Life According to Mike: It was almost like a song....actually it was a day just like a song.

So here it is Thursday. A day largely ignored by the Western World.
I need to write a blog so...
I am writing it with song.

let's start with the only song I could play well enough to annoy my family (they were not huge country music fans- okay that's not fair, they weren't country music fans period).

The one song that I could actually play on the piano without messing it up. So I played it until my brother, the ever tolerant, Stephen van Vuuren, came up stairs and begged me to learn something/anything else.
so I did.
It's funny how life forms around things that come along. I have always been very absorbent and thus much of what I am, the way I am is from a constant influx of books, movies and music.
I many ways, my early psyche was from this song. I loved long before most children ever show an interest in it, and thus the loss that comes with love came early to me. I really didn't know how to cope with it until the next song came along anyway.

When my brother realized that I could play this he probably swore off country music FOREVER. Well, it could have been that or the fact I played the Staler Brothers Greatest Hits over and over again until the nail pushed out of the hardwood floors and My brother threatened to smash the records. Then I discovered Peter, Paul and Mary.

And Here is further proof that I am solely responsible for my brother's depraved childhood...

he was so good as to remind me of the ones he despised more than the others.

Fortunately for SV2, we live in separate states and I grew a sense of humor whereas He went deaf. (it's a lie, but it is funny).

ANYWAY

moving on.

Now this would be the song I would dedicate to my exes...that is if I actually had any worth mentioning. Okay that is also mostly a lie, some of it is true, at least in the fact that I loved way more women than they loved me back. Mostly i say this to the women I flirt with one Facebook. They only know me well enough to know how truly awesome I think I am.

IN OTHER NEWS

there has been an outbreak of Baha in my life a time or two, fortunately I mostly live alone. There's a cat, and while he finds me mildly amusing. he does leave the house when I play:

These days songs and music take me to many places, as often as my moods take me. When playing World of Warcraft, one gets tired of the music loop after about an hour (with every patch/expansion it gets shorter)

So I took to listening to my music collection (at 1 time it was 250 GB of music I had ripped/torrented/found/bought/borrowed. It was enough to last over a year nonstop) then the drive died before I had backed it up and it was gone, all gone. The irony is that I had stopped listening to it by that point. Pandora had come along and changed the way I listened to music.

Then along came Spotify and changed it again, so now I am rebuilding that 250GB music collection playlist by playlist.

Now I will take a brief excursion down memory lane with the odd music I listened while playing various Video Games.

Castle Wolfenstein was first.

This wasn't hard since the sound track wore really then after 3 levels (I was playing the first 100 when I knew something had to give) Thus enter the CD player.

Irony: It was American GI vs. Nazi zombies and SS chain gunners with Restless Heart playing in the background. Now I can't play the original Wolfenstein without hearing the songs in the back of my mind. I would just put the CDs on repeat. Sawyer Brown was in there somewhere with some Kate Bush and Queen.

By the time DOOM had rolled around, soundtracks had improved.

The Soundtrack was Rockin' for 2 games, but by Doom 3 it was getting old. At that point Internet Radio had first surfaced. Slacker Radio came along, there were other but by then I was with them. So i was rocker my shotgun frenzies to the likes of Red Hot Chili Peppers:

I also listened to Faith no More (Epic) and the like

Then After Doom had shot out it's last bullet, It was time for Quake II, I had already been playing Quake (1) but it did not grab me like Quake II did.

I came late to Quake II. One thing was that the original Quake did not appeal to me at all. It was this weird mish mash of guns/scifi/fantasy/horror and annoyance. When I like a Video game i will play it death. I played QII to death. Also the music go old too.

Quake II music (via youtube)

so I found suitable songs to listen too.

I ran this back to back with some NIN, Monster Magnet and the like. But it was "Save Yourself" that would become my theme song for QII.

Somewhere in the midst of this I got Tomb Raider.

The music is quite staid and soft, even the boss battle stuff is mild compared to other things. So I had to kick it up with something (we are talking playing the game straight for hours and hours) (yes I played through it several times). So I cast about and ended up with. I kind of went on this Hip-hop rap outshoot

and before you know it I was Crunking it and listening to stuff that got me kicked out of the white boys fan clubs. Not that they would let me in the Crunk ones either. I guess I couldn't get low enough. I was on a ninja roll by then.

The point is until Pandora came along I was more about listening to a song over and over again than fleshing out to listen to new stuff (at least while playing video games.) I did explore around the wide world of music doing other things.

My music was fairly random at the best of times anyway.

After I gave up on Pirate Bay (music) thanks to the RIAA witch hunts and the Public Library crazy mish mash of CDs. I let Pandora's algorithm roll me around some but then spotify came along and has since brought me back to finding music that not only suits my needs but often suits the video games I play once the soundtracks wear thin.