This Won't Hurt...

45 years and a Gold Plated Watch

2008-08-17T23:36:00.003-05:00

I don't know who you are.

I sit in my kitchen every morning, Sanka steaming, pajamas still on. It is what it is. I am retired, my wife died 15 years ago, my kids - middle-aged - have entered into their own orbits, mine left long behind.

After decades working as a grocery warehouse manager I managed to squirrel away enough money to sit here, at this table, and watch you.

You have so many dogs, little dogs, dogs on leashes that extend out 10, 20 feet, maybe more. They shit in my yard, in the neighbors yards, sometimes they even shit on the road. And you, always at the ready, baggie in hand, the dutiful public servant there to remove the evidence and keep our little world beautiful.

What have we reduced ourselves to that in order to get a grip on the need for companionship so much a part of our makeup we are capable of suffering the indignity of handling the warmed feces of a small mammal with nothing between the pile and your hand but a microscopically thin sheet of plastic? It can't be good.

I wonder how this day will go. Will the young boy from up the street drop in after school to pander his melted chocolates in order to support the local special ed kids, or the drama club, or whatever bottomless void is in need of a good tithing.

I have it on good authority that this particular young man is wont to take the earnings from his many bogus altruisms and use them to purchase the sexual favors of the woman who lives on the other side of my back yard.

She lives on a government stipend and the remnants of an inheritance given her from her late husband. Bit of a thrill seeker who tries to keep it honest by cloaking her deviance in the guise of professionalism.

Maybe I will receive another post card from my brother. Ever since our parents died in the seventies he has lived in the south of Spain on a fucking vineyard of all things.

We grew up in the 30s on the outskirts of Youngstown, Ohio. Nobody knew anything about wine. My brother knew his way around the beers of the Midwest, alright, but wine was out of the question.

Perhaps he wanted little more than to escape this reality and build a new one.

His postcards never contain more than one sentence, and honestly enough, he often misspells my name.

My wife spent so many years of her life in this very kitchen. Only God knows now what it was that occupied so much of her time in here. Even in the face of her unavoidable death at the hands of the cancer that reduced her to a virtual skeleton she spent her days in this very room waiting for the end to come.

I would come home late at night from my job to find my dinner warming in the oven, butts in the ashtray, her notes to herself in her own shorthand most likely gibberish anyway.

I would sit in the dark and eat and wait for the sun to come up so I could watch you.

Today the revolver sits on the table beside my coffee cup. One of my socks is sagging, the elastic long since worn away. My hair is unkempt. The sink is full of dishes.

You pass by, 6 AM on the money. After this morning, I wonder how this day will go.

I know what to do.

New Blog/Blood-Pleas/Please

2008-08-10T12:27:00.005-05:00

Up until a couple of weeks ago, I was a regular weekly contributor to the music blog, Nonalignment Pact. I have stepped away for a number of reasons that I won't go into, but suffice to say that I have no intention of slowing down my writing output as a result. In fact, if it is all all possible, I intend to focus much more heavily on my writing in the future.

Moving forward, part of my plan is to start a new blog project. While writing about music is fine (and don't buy the retarded 'writing about music is like dancing about architecture' horseshit, that's just lazy), I spent a great deal of time in the NAP trying to think of ways to incorporate the rest of the flotsam in my useless brain into my posts.

I began to entertain the idea of starting something that covers more of what I am interested in to not only give a more accurate view of what sort of world I see around me, but also to give myself an opportunity to incorporate the world of books, film, culture, misanthropy, and all other manner of hateful ranting to my heart's content.

This is a venture I don't intend to undertake alone.

This means I need help. Whatever you've got. If you want to participate, or are the least bit curious, then listen up:

I need writers. That means you like writing. It doesn't mean you are Shakespeare, or a grammar teacher, but it does mean that you need to have a voice and you need to be able to be honest with not only the rest of us, but more importantly, yourself.

I would like to have a stable of writers who will agree to commit to at least two posts per month.

These posts can come in two consecutive days, and they could come on the first and last day of the month. I don't care, but I do want you to consider that this is at least a small commitment for you.

Write about whatever you want. That means, pretty much anything. If I have to put up a disclaimer in order to allow you the freedom to express yourself without offending the rest of us, I will. Just say it loud.

I also would love either some literal help, or if not, then some good pointers as it relates to both design and layout. I will most likely stick with Google and thus Blogger as I like the interface just fine, it's free, and it links up quite nicely with my Gmail account (Google Docs, Calendar, etc...).

Little is off the table as far as ideas go. So if you read this, are interested, and have ideas, let me hear 'em. I'm all ears.

Most importantly, I am well aware that practically no one reads this blog, and that the few who do are either already disposed, uninterested, secretly hate me, or worse...

Still, think of all the ways that we could piss people off, people who so deserve it, and think of all the things that need to be said, because that's what I'm after.

And I am the dictator. This will be no simpering democarcy without any actual decisions ever being made so that no one can ever actually be happy at all. If I get tired of whoever you are, I reserve the right to make bye bye.

There, that ought to pull you in in droves.

I will be waiting for your prompt responses.

God, I hate you all.

8/8/08 State

2008-08-10T10:31:00.004-05:00

This post will come off as being overly political, and I have tried to keep my political views and opinions to myself in the last few years, since it virtually leads nowhere. Having said that, I hope that my critiques here will fall closer to the social commentary column than that of pure political editorial. It doesn't help that my knowledge of world politics is rudimentary at best; so with that in mind, I respectively admit my shortcomings up front. Maybe this will make this post more readable. Maybe not. Maybe you can go fuck yourself. As always.

It's off to the races in China as the 2008 Summer Olympics have hit the ground running (ahem).

From what I've seen of the near four-hour opening ceremonies, lavish pomp is something that the Chinese do better than anyone else (in fact no one even comes close).

If you happened to hear the Democracy Now episode Friday morning then you heard about how the Chinese government spent over 45 billion dollars in order to host these games.

45 billion! Can you fucking believe that?

In Athens the 9 billion they spent on their games was way over budget and they will be in debt to themselves for many years to come. As an example, Montreal, who hosted the 1976 games, just payed off the last bit of their debt from those games in 2006. That means it took them 30 fucking years to deal with that. And guess who footed that bill? The people of course! Yay populism.

Anyone else think that maybe the games are not really about sport at all, not really about the spirit of human achievement, and perhaps more about commerce?

Doubt that? Well, think about this, this was the first opening ceremony to be attended by a visiting American president in decades. Any guess why?

Economically speaking we are in the pocket of the Chinese. Our need for cheaper and more plentiful crap is so voracious, and Chinese labor production so equally cheap and plentiful that as we continue to become indentured servants to the exploding Chinese economy China in the meantime is assuming its place at the global table, horrific human rights atrocities and soul-crushing anti-democracy right there with her.

China apparently displaced over a million residents of Beijing in order to make room for the posh Olympic accommodations that pepper that huge city. It's hard to imagine a country that covers such a wide range of social stratification especially considering their supposed love of the working class. The Chinese poor are very, very poor, and the rich are getting much, much richer. Just like every other Capitalist superpower! Joy!

The lengths that we will bend over in the name of commerce is appalling, but it should come as no surprise in a world where your entire being is summed up by its value to a global economy that thrives on control and marketing.

And speaking of marketing, can you believe the propaganda machine that has kicked so heavily into gear to sell these games as an arms-opened hug of humanity?

Pepsi has changed their can to red to celebrate the red of communist China, a move that must have McCarthy's ghost shitting its ethereal pants as we speak.

And just as we see every two years (winter/summer games), the media does its best to portray the sentimentality of the struggles the athletes must endure in order to realize their dream.

But how many athletes dream of being pawns for some sort of corporate marketing strategy to reach the hearts, minds, and dollars of China's, let alone the rest of the world's wealthier nations exponential upsurge of wealth?

Me, I have always enjoyed watching the games. Perhaps it is the spectacle that has captured a growing segment of my attention as I have grown older (and more cynical), but I still take a great deal of enjoyment from the games themselves. And that is in light of the discrepancy that exists between money rich countries like the US and China and other embattled political hotbeds like Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan.

In fact, watching the opening ceremonies was more than a little depressing. Watching as the countries paraded past with their vastly differing coteries of athletes, I felt a bit sheepish at the sight of the massive, attractive, and incredibly well-financed American team.

But, if nothing else, the games are a barometer for the climate of the world in which we live. And given the nature of our times, seeing the games take place in Beijing, while Putin watches and cheers as his fellow countrymen at that very moment open war on yet another breakaway front, while Bush does what no other president has bothered to do for so long (in order to curb favor) while our unending war in the Middle East rages on, while Pakistan's Musharraf stays home to combat a growing threat to his self-imposed leadership, perhaps it is only normal to see these games as a literal window into the human condition, warts and all.

Despite that winded vitriol, I will honestly be enjoying the games anyway. I always have, and likely always will.

I am Robert Bloch

2008-08-08T00:03:00.001-05:00

MyHeritage: Family trees - Genealogy - Celebrities

Beak Holes

2008-08-06T22:03:00.004-05:00

Okay, I will admit to loving hysteria as much as the next guy. When I waxed rhapsodic about the non-event tropical storm that drivelled its way across the Houston/Galveston area, even I was wont to overestimate its effect on the environs.

Look, it fucking rained for about four or five hours. That was it ladies, the whole shooting match, the whole enchilada, lock stock and fucking lot. There was no wind at all. It's not like it was a wee breezy. No. There was no wind. I pass more wind daily than that damn thing did yesterday and no one is calling my ass a tropical storm.

Thank you. I'll be here all week.

Today, in lieu of actual work, I was reading the book, Isaac's Storm, about an actual storm that blew through here in the year of our lord, 1900. That fucking thing was a monster, and we've had our share. Camille, Claudette. Galveston was practically eradicated after the 1900 storm.

Reading about the science of hurricanes is no joke. Well, reading about it I guess is as much a joke as anything really, but the science is no joke.

The world record for rainfall in a 24 hour period goes to a storm that pissed out 73 inches over Jamaica in one day. ONE DAY.

The most rain recorded for one storm total was NINE FEET in 3 days of raining.

Camille (I believe it was), the monster storm that dropped 4 feet over Alvin, Texas in a day, went packing up north and ended up dropping 3 feet of rain in Virginia after days over land. The rain was apparently so heavy that it was reported birds drowned from the water filling their upper beak holes faster than the birds could drain it.

Edouardo, you sir were a pussy.

That's right, I said 'beak holes,' got a problem with that?

Yeah, But Can You Play That Thing?

2008-08-06T20:37:00.004-05:00

Ever since I moved into this apartment a month ago I have taken great pleasure in putting my turntable to use. For some reason, when I bought the thing it sounded crap whenever I used it through the stereo I used to have at home. I had to use a preamp since the receiver was one model number away from having a phono jack packaged with it. For some reason (that some total tech dickwad would gladly share with you over milk and cookies), using that preamp through the receiver not only sounded bad, it was also way too quiet to matter. Therefore, I did what anyone in my position would do: I stopped using it.

Fast forward to my previous apartment (the one with the cocksmoking nuthound that lived upstairs and stomped about day and night) and I purchase a lovely set of plug-and-play speakers for my laptop. I just wanted something decent. Much to my surprise these things sound fucking boss. Boner city. The sub is more than powerful enough to piss off any neighbor who dreams of me standing over them at night with Naked City CDs in hand.

Unfortunately for me, my turntable was packed away in a corner since the damn place was often housing five hapless souls in its one-bedroom splendor.

Things had to change.

And so we are here in the now in this spacious little number in stripper central.

(As an aside, we received a complimentary copy of the Koran at our door the other day. I couldn’t have been happier. I’ve wanted one of those babies for a while, and the idea of the Koran being handed out in a place as backwards as, well, as America by some sort of Islamic Gideons is just too cool.)

So I now have more than enough room to whip out the vinyl and use the old phonograph. And man, I’ve got to tell you, listening to Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell through my Sony is a fucking revelation. The bass response is simply majestic, and the mix is full. If I weren’t such a modest man I would service myself in the mirror while listening to that album. Just saying, it’s that good.

If you know my writing from the Nonalignment Pact, then maybe you remember my mentioning the extreme metal magazine out of Philadelphia, Decibel. If not, know that I love that damn thing. And also know that every month Decibel adds another album to their Hall of Fame.

So, as I was listening to Heaven and Hell I was thinking to myself that it would be badass if Decibel had the sense to use H&H as their next Hall of Fame entry. So I grab the new issue yesterday, and there it is, Hall of Fame, bitches. So well deserved. Buy the album on vinyl, buy Decibel, buy some crack and snag some steel wool from the pantry, retire to your den, grab your full length mirror and some lube and have yourself a night.

And you’re welcome.

Oh yeah, there is another thing.

I have a really scary vinyl collection. Most of my records I have acquired from my mother who was liquidating her stuff years back since she had no turntable of her own anymore. This meant I ended up with gems like Charles Aznovour, Johnny Halliday, Serge Gainsbourg, Barbara Streisand, Cat Stevens, The Kingsmen and so many others. It also meant I ended up with several albums that my cousin left with my mom for some reason, stuff like Savoy Brown, The Beatles, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, The James Gang, and Traffic.

So I’ve been playing Traffic’s The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. I really dig a pretty good chunk of that album. Sure, it gets a little “flutey” so to speak, and it has that doofus, Steve Winwood, on it, but overall that thing rocks. I highly recommend it. And don’t fuck around with a CD of it, or worse still, a fucking download. What you need is the vinyl and here’s why… Check out the unit on the guy on the far left side of the front row! Holy fuck! What is in his pants for god's sake? I know it was the 70s, and I know that it was de rigueur to have the old armadillo in trou’, but Jesus H., that is some scary shit. I’m not sure who that guy is. I assume he was the sax player, Chris Wood (Wood, hahahahahaha), because he has that apparatus around his neck. For some reason, he also seems to be holding a fucking walkie-talkie in his left hand! What the fuck for? What self-respecting genital mutant needs a walkie-talkie anyway? Whoever he is, there is some serious shit going down in his pants. His package is so disproportionately large that it seems almost hard to imagine that the guy donning it would have the abdominal strength to stand up straight. There is so much action in that guy’s crotchal region that it is almost possible to not even notice the batshit crazy black guy next to him. What’s up with the black dude? Full camo zipper suit? Woven straw hat? Ridiculously dark oversized sunglasses? They’re all there, but you would be totally forgiven for not noticing thanks to Mr. Cock and Balls over on the left.

Buy it.

Tropical Storm Retardo

2008-08-04T19:29:00.004-05:00

It's amazing what watching the undoing of a city at the hands of a hurricane can do to the sanity of a neighboring city.

Back when Katrina exposed once and for the near total lack of competent leadership in the federal government, and the central Gulf Coast suffered the worst natural disaster in its recorded history, something happened to the psyche of Houstonians. We saw the abandonment and inundation of New Orleans as a potential worst case scenario here as well. Never mind that we don't live in a virtual cereal bowl, every day losing valuable natural protection to the willful destruction of surrounding wetlands in the name of profits and at the expense of civil safety. Never mind all that. When we panic here in Houston, we do it right.

Luckily for us, hot on the heels of the Katrina debacle came Hurricane Rita, which was the most powerful storm ever if you measure it by barometric pressure (which only weather people actually do).

Had the Houston/Galveston area sustained a direct category 5 hit like it was appearing a day or two before landfall, things would have been pretty ugly here.

The ensuing flood (and only flood) of residents heading for safer locales ended up being a crisis unto itself as literally hundreds of thousands of area residents were trapped in a bumper-to-bumper nightmare in the Houston freeways.

A whole busload of elderly people being shipped to 'safer' ground was basically burned to death thanks to a fire that got out of hand very quickly.

Since that near miss we really haven't had much to talk about in the tropical arena here in Houston.

Tonight, Tropical Storm Edouardo is threatening to become a category 1 hurricane overnight and then make landfall directly on Galveston Beach before heading for Houston.

This means that if it even becomes a hurricane at all, the highest sustained winds would be around 74 miles per hour. If it happens at all, by the time it reaches Houston things will have died down somewhat. Basically we will see loose items blow around, some dead trees and limbs break, and probably a hell of a lot of rain. That's most likely it.

Thing is, on our way home tonight we stopped at the local yup-mart to grab some stuff for dinner and the fucking place was a mob scene.

Even the fucking local news was on hand to capture the lunatic frenzy. You'd think something important was about to happen the way folks were clamoring for bread, water, and of course beer.

I think, in retrospect, that since so many people will be off tomorrow, and since the stores may well be closed (not mine of course), they might as well stock up and stay at home and get bombed.

Now that is America at its finest.

Jesus is Making for us the Chicken

2008-08-03T17:46:00.002-05:00

Jesus is making for us the chicken.

We will give thanks to him, Jesus, for it is for us that he has bestowed the chicken.

And seriously, those empty chicken eyes, all glassy, malignant voids of darkness, and clear hosts to the majesty of the dark lord.

Chik-Fil-A is the lord’s venue for the word on the front of fast food and in this we must rejoice.

Jesus too has made for us the pizza.

We will give thanks to his majesty and rejoice in this sacrament of dough and cheese (made with real milk, ye of little faith), and spicy sauce with but a hint of sugar.

Incredible Pizza Company is the lord’s secret way of delving within the recesses of your wayward soul and touching us with his word all through the sacred joys of pizza and shitty video games.

Amen.

Yes people, yay verily, and so shall it be that his majesty is in the business of cheap, nutritionally worthless fast-food and mindless electronic entertainments served up at the mercy of a token. This token will go down like the very wafer, an analogue of his flesh made real and transposed into the gleeful faces of fat, ruddy faced children.

What would Jesus eat?

Jesus eats pizza and chicken.

Peculiar this shunning of the bovine culinary delights seeing as how the cow has been granted certain sacred qualities in other equally ill-informed monotheistic ventures. You would think that we would shove as much cow flesh into our massive yet ironically malnourished bellies as was humanly possible.

Oh yeah, we do.

Just not at Chik-Fil-A.

Chik-Fil-A isn’t even open on the lord’s day. Yeah, that’s right; Sundays are for worship, not eating chicken. How’s that for devotion? Never mind that fried foods in highly saturated oil is tantamount to a slow and controlled genocide on a mass scale. That’s no sin.

Check out this little excerpt from Wiki on the Chik-Fil-A god hookup (warning: it’s fucking retarded):

Religious connections

Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy is a devout Southern Baptist who has taught Sunday School for over 44 years and whose religious beliefs permeate the company to this day. The company's official statement of corporate purpose says that the business exists "to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us and to have a positive influence on all who come in contact with Chick-fil-A." The chain invests heavily in community services (especially for children and teenagers) and scholarships. Cathy's beliefs are also responsible for one of the chain's distinctive features: All Chick-fil-A locations (company-owned and franchised, whether in a mall or freestanding) are closed on Sundays.
“
Our decision to close on Sunday was our way of honoring God and directing our attention to things more important than our business. If it took seven days to make a living with a restaurant, then we needed to be in some other line of work. Through the years, I have never wavered from that position.
„
—S. Truett Cathy [5]
The religious organizations to which Truett Cathy and Chick-fil-A have lent support include such groups as Focus on the Family. Groups researching financial support of religious groups have noted that Truett Cathy is one of the largest corporate sponsors of politically active religious groups in the US, largely through grants from the Truett Cathy Foundation but occasionally through direct sponsorship as well or through partnership with other foundations that are major corporate sponsors of politically active religious groups.[citation needed]
Chick-fil-A has promoted religious groups via toys and CDs included in children's meals, much as movie studios promote new movies via McDonald's Happy Meal toys. These have ranged from including toys from the Christian television series VeggieTales in children's meals to including Financial Peace for Kids children's books by Christian financial guru Dave Ramsey and CDs from the Christian radio program Adventures in Odyssey, as children's meal incentives. The latter show is produced by the radio division of Focus on the Family, and typically heard on Christian radio stations.
Chick-fil-A and Focus on the Family also have a history of cross-promotion. Chick-fil-A has also sponsored meetings by the group All Pro Dad; All Pro Dad is a group with affiliations with Focus on the Family via a group called Family First; Family First promotes a large number of conservative religious causes, including covenant marriage.
Chick-fil-A has also directly sponsored other religious campaigns. One of the groups sponsored by Chick-fil-A is Athletes In Action which is a sports missionary arm of the Campus Crusade for Christ.
Another link between Chick-fil-A and religious groups includes promotion of National Bible Week. Truett Cathy is the chair of the National Bible Week Committee.
Amidst the company's push to the southwest, Las Vegas remains the southernmost metropolitan area without a Chick-fil-A location.[6]
Truett Cathy is also heavily involved in the WinShape Foundation, a non-profit organization which was started in 1984 with its goal to "shape winners" by offering summer camps, retreats, foster care, and other services.
Chick-fil-A's connection to Christianity has even been brought up in court when Aziz Latif, a Houston-based Muslim employee for 6 years, sued the company in 2002 for firing him, alleging that he was fired for his religious beliefs when he had refused to take part in an employee prayer.[7] The suit was settled on undisclosed terms.[8]

Know why the suit was settled? Because the guy was right.

Jesus is making for us the hypocrites. Hope you enjoy it because you asked for it.

The Chrism

2008-08-03T16:37:00.000-05:00

The world is a giant cesspool. For once we can all be in agreement. No more of this incessant self-congratulatory simpering garbage that parades for civilized behavior for us, oh no, it’s time to pull out all the stops and beat our xenophobic drums, pound our hairy chests, and make every effort to isolate and crush any threat to our own perceived sensibilities. Welcome America, your fate will not be a pretty one.

Reading the news lately has been a huge exercise in hubris, or if I was to be more accurate, a huge exercise in horror.

We all are aware of the unparalleled amount of exposure that we now have to the world around us thanks to venues like the internet, and while it is nice to have so much easy access to so much information, one huge side effect of this glut is the simultaneous exposure to the utter douchebaggery that only humanity could master on such a grand scale.

Case in point.

The anthrax guy. Was this the right guy? Do we trust the FBI enough to believe that this dude was the guy they were really after? I mean, now that he’s offed himself, can we really trust the feds enough to believe that they were one step from cracking it wide open and handing this guy his ass? Apparently he took the dirt cocktail because he was tipped off that he was about to be arrested by the goons. Who knew that was coming, and why in the fuck would they tell a man who was (according to his shrink) homicidal? The whole thing reeks. And the bonus round has me wondering why this guy was working at Fort Dietrich at the bioweapons facility in the first place if he was so goddamned looped. What possible good would come from keeping a homicidal bioweapons expert on staff at a US Army bioweapons research lab? Anyone?

Then there’s the ‘Snooks” abduction case.

Some total jackweed marries a rich socialite businesswoman. The guy tells his wife he is a member of the ultraloaded and ultraconnected Rockefeller clan, and she, being the mental wizard she has been touted to be in the press, marries this clown without so much as a peek at anything pertaining to his actual reality. They have a kid, and Mr. Creeps becomes a stay-at-home dad while mom is off traipsing around the world making a mint and raising her standing in the vapid world of finance and influence. After a spell of this the woman decides that this dude is hiding too much and wants a divorce. They split, but he is able to wrangle it so that his actual identity is sealed from her. Her reward for allowing this nonsense is full custody while the nut job dad is left having supervised visits with a social worker.

So this guy does what? Well, he tells friends he’s going to abduct his kid, and lo and behold… wait for it… he does!!

Whoa, shocker, never saw that coming.

Let’s see, he hid his identity from his own wife, and then after they split he tells people he will abduct his kid, and then he does? No way!

Isn’t it retarded?

So, he is caught, the kid is fine, and what kind of world are we living in?

Well, I’ll tell you.

Did you read about the fucking guy in Canada?

This 22-year-old guy is coming home to see his family. He’s a fucking carny for chrissakes, which in itself is weird enough. So, this carny is heading home on a bus through the Canadian wilderness. Luckily for him he gets to sit next to a 40-year-old Chinese guy, who for what may never be fully understood, has finally snapped. For whatever reason, the Chinese guy suddenly whips out a huge knife and starts stabbing the younger guy. He ends up stabbing him 50 to 60 fucking times! While all of this is going on, the people on the bus clamor to get off. No one stops to help the guy getting brutally murdered.

Now let’s, as an aside, just reflect on the information we have so far, shall we?

I know that watching someone go apeshit and start stabbing another guy is real fucking terrifying. I get that. And I think it’s only normal that a certain segment of the population would simply freak out and go for theirs in that situation. You know, like the mother holding the infant, they were sitting behind all this hellishness. She tossed her kid ahead, past the action, and got the fuck out of there. I get that. But what happened here, it appears, is that the entire remaining busload of people just got the hell out of there. Not a single person tried to stop this. Not one.

And it gets worse, so much worse.

While everyone else on the bus was apparently fighting to get out of the way of this scene, including the driver, the Chinese guy actually does the worst thing you could imagine and beheads the passenger. Yeah, cuts his fucking head OFF.

Somehow, as this is all going down, a cop is now on the scene calling back to the station to relay what is going down. During this call he very calmly tells the dispatcher about how the suspect is now “defiling the body,” and eating pieces of the dead guy’s flesh.

Is this cop raising a finger to stop this? No. He’s giving a play-by-play. He has become the Harry Carey on the scene. That’s fucking great isn’t it?

Welcome to earth.

And the best part of all is that these mountains of horrific indignities are played out in so many guises day after day in every city of this world without any sign of slowing down.

Meanwhile, there is ice on Mars, Comets may well destroy us, nuclear war is brewing in a place we know nothing about, David Lee Roth is back in Van Halen, Christina Applegate has breast cancer, and I hate everyone.

Okay, the last bit is hardly news.

I’ve talked about the death of my mother in here on a number of occasions, and I will always miss her. But seeing as how she saw how ugly it all is almost as well as I do, I am not sorry that she doesn’t have to see any more of this ever again, because we aren’t getting any more attractive as a race.

Can’t global warming hurry up and work its mojo? Will this shithole city be inundated when the ice caps go away? I can surely dream.

What attracts me more and more each day? The passing of time finds me shrinking into myself like a withering fruit in a drought. This life finds me drawn to the solace of silence and of fantasy and of…

Fuck it.

When you walk in this world in your bleached white baby dress with your garish platinum hair and your pathetic child dangles from your arm like a trophy of your claimed faith in a higher power to which you have donated your shriveled visage on each Sunday morning in exchange for a self-righteous gleam on which to hang your soul in judgment of all that is not you, when you give only of yourself your small-minded posturing from way up on high, do you not feel the pangs of guilt that you are somehow symptomatic of the very thing that will destroy us all and leave us in the annals of universal history as a stain and a blight on all that was good in the great failed experiment of life?

The only thing that allows me a small shard of peace is the comfort in knowing that no matter how long your family line goes on, no matter how many genetically atrophied mongoloids spew forth from your soiled loins, all of us, every single one, will one day die and be long forgotten. Forgotten, yes, because we are worth nothing and will be reduced to just that in the equalizing wash of time.

In case you haven’t noticed, I fucking hate Houston in August.

It’s a recurring theme.

Some decisions bear the sweetest fruit. Time is marching, I hear the boots, but I will fuck it all back with an unyielding vengeance. And I will go for mine.

Don’t talk to me of smiles and patience and acceptance; just crawl back to your empty hearts and your coddled nests of phony sympathy and pray to your words of christ in red and smile at yourself in the mirror. One day I will meet you on the road and your dress will be stained with the soil of a thousand floods, only then will the smiles take root and find their way into the waiting arms of mercy.

Foolish stumbling voles, eyeless, naked, utterly savage, and never less alone than right now…

And right now…

And right now…

And…

The Hiatus, One Foot Into Another Hiatus

2008-07-24T19:47:00.003-05:00

Well okay, I'm back. I made my blog private for a while, and then promptly wrote not a single word in the fucking thing. Such is my life.

Much has happened since my last post. I have moved. That's all you need to know about the big stuff.

I continue to rediscover my devotion to heavy metal, and I must admit that I have not had so much fun with music in many years.

My art, my writing, my music, basically anything that I do to express myself creatively has been placed deep on the back burner in light of all that has come in the last few months.

I love, fucking love living, but I also hate it more than I could ever imagine, which is to say that my hatred for life is ever expanding, ever finding new corners in which to foster itself and develop into a cancer of epic proportion.

And I'm 40.

So, no, to my twenty year old self, worrying that I would lose my edge and become all Dalai Lama with a lobotomy if I lived to this tender age, no, it didn't happen. I have learned to be wary of humanity more and more with each passing year. And honestly, thank god for that.

I see myself as a huge teenager, prattling about, leaving a radioactive trail of ignorance in my wake, and generally wasting the precious time I have been given in this life. So, nothing new there.

I am hurtling towards a change, a sea change, a rift with the past that will find me more at ease in my skin, more in tune with the voices that drive me to open the gates and allow the cattle to come home, bellies full, a pasture left to regrow.

I need to keep up the focus on writing. That is not to say that I am somehow impressed with myself, though I think it is fair to find my own writing serviceable and not just a little bit juvenile (or self-indulgent to the point of being off-putting for that matter), it is meant more as a way of expressing my own need to communicate in a creative fashion whatever it is that allows me to look in the mirror and not shrivel away into a husk of disgust and self loathing. That, I could do with the slightest provocation.

I am a regular weekly contributor to a music oriented blog called the Nonalignment Pact. At the NAP (as we affectionately call it), I have done a fairly good job of painting myself into a sort of corner.

See, here's the deal. I have a bit of a mouth on me when I write candidly. I just do. It's my voice. In the almost two years that we have been doing that little experiment I have managed to piss off damn near everyone who walked through the place. Mission accomplished? Well, yes and no.

Let me explain.

Yes, mission accomplished because the languor with which we have conducted ourselves has a tendency to make me feel jumpy. I like the lively discussion. Thing is, I stick in craws whenever I do it. It's maybe a side effect, or perhaps it's more of a symptom.

And so, no, mission not accomplished because I don't have any interest in quashing interaction not only between the NAP and the outside world (or each other for that matter), but also between myself and the rest of the entire universe.

I mean, fuck. Am I either that boring, provocative, or just plain stupid?

Yes, many might say.

Fair enough.

But objectively so?

I doubt it.

So, what am I after here?

Who knows. Shit, who cares.

Her Desk

2008-05-07T23:37:00.000-05:00

You know, as drawn out as certain aspects of this life can be – and we all know that much of this life is a brutal, uncaring and interminable hell – there is always the thought that the alternative is simply a total wash. So, speaking of alternatives, what else is there? Anyone? I mean, beyond the pipe-dream fantasies of eternal life in the arms of a welcoming god, what lies beyond the delicate veil of living?

Here’s what I know. I know that I have no clue. This means that there is nothing that has come to me yet that has helped illuminate the mystery of that stupid-assed question.

Not a god damn thing.

For all my incessant carping and simpering and all-around whining, there is actually a man buried beneath the layers of scorn that has an acute awareness of just how precious this life really is.

It takes one moment of sitting in my mother’s chair at her desk the day after she died to know that, to drive it home, to make it one with my being. It took one single moment of sitting there at her computer looking at her little notepad and her water glass and her package of gum to know that this is it baby and there ain’t no more.

Yeah, maybe there’s just an aesthetic to that sort of thought. I’m aware of that possibility. But what I’m saying is that the answer is that there isn’t an answer at all, and/or the answer is that you’re living it and it’s time to notice once and a fucking while before it’s irrelevant.

What if death is less than the end? What if death simply is, and as such is beyond comprehension? What then?

Look, believe what you want. I just want to make a fairly simple point even if my logic is flawed so deeply that it threatens to rob meaning from the idea itself. The idea is that we are here now and we know that much and while we are here we need to do ourselves a favor and open our eyes on occasion. Every once in a fucking while it might be a good idea to go ahead and listen to what is going on instead of tuning out.

And look, I’m not advocating never tuning out because all of us have to. In fact, I have to more than others, so stuff that up your ass and hobble on by.

This isn’t meant to shit out of me like some sort of Dr.Phil, back slapping jerk-off. This is meant to point those of you who teeter towards absolute oblivion to recognize that even on the very bottom there are things that will awe you in their beauty. Even in the darkest void are things that will take you in comfort and share with you their power.

I know, I know. Tony Robbins has arrived.

Fuck you if you don’t get it.

Just go back to your shaved chests, and your plucked eyebrows, and your luxury convertibles, and your blue tooth headsets, and your flatscreen television, and your romp through the beds of an endless parade of empty encounters tailor made to embolden your flagging esteem when you are the source of the pain in the first place. Just go the fuck on back.

I’ll stick with silence, and crying, and loneliness, and courtesy, and shyness, and modesty, and honesty, and fortitude, and a deep and intense inner power to confidently express who you are even as you are changing from day to day and moment to moment despite whatever it is that gets in your way every single day of your life. I’ll stick with this crowd because that’s what this is all about.

Or, well, you know… maybe not.

Who can say for sure?

The Neighbor

2008-04-26T20:45:00.001-05:00

I really shouldn’t post this, but I’m going to anyway.

I was just a child. You too, you were just a child living a child’s life in a place barren of meaning, in an environment that reduced us all to mechanical reproductions of the people we once were. It was honestly terrible growing up in the suburbs in the 80s. Not terrible in that urban way in which your life is constantly threatened by the world that shows its teeth all around you. No, this was a sort of danger that is more insidious, this was a sort of viral affliction that grabbed hold of all who came before it and bastardized its host towards its own ends (nasty thing, that).

Being shy, shy in the way that I was, and being a stranger to the entire scene (the latchkey life, the extreme summer weather, the power struggles of adolescence) meant that I was in a position to be easily manipulated and ultimately pushed around.

And so I was, by you.

Boredom is a powerful motivator for poor judgment, and so too is immorality. You were both unbearably bored and irretrievably immoral.

I met you the day we moved there to that suburban purgatory. Born in Ohio, raised quite briefly in New England, and then quickly hopping the Atlantic to Europe, mine was a life of never staying in one place for too long. But moving us here, to this toilet of a state, to this genuinely terrible, terrible city, Houston, insured (at least for me) a life of confusion and often-monumental anxiety.

We drove to Texas, drove here in an orange Volkswagen Rabbit. May parents, my brother, and I, all tucked in to that tiny little car.

And I will never forget the day we arrived in Texas, stepping out of the car and into the Texas summer heat for the very first time. I had never felt anything like it. The air was thick like a soup, and tactile in a way that I had never known previous. And the heat was absolutely cloying, hanging on to you like a wet blanket, seeping into the very fabric of your clothing before you had time to register what was happening.

The day we moved into our suburban house, the one directly across the street from a bayou, you headed the welcome committee to come to my door.

Naturally, being the coward that you are, you assigned the next oldest kid to do all the talking because you were afraid to do it yourself.

I now know in retrospect that you were simply coming over to size me up and to see what threat I might pose to your dominance over the kids on the block.

You were then, and remain today, a fat fuck. Excuse my colloquialism, but you are a fat-ass. No need to get coy about it. You ate too much and your body let it show. That was a side effect of your being completely spoiled by your parents who also were unable to have the fortitude to raise you as something other than a little hillbilly king, set to inherit dad’s hard-earned business, and with almost certainty, run it into the ground.

Aside from the kid you charged with the introductions, I was the only other kid on the block who was basically your age. I was also the kid you decided to hang out with since I lived two doors down from you. This meant that it was our job to tease the kid down the street so that he never forgot who owned our little corner of the world. Fortunately, that kid had the sense to develop actual interests and escape the bottomless pit of your company. Me, being the way I was, spent four years under your asinine tutelage.

Those years left me feeling very unsure of whom I was and if I even had any reason to be in a world like this one at all.

I think about the litany of indignities that I suffered while in your company and of the endless string of selfish actions you undertook in the name of your amusement.

You stood by and watched me get beat up by a kid much older than me just because I rode my bike past him and his friends while they were drunk. You even laughed as he hit me in the face and knocked me off my bike.

You allowed me to introduce myself to the girl that moved in down the street, getting us both in the door, so you wouldn’t have to worry about it. Then, once we were on friendly terms, you made your move when I wasn’t around. Then you invited me over and tried to get me to watch you fucking her, peeking through a crack in the door, just so you could bust me and make me look bad in front of her. Sorry that one didn’t work out for you, buddy.

And best of all, you coaxed me into performing sexual favors for you, and always with the threat of physical violence if I ever told anyone. And I will never live down actually doing them. I would rather have been beaten within an inch of my life than to have done what I did back then. For every day I that have left, I will never live down the stupidity of my actions in light of my fear. I despise myself, even more than you, for ever allowing myself to be in that position. The events of those days have crystallized my anger to the point of shooting forth from me, like bullets, like arrows dipped in poison, shot in every direction. No one will ever take advantage of me that way again, and if they do, I will make them regret it.

So now, here I am and I’m telling everyone. The entire world will now know what you did. Anyone who reads this will know you and know you for what you really are. So, I’ve told now, the cat is out of the bag, faggot, so come and get me whenever you’re ready, because I’ll be waiting on baited breath.

Yes, you are a faggot, the one thing you feared the most. You are a closet fag. You dream of the company of men but will never have the strength to admit it to yourself. You will never be able to out yourself because you foster this dream of masculine fantasy, with yourself at the helm, the women of the world swinging from your pathetic cock like little monkeys. Your fevered ego could never handle the blow from exposing yourself for what you really are.

Of course, in truth, what you really are, is trash. You are a piece of human shit and you have no place walking the same streets as me. Your cowardice and your animalistic urge to ignore your pea-sized brain and hone directly in to the reptilian desire to control will guide you forever and leave you a withered hull of a man as you age and shrink into obsolescent decay. Fuck you. You are less than human.

Finally I grew to the point where I was not afraid of you anymore. No more would I allow you to tell me anything, no more could you con me into anything so defiling and so degrading ever again, and from that moment on, we never hung out again, not once.

When you lay your head down at night, when it’s time to go to sleep and to refresh yourself to return to the world you own once again, do you ever give pause? At night, as you lay next to whoever it is that sucks your cock now, does it ever dawn on you that at least one man out there could kill you with a reason so good it burns him sometimes?

It's dawned on me.

But even better that that, I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out why it is that I am so crippled when it comes to functioning on a normal level. You know, the way others seem so comfortable doing. Getting by, for me, is quite honestly a sort of ordeal, and it is because of people like you that I have become the way I am today.

This is the only time any of you will hear me say this, but for the record, I was defined in part by my experiences all those years back. I was damaged in a way that seems to have handicapped me from being able to live a life that thrives healthily and doesn’t hinge so heavily on the effects of the past.

I am living proof that abuse of any kind while growing up (or at all for that matter) is something that takes an entire lifetime to deal with and only goes away when we go away.

I shouldn’t have posted this, but I did it anyway.

It’s good to have that out there and to finally let it go, at least in a sense.

I am moving on.

You should too.

The Console

2008-04-25T01:08:00.000-05:00

I am exhausted. I haven't been sleeping well. Not sure if it's the change here in balmy ol' Houston's weather from bearable to not-so-bearable, or if it's something much more insidious. When I consider all of the changes that have wrought blood from this life of mine in the last months, or even years for that matter, I suppose it should come as no surprise to recognize that this world of my own design should exact a heavy psychic toll. It has.

So, tumbling through nights that threaten in as much as they replenish is an almost certainty were I to stand back and play all objective and shit.

Tonight is my night to have the kids. They are sleeping in the other room, I just checked on them and they are down. What is it about watching children sleep that is so heart wrenching for me? I covered my daughter as she had rolled out from under her blanket, and then I stood there for a few and just watched her in her godlike beauty. I saw her walk today for the first time. It's odd seeing her upright and in motion. She is clearly proud of herself, and her pride could only be matched by my own.

My anger has been a near constant companion lately, and again, without getting psychoanalytical, I will say that there are numerous obvious reasons for this. Unfortunately, none of them are easily dealt with.

If you were to take the world through which I am wont to pass, and spread the various elements of it from end to end, you would be left with the image of a puzzle with many missing pieces. You might even find pieces from other puzzles mixed in from somewhere unknown. Nice, no?

Who knows me? Who knows anything about me? What of me doesn't serve you, and what of me is of me alone? Anything? Because I wonder. I do. I wonder if I am not here as little more than an oddity kept around in order to amuse. How fucking cruel a joke would that be? What if I was right about that, and what if illuminating it did nothing to remedy the situation? What if requesting release was simply a conceit that sent the gallery scrambling for their footing amid the riotous laughs that rippled through their ranks?

I don't know if you know this or not, but I see myself as being unpredictable in a way that contains nothing sexy about itself. Is there nothing there of me that leaves me cutting paths that remain passable for longer than it takes for me to move through and not a moment more?

Is my unbearably intense internal discomfort as obvious as I think it is, or do I read like some over reactive child, too self-absorbed to see a world outside of my own? Fuck, I just thought we all operated that way. Maybe I'm wrong.

My door opens into an alien environment. Always felt that way from day one. It took years to shake the ineffable quality of being separate from the rest of the world I passed through, on my way to where? Am I going anywhere? I must be going somewhere because I feel so lost. You can find yourself as being lost when you have nowhere to go. You lose your way, can't find the path. Stumble around in the dark.

I don't mean to sound so maudlin.

I want to tell you all about it. I want you to sit down and become absorbed in the way the car holds the road, takes turns, and does its very own thing its very own way. I can go, god knows I can. I can take the money and run like a man possessed. And is there a single person out there, a single one who can honestly take the credit for listening? Seriously. Can anyone claim the mantle of being the solitary member of the I-listen-club, because I ain't seein' it if they are.

Maybe I shouldn't have expectations. Maybe I should model myself on the paeans to heroic being that stipple the histories of man like minute handsful of luminous creatures scooped from the dark waters at night. Maybe I should take a ticket and stand in the line of those who adhere to the doctrines and dialogues of the majestic few who have divined the holiest wheat from the chaff. I can't though, because I have to call bullshit on that whole tale anyway. That shit is truly for the birds, all that saving us from ourselves garbage, and all that showing us the true path crap. That shit is for the birds. That shit is for the weak, because in the transparent comfort of myopia does one see whatever it is they want to see without actually having eyes of their own.

Nah, fuck that.

I am just laid out here, typing out a clicking treatise on the mountainous heaps of arrogant stupidity that flows out from these fingers into the electronic ether to wallow and rot and ultimately find itself swarmed in the larvae of scavenging insects.

Here is a man that runs through windows, blindfolded. This is a man with the power to destroy entire lives by merely being honest. This is a man who has crafted reams of evidence to support the claims of the council on the effects of being too sensitive in a world that chastises one for feeling anything that isn't directly connected to burying women with your undeniable virility or reducing those around you to something less than human in order to take your cock out and dip it into wells of cash, without end, because to do these things is tantamount to being a success.

Welcome. Welcome to the truth.

You may now return to your rapes and your petty vindictiveness and your hyperactive stupidity and your one-sided romp through the fields of innocence, only to come out the other side bloodied but unbowed.

Who do I hate more, myself or you?

At the end of the day, that is the question that keeps me up, leaves me exhausted, and sends me into tomorrow, no less hip to the solution out of this mess and into the into, and into this life.

Try me.

I will sleep. You? You never rest.

Guess why.

A Kingdom of Fools

2008-04-22T23:17:00.000-05:00

There are places in this world from which there can be no rest from the encroaching forces of entropy. Find yourself there and pray for an early death, because once you are stuck in that directional motion, that lateral slide, it was pretty much nice knowing you.

Maybe you escaped your youth with just enough callousness to pad the nerves from giving out their messages of pain, and maybe in the process of establishing your foothold on the promontory of adulthood you also cashed in that pact you made with the dark and handed over any future chance you may have previously had for redemption.

And it just might be totally overlooked by almost the entire balance of mankind, but then again there are those who walk beyond the warning signs and hunt for scraps in the sordid minefield of your own making. Revel in that, cherish the sheen of pathetic disastrous unhinged stupidity as it rolls from your distorted grimace, as the spoils of naked terror insulated from the outside with a cleverly sewn mask of control bide their time and flush with anticipation at the coming glory of release.

There are no actual vacuums in the world of men, no hiding places that play out their enveloping protection from the tidal wave of truth. And it is almost a little comical to think about the way with which one goes about preening, on full display, shaking shiny treasures before the menagerie in hopes of padding nests with fragrant emulsifiers, with the perfumes of ultimately imaginary security. It is a sophomoric thing of beauty to imagine the invariable outcome of this particular brand of arrogance, because in the end the fall from the great Babylonian ziggurat so carefully constructed stone by stone will be that much farther down and that much harder.

Fortunately for you, however, there is pity out there for you. There are minions of salvation that soil every corner with the pointless optimism of a lapdog when you first get home from work. There are those souls who have made pacts of their own with the powers of observation and have declared a truce with reality. These are the ones to whom you will undoubtedly run when suddenly you lose your footing on a once familiar path.

To think of the way in which some utilize the trappings of environment in order to impose a rotten and most foul template of diseased stench is enough to nearly convince me that bags will be packed and miles shed all in order to deliver a very personal message at the ends of arms driven by rage.

The prophesied condemnations of historical ignorance will roost, and roost, and roost again in the ragged temple of your own design. This is the payoff that fulfills its promise almost in spite of the Herculean efforts you have undertaken in order to reshape that that makes a jester out of you in a kingdom of fools. You have worn the garish plumage plucked from the birds in the garden as a talisman against the encroaching pain of self-realization. But the thing that you insist on walking around, the one thing that will be the very downfall of your folly is a simple and truly unavoidable fact.

You are simple, and you are weak.

There is nothing to do in order to put off the truth of the above statement. Not a fucking thing.

There has never been an ounce of give in that mule that shadows your every move. That foul, withered beast has stubbornly refused to allow anyone to sit at the table, and now, with coffee being served, not a single soul will pour the cream.

Carriers have burned the midnight oil just to insure the arrival of the mail. Synapses have sizzled away in the chaotic haze of newly grafted skin. Your weight has ballooned to a critical mass, and you are throwing it around like a ravenous bear. You have taken the pinpoint of true experience, turned it on its head, defiled its purpose and led it through the streets, genitals shaved and exposed, while the townspeople gather from their huts and point and laugh and throw stones as you pass.

You can say you weren’t warned, because it’s true, you weren’t, but having to be told of your sepulchral stench when it has to be obvious to you as much as the rest of us that you are burning the air with ugliness begs the image of unfettered ego.

Enjoy the spoils of meaningless existence. You’ve earned them.

Motherfucker.

Safe Harbor

2008-04-20T08:26:00.000-05:00

There is so much I've forgotten, but there is also so much that I remember.

Those days in which the future came to me with bossy demands, stock still, tapping its toes and waiting for an answer.

Milestones.

These days they come cheap. Crack a door and they come rushing in. Peer into a closet and find the damn thing loaded to the hilt with them. Stand on a street corner and simply hold out your hand and watch as it fills repeatedly, and without respite, with them.

Oh what I wouldn't give for a few less, for the solace of anonymity.

But we are our lot, and mine is to hang each day on the hook of axiomatic flux, and quite frankly, I am growing tired.

I have always been better suited for the kiddie pool. The shallowness of its layout the perfect foil to my deliberate wallowing gait. But for some damn reason, I always find myself gasping for air in the deep end, being pulled by some unknown force into the darkest murk. And I gotta tell ya', that is no damn good.

If only my mother could see me now. If only I could see me now with my unprepared auditions and my sprint through china shops, eyes tethered with a blindfold. Were it not so damn harsh, I might find humor in it.

It's amazing the capacity to endure when all signs point to emptiness, when every single place you look you see the returning gaze of apathetic disinterest, and you know that all fights are fought without a safety net and without fans cheering in the corner.

You could allow the flock to come sit at the table and read them bedtime stories for all the good it would do you. You've got piles of pigment rich soil at your feet and no medium with which to use them. You've got tender words of fragile and delicate beauty with which to bolster your window display so the neighbors will gasp in delight at the illusory celebrations that appear before their eyes. You've got a box full of left foot shoes with no matches. You've got an opaque disposition that leaves a wake of confusion. You've got a tongue that serves no constructive purpose unless one were to include obfuscation and the handing out of bad directions.

I take the coterie for a walk every morning, dutifully, regardless of how hard it is to unify this motley bunch. The badger, insistent, unwilling to follow the course, the wolverine, headstrong, picking fights with whoever comes too close, the geese with their regal air and their continuous need to walk in front, the bull, throwing its weight around, smug in its arrogance, and the vultures, always lagging behind, snickering in their gullets, always waiting for something and making everyone nervous. What a fucking laugh it must be to see me from your breakfast nook, where you sit in judgment. coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other. Your grandpa slipper hanging off your toe in that painfully insipid way.

If only I could cash in that ticket I've been saving. If only you would come and take me away, and really take me away, away from it all, away from all of it, every single last little bit of this all-consuming morass, and off into a future that envelopes me in the arms of peace and breathes a soft honey scent over my face, where all the world is in harmony and all this lumbering, all this one-sided crippled stumbling is no more a thing of the past than a thing of the future (which is to say that it never was).

I have foraged into this environment in search of the new terrain, and always I arrive after the place has been defiled, after the bands of ravaging madmen have had their way with the place, and all that is left is smoldering ash and piles of garbage. How I long to banish them from the temple and allow the underbrush to regrow, the wildlife to return, the plaintive hum of the insects to sing their way back into the fabric of this place. How much would I tear down if I knew that behind the final curtain was a scene of beauty so stark and so complete that to see it was to be a part of it forever.

Back here, at the tollbooth, however, my pockets are nearing empty and it is only a matter of time before the toll man demands payment and I have nothing left to give.

Who are these hooded weavers who sit along the pathway with their looms and their hideous, oily, and blackened thread, and wait for us to pass? Who are these beasts that grope in the dark, eyes sealed over with thick flaps of flesh, gangly limbs waving about in the air in hopes of grabbing any part of us along the way? What is it about the stretch of time and distance that invites these creatures of less than stellar intent, to sit along the path and weave their enraged, diseased tapestry of death into the fabric of our course? How could anyone make the trip with this chatter of blunted teeth and clicking of sewing needles, made of bone, and the faint luminosity of their eyes, beneath their drawn hoods, peering out, ravenous and eternally patient?

It is enough to cover the path with soot, to cloud the air with venom and scorn. They will have it this way forever, and it grows like a cancer.

No one is anything until someone else points it out. What is your finger saying about me?

In June I am to be forty years old, so maybe I am beginning to see both sides with a little clarity. For those who are unfamiliar, I am practicing my math in the most open of forums. I have divorced myself from the past and have done so with relatively severe consequences. For all that I have given, and I have given a lot, I am also masterfully adept at taking away. Always have been. And in the realm of futility, I am like the aged seer, doling out shards of wisdom to all who come before me.

As you read this, know that I am someone who has very personal needs. I can take the truth out for a while, give it some air, but I am always holding on to things, keeping them close to my chest, and never letting them out of my sight. For all the senseless blather that I can muster (and let this blog be a testament to that), also know that what passes for quiet, and what passes for whatever the fuck it is you care to attribute to me with your judgments and your critical fucking opinions from the depths of your flaccid imaginations, that I am not foolish and I am not thoughtless and I do not make decisions lightly and what fucking difference is it to you anyway?

I have enough to shoulder without the weight of your opinion hanging around my neck.

I have strayed.

May I return.

I hope that the stinger is embedded and that the birds of prey have removed their brothers from the scene to pick at the corpse that invariably will lie beneath them. I hope that as you sit in the silence of your self-made late night haze that you wonder, to the point of agony, what it is that you could have done to turn the tides and to rewrite the headlines.

I just hope that you sweat it, and that it eats you alive from the inside out.

Yeah.

Impossible Angles and Improbable Angels

2008-04-16T20:18:00.000-05:00

Here I am again. Here I am, returned from the respite of being, or is it to the respite of telling? No matter, really. I am here, once again, and I have with me a story that is picking at corners and sniffing cracks in hopes of fresh air. I am an unquestionable lout when charged with the role of protector, selfishly spilling the word like a drunk sailor on leave, and equally selfish in my need to guard, to deny, to confuse, and to deceive.

Perhaps it is with a peeling back of dramatic insulation that I open the lid and allow the story to extract itself from its box, but if the truth must be told, the story is told all on its own and the reader writes his own chapters for only himself to read. I can admit that. It's no bother.

He'd had a bit of a trial with the onslaught of insight that has barged in to the party and thrown its weight around with arrogance and scorn. He'd written a history of the world told through the eyes of acidic fear and caustic clarity.

Arriving on the wings of record, perhaps without purpose, almost certainly without purpose, this undercurrent of revelation has brought demons to the halls of calm and loosed them upon all which comes before them.

Things being as they are, and not as they were, it is perhaps better that the lights stay on than to forge ahead in total darkness convinced that the map is the territory and the territory has remained static. In this sort of environment it is only a matter of time before one finds oneself stuck in a hole too deep for escape, doomed to a fate much less than noble.

These heralds have carefully crafted ships that sail to the future, plagued cargo in tow, all with the ability to cripple and maim without any actual conscious effort. They come to work their magic on the unsuspecting with a professionalism that leaves wonder in its wake.

He stumbled over the rough terrain, fought to regain a balance, to regain footing on the grossly uneven surface, fell many times and then finally, eventually was able to call a truce with truth and begin moving forward again.

Nonetheless, he still has visits and he still surrenders in his obligation to entertain the guests, though he is always very careful to be a good host and not to make these guests uncomfortable, it must be obvious that he is counting the seconds until they leave, and leave him be.

I find myself wondering how things would differ if the perspective was to shift suddenly. How would things appear if the sun were to suddenly decide to rise in the west and make its way east across the sky?

Is it obvious that the seal has been tampered with?

Have the ravaged companions of lunacy bought seats on the floor, sat down with their snacks and trophy wives and hogged all the attention from the game itself?

The claims of ignorance, of being led astray in the throes of the calendar, are making the panel weary. There had been much debate among those gathered as to whether or not the hearing should be called on account of a well documented case of falsified evidence. "Not in my courtroom," mewls the judge, tired of being made a fool at his own party. "No one will tell me how to run my courtroom."

So the nurses have all come round, and tucked the little babies into their beds, prepping for another day in the yard, another day of discovery and adventure. But these mouths have to be fed and the pantry is running bare. The deliveryman has fallen ill and the weather is turning foul. The crows have gathered on the eaves and caw with anxious glee. So it is without pity that fate shall visit these confines and wreak havoc on those gathered. It is with malice that the mouths will starve and atrophy in their tomb and the pipes will freeze and the birds will have their day and the world will return after the thaw and recoil in terror as the dogs of brute idiocy will be fed with innocence once again.

No one will ever regret the toll taken on the weakest of the weak. Justice will have ushered itself into the mythology with a certain poetic swagger and the foolish will step in ever widening paths through the cobbled streets.

Never think for a moment that your lot is one of sound footing. Never believe that the wages of your sin could ever pave the way into the kingdom. To do this is to surrender to the throes of folly, which, despite all your gaudy parading, will actually happen, and will do so without the auspicious guise of smug satisfaction, but with the naked, bloated, wretched, and most corpulent mass of reality.

Back to it then, little man, and don't forget how alone you really are. Because all you ever really are is alone. But don't feel bad, because in that, you're in great company.

Backflow and Expanse

2008-02-16T10:52:00.000-06:00

What's new with Captain Intermittent, you ask? Well, here's the lowdown. Since my last post, which I happened to accidentally post on the other blog I write for (the Nonalignment Pact), I have been very busy. Some of the highlights have included the arrival of a natural gas bill that was about fourteen times the highest bill I would normally receive in the course of a year. I almost never run my heater in the winter here in Texas since Houston really has no winter to speak of. Therefore, my highest gas bill in this town, in this apartment, is about twenty bucks. The bill that arrived the other day? Two hundred and ninety one dollars. I'm sorry, that's wrong. I meant to say two hundred and ninety one motherfucking dollars. Well, I had smelled gas outside for the last few days before the bill arrived, so without wasting time, I called the gas company and reported the smell (or the additive in the gas to give it a smell).

In retrospect, this was perhaps not the best move on my part. The dickbag assface fuckhole cockpony ballsniffing shithorse that showed up to find the leak, who incidentally looked like Freddy Fender, was one of those emotionless imbeciles who refuses to answer any questions, never listens to sensible direction, and then fucks you up the ass before leaving and taking your dignity with him. Translation: He red-tagged my wall heater for leaking around the valve core, and shut down my gas until my landlord calls in a liscenced plumber to fix that problem, hopefully find the actual leak (because the wall heater never smells like gas, and especially not like two hundred and forty five cubic feet of gas in a month's time), and fix the leak. Then, the plumber has to call in a city insepctor, said insepctor must check out the joint and sign off on the repairs, make sure it's all up to code, and then the inspector calls the gas company and they come out and hook up my gas again. The whole thing, if it goes right, takes several days. That's several days without gas, which means very cold showers and no cooking. Great.

And the best part is that no one wants to take responsibility for my exorbitant gas bill. The gas company says it's my responsibility sight unseen, case closed, no further discourse needed. My landlord has not been quick to jump up and let me know that it is his responsibilty since it's his apartment and his leaky pipes that caused this in the first place.

So it's the weekend, and inspectors don't come out on the weekend. And even when he does come out, the plumber has given me no indication of where the leak came from in the first place. That means that even if the inspector gives the greenlight, there is a good chance that when the gas company comes out I will still be reaping the fruits of the mysterious leak no one seems able to find.

Someone is going to pay this bill and it won't be me. I have told my landlord I want out of my lease for reasons other than this fiasco, and since he unceremoniously was uninterested in my pleas, if this gas nightmare doesn't pan out in my favor, I will have a legal reason to bail on this fuck.

What else is new? I feel like a rubber ball, in my personal life that is. I feel like a superball. Rememeber those, the ones so bouncy all it took was one throw and you never saw the thing ever again? I feel like that. My life has changed rather dramatically in the last four or five months. Yet, with all the upheaval I am still the victim of all my issues. I am still at the mercy of my innumerable idiosycracies, shortcomings, and neurotic tendencies. Not that this comes to me as any sort of surprise. I am more than well versed in the ways of my weakness. I am the master of knowing that which leaves me less than whole.

This post has begun in the straightest of narrative formatting. I am relatively comfortable utilizing this voice in order to literally convey certain sorts of information. In effect, this means that whenver I am simply venting an annoyance without interest in protecting anyone or keeping a certain level of opacity, I will do so as directly as I can. It doesn't make for exciting reading but it does get the job done. But what if I were to degenerate this post in the course of writing it by simply beginning to disassemble the immediacy of the style in order to make way for something mre florid, something that interests me much more, and also affords me the opportunity to express myself more easily, more comfortably, and more openly?

There is that day, that once annual day, and it signifies certain things that are obscured through the lens of ignorance that is fit over the frames of the entire world. The day never seems to work out right, maybe due to the weight placed on its already fragile shoulders, maybe due to the ambivalence I happen to feel over its importance, and its origin. The latter is the most likely culprit. Nonetheless, on this day, this year, much has been at stake. There is a currency that is at work here, and its value is up for grabs. It is valued by its use and by the context in which it is employed. Nothing truly new there, age old problem, but it is always new at certain points in life, and this point is axiomatic in importance.

There is a certain level of flux under which I have been forced to operate, and I am not sure how I feel about it. Sometimes the world will do several revolutions and I will feel like I hopped up and allowed the whole damn thing to turn while I hovered above and looked down in increasing bouts of discomfort and apathy. With each turn of the globe lives change down below while up in my cocoon it is always in stasis. By the time I decide to return back to earth I am faced with a sort of dilemma. Now I must figure out how to rectify myself with all that has come in my absence. Thus, a conundrum is created by the situation. If I stay engaged and reactive for too long, I run the risk of falling apart, of being spread so thin that I begin to lose form and am virtually worthless. However, if I make the choice to leave this world, to leap into the firmament and take flight, then there is the risk that I will become almost incapable of having the will to return, and with each passing day, the world becomes less and less appealing to me. I used to think there was a balance in there somewhere. Now, I know better.

There is no balance. There is only tension and release. A whole lot of tension, and only a precious little release. That's just the way it goes, I guess.

And then there is the aesthetics of being, of just being, and then of being in my life. There is that in which I find beauty. And this tenet of being has been redefined for me in ways I could never have previously imagined. I have been handed the keys to the castle, but I have never been given the map. So I stumble through the growth, bushfighting, battling to find the way, all the way knowing that there are great riches that await my arrival were I actually able to arrive before being overtaken by confusion and digressive backflow.

It is amazing the ways in which I have inherited this intense ablity to take the force of life and to wrangle it into a submissive posture, its belly exposed while I am the one being vulnerable. I don't know how that works, only that it does, and only that I have inherited this trait from my deceased mother. She was the one with the strength, she was the one with the humanity, the workable humanity, the qualities that gave me dignity. My father, still living, strong in his own right, a great inposing wall of impenetrable silence, an infulence all his own. This man is distant and vague and self supportive to a flaw. I have inherited his rage and his confusion and his awkwardness, and little of his self-sufficiency, little of his inner fortitude. Of my mother, I have inherited her humor, her intelligence, her insight, and her vision. I have also inherited her fears, her fragility, her unconventional instability, her virtually inpossible lack of usable drive and motivated direction. We are virtually inseperable in our inability to take this life and make it work for us. We have both kept to the road of exclusion, both have enjoyed the place of the outsider looking through the windows at those who were welcomed, gilded invites in hand, enjoying the fire, and the warmth, and the security of the indoors. Our vantage point is in the blue light of the moon, with the crisp air against our flesh, tattered in our lack of compromise, insulated in our thick cover of emotional distance.

And I am now alone in that expanse.

I am left to leave the window, alone, and head for the seductive path into the woods. I am alone to follow that path into the darkened growth, flashlight in hand, hearing the insects bleat through the air, hearing the brush crackle underfoot, a rustle in a nearby patch, a bird overhead, voices in the home on the edge of this wood. I am left to curl at the foot of a behemoth and let the mossy root be my only protection against the rage of the coming storm.

I am on the top step, I am looking down at the gentle edge of the great lake. The water is pitch black, it is night. The sky is so clear, the moon is so full, the landscape is tinted a deep rich blue. The wind is picking up, the leaves are drawn across the hill leading down to the water, and my coat's tail is whipping against my legs. I make my way down the stairs, careful not to fall, the steps so close together and so steep. As I clear the brush and enter the open beach the wind slaps my face indiscriminately. There are visible stars, so vast in number, painted across the sky in an impossibly balanced array, and it is almost impossible not to be drawn into their alluring fray. There is the boat, the small skiff right before me on the shore. Funny, I didn't notice it before. I step into the boat and sit. I close my eyes and listen to the lapping of the gentle waves against the sides of the boat. I see the tails of the lampreys attached to the boat, swaying in the current. I sense their hunger, their desire to latch on to my flesh and nourish themselves on my lifeblood. I look back up the stairs and see the dog. She is at the top stair, where I just was myself, wagging her tail dutifully, awaiting direction. I gesture her towards me. She takes one quick look back at the house, at the orange glow from the windows. She takes one quick glance back up at the house with the rooms full of revellers, party in full swing, a world away, and then she descends the steps and enters the boat.

I push away from the edge of the water, and as we drift out into the lake, I take one last look back at the house on the top of the stairs, and then look back to the open arms of the great bottomless lake, and allow the lampreys to guide us to the place we must go, never to return.

Welcome Wacom

2008-01-25T03:10:00.000-06:00

This picture and accompanying post are all being brought to you courtesy of the Wacom Bamboo tablet used in conjunction with Corel Painter Essentials. For those unfamiliar, Know that it fucking rules. It means that the whole shooting match was done in a digital tablet format. l will paint/draw/do flyers, if anyone wants to consider a future comission. Whatever your wallet is ready to part with.

Now, go to bed you ingrates, it's fucking late.

Cartography

2008-01-20T21:17:00.000-06:00

Words
Words
Words

Still failing me
Still at a loss for the right ones
Have I learned them?
They must be in there somewhere
Somewhere in that convoluted shithole of my brain
Someplace stored away
The right words
The ones that aptly describe terror
That aptly espouse the truth they contain
But I can't find them
Not without trouble
Not without stumbling
Not without consequence

So I wither
And I build
Build
Build
Walls
Walls made of rubies
Opaque
Deliriously gorgeous
Flawed
But without match

This is a public forum
We all need something
I need this
I do
I need to pin the shirts to the line
Drag them into the breeze
Let the wind do its thing
And pull them back again

Sometimes beauty does this funny little trick
Sometimes beauty comes over but brings its cousin
And it's the cousin that no one likes around
The cousin causes you to begrudge beauty
The cousin talks your ear off the whole night when your attention lies elsewhere
The cousin is a tornado

Beauty's cousin love to dispense with the familial advice
You are no match for this
No one is
And the advice is always taken
No matter the cost

Here's a line
here's another

Stories like to play dress up
They enjoy the masquerade
Guilded cloaks
Ornate masks
The province of myth
And we are tourists to the plot

So there are elements
And there are facets
There are paths
And there are signs pointing in various directions
One must know how to read a map
One must be a fucking cartographer
One must be familiar with survival tactics
Because in the wild
All is fair
And everything is hungry
And you are dinner

Pink bunny
A cymbal
A symbol
Still going
Still going
Still going

And here I am
Everywhere and nowhere
Maybe nearer to the light
Maybe as lost as ever
Wouldn't the keeper rejoice
Wouldn't his flock give pause as he jumps for joy
Lands in piles of shit
That no one could ever keep up with

Stop Laughing

2008-01-20T03:35:00.000-06:00

The Turnip Truck

2008-01-17T23:05:00.000-06:00

what was there
a mote
something intangible
an open hand
a fucking freight train

what flew in
a span
an awesome reach
and dropped its workings on the world

like a seer
like a soothsayer
wind in its wake
damage in its half life

how does the night
this night
get the latest

how do the walkers know the way
where will they end up tonight

when will the pages run out
the story reach an ending
perhaps without glory
perhaps in a quiet room
on an empty bed
with weathered skin
and empty hands

and who will stand in the gardens
reap the fruits
of someone elses labor
and tear a hole in the earth
to jump right in
and share it all
to any who will listen

these things come to me
and then pass
only to come again

on this night

Hey Look, It's Wednesday

2008-01-16T22:39:00.001-06:00

Up there somewhere is our bloated Texas moon, hanging in the firmament, abiding, dormant. The skies are overcast, clouded with rain, the eternal rains that pass this way throughout the year. And we can rejoice in the coming cold, the Texas cold that will rush through, one drunken bout face down and you'll miss it. But for one fleeting night it will be here.

Me, I am a head full of these very same clouds. The saturated grey swells within my mind and threatens downpours. The weight, the weight, the weight.

the barren congestive declarations
a halo, an ivory halo, framing a window
the empty hole, the hollow
the percussive impact of unspoken agonies
the reptilian avatars
miles of wire
the unyielding maw, never sated, always hungry
always hungry
always hungry

I am standing here
standing in the harsh light
invisible but no less present
hands on the ribbon
hands on the gold
smiling into a void
reveling in the downfall
swelling to absorb the agonies
revealing nothing more than the plot

caught in the woods
paths that end
dead
dead ends
and everywhere is new lines
new ways
news
agonies
Mr. Parker's agonies
unbearable solitude
colonial upstarts seeding lands for blind hoards
clutching lists of empty hopes
and this one stands among them
and this one takes tender steps
missteps
but steps none the less
and that one trembles
and that one reflects
reacts
and this one builds a home in the invisible territories
and this one fills voids with more nothingness
and that one tends the dying gardens
and leaves a trail of crumbs into the grey
this one has but to follow
unless the trail runs out

The End Of Dialogue

2008-01-15T19:14:00.000-06:00

This is the end result of the Open Dialogues post a few days back. I am pretty happy with it now. Eventually I intend to get this sort of thing on a much larger scale. As in many feet by many feet. In my mind, it is really the only way this sort of thing can truly thrive. I wish a pox upon the man upstairs, and a horrible bout of cod worms. Pass the salt.

Three Cheers For Overtly Anal Douchebags!

2008-01-12T23:31:00.001-06:00

I don't think I am done with this one. I kind of like it though, so I may not touch it on the exceedingly reasonable chance that I will be arrested for raping my own art.

I can't shake the feeling that this stuff is far too decorative for its own good. There's no life in it. It has absolutely nothing of value to say. My art is Paris Hilton.

Although, maybe you'll get a blow job out of it.

Hey, I never said there weren't perks.

Come to think of it, that's not really a perk, now, is it?

Open Dialogues

2008-01-12T23:15:00.000-06:00

This was what I originally came up with. It just didn't do it for me.

So, I went ahead and totally assfucked my own work, and came up with this.

Now I don't know what the fuck I think. And, to top it all off, I have run out of steam. Great.

My fucking life.

Open dialogues.

I will paint for money. Request something.

This Weekend

2008-01-07T18:50:00.000-06:00

It was a long weekend. I won't lie. And the length was entirely my doing. Why you ask? Because I am a total shitbag, fucking no account. Why? Because I've lost the plot. Because I have spent decades perfecting this tightrope blend of idiocy and damage. Decades. Beyond that, I know that if there is one thing of which I can be certain, it's that the old Jonestown adage - the little chestnut from the electric Kool-Aid meltdown, the one that equates ignorant disregard for historical missteps with the condemnation of repitition - well, I know that despite the creepy factor in that tale, that there is more than an element of unironic truth in it. And I am living proof.

Fortunately, however, I am the luckiest man in the world, because I have been handed a ticket to sit at the table of the glorious host, and I won't give it back no matter how heavy it may be to carry the thing about, no matter how much I stink up the gorgeous chambers, basking in the glow of her majesty's genius.

So, what is the purpose of life? Well, the purpose of my life is the quest for beauty, for unyielding and pure untouchable beauty, and I have been honored to be able to walk right up and sample its immaculate glow. The moment may be a fragment, no one makes that call without an outside opinion, but the effects are eternal.

I have been welcomed into the fold, and nothing, no histrionic squatters, no recurring abcessed madness, no traditionally unhinged baggage will even have a shred of a chance at diverting the course of this carriage. The mission is just too valuable. So, just make way, motherfuckers. You're just noise, and nothing more.

These are for you. A pair of microscopic, subatomic particles of hopeful beauty for the universally, cosmically and undeniably beautiful. And there is so much more to come.

You'll see.

Keep them open. It's worth it. I promise.

All of it. All of me.

Always...

YeeHaw, Ya' Big Sailor

2008-01-06T14:28:00.000-06:00

There's a man upstairs. I think he's a gay cowboy. I saw him arrive, Christmas day, gay cowboy friend in tow, twelve of Busch in tow, and head for the upper reaches of his apartment. He was wearing cowboy getup. Boots. Vest. Tight-assed Wranglers. The whole nine. Cowboy. Handlebar moustache. Gay.

I'm not pointing fingers. I'm not suggesting we gather a posse and run him out of town.

Well, okay, I am, but not because he may be gay.

I want to run this rat fucking bastard out of town because I have never in my life had a neighbor that is as bizarrely loud as this ass puppet.

The first night I slept in this place, as I laid my tender little noggin down to sleep, I am immediately roused by the oddest racket. Coming from directly above me, it sounds as though a herd of bison have taken roost up there and are on the march for more fertile grazing territory.

What the fuck, I wonder as I am in equal parts shocked and amazed and the ability of one man - is it one man, or is it a couple - to be so insanely loud just by walking across the floor.

Seriously, it sounds like Tony Stark is up there and has finally finished his Iron Man suit which he has promptly donned so that he can try the fucker out.

This guy, he must have no feet, he must have lost his feet in a terrible gay rodeo mishap, because he FUCKING STOMPS across the floor sounding as if he is wearing cement prostehtics. I mean STOMPS! The thing that's weird about it, si that when he stomps, he stomps with what to him is a slight level of control with one foot, but with the other, he sounds like he is dragging a huge chain with him. So the effect sounds something like this: STOMP, CHHHHHH, STOMP, CHHHHHH... ad infinitum. It's unsettling.

What is the dilly? I know this is an apartment building, I get that. I am sensitive to the plight of the apartment dweller. And I also get that the floors in this place are pretty thin. But, the thing is, even if this dude wore feathered slippers and slipped across the floor, all lithe like some moustachioed swan, I would probably still hear him. That's fine. What I am talking about here, is a grown ass man, getting up to piss at four AM, and literally stomping his way to the toilet.

JESUS.

But it gets better. Oh dear children, it fucking gets better.

This shithound also gets up every morning at, wait for it, 5 AM! Oh joy! 5 O'clock in the bitch fucking AM! Every day, too. Every single day. Thanksgiving? 5 AM. Christmas? 5 AM. New Years Day? I'm gonna kill this fucker if it's the last thing I do. You know, before I kill myself.

But hold on, huddled masses, 'cause there's more.

He also has a few other idiosycracies I'd like to share with you if you don't mind.

He clears his throat constantly. As in, all day. Why? Who knows. But he doesn't just do a little "ahem...," oh no, this cunt lets loose with one of those trying to get someone's attention throat clearers. One of those ones where you are trying to deliberately be as obnoxious as you possibly can. Seriously. And he does it all day.

And, he sings occasionally too! For no reason. Not in tune, without rhythm, but very audibly. It's as though he has headphones on. Nice.

Oh wait, don't forget the clapping and the snaps.

He is wont to clap, very hard, very slowly, and very loudly, twenty or thirty times, several times throughout the day, and again for no reason whatsoever. He also snaps his fingers the very same way.

I will kill this man. I will. Mark my words. I have it in me. There's a first time for everything. My murder cherry is ripe for the popping. Let's get it on, Gay Cowboy, because you are going down.

April, 1988

2008-01-06T00:22:00.000-06:00

In case you were wondering what I was like 20 fucking years ago. Now you know.

The Glory of Facing the Truth

2008-01-06T00:13:00.000-06:00

I'll be forty this year.

He called me because he missed me. My heart is fragmented. What a rich sorrow.

And what of the birds?

Perhaps you have no idea what I mean. That's probably best.

I've scavenged my past and found keys to the present. I always wondered where I would be the year I turned 40. Had I known...

I will take commissions. If you are the kind of person who likes my sort of thing.

Hefeweizen reminds me of Stranger Than Paradise late at night in the Strehler's compound. Mountains and cigarettes. Crisp air. berries and cream. The girl with the castle walk. Gyros. MDC.

One before the other, son. It works every time...

Fare thee Well...

2007-12-31T02:32:00.000-06:00

Well, it is the dawn of the final day of this the year 2007, and man, what a mindfuck it has been.

Easily in the top one of my all time shitty years list. And that includes last year, when my mother passed away. That fucking blew. It also includes the year my parents divored, as well as the year I developed a years long battle with panic disorder. Mmmmm, that was a fucking vintage, that one.

We love our resolutions, no? I am resolved to once again becoming a habitual drunk this year. I miss the outward expression of hopelessness, and the endless nights of forgotten stupidity and loss. I am also resolved to develop some sort of marginally terrible mental illness. I'm kind of over anxiety, so I'm thinking maybe depression this time. Yeah, the enveloping black arms of depression. Ooh, I can't wait for the endless nights and days of not having the will to get out of bed, the days long crying jags of self pity, the slipping of my personal cleanliness to outrageous levels. I can't wait!

I wonder what gems are in store for 2008? Guess I'll find out soon enough! Shouldn't get too excited in anticipation. It will come when it's ready. From where will it rear its ugly head, this sure to be crushing failure? Tsk, tsk, we'll just have to see, young fellow!

Hey, guess what, if I was to go to bed tonight and never wake up, why that would fine by me. Just fine.

Well, in summation, I would like to drop my pants and wave my pallid white ass in the general direction of the year 2007. And to think, there's still one glorious day left. I can't wait to get run over or worse! Oh the anticipation is killing me.

Wait, is that ironic?

Who cares, fuck you all. Every single one of you!

Happy new year!

Saturday night

2007-12-31T02:20:00.000-06:00

Don't expect too much more of this. I'm sure I'll self destruct soon enough. It's what I do best. Enjoy it while you can, though the fall will be even better. You know?

The first two are acrylics, as is this one, plus sharpies both black and white.

Scum fucks.

An Unmarked Package

2007-12-29T13:36:00.000-06:00

Here sat the table. A small card table, folding legs, vinyl surface, slightly worn. It just showed up in the park.

Winter. Trees without leaves. Crisp, grey skies. Bluster.

Two old men sit at the table. Bundled, insulated, scarved, hatted. Bound against the bitter air.

They sit, facing each other. On the table, a collection of minutiae. A small pile of rocks. A bottle of whiskey. An unmarked package, visibly worn, wrapped in brown paper, bound with twine. And a gun.

In the air their breath fingers out, exploring the cold, tentative and spare. One man takes a pack of cigarettes from his heavy coat. He lights up.

The other man takes a mouthful of the whiskey.

The first, the smoker, speaks.

"When we first met, as children, as neighbors, we met, in this very spot. Our mothers lived in the building which once stood behind us. This building is no more."

The other.

"Yes, I remember. I remember my mother was the seamstress for the building. Her projects piled up around our tiny apartment, garments on hangars throughout. I used to wear these clothes whenever she left to go to the store."

The first.

" As you can see I have brought what I promised."

"I do."

"I will assume that our deal still stands?"

"It does."

The first man smokes down his cigarette. The second takes more of the whiskey. They are so methodical, so deliberate and calculated in their motions, a side effect of aging and of great purpose. A crow lands on the table, and begins pecking almost absentmindedly at the twine.

Both men sit in silence, motionless, as if in a trance, watching the bird. Eventually it flies away.

The wind picks up. the weather is turning. Clouds have gathered. A storm is near.

The second man speaks.

"In our shared dreams, under the cover of night, always we are apart, yet always I have sensed you near. As I was, as you were, as I found myself the world over. Marrakesh, Istanbul, Stuttgart, Nice, you were always by my side. I knew it as well as I knew myself. And I must thank you for that."

The first.

"For years I thought you might forget this promise. I began to wonder if you would come back, if you would honor the words of our youth. As the day approached, I grew apprehensive, even doubted coming at all. You know that I have never left this city, and in fact, I have lived and worked in this very area my entire life. Your postcards came less and less often, but always they remained true. 'I remember' they always said, and so I knew. But still, a lifetime being what it is."

The second.

"I am here as you can see."

First.

"It is time."

The sky begins to break, small drops tap the tabletop.

The first man pushes the package towards the second, takes the rocks, places them in his pocket, and then he closes his eyes.

The second man picks up the gun. He points the gun at the first man, and shoots him between the eyes. The first man slumps forward, blood flows down his face.

The second man places the gun in his coat, picks up the package, and walks away. He turns up his collar.

The sky empties.

My Friday

2007-12-29T00:52:00.000-06:00

Yours

2007-12-28T15:40:00.000-06:00

I sat, calm, prepared, and yet in no way ready. You entered. My life was over from that moment forward. And maybe all the clocks really did stop, not just in our hearts, and maybe each second thereafter is a tribute to all that we have become. Lost as I am in your grace, devoted as I am to your beauty. Prone, naked and bleeding, and offered forth in faith to the allure of our untouchable desire. Moments that will feed me long after they're gone. All of it, yours. All there could ever be.

The Agreements of Twilight

2007-12-25T15:30:00.000-06:00

you could take a heap of stones
and you could stack them high
you could build an unstable tower to celebrate your agony

you could open a door
in a black, black wind
and you could hope for the best

but in the end
you would get what you deserve

you could turn your back on reason
make an enemy of thought
drive away that which you held dear

because that is the substance of your argument
but, good luck when the city sleeps
when the stories hold their sway
when the eyes should grow heavy
and the morning never comes

And in that time
when shoes lie unworn
when light is a mockery
when doubt drapes your shoulders
it is the truth that won't relent

and the stones will return to earth
as they should

A Great Unraveling

2007-12-22T16:08:00.000-06:00

there are eyes pressed at the windows, teeth gnashing staccato rhythms
there are cracks in the pavement, poison grasses sprouting forth
there is a gathering darkness, all will fall
there are too many corners, and this vehicle is unruly

a chapter is ending, though none will finish it
and beneath the amassed, enraged nightmare lives a world on edge

there are days, too many to mention, during which the hills are impossibly graded
there are nights during which colonies of blank stares mill about, hardly a thought among them all
there is a great unraveling, and the fabric is compliant in its own undoing
there are too many thoughts to mention, so I will only give you pieces

and maybe that is all I have
pieces to a puzzle with no solution, and, an inside scoop on the very nature of ugliness

My Curious Heart

2007-12-21T19:47:00.000-06:00

The words continue to fail me. I have asked favors of them, requested their compliance with my most personal wishes, and made demands on their time in ways that seem to have upset the balance between their willingness to assist me in my venture, and their need to take roost in more fertile soil and grow into something with service. I make altars at their feet, offerings to tide their gods, and yet nothing will do.

In some sort of unseen alternate universe, clarity simply is, and comes without purpose, taking us all with it like a wave of calm in a sea of unrest. In this world, in our world, or perhaps just my world, there is a concerted effort to battle that which rages and threatens to demolish all that might dare take position and mount an attack. And to define that which is set on the offensive, one must work within the confines one's own logic.

Me? I have found myself in a place of intense personal turmoil. In order to make a mistress of words, I must find a way to handle the sources of my chaos and turn them to my own use. Unfortunately, doing so would only encourage additional chaos, feeding on its tail and rolling away into the tall grass that lines every passage.

I am in a locked groove of my own making, and this time there is no way to pretend that anything could ever improve without my being the catalyst and agent of such change. But perhaps this is simply a platitude for those who are happy to find no joy in platitudes, a salve for that which festers.

No, no, this holding pattern, this barrier between sanity and madness, this barrier between security and disease, this wall built around this, my most curious heart, will surely crumble under closer scrutiny.

Never before have I been so succeptible to the turning forces of pain. Not even in this life so replete with stories of personal agonies and overly sensitive mileposts has there been a chapter that rivals this one. I could not concoct, were the words to arrive without haste, a tale to rival the heft of this one in which I find myself embroiled now.

And right now, scrutinizing is all in the air. you can smell it on the breeze, the birds whisper my name and hold their wings aloft, the insects hum a song of judgment that chips away at my exterior. And all around me there are infinite varieties of opaque undertow, sweeping my feet away and leaving me gasping for air in the rising tide.

There are days, well, there are days that consume me from within. These are the sorts of days that take great pleasure in kicking me, me lying prone on the cold hard floor. With the passing of time through the uncharted whirlpool, it is becoming readily apparent that these angry days, so full of bitter scorn, have conspired to keep this process from handing over anything bigger than a size too small to measure. This is a time of microscopic victories and epic loss. This is also a time of axiomatic upheaval, ripe, glorious, and eternally present, and also fleeting and temporary to the point of being nonexistent.

This most curious heart. This, my most curious heart. How it has led me behind its whimsy...

How it has confined me within the walls of its labyrinthine horrors.

For this my curious heart, it has grown from a single cell, a single feeble cell into a child.

A child awash in the confusion of being so new.

I was that boy, the boy with the fears that always found room at the inn.

I was the boy with the constant companion of himself, an awareness of self that bordered on agony.

This boy, whose very own curious heart kept fists raised, words aloft, forces at bay through sheer will, and who was always uncomfortable to sit at the table with the unwanted guests. This child with the skills to garner loose change in the cup held aloft. This child with the need to please and to give comfort, but always at the expense of his own. This is the child that now is this man, and yet this man is no longer a child. In fact, though the resemblance may be there in theory, in practice, these days are borne from different stuff entirely. These days, for this child, with this most curious heart...

I have said too much. I always do, always will.

And yet, It bears repeating.

The words continue to fail me.

There is something I want to impress upon you. There is something that eats me like a cancer, something that opens the door to any passersby and offers itself like a Victorian whore with rotting gums and bloodshot eyes. There is ugliness there, right in there. Can't you see it? Lift the corners and have a look. It's there, I am on good terms, and we play when no one else is around. You can't see it? Look again. It's there. And then behind that, deeper still, do you know what you will see?

You will see nothing exactly. You will see exactly nothing. You will be privy to the grandest secret of them all. You will bear witness to the crush of emptiness that fills every crack of this man and tears him limb from limb from time to time. You will pull up a chair and be a guest at the opulent home to nothing at all. You will be charmed by the seductive qualities of the eternal space that screams through every second, that lies at the bottom of every moment, that always exists, leering, calling out, howling like a perpetual silent wind. This is the source of fear. This is the core where there is no core. This is the base from which all must come. And this is an impossible truth in a man, a child, one with a curious heart, and a cross to bear, and with forces to fear, who must answer to the emptiness, and offer it all that there can ever be.

And I am here to tell you, it is never ever enough.

One day none of this will matter. It may not matter much now, but in the end it won't matter a bit. One day, the road will collapse on itself, the story will evaporate into acrid dust, dotting the landscape in foul carnage. No one will notice but all will be affected. And nothing will be sated, because nothing ever is.

And there it is. Dawn. The first rays, encroaching on the night, sending all that is made of hunger, woven in the fabric of desire, rushing for the cover of darkness. I sit upright, maybe for the first time. I stand up, as the man, and I face the sun. But I am burned by its brilliance, and blinded by it intensity. Blinded through eyes clenched tight, but not immune to the unrelenting power of the sun's rays. And so I am forced back down, on the soil that has held me up, to face the atonal and gutteral howls of the emtpy wastes that make me less than whole. And I am entirely at its mercy for now and forever. This is simply the way it must be. Don't be foolish and think you have anything to say about it.

I am not weak, and yet, I am the weakest man there has ever been. I am not afraid, and yet, I am consumed with a fear like no other. Maybe I have been left at the side of the road to fend for myself without any tools to speak of. Maybe the truth is so unspeakable, so unwholesome, and maybe so utterly simple, that I am unable to see it.

Maybe my lot is one of solitary passage, of longing. Maybe my life is a string of unsteady steps, loping, foolishly searching footing in an alien landscape. And maybe I have no business dragging you into this whirlwind of confusion and emptiness. Only time knows the outcome. I am powerless to fight it. So I simply carry on. God damn, I hope I am doing the right thing, because this heart can bear no more sadness. I am no longer capable of facing the explosive energy of failure, and I know how close it always is because I can smell its breath. The hairs on my neck have taken note, and the sweat on my brow confirms it. This time, no matter the outcome, I am taking the way of hope, real hope, and hopefully, I will stave off the toothed jaws of madness at last.

So you see, these words, these words which fail this man, these words which trip up this child, these words which are the accomplice of the unspeakable, they will speak the truth to this, my curious heart. And there is a place for you, beside me, though the lights may dim, and the voice may grow silent from time to time. Despite it all, the place remains, and you have but to sit beside me, close your eyes, and listen...

A Screaming Comes Across the Sky

2007-12-14T11:02:00.000-06:00

Nothing left but a few miles, a few brief hours. The future arrives in steel bundles, cuts a swathe across the heart and the heartland. The hours, the days, the months, this fucking life, laid bare, before itself, hungry and desperate for air, laid out in a deep well, watches the sky for signs of rain, and waits with tongue extended for a single cooling drop. The anatomy of desire with lines not so clearly defined, a system of deliberate digressions and illicit obstruction, all swept aside in a tide of truth. The lights have been turned on, and the darkness parts, no, shrieks and retreats, beaten for this one day. I am as helpless as I have always been, a victim to hands that urge and coax, to hands that sully and press, to hands that violate and disturb.

Maybe it is not my place to stand in the way of the onslaught, perhaps I might be better served to clear the path and add my back to the road of compliant acceptance that is so well defined already. Maybe I too should give myself to the insatiable lust that draws an outline around something so otherwise uncertain. This time, though, things have changed. As I am spitting in the wind, telling the world that never comes of the truths that dot the fringes of these empty words, in between these fragile lines is another single untouchable truth that gives pause to the emptiness that sits ravenous at the edges of my mind, waiting angrily for me to finally return. I am in love, and I have been brought around to arms that have no end, to an embrace that captures me within and without and never lets go. I am the one who has been given gifts of unimaginable beauty, and nothing will ever change that no matter the course. In a brief fleeting moment, time and all its accompanying indifference, and worse, its arrogant destructiveness, has been forced to resign itself to my happiness. The seas have parted for a day and the sound, the deafening roar, the howl that has consumed me for so many years, has finally subsided, if only for a second, but it is in that second that I have been the honored guest at a table set for me, but filled with every person who ever mattered, with every soul that has touched me and made this life one that never loses sight of that which keeps the sun hanging above. All comers are present, all those who ever thought a kind thought, or wished me well, or felt their life was one second better, their world one person stronger for having known me. All of them are there and they are smiling, and I don't have to utter a single word because the world has done so for me.

Under the blanket of this night's sky a new world is born, and in its embrace untold beauty will grow. The effects of this love are limitless, the goals redefined to gather in the past and dissolve it in the ocean. The words will come, renewed, renewed, renewed and invigorated and ready to dispense with the niceties and get on with the work of destroying the boundaries that separate men from their hearts and children from their fears. The ball is rolling and nothing can stop its course. One has only to decide to be supine or to escape. There is no other option.

I want you here with me, whoever you might be, mother, grandfathers, grandmothers, friends, believers, supporters, my beautiful children, and help me push with all we have, because no good will come of anything less, and nothing will ever stand in the way of this awe and this power and this beauty, ever again. For all those who have seen life in a better way with me, who have given their love in whatever form to me, know that I am smiling, and that I am ready to smile yet again, and know, too, that on this day, on this very day, this very moment, I am stepping into a clarity of vision which blinds most others, I am dipping my toes in a pool of boundless depth and enveloping warmth, and I am walking towards a beauty that has embodied the desire that has laid at the bottom of my heart like the remains of some long forgotten animal, decaying into the earth. And I am sharing this because it must be known, and its light will be seen for a lifetime, and all that lies before will be illuminated and washed clean. In this lies truth and in this is the expression of all that there could be, and it is through this that walls will crumble and be rebuilt into chapels that honor and illuminate and give life to all who enter its doors. A fearless love that consumes and nourishes and feeds and remains, after all, and for all time.

I love you.

The Trajectory of Myopia

2007-06-17T23:58:00.000-05:00

My posts in here as of late have become less regular than Wilford Brimley, and for that I am somewhat apologetic. I could blame it on the birth of my second child, and really, few could criticize me for this, but it has just as much to do with my being a lazy and insular bastard as anything else.

I’ve got a chip on my shoulder that has so much heft it’s a fucking miracle I can carry the bitch around. I don’t really attribute it to any particular hardships that I’ve had to endure. I mean, I’ve had my share, but I think I just have been cursed with the type of mind that is able to flesh out and fully define that which is ugly about you, about me, and about the ugly fucking world that we share.

I’ve spent the bulk of my life in one form of hiding or another, so establishing a presence via my writing and then vanishing for an undetermined length of time is no big surprise when you get down to it.

It’s funny what people value in their lives. I took some time out today to peruse the “next blog” feature in Blogger, and I’m here to tell you, people are so fucked up. Every stupid idea imaginable is represented through the world of blogs. And the whole deal makes me think of an idea I’ve pondered about films, which I think is applicable here. Whenever I watch a terrible film, which is to say, whenever I watch a film that is so bad it causes me pain, I always end up pondering the following.

It completely baffles me to imagine how outrageously horrible films are made. I mean, think about it. We’re talking about a process here. In my fevered mind, I think it goes something like the following:

Some guy named Brad, who moved to L.A. five years ago, and is tired of mopping jizz off the floors of the 24 Hour Wankstand, decides that he wants to bite the bullet and make that movie he’s dreamt of making since he was just a wee date rapist back in Bumsniff, Montana, or wherever it was he was spawned. His big idea? Something about aging porn star Marilyn Chambers who plays an aging porn star named Marilyn who also happens to run a whorehouse. Brad’s idea is to take this highly imaginative concept and develop it into a soft-porn masterpiece featuring loin-cooling scenes of badly simulated sex interspersed with chunks of dialogue so poor one could easily accept that it was written with a computer program that randomly generates lines. Naturally Brad has spent years working on the script, software free. Since Brad spends an inordinate amount of time in strip clubs, he just happens to make the acquaintance of a guy named Diego who, when he isn’t dealing coke, makes his living producing small-budget films for HBO. Against what any sane person might consider the odds, Diego likes the idea. He gets Brad to get Marilyn to agree to blow Diego on the front seat of his Maserati the next night, and we are off to the pictures! What follows is the production of a total and utter waste of time, money, and energy. But this is the part that simply blows me away. These people actually go through with it. The cast is hired; the crew is brought over from Diego’s production company. The digi-cams are charged up, and the sets are paid for. Real people with real aspirations and real dreams spend real time making this real piece of shit. It clearly has no redeeming value whatsoever, but yet it sees its way through to release. It’s a direct-to-cable picture, but HBO is on it, and if you are so sexually frustrated and unimaginative that this sort of thing turns you on, then there you will be at four in the morning spanking it to this abomination. And the worst part of all this tomfoolery is that the world not only tolerates this, it encourages, if not nurtures it.

So in a roundabout way, this is the way the blogosphere, and by extension reality, takes place. Armies of mindless retards with nothing to say of any value to anyone else are out there letting you know just how much they love Chester Donnington of Linkin Park, or waxing philosophical about the newest Chrysler, or spamming the world over with pictures of Debra Winger’s pubes from 1812, or whatever useless pandering nonsense you can imagine. And we, the silent consumers, are complicit.

I realize that we all see the world the way that works best for us. If you were to spend the rest of your life in a prison, you might learn to appreciate the little things. In this situation, micro becomes macro, and macro ceases to exist. The big picture is even hazier than it is for those on the outside. If you never had two cents to rub together, a little is a whole lot. I can appreciate this concept. My mother had very little to give my brother and I, and we did fine with what we had. Sure, I am a completely fucked-up individual, I admit that, but I firmly believe that without someone as amazing as my mother in my life I would either be dead, in jail, or god knows what.

So taking all of that into account, I still burn with the fact that the world, and in particular, my world, is populated so heavily with total fucking morons. They’re fucking everywhere you turn. Open a door, and boom… moron! Turn around… moron! Answer the phone… you guessed it you moron. It’s like a plague, until you start to think that maybe the moron is you. I’m the one who struggles daily with my discomfort with the world. I am in a perpetual state of existential discomfort. I am virtually defined by my inability to feel comfortable in a world in which those who feel the rest of us owe them a huge debt walk with their heads hung high.

I’ve spent my lifetime refining and perfecting my ability to blend in and not make too many waves. It’s like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If I fuck around too much, I may be spotted and then it’s all over for me. If I speak my true mind I’d be living under some bridge, fighting guys with no teeth for the gristle pulled from a restaurant dumpster. I don’t need that kind of attention.

I’ve never had the fortitude to do what I need to do to thrive in this world. I’ve just never had it in me. I don’t know if it’s genetic or if it’s something I picked up along the way. I do know, however, that it blows ass. So maybe I’ve been looking at it all wrong. Maybe thinking, and feeling real feelings, and being sensitive to the ways in which humanity works, is all horseshit. Maybe tying one poorly executed event to the next and making a life of it isn’t a symptom of a person with depth and true value. Maybe all of the traits that I have assumed to place so high in my scheme of things are nothing more than a heap of shit. Maybe in my never ending quest to find meaning in what is clearly to me an unenviable cloud of confusing stupidity and reptilian carnal urges expressed through self-serving acts of myopic carelessness, I have discovered the worst secret of them all…

I am the moron.

Goodnight.

Sometimes

2007-04-07T02:24:00.000-05:00

It's two o'clock in the morning. In a year I'll be just about forty. My son is asleep, as is my wife. In her belly grows our daughter, who by anyone's standards should be here any day now. I am listening to Earth's Crooked Axis For String Quartet which is perfect for this hour. In Texas, my home, it almost never gets as cold as it will get tomorrow night this far into spring. Up north this is considered a curse. Down here it's a fucking blessing.

Somewhere, closer than I wish, a small dog is wearing out its lungs at some ignorant asshole's door. It sounds like a pipe being struck in a consistent rhythm with a stick. My refrigerator, the new, offensively expensive one, is doleing out its cooling gasses in a digestive belch that lends itself to thoughts of disorder.

I've been called negative. I can be. I have been called an asshole. I most assuredly am quite often. But you can't fairly categorize me as a negative asshole. You know, try though you might.

When I was real young, as in too young to get who I am now, but not too young to try, I wondered where I would be around this phase in my life.

In this phase I still see the vultures. I still hear the dull roar. I still am waiting for an answer, but I am beginning to accept that there probably isn't one. And I'm beginning to accept that that's okay.

That's probably not growing up, but it's a definite sign of a trailing history.

So what makes me smile? What doesn't, really.

Too cheap?

Okay, I smile when I see a child make eye contact with me and I remember being on that end of those sorts of exchanges. Torch passed. Yes kid, I know what you're thinking. You are more than loved.

I smile when I am alone at night and things aren't boiling over, and I can sit here and I can empty out the water and start anew.

I smile when I think about the years I have left and how they will bring awe in no small measure.

I smile because I know you, and because that will never go away long after we do.

I smile because I was a part of what you wanted life to be and I smile because I was able to give you a little bit back of what you gave me.

I wasn't there when you went away, but I am smiling as I write about the last time we spoke. You told my son how much you loved him, and he knew it then, and he will always know it.

I smile because you will never again have to feel the wall of pain that pushes us all no matter how hard we push back. I am thrilled that you cheated the final agony and although you are gone, you will always make me smile.

Thanks.

Show of Hands

2007-02-20T20:52:00.001-06:00

Why is it that the people around us, those that we are forced to interact with day in and day out, are the very ones who are virtually begging for the most cosmic of bitch slaps? I don't know if it's the impending birth of my daughter or if it's something malevolent, but I'll be damned if I'm not finding myself revisiting a classic level of misanthropy to which I had erroneously assumed was well under wraps. I mean, oh sure, my reputation preceeds me, but fuck all that horseshit. You really can't expect the people you deal with daily to actually know anything valuable about you, but you can sure as hell expect them to make snap judgments and dramatic overreaching leaps of reason to your detriment.

And then there are those who simply lurk on the very bottom rung, the one which is permanently stuck in the mire that lies at your feet. For the bottom feeders, the rules have been either completely rewritten, or even worse, totally suspended in a sort of immoral denouement. For these, nothing isn't fair game, no ball out of play, and you are the playing field, totally at the mercy of the situation. It's apalling.

I used to live down in the flaming pits of League City, an asshole of a town, and in this berg I would set out to commute with my deranged mother on her daily quest to earn a pittance. My inclusion in this jaunt was short lived, which is attributable to not only my self-destructiveness, but to a rapidly growing recognition of the way things really were. One morning, as we drove in, we spoke of corruption and dishonesty, and how those that were comfortable with their bullshit were effortlessly ably to trump any fool dumb enough to have actual morality to tie them down. I was shocked to realize that there was a disturbingly large number of people out there that operated with no qualms about fucking those around them. Because really, without morality, you can do whatever the fuck you want, and the rest of us are stuck milling about like blind cave fish, squirming to get our little crumb.

Melodramatic? Of course it is, but it also is true. Adn that shit simply killed me when I was staring down the scope of it.

So where does that leave me now? I mean, I am damn sure more aware of this concept then ever before. You work hard, you keep to yourself, your own problems, and you scratch by. In my case, I worry. I am an eternal worrier. I never thought of myself in that way until I developed a full blown case of panic disorder (which for the record, is shitty and hellish).

But so what, right? You've got to rise above and all that shit, right? Well, what if you can't? What if you are bogged down in it?

Well that's your problem. I'm just whining about it.

To Me it's Just Monkey Business

2007-01-26T19:24:00.000-06:00

I'm in a weird mood, and I'm all about shitting out a ton of even more useless than usual stuff for you tonight, so either consider this a caveat or a casually thrown precursor to a very long postscript.

I have been in the throes of metal of late. I've blogged on it in the Sisyphian avalanche of the Nonalignment Pact, and also in here to some extent. And if you haven't had the gumption/stones/mettle (heh heh)/nerve/desire/intestinal fortitude/or genital development to follow my lead, then you either deserve to spend an evening with Samoth and Burzum (look 'em up), or you deserve to to go bowling with the head of Saddam's brother in law on two for one night in the emerald city.

For your dollar, nothing is as simultaneously ridiculous and utterly satisfying than a good strong dose of Emperor, or Mayhem, or Slayer, or Maiden, or Skid Row.

Yeah, I said Skid Row.

I work with a dude (said dude knows who I'm talking about), who has no qualms not only following his muse, but following it wherever it may lead. Now I know that you - whoever you are - are sitting there reading this in your white belt, choppy multi-leveled haircut, pointy ankly boots, dipped on jeans, smelly pits, and shaved - no make that prepubescent - crotch, and thinking that only irony leads one to the joys of dumb music; but that's only because guys like you are devoid of any soul whatsoever, and are so wrapped up in your men-can-cry bullshit as to overlook the actual feelings that real people feel in the course of their actually shitty life. And hey, not that your life ain't shitty too, because damn... And I know that that new Deerhoof record is causing you to get all moist in the privates everytime you merely think of it, but when you're done stroking your own ego, take a small trip into the land of base pleasure and admit that you too love really dumb cock-rock. My compadre did, and he had the eggs to pass on his right-in-front-of-your-face wisdom to me, and now... I... to... you. Sure, Sebastian Bach is a complete horseshit dickbag, but then so was John Fahey, and we all know how we feel about him, no? Just nab their greatest hits collection online, and add in the Winger collection too, because when you hear Heading for a Heartbreak on the tail end of that baby, you will be sure to grab the first girl with a mullet you see and profess your undying love for her, without apology.

On a totally unrelated note: You know, I've got friends in high places that I don't even know about. And when I die alone - because that's what I've got planned - I'm gonna have a flash of why-the-fuck-didn't-I-give-these-people-the-time-of-day syndrome right at the waning sliver of my time on this epically confusing boat. Cultivating the aura of untouchable glibness is not something to take lightly, and is, as such, something I have learned in my travels inward. And though I don't have a map, I always seem to know where I'm going.

Oh sure, it's easy to sit here and shit out of my fingertips onto the keyboard, and then sit back and wait for the recriminations to waft back like an anhydrous ammonia spill on the tracks of a northern line. When you look at the horizon and are just able to make out a shadowy version of yourself, barely recognizable, huddled, shivering, maybe even naked, and you realize that all has been taken away by no fault of anyone but your own, it can be a little sobering.

Not that I could possible be any more sober than I have been for the last eighteen god-damned motherfucking years. It makes me think of that bragging husk that wrote his great novel about reality, starring fiction as reality, and bullshit as the god's honest truth. So fucked up that he could have easily flown home, in the opening chapter, on his own two arms, whereupon he would shit directly on the desk of his rehab crony and hitch the next cab back to his dealer's for the final draw. And the world would breathe a collective sigh of relief for having missed out on the end times comet that would have been this guy's herculean lies. No, I've managed to avoid that level of self-loathing for a much more proletarian variety.

And so: I have a second child in line for the near future and that is a life killer. The shards of my past self that I found at the bottom of the well they were dropped into, now sit at the bottom of my tea cup and spell out a long, skint haul for the soulless suburbanite experiment I am so embroiled in at the present. Sometimes being radical starts at home too. We can't all be shot by riot cops in Italy in front of a videocam, now can we? Some of us have to hold down the painfully antisocial homefront.

The book I was reading told me to go in for the kill at the end and not to under sell myself by diluting the message. (What are the orders in the absence of a message, I wonder?)

I guess we can give it the old college try.

In conclusion: It could take a man years to learn what I will simply hand over to you like that first hit of crack that sticked-carrot-like hangs before you now:

That new Shins record. it's just okay.

And hold...

The Grist List

2006-12-27T23:56:00.000-06:00

What is it about the end of the year that makes us get all fuzzy for lists? Chunklet.com's got 'em, Pitchfork's got 'em, The Houston Press, Foxy Digitalis... damn near everywhere I poke my stinkin' head around has some sort of god damn list that hopes to draw your attention away from the otherwise awesome spectacle that you call your life, waste a few of your minutes, and best of all, possibly turn you into another drone for the cause of mediocrity that all the kids are having handed to them courtesy of Sprite, Nike, and Che Guevara's favorite brand of rebellion, Target.

A year is a fucking year folks. It's three hundred and sixty five more days of us all getting older, nearing death, and hurtling towards total, useless oblivion. Sorry, but it's true. Now I know that we all get a little moist in the privates at the mere thought of creating a niche market for our delusional fantasies, myself included, but the way it all boils down leads one to this revelation: unless you are me, and you aren't, then your opinion is worthless. Ditto for whoever you are as you read this. Unless the rest of the world is you, which we aren't, then our opinions are as valuable as compassion lessons from the Duke Lacrosse team.

Me, I'm so fucking happy if I am simply able to come out the ass end of a year with all my limbs, lucidity, and relative sanity intact. Each year that passes, that goal gets a little harder to reach.
So with that in mind, here's a list of some of things that got under my skin, chapped my ass, made me smile, made me cry, and generally caught my attention. No, they are in no particular order (unless you're some sort of Freudian twat).

Hey, I never said I wasn't a hippocrite. You bitches.

1. Opeth
They fucking rule on a scale grander than anyone else by a long shot. No joke, no catchy gimmick, they simply blew me away every single time I put them on no matter the release. Opeth makes life worth living. I'm not kidding.

2. My mother died
The moment I have dreaded since I was old enough to realize that it would happen whether or not I cared to admit it would happen... happened. It was an empty, lonely moment for me. I am also part dead after that escapade. Blah, Blah, Blah... she was the best person I ever knew. I am fatally flawed as a human. Ask anyone who really knows me. But while this is irrefutable, my mother never cared. I was her only biological son, and our bond was impossible to deny. She died in her sleep, cheated the horrors we all see peeking at us from around every corner, but none the less, left me feeling empty and alone. I didn't even get to say goodbye to her, which while sounding maudlin, is actually something that really bothers me if I think about it.
So I won't...

3. Julian
My son is three now. He is all that three entails. As exhausting and challenging as it is to be a father, to be his father, it makes this hollow person feel partially full again. That is a gift.

4. Writing
A huge singular disappointment - that I won't go into - coupled with slow, small successes have given me a huge boost in my confidence with writing. No, I'm no Joyce, but then neither is anyone else. I dream of steady freelance gigs that supplement my income enough that I won't live in constant fear of moving to the nearest overpass. Until then I will be happy with my reasonably steady show previews (thanks Brian), and occasional other whatever for Lomax at the Press. And then there is the Nonalignment Pact. It's the music blog I contribute to once weekly (Tuesdays), along with other Houstonians past and present: Kilian Sweeney (de Schmog), Doug Dillerman (Dyn@mutt and also ex KTRU), Heidi Bullinga (the Mike Gunn muse, KTRU), Justin Crane (KTRU), Carlos Anaconda (Dry Nod), and the inventor of the NAP, Ramon Medina (madman). I also contribute now to Foxy Digitalis e-zine, a clearing house for out stuff of all sorts. They rock, check them out.

5. Work
The persistent rumors of our demise have been greatly exagerated while simultaneously accurate. It's hard to explain. My professional future is sort of up in the air. Such is life, I have bigger fish to fry at the end of the day.

6. Pregnant wife
Now we've done it. 2007 is shaping up to be a doozy. When will I learn to convince my wife I am gay and curtail all this nefarious rutting? Only kidding, of course. Heh, heh...

7. Mortgage woes
My dumb-ass fucking mortgage lender fucked my wife and I royally by "accidentally" dropping school taxes out of our escrow withdrawals, which for the real estate illiterate means that our house note went up by $180 a month for a computer glitch created within a system undoubtedly fabricated by idiots. Thanks cock eaters.

8. Cash dirge
I got a fifty cent an hour raise in a year during which everything else went up in price at an exponential rate (including fucking gas). I feel a little sore in my hind quarters. Anbusol anyone?

9. Death to POLAD, long live POLAD
I virtually retired myself as a viable musician of any promise whatsoever. Not that I thought I was the new Raffi or anything, I just always figured that wherever I was hanging around, you would always find a guitar nearby. This has turned out to be a horrible misconception of the actual turn of events this year. I played a show in February that made me feel good about myself as a musician for the first time in eons, and after that night, I was hard pressed to carry on. Let's face it, I'm not that interesting to begin with. I always did it for my own enjoyment over anything else, and I have, of late, detected a certain sort of vague malaise in my constitution that has perhaps gone undetected for many years previous. Here's to shitting on the past, and birthing a new future!

10. Enron
I was a cunt hair away from actually sitting on the Enron jury. Imagine that, I could have shared in the honor of convicting two men, just to eventually watch as one of them died before sentencing, thus escaping the rigors of actually going on record as having been convicted in the first place. Texas rules.

11. Fat
I'm fattish. Deal.

12. the man
The fucking FBI is actually putting up an enormous building directly in view of my back door. In fact, I can see it from where I sit right now. How's that for creepy? So when you read about how some fuck-twist like Timothy McVeigh or some such shit has decided to get famous by sucking, maybe you'll see me chatting up Anderson Cooper one night on CNN about it. That's just fantastic.

13. Black Books
The British sit-com, Black books, is a complete fucking riot from start to finish. You must find it and watch it. Preferably you can rent it from the new video store called "Movies" up on Richmond in the Montrose just between Dunlavy and Montrose avenue. The show is genius. it's about an Irish expat living in London who owns a bookshop. He is a total misanthrope, and a drunk. He is oddly close with his neighboring business owner, who is a fellow drunk. He also befriends a lunatic doofus accountant who finds himself needing a job. Said doofus gets job. Hilarity ensues. it's simple, insanely dark and well written, and it kills just about anything on Ameriican TV save maybe for the Office. Watch it now.

14. the Darkest hour
While continuing to develop my reputation for being a sarcastic, caustic asshole of a man, I still maintain that it is all a misconception borne from the very pits of myopic ignorace. I mean, really. How many sarcastic assholes do you know who will cry at the sound of Crowded House doing "Whenever I Fall at Your Feet"? Well, make it one. Hey, people are ugly and stupid. It's simply a fact. Books will never stop being written about it because of its inherent truth. I am quite simply one of the people who has no problem pointing things like that out. I don't exclude myself from the observation, it's not a superiority thing. It's simply a clear observation of an animal gone horribly awry. But I also know that crippling beauty is always a fingers length away should we be so bold as to stretch out and give it a whirl. That's the kind of shit they don't sell at Woolworth's.

There's more, but who really gives a shit, eh?

My mother won't die in 2007, so there's that. As for the whatever else is hiding just on the horizon... fuck whatever it is. As long as I'm around I'll give it a sniff, because that's the kind of dipshit I am. But don't expect anything too exciting from me. I'm a parasite. A hungry one...

Was I dropped here by aliens?

2006-11-04T09:04:00.000-06:00

I'll start off-topic.

Way to go Ted Haggard, way to fuck mens asses while preaching your homophobic agenda to your legion of sanctimonious douchebags. This is why the right is shaking. This is why they are so afraid to lose the House for another forty years. They are afraid because thay allow themselves to be hoodwinked by hippocritical closet cases like this: Haggard goes down

Ok, now...

For din-din tonight, the brood headed over to Star II for the thin crust (which fucking rocks by the way), and the little lady shuttles home a copy of the latest issue of Envy magazine. For those who are unfamiliar, Envy is a very well produced, super glossy, circle-jerk of a magazine for the uber fucked up yup-monster set. Upon page after page is the documentation of the Red Bull fueled dementia of today's vapid doltish jock/sleaze hybrids, and their saline sacked, platinum blonde, camel toed, halfwit trophy whores. It's a litany of Houston's unsavory underbelly spread open like the legs of Tera Patrick on your round velvet bed (that you bought at Cantoni with your coke money).

It's as though Dallas packed up and moved here, tired of the weeks long 110 degree summer spells, and blustery, bone chilling occasional winter storms. It's as though every date raping, meth snorting, Beamer driving, teeth whitening, creatine eating, salon tanning mook dropped their Pumpkin Spice Lattes and busted south on I-45 just as fast as their Lexus Convertibles with spermicidal leather seating could go. And then the fuckers took one look at the bum infested streets of our fair city and said to themselves, "I can see it, like a fuckin' field of dreams. Shitty-ass clubs, as far as the eye can see, lining both sides of main street like a gauntlet of spiritual decay. A veritable temple row of heretical, deviant palaces, erected like a Viagra laden, semi-flaccid member, post pump-implant, wrapped in neon to attract - baboon-assed like - the attention of anus bleached creatures whose cheap perfume chokes the air like a Baytown refinery in August. Fuck it, I'm jerking off right here."

God fucking dammit, I hate that magazine and what it represents for Houston. There is an actual bar in Houston called Kobain. I am crappin' you negative. Named after my generation's terminally lost casualty, Nirvana's Curt Cobain, whose corpse is no doubt trying in vain to revive itself so that it can once more rid the world of itself once and for all.

Can you imagine the ball-less groins these shaved, greasy, walking zombies must hoist about on their jaunts to the devil's many lairs? Can you imagine the hairless, pre-pubescent, crotches that unnaturally decorate the nether regions of the lobotomized Frankenstein monsters trolling the strip for another hollow husk of a bar, so that they can pickle their lizard brains just enough to take one of these eunuchs back to their Tyvek townhomes to rut with soulless abandon? Wow, it's so fucking depressing. And the police are all blocks away, in the Heights, tazering children, and harassing vegans for reasons other than being vegans.

So motherfuck you Ted Haggard, the apocalypse is now, thanks to devious cowards like you, whose every duplicitous breath is another waft of oxygen that could have gone to someone who really needed it.

Once upon a time, my city had balls, but now it's unholy avatars run the streets downtown. And plague the city with awful decay, of which we may never be set free.

Sometimes it makes me sick. Fuck you Envy. I don't envy you at all. Thank god there are real people out there, and thank god I make an effort to associate myself with them, because god knows how I would function here with an entire city of you unflappable zombies.

GoTarts! otherwise known as RoadWhores!

2006-10-25T17:23:00.000-05:00

On our trip last night to the local CVS, I was perusing the shelves for something amusing to look at when I happened across the sale item I could not control my urge to pick up. GoTarts!. Yeah. PopTarts for people on the go! Now I don't know about you, but when I am burning the candle at both ends on my way to my menial job, I really don't have a lot of time to fuck around. And you can bet your sweet ass that I don't have the time to prepare a standard two-tart foily bagged dose of PopTarts. So you can imagine my excitement when I stumble across an entire box of Chocolate Fudge flavored GoTarts! for only one American dollar.

Never mind that the whole idea of having a pastry that you can drop in the toaster so that you don't have to waste your precious time doing things like actually preparing a real meal has completely gone down the shitter years ago. I mean it's a PopTart for those on the go. Well fuck. If you're on the motherfucking go, then you are probably going to be one of those dolts who already eats PopTarts to begin with, right? How does putting one long, skinny, single, tubed tart down the toast chute go to improve things? Oh wait... long, skinny, tube shaped... down the... I get it.

All of this just brings me back to the townhouse I lived in with my brother and mom eons ago, and the fancy new product that hit the market at the time: Toaster Strudel. Again, the none-too-subtle name gives it away. Yes, a strudel-ish pastry item that you toast and then coat with this ghostly white "icing" (of sorts). It's magic for your mouth. It was the golden years for the tart trade. The tart magnates were raking it in back then. The heady Tart Revolution of '85.

But I digress... Let's get back to the tart in question.

You know, the makers of sugary snack foods must really have a bitch of a time figuring out how to remain in the minds and wallets of the consumer public, because basically taking your entry-level tart and turning it into a candy bar shaped version of itself, packaging them one at a time, and then spending millions of dollars to make them sound sexy, and inviting, and new, seems to this scribe to be a mindlessly hollow example of shameless marketing. I mean, for real, who the fuck falls for this sort of thing?

Naturally I bought two boxes.

They were only a dollar.

Twelve Minutes

2006-10-23T22:54:00.000-05:00

A thousand years ago, when I was in a band with Ramon named Bongtooth (don't say anything, I already know), we had the incredible fortune of being asked to open for a new band no one knew about yet called the Jesus Lizard. I got a call from JR over at the Axiom asking about the bill.

"Hey John, I've got a show you might be interested in. You would be opening for the new band for two of the guys from a band called Scratch Acid. Ever heard of them?"

"Fuck yeah I have, and yes, we'll do it."

"Cool. It's over at Pik-n-Pak because something else is going on at the Axiom that night. I hope you don't mind."

"No, not at all. Which guys are in this band?"

"Umm, I think the singer and the bassist."

"Wow, I really appreciate it by the way."

"Sure. Hey, I have their first record if you want it, they have a drum machine, it's a little weird, but it's ok. Want it?"

And so off we went expecting to play with Rapeman/Big Black junior, which would be totally fine in itself. Of course I had no idea what I had in store.

The opener was this shitty-assed local band whose name escapes me at the moment. They found it to be incredibly hilarious to act like pirates while loading in, performing, and breaking down after their piss poor, interminable set. In fact, they played for so long that people were leaving before we even had a chance to play, let alone the Jesus Lizard.

Now you have to understand that we were more than thrilled to get the chance to open for some of our heroes, and so we had practiced ourselves silly in preparation for the show. We even had the trump card of using Tom Carter to play sax on a couple tunes if memory serves me well. But the thing was that since the opener played for so god damned long, and since JR didn't seem to think it was his obligation to get these dickwads off the stage, when all was said and done, two long hours after those guys took the stage, JR turned to me and said the four words that burn my ass to this very day. He said:

"You have twelve minutes."

"Excuse me?"

"I said, you have twelve minutes."

"Twelve minutes to play?"

No, twelve minutes total. Twelve minutes to setup, play, and get off the stage."

"Are you fucking joking?"

"Nope."

"Wow."

Looking back over this moment, I am struck by how surprised I was at the time. I am surprised now because I clearly was green enough back then to actually think that there is some sort of dignity in the way that people conduct themselves in the scene. Naturally, I have since seen that people are just as shitty and lame, if not more so, in the music scene as they are in the world proper. You don't have to have played in a band to know that it is impossible to set up a guitar amp, bass rig, and drum kit, play a set, and then get off the stage in twelve minutes. We couldn't even play four songs in twelve minutes. Guys like Ramon however, see things differently from me. He and Tom insisted it could be done. They said that JR could go fuck himself if he thought we were going to do it all in twelve. Let's just set up, they said. Once we start we simply jam and then we refuse to stop for about twenty minutes or so. Hmmm... I thought. Ok, fuck 'em, let's do it. And so we did, and it was retarded, but we didn't care. We were too loud, and we didn't act like fucking pirates, and we clearly didn't give a shit. And like true rebels, we played for a good fourteen minutes, so in your face mister JR assbag!

Following that fiasco I had the impending urge to go home. I had had enough. And then I was approached by David William Sims.

"Hey, that was great."

"Yeah right."

"No, I'm serious, you guys were great. I mean you clearly were pissed, but it worked to your advantage."

"Well, the booker told me we had twelve minutes."

"For what?"

"The whole deal."

"Well, you pulled it off."

"Thanks, I really appreciate it."

"So, are you guys friends with the first band?"

"Oh no, they're just some local band, I don't know..."

"Oh ok, because they sucked. I mean sucked, as in real bad."

I decided to stay. And thanks to my decision to stay, I was treated to the best rock show I have ever attended/seen in my life, bar none. Of course Steve Albini's Roland was nowhere to be found, unceremoniously dumped as it was by a one Mr. Mac McNeilly, a real motherfucker of a drummer. And seeing them in so small a venue, packed though it was, was a religious experience. Nobody owns the stage like they did that night. They did everything just right. It was sheer brilliance. David Yow assaulted the crowd, terrified us, and made us his friends all at the same time. Sims, stock still, ready to consume whoever was in his way (as always). Duane Dension showing equal parts technical precision and brutal, crushing muscle. It was a clinic for how it should be done, for the promise of electric music, and the embracing power of rock. Legions of metal/hard rock/punk/heavy/whatever bands have all gotten it wrong since. That night, and many more for that matter, the Jesus Lizard were all things at once, and for one small window of time I was able to forget just how much I wanted to go home and wallow in my disgust for a culture that I would eventually learn to avoid with a fervent passion. Man am I glad I stayed.

PS- You can see the flyer for this show in my MySpace pictures. Lyman Hardy did it and it's lovely.

Ignore this one

2006-10-20T23:09:00.000-05:00

The view back to my past is always a scenic one, but it's also frought with more than a little ugliness. I've been blog browsing and happened to stumble across something a very old friend wrote about all those years ago, and it occurs to me that there are archetypal relationships that we develop (usually) early on in our lives which breed the often dubious honor of holding sway over the boundless grey that is our future. The way the past is portrayed stands in stark contrast to the way I remember things to be, and twenty years later it still bothers me (much to my surprise). I know we all follow whatever it is that motivates us to move on, and I am certainly no different; and if there's is one lesson I've learned from my adolescence, it's that by the time you realize that your life is never going to be quite what you had hoped it would be, it's basically too late to even bother thinking about it anymore.

When I think about the time I wasted believing things that were so far from true that it still hurts today to write about it, it only hurts in the sense that I get pissed with myself for ever being so gullible in the first place. When I was a kid I learned a hard lesson about not letting yourself be pushed around. And if there is one thing in life that makes me irrevocably angry, it's being lied to, and in effect bullied, by someone I care about. Because what it means is that the person you care so much for, respect so highly, trust so completely, does not share your feelings. And that, kids, is a hard lesson to learn. In fact, I hope that you, dear reader, never have to feel that way, because it is a total bitch.

And none of this would have entered my mind if I wasn't already feeling oddly sentimental thinking about how my mother is no more, and I am now stuck with a world of (let's face it) assholes.

I've lost my best friend, my closest ally, my biggest fan, and a major reason why life is worth the all-consuming black hole of shit I usually think it to be. And she knew this as well as anyone. In fact, we shared -and revelled- in our hatred for so much of what you represent. Sorry.

And so when I read about a world I knew existed, but don't like to think about too much, it makes me realize just how little I would ever want to return to my youth and have to relive the interminable hell it so often turned out to be. God, it's no wonder I was so fucking high all the time. A straight edge kid who was so unhappy, so bored, that anything was better than what I was not doing with my life.

Again, my apologies for the drama show here, but I often try to cloak my frustration and anger in nicer terms for those who read this so that they don't get either too disgusted, concerned, or bored with it, but today I say fuck it. I wasn't the happiest guy you ever met when my mother was well. Her absence has stolen a huge chunk of what I still have left.

But then again, what the fuck, I don't believe I get another shot at this, so let's see what happens next. Bring it on, and as long as I am still standing, I will laugh in your face.

I know who you really are, now don't you want to get to know me better?

Kathleen "Kitty" Louise Cramer, 7/28/1941 to 9/30/2006

2006-10-08T17:37:00.000-05:00

While I recognize that this not the best way to tell someone bad news, I am so over talking about this that I will have to inform those of you who care of this in writing. Early last week, sometime in the first hours of September 30th, my mother died in her sleep. While this was not a surprise, it can never be anything but a shock. She has been, as most of you who read this already know, horribly sick for several years now, and I have written many blogs on her litany of major health problems. But in the end it was her heart that did her in. Not the cancer that should have taken her down, that she beat in style. And if there is a silver lining in all this it was that she died in her sleep, a fact she will never have the pleasure of knowing, but one that will help me sleep once I am able to get in a full night again. She had spaghetti for dinner, and a second helping at midnight, easily her favorite meal. She awoke at five a.m. and went to the bathroom, and then went to sleep for good. It would appear that she was totally unaware that she passed at all.

So for the last week I have been in Florida trying to get a handle on her affairs, which were to be honest, a complete mess. Supposedly she left a will, but though we tore the damn place apart looking for it, no luck. She was broke, in debt, and virtually without assests. That means an almost assured future in probate. Yay.

Part of the trip east included a sorting through of her things to decide who wants what. She left little instruction, so all was up for grabs. No one feels comfortable taking things after someone you care about dies because you are so riddled with grief that the idea of wanting anything more than to have another minute with the person is repulsive. Plus, shipping her furniture to Houston is really expensive, which causes another problem. It's not interesting for you to read, so suffice to say that the last week has been draining.

My brother and I also had the task of planning and executing her funeral plans. All we were certain of was that she wished to be cremated. The rest was improvised while trying to capture what we felt her wishes would be. I'm sure she would be a little pissed at the outcome, but she would also have a huge laugh over it. Death is weird. The business of dealing with death is truly bizarre. None of our immediate family is Christian, and I personally am a non believer, so you can imagine how I feel about a service with God in it at all. But we agreed that she was a believer in God, if not a Christian, so I guess I can live with the memorial service. Thankfully my son kept me occupied during the ceremony so it wasn't too bad.

We drove to Florida in part to have a vehicle to bring things back, and partly to have some away time to get my head together. It's a brutal drive with a three year old and a pregnant wife, but it beats the hell out of flying, which I abhor.

We made out return trip in good time, and so I voted to detour in New Orleans, one of my favorite places, and one I have been itching to visit since Katrina. Driving through Mississippi on I-10 gives you a view of what the storm did, at least a little, with many snapped, downed trees, and many blue tarped roofs. But pulling into New Orleans from the west was a shocking sight. As you pass through the Chalmette area along I-10 you see a several square mile are of apartment buildings that are still almost totally destroyed. Windows are out, roofs gone, debris everywhere, dead lawns, collapsed buildings, and not a soul walking around. It was really sad to see this. I wasn't sure if we were going to see stuff like that or not, and it was merely a small chunk of what happened to say the least. The French Quarter goes on as if nothing ever happened, but take just a slight detour into downtown and you will notice the high water mark on the sides of buildings which were easily fix to six feet high. Canal street is a chaotic mess, there are cops everywhere and they seem a little edgy as one yelled at me for no reason. We ended up sitting at the Cafe Du Monde and having a cafe au lait and some beignets. The weather was beautiful, and there was (as always), a guy playing sax and singing on the edge of the cafe. And while I usually find these guys annoying, this time the whole situation was fairly heavy. We strolled around for a little while and it was all strange and bittersweet. The town is one storm away from being done for good and you never forget that while you're there. My mother always wanted to get to spend some time in New Orleans, it suits her perfectly. She has a similar eclectic sort of creativity in her decorating much as the little shops that are dotted throughout the quarter, and she would absolutely love the coffee and food. So we had some for her, tried not to get too pathetic, and then went home.

We all go eventually, but those who love you are never thinking today would be a good one. And despite the loneliness I feel now without her to ever be there for me again (something I may never get over), last Saturday was as good a day as any for my mother to make her bow. She ate like a queen, slept like a baby, beat the misery that haunted her horizon, and had the last laugh. I hope I can be as lucky.

Bye mom. You can't imagine how much you will be missed, or how much I owe you. Without you I might have become... normal. And that's a fate no one should ever have to endure.

Puffy Giuliani

2006-09-27T20:01:00.000-05:00

You know, I just read this article about Rudy Giuliani in which he defends Bill Clinton's record on hunting public-enemy-number-almost-forgotten Osama Bin Laden. Clinton was asked about the subject by Chris Wallace from Fox News, and responded by becoming what the entire news media universe has unanimously termed: combative. He never was one for direct confrontation, and is clearly someone who thinks we should all bow down and recognize his political brilliance. He is without doubt a very intelligent man, but he also happens to be a self-serving douche with a penchant for very clever subterfuge.

But I truly digress, because the point of this blog is to refer to a statement Rudy made during his aforementioned speech. He said that he honestly believed that every president he ever met would "give their life" to stop an attack like the one on 9/11.

And that my dear friends is the rub. There is simply no fucking way in God's green earth that Bill Clinton or George junior would ever even dream of giving their life for this country. In fact, each of them was given the chance to do so, and lo and behold, they both shirked.

But I must admit that this is really written in the spirit of mirth. I simply can't get past the image in my mind of Bush getting a call from Osama, who wishes to deliver this unimaginable plan:

"Hello, is this George Bush?"

"Yeah."

"Osama here. Listen, you son-of-a-dog imperialist, I have a proposition for you, and it is one that I bring to you with all the truth I can muster."

"...."

"We have some planes, and we will use them. Unless."

"Unless?"

"Yes o' Satanic infidel, unless you take your own life."

"Well, that's a tall order there Mr. Bin Evil Do-er."

"You have unt..."

"Ok, no."

And there you go. Our world is a retarded place. No wonder it's considered rude to use the term retarded. We have shamed an otherwise perfectly specific term with no innate offensive qualities.

Retarded.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston

2006-09-26T20:36:00.000-05:00

Last night I watched "The Devil and Daniel Johnston," a documentary on the eternally fragile, and mountainously creative artist, filmmaker, and musician, Daniel Johnston. Anyone who pays any attention to Texas underground music (and American underground for that matter), should already be familiar with him, and at least be aware of the basics of his work: the "Hi, How Are You?" tape, and his instantly recognizable cartoons and watercolors. While I've heard him here and there for many years, I was never a huge fan, and often felt a little uncomfortable as I heard stories about his consistent unravelling before the eyes of his "fans." His mental problems are the stuff of legend, even myth, and according to the film, they are for the most part almost entirely true.

What I took from the documentary, which was excellent by the way, was that this is a man who is very clearly treading a thin line between madness and sanity. And while his music sounds rather disjointed and almost emotionally painful to the point of being difficult, there is also a playfull enthusiasm, and heartfelt intensity that is hard to deny. But it is also hard for me to draw the line between where his fans stop being fans and start being exploitative. Now that his father has assumed the role of managing Daniel, he is no doubt in the most capable hands there are in this world, and it's tragic to realize that when Daniel's parents are gone, he will face a frighteningly unsure future.

Virtually born with an innate desire to express himself in some sort of creative fashion, Johnston quickly took to drawing and filming with a super 8 camera. It was soon apparent to his family that Daniel was not like his siblings in many critical ways. He was more inwardly focused than his siblings, sleeping in late, and turning his room into an extension of his inner world. And this world was one that was raging with ideas. He took to making tapes of his experiences, a sort of audio diary. He would tape shouting matches he would have with his mother, who was clearly confused and concerned about what was becoming of her unique child.

Further developing his love of artwork led him into a brief and ultimately unsuccessful trip to college. However, Daniel did manage to meet the girl who would become his lifelong muse and inspiration. A deleted scene shows the twenty plus year reunion between the two, and it is fairly moving if not a little uncomfortable for me to watch, partially because of my role as a voyeur, and partially because Daniel's realtionship to her is a little unbalanced and quite frankly, a bit of a manipulation on his part. He uses his idealization of her to fuel his illness in a sense, as well as for source material.

As far as the film itself goes, the cinematography of the footage shot for the film is amazing, and really gives a specifically beautiful atmosphere to the film. They do a great job of integrating a ton of audio recording with archival film and video, and photographs, without basically creating a sort of montage. The whole thing flows smoothly, and I found myself really caring about this person, and relating to him.

It was also cool to see Mark from Clouded who now plays in Daniel's band The Nightmares. I remember when he told me he was playing for Daniel. I was amazed. It's a touch of a departure from Clouded to say the least, but Mark is a great guitarist, and he could easily handle Daniel's pop travesties.

The music, in all honesty, is not for everyone, although watching the film, you would be excused for thinking that you somehow were left off the boat. No one seems to think his work is anything but genius. I don't question his songs strengths, because I think they are often brilliant. But in order to accept Daniel's music, you have to be ready to accept the challenge of learning a little about who he is, because while much of his music is playful and fun, it is also very fragile, like him, and it would be easy for it to simply fall apart with the slightest tap.

As long as his parents are in the picture, and he keeps taking his medicine, Daniel will probably be fine. His story is amazing, as is the film. Both are worth checking out and supporting. My only caveat would be that we, as fans, should be a little sensitive to who this man is, and what his needs are, because he is truly unique and wonderful, and it is a little too easy to take advantage of his weakness for our own benefit. A healthy Daniel Johnston is a treasure. A sick Daniel Johnston is a tragedy.

Catch Daniel here: Hi, How Are You?

It's fuck-all to do with anything!

2006-09-23T00:36:00.000-05:00

In a past blog I spoke of my hoopty vehicle. For those unfamiliar, I am the proud owner of a 1996 Hyundai Accent Anniversary Edition. The Anniversary Edition bit is the part that gets under my skin a little. I mean come on, it's a fucking 1996 Hyundai. Who gets moist in trou' over that prospect? And what sets it apart from the standard run of the mill piece of shit Hyundai? Well, mine has the most minimal of pinstriping. Picture a pinstripe job that was executed by Phillip Glass before he got into music. You know, when he was apprenticing at the little hot-rod shop back in Ventura. On top of that, I am the proud owner of embroidered floor mats which say: "10th Anniversary Edition." That's it. Otherwise I drive a Korean Matchbox car.

And with it comes the requisite plastic parts that are all breaking off now. Parts like the dashboard, which is split down the middle, the clips for the rear view mirrors, and my personal favorite, the door handles. The latest tally is two replaced handles, and now two more broken ones. Currently, the outside driver's-side passenger door handle is totally snapped and totally inoperable. The inside driver's-side driver's door handle is now demolished. What this means is that when I want to get out of my car, I have to roll down the window and use the outside handle. Thank God I am already married. Nobody wants to go out with a guy who looks like Sasquatch driving a miniature Ozarks hillbilly car. Well, nobody I need to be hanging out with anyway.

Here are a few records I've been listening to and recommend:

Jandek's Glasgow Monday. Unlike anything he's done to date. A live recording of his outsiderness with Richard Youngs and Alex Neilson on bass and drums respectively. Jandek is playing a piano, and it reminds me of Popol Vuh's soundtracks for Werner Herzog's visionary seventies shit.

Robbie Basho, Venus in Cancer. The first official CD release of this classic. His sixth CD, and first to depart from Fahey's Takoma label. Amazing ragas, and otherwordly operatic singing. Must be heard to believe. Think Fahey meets the guy that yodels on Pharoah Sanders classic Hum Allah. Essential.

Radio Thailand, Dispatches from the Tropical Kingdom. Assorted, insane radio recordings from Thailand. Various permutations of pop, traditional, rock, hip-hop, and damn near everything else you could never imgaine. Recorded, assembled, and edited by Alan Bishop from ethno-dorkologists, Sun City Girls. Brilliant double-disc lunacy.

Geoff Mullen, The Air in Pieces. Fantastic and damaged electric guitar landscapes. Spacious and distorted, but never abrasive or confrontational. Yet another reason why Rhode Island out-Austins Austin. Let's see, Edie Brickell vs. Lighting Bolt. Hmmm... tough one.

I also watched the Minutemen doc, We Jam Econo. If you never got into them, you could do worse than to start here. Packed with interviews of SST folks (who are getting really old), and tons of live footage, it's a curbed, but still fun history of the band's short lived career. Also essential.

And I am reading the Chunklet Overrated book, which is absolutely hilarious. Anyone that isn't afraind to go after, well, basically everybody, and can do so and still be funny gets my vote.

So there's a tiny slice of what I've been doing that is actually of possible interest to someone else (except for the car part).

Murakami versus Kawabata. Mastodon, Opeth and late summer.

2006-09-23T00:31:00.000-05:00

Late summer, late September in Houston can make for a fairly grueling proposition. If you read this blog regularly (and I know that you love it), then you are aware of my great hatred for the month of August. For some reason, although here in Houston where I have lived for the last twenty-six or so years, I tend to think of September as a fall month. I don't know quite why. Yes we do occasionally start to see the temperature get below 95 in the day and 80 at night, but that hardly makes for a fall-like transformation. Summer isn't even technically over until the end of this month anyway. I guess it just signifies the advent of the end to the torturously long, damp, scorchingly hot days; and not a moment too soon.

I got the new Mastodon the other day, and although I like it, I wonder how much of that is due to my being a fan to begin with. In all honesty, some of the vocals on this one are a bit horrific. There's even a hint of dead Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley lurking about in there. I never really listen to metal vocals anyway when you get down to it, unless they are amazing (which is almost never), or real bad (think Dragonforce or Six Inches of Blood). Opeth is an example of a band whose vocals should send me running away, but actually have ended up making me like them even more. Akerfeldt actually sings, and I mean striaght up sings, and manages to make the music work even better for it.

I guess the thing I like about Mastodon is the musicianship. It's funny to see them play because they look like complete inbred hillbilly wrecks (which I suspect they are), but when they play it's not hard to recognize that these guys have chops. And while they are able to play punishing rhythms, they are also able to lay melody over that abuse with equal ease. I think of them as a sort of Neurosis meets Opeth, or something. Presicion, ugliness, silly metal posturing, and downright heavy, macho riffing with a huge emphasis on might. Lovely really. I mean, I'm not sitting at home diggin' the sword-metal lyrics as though they've been chilling with Dylan or something; I just appreciate a good metal band, and they are a pretty good one.

I've just about wrapped up the novel "Beauty and Sadness," which I acquired thanks to my friend Sarah (who must hate me because she never writes), and I have to say that there would appear to be a great deal that was lost in the translation of this short, baffling novel.

I've logged a few hours with Japanese contemporary literature, not too many, but enough to recognize a certain stilted quality to them that leads me to believe that Japanese is every bit as difficult to translate as we have been led to believe.

It's the story of this pompous writer who, earlier in his life, had an affair with a young girl 16 years his junior. The girl gets pregnant and ends up losing the baby. She attempts suicide (something the Japanese love to romantacize), survives, and eventually grows up to become a famous painter. The writer, meanwhile, capitalizes on his pedophilia by writing his first novel about a writer who bangs a young girl. Sound familiar? All of Japan knows the story is semi-autobiographical, and this brings great suffering both to the young woman, and to the writer's pathetically vacant wife.

The young woman takes on a pupil, a young beautiful girl, and they eventually become live-in lovers.

The story proper opens with the man going to Kyoto to try and revisit his past with the young woman. The painter's lover is angry that the young woman has never quite gotten over her obsession with the married douchebag writer, and plots her revenge by seducing both the man and his geek-assed loser son.

I don't have a necessary problem with the soap-opera histrionics. But I do have a problem with the banal, almost childishly bad dialogue on damn near every page of the book. There is a scene in which the young pupil is with the older man, and she is about to have sex with him. The way he exerts himself, and the way in which she responds, both physically and verbally, is simply retarded. I felt as though I was reading a romance novel written by a pretensious mongoloid.

And to contrast with this book, I think of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood. It too is a romance (of sorts), which revolves around a writer who in this case is reminiscing about a young (bat-shit crazy) woman with whom he has a very fucked up love affair.

I liked Beauty and Sadness, and I truly loved Norwegian Wood. But both books share a number of qualities. What sticks out the most is the way that women are handled. In both books, women are almost like alien creatures. I know that men tend think of women as being different from men, but not so much in the pod-people sense. In these novels it would appear that women are these sexually generous, fragile, tortured characters, who can barely function without being totally integrated in a male dominated society. The men, on the other hand, all seem to be in charge, both literally and figuratively, and operate in whatever self-motivated fashion suits them. The women are clearly there to bounce the real characters (men) off of, and they seem to have little to almost no actual identities of their own. This isn't overlty stated, but when I look back on both novels, I do get this impression very strongly.

I think one reason why I prefer Murakami over Kawabata (at least with these two books) is because Murakami reads more familiar to me than Kawabata. It makes sense when you consider that Murakami is much more interested in absorbing elements, thematic arcs, and cultural references from the west. Kawabata stands more as an almost traditionally Japanese landscape artist. His story is more involved with the natural world, evolving around rivers, trees, earth, the seasons, the rain, mountains, trails, and so on. At times, the translation is beautiful, but more often than not, the staggering dialogue gets in the way of my ever getting emotionally involved in the story, and worse, the characters.

Again, I think that there is a lot to be said for the fine art of translating a language as far from English as Japanese. It is obvious that these books are basically new books when they are placed in an English context. Countless cultural elements are simply washed away, and the original flow of the language, the prose, and the dialogue, is simply gone.

Although I would recommend both books, I would also say that the best way to read them can inarguably only be in their native language.

Easy for me to say, because there is about no chance of my ever learning Japanese.

Oh, and for the record, Obe and Mishima have almost the same effect on me, so I know that we are but yokels, in the infant stage of getting the great Japanese literature of the twentieth century.

As for the rest of my life right now, I am simply trying to get past the terror of figuring out how the hell we are going to afford the cost of another little person in our lives. We'll manage somehow, (how's that for banal?) How do poor people make it? You know, like dirt fucking poor, like piss in a hole poor. How do they feed a crying baby when they have no money? That shit kills me.

Onward...

Am I the only one who thinks that the Democrats actually have a snowball's chance in hell of taking over the House? Let's not even mention the Senate. There's been so much claptrap about them taking over at least the House, and possibly the entire Congress, but I just want to know what people are smoking, because that shit is not going to happen in November.

And even if they miraculously do sneak in there, who's to say they won't be just as stupid as the GOP? Because I can tell you right now that they will. I mean, come on, Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean, and that Harry Reid dipshit are our hope for moving forward? At least I know what the GOP has in mind because of their railroading towards special interests. Who knows what the Dem's are up to. They just want in, but when they get in, then what? Business as usual, I'm sure.

I'm rambling. Somebody stop me.

A lovely little tale

2006-03-15T23:36:00.000-06:00

In the wilderness of debt and idiocy, I stumble about, like the rest of us, powerless and naked, like a primitive animal, full of fear and doubt. There's nothing to be gained through this coming monologue, nothing save for the satisfaction I will undoubtedly feel, if only for a fleeting moment, after I unload all the vitriol and scorn I can muster in my (poorly written) blog.

So here we go:

Eons ago, I acquired a credit card from a well known monolith. Said monolith was consumed by a greater monolith. I went along for the ride. The transition went smooth enough. Eventually the greater monolith more than tripled my interest rate for no good reason. The only notification I received about my astronomical rate hike was in a tiny insert - one of about ten - that came in a bill a couple months previous. I only noticed because my balance was going nowhere. I called them, and they lowered it. Just as easily as they tripled it. That was about two years ago, or so. Since then, I haven't paid them late once. Of course, any late payment of any sort to show on my credit report could allow them to boost it right back up again. But they didn't. Several months ago, the current monolith was co-opted by one of the most monolithic of monoliths. They promised an easy transition. I have always paid them online. Not a problem to be found. Until my last payment. The latest and greatest monolith, the one I am currently enslaved to, streamlined me into their new website. They did so with the promise of ease, and improved funcionality. What I received was the following:

In order to pay them online, I had to reenter my account info from my bank. I did so, and paid the account online. Today I receive a letter informing me that my bank rejected the payment because my account number was wrong. I call the card company and am told that the number I gave them was sixteen digits long. I accidentally gave them my debit card number. Brilliant. To fix the problem I must now pay my past due amount, plus a $ 39.00 late fee, plus a $ 39.00 returned payment fee! Nice. Then I discover that to repair the error, to get the basically bogus fees waived, I have to pay the new grossly inflated minimun payment, wait two days for it to clear, and then call back and ask again if they will reimburse me the purely imbecilic fees. All of this, mind you, because of the "convenience" they have provided me by changing something that worked perfectly for years. Something that may end up costing me an extra $ 80.00 simply because they suck so much cock that they can't breathe properly. To cap the whole thing off, I notice that they have also gone ahead and put my interest rate back up to double what they had it at before. Thanks assholes. No notice at all. No little note buried in the offers for calculator pens, race car tape decks, and magazine subscriptions. No mention when I called them THREE FUCKING TIMES on the phone today. No mention at all. Just a little "zing!!" and my interest rate is higher than the U.S. snowboard team. I call for the fourth time, and the guy lowers it again, just like that.

I will get this repaired, get my money back, and then look for another card to transfer my balance on to with a low rate for transfers.

So to recap:

I am a sucker.

Credit cards suck my balls.

I am so angry right now I could punch a baby seal.

Sometimes life makes me want to jump off a bridge.

People who work for credit card companies are heartless, soulless scum. I don't care if they are just making a living like I am, they also happen to be heartless, soulless leeches who deserve to go hunting with Dick Cheney in the dark with Uzi's, tons of beer, and adrenaline shots all around.

The world is a cold, dark place, full of traps and pitfalls, ever present, set to ensnare the best of us as well as the rest of us. No one will escape death. I take heart in that.

I tend towards the melodramatic.

Despite the fact that I have always despised this term, I find it to be more than applicable...I feel violated.

MOTHERFUCK.

The Endless Rant

2006-03-09T00:28:00.000-06:00

Here's a nugget of wisdom regarding my personality that may have slipped beneath your radar. I say this because I am a reclusive asshole practically beyong the pale of normal human relations, and thus you are probably not privvy to stuff like this, so I'm going to throw it out there as the underpinning to what will (shamefully) follow.

I have an obsessive personality. I'm fairly good at hiding it, much as I am fairly good at hiding my actual feelings on a lot of things. I only mention this because as much as I would love to simply forget it and move on, I am continuously drawn back to the flame of the John Lomax band suicide article like a retarded moth. Not because it's so provocative, but because I keep stumbling across more evidence of the article's ability to get under so many people's skin for some reason.

I mean, the article itself was fairly innocuous in its content really. Most of the complaints lodged at it have been fair and fairly accurate I think, but the one thing that keeps coming back to me is the story of Haaga himself (the obvious, badly hidden, and true topic of the piece).

I would just like to indulge myself further for no one's benefit really but my own. What strikes me about Haaga is that he is a guy with at least some talent for playing music. He is clearly very
good at assembling a large group of very different musicians and getting them to do what he wants without compromising their expression for his vision. He knows how to put his ideas down in a studio in a way that pleases him. but what he is tragically bad at, is recognizing what
he needs to do to appeal to the business of marketing rock music. For one thing, his material is really fairly out of place with what is in vogue right now. That's not a judgment, it's simply a fact. He has also been completely mislead into thinking that matching outfits, or the display of a thematic visual element, whether through colored garb or through an ill-conceived logo would do anything whatsoever to gather, and more importantly keep the attention of people in the
industry. He is totally unable, it would seem, to grasp the concept that financial success and industry acceptance is an entire universe unto itself, and in no way related to the musical talents of anyone involved. The amount of drive and labor that goes into being accepted on a national level by anything larger than a local sized audience is astronomical. You have to have a special quality to pull that off. That's why so few people achieve stardom despite the monumental amount of bands who try. You can't just do what the article mentions Haaga did and then expect to get noticed. That's a virtual impossibility. I just hope that if Haaga loves music as much as
I would imagine he does, that he doesn't throw in the towel for good, but instead keeps doing what he must love the most of all...making the music itself.

For me the answer is easy because not only do I not have the desire to pull off that sort of single-minded devotion to one thing for too long, I also have no desire whatsoever to suffer the
pitfalls inherent in a life of professional musicianship. Yes I could handle a tour, a label, an audience and etc...but I could only do so with total control over the in's and out's of the whole thing. I don't like the business of music. I respect the importance of it, and the desire to commercialize its importance, but that's much different from liking it. I'm 37, I feel 37. I am a father, and a husband. I have no college degree (by choice), I work in a bookstore, which I usually don't mind too much, and basically have no future to speak of. But I'm ok with that for now. I still have an obsessive fascination with the present. The rest (past and future) give me big trouble, and I will no doubt spend the rest of my life trying to deal with that. I think in some ways I am hopelessly romantic about life. I am never more happy than when I am alone, and I don't find that to be in any way contradictory when you couple that fact with the equally valid fact that my son is wonderful beyond words.

For me, music is about expression. It really is that simple. It's about getting something out. I don't really care about money, fame, all of that. I don't mind money. I think fame would be a bit of a trade off - ease and comfort for privacy and anonymity - and those things scare me. So I have chosen to focus my creative energy on writing, and playing music. I'm an ok guitarist, an ok writer; well aware of my manifold limitations in both areas, but I am also so happy to not have the lack of foresight that keeps me from becoming a Haaga. I envy his drive, and I envy his ability, but I will never envyhis confusion.

When I pick up a guitar, I do so with the intent of advancing to someplace other than where I am now. I am very restless, but I tend to think that I am always moving forward in some way. To me, there can benothing more succesful than that.

It doesn't matter.

Destiny's child made it. ZZ Top made it. The Geto Boys made it. They made it in the most commercial of senses, in various ways. It occasionally happens here just like any other major city. It doesn't happen a lot anywhere but in LA, New York, and occasionally Chicago. The rest of the country plugs away and gets its occasional hit. If it was easy everyone would be big, but it isn't, it's a bitch, as itshould be, because the whole country wants it too.

Making it to me would be being able to quit my day job and write full time. Lance Walker has made that happen. It won't happen to me, I don't have the nerve to battle it out like guys like him. And nevermind the ability.

You know, I wish I was in Leland right now. I can almost hear the wind in the trees off the lake. I can almost feal the crispness in the air. Almost, except of course that I can't.

This site is clunky

2005-08-05T23:30:00.000-05:00

Am I the only Blogger user who thinks the interface is incredibly user-unfriendly? It seems you have to wade through a million fucking screens just to get anything done. You can look at my blogs and see that the fonts are inconsistent. That's because I fucking gave up trying to get them to fit into some uniform set up that I could stomach looking at. I tried several times to get the fonts to look readable as well as reasonable and finally just decided that it wasn't worth wrestling with any longer.

When I try to look at many people's blogs on Blogger, pictures rarely load all the way through, so I can only guess what they are really of, and that too pisses me off.

What's the big goddamn deal? Is it that hard to program a site that someone can navigate without having to be a member of fucking Mensa? clearly I am not a member of Mensa

Someone has to stop G Love

2005-07-25T22:39:00.000-05:00

I don't want to be the bearer of bad tidings, but if you ever happen to run across this guy:

do the world a favor and fuck him up. He calls himself G Love, which, by the way, has to be the worst white-guy-trying-to-be-black nickname ever. He, in case you didn't know, is the utter douche responsible for the Coke commercial in which he simpers that he would "Like to give the world a Coke and teach it how to chill". That's funny because I would like to take my left foot and shove it ankle deep into his tight white ass, and teach him how to grow a pair of balls. I guess we're not so different after all. And me with my sour ways. I've got to remember to be a uniter, not a divider.

Ahh, who am I kidding? This clown deserves what he gets.

I work in a bookstore

2005-07-25T20:46:00.000-05:00

I am employed by a corporate monolith in the book industry; I won't name them, but suffice to say that unless you live under a bridge, you've heard of them. We're located near the center of town and so we get more than our share of crazies coming in to crap on the floor, pee in the aisles with their member wrapped in tin-foil and look up women's dresses. It's all in a days work for us at your local family store. Last Friday I had the exquisite pleasure of finding a crackpipe in the men's room. Mind you it was at a little past 9:00 am, which is easily well before most decent folks idea of crack smokin' time, but who am I to judge? But it makes you wonder why anyone would go to the trouble of fabricating a home made crackpipe just to go and leave it lying around on a diaper changing station. Usually anything associated with crack is high up in a crack smokers list of things to hang on to, because it's not so easy to grab a crackpipe on the fly. Uhh..or so I'm told.

We're entering a period in our store that for me signifies that the end may well be nigh. It's the joyous days of "The Meetings". I learned many years ago that when a company beings to rely heavily on meetings in order to solve every little problem that pokes up its little head, that's when you can pretty much guess that it's time for you to start looking for another job. When meetings are held so that everyone can pontificate on the subject matter of the upcoming meeting, you can be sure that while the ship hasn't quite sunk yet, it sure does have a lot of holes. That's where we are in my store now. Our boss seems to need to huddle behind her closed door on a very regular basis in order to address God-knows-what covert operation is in the works for that day. It's silly and ridiculous. Especially so when you consider that there is so much to do since our corporate office has deemed our store to be one that needs almost no payroll to operate on. We need every hour someone is there to give, so it chaps my ass to know that the highest paid employee in the store is spending so much time jacking off in her office under the guise of official business.

Oh well, such is life.

As our illustrious leader is so fond of saying... Fuck the world.

Suck it

2005-07-25T00:22:00.000-05:00

I fucking hate money. I hate what is represents to me. I hate the way I depend on it so wholeheartedly. I hate that I spend so much of my life trying to get minute amounts of it so I can barely gather the will to get out of bed and go get a wee bit more. You see, when I was younger I made a pact with myself to avoid the stuff whenever possible, but life has a way of sneaking up on you when you're looking the other way. Here I was, a wasted teen looking for an out. I knew that the college route was out for me. I thought of it as being totally out of the question. I had no interest in doing it. I wanted to find out what life had in store for me without it. And with that brief description, I leap ahead to now. I have a steady job. I'm married, have a house, and a two year old boy. All those things are totally consuming for me for many reasons. I try to keep up with my reading, but I am way behind. I try to play guitar as much as I should, but find that slow going too. I still have no desire to self-promote, and therefore have little to no chance of getting more than five or six shows a year, played to five or six people.

What keeps me going? I can't really say, but I'm still here, crawling along. Make way, I cut a huge swath and I can't be stopped. Oh wait...yes I can.

Carry on.

Hero

Klaus is clearly the man

2005-07-23T22:33:00.000-05:00

What can I say, really? Is there anyone cooler than this guy? If there's one thing I know, it's that Klaus Kinski will always be cooler than anyone else regardless of what they find themselves doing in life. He's the kind of guy who trumps all those who lay before him. What can I say? Some of us have got it, and the rest are like me: silly, restless, and lost.

A couple of quick points before sleepytime carries me away-

There's a coffee shop here located across the street from one of the high schools featured in the film Rushmore. On my many visits there over the years, I have noticed that the place is always heavily populated by young, disproportionately attractive Asian people. By my guess, most of them are Vietnamese. Is it the coffee? Do we have the French colonialists to thank for this oddity? You have to consider that this neighborhood is comprised almost entirely of obscenely wealthy white people. The Asians rarely do more here than manicures and sell over priced gasoline for the countless luxury vehicles coating the streets, yet for some reason they arrive at the beignet shop in droves and lounge about looking really good and drinking decaf by the gallon.
Crispin Glover. Nuff said.
The word "guns" has been inexplicably stuck in my head for hours now, and I have no idea why.
If you are traveling to England anytime soon, perhaps you may want to avoid the underground for a while. Those peace loving bobbies are getting a bit trigger happy ever since the bombings a few weeks back. That poor Brazilian guy got the short end of that stick to be sure. Poor bastard.
I'm way too tired.
I am now going night-night.