… can never lead to anything good. I’ve been neglecting my sleep pattern again. And there’s loads of dirty dishes in my head, er, sink. And I don’t know what daylight is anymore. And I haven’t eaten well in days. And I haven’t shaved, had a haircut, gone to the dentist and the doctor, like I planned.

Everything I plan always fails. I was so happy in my BlogTV show this night. But right afterwards it made me so sad that with all my intelligence and talents, I’m still stuck here in this little room, on my own. All because I can’t live by a planning.

I’ve been trying a gazillion times now. And I won’t give up. Tomorrow it’ll all be different. Again. Again. Again. Until it works.

Young people dying in the age of Twitter. Reading their trivialities, carelessly unleashed onto the information superhighway, not even 24 hours ago, oblivious of the rapidly approaching and sudden end. I’ve seen it a few times these last days. I should start thinking about every tweet I post. Every single one could be my last, and I could think of a lot of things I wouldn’t want people to read after my sudden passing. At least @arjengrolleman went out on a nice philosophic musing. As if he did know it was his last.

Don’t you think it’s weird? First there’s this place with no dimensions, which contains every bit of energy in the Universe. Then it explodes to life. Elements are born; expanding and cooling down begins. Nebulas cluster together and, in gigantic swirls, galaxies spring to life. Inside one of those billions of galaxies there’s a cloud of dust that starts swirling particularly fast. In the middle of it a not so impressive star begins to shine. The rest of the dust clutters together in eight (or nine) planets and a belt of debris that kind of refuses to clutter together. On one of those planets, the elements start to brew in this strange way that lets certain structures of them copy themselves! After an incredible amount of mistakes in those copies, mankind arrives, which spawned me, my house and my bed.

That's me, lying on my bed, oblivious.

My bed, on which I fell asleep two hours ago, and woke up on just now. In the period in between those two moments, I had not even an inkling of everything I just described. Don’t you think that’s weird? Well, I do.

The main reason I don’t seem to be able to find my way is that the choice is getting bigger by the minute. New blogs, internet radio stations, interactive listening platforms, magazines and social networking sites are born every day. And most don’t get a long life. The ones that do, tend to collapse under their own weight, because to make something last, it needs to grow, and for something to grow, it needs to appeal to a lot of people. So the butt-shaking black ladies return. Which might be good for sales in general, but you lose me.

I’d rather go for a guy with a lazy eye in a fish tank running full of water. Or a guy with pointy hair throwing glittery confetti from behind his keyboard while screaming ‘fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuckity-fuck’ into a megaphone. While we’re a minority, I know there’s lots of us on the planet. So let’s get together. Let’s connect and rejoice in our common madness.

• … to continue  school, at least for this year, and try to get me some points out of it.
• … to give The Postponers a last chance
• … to keep working with Marc
• … to really start profiling myself as a solo artist
• … and to put all my effort in making those things succeed, so I can make a living out of them.

I’ve always been against the emphasizing of being gay. It’s a normal phenomenon, so why would you scream it off the roofs? I’ve even despised homosexuals who seem to be able to make their gayness show in literally everything they do. I thought such prolific expression only increases misunderstanding of, and hate against gays.

But I was wrong. Sure. Being gay is normal. Approximately 5 to 10 percent of the world population is gay. But that’s the problem. We’re a minority. We’re outnumbered at least one to ten. Which makes us invisible among the majority if we don’t deliberately stand out. If you look at it that way, life actually gets easier when you’re immediately recognizable as gay. Everybody knows what to expect. And the threshold for other gay guys to approach you gets lower.

J.B. Dazen, he's bisexual, you know!

In my case, no one ever notices. I’m bi. I look and act like a straight guy. Although I don’t hide it (I talk about cute guys whenever I like), it’s not evident. And because I’m part of a minority, members of the majority will automatically count me as one of theirs. It simply doesn’t occur to them I might be different, because it’s not part of their system, and I’m not recognizable as different.

This also happens with  guys I’m in love with. Because I like them, apparently I’m appearing very likeable to them. It has happened on many occasions that I ended up spending lots of time with such guys, because we just clicked. But it never occurred to them I might be in love with them. Even though they know I like boys, they don’t seem to register it. Even after having told I’m actually in love with them, they still don’t change their behaviour towards me. Which on the one hand means I’ve chosen the right people as my friends, because there’s no homophobia there whatsoever. But on the  other hand it means it’s very hard to end my feelings towards them and open myself to new opportunities. It’s just so damn nice to be with them that I take the missing part for granted.

But eventually that holds me back. If I had detached myself from them quicker and been more visible as a gay guy, the chance I’ll find someone suitable for me would have risen considerably.

That means two things: I have to be strict to myself and sometimes disappoint friends who are holding me back. And I have to be more prolific as a gay person. But I’m bi, you say? Yes, I won’t give up on the ladies. But I tend to like guys more, and I feel I need to let that side of me get the spotlight at this time. Ninety percent of the population assume I like girls anyway, so no emphasis needed there.

So there you go. I LIKE BOYS! Just so you know.

Pomplamoose, just plain brilliant

Then there’s YouTube. A medium I was quite excited about at first, because I thought it would automatically connect me to liked minds. But after a year of intensive YouTube-ing, I still have the feeling I’m a lonely soul screaming in the desert. The quality of music on YouTube is generally below par. And the praise is out of proportion. Because the only people who comment on your videos are the ones that really love it, you get the feeling you’re the greatest artist in the world. Still, view counts tell a different story. I’ve seen crappy songs, and I really mean stuff that’s dull, badly written, poorly executed and horribly recorded, get the same praise as my own stuff. So far, the only thing that got me really excited was Pomplamoose. Tom Milsom is quite ok too, especially lyrically, but his production skills are substandard. And that’s it. Quite a poor harvest for a year of YouTube activity.

Maybe I’m asking for too much. I’m not satisfied until something baffles me to the core. Maybe it’s not possible for that to happen more than every once in a few years. But still, I feel it should be. There must be loads of artists in the world I have never heard of but that are capable of giving me that instant ‘Champagne Supernova’ feeling. The only problem is how to find them. How to find the gem without having to plough through all the dung. I need to find a new radio, TV, magazine.

The main reason… (ctd. tomorrow)

Groningen. Pretty, isn't it?

A new period started when I moved to Groningen and hit the cultural scene there. Once again, I felt in place. I got to know loads of small, beginning bands that rekindled the fire in me to want to perform myself. It didn’t take long before that happened. But here came another problem: overload. I found myself visiting more concerts than ever, and I felt rushed. Internet really started to kick in; downloading got easier, so I ended up with heaps of albums on my hard drive that I barely listened to. You know that feeling, when you’ve got Winamp on shuffle, and you’re running to your screen to see what the heck it’s playing? I started to feel strained. I couldn’t keep up, so I retreated.

Ever since, I’ve been looking for a nice way to get reconnected, to find nice stuff without have to plough through loads of garbage. To feel that excitement I felt when I first played ‘Morning Glory’. Socializing with musicians has helped a bit. Being excited about bands you actually know personally is a whole new thing. It adds a new aspect called competition. You want to stay better than them, and once you get baffled by them you feel uneasy because you’re not the best. So that’s not completely satisfying.

Then there’s YouTube… (ctd. tomorrow)

So radio and TV started to lose their appeal. Exciting rock ’n’ roll got buried beneath the mainstream again. Luckily, Radiohead had grown over the years and still kept making exciting stuff that broke through the surface. Around the break of the century other new bands started to rise that, at first, got the stamp ‘Radiohead-clone’. Coldplay and Muse both admittedly had certain qualities that reminded me of the emotional aspects Radiohead had delivered to me so well years before. But soon it emerged that those two bands were to become superstars by themselves. And Radiohead had moved on so stunningly with ‘Kid A’, that they didn’t even sound like themselves anymore.

A lonely cry in the desert

Besides those two great new bands, I started to feel I lost touch though. After radio and TV, the magazines that I had stuck to for information began to write about stuff that didn’t excite me as much as before. The only source for new music was now friends. Having quit school, those were starting to go down in numbers too, so in the end, when I finally had my first band, I was down to only one friend, a band mate, who shared some genuine musical taste. And then that ended too, and I fell into a dry spell. I fell back on new releases of bands I already knew and maybe the odd connected thing here or there.

A new period started… (ctd. tomorrow)

Finally I had found a real-life version of The Beatles. I started following everything that came from the UK from that time. I read ‘Q’, local music magazines and the newspaper that I delivered, which always had good stories on British music. It was the height of the Britpop hype. Blur vs. Oasis, you know, all that ridiculous stuff. I finally felt at home in my time. This time shaped me to the person I am right now. Lots of decisions were made final. I wanted to be a rock star from when I was twelve, but now I was definitely going to be one. With the first teenage angst setting in, I started spending hours and hours locked up in my room with my guitar, writing songs and singing Oasis ones.

Friends at school, I discovered, shared my musical taste. We started exchanging CDs and making mixed tapes for each other. Eventually we visited our first concerts together. Magical times. But times change. R&B, and I mean the slick, commercial version of it, began to replace Britpop on MTV and the radio. No scruffy white guys with cheap guitars but great songs anymore, but richer and richer black people who only seemed to enjoy lots and lots of bare-assed women. Not that I don’t enjoy a bare-assed woman, but there’s a time and place for everything, you know.

So radio and TV… (ctd tomorrow)