I'm on myspace. People can go to my page and listen to some of my music for free, woohoo! I've also managed to meet a few of my favorite musicians in cyber-space, including the most excellent jazz guitarist Henry Johnson, and I've manage to check up on my kids from time to time (not in the manner of one of my cousins who would email a niece or nephew and ask if they really wanted to post a picture of themselves hitting on a giant bong or if they were, in fact, 21 years old). Ahhh, kids, ahhh, parenting, ahhhh networking... ahhhhhh... but the thing that sold me on myspace and the thing that I pointed out to my good buddy Jeff was Tila Tequila's page. Ahhhh, Tila Tequila...

Tila Tequila... sorry, no link, can't seem to find one... maybe you'll be able hunt it down...

She is not the subject of my meandering. She's a driven, enterprising woman who knows what she wants and is going after it. Holy cow, is she going after it... I'm not a hater, I'm a marvelator! But I never got around to watching her tv show. I mean if I'm gonna sit down and watch some tv it has to be a football game or a basketball game or a good movie... otherwise I'm gonna sit there and practice scales and arpeggios and get distracted.

Momma, momma???

I never called my mother "momma..."

I don't think I did, anyway... but I think that where the old song says "cowboys" we should insert the word "musicians..."

I know that the right wing noise machine generated a lot of informational debris to mask the debacle that was unfolding in the Senate this past week... but they didn't manufacture one tidbit of news, and that was the passing of Joe Zawinul. How many of you were hit in the gut by that event? I lost a couple nights of sleep over it and I didn't even know the guy. But his music... his music... his music will be around for a long time... as long as we have electricity and the capability to play the stuff back on our ipods or music players of choice...

Hey, it's Sunday. Yesterday I was browsing through a little crooksandliars.com on a commercial break during a playoff game (and if you must know, God's team won...). In the comments section under an article someone posted a link to a BBC documentary about a church in these great United States of America where the primary tenet was that our nation is on God's s@#$-list because we are too nice to gay people. This is a "christian" church, or so they insist. And I'm not posting a link to the video or citing the name of the group...just as I would have never aired the ravings of the shooter down in Virginia or an angry message from a father stuck in a child custody dispute...

"I used to smoke
I used to drink
I used to smoke, drink,
And dance the hootchie coo..."

- Lieber and Stoller

Pardon me if I didn't get the lyrics exactly right. I tried. My heart was in the right place. And hopefully many of you know the refrain: I'm Saved!

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote (is this a tired cliche?) something about visits to strange places being dancing lessons from God. But how about visits to strange places that are altogether familiar? For instance, due to a steady and firm shove from my girlfriend I wound up at a bible study group in Phoenix, Arizona last weekend. Considering that I live in Los Angeles, that is a remarkable and strange thing. Still, once I was seated in a circle with the rest of the bible students, holding a copy of a book by Chuck Colson instead of the Bible and listening as one particular attendee began to take over the meeting, I found myself in familiar territory. I was in the land of God-fearing, earnest believers who allow a zealous, over-bearing pharisee take over their agenda.