I actually posted this on another site that some of you also frequent, so if you've already read this you can give me shit twice.   

     I apologize before-hand. It seemed a good idea at the time could well be my second middle name. My legal middle name is Christopher. I like it and fully intend to keep it (hence, the second middle name reference above). It’s got a good feel, erroneous lettering; it’s even got options. I love being a Jason, but I like being a partial Chris and a probable Christopher, too. My name, apropos of nothing, came from my initials. Both of my parents wanted me to have good initials. I was going to be a J.R., after a damn groovy uncle who’s got a Richard Dreyfuss-ness. My brother, on the way home from a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar, said, “How ‘bout J.C.?” By way of Andrew Lloyd Webber, I am named, in part, after an avuncular grooviness and the Christian Lord and Saviour. Despite such auspicious beginnings to pre-infant nomenclature I’m still prone to bad ideas. Bad ideas and I go way back; we’re old friends, us.

If you think a bad idea is a poor way to spend your time in front of this communal window and find it in poor taste to invite others into an admittedly bad idea, go here *.

If you find bad ideas intriguing and would love a further example, go here +.

If you’d like to just go ahead and get on with the blog already, go here $.


+ In high school a friend dubbed me Circus Boy owing to the fact that I took up balloon animals, cheap magic tricks, unicycling, and juggling. I juggled balls, scarves, rings, clubs, and the mighty, mighty torches. Juggling fire was ever a bad idea clothed in beautiful, buttery goodness. If torches were so cool, I reasoned, juggling flaming tennis balls would be the early nineties pre-shiz-nit. The tennis balls and lighter fluid I already had, fireproof gloves were a bit more difficult and juggling in heavy gloves is not easy, anyway. In our local supermarket I found some thick, but not too unwieldy acid-resistant gloves. They were heavy, but still afforded some movement. Now, mark you, please, I’ve always been alright with words (words and I get along as well as bad ideas and I; in fact, words have helped encroach on some of those bad ideas in the first place) and I was well aware in that youthful mind and body that acid resistant and fire resistant are not really synonymous, but I figured them to be close enough. The game was on.
      That night, in my best friend’s driveway, I dosed and lit those furry green bastards with my somewhat ungainly gloves and started juggling. Contact isn’t long in juggling, but it’s consistent. Within a few rather deftly performed rotations of small globes consumed of the only element that devours the gloves began to melt into very warm and rather uncomfortable pools of supercharged acid resistance burning onto (and seemingly into) my palms. Only when one small (now uncatchable) ball of fire rolled underneath my friend’s Mustang convertible was a cry of alarm raised, but no real harm came of the incident. My palms, by the way, are fine.

If you’d like a cheap masturbatory reference to the last sentence in the above paragraph, go here #.

If you’d prefer to go on to the original idea for the blog, go here $.

If this is already just a bit too stupid, there’s always here *.


$ Believe it or not, this whole idea started with a conversation with my buddy Tim in regards to my music snobbery. I’d been called out again in a previous conversation with another friend with the all too relevant statement of: you wouldn’t like it; it’s popular.
     Fair enough. There’s some truth to that, I must admit. When everybody at the water cooler was talking about Seinfeld I couldn’t stand to watch the show. Some time later, I was cool with it. Hootie and the Blowfish still spook me, however. Another friend succinctly put this fear into words when he said to me that he’d never run across a band before that crossed so many barriers. Elementary school kids were listening with their older siblings and parents and grandparents. Why such a sentiment sends a shivery little chill up my spine still I can’t explain, but it does. In my smugness I’ve previously ascribed to the neophyte/neophobe argument, but when presented with the ‘you wouldn’t like it; it’s popular argument’ I suddenly found a rather simple and childish response.
      Thirty-four is not old, but it’s older than some. In my thirty-four years I’ve actively sought out different experiences through art (be it visceral or whatever the hell its antonym might be) and sought many of them out in the physical, non-internet manner. Further, I’m a collector, greedy and amassing. I’ve held on to albums, tapes, and cd’s for years because of a single sound in a single song. My I-tunes has built up to twenty days of music, which isn’t super-human, by any means, but it’s not a third of my cd’s, not a quarter of my tapes, not a tenth of my albums, and nothing to the sea of muddled memories kicking about in my head.
      My argument to my friend was that the popularity isn’t really what puts me off (though it’s possible that it taints the listening). It’s the impending sense that I’ve heard this before and that, even at that time, it was only okay.

If the mention of ‘taint’ made you giggle and you skipped the chance at cheap sexual humour earlier you can always visit # now, but I’d recommend jumping forward to ^, personally. (It’s still there, I checked.)

If the earlier reference of non-internet searches confounded or interested you, you can go here@.

There’s always the option of seeing whether or not this blog actually goes somewhere by going to $$.



# Sorry, I know I offered it, but it’s just too cheap and too easy (as is that last sentence there). We’ll just have to leave the bad double entendres up to you.

If you feel somewhat cheated and would rather that I hold up my end of the bargain in regards to crass sexual humour, go here ^.

If you’d still like to read the blog, there’s this one $.

I’ll not cheat you out of an easy escape. * is still waiting in the wings.



^ There once was a girl from outside the city
who lamented that her chest was so itty-bitty
so, with no waste of the clock,
she sought out a doc
who then made a sale of two titties.

Uh-oh, cul-de-sac. Its here $ or here *.



@ In my day, finding new music, movies, authors was an endeavor and taken quite seriously. We loved the game (and played it well, I might add). Heartbeeps and Ski School (one and two) on VHS, Necromantic (one and two) on DVD, the companion EP to Grandaddy’s Sophtware Slump, The Soft Machine, Porcupine Tree’s Voyage 34, check. We prided ourselves on it. We knew the locales, the people, the connections, dig?
      Internet killed more than a little bit of the joy, sadly; ones and zeroes diluted the mix. What was the unsettling eeriness of Necromantic when penis torture montages were readily available with a single click? Midget wrestling, musicals, German avant garde-ness, and, yes, even pornography, had become as easy to find as asking google who sang Le Soleil Est Pres De Moi (go ahead, ask ‘em; I had to search out those groovy frog bastards on foot and buy that release in person).
      We felt something of an elite in the difficult finds. This is certainly not to say that we didn’t get burned and screwed in our efforts, but the anticipation added to the whole experience. Now, anybody can come along and say, “Yeah, I googled Air and I didn’t really care for it.” Now, I’ll not ever compare myself to any veteran, but I will say that, “you weren’t there, man; you don’t know.”

At this point, I’d recommend you go to $$ so I can finish this bitch.

But, if you’re tiring and really just not that into my meandering throughout various bad ideas, you can still find *.

If you’re a masochist, you can go back to the top.


$$ So, new. I’m surprised that this doesn’t come up more often. When watching the new Star Trek flick (which, I dug; the geek in me was happy) I was amazed that they decided to use a Kid Rock song as a bastion of strength and rebellion so many centuries in the future. I’d have called on The Secret Chiefs Three and asked Mike Patton to sit in again to give some sound that we don’t know. “New thrash and subversion,” I’d have said. Take whatever umbrage with that Cantina song in Star Wars, at least it wasn’t Kid Rock (which, I understand isn’t even possible in any sense, but imagine Han Solo {shooting first} to Molly Hatchet- wrong, wrong, wrong).
      Why is that Sir Mix-a-lot’s Big Butts has generated some kind of genetic memory and Catherine Wheel’s Mouthful of Air doesn’t even blip on the radar? I love them both, I really do, but, given my druthers, I’d take Catherine Wheel every time. Maybe bad taste couples up with my bad ideas and they hide in the shadows waiting for a moment to spring forth again when someone offers to play me yet another cover of Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight. I like what he did with the original. I don’t need anybody screaming the chorus now. I’ve heard it and it was more than okay the first time. I’ll listen, but I’d really like to hear another Kid A floor me.
      “Oh, you like the noise.”
      I guess I do.

Aaand, I’m spent. Go to *.



* The end.

............

A couple of days after realizing a very noticeable fault in the sonar system of bats and rapidly moving, reinforced steel frames (and the odd thought that only batshit got an acceptable synonym other than scat {which I always found insulting to the truly American invention of Jazz}) I had a young cat apply for an open position in my store.  I noticed that this guy was born in 1990.  After removing my shoes and socks for a quick calculation on his age (thank the gods he wasn’t twenty-one) I realized that this “kid” was old enough to legally kill someone in a foreign land (given that he was properly trained to do so, of course) or to even order a beer with little official hassle at a given distance from the American coastline.

Holy Christ and jumping Jesus Lizards, I thought to myself.  I’d be middle aged if we didn’t live so long now.  I’m certainly older than that goofy bastard that I was for so much of my life ever envisioned himself being.  Thank the gods again that I knew so much when I was younger as every day I age now the world grows more and more alien and incomprehensible to me.  Thanks and libations to all those other gods that xenophobia is not listed among my many faults and short-comings.  (Note to anyone that thinks that I just might have picked something up in thirty-plus years and is willing to entertain the thought that it could be reasonably argued that I do really know anything about anything: a healthy interest in something new will prolong your life or, at least, make the shorter and shorter stay more enjoyable.  You may quote me if you can make any sense of the previous sentence.)

This guy applying for the job reiterated at least four times that if he didn’t have a job (even part-time, which is what we’re shooting for) by the seemingly erroneous and rather exact date of the seventeenth of this month that he would lose his house, be unable to stay with his fiancé and her child, and pretty much cause a near total dissolution of his very existence as he knew it.  Pogo sticks and other veiled hints at blasphemies, I thought.  What the hell is this all about?  Despite my ever-present and, I think, oddly mature and definitively youthful sense of curiosity, I just couldn’t bring myself to ask him.  This enigma’s too rich, I told myself; wallow in it, hold tight to it, appreciate it and don’t be too hasty in crushing it, of solving and absolving it.  I’ve relished it, but I may still have to interview him solely for the fact of seeing why a mere twenty hours a week might save his house, fiance, someone else’s baby (a tidbit slid in during our brief encounter), and his very sense of the macrocosmic view of his reality. 

Bathsheba, Job, and other age-old put-upons, am I this young man’s keeper?  Do I wash Pilate’s hands in not hiring this veritable puppy, new to Georgia, who came with a backpack and a change of clothes to a fiance who may or may not have been dating him when the impregnation occured? 

Oddly, I think of the bat.

Fleeing homeward from the store where I spend the vast majority of my waking life lately, in the pre-dark dusk, at a comfortable speed of a mile a minute (my apologies to the metric folks reading this- I majored in theatre and literature) a small, swooping figure purposefully dove in front of my fast traveling (everything’s relative, of course) company truck, presumably intricately and exactly tracking some variety of a bug the size of a dime or maybe a quarter (although certainly not a Susan B. Anthony dollar) while completely negating the very real possibility of a two ton measure of death traversing an intersecting line of a possibly avoidable bad choice.  It was a dull, seemingly unechoing ‘thwock’ that confirmed that the movement to my right hadn’t cleared the bumper.  Arguments of soul notwithstanding, the lifeless form rebounded and fell behind me as I continued to the comforts of my favourite haunt, home.  I say bat now as I saw no feathers.  No swallow or titmouse this.  (And why do birds get all the funny names?  A search on guano proves that I was pre-emptive in my thoughts that bats get special names for scat; birds, bats, and even seals {honking, horking bastards, they} all seem to seep guano; bat shit, however, seems to be particular useful as sunlight doesn’t taint it by making it less shit-like.  No matter, the guano-thought invaded my mind and remained specifically centered on the bats.  While I may not show the tell-tale signs of xenophobia, I may well still be guilty of specieism or some taxonomic bias.  We can’t all be perfect.)

As it is,liking someone else for the apparently coveted twenty hours a week to schlep shit, clean, answer phones, and all the ad infinitum, I still wonder if I’m missing the feathers.

Holy Ghosts and Talk Show Hosts, how much life do we really hold in our hands?  How much are we accountable in all our decisions and deeds?  How much, in the zen-like addiction to non-duality, are we the featherless bat, the jobless, tatooed cat, the presumably fatherless brat?  While, I'll not take the world's weight on my shoulders, four thousand pounds (sorry again, metric users) is my responsibility and with it I kill things unknowingly.  My witlessness, my very knowledge of suitability may (okay, will) be the undoings of some small, un-, or poorly, vocalized living being.

Avoiding all allusions here, you have to be older to realize just how vitally important and how vastly inconsequential you really are, even in the day to day scheme of things.

I hope that "kid" has feathers to spare; by bastard standards, I'm an alright guy.

     

Why Dont We Do It In The Road - Dana Fuchs Band

Or:


Anenome - The Brian Jonestown Massacre

Coca Cola - Between The Pine

I’m that guy who wears his pants too high.  I’m that cat with the hat.  I used to be the guy with the hair.  I’ve been the poet, the philosopher stoned (which is just as well in the past, as philosophers forget too much even without the aid of narcotics and laugh far too little for my tastes).  I’ve been the zen paradox, the lover of life who argued that man is little more than animal.  I’ve laughed at you falling and picked you up and defended you without your knowledge.  I’ve desecrated your shrines and altars while lauding and applauding your faith in them and meant it all.

I’ve been predator and prey, slid between your sheets and pleased you and let you down; the wise man foolish enough to try weakness as a strength.  I’ve been the wolf whose bite is a caress and the lamb whose throat is willingly bared for the sacrifice.  I’ve poured my libations and drank the well dry.  I’ve further screamed whore and saint in the same thought, damned myself while counting my blessings.  I’ve denounced, decried, adored and spied on the very things I denied and relied upon.

I’ve been the drunken muster, the nervous bluster; the insulting go to hell and the listening wish you well.  I’ve been suave and cool, the outspoken fool, and ever the tool.  I’ve played at Jesus on the dashboard and the fly on the windscreen.  I just may be the wheels on the bus that go round and round.  I may play at the eternal recurrence, but I could be the song gone wrong, the laughing moment of an inappropriate soundtrack.  I could well be but-maybe or I might be what-for.

I may have loved your taste or misplaced hate.  (What’s in understanding, after all?)  I may, as well, have wasted away in seeming complacency.  (What use in planning for the fall?)  I could be some obscenery, some debacle on some ugly seas; then again, I could be the green grass still greening, I could be better things, even in memory.

I’ve been the smartest, the kind one, and, even, the most sarcastic.  I’d like to be the hardest, the Descartest, the fine and blind one, the most elastic.  I’d like to be laughed at with the niggling doubt of fear.  I’d like to be missed, to coerce and sway.  I’d like to be the one that got away.

For all I blather (like that matters), for all I pray (to all gods and to all that pratter), for all my wants and pretty, petty needs, I really just want to be that guy that strangers read.  That’s enough for me.

Inexplicably, I can’t hear the word baby lately without an involuntary hearkening back to an ex.  It’s odd.  This ex didn’t call me baby anytime other than during rather intimate moments.  Coitus.  Sex.  The beast with two backs (which is only somewhat imaginative).  Or just fucking if you’re into the vernacular.

 

What spurred this word-sensory recall is odd in itself.  A song called Baby that I put on my mp3 player and really don’t even know where it came from (a movie soundtrack, maybe; I’m not sure and would rather keep it in the realm of semi-enigma, thank you).  The woman singing doesn’t sound like my ex or say baby in that breathy breathless way that I was oh, so fond of.  So, why should this particular alto voiced singer throw me back to a lost love?  Further, why should this singer make that very word always force some memory of a lover no longer?  Don’t know.

 

Honestly, I never focused on her calling me baby in those le petit mal moments before.  It wasn’t a defining feature of our relationship, nor was it something that I really even made note of at the time.  It’s not that I overlooked her saying this until this song unearthed the memory of it.  I liked the way she said it, but there were other things in those moments that took the focus away from mere words; there were other senses to deal with that took a matter of precedence.  Suddenly, though, I’m presented with random (and not entirely sexual) memories because this one song (which is alright, but not great) spurs on some synaptic past-water appreciations.

 

This word has, because of the song and the long memory, become imbued with a person.  I’ve had smells attach themselves to memories, sounds and songs etch themselves into remembrances, sights and shows fetter themselves to the non-reality of pasts, but never has a single word anchored itself to some vast amalgam of bits and bytes in this messy dog’s breakfast I call a head. 

 

The brain’s a funny thing.  This four lettered ex recollection isn’t wistful or longing, isn’t bitter or recriminating; it’s simply a pleasant memory of a pleasant time and, though, I can’t call the entire experience joyous (or even completely pleasant), it induces a certain feeling in me that’s, well, pleasant.

 

My senseless philosophies may be leaking further into me.  I’m curious (and somewhat hopeful) to see if I can cross-reference everything some day and store all of the previous mes and shes and wes in the same drawer.

 

Enough prattle, the lightning’s out playing carefree in a storm, the thunder’s crying, “lookit, lookit!”  The front porch calls and the wind just might sigh out a “baby” just to mock me.  I can dig that.

 

Here’s to something good for you and your brain not making sense of it.

Summertime Rolls - Mike Dillons Go-Go Jungle


Bah and fie and fuck all, my head’s gone all cloudy again. Granted, I trust cloudy, but it’s an old cloudy that’s cropping up anew.

Some (mostly) inner conversations have hefted that mighty word ‘art’ back to the forefront of my mind and my mind shot back that art is not truth (my mouth was all too quick to spout this out, as well). Back-pedaling in my head, I added that art is a perception of truth, or, at best, an attempt at truth.

Dwelling further on it now, I don’t like art and truth mingling in the same sentence. (Can some one be a segregationist solely in regards to words and ideals?) Should I meet Keats in some kind of after-life, I may give him a little hell for entangling that whole beauty and truth bit. To call beauty truth is, I think, a disservice to both. They stick in my craw, itch in my sleep; they chafe sensitive parts of me.

Beauty is, well, beautiful; but, by its nature, utterly and completely subjective (I dare you to argue this, double-dog dare you, even). Truth strikes me very much the same. Truth is dependant on experience and memories, perception. I’ve been accosted with a truth or two that was damn wide of the mark (and I can miss the broad side of a barn with many, many things). Truth; just hearing it makes my skin crawl a bit and I know I’m not alone in this. So, why do I feel so alone in this? Because I’ve adapted my mindset to the ideal that no one can truly perceive as I perceive. We can cross lines and bridge certain gaps, but the truth and beauty (damn it, same sentence again!) of Great Expectations are mine alone (especially when we start dealing with whatever ending we’re talking about at the time; Dickens, consequently, could’ve stuck to his guns on one definitive and definite ending).

When I was in high school I was prompted to write that art is not limited to beauty, but, rather, a definition thereof. I suppose I can stand with that still. It’s missing something, though. Art is larger and smaller and much more ephemeral. It deserves to be arguable, I would argue.

For some time I was attracted to the shock and awe of some profound piece, the offence and effrontery of some random cat’s attempt at something. I loved gore, horror, darkness, offensiveness; beauty in misery and filth. For some time I loved attainment, achievement, happiness. For some further time I loved the distracted, untouchable quality of certain anti-heroes. Right now I love misinterpreted kindness and unknowable benevolence, saints tainted by humanity. I can’t wait to see what I get hung up on next.

But, back to art. Art needn’t be beautiful for me. It certainly doesn’t need to be true. It may make me think, but I haven’t fully evaluated that idea yet. That may be my mark, but I think I’m afraid of defining art. Defining it hems it in and I’d very much like to keep art as wide and open as it was when I was sixteen years old and just finding new things to prove me right or wrong. Sadly, I do find art dwindling with age and new findings. Then again, it’s not so sad, at all; art hits harder when I find it now. Everything’s a trade-off, I suppose.

Any thoughts?

Let’s start with some shameless plugging, shall we? Tim Kelley's album is now released and available on various sites. It’s very smooth with beautiful vocals and harmonies and lots of instruments making very pretty noises. Check it out and be sure to read the bio on cdbaby.

Randomly jumping to another thought: where are all the memories confined, in the heart or in the mind?

Another friend, who’s very fond of existential crises, recently asked the ever-perplexing question of “who am I, really?” There’s nothing quite like the light banter of the nature of reality and the seat of the ego. The closest I can come to anything even resembling an answer is that old “you can’t cross the same river twice” idealism. And then my time sense gets all angry and I wonder about what constitutes the present. Some niggling, little voice starts spouting shit like, “you can only know things in retrospect,” or “once you’ve labeled a thought or event it’s already necessarily passed from existence.” Know thyself is great advice, but which self, from when?

Defining ‘now’ is most definitely splitting hairs and I’m not really all that hot on definitions at any rate. I think my head keeps bringing it up just because it annoys some other part of me. I kinda dig that I can trust my head to be a pain in the ass to me.

Twitter tweets: how can 160 character updates be so sweet? Facebook continues to make no sense and to make a site devoted solely to “what are you doing right now?” seems, well, stupid. When a friend first told me about it I responded with an emphatic “fuck that”. Now I check it daily. Darth Vader, David Lynch, and Vincent Gallo have sold me utterly on what I fear to be the most profound and insipid idea since I got dragged kicking and screaming into this social site. Note to those with the Twitter jitters, the Nietzsche-bot seems to work for shit. Shame.

Speaking of Facebook, I continue to have more conversations there, despite the revamping of that site that makes even less sense than it previously did and it’s fuck all for blogging. It’s like having a regular hangout where you love the people, but the jukebox doesn’t have any good tunes. The oddest thing about that site is the voyeuristic quality in being privy to so many friends’ conversations that have nothing at all to do with you. Lady Godiva would hate that place, but the family of yentas in my old neighborhood should be eating it up right about now.

Sticking with a theme, YouTube is of course playing around a lot with copyright issues, pissing off more than a few folks. I’ve not really been affected by it yet as I still have to dodge a plethora of performers covering some song that I wasn’t all that crazy about in the first place. I must admit, however, that the brouhaha has been fun. In fact, ownership issues seem to be popping up like some kind of Whack-a-Mole game. Facebook pissed off tens of thousands with their policy changes (and eventually changed them back) and they may or may not own every photo that’s uploaded there. Don’t even try to embed a song on there. Or here, for that matter. I miss my old player on here that infringed on someone’s rights to music that I thought it might be cool to share. Nihilism may be so passé, nowadays, but, on the other hand, it’s possible that you can now define yourself in a specific space and time in just a few lines of text.

Blood Red Sentimental Blues - Cotton Jones



Inasmuch as I’ve ever had a day, back in my day Little Five Points was the coolest place in Atlanta. It was where you found music, shows, books, movies, plays, freaks. God, the freaks, some great folks: ranting madmen, psycho-spiked Mohawks, some dude named Mobious who created poetry by whatever parameters stated for spare change (I got a morbid free form for a quarter). Little Five was something.

One day the tiny concert arena called The Point (where a little goth chick grabbed my balls- and do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a specific goth chick at a Marilyn Manson show, even in a small venue?) moved out of the neighborhood and The Vortex moved in with their giant cartoon skull doorway.* ‘Oh, Christ,’ I thought, ‘here come the yuppies.’ And they did. Junkman’s Daughter used to not feel like a tourist spot, but maybe I just got older. I don’t believe it, though. Junkman’s used to be something else, something more subculture. (Suddenly I’m hearing Tool’s Hooker With a Penis- I can’t fault folks for success, but fuck all, what happened to the underground?)

Underground Atlanta was always something of a tourist spot; the street vendors and performers had to have permits. I like people offering wares outside of accepted agreements. I like people offering other people something for something, even if it’s not worth it. I like effort. And it’s outside of Underground that they drop the peach every year. I should be less bothered by peach droppings than I am. The peach, I feel is not entirely eponymous. The apple works (big or otherwise) and, while I like peaches, they seem a poor settling of a mascot fruit. Bananas grow upside down, you know, there’s something to that, at least.

On my last visit to Little Five Points I could not find one of the three bands I was looking for (and, Jesus, that dude sixteen years ago at Criminal Records even knew who Poopshovel was and who the fuck even knows who Poopshovel was? There was dedication in my day), got rudely denied by a snobbish book dude at Acapella Books (in their second location, dangerously close to Junkman’s current and Criminal’s old haunt) who will no longer take my personal check for a couple of Bob Wilson books (maybe as a business they should invest in Telecheck; I’m just, saying…), and, most surprisingly, found a very governmentally printed sign designating this small area of Euclid and Moreland Ave as L5P. Is there any quicker death to the relative cool of an area than the accepted nomenclature of acronyms? IHOP is, I think, the last one to make that work for them (and if I could smoke at IHOP it would be my favourite place).

L5P.

I don’t like the sound of it. We never called it that. When my best friend saw a guy beheaded between a cop car and some subcompact on the way to an international exchange program puppet show at Seven Stages we just called it Little 5. It didn’t matter that we knew shit of, nor cared shit for, 5 Points. Little 5 was ours as much as anyone else’s. Smoking a joint behind the liquor store and combing through the vinyl and concert videos at Wax N Facts, lunch at Fellini’s pizza. Little 5 was something for us; not a staple, per se, but a bastion of something. In Grosse Point Blank there is the line that goes something like: “you can’t go home again, but you can shop there.” I can’t even shop there any longer. Christ, am I so old already?

Now, fool I may be, but I’m not such a fool as to trust in a static idealism; flux is so much more honest and healthy. Maybe this is another one of those curses of aging things where I succumb to the idealism that things used to be so much more honest and pure (those good old days). I hope to hell that I’m not falling into that trap. Of course it was easier to find new and exciting bands when I was younger; there was so much more new and exciting to find for the simple reason that I was young and hadn’t had the opportunity to hear it. Of course Junkman’s Daughter was overly cool as I had not then found anywhere else to buy bobble-headed Jesi or random Buddhas that also had an attached head shop.

Maybe, just maybe, L5P didn’t change all that much at all. Maybe my perspective has just shifted and I’m currently more prone to ferreting out trappings and finding other things to shun so that I might feel still a bit subculture. I am still interested in nichelessness. Maybe losing your own personal Little 5 is just a rite of passage. Holy Christ and hopping terrors, I may be closer to actually being an adult.

But, then again, L5P may have just polished itself into something more of the norm; they may have cleaned themselves right into something almost respectable. Damn shame, that.




*The Vortex, however, does have a burger that looks unimaginably delicious. I’m not even all that much into eating (mostly it’s a sustenance thing), but that burger calls to me.

The Fix - Elbow


You know, I said once that I don’t want to be human any more. I still don’t. Now, mind you, not something completely outside of humanity, but just alien enough to make the fanatics, wise men, and the over conservative worry just a bit. I want to verb my life solely through certain seeming inactivities and moisten the xenophiles. I want my wants to be written in encoded hieroglyphs and the soundtrack to be just a tiny step too far out of the audible spectrum. I want thunder in my coffee that on warm spring mornings rattles the neighbors out of their sleep and dulcet tones in my scotch that soothes them back to bed on colder evenings. I want blood and cum and spit and noise in all my words and all the wrong people to ‘know’ exactly what I mean and all the right people to wonder just where the hell I’m going with all of this. Which reminds me, where the hell am I going with all of this?

Do you get it, too? That somewhere outside this growing sphere of humanity is still something so new that we’ve only glimpsed it out of the corner of our eyes, something so close that it takes an idiot of a genius to say, “There! That’s what we’re missing!”? Honestly, I feel like I can see the forest, but I can’t find the fucking trees. (Honestly, you can lead a horse to laughter, but you can’t make him think.)

One theory holds that all systems descend towards chaos, another (albeit genre-different) holds that out of chaos comes order. There’s one about no true communication even really being possible and the one that it an infinite universe any possibility becomes a necessity. We’ve got Big Bangs and multiverse orgies, black holes, time as a causality, celestial dwarves, and matter as perception (“Dead stars stink,” said cummings). What I’m saying here is that I think we’re off to a pretty good start…I think, at least, maybe.

I hold much hope for humanity, but not really until it becomes perceptibly more alien than its current form. Don’t get me wrong. I love humanity and many, many examples of it. But, I think that this roughly three pound dog’s breakfast in all our heads is limited only by us and I think that we (as a movement, as a vast patricide of generational idealism) are terrified of moving too fast. I include myself in that, by the way; philosophies, as far I’m concerned, should not be susceptible to eradication at the speed of light. Ideas take time to settle, to root, to grow and fall. But, I lament the seeming lack of curiosity. My god, what was it, you think, to someone who knew the earth was flat to suddenly know it to be round; to someone who knew it to be held up by turtles to suddenly find it circled the sun? Was there joy, excitement, wonder? With my thunderous coffee, I want more and more research on the ridiculous and impossible, more poets honestly frightened by the word “is”. I want more DaVincis of destruction and more Ionescos of creating. I want jokes and jokes of higher elevation. I want the word sacred to somehow become sacrilegious. And I want somebody to mock even that, while others adore it.

I’m holding out for the descent into chaos and a decent order born from it be somehow balanced by each other, for new right ways to be in a constant flux, for more and more boundaries and more and more horizons. I want the trees themselves to breed historians of humanity as we make a fool even of Darwin for all of our damned evolving. New, new, new. (The homophone strikes me: knew.) Information doubling and doubling so fast that rabbits are encouraged to point out that in times of crisis they can reabsorb a fertilized egg, somewhat consciously retarding their growth. “Watership, slow down,” I hear them pun.

Did Nietzsche ever meet his Overman or merely dream him? Small pockets of thought, I think, will kill us all. I see nothing wrong with this as, to me; it’s just the way things seem. I’m just looking for better dreams.

And, though I want it, too (God, do I); I want more than a warm body tightly beside me in the morning to look up (before that thunderous coffee) and say, “You’ve changed somehow, haven’t you?”

Labour of Love - Frente

Recently, one bleary and red-eyed morning, I found myself stuck behind a dump-truck for several miles of a no-passing road. Houses, lakes, and trees blurred beyond us as we sped to our respective workplaces. The back of the dull-silver truck was stamped like a tic-tac-toe grid and there in the middle of said grid was the indelible black-painted word “inedible”. I stared at it for about five miles (which equates to about five minutes, give or take).

Do you ever feel like the world is leaving you behind? “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space”, yet I cannot fathom any reason, whatsoever, to print ‘do not eat’ on a vehicle known, rather specifically, for carrying dirt and rocks. Further, knowledge of the word and the ability to read it at sixty miles an hour might be a completely extensive and compelling argument to its utter and total uselessness. It makes as much sense to me as printing ‘inedible’ on mud-pies in a child’s garden. I don’t get it. The boat left and I wasn’t on it. I thought Please Don’t Eat the Daisies was nothing more than a fun film from a bygone era (incidentally, and a little off topic, pesticides make roses taste a little odd; natural roses aren’t that bad really).

N. Frank Daniels (you can call him Nosh, if you’d like; he’s alright with that) has been staying with me while he promotes his newly released Futureproof and readies his reading in Atlanta (Tuesday the 10th, at seven o’clock, the Highland Inn Ballroom, if you’re hip to it). He recently got an e-mail from a newfound fan (of whom I’m still not sure if she actually bought the book) wherein she asked him about love. For some inexplicable reason I can’t shake her question from that tic-tac-toed dump truck.

Inedible. Honestly, how does that correlate to the heart? But, it’s stuck; they’re linked. Imagine me writing about them now. Somehow, I’m looking to make sense of dirt, love, and junk (read that as a Burroughs reference, please) and, you know what? I can’t do it. There’s no reason for these things to combine in my head. Stamp me with an ‘insensible’ (‘incomprehensible’ would be too much of a compliment at this point and time).

Maybe it’s the worthlessness of the message of that truck that links me up to love. What’s worth stating in love, really? It’s all action; it’s all really a proof. Words sound nice, but when it comes down to brass tacks, what do we ask ourselves: “How do they show it?” That such a situation would sidle up to the love question bodes none too well for some hidden parts of me. I’ve seen history prove the condemnation of many a love and future as the heartbeat of all of it. (And what can I say of present? I can’t define it. When does it start, when does it end?) Maybe it’s that same enigmatic feel of labeling love that ties itself to an adult word of warning about eating gravel.

But, what can I speak of love? I know about a thimbleful. I’m constantly amazed at all the nuances of it. I love my friends, my pets, my books, my music. I love my lovers, ex and otherwise. I love a vast sea of humanity that I don’t even necessarily like (eat your heart out). Maybe I’m on the verge of an epiphany…but, I doubt it. I’m meandering again through MacEzrean cynicism and MacEzrean hopefulness.

Inedible is my heart, inedible is my mind. I’m awash in the non-perishable quality of my thoughts; no mere cookie, me. I need to think some more on this. Or maybe I don’t. Maybe I should just appreciate the small idiocies as I find them and relish all the more my own idiocies brought to light by them.

The Monk Song - Miranda Sex Garden

Her name is Kate (circa ’38) and she’s been dying since the day I met her. Much like her Shakespearean namesake, she’s a cantankerous old broad, but, much to our mutual benefit, I’ve a very certain appreciation of cantankerous old broads. I met her on a dual collection/furniture repair call and we talked; or rather she did. I came by again the following month and we talked some more. And so we continued.

Her biggest fear, it seemed, was living out her last days alone, dying alone, regardless of the physical proximity of one or two others. She confided a few things in me, apparently because I hugged her, helped her with her socks, listened. And despite the fact that I write of her here, I’ll not disclose those things now, as they were hers to share. For the moment they still belong to her and not to me.

Yesterday I learned that she’s back in the antiseptic halls among the same nurses that she so readily chastised on her last visit and the doctors that she wears out continually without limit. The prognosis is less than pleasant from a western medical point of view.

Death.

On my birthday, on my way home, I passed the aftermath of a rather large auto accident. They had cleared the streets and were ferrying one body slowly to the ambulance much like Charon across the river Styx. In that instance I wondered of the family bereaved. I wondered about the twelfth day of Christmas for years to come for them. I pictured some fictional family gathered and someone looking to the door only to remember someone not coming home again. I felt horrible for them.

Oddly enough, though I’ve talked to some of them, I don’t worry about Kate’s family. I’m afraid for her. I’m afraid that, respirator breathing for her and her showing little signs of cognizance, she’s stuck somewhere inside herself, alone and embittered. Even Hitler had Eva Braun. Even if it’s a palace of light and seraphim improving on Bach that awaits us all on the other side, I’d like for someone to be holding my hand when I burn the mortal bridge. I hope the same for her. I figure everybody deserves that. In all selfishness, I hope I can tell her as much before it’s too late.

Thank god for guilt, eh? What might we be without it? How many good deeds are perpetrated out of the fear of how we’d feel if we didn’t do it? “…use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?” I don’t mean to sound the downer, we do better and better, and better we are, regardless of where it comes from; “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”. Tomorrow I mean to do some good by my thinking.  Tomorrow I mean to be a bit better than today.

And to continue with the incessant quoting, I, not surprisingly, keep bumping up against cummings again. Its very inappropriateness makes it stick in my head lately. Remember this one?

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Deer Stop - Goldfrapp



Thud, in all its onomatopoeic glory, is decidedly not the sound that a truck makes when striking a normal sized southern deer at sixty-five miles an hour. Whoomp is closer to the mark, but still quite wide. There's something in one or two tons of steel at a high velocity impact that denies any proper spelling of the sound, like certain African language clicks. The dull implosive sound of two cars colliding is more a sensation than an audible wavelength, really. That same steel striking a not quite fast enough muscular, hoofed quadruped is strangely similar, though not quite so metallic.

At first, nose in book, smoke in mouth, eyes in dark, I thought someone had blown a tire, until I noticed a not so small animal rolling beneath the offending and rather unsuspecting truck. In an indefinably silent way the next moments were cacophonous; Dopplerred cars moving along swiftly and always centered in their world like one of Joseph Conrad's boats, the roll of tires over pavement and muscle, the hooves clattering, the body mass against the earth, the inertia driven slide of fur on the damp street, and the clatter of a side mirror tumbling ass over tin cups after yet another car realized that missing the now still and prone deer was less important than missing the slowing and more resilient truck to its left.

I don't think the initial truck actually killed the deer. The second one may have, but, by the time the first guy had pulled into the turn lane and backed up, the last two motorists certainly seemed to print, clip, and frame the obituary. In a sense of responsibility that I find admirable and sense of assured urgency that I found a bit foolish the man who hit the deer parked, hit his hazards and tried to stop other cars from catching the downed deer. As mentioned above, two of them paid him little mind. Finally, with a break in traffic, and without checking for a pulse or even resorting to the tried and true method of poking it with a stick, he grabbed a hind leg of the deer and dragged it out of the road.

I'm no hunter; cold, early, and guns don't do much for me. I'm more coffee, book, and considerably after dawn inclined. But, I do know that these animals can be shot in the lung or heart and still dart a mile away. I know that two tons of steel can plow into them at speeds not recommended to plow into anything and they can hop up, cast an angry or startled glance and flee the scene without bothering to ask for any insurance information whatsoever. And they bite. And have really sharp hooves. And are damn strong. It was with a kind of hopeful dread that I watched him grab the deer, wondering if four cars had only stunned it or even put up its dander a bit. After all, coming to after the shock of a hit and being dragged by a leg is enough to put even a pacifist on the ready. There was no incident, however; the animal's mortal coil had fully and forcibly sprung.

Finally, the man noticed me and I inquired as to whether he was okay. In my full verbosity I shouted over two lanes of northbound traffic, "Are you alright?" In full understanding of the nuances of inference and language he replied that he was, but that he was a bit rattled and upset at the other motorists. "Fucking people are crazy!" he shouted to me as he got into his truck and drove off.

The deer was picked up moments later by someone who was undoubtedly all too happy not to have to track it and drag it through the woods some early, cold morning. For my part in the ordering of a small patch of sudden entropy I threw away the passenger side mirror that had cluttered so noisily towards me in the previous melee, making a noise that at the time seemed to me to be the somehow severed hoof of the deer, despite having never once heard the sound that a severed hoof would make clicking and clacking towards me on a busy road in the early evening dark. Fucking people are crazy.

I have a new super power heretofore unrealized to me. Added to my ability to clear a room in three to five minutes with a well chosen song, my panache in stringing seemingly innocuous words together in such a way as to confound, offend, and, in circumstances, move to anger any given stranger at certain inappropriate moments, or even my God-given gift of blasphemy, I can now, with a simple succession of key-strokes, make an otherwise public blog private. You're damn skippy; it's officially added to the repertoire.

Like the Earth's yellow sun to Superman's building-leaping, bullet-stopping prowess, the ascension of this thing, the interweb, has brought this previously dormant puissance to light. Granted: it only works once and, in comparison to other noteworthy heroic capabilities, it pales even to the as yet unmovied strength of talking to fish or squid. I should take more note of the blogs that I've closed to you or me or those myriad random folks that like to click odd links just to see. It's entirely possible that I missed a currently unrewarded calling. I used to play a decent game of darts, but I'm pretty sure I'm sharper at this one. I know I couldn't bowl this score.

Thinking about it now, this could be my own new app: Be the best blog-killer in your virtual network. The rules are simple: be kind and polite (to the point of refraining from any vulgarity, whilst allowing the occasional and situationally humanizing damn or hell- fuck, however, is right out); when possible, be complimentary in relevance to the blog; hit only blogs of people that you do not physically know (virtual friends and absolute strangers only). Points would be awarded in respects to previous correspondence, content, form, approach, sobriety, and grammatical and spelling errors. Extra points for being deleted from a friends list while maintaining a sense of decency commiserate with prevalent social mores. Mafia Wars (like Sodom and Gomorrah), watch your ass.

The fact that in a public forum plenty of folk still don't want strangers reading their shit refuses to nestle quietly in my head. I can understand it to a very certain degree and, ultimately and entirely, I'll fault no one for it. But why post web-logs if not for some sense of dissemination? The performer in me balks. The voyeur in me gawks (albeit, to be sure, at less pages).

The worst part of it for me is the feeling that such closings engender. I feel like I've walked into an open house and the host or hostess suddenly realized that, "oh, shit, we didn't mean you." It is, of course, not unfathomable that the MacEzra nom-de-plum (currently replete with a red-haloed lamp pic) should strike someone as a not entirely benign and a quite possibly viable stalker-fitting profile. MacEzrean attentions may well be a frightening thing when blogging about last weekend's barroom banter at your favourite local haunt. Perception is, after all. It still just makes me feel like the guy who took the last beer and pissed on the rug (and, man, that rug really tied the room together). Added to this is the too-close-to-home fact that I like to read blogs by people roundabout my vicinity. I get a kick out of reading people's thoughts on places I may know or have visited. A thousand mile questionable is decidedly removed from a two towns over questionable. And how does one procure benevolence? By repetition, and repetition, definitively, comes from being able to visit more than once. Causing a barring of that door ensures my niche in the 'that guy' position.

Despite the dark aspects of my newfound power, I've no intention of curbing my occasional forays and inimitably infantile infatuation with unknown posters; arguably nihilistic hedonism in vicarious lettered voyeurism still compels me and my responses to such may well read between the lines as "Killjoy was here", but I do enjoy the little waltzes in someone else's dance (a rather sophomoric solipsism, sorry; I'm prone to those, too). I do apologize with a misapplied catholic fervor if I've forced a new censor on any unsuspecting readers or writers. Honestly, I was just fucking around on Myspace again. -Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a sense of virtual trespass and digital wariness out of my ass.