Chris Wood's Rants

Chris Wood's Rants Hate me if you want but think before you speak.

09/09/2024

I don't know why you thought he would give a s**t. Have you forgotten all the times? When you were talking about your past and how if one important person had felt differently your entire life would have been different, and he interrupted to tell you you shouldn't let another person dictate what you would have been... or how about when you were having bad trouble with your marriage that was tearing you apart and he said you don't have to tell him about it, he knows exactly how you feel? In other words, I don't want to hear it.
Did you forget that he NEVER answers his phone when you're calling because you need to talk to someone? Did you forget that you texted him with good news about finding a long lost friend and he ignored it? WHY would you think that telling him this morning that you really needed to talk would result in him actually listening to you? And then he called and your stupid ass thought there might actually be some conversation, but he talked for half an hour about how bad HIS day went before he was "shot" and had to go. Have you even realized that boy has never actually asked you how you're feeling since your wife went off to rehab and you're not sure there's a future there?
Why do you even call him a friend? He supplies absolutely no friendship material for you. Thankfully you have Gus to hold you down, how would that happy as***le feel if you offed yourself tonight and he realized you were calling for help and he "forgot" about it?
He talks endlessly about getting the band back together but it's been almost two years since you actually did any music... and you're doing your own thing still but he doesn't support that, either, in fact he likes to make little side comments about your singing and abilities, disguised as a "you know how some musicians are". Long ago there was some talk about bringing me over to Europe for his little side project, and after this last trip it's been talked about again. Are you holding your breath, Mr. Wood? You know you're not going to Europe.
He asked you to return to work because he needed someone to run the field so he doesn't have to get out from his desk, but when other employees displayed disrespect to you in front of other companies and customers, not only did he tell you that he doesn't NEED a field manager, he ALLOWED the fu***ng children to disrespect you and no apologies were made. One of the children went out to training for the product YOU install, while your training was put off until now he's pi**ed off at the company and wants to go with someone else, so that means the child will again go to training ahead of you and you will again be put off with promises.

You care more and give more to this friendship than he ever will. Why do you keep calling him a friend?

09/07/2024

Today is Friday. Payday. I started my day at 6:30am in Islandia and drove 3 hours into Brooklyn. Did the job and managed to leave 1/2 hour early, 2:30pm, to sit in three hours of traffic returning. In the meantime, I had to make a yearly payment to reinstate my car insurance that cost me more than half the paycheck I got this morning. The phone will automatically deduct my phone payment in two days. I will be fifty years old in four months and I can't manage to put ten dollars in a savings account per week to get ahead.
As of this very moment, my dog Gus is the drop dead ONLY reason I'm still alive. I've been done with life for years, and the past few months have not given me a warm squishy feeling that makes me want to see what being 80 years old feels like. Nobody NEEDS me besides Gus. I have no home, my marriage failed because I'm not good enough to keep her from drinking, my job sucks because I'm not good enough to be trained properly, I have a band we talk about but don't even get together much less play shows or anything else... I do record my own music but as I have a total of five fans and none of them are in my band, there's no point trying to sell that. I never go out, can't afford it, not even just having a beer. My life is pointless. I painted myself into a corner believing in myself when very few others did, I followed my conviction and found that pretty much nobody cares. My knowledge is never called on, my talents never utilized. For about 80% of my life I am a ghost and useless to the world. I'm sick of merely surviving and not being happy. What the f**k is the point? I had a chance to check out and they wouldn't let me take it. Had a fu***ng expensive pacemaker shot into my heart so I could survive for... THIS?! A new lease on the same old s**tty boring pointless useless life? F**k I hate everything. This is why there are angry old men, they realized they only exist to make others go further and they go nowhere, and they can't manage to fu***ng die so they keep having to experience this s**tshow long after they got done with it.

The best part is that I can't say this to anyone because they wouldn't understand me.

08/31/2024

The end of August has come and I have not seen the promised results. I was supposed to go to classes "mid summer, by the end of August". I have not been sent to the training course, but we have rehired another employee... one who has always shown that "I'm better than anyone else" mentality. The one who was trained hasn't been able to produce satisfactory results. The one who's been around all along is only useful to a small extent.
Therefore I have returned to a situation where I am the most knowledgeable of a group of people and none show me the respect I should be due, the administration keeps putting me off in regard to proper training, and the jobs drag out and make us look like as***les instead of being finished quickly and properly.

It was foolish to return. Nothing that was promised has been fulfilled. I'm exactly where I was before, trying to get a job done properly whilst babysitting a bunch of other people who think they know it all and disrespect my knowledge and abilities. I should be a field manager but the owner who wants to get out of the field doesn't need a manager in the field so the owner will always HAVE to go into the field. There is no trust in my abilities, knowledge, or experience in management. I'm just floating in a field I should be excelling in, and now I'm at a point where starting over again is not an option so I literally painted myself back into a corner.

08/22/2024

Why the f**k does my pull down tell me there's 10 notifications on a sub page that has no friends? Then when I come here there are no notifications at all. You suck sweaty balls, Facebook.

12/13/2023

I keep saying it's a Facebook problem to be nice to everybody, but it's not a Facebook problem. Not when I tag twenty people on a post and get four responses. Not when I repeatedly post a song and get a bunch of likes for the post but no plays on the song. So you'll tell me that I have to get out there, nobody makes money off "album sales". I'm not charging money, so if I can't get all my "friends" to spend five minutes listening to a free song, what the f**k makes you think they're going to get in a car and drive someplace to see me play? "You should do it for your own enjoyment". Oh, I am, I listen to my stuff all the time, too bad I don't get play credits from myself, I'd have all my songs matching the stats of that one the other guy wrote and all of HIS friends listened to it (For reference, "Shinedown" has 657 plays. My top song is "Break My Stride" {a COVER} at 65 and next is "The Only Love" at 60, four years later). So, thanks for the support, everyone.

08/17/2023

The polite side of me has refrained from making reference to my overmastering sense of out of placeness. Mostly because people always said I was crazy, nobody ever ostracized me. I must have a severe manic paranoia, then, but really, I don't.
Obviously in grades 6-8 it was not hidden at all, I've covered my experiences with bullying. It actually didn't stop right away when I was switched to the private High School- I still had things thrown at me on the bus, poked in the back in class, one memorable female who had a lot to say very loudly in the hallway about me. It gradually tapered away and was replaced by the illusion of acceptance, and to be fair, some of it was sincere- I still talk to them on Facebook, older and younger, but for the most part the kids in my class don't communicate with me, FB friends or not.

Here's the part where they say I'm crazy- I never had a secret admirer, no female ever looked at me with any interest, and aside from two or three senior year instances, I NEVER saw or heard from any of them outside school. Senior cut day, a bunch of kids decided they were going to hang out. I was able to catch a ride with someone to drop me off home on their way there. I feel like I don't have to add that the reason I didn't go wasn't because I didn't want to. Graduation, a couple of them came to my party, and I think I was actually invited to one but I don't remember if I went, so probably not. In the context of this writing, I feel like the only time in my life I was invited to a classmate's shindig would stick out in my head.
Understand that I'm not angry, I was a lower-middle kid whose parents had to work extra to keep me in that school, and most if not all of the rest were... well, their parents weren't breaking a sweat, I'm sure, based on the towns they came from. That I wasn't openly ostracized in that situation was miraculous, but there's a huge difference between camaraderie and tolerance.
Quite a few years ago when I was in a bad state of mind, I posted a question to whatever female classmates I had on Facebook, what was it about me that caused nobody to have any romantic interest. The one person who answered said that she'd never really thought about me, and THAT is the answer.
The out of placeness is not caused by people not liking me, it's that they don't think of me at all. I'm sure there's some classic visual example but it's escaping me right now... they remember I exist when I'm right there in front of them, but the moment they can't see me, I cease to exist. High school kids have (hopefully) outgrown imaginary best friends and made-up boyfriends from another school, so I stood no chance of real closeness with my peers. I can't hold them responsible for that, it's something about me, some involuntary Sith mind trick that makes everyone forget that huge, crazy, rugged, slightly handsome dude that blocks their view when he sits in the front row.
Don't get me wrong, I had a good friend and a few acquaintances, I finally got a girlfriend halfway through 17 and then had to break up with her because laws. I have a handful of Facebook friends now who actually check up on my stuff, and I cherish them.
Slick segue into the true topic of the rant. I know it's not Facebook burying my posts. No, they don't propel them to the top like my jokes, but people see them, and my Sith mind trick flows through them and they keep scrolling. I politely rave at social media for automatically putting my creativity six feet down, but even people who know me and have talked to me about my music don't stop and listen, I have ceased to exist because I'm not right in front of them.
In conclusion, I'm beginning an experiment whereby I will start regularly tagging people in the comments to the song posts. I'll most likely end up in jail but we'll see if I force the platform to show it to people. It worked that one time...

08/14/2023

"People don't change." But they do. Those who do not believe it's possible are incapable of changing themselves, so they can't imagine anyone else being able to. Wrapped in themselves, life can only be lived the way I live it, so much so that they cannot see a person changing right before their eyes. You know a person decades and they don't know you.
But that's the American way, isn't it? Me first, and only me. You look so hard at YOUR goals that you don't realize or care who you hurt to get it. You're not paying any attention to what's going on around you so you make assumptions about people and you get it completely wrong. And then you're surprised when people separate themselves from you or outright blow up in your face. So confident of yourself you overstep your boundaries and effect another person's life, and you don't understand why they're angry or don't want to talk to you anymore.
The irony is, the people that need to hear what I just said are so wrapped in their own agendas that they don't have time to devote to what I care about. They just wonder why they end up alone.

08/13/2023

I'm working on two albums now- finishing all of the many covers I've done over the years for the first one, finally an official cover album! Also, there's more than enough material for the original album- #16 or #4 depending on semantics- to be a double with no filler.

The cover album will be available for free since I haven't secured permission for any of it, it's just a fun project to show off my tastes and abilities. I encourage listeners to support the original artists and widen their listening tastes.
The original album... here's the irony of it. Since it's going to be a double album, I would ask $10, twice the asking price of any of my single albums. To date I haven't made a penny on any of the single albums and they are available for free on my SoundCloud page. So for me to even mention that I'd expect money for a double album is patently absurd, isn't it? I'm only doing this to make MYSELF happy, or so I've been told (as mentioned in an earlier post, that phrase is Politese for "I haven't listened to it and I'm not going to.") You and I both know that the first anyone is going to hear the album is when I post it for free on the page, and it'll be the usual four friends who'll pay any attention to it, anyway. Then maybe over a few weeks there'll be a few random listens from other SoundCloud entities, some of whom will contact me for permission to boost my song but don't end up doing it, and a year from now I'll look at my low double-digits listens and wonder why I bother.
For the same reason I have this page. In my head there's a stadium full of adoring fans, and there are also thousands of people who look forward to hearing my thoughts on life and conversing intelligently. So this page is basically a digital version of me walking through a crowd shouting to myself and everyone looking away awkwardly.

I know the reason why I'm not famous and respected. It's because I've spent nearly every moment of my musical life catering to bands. Even when I was the writer for the bands, whatever I passed on to others mutated into whatever they felt like adding to it. Sometimes the change fit and became canon in my head, I'm not averse to collaboration. But with that also comes "don't sing like that, don't play like that" and "I don't like that song, we're not playing it". Never once have I fronted a band that just played what the f**k I tell them to play... but when they get bored, suddenly everyone's looking at me like, "got anything new for us to butcher?", not "hey, here's a song I'm working on, wanna try it?" Nope, everyone can tell me to shut my face unless I'm singing, they can tell me how to sing and play, but when the old stuff gets old, suddenly I'm Santa with a sac full of goodies.
The band I'm in now... positives- I play and write bass. No pressure for new material, no nitpicking what I give them to play, freedom to care about my best instrument. There is good vibe and good rapport. I enjoy being a part of it. BUT. Stagnation and personnel issues. I can't put it any other way, but I will also not elaborate. All I will say is, that project is definitely not soothing the muse.

I've never really given MY music my full attention. Either I'm doing all the work or I'm waiting for something to happen. So now I'm on the verge of releasing what SHOULD be my 16th original album, but because I paid more attention to other s**t, it's only my 4th "official" release, and still I'm not giving it the attention I should be. It's my fault, I can't expect a page full of musicians to care about what I'm doing. Also from earlier post, nobody's asking you what you're working on and don't care when it's done.
So I'm going to finish these works and put them out, and then I'll put together a set list and hit some open mics. Maybe in a couple more years there will be people looking back on this and thinking I was crazy.

08/11/2023

Last last thought for the night. You... will probably hate me for this next. I'm a lot like Jesus. Hear me out. I'm not a mystical son of the proverbial god, I don't do miracles or physically heal people. I'm not going to sacrifice myself for the good of a humanity that wasn't really worth it. Mmm, by nature of my name being pretty close, I probably won't ever have a religion following me. Future people, take heed- I do NOT want a religion based on me. What the f**k are you thinking?
But our mindset, the way we treat people and encourage them to treat others...
In early life I was "religious". I've read the Bible and learned the rules and hymns. I will absolutely admit I felt what you call the spirit many times in my life, a q***r uplifting. Without going down the rabbit hole of religion and the many personal stories about my experiences, I've "fallen away". I've gone back and left a few times. The bible itself is its own rabbit hole, I have many theories. The one thing I always took away from the officially accepted accountings of Christ was his message. How you treat people, you care for them, guide them, teach them to grow. To NOT judge a person by what they look like or where they come from. To always put another's needs before your own. And honestly, like myself, I feel like Jesus would be mortified, disgusted, and insulted by some of the s**t that's been done in his name.
Okay, folks, have a great night, sleep well and dream of large women.

08/11/2023

Yes, this page is largely negativity, mostly for venting purposes. But honey, believe me that life is not balanced for most people. There are good moments, and you better cherish them, because the sky is red this morning. Minor inconvenience, stress, and outright disasters rule the weather. I'll explain.
A few years ago, my father died, and the settling of his affairs left me with a fair amount of nest egg, and I got my father's truck. I started making plans. Roughly a month later, I'm in the hospital getting two hernias fixed. Recoup, self-rehab, have to live off the money. Get a job. Truck needs repair. Dog needs surgery. Truck needs repair. I'm in the hospital getting a pacemaker installed because my heart is stopping. More recoup, more rehab. Back to work. Dog dies. New dog. Truck needs repairs. That's it, square one. I'm not even getting into the things my wife went through.

We got three small vacations by "going away" for a week or two at the dirt cheapest prices in off season. I bought a few new tools, but only when they were on sale. I was not Scrooge with the money, but I wasn't dancing down main street fanning hundreds into the crowd. Living and a steady stream of major s**t turned my future into being in the exact same place I have always been.
Then I look around at the world, and people who have it far better are crying in their coffee about the mortgage on their second house. They're driving around in the latest model flashy car with vanity plates and grinning because they can go in the left lane and pass my work van... and then cut me off and slam on the brakes... tangent... I look around at everyone who doesn't know how good they have it, or those who do and flaunt it, and I wonder how anyone could have a positive attitude about any of it.

On the other hand, I'm a clown, and at the end of the day I laugh at the rest of the world and make fun of it because it's all just so fu***ng stupid. Sorry, I'm a sarcastic clown. But it is, we're all just animals crawling on the face of the earth, parasites that destroy all they see because they're "intelligent"- evil geniuses that invent tools to do work for us, dominating and subjugating every facet of the spinning rock we're stuck to, breeding at an alarming rate and consuming everything. Someone even wrote a whole fu***ng book telling us about how this rock was put here just for us!

08/11/2023

More about Me: Ego

Nonexistent. I am a natural clown and often preen, but my self-esteem is in triple negative. Don't take this as a pity party. I'm okay with where my mind is. Self-loathing is healthy, you push yourself to always be better and once in a while you're pleasantly surprised at yourself.
Keeping dirty laundry to a minimum, there was a fair amount of negativity in my childhood. Balanced, life was mostly good, but I was shown my place and I knew my place, I feel that explains enough. In Middle School, I was bullied by peers, physically and mentally. Two or three memorable teachers that singled me out, as well. Teens, better, at a private school, and "accepted" but still felt outside of everything. I ALWAYS feel outside of everything, I really don't belong anywhere.
I learned on several occasions that the little bit of pride I did manage to have was shot down. Middle school, showing off my cub scout awards and being told you can go to so and so store and just buy them. If any of you were in high school with me, here's a hurting one- junior prom, when the senior Music Genius was graduating, and I was moving up, and I made a mention of how I was going to be next year's Music Genius, and a bunch of them laughed and said I could never fill his shoes. I wasn't the only musician in my class, but I'm pretty sure I was the only one playing three instruments and recording his own material, in a rock band and a marching drum corps... Regardless, I was shown my place. Anyone known me long enough to remember Phrapp? Me, lead singer and bassist, primary songwriter and sole lyricist, sat down one night at a gig and talked shop with the bass player from another band. Later we were told that I was self-centered and only talked about myself. I was instructed by the drummer and newest member of MY band that I was to shut my mouth unless I was singing from now on. I'll leave it there but the examples continue to the present time.
Humble bragging continued, I almost always put others before me, I've done things for people who needed it. Yes, those examples are numerous, yes I am absolutely proud of them because I prove what kind of person I am. Sometimes there's some good stories, too.

In conclusion, I'm smart enough to know there's a fine line between pride and ego. I'm nowhere near the line because I'm never really allowed to be, but I wouldn't be a real musician if I was truly happy.

08/11/2023

Moving forward I may encounter readers who don't know me personally, and I'm eloquent tonight, so I'll do a few "short" ones about various things about me.
My stand on racism/genderism/allotherisms... music is my life so I'll explain starting there. I grew up in the 70's and 80's, I listened to Queen and Elton John, the Village People, Boy George, George Michael. I listened to Earth, Wind and Fire, Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, Run/DMC, the Fat Boys, LIVING COLOUR!!!! Just a few examples of my eclectic taste, and I don't remember there ever being a time when it mattered to me that an artists was a different skin tone than mine or whose bed they chose to sleep in. The differences between you and me are only differences if I choose to notice them. Or if you do. Does it matter to you that I'm a straight white male? Why? I promise you I have received no special treatment for my outward appearance- in fact, in the '90's, I had long hair and I was pulled over quite a lot. Yeah, it mattered back then. And to be honest, being a 6'5 hairy white obvious male has led to roadblocks in my life. More on that later.
The problem with what I said above is that our society is focusing on "ASSIGNING" people into groups. Hear me out, equal means balance. For balance, everyone has to be the same. The more letters you add to the list, the more you SEPARATE yourself from equality, dig it?
Here's where I'm drawing my line. I do not care about your identity or assignment, you be you, I'll be me, and we can both be free humans. I am going to judge you on what's in your mind and what comes out of your mouth, not by what you look like. However, DO NOT force me into a slot, do not tell me how to live MY life so YOU will be happy, DO NOT CALL ME CIS, I don't "identify" as your stupid gender assignment. This is the exact reverse of what you're supposed to be fighting against. I'm not telling you how to live your life, don't tell me how to live mine, okay?
As far as "pronouns", I have eyes. It's he or she regardless of what's under the clothes. Don't give me the "they" bulls**t, though, sorry, that's just stupid, drawing attention to yourself, asking me to go against my beliefs and upbringing to make you happy. Not doing it, sorry not sorry.
The only true division in the human race is this- there are good people, and there are fu***ng as***les. I'll figure that out after a short conversation with you.

Ah, s**t, I've already posted a lot of these thoughts. Oh well.

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