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Monday Morning Ramblings

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First, congratulations to the Green Bay Packers.  They simply beat us and deserve to be champs.  It was a good game, and we had our chances to win it but just didn’t make the necessary plays.  Losing sucks, and I’m not going to pretend like it doesn’t sting, but life goes on.  I’m just as big of a Steelers fan today as I was yesterday.  We’ll be back in the big game soon, and we will bring home number seven.

That’s enough about the game.  What I really want to write about today is that god-awful excuse for a halftime show.  Five Finger Freddy, or whatever the hell his name is, said that the Black Eyed Peas were going to take it to the next level.  Well, if that’s the best you got, you are a terrible excuse for an entertainer.  That show was pathetic.  Sure, there were lots of flashing lights and cool effects, but the “music” was beyond lame.  I would’ve rather watched Milli Vanilli lip-sync their way through twenty minutes of their crap than watch those four no-talent jerk-offs stand around like statues and mumble their songs out of tune, out of tempo, and out of harmony.

That show confirmed so much of what I believe about what hippity-hoppity has done to the music industry.  I prefer my music sung by people who understand harmonics and key changes and well, singing.  Hippity-hoppity has become a terrible parody of itself, much like Air Supply and Journey were a terrible parody of real rock.  Real musicians hold up live, regardless of the venue.  That steaming pile of horse dung that Sam I Am, or whatever the hell his name is, and the others left in the middle of Cowboys Stadium shows just how thin and weak the music industry has become.  Real musicians, who can play real instruments and create beautiful songs, can’t break into the industry, while talentless hacks get to play the Super Bowl.  I mean, they were so bad they made Slash, one of the greatest guitar legends of all-time, sound lifeless and bland.

Part of me looks at the music industry as a perfect metaphor for where we are as a nation.  Sixty years ago, our nation created some of the most powerful and amazing music in the world, and that music inspired the world to follow it.  Musicians like Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and Elvis Presley had real talent and honed skill.  At that same time, our nation was revolutionizing technology and industry and leading the world into the future.  Today, our country produces mediocre garbage that couldn’t inspire a pig to root in crap.  Our masses still lap it up, however, because we’ve become so accustomed to mediocrity that most of us can’t appreciate real music and real talent.  At the same time, we have lost our innovative edge and have fallen hopelessly far behind in education.  We stand around bragging about how great we are, while the rest of world blazes by us.

Please, America, please, wake up and realize that when you settle for mediocre crap, you become mediocre crap.

General Posts

Thursday Afternoon Ramblings

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I finally found the time to format both my books for the Kindle.  It’s a project that has been idling on my to-do list for two years.  When I would think about it, I would be up to my eyebrows in work, and when I had the time, I wouldn’t remember to do it.  However, both have been submitted for approval by the Amazon team, so I should know by tomorrow if they’re approved.  I’m not 100% satisfied with how they looked on the preview screen because the Kindle strips away most formatting, but hopefully they’ll be legible enough for the average Kindle reader.

It’s fairly obvious that e-books are the future, so I’m going to try to get mine out there in as many formats as possible.  Next, I’ll submit them to Lightning Source, my current printer, for them to distribute in their network.  I’m hoping that these new outlets will help to get the series wider exposure.  With book three nearing release, it would be nice to broaden the audience.  My fellow independents can attest, often in this industry, we work and work and work without seeing much in return because making a dent in people’s consciousness has become extraordinarily difficult recently.  People are so overwhelmed by commercials and marketing that a lone voice from the independent realm is often lost in the din.

Yet we still press on, hoping to build an audience and hoping that one day all of this effort and energy will be worth it.  Even though we all proclaim that we don’t write for the money, most of us want at least to make our living solely from our writing, and while that doesn’t sound like an unreasonable wish for a novelist, in this country at this time, it often feels like an absurd pipe-dream.  Maybe it was always this tough, and I just had unrealistic expectations.  Country musicians used to call it “The long, hard road” to success, and maybe writing has always been this difficult to break into.  All I know is that I’ve gotten a tremendous amount of positive feedback on my books, but to the large presses, I’m not up to par.  Either my readers are fluffing my ego or the editors are out of touch.  Either way, I’ll press on, writing a series that lives up to my standards and promoting as much as I can.

www.daadams.com

General Posts

Monday Afternoon Ramblings

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Let me be as clear about this as possible: this is my blog, and from day one, I’ve written about whatever was on my mind at that moment.  I’m not a journalist and have never one time claimed to be a news outlet.  I openly and happily admit that I’m an entertainer.  This blog serves as my outlet for new ideas, heartfelt opinions, old memories, frustrations, outrages, and anything else that crosses my mind.  If you don’t like my opinions, feel free to comment on that blog, openly and publicly.  As long as you aren’t more profane than I am, I’ll approve it.

I don’t belong to any political party because I believe that all parties by their very nature are corrupt.  The party, regardless of political affiliation, is about the garnering of power, and as such, the leadership of that party must distort facts, twist ideas, and misrepresent situations for their own benefit.  To me, the leadership of the Republican party only represents the upper 2% of our population but to appeal to a broad base uses fear and hate to move people to vote against their own best interests.  After 38 years of witnessing their actions, I’m pretty entrenched in this belief, and no amount of Fox News bullshit will change my mind.  I also believe that the leadership of the Democratic party is a group of elitist intellectuals who want to control and manipulate people’s lives because those leaders believe they know how to live better than everyone else.  In order to appeal to a broad base, they use fear and hate to move people to give up self-sufficiency.

I’ve said before, the reason why I’m more vocal in my absolute disdain for conservatives than for liberals is because I live in a very conservative region and am bombarded daily by the hate and venom they spew.  I see it on bumper stickers, hear it in stores, and feel it everywhere I go.  If I lived in a liberal region and were bombarded from the other end, I would vent and ridicule their perversions just as vehemently.

The bottom line is that this is my outlet.  If you don’t like my views, that’s fine.  Start your own blog or write comments in public for others to read and respond to.  That’s free speech, one of our most sacred rights as Americans.

www.daadams.com