time on social networking sites, and he clocks in quite a bit of dough. He's always working. You work, you eat. Bottom line. You wanna fuck around online all day, you make money for the people who are trafficking in your page views. That's it. You get high off your own inflated sense of self worth by twittering your life away, facebooking every move you make, and taking myspace pics of everything, but the reality is, while you're doing that, someone is working. Diligently. Attentively. Productively. And they are getting one step closer to where they want to be, while you're content getting one step closer to letting the world know the truth. That you're just a big time waster.