The Chest Hair Of The Apocalypse

The glowing bulb of consciousness we call life can dim and flicker. When our lives seem to be a dark cellar and you’re right in the middle of that flight of stairs that are all rickety, badly constructed, and have nails at irregular intervals jetting out of them. Yeah, a bit like that. It can make as much sense as waking up one day and finding you have a single four inch hair growing on your chest. Just one single, extremely long and disturbing intruder just lying around uninvited to your torso. You wake up, stretch a bit, scratch that mass of ass-fat, wish that hunk of ass fat was smaller, wish the bed a fond farewell with promises and kisses of a quick return, and find an anomaly has plunked itself onto your fragile person.

“Where did this thing come from?” you might think to yourself. “Is this some kind of joke my body decided to play on me late last night?” I can see my heart and chest having a quite droll conversation about my reaction to this very predicament. I know for a fact that thing wasn’t there when I went to bed. Do I have some kind of superhuman hair-growth gene my parents always meant to tell me about but never got around to? Whatever the reasons, there it is. A gigantic hair staring you right in the face. Just mocking your notion of what protuberances your body should have upon waking. Laughing with its tiny, nonexistent mouth - although I may be only four inches long, I’m going to rock your mind for the rest of the day.     
     “Take that!” it seems to scream, and you’re left picking up the pieces when it’s done. Darn you, four inch hair of doom. Darn you good.

So what to do now? What is the possible course of action for such an affront? Do you pluck it off? Wouldn’t that be just what that nefarious hair wants? To be plucked free to wreak havoc on the whole world? Could you really release such a devious thing into the world? What would be the possible consequences of such an act? By tomorrow morning all you know and love destroyed by your selfishness of not keeping one single (yet horribly evil) hair upon your person. Shame on you. Look at what you’ve done…

Cars left abandoned in the streets. Skulls of tiny sea creatures adorning that thing on the mailbox that you put up to let the mailman know you got mail in the mailbox that needs to be picked up. Nobody knows what that thing is called, but I’ll be darned if it’s not replaced with sea skulls. The farmers market is out of fresh carrots, dogs barking, planes falling out of the sky, windshield wiper fluid replaced with the blood of virgins - you know, typical apocalyptical scenarios. This is the world you’ve created from your own selfish needs to be rid of the small anomaly on your chest. I hope you’re proud of yourself. I had a bill that needed to be paid. Now my mailman (bless his heart) is reasonably confused by the replacement of the mailbox flag with skulls. Thanks a lot. You jerk.

So what’s to be done? Dress in layers and hope that the office isn’t having one of it’s infamous “everyone must take off their shirts to use the printer” days? On any other day, you would be excited, if not a bit bemused by such a day at the office. But no. Not now. Not when you have the Hitler of hairs secretly concealed within your multi-layered wardrobe. The press of shame against the undergarments of anguish and self doubt. The blemish of pity on your ripe apple. The pain of…ok, ok, yes. I think I’ve sufficiently made my point.

You my sad, poor, distressed friend have a problem. You haven’t had your coffee yet, so the solution to this problem seems to slip your grasp like a man made of Jell-o who just sprayed a pan with PAM and got some on his hands, then tried to peel an oiled-up banana. Did I mention that the banana also has a thin layer of super slippery soap on it too? No? Well it does. And boy is it hard to grasp. Just like your problem with your long Chest-Hair-Of-The-Apocalypse. Go get your coffee, we’ll wait….

　
　
　Got it? Did you remember to put sugar in it? Put the milk back in the fridge? We don’t want that milk going bad - it’s a brand new gallon. You did? Ok good. Now that we have you caffeinated, maybe a solution will present itself. Could you tie the hair in multiple knots so it doesn’t seem so long? No. Now it’s gained girth. Burn it off so it can't escape to be the harbinger of death to all living things? No, that body spray you put all over your chest surely would turn you into that one marshmallow that always falls into the campfire. We all mourn that fallen marshmallow soldier who blackened so another could find its way to perfect brown marshmallowiness. Maybe you could put a bow on it and disguise it as a small, ugly lapdog. No, no one would fall for that one again.

What to do? You seem smart and well adjusted. I mean just look at that cup of coffee you made. The perfect creamy brown color. The lovely scent of angels wafting off of it. Just the right amount of milk and sugar. Oh and look at you, you even dusted the top with a bit of nutmeg. You are a coffee making superstar! Surely someone who can make such a magnificent cup of coffee can figure out how to be rid of the hair that ails you, right?

Your whole day destroyed - by a tiny little insignificant thing. A thing that should be overlooked and neglected. They say these things wither up and die when you give them a lack of attention. The hair screams your name from under your shirt and jacket, pleading to be acknowledged. You will do no such thing. You will go into that office. You will type out that memo your boss so thoughtfully gave you right before lunch and demanded done in 30 minutes. You WILL take those layers off when the printer demands that one go shirtless. You will not be affected by the small things that demand your attention so passionately. You will enjoy your day and revel in the fact that you did not cause the end of all mankind because of one insignificant hair. You are empowered! That hair? Which hair. Oh you slightly remember it, somewhere in the back of your head. The next morning, that hair… is still there.

Crap. Oh wait - no. It was just a long piece of fiber from the couch you slept on last night. Whew. Thought we’d have to go through all that again. The hair, once ignored, went into hiding. Only to be found again when your self-doubt resurfaces like a submarine upon the mighty ocean. A hair sub. Ok, maybe that was a bad example, but no matter. You are free.

Good for you. I for one always knew you wouldn’t cause the end to mankind and the mail as we know it. That makes me happy. That bill I needed sent out was really important, after all.

The Birth of Photophore

     What is there to say about Photophore? We make music, we drink beer, we are sarcastic, and probably most prevalent we are just silly. Our music is not for all, and probably not for most. I don't think you would label us an "indie" type band because we mock love of cheesy 80's music and our sick love of old country with such respect, that it has become what we are. Also, we don't whine with acoustic guitars like I picture most indie bands doing. I certainly, probably, most likely am wrong in my assumption of indie bands, but I digress...

     Fifteen years ago I started my first band with a buddy of mine. He had gone away for the summer and came back with a brand new electric guitar and two months worth of guitar "training". I had no training whatsoever in any instruments, and decided for no other reason than it sounded like the easiest instrument to play, that I would play drums. I bought the cheapest, ugliest, most ghetto drumset I could find and people had compared it's sound to pots and pans being banged together with a weedwhacker thrown in there for good measure. But, we had our first band. What at the time I think we called something gay like "Purple Haze" or some other such terrible, unoriginal name like that. We played mostly bits and peices of covers, and had a few little originals that my friend had made up. I was just happy to bang on the drums way off-time with him. My love of playing music at the time went no further than that. We played we he would come up with and he would spend the night. Amazingly my mom and dad allowed the terrible sound in there house for hours at a time. I can sum up the rest of the story in two short words. We sucked.

     A few years later my friend and I had long went our own seperate ways. I still played drums to my cd's and tried and best I could to get better. I never was, and never will be a good drummer, but I did headbang and bounce around alot so there was always the "Hey look at that idiot go" factor to my drumming.

     Anyway, when I was about seventeen I had a girlfriend that introduced me to a bass player. He was quiet, had long hair, and smoked pot. Yeah, typical bassplayer. This was my first introduction to the bass guitar. I'm sad to say that at the time I had no idea the difference between a six string and a bass guitar. I feel better to know that a lot of people who don't play an instrument don't. We played in my bedroom and I got my timing a bit better. He introduced me to a funk/slap style that just blew me away. We played for a month or two and got introduced to a guitarist and my first "real" band Paradigm was born.

     We mostly played some funk and a newly born (and terrible) emo music. As it was explained to me at the time it was short for emotional music. It still to this day confuses me exactly what that means. We played a few shows at friends parties and people would come over to watch us practice. The bass player and guitarist made up all the songs and I just played drums. The idea that I could write didn't really even occur to me. I was just the drummer I would always say and I was happy with just that.

     Around this time a super cool, quiet, sarcastic, and beautiful girl came to watch us play. In short, I was knocked on my ass by her. Quickly after we met we started dating. She played bass guitar so we would practice together from time to time, but it was mostly just me and the band. Shortly after meeting this girl, Nina, the band replaced me with a better drummer. I'm certainly not saying it was meeting Nina that prompted this action, but rather my aweful skills at the drums. It stung a little, but the band members and I still stayed very close for years after that.

     This is when the infant Photophore was born, although we wouldn't be known by that name for many years to come. Nina and I played together and started writing a few simple songs. Mostly influenced by her love of sublime at the time. We had many band members that we tried come and go throughout the next year or two, but nobody seemed to fit with what we wanted to do. We wanted to play experimental music. A weird mix of casio keyboard trumpets, weird 80's synth, and country twang. We wanted to play all genres and at times combine them. It made for a confusing, yet sometimes catchy and fun, odd mixture of music. Nobody got what the hell we we're doing, and I'm not saying that in the way that we we're musical geniuses and beyond comprehension...we just we're, us.

     After a while of doing instrumentals we moved on to putting odd, quickly written, and usually stupid lyrics to our odd mix of music we were doing. It didn't really make much sense, but it gave us some fun times on our 8 track that we used. We mostly wanted people to laugh at us, because we were laughing at ourselves on a daily basis. We realized that finding band members was a hard job, and keeing them together even harder. So, we leared to play more intruments. I stopped playing drums and we used our casio keyboard drums (there were only 100, out of those maybe 50 were usable) to play percussion. Nina learned to play the keyboard, and I leared to play guitar and keyboard. Our sound grew a bit and we leared in full force how to write music.

    We needed a name. But what name? We had no idea. We tried many: Granny Plucker's Homemade Jam Band? No, too long. String Theory? No, too hard to explain. De-mutate? No, just a rip off of DEVO. Cage and Aquarium? Yes. A song from a band that influenced us more than any other at the time, They Might Be Giants. We had a name. For years we made music under this name. Nina and I went crazy writing hundreds of songs. We had metal, grunge, techno, silly, sad, strings, country, jazz, funk. All the things we loved. Cage and Aquarium was a genre mess.

     For years we played this way. Confusing and delighting our few fans. Around 2004 we had dropped the 8 track for a more updated means of recording: a computer. This gave us more tracks to layer on and added a whole new dimension to our music. Around this time we found the newly popular Myspace and decided to add our music to a band page and get a few fans more than what we had. I remember being happy when we got over a hundred plays and had 50 fans. It was amazing! Because it was just the two of us we never played live so no one except close friends and family had ever heard our music. This was a brand new means for home studio bands like us to get our music to the masses. It surprised us even more when over the course of the year we got over 5,000 fans and a total over over 20,000 plays on our songs. I think this more than anything changed what we would later become. I started taking much more time on our music. Instead of writing 5 stupid, quickly written songs in a day, I started taking much more time and thought about what we were saying and what we were writing. Our songs still remained silly at times, but they took on a more polished edge. 

     We we're still confusing. People don't generally like or understand a band that plays too many genres of music. Our first CD sounded like 10 different bands and although we took pride in that, we had no genre to call our own. It was at this time I got my first drum machine/ synthesizer. Nina and I loved Devo, The Cars, Duran Duran, The Buggles, and many other cheezy 80's synth pop bands.  It had always been a part of our band from the start.   I started a new band on my own called "The Chaberlains Air Conditioned Meteor" which had a much more club-electro feel than our previous attempt have had. I wanted to do something so different that Nina would'nt recognize who was playing. I put it up on Myspace, and showed it to her. She had no idea it was me playing the music. It was a Sci-Fi mix of electro and weird sounds and clips from old Sci-fi movies. We liked it. I brought Nina into the CACM and our electro sound was born.

     The name was too long. Damn, we hated having to tell people that name. After the word Air people's eyes started to gloss over. We needed a shorter name. A one word name preferably. After searching the internet, I wanted a name that was bright and cheerful, yet had a darkside to it. Bioluminescence was on my mind. I liked the idea, but the word was too long. So I searched some bioluminescent sites and found the word photophore, which is the light emitting organs on jellyfish and other glowing sea creatures. It was perfect for our new sound.

     Our style got less experimental and more synth-pop. We had hooks to our songs now. We took months to write them. We were proud of them. We got many more fans. Then myspace sort of died out. Facebook was king. Over to facebook Photophore goes.

      Our music in the last 5 years or so got more and more dirty. We swore more, and almost every song was about sex, or sexual postions. We loved the word penis. We wanted to write music that wasn't exactly beyond the point that most people were comfortable with, but damn close. We wanted to be that dirty little secret people had when they listened to us. A laugh by yourself. Everyone thinks sex is funny. I mean let's face it, it is. We want people to be able to feel comfortable with the fact that they certainly didn't think of the nastiness Viz and Nina are spouting, but glad it's there. Somehow along the line, we became a dirty, sarcastic, sex band. That isn't all we do, but by far it's our most popular. We enjoy it as well. So many studio sessions are spent laughing at ourselves and how nasty and silly we can be.

A little under a year ago we added our third member to what has for 10 years been a duo. We did not take this decision lightly. We knew it would change the feel and the sound of the band greatly. Our best friend had recorded a few songs with us before and even starred in one of our first music videos. She was an unofficial member for years. We asked her if she would be interested in joining Photophore (we had no idea if she would or not) and she seemed to love the idea! Nunya Biz was born. Photophore being a threesome has really expanded our sound. We can write things we never could before. The evolution of the band was going right in the direction we wanted it to.

    

     Wow. That wasn't supposed to be such a history lession. Sorry about that. I hope the one or two people who read this found it at least somewhat interesting how our band became what it is today. Still a group of idiots having fun, making the music we love.

Prank Injections- Lonely Fish Guy

Ah yes, also I have too much time on my hands.

The Saga Begins

     A blog is a place that people write stuff and get ideas from their heads to a page online for others to read. Now that you see that everything I say IS indeed wisdom, I can get this blog going full steam. First a little about me. I smoke too many cigarettes, I drink beer, and enjoy on occassion reading books in the nude. No wait. That doesn't really paint the picture of me I'm trying to convey here in this blog. Let me try again. I eat well, I get along with everyone, my breath alone can attract women from two counties over, I do everything right, and I always make good decisions. There.

    Can you imagine such a person? Does that person even exist out there? I'm sure they do, and that either really impresses me, or really scares the holy living crap out of me and I can't seem to decide which. At least once a day in my life I have someone say to me that they feel like they aren't "normal". My response is the same as I would imagine most people's are, "What the heck is normal anyway?". We go through life with these expectations of ourselves that we should fit in and have a "Leave it to Beaver" type of life, but does that life really exist? If it does I sure haven't met anyone who even comes close to it.

     We try so hard to impress upon ourselves this unreal way of being. I for one say "Hell if you want to wear an army helmet around the house and dance to Lady Gaga while drinking a beer, go for it." Well, actually, that might be the first time I've ever said that exact sentence, but you get the point. Life isn't about trying to impress others, or to even hide that wacky messed up side that we all have lurking somewhere in there. I don't just mean the silly side, but also the dark "my parents screwed my head to hell" side that everyone I know has. Now, I'm not saying you should go stark raving mad in the streets kicking hotdog venders with dead animals, but rather show your freak flag from time to time and know that everyone else is more or less in the same boat you are.

      I feel like I'm jumping all over the place and I know somewhere in here there is some sort of point to be made. Maybe what I'm trying to say is, that people should worry less how they look to others, and more on how they feel about themselves. Not that I'm one to talk, I constantly worry about what others might possibly think about me. I worry about little things I say to people later on and hope they didn't take me the wrong way. It's a hard struggle for a lot of people to really be themselves in front of others. Will they think I'm nuts? A jerk? An idiot? Because let's face it, we're all different. Everyone of us has different things going through our minds. What one person will find funny, another finds terribly offensive.

     We have all had different experiences in our life, along with those crazy chemicals that fill our brains that make us who we are. It's a wonder people get along as well as they do. We learn though from these differences. I know my friends and family are always forcing me to grow from just being exposed to them. I am really grateful for that. I guess what I'm trying to say is, no matter who you are, you are important to the people who surround you. Not just those close to you, but people you meet and greet during the day as well. Being "normal" in my mind is only being what can be thought of as crazy, and honestly...I wouldn't have anyone I know be any other way