UPDATE: 12:43 AM -- I figured out that Yahoo didn't like my browser -- I tried another and got the song uploaded to my MP3 folder. I also tried to make a direct link, but I dunno if that'll work -- if you try it, let me know, either way, thanks.

4/5/04 6:02 PM: I don't really know how I'm feeling right now. The title of this long winded rant comes from not the Ja Rule/Mary J. Blige collabo, but "Rainy days and Mondays always get me down," which is sadly true.

I called my lawyer today, as I haven't heard back from him regarding getting my car fixed after getting rear ended just over a month ago. He tells me that Safeway Insurance is saying that the guy who hit me was uninsured. "That's not right," I told him. "I looked at the guy's policy, held it in my hand, it covered the date of the accident." He says sometimes there's issues of payment, blah blah blah. He's sending a second request to Safeway and calling the guy who hit me to yell at him. This is not good.

My car is not in great shape. The accident caused a host of zany things, including not being able to open the passenger side door, not being able to open the driver's side window, having a rear bumper that's hanging on more by the laws of faith than the laws of physics (and anyone who knows me these days knows how little faith I have). In addition, at the lawyer's behest, I've been seeing a chiropractor very regularly (six times a week for two weeks, three times a week ever since), which surely is running up a considerable tab that I certainly have no interest in paying from my own pocket. I don't want to drive myself into debt to get my car fixed, I don't want to rack up a bunch of debt to get a new car (this one just got paid off last year). It's also really not stylish rolling around in traffic with a car that looks like it lost a schoolyard fight, and asking a lovely young lady to climb in the driver's side door and crawl over is so embarrassing. It's been a shadow hanging over an otherwise pretty decent time of my life. The accident has ended up eating up my time and my mental energy, taking me away from other things I'd rather be doing. That's not so cool.

I have been enjoying something of a televised renaissance, with great episodes of Scrubs, 24, Alias, The Practice and more littering my screen on a regular basis. I've particularly enjoyed two offerings from Fox, the delightfully snarky but brilliantly written Wonderfalls and the borderline genius Arrested Development. I have two VCRs at my house, which is especially funny given that I don't have cable. Anyhoo, I've come to really adore the madcap whimsy of Wonderfalls in particular, led by the insanely charismatic yet wholly indifferent Caroline Dhavernas. Plus, it has the threat of lesbian action, which always makes me happy (I am a full supporter of any brand of lesbian, since I am merely a lesbian, trapped in a man's body ... who wants to get into a woman's body ... and out again, and in, and ... well, you get the point).

Anyhoo, I read that Wonderfalls is as dead as the Kunicich presidential campaign and there's even doubts that the remaining episodes will ever be shown. The list of shows I've loved on Fox that died horrible, undeveloped deaths is lengthy -- Profit, Action, Andy Richter Controls the Universe, Family Guy, Greg the Bunny, Getting Personal, Futurama and more. It's sad that the network that once ushered in the Bundy family can't get it together to leave The Bernie Mac Show on one consistent night and takes a critical darling like Wonderfalls and puts it in the part of the week where nothing works, then slates it against a dangerous Donald Trump-fueled reality show. It's like the wanted to screw it up, just so they can say, "well, we tried smart programming and nobody watched." Hell, if not for my VCR, I'd never have seen it, because I'm normally out having a life when the show was broadcast. Dammit.

On a considerably happier note, I'm passionately in love, and it's wholly gay, and I couldn't be more pleased. The new love of my life, my glorious digital paramour is none other than GarageBand Apple's music production software. Now, I've been a Macintosh zealot since high school, I have an Apple sticker in the rear window of my currently beleaguered Monte Carlo, I've bought and directed the purchase of easily twenty Macs in my life, for me and people I've dealt with. This is just too much for me.

GarageBand is part of a software package called iLife, mostly free apps (iTunes, iMovie and iPhoto) which have been around for a while. They retail the whole shtick for $50. I got it on eBay, including shipping, for $38.90. I installed it last Sunday, and over the last week have spent about a dozen hours working with it, programming music, singing (it records directly using my PowerBook's internal mic, which I often forget about), et cetera.

The result is a song called "My Kingdom Come," a song about heartbreak that relies heavily on my own failed marriage but also draws from every time I've gotten my heart broken (which is a lot more than I care to think about on a regular basis). In the whole song, three minutes and seventeen seconds worth of music (another in joke in the song for myself, there are several), only an acoustic guitar loop and the drums are not played and arranged wholly by me. The MP3 is less than four megabytes of data. It's wonderful that I could do so much in so little time with nothing more than my own sweet little PowerBook.

But I can't remember the way to log into my Yahoo! Briefcase where I keep my MP3s, so I can't upload it yet. Watch this space, I'll let you know when it's available for download. It's made me so happy, just sitting here, headphones on, listening to my ideas come together.

"Why a song about heartbreak, Hannibal? You're so pleased with your personal life!" That's true, I can't deny that. However, I started the song by thumbing through the scores of loops that the software has (it has all the features of more expensive packages I used to use, like Performer and Cubase, without any of the drama of me needing external modules to get, say, a piano or a drum kit sound). The acoustic guitar loop that's at the core of the song is fairly mournful, so I wrote to fit it. No greater story than that, really.

On a funny side note, I was working on the song Friday afternoon when the phone rang. The caller ID said, "Los Angeles Sentinel," which normally means my old editor Lela (who used to run the paper I now run, the Herald Dispatch) was on the line.

I picked up the receiver. "Talk to your Teezy," I said.

"Lela, how the heck are you? Bob? The kids?"

Blah blah blah, catching up, telling her how pleased I am with my life, et cetera.

"You know, Hannibal, I ran into somebody that knows your wife ..."

"I don't have a wife," I was quick to correct her.

"Your former wife, then," she continued. "They said she's become a really bitter, unhappy, depressed person."

I was quiet a moment, considering this. Finally, I said, "Good."

"What?"

"You know, the more I think about that, considering the weekend I've got coming up, what I'm doing with this song software right now, and how blessed I am, that just about makes my day. Thank you for sharing that with me, Lela!"

We go through a brief thing that we do a lot when we talk, where she tries to convince herself and me that somehow, under my bluster, I'm a wonderful, warm person. I remind her that under that wonderful person is a person that would cheerfully and without hesitation slit his nieces throats if I felt it was the right thing to do, and that I am not only evil, but happy about it and wholly unapologetic. She normally shakes this off, because knowing such a person makes her twitchy.

So she wandered off and I got back to working on the song. It's been a warm thought in my mind ever since. Sure, I have ups and downs, but on an everyday basis, even hating all carbon based life as I do, I'm pretty chipper (back to "whimsically bitter"). I'm surely tons happier than the writing of the past shows me as. So that's that.

In other news, I hosted one of the first contests of the qualifying rounds for KaraokeFest a big contest. It was a lot of work, with a lot of people bothering me with stupid questions and not a lot of tips. Plus, I have to suspend my normal show (i.e. normal customers) for something like two and a half hours. It's a pain in the butt. Plus I can't compete anywhere, since I'm working the contest. Plus, designing eighteen-by-twenty four inch signs, business cards, flyers (fliers? I never know), and developing a marketing plan for the contest took up a lot of time and energy. Now that I've seen the contestants, I might have had a chance, but oh well.

Anyhoo, my dawg Dana qualified to move on in the contest, singing "Joey" by the Concrete Blondes. She complained, since she cracked once in the song (which surprised me a lot, she's very well trained and has an amazing voice) and wasn't on top of her game. "Was it how I was dressed?" she asked. Jon replied, "It doesn't hurt." A lot of the other female contestants were rather beastly, and since the contestants are judges ...

Anyhoo, I don't have to worry about it for a week, since my co-worker Laura is switching with me this week. That means working Friday from midnight to 4AM, which is a whole other set of madness.

I'm in limbo on comic book writing things. I sent back the deal sheet to the Canadians, and I'm waiting on contracts to sign so we can get to work. OTOH, I ran into this chef who wants to draw comics, so I'm gonna give him the full script from my shot-down Epic project and let him go nuts. It's a saleable project, so any progress there would be good. Then I've gotta resubmit my "Floyd" project to Image Comics since my old co-worker Eric is now in charge of day-to-day operations, and since Valentino could never remember whether or not he'd seen my proposal ... I dunno about any of that. All very nebulous right now. I'm not a fan of nebulous.

Of course there's the fact that The Crown is going on two weeks late. I started working on it at Wizard World Los Angeles (which bothered me to no end, since it was in Long Beach, easily a 20 minute drive under good conditions). I got a lot of this chapter done, but I haven't had time to slow down and look at it since. I'm still just a hair busier than I wanna be, and it slows me down in a variety of fashions.

Looking over this, there's a lot more to be happy about than unhappy about, so my bad mood doesn't have too strong a grip. I'm not rooting for either side -- good moods and bad moods come and go. It's just interesting to note.