New Song: Five Days Later

An elderly great uncle and great aunt (husband and wife) of mine died within five days of each other last week. When I thought about it this seemed like a pretty ideal scenario. Sure, it's always sad when people die, but the worst of the heartache comes from and on behalf of the life partner who is left behind. It has to be extremely painful to lose a spouse at a relatively old age but still live on yourself for many more years, missing the person every minute of every day. This couple was spared this sorrow by passing away in such a short span of time. It's bittersweet- but more sweet than bitter, I think.

I've been listening to and playing a couple songs recently that sort of deal with this topic - Wilco's "On and On and On" and Death Cab for Cutie's "I Will Follow You Into the Dark." I've always liked the way those tunes capture the sorrow, the redemption and the closure that can come with death after a long life. I was inspired to write a similar song of my own called Five Days Later.

You can listen to Five Days Later - and the rest of the songs on The Long Road Home (my album in progress) by clicking on this link.

I really like this one- let me know what you think.

The Next Big Bust?

At least once or twice a decade there seems to be some big consumer crisis that sends everyone into a panic. We've been hearing about the mortgage credit/housing industry collapse for about the last sixth months. Before that it was the Dot Bomb. Before that it was the Savings and Loan industry. I'm too young to remember anything before that (the oil thing in the 70's, maybe? The California Gold Rush?), but I'm sure it was some similarly large, quasi-catastrophic meltdown of some key consumer sector of the economy.

The common thread in each of these episodes seems to be the inevitability of collapse even at the height of the mania. At the pinnacle of the housing "boom" in 2005 virtually everyone involved seemed to understand that prices could not keep increasing indefinitely. But no one knew when the bottom would fall out, so consumers had to keep buying to avoid being permanently priced out.

My wife and I fell into this category. We bought a two-bedroom condo in March 2005 even though we weren't quite ready to be homeowners. We sincerely feared that if we waited another year we would be priced out of even the most modest home here in the D.C. area. Of course, the real estate and mortgage banking industries were all too happy to stoke these fears.

All of the famous boom/bust episodes in history seem to follow a similar timeline:

1. Anecdotal evidence of unusually high returns on some investment begin to circulate through word of mouth.
2. Media picks up on anecdotal evidence and gives windfall beneficiaries a larger soapbox.
3. Speculators enter the market, driving up prices and further fanning the flames of hysteria.
4. Cottage industries, fly-by-night providers and associated vultures enter the market with promises to help consumers. The true intention of these providers is to extract value, often fraudulently, at the expense of consumers.
5. Prices begin exceeding true value by 100% or more; would-be regulators and consumer groups begin to sound the caution alarms.
6. Speculative and increasingly desperate consumer activity continues; no one wants to be without a chair when the music stops.
7. Investment goes belly up; media churns sad-sack stories of consumers who lost it all.
8. Massive bankruptcies of industry providers flood the system, infecting other sectors of the economy. Government steps in to bail out providers and consumers who should have known better. Republicans get mad.
9. Government threatens industry regulation, industry promises to self-regulate, bribes are placed, government looks the other way. Democrats get mad.
10. Celebrity inadvertently flashes private parts while getting out of car, everyone forgets about investment bust.

I'd say we're at about stage 9 for the housing bust, meaning we're one celebrity crotch shot away from the beginning of the Next Big Market Frenzy. If these cycles are so predictable, we ought to be able to see the next one coming as soon as it starts.

So what's it going to be? What's going to be the next out-of-control thing that causes us all to abandon common sense and dive right in?

I'm going to go ahead and predict a meltdown of the retirement savings industry. The retirement ranks are beginning to swell with Baby Boomers, who are likely to live longer (and need more cash) than any previous generation of retirees. You can bet that an industry will soon spring up with promises of high returns for Boomers if they invest in risky funds based on derivatives. Seniors are going to lose their shirts and Social Security won't be enough.

How about you? What do you think The Next Big Bust will be? Drop a comment with your prognostication.

The Long Road Home

I started teaching myself to play guitar in a fit of boredom about four years ago. I bought the cheapest possible guitar, found some lessons online, and started whaling away. I haven't been able to put the damn instrument down since. I've always been a music lover, and there's something extraordinarily cathartic about actually feeling the music flow from my hands and mind instead of just being a listener. It brings me peace.

Four years later I own three guitars and have started writing some original music. As a Mac owner I couldn't resist the pull of GarageBand so I plugged in the guitar and started recording at home in December of '05. Last spring I took another leap and started playing in front of other people at open mic at Tiffany Tavern in Alexandria, VA. If playing other people's music is cathartic, I've learned that writing and performing original stuff is even more so. You're laying your deepest hopes, fears and suspicions out there and hoping that you can connect in a way that supersedes the superficial. It takes cojones, sure, but I've found it incredibly rewarding.

I've begun assembling a record out of my songs called The Long Road Home. It's a folk/rock/alt-country collection. I play all the instruments, do all the mixing and the cover art is even one of my photos. It's all me, baby. Thematically it's about the search for home that we all take throughout our lives. "Home" in this case means many things: inner peace, a return to a better time, coming in from the cold, returning from travel, reconciliation. It's something different for each of us at different times in our lives.

If you'd like to hear some of the songs I've posted them on the web at Ultimate Guitar (click on the link to listen). Yes, I'm an amateur and a hack, but I've had a lot of fun writing and playing these songs and I'm looking forward to making more music.

Pants Pegging

Greetings. I first started this blog back in 2004, back when blogging wasn't cool. Now it's 2007 and blogging still isn't cool, but it's gotten more acceptable only because so many people have blogs these days. So here I am at my kitchen table with a beer and a keyboard and here you are reading, and Fluorescent Sunshine is back after a three-year hiatus.

It's kind of like back in the early '90s when everyone was tight-rolling their jeans. That particular fashion trend was colossally and unacceptably lame, and we all knew it. Yet everyone was doing it, the cool guys, the popular girls, and you didn't DARE not tight-roll your jeans, for you knew that being the first one off the fashion fad merry-go-round was the sure path to ridicule.

I remember the first time I was exposed to the intricate pants-pegging procedure like it was 17 years ago. I was at the sixth grade dance, that wellspring of adolescent awkwardness and desperation. M.C. Hammer, Vanilla Ice, and EMF's "Unbelievable" were blasting from the speakers in the gym. In between sweaty, earnest iterations of dance classics like the Running Man and Roger Rabbit, I noticed something different about the cuffs of some of the girls' jeans. They were like, rolled up or something, but folded, too. "Huh," I thought, "must be a girl thing. Looks pretty good with those bangs, though." But then I spied the same look on the jeans of a few of the guys. I thought: "Jesus Christ! That looks freakin' ridiculous!" I made a mental note to rip on those guys but Bryan Adams' "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" came on and I had to find an awkward slow-dance partner.

By the end of the next week at school the pants-pegging virus had spread. Now nearly everyone had crisply, precisely rolled jeans cuffs...except me. In a panic, I took a friend aside at lunch and demanded that he teach me how to roll my jeans like that. It was all too easy: I folded my cuffs over and rolled two or three times. I took a few steps. It was pretty uncomfortable with my newly-pegged pants riding up my ankles. I looked and felt like a total asshole. But for the next few months I didn't dare leave home without meticulously rolling my jeans. If everyone else was going to look dumb then dammit I was going to look dumb with them. But I think we all, along with our pants cuffs, breathed a big sigh of relief when the fashion gods of the early '90s decided to relax the pants-pegging protocol.

So you see, that's why I'm writing this blog. Because if I can't roll up my jeans like a one-legged pirate then the least I can do is post a bunch of stuff up on the internet for your entertainment.

Thanks for reading.