But to me, old Bulldog represents more than a tool or a machine. She was an important part of my life.

Back when my friend Tim built her for me in 2001, she was a pretty killer box. Understand that at that point in my life, I was just learning how to deal with the reality of being legally blind. I was at a real difficult point emotionally and this computer was really going to be my way out. On this computer, I learned how to use text to speech readers and magnifiers so I could keep up in the digital world. On this computer, I re-learned how to make art in Photoshop. I spent hours figuring out how to make a website again. On her, I discovered that if I played with some of the gauge settings and config settings enough I could fly my beloved Flight Simulator again.

All of this was great, but the thing this machine was built to do was to make music. It was on this computer that I learned that I could manage my way through the complicated interface of Sonar, a recording program that I mastered well enough to create a very therapeutic CD of original music I composed and recorded in my garage.

You see, while this old bucket of transistors and chips may be nothing more than a dusty old relic today, to me it was a conduit to a life reclaimed.

Over the past couple of weeks, she was acting strangely, almost like a virus, but even a complete wiping of her hard drive couldn’t save her. Ultimately, those years in the polishing shop had coated her motherboard with a layer of zinc dust that corroded her badly. So I gutted her today and put her serviceable parts into another old machine I had laying around. I saved her video card and her sound card as they can be useful in a pinch. But the old chassis, motherboard and chipset will be curbed tomorrow permanently.

So there you have it my friends – a tear for an old bucket of bolts named Bulldog. She will be missed…

I remember my teenage years pretty vividly. They were confusing, invigorating, intoxicating and tinged with enough daring-do to make me wonder how I lived through it. I mean, we did some stupid-ass shit. When you’re at that age, you feel invincible, immortal even.

I had a friend with a Silver Plymouth satellite, a beast of a thing dating back to the days of real muscle cars. Well, to be honest, his was a bit under-powered for its time but that’s beside the point. Late one night several of us packed ourselves like lemmings into this shiny metal box and cruised our way north on i-95 towards West Palm. Somewhere north of PGA Boulevard at 3 in the morning, Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine” blaring from the cassette deck and who-knows-what coursing through our veins, the driver decides it would be neat to kill the lights while going nearly 120 MPH. We drove that way for 5 miles until both the road and song ended. We stopped, rewound the cassette, turned around and did the same thing again.

Like I said, stupid-ass shit. Romantic in a youthful, Springsteen kind of way. But stupid.

“In spite of the weather a supersonic tether is pulling us outside…”

In the modern world where muscle cars and cassette decks morph into multi-stage turbos and MP3 players, the same brazen sense of life immortal plays out. But I am older now, with kids nearing or at this age. The risk verses reward equation tilts a bit harder in the direction of risk. The impact of this change can be felt in a local story from a couple of weeks ago.

Homecoming night had become morning. A group of four teens on their way home from a party get into a little fender-bender. The driver inexplicably puts the car in reverse and backs up nearly 150 yards, loses control, hurdles a guardrail and flips into a canal. Three of the four teens die on the scene.

Now I’m a pretty realistic person. I can often cast aside these kinds of horrors as a part of another more complex equation. It goes like this:

(6.5 billion people) + (revolving rock) + (dying star) = Shit Happens

But this was a bit different personally. It was local, up the street in Coral Springs. In fact, my son had just driven us by what would be the accident scene a couple of days before. And of course, these kids were just 15 and 16 years old. It becomes really easy to project this onto one’s own life, more so than in most cases.

It’s not that I can’t imagine it. Quite the opposite really. It’s too real.

“So charming and clever supporting our endeavor with digital oxide…”

So how does this all reconcile itself within my artistic expression? Well, the reconciliation happened a couple of years ago when I wrote “Digital Oxide”, which contains within it the spirit of “driving with the lights off” mixed with the potency of regret. I had tried to record this song for several years, missing the mark with regular precision. I could never come up with the arrangement I wanted, the sound I wanted, the spirit of the idea. But somehow in the shadow of the tragedy outlined above I was able to conjure something. Live drums, orchestral bells, tons of reverbs mixed together creating the proper sense of drama. Unapologetically epic.

“Nothing ever dies. Even when galaxies collide, a part of us is always alive…”

Digital Oxide

We’re dumber than diesel
Trying to appease you
Trying to make it right
In spite of the weather
A supersonic tether
Is pulling us outside
We have nowhere to go
Nothing to see
Nothing to hope for
A subatomic law
Can’t erase the things that we saw

While we were driving with our lights off
Speeding down a blacktop four-lane
With nothing but a fist full of promises

Reaching through the sadness
Pulling out the madness
Letting it be our guide
So charming and clever
Supporting our endeavor
With digital oxide
We want somewhere to go
Something to feel
Something to hope for
Nothing ever dies
And no one’s gonna stop us tonight

While we’re driving with our lights off
Speeding down a blacktop four-lane
With nothing but an arm full of promises
We’ll be done before dawn
And we’ll be sleeping with the lights on
There’ll be nothing left to explain
We don’t care what your momma says

Now we’ve got somewhere to go
Something to see
Something to hope for
Because nothing ever dies
Even when galaxies collide
A part of us is always alive…

©George Zhen, 2009

From the Sun-Sentinel:
Car accident that killed three Coral Springs teens stuns community

Click here to view the embedded video.

My youngest son, Cameron, had a student project in his middle school to make a little video inspired by his fears. The teach does this sort of assignment every year. I distinctly remember my older son’s production which entailed him being devoured in time-lapse fashion by rubber worms. But in the years since, I have a new computer which has iMovie, so this time around i figured it was a great chance to give the younger one some basic lessons in video editing and story-telling.

Hey, it’s no Final Cut Pro, but it will do for middle school.

What you see here is the result: Attack of the Killer Sponges. Cameron’s professed “fear” is being clean, or so he rationalizes. So being attacked by sponges makes sense. LOL! iMovie, a cheap and very bad video camera, a bunch of sponges from the dollar store, bamboo skewers and some cut out felt faces were all the budget allowed. Even Michael Jackson went without a paycheck for this one.

Of course, the academy award for Best Scream must go to Nana… she makes the video!