Valiant acts of selfpromotion to a longed for kindred spirit

Last night was one of the nights when things happened the way one would have hoped. I am always grateful for that - we all know how it feels when it goes the other way.

So I woke up in a sensitive and generous mood. I started some coffee on the hob and checked all of the places where I receive word, image and sound from others. I often think of this in the spirit of checking crab traps in the morning (and I have, in fact, checked actual crab traps in the morning, in the state of Maine, in a bay opposite the Rockefeller mansion, or one of the Rockefeller mansions). Who knows what will have swum in.

Something had swum into my MySpace page. A letter. A kind of message in a bottle.

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Hey there, Timo here,

First, sorry for the spam, please feel free to write back and yell at me if it doth offend.

Secondly, and much more importantly, I play in a band, we’re called Motel Motel.

We’re a bunch of kids living in New York City trying to play music as much as we can. And unfortunately, it’s really hard to get your music out there these days, so we have to resort to this kind of strange requesting.

Sorry about it, but I definitely wouldn’t waste your time if I didn’t think this music was worth something enough to solicit random people to listen in. So if you got the time go and listen. And if you like it tell us, or be our friend, because we all could use more friends.

So yeah, my name again is Timo. Feel free to yell if you like, and thanks for reading this far if you are.

Music is great - Timo

P.S.
I found you because of The Meat Puppets

*

Not only because I woke up in a sensitive and generous mood, the morning after a night things went the way one would have hoped, and sometimes it goes the other way, but I liked this message in the bottle of a MySpace page.

Timo was, I would expect, cutting and pasting the same message to everybody declared a "friend" of The Meat Puppets on their MySpace page, but you've got to start somewhere, Timo is a wonderful name, he knows and uses the word "doth," I like the band name "Motel Motel," and I recognize in the yearning tone of this sequence of sentences something I've tried to keep alive in myself that I cherish.

I visted the Motel Motel MySpace page. I gave this kid the chance he was asking for. I liked the music well enough. I wasn't transported, the way The Meat Puppets transported me, but that's not a trip everybody gets to take you, and who knows what's next for these kids, they probably will grow and get even better, they will get to take people places.

I wrote back to this Timo, figuring one valiant act of selfpromotion to a longed for kindred spirit deserves another.

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Dear Timo,

This story includes the first person I ever knew who also knew the music of The Meat Puppets.
He and I later met Bostrom of The Meat Puppets in Phoenix. Perhaps inspired by you I'll tell that story today.

I once selfpromoted my music as you are doing now, though that was before the internet when things were hard in a different way that seems harder than it is now by comparison, but probably was only harder in a different way. Look for Skuntry Music on SpaceMy if'n you want that rock music.

Zed Naught in my friends, and he actually is my friend, has been so for years, books a good club here in St. Louis, should you tour, and you must tour, it profits the soul, and there is no other profit, in the end.

And it does end.