Nervous Acid is an internet notebook.

Thriller

• DOWNLOAD | NEW END ORIGINAL “Better Than This” Thriller, 2001

The first thing anyone ever said when I told them the name of our first album was, “But you can’t do that!”

Or, “That would be like naming your album Dark Side of The Moon!”

But it wasn’t, I argued. Dark Side of The Moon is a concept; Pink Floyd owns that. “Thriller” is not a concept; it’s a word — a common word, in fact, that is used in film, in literature, in the dictionary. Michael Jackson does not own it any more than he owns the words “bad” or “history.”

It actually wasn’t too difficult a decision to make. We just showed up to practice one day and Jonah said, “I have the name for the album.”

There wasn’t even a discussion. We just said, “Awesome, yes, Thriller,” and plugged in our guitars — just like that.

I don’t really have a heartfelt eulogy to give for Michael Jackson. He came, he saw, he conquered, and then he kind of fell apart. But I’ve always had an empathetic heart towards Michael: the plastic surgery, the pet monkey, the Peter Pan syndrome — for better or for worse, the man was acting out. The world stood in judgment, as if we knew that any of us could have handled becoming a worldwide superstar at age 11 any better. As if we really believed that having all the money and fans in the world could heal the broken heart of a child.

The worst thing about Michael Jackson’s death is that he never seemed genuinely at peace with himself in life. He was a brilliant singer and dancer and entertainer — a genius, perhaps, in the same way that Van Gogh was a genius even though he cut off his own ear as a gift to a prostitute — the best of which, I believe, often happened subconsciously. Near the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin,’” for example, right before the fade-out, Michael famously ad-libs:

So lift your head up high
And scream out to the world, “I know I’m someone!”
And let the truth unfurl.
No one can hurt you know, cos you know what’s true.
So I’ll believe in me
And you believe in you.

It was the least self-conscious verse that Michael ever sang. New End Original used these words for our Thriller — in homage, on a song called “Better Than This” — but we left them off the lyric sheet. Because, you know, that might be stealing.

Slow Motion Start

• DOWNLOAD | EE “Slow Motion Start” For 100 We Try Harder, 2002

Before I begin, let’s lift the veil a little bit: A little over a year and a half ago I decided to go back to school, as an adult, with the objective of teaching high school English — ostensibly for the rest of my life. It was the first real big-boy decision I’d made in quite some time, having been — up until that point — pretty satisfied with the mutable state of my career. In a typically impulsive fashion, of course, I mulled over my options, made this decision, and started classes all within a two-week span. Today, I am a little more than halfway to graduation. In roughly two weeks, I’ll be 35 years old.

I realize that I am not the only adult in college — there is a man in one of my summer classes who is at least as old as my father — but I am the only adult in college that I know this intimately. I’ve lived enough to know who I am, what turns me on, and why I persist with anything. I’ve also lived enough to know that linearity — the idea that my routine will not significantly change until 2011 — makes me incredibly frustrated. Sometimes downright depressed, in fact. Especially when I take into consideration the fact that I’m working towards establishing a new routine that might take up the rest of my life.

When I was 17 years old, I sold what few material possessions I had and moved into a Hare Krishna monastery. At the time, I thought it quite feasible that this might prove to be a lifelong decision — the prospects of which feel silly to me now. I’ve had several projects and philosophies and careers and homes and friends and lovers since then; life is, for most of us, too long for anything like that to stick. But the older you get, the more this idea — of the rest of your life — becomes less tenuous. It is, for the first time, arguable that I could very well have already lived in the past longer than I will live into the future. This is the moment I assume is most popularly known as a midlife crisis; those “midlife crises” that I complained about in the past were, apparently, false alarms.

So I don’t know about you, but whenever I feel like I have to give up control in one part of my life, to surrender to the bigger picture, I often feel the need to take control of another, more easily manipulated wedge. That’s the interesting thing about being a blog reader: You can read my mind simply by how much I fuck with this website.

If I had to put my finger on something — on a catalyst to this How I Spent My Summer Vacation story — it was probably the whole Tumbularity thing. For those of you not on Tumblr, this is a relatively new feature developed to award each Tumblr blog a seemingly arbitrary rating. From what I can gather, the algorithm works like this: The more you post, the more other Tumblr bloggers can reblog you. The more posts that are reblogged, the higher your Tumbularity rating. The higher your Tumbularity rating, the more “popular” you are. The more popular you are, the better the chances you’ll be promoted at work, win the lottery, and have an enviable life partner. Or something like that.

Unlike most of its critics, I don’t think Tumbularity is detrimental for what it is — that is, a subtle popularity contest — but because of what it encourages. Its mechanism is essentially designed to coax the Tumblr community to post more and say less. I think I was lured by its spell for a hot minute, when my Tumbularity peaked as, like, the 4,000th most-read blog in the system. (If I just reblogged one more picture, I schemed, I might finally crack that glass ceiling.) But I snapped out of it quick.

The most problematic aspect of this issue — for me, anyway — is simple to distill: That isn’t who I am. It’s not who I am as a writer, certainly, but it’s not even who I am as a blogger. Even when I worked as a music writer, I never thought of myself as a mere reporter of facts; I wanted to be a filter of sorts, with a distinct and purely subjective voice. I never subscribed to the idea that a writer should write himself out of a story, but in fact, quite the opposite: the world does not exist to me without my point of view, and I am the only person in the world who can describe this singular vision. That is still worth something to me, and I’ve always preferred to believe that it holds value for other people. This is why I’ve been self-publishing for the past twenty years.

The near future of this site is, therefore, always under construction. But at this moment, I’d like to focus on increasing the signal-to-noise ratio. There are hundreds of link-blogs — both inside and outside of the Tumbularity system — and if you feel like having a click party, I could probably send you a list of them. Nervous Acid, as it stands, will choose to inch itself further back into the field of original content — the definition of which will be refined and improvised, but always personal. There is merit in the momentous and the mundane — to get all alliterative on you — and I’ve spent most of my life trying to capture the balance. I won’t stop writing until I figure it out.

Photo: Yusso

Return to Acid

• DOWNLOAD | KERRI CHANDLER “Return 2 Acid” Return 2 Acid EP, 2005

It was a nice vacation, thanks for asking. I stripped down the design — a work in progress being developed from Simen’s framework — and I’ll be back to posting this week. That said, I’m pretty sure you’ll notice a change in tone and direction. I’ll try to explain that somewhat in my first real post back, but in the meantime, a recent record from house music pioneer Kerri Chandler to christen the venture. Thanks, as always, for following me.

Photo: Thatvandal

A brief respite.

Since my “Tumbularity” seems to be tumbling into oblivion — and regardless of the fact that I’m not even sure what that number stands for — I figured I’d check in. Because the last time I disappeared from the Internet without saying anything I got hit by a tow truck and had to take blog break while I was unconscious in the hospital.

Comparatively, this little break is far more innocuous. I’m just really busy right now, as it goes with life sometimes, and I’m taking a break to prioritize and get-things-done and maybe do some of those things that Merlin Mann keeps going on about. Also, I’m about halfway finished with twenty-something pages of academic writing, and that kind of thing will make you want to run away from your laptop as soon as you’re finished. (I do, admittedly, still find the time to tweet.)

In my off-time — at like, three in the morning — I’ve been thinking about how Nervous Acid is kind of like a band to me, and how every time I’ve changed it or redesigned or switched focus, well, that’s like making a new record. And as much as I loved, say, OK Computer, I don’t think I ever wanted Thom Yorke to sing about Gucci little piggies forever. So, in line with that analogy, I’m kind of working on a new album. In the meantime, enjoy the silence. It’s nice outside.