I don't feel like writing.

I don't feel like writing and so... I'm going to write. Taking a break from the diaries and just sitting down to let what happens happen. It's February 15. As noted in this little piece i did for Holiday Matinee, I've been religiously jotting down notes from every single day of 2010. And this day was set up to be a real stinker until I sat down here... or had it?

I'm very lucky to work where I do and to do the work that I do. Why today, I helped write and direct a fake TV commercial in the style of all of the low budge local ads we all grew up with. I even did a little bit of acting. I decided to dress up an old empty water jug to resemble a jug of moonshine, complete with the "xxx" marking, and I helped come up with a fun Match-Game-style event I hope to bring to U-Stream tomorrow, along with a lot of fun, interaction, and laughter. So I guess the day wasn't a stinker after all.

But come 5, my brain was fried. I came home, watched a few old DVR's No Reservations, opened a bottle of wine, and began to zone out. And then I sat down here.

I had no plan nor am I formulating one presently. I'm just going to keep writing and see where it takes me.

I need to start writing more music. I am going to now admit something very soul crushing. In the past, oh, 8 months, I have written... ONE song. Wrote and finished, that is. Right around the time that my band Certain People I Know was softly dissolving (and i take a good brunt of the responsibility for this), I decided it would be a good idea to break my right hand... and nothing was really the same after that. The song i wrote was called "All of a Sudden" and it's on the freshly released split 7" with Into It Over It. It's a fitting wrap up for the past 8 months as summarized in the lyric: "From just plain broke to a broken man. We broke up the band and I broke my hand." Just gotta write about what you know I guess. It's got a nice musical progression and vocal melody that you may enjoy if you're not at all interested in my personal issues. Hahaha!

The other song on my side was written by Lauren LoPiccolo and I just snazzed it up a little, even though it was pretty darn great before I heard note 1. It's called "I Do" and the lyrics begin: "The pills, they are the colors of your high school, and when you blink you see just what you wanna do. It's in the way they lay, available, an easy play. It's kinda how I feel about you." When i first heard her demo of it, I thought... this is fucking great and people need to hear it. So yes, please, hear it. I feel bad that i've been so out of it lately and so fortunate that she's there to pick up the slack and then some. We need a name and possibly a few more band members. I originally wanted to call the project Do Your Best And Don't Worry. I guess I have a Morrissey thing. Maybe we'll be called Lucky Lisp or Tony The Pony. Maybe we'll be called Journalists Who Lie or At Amber. Maybe we'll be called My Love Life or The Lazy Sunbathers. Gotta run - Tony's in Istanbul.

Feb 15: Helped write and direct a fake commercial, drank wine, wrote a bunch of nonsense. Hit 'publish', closed laptop.

"Yeah, and my tongue will be in your mouth"

I left work early today. Around 10:30 or so. I took a vitamin and it immediately made me feel like my stomach was going to explode. As much as I tried to ignore it, knowing it would pass, it wasn’t working. I couldn’t think straight. Even when I walked into the warehouse, the music that was playing innocently enough, was like an orchestra of chainsaws in my head. So I left. I went home and laid in bed, eventually falling asleep and eventually waking up at 3, stomach calmed but still confused as hell… and I made the poor decision to get up and go to my gray bin full of 20+ years of writings. And the only time I really wrote stuff down back then was when I was… confused as hell. So it didn’t help.




The first book I picked up begins on a new years day. I can tell this was new years day 1998 because later in the book I’m in Europe with the Get Up Kids. The first thing I notice on this page is that I’ve written nonsense vertically in the margins… and on most subsequent pages as well. It didn’t take long to remember that was where I made notes on what I had dreamt about the previous night.



On this new years day, the margin read: “I’m in a movie… my hand is bloody. There is a big flashback scene, where a car full of my friends are dragging me with my hand in the trunk. They are ditching Bob Weston.”

Now, Bob Weston did produce the first Get Up Kids record, so maybe I was unwillingly being dragged along for a ride that year as they were escaping his grasp? Side note: we all know that the first Get Up Kids record didn’t sound that great. Apparently Bob apologized to them a few years after. This may have been the situation with the first Promise Ring record as well: producer apologizes well after the fact. Or I could be mixing up my stories. What I do know is that the first Braid record is long gone. The producer sold his mini studio, along with the ADAT tapes, and they have presumably been taped over. For about an hour, I was REALLY upset about this. End of digression.

The rest of the page begins with “I woke up with tinsel draped around my neck…” and details the night before at Empty Bottle that ended with a “kiss-the-concrete stupor” outside. I had been working there for the prior few months and so apparently in the minutes leading up to midnight, I was one of the people called upon to help distribute “malt liquor” new years toasts. I drank most of the bottle I was supposed to be divvying up. I list a bunch of people by name that I kissed (some of the names simply do not ring any bells) and then I hit the floor. Another shocking revelation – I remember talking to a girl (named here) earlier in the night and saying “I’ll see you at midnight!” and her response was “Yeah, and my tongue will be in your mouth.” Shocking. It is detailed here, though, that she in fact left before midnight (possibly due to a fight she had with her present boyfriend, also in attendance) and this did not happen. Still, a shocking beginning to a “diary.” Makes you want to read on, huh?

This book is a day by day recollection up until the end of May of that year… And this is only the first page. This page ends on a sad note, though, with the sentences: “She hates me now. She was so right when she said I only wanted to be liked She wouldn’t even pour me beer. I just shouldn’t have gone.”

Ugh! This is only one medium sized book in a bin FULL of books, large and small, scraps of paper just sitting there, haunting me. I can’t just throw em away, so I guess I’ll just blog about ‘em.

One last thing, I am WAY into the Stephen Tobolowsky podcasts known as The Tobolowsky Files. You should have started downloading them before you started reading this so that you could NOW go and enjoy something much more entertaining. I’ve listened to episodes 2, 3, and 4. They are all amazing. Funny, touching, well-thought out true stories. Highly recommended. I did hang out with Mr. Tobolowsky for an hour or two in 2008. This was before he was killed off from Heroes and before he was introduced on Glee but well after he was Sammy Jenkis in Memento and Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day.




Looking forward to page 2!

I'm sorry. I love football.

First and foremost, I'm going to blog more this year. Not only do i often find myself with shit to say that does not fit into Twitter's character crunch, but i also have a TON of old notes, writings, diaries, photos, etc that i need to document/archive somehow. This seems as good a way as any. That way, folks can enjoy or hate the trip down memory lane with me... Either way, getting memories down on "paper" is the goal here. This is stuff I do not want to forget.

Secondly, I'm sorry. I love football. I feel like I need to keep this obsession under wraps because there are just so many gosh darn haters out there. When folks post about how they wish football was over, I take it personally. I can't help it. The one thing we ALL have going for us, haters or not, is that football has a very short season. 16 weeks plus playoffs and Super Bowl. From September to early February. And games are played on the weekends, primarily Sunday. Can't you all just handle it for one day a week? Hahaha. I don't go apeshit when people tweet incessantly about hockey, american idol, basketball, foursquare, etc... so why am i so wary about posting about football? Ah well.

My dad played football for Michigan State. I cannot find any online evidence of this, nor have I tried too hard. You see, he's Bob Nanna as well and I can't seem to wade far enough past the junk that our name has accumulated. I don't think he was very good but the fact is - every single Sunday, we ordered pizza from Salerno's (a hike from our house), drank root beer, and watched football. There is even a "famous" picture of me as a bald <1 year old holding a football that my mom likes to parade around the house when company is over. (I couldn't find this online - but i did find this gem.)

Anyway, the season ends tonight, so we can all get on with our happy lives and frolic carefree until September. I hear there is a probable football lockout for 2011 - aka NO football. I don't even want to think about it...

I'm at Threadless right now. I set up the chili cook off stations and now i'm just wasting time till the game starts. I'm wearing black and gold.

David Foster Wallace and "Too Much"

Man, I'm bummed. I'm bummed about the news of David Foster Wallace's suicide. I'd be hard pressed to make a case for myself as an actual "writer." Throwing together blogs or doing quick profiles/reviews for a local magazine hardly qualifies me to even be classified as such (maybe typer is better?) but if you happened to plow through my rambling, long-winded (but hopefully entertaining) entry in the Revolution On Canvas Vol 1 book about the day to day concerns of a neurotic vocalist on tour - you will find heaping bushelfulls of nods, inspirations, and maybe even straight up rips of David Foster Wallace. If I remember correctly, I may have even put in a bunch of footnotes and eventually scrap them... thinking it was too much.

But that's what made DFW so great. "Too much" just didn't exist for him as a writer. Jesus, I dragged around Infinite Jest for several tours - eventually ditching it for something slimmer and lighter... a cinder block, perhaps. It's not that it wasn't fascinating. As my friend Zach noted - you need to read it with 3 bookmarks - one to mark your place, one to mark your place in the footnotes, and one to mark the hilarious parts you want to show others. But they'd never get it just from a paragraph, or a line, or even one of the oddly sequenced chapters. I once pointed out character James Incandenza's extensive filmography (one footnote) to a friend, saying it was just about the funniest thing I'd read in awhile. I don't remember it garnering much of a reaction. Maybe I'm just a fan of fun, nonsensical lists. (Side note! The Rye Coalition had a song named after one of Incandenza's films: "Blood Sister: One Tough Nun")

While Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews, Consider The Lobster, the amazing 9/11 essay in Rolling Stone were just fascinating, it was his writing style that I was just so ready, willing, and able to champion! It wasn't Kerouac-ian stream of consciousness or some randomly written journal entry. It took a LOT of thought, a LOT of research, and a LOT of experience. "Too much" even. It was so much information that - hell, if it took a page-long run-on sentence, or a novella worth of footnotes, or insanely esoteric language (the radio show passage is killer) - it didn't matter - as long as it got out of the head and onto the page. Conventional writing structure (and probably several editors) be damned!

After a few unsuccessful stabs at reading Infinite Jest on tour, I just said fuck it, I'm going to do this. So, during a month at home, I dug in. I took notes on all of the characters, I chronologically figured out what takes place when, I kept track of all of the plots and subplots... and I did it. You know, it's almost like a dare. I'm glad I took it on, though. It was so eye-opening and so envelope-pushing... I have many favorite parts but there's no way I'd be able to find them in that haystack. I'm just going to have to read the thing again.

DFW didn't publish much the last few years, but I bet he was writing... a lot. I wonder what, if anything, will come of it. Whether it's amazing or disappointing, it will most certainly be tragic because something became "too much."

And leave it to a tragedy to get one writing again.

Bob Blogs

It's a new beginning. A new chapter. Let's hope it doesn't suck.