If you know me, you probably know my affinty for music. You know my sometimes...err, eternal elitist attitude towards what is considered credible artistry and inaudible shit. I've always tried to challenge myself to pinpoint a Top Five, and while that task is a veritable "whack-a-mole" (<--promised myself I'd find a place for that reference today), what with my ever-evolving and fluid taste in ALL kinds of music, I've narrowed it down to five songs that I dig pretty heavily and always have. It's no wonder that three songs come from my top three favourite songwriters...and while I will always claim that one particular song is amongst my favourite songs (mostly when drunk), it will usually have a brief stint in the ether only to be replaced by a completely different song (during a completely different booze session).
*However, these five songs would be the "gun to head" list I'd make if there were only five songs I could listen to for the rest of my life.
ANYWAYS...in no particular order...
*I couldn't go too obscure because the website didn't have a couple of songs I might've put on there. Maybe I'll make a "Cory's Top Five Greatest Obscure Songs" list next. Or maybe I'll punch your face.
I used to know my limits. I somehow forgot them on that long dirty highway. It gives you enough time to hallucinate as you dart through the swamps. Some AM station rattling off voodoo-cajun-french-creole-fair.
There are two types of drugs that you should never find yourself tackling in New Orleans. Watch Easy Rider and that'll tell you one of them. Ask me, and I can tell you the other.
Ah, we were killin' old lovers and stuffin' em in boxes. Boxes of booze and pain killers. Driving insanity across state lines. Creole spice and ethanol grade bloody marys. Old world hotels and beautiful dentists on leave from Paraguay. Dilapidated lofts and plant-adorned balconies. Young and hypnotic. Old and mysterious.
Professional sports team owners and young chaps from the South with their Alabama-slide haircuts...they all look the same. Arm and arm with their girlfriends...they all look the same. Drinking for free is always the way to do it, no matter the company you find yourself in. A clever story, a welcome smile, and a helpful accent are useful tools.
I turned down an interview that probably would've been a bad move anyways. My buddy dodges texts that he don't care to read from a girl that he don't care to read. The other scouts the landscape because he doesn't sleep as much. He eats in bed for the nuclear day. Buying art, chasing people, young South American dentists. Buying drinks. Rod Stewart sings and tells me my fortunes...gulps big purple drinks at Phat Tuesdays. Dirty canastas now have my cell phone number and call it when they wanna warm up to something visceral. We're in pictures of people we don't know. We're in pictures we'll hang on our own walls.
New Orleans is the last great city of Old America.
Soooooo, there are certainly some elements that you (and your magic book) pointed out that are running a definite parallel with specific entities knocking around in my brain. In all honesty, it’s a little frightening how accessible those things might be just from a dream. The motion of the crowd is definitely career-oriented and probably falls in the arena of “next-step-in-life” projections. What am I doing? Why? To what end? Is it what I want, or is it what someone else wants for me? Of course. The crowd itself obviously would allude to people acting in a sheep-like manner…aimless wandering, thoughtless following, lives void of self-introspection or personal inquiry…certain traits that are all too common in the American social conscious…and to some degree, the idea of removing yourself from that to generate and appreciate your own uniqueness. I gave you the abbreviated version of my dream. An adjunct detail being that I was actually arguing with someone who was in proximate age to me within the crowd. I’m not sure of the reasons for the arguing, but it almost descended into a physical altercation and I just wanted to get away from the whole afflictive spectacle itself. That’s when I noticed you and the house in the hills…further evidence of my desire to exit the current situation. In fact, he followed me up to the house and you wouldn’t allow him access. Of course I can connect the dots to my current career and certain aspirations I have that I may be struggling with as far as standing on a ledge overlooking the possibilities. But the access offered was exclusive and it was for me.
I suppose with any change, a certain amount of apprehension always accompanies it. That’s probably where the dark clouds came from. The white clothes…saints, hero’s, people who have been anointed with a certain amount of freedom or aptitude that I seek? Possibly. I don’t remember it being your house, per se, but you were certainly the one who allowed me entrance and extended the invite. The greenery (trees, new and thriving life) is interesting because with change, a sense of eagerness and hopeful optimism also makes a fitting co-pilot. I think everyone expects (or at least longs for) a possibility of promise when major change is presented.
I think at this point I’m probably just regurgitating everything you brought to light. I think the drugs are probably inane and rather self-explanatory. Unless my subconscious was telling me that my reality was altered...totally nullifying the whole thing! I’m not sure the specific role they played. Do you think Freud enjoyed the occasional mind-bender? I’d be hard-pressed to assume that he didn’t! Wait, don’t you have a psychology degree???
As far as your role, well…that’s more interesting…I suppose. It’s the first time you’ve showed in one of my dreams, and the dream wasn’t fuzzy or scattered. It was definitely linear and very, very specific. I think I spilled enough of my own drunken guts to bypass offering up any explanation that would further put you inside my head or make me blush on several accounts, so I think I’ll leave that in the reserve tank! I mean, obviously, our friendship has been more on the social/breezy/unassuming side, so that probably lends itself to you taking certain footholds in my brain that may or may not be rightfully accurate. But the fact that you were there is most definitely intriguing. As you are pretty goddamn intriguing.
There's a few things to consider when you've denied all convention and that singular choice has you standing on the edge of mortality. One being the unfortunate regret that you've allowed most of your life to be ruled by your own cock. It's all very elementary and this tragic end befalls too many of one half of the world's population. Too many tragedies. But that's probably not altogether accurate either...
A tragedy is the contradiction of principles. I have no principles.
When my nose exploded and turned into a warm, runny faucet, I understood why they told me not to stumble and fall between legs that didn't belong to me. Just on the outskirts of Camp Pendleton, the cholos who run drugs for the psychos who haven't yet packed their rifles are easy hires. Soldier's wives are nearly as treacherous as the training their husbands receive. Assassins in their own right. It's no wonder military kids are so fucked up. So as I sat tasting my own metallic liquid insides, tracing blind spots in my vision, with my head swelling up like a balloon, I realized the other thing...
So the world is showing evidence of ending in 2012 I'm being told. At least it can surely be confused as preparing itself for this fate. So I run in the mornings to enjoy the finite sunrises we still have in our account and today I took a withdraw and ran early...long before sunrise.
2008 has reached it's end and drew it's last breath (a heavy one, at that) tonight.
While running Town Lake I noticed several things. Mostly visceral observations that were inescapable. My tendons popping in my knee, leaving me lame for the remainder of the day and reminding me of my ascension in age. 37 degree weather probably doesn't help. Two homeless men sleeping hunched over bobbing their heads up and down from sleep deprivation on the benches of the pedestrian bridge remind me how important constant movement and metabolic rate are to warmth. They seem to be losing their battle with the cold and their breath is tangible and in rhythm with their shivering.
In the great opening of Auditorium Shores stands a 30 foot wooden clock. Lighted from all sides in the blackness of night it stands like a spooky pagan idol just under the skyline of downtown. It's being tended to by a handful of workers who almost seem hypnotized and at the behest of it's ordering and directive, almost life-like nature. It's gears turn and grind behind it's oval face, and it's weapon-like hands move frantically over Roman Numerals. There are artful spires and gothic towers surrounding it throughout the neighboring grounds and they tower above me as well. There are little campfires to either side that are surrounded by it's keepers and ultimately it's guardians. You can hear their inaudible conversations in the quiet, still cold. In time, it will be burned down.
I stand alone and while looking through my own breath, I'm a little spooked by it's presence. It's dark, really dark. There are four or five people tending to this clock and it stands there, like a real-world incarnation of the Clock of the Time-Dragon from the novel I'm reading right now. It's alive. Like it jumped out of the pages of the book I'm reading and landed in Austin.
On the news today, people filed into the park to write down their resolutions and fix them to the clock. Everyone is encouraged to do so. 2008 has left scars on the American psyche and I think we are determined to find a suitable send-off for this year. Write your wishes, your fears, your resolutions, your hopes, and dreams. Your lusts, your sleepy boredoms, your lies, your truths, your demons, your saints, write yourself on this clock, because time is ticking down. The TV news told me today that when it does reach it's finality, the whole thing is going up in a ball of flames. This morning, witnessing it's birth in the pre-dawn hours, I have a feeling it won't go easily, and I won't be there to see it.
In the dark morning light it shines brighter than the moon. Like it's trying to outshine the great lunar orb. Almost as if to exact an ancient revenge from some distant and long forgotten time.
It stands there in abject denial of it's existence as a temporary figure amongst the skyline. I don't think it was gently accepting it's fate, and why would it...set ablaze amidst selfish cheers for wishes and desires going up in its smoke and laying lifeless in it's ashes. It bore little resemblance to the phoenix, but I think if hope was animated, it would rise from the night and pour solid magic on those who ooh'd and aah'd.
A few things remain that I would like to throw on that fire before all time finally stands still.
I have it on good authority that there's reason to believe she's in possession of certain character flaws that I've stepped in the ring with before. I've really no inclination to take one on the jaw again in that manner. Last time took awhile for the swelling to go down. So I won't go on allowin' my delicate sensiblities to be bruised or maladjusted with this one. I think I'll go on about my own merry way, thank you very much.
Last night, what we talked about...it made so much sense. But now the haze has ascended; it don't make no sense anymore.
I might be an American aquarium drinker. I'm not quite sure yet, but I've been feeling this way as of late.
When you've found yourself in the arena of moral relativism, nobody carries a yardstick, so don't count your steps in or out. And just because you find yourself looking coyly down your nose at me while sipping your drink doesn't mean I'm going to melt away into the gutters.
I hang my head in dutiful reverence for your task at hand.
The Western skies are full of blue. My chest is full of pressure. Tangible pressure. Self-administered pressure.
You try to cradle humility in your voice, when everyone is telling you to speak your mind. But I hold off, because harmony and balance were etched into my psyche and personality when I was a formative child, and they found a welcome, warm home.
I have a loud voice, audibly. It's easy to hear me. I say what I want when I want. I've no problem broadcasting my thoughts. But it's usually reserved for those who can only hear what I have to say...and what I have to say is usually drowned in an effort towards tactfulness.
I was burned for my tact tonite. Like the way she burns through cigarettes and glances throughout the room. Tall and long, dark hair and eyes. "Cory Will...just say what you have to say." It's that easy, huh? It's not that easy. The world preaches self-interest. That's unfortunate.
JUST BE WHO YOU ARE. LET THE WORLD KNOW WHAT YOU THINK!! WE CARE!! BECAUSE IT'S IMPORTANT.
Really...it's not.
It's self-masturbation (<--redundancy, but I don't police grammar anymore). Self-control is admirable. Nobody fucking cares what you say in the end, or for any longer than measurable time allows. Nobody here anyways. It's my admiration that's reserved to those who have restraint when it's needed.
You cross lines, I'll tell you what you need to know. But I won't tell you my every thought to cripple your knees. The modern world preaches self-promotion and self-interest. Your words plummet in value when it's a constant stream of meaninglessness and you've flooded the market with them. You should know that.
It's as easy as Everest. There's no oxygen up there, and when nobody can breathe, they don't care what you have to say. There's more pressing issues, and you should know this at lower elevations. It's elementary.
It's easy for everyone else. It's a projection theory. Saying everything and putting it out into the atmosphere just to see what comes back. Just a bit of tactical preparation, or strategic patience is worth looking into, if for nothing more than an exercise in veneration.
Someone telling me something they don't like about me when what they mean is themselves. That's why mirrors exist. If you'll look across the room, you'll see one hanging in the back of this old dirty hall. They tell you stories that you need to know about yourself. This one's no different. It'll do that here and now for you on this cold night. For that I can offer no excuse...especially on her part. How can I? Your thoughts are not mine. I have my own. You don't need to project them onto me.
I hang my head in dutiful reverence for your task at hand.
I'll handle what I have to handle, and I won't make apologies for that. My ears have been filled with ethereal plans that people have. My ears are pinned back to confront those things that threaten me, but yet, my ears somehow find themselves devoid of harvest. None to my surprise. I just say what I mean, and mean what I say. Sell myself short at times? Sure. But who isn't guilty of that? I know what's within reach. Grand dreams are going down a waterfall in a barrel. Don't come down on me for things that you can't deliver. It's not my fault that you can't find the strength.
Coming from the burning side of the building, it's hard to ask for water when you struck the match on all of us.
So I've spoken. So let it be written.
Write your own pitiful story before you write mine.
Hemingway once said, "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." Well consider me in need of a tourniquet.
I guess everything one day converges in a blossom of all that's come before. I'm the third generation of calloused hands, but mine aren't near as rugged as those who've come before me. Not to say that I don't know how to lift my weight, but comparatively this world laid me on a pillow, like it did with most of my generation. I will say this, I'm a good mix of what's come before. Mom's side was of English descent and the man fought over the skies of Germany, toppling the "Thousand Year Reich", spent two years in a Statlag Luft Nazi prison camp, came back and built our ranch with his own bare hands, and virtually controlled what could very well have been a mess of a situation when he returned. The old folks in my hometown still tell me how much I look, talk, and move like him. 5'10" stature and an iron jaw...dark eyebrows. The other, of German descent, worked the land in all it's harshness in the unforgiving North Texas plains and drank too much. He fathered my own father and his two sisters and left the world before he was probably meant to. I feel the same weaknesses in my blood that drove him off the road. He was hard, and he was hard on my father, which made my own father hard. My father and mother, because of their own intricate lifelines were both humbled and gracious for the life they were given. They gave life to me, and in my blood rests their lessons.
Quiet and loud. It's always been quiet and loud. In my head.
I was born on the same day as the Jonestown massacre and I think maybe God works on a balance. Like He did after the war...and all wars. Maybe I took a place that was vacated that day. Not too many people have that aesthetic on their day of birth, but I do. Not that it means anything, but not that it doesn't. My father bought me a gun on the day of my birth. November 18, 1978. 10:10 pm...lucky, "make a wish" baby.
When the smoke clears and I feel the rabid animal calm down that has been running through my internal systems for as long as I can remember, can I see where I've come from. I think something snaps and focus floods the view. I've forever been a pack animal, running with the moon's cycles (alone and sometimes with the fleet-footed), and I've had my "dark night of the soul." My own la noche oscura del alma...then humbled by some sort of light from the places we can't see in this life. Not too sure if I'll have another, but I do know what I know because of it.
I have no tattoos. Only scars that I earned, and I like it that way. I'll be as clean going out as I was coming in. Sometimes I find myself turned inside out like a dumpster, opening to the world the ugliness and repulsive things that I don't like, and others I'm too goddamn charming for my own good. I've been in love three times in my time...or what most people would consider as such. But only one almost broke me. They all had their significance, sure...but there's only one that I can't seem to shake. There's only one that haunts me and leaves me incensed. Couldn't navigate it the way I wanted, and it felt helpless. So ridiculously helpless.
I've been blessed. Blessed in the way a desert sees rain, or a farmer reaps a harvest. I've been blinded and ungrateful at times...disregarding these blessings, but they always seem to unearth themselves in a manner that makes me feel like I'm living a movie outside of reality. All I have to do is look around. My life has never bored, and when this gift of life was passed to us by the powers that be, isn't that all you can really ask for? Boredom is humanity's greatest enemy (a fitting co-pilot to pride), and I've done a bang-up job of keeping it at bay. Even in this post-modern world. But I could bleed on that over wars and wars of nothing and nothingness. There were times when I felt my innocence was raped in a red light. When a dark alley felt like the best place to call home. I could turn a nuclear war on it's head behind my eyes, and it's come close, but I duck it somehow. I think God gives us the grace to forget that which causes us to give up. At some point you get reeled in from the depths, like showered convalescence from a nurse. Even if by a shoestring.
I knew at a young age that things were going to hit me hard, and that I would feel more than maybe I should, like a slender skiff caught in a gulf storm, but that's what makes me who I am and I don't make apologies for that. None whatsoever. I have found that the fates place lighthouses in your view. Angels on Earth who walk amongst us. They hand us swords and scrolls to navigate this mess, and I am resigned to believing that EVERYONE has them. It's our own choice to pay attention to these signposts. To breathe their message and let it nourish us...to ignore or take heed. It's also my belief that we are given the opportunity to play that role. To impart, and advise. It's the way the universe perpetuates it's existence. If we didn't know our way, or have those who tell us the way, it would collapse on itself. Luckily, enough of us have decided to take heed and allow the pillars to hold us above sea level. It's how we're all connected even when we don't have the slightest fucking clue as to why we're here. It really is the universe's great secret...told to us in all its magnificence. In it's simplest form. Each other. That's the secret. It's hard to understand and simultaneously, to ignore. We go wayward, but we're always pointed back.
I've been told to share my gifts. I've been told to express what comes to light. I've been told that if you have a story, then open up your mouth and say it. But I've tried to avoid sanctimonious self-promotion. In an effort to avoid the dirty underside of all that I've seen in myself. Life isn't always pretty and neither are we. Like a foghorn blowing through the night exposing our whereabouts when we try to keep them hidden. Everybody turns their head and we shy away.
I've had a trying test of patience, and I think that is the great lesson that whoever is running this show is trying to teach me. Gratefulness and patience. I think that is the singular lesson that I'm meant to learn. Because it goes against every instinct that I naturally have. I think it's the nail that will be driven in my chest when my heart stops beating. Because it's so hard to resign to it...it's what I need to learn about my life. It's my great teaching. My personlity is one big whiskey-soaked, shit-stomping song that breaks beer bottles on the bar and waves them in your face. It's been told to calm down and let cooler heads prevail, but it's awfully painful sincerity has carried it this far, and I won't shake it without a fight. Trouble has been a good friend of mine...no doubt.
But the world gave me a big hug on my thirtieth...and it told me, point blank, that I still have a few laps to run in this big race. No matter what I've convinced myself of, or doubted in that time.
I hope and pray that someone out there is burning a candle for me.
Her room was always a light tan color. I think they call it taupe. Whatever the fuck it was called, you could see it light up when the sun would rise and cast it's warmth throughout the room. The rays would always be carved up by the dark tree limbs and dying leaves. I climbed that tree and took a sepia picture. Sepia makes things look more "important" or "nostalgic" I suppose. Sepia...that's what color her room was, I guess. Or it seems that way in my memory.
Sentimentality has always been a bane in my psyche like a double-edged, razor-sharp sword; because while it adorns your spirit with warm memories that shudder your soul, it's found itself to be quite adept at poisoning and folding and turning you inside out when the whole damn ship sinks. Plus, I have a photographic memory and a phonographic memory. I can remember anything. I usually do. I envy those who forget.
You can always tell when Fall arrives. Everything goes orange. The sun...the sun on the towering buildings downtown are painted orange. They don't host that bright yellow Summer sun anymore, or wear it like a uniform of freedom...they relax and take on a more somber stance like they're awaiting something; almost like they're putting on a sweater to weather the coming days. They squint their eyes and acknowledge the passing of yet another season in the many seasons that find them standing tall watching over us as we pass. Passing along, and eventually passing away.
The days stretch their arms and legs and yawn at the daylight much earlier than they did in the scorching halftime show of Summer. Your bones can detect the air surrounding them dropping in centigrade and you feel Autumn's approach in your solar plexus. Your lips dry out and your skin fledges it's new layers, much lighter than that which you worked so hard on during Summer's solstice. The Autumn envelopes itself around you and cools you down in a slow step process, bringing your body's core to it's new destination...it's new season.
She would always wake up and start the coffee-maker if we were still detoxifying from the mass amounts of pain killers and alcohol and madness we ingested during the night before; descending into some mysterious place scattered between Heaven and Hell where bad was good and good was evil and evil was exciting and excitement was purity. If it was a work night, she'd grab a Red Bull for a quick inoculation of combustible fuel to ignite her brain activity and her movements because she was usually late. So was I. I'd call in and walk outside into the cool morning while drinking my coffee and stare at that tree; pondering where I was, who I was with, why I had never felt this way before, if I would ever feel this way again, and how I could possibly imagine myself (or strategize) getting through all of it constructively, without complete and utter breakdown or notions of suicide, when she left and it was over.
Fall would have arrived for the 5th time since that one. The soundtrack to many of those moments I played today on a day much like all those other cold Autumn days. As soon as I walked out of the door, the song hit my head like the cold hit my skin, sending chills to my insides that had been previously warmed in a bed and hot shower before readying myself for the day. Because I've been there before, the jukebox in my mind firespins that song when it's surrounded by that first Autumn cold. Late to work again, I dug through the CD case and pulled out the solidly scratched CD that we listened to over and over again on her bed with the windows open, letting the first breezes of the Autumn cool roll through her bedroom and blow the thin curtains to either side; and blow our minds wide open to real possibilities. Saying nothing. Just listening. But the insecurities and paranoia couldn't be blown away. They only sat there with us enjoying the comfortable temperature. They'd stick with us till the bitter end and eventually become our bitter end.
Bows and Arrows. Loud and jangly. Lot's of treble. Vintage guitars and shoddy strings emanating from the stand-up piano into the lo-fi production microphones. A staccato bass and drum heads that need to be tightened. There's a slightly out-of-tune harpsichord, and chaotic melodies of pained regret and optimistic surrender. I remember the way it felt, I remember what it meant, and I remember how it sounded. I still do. I did today. And I'm embarrassed.
Paint me in your arms. You're the only person to ask me that question in the last 4 years since the last girl asked me that question. Paint your landscapes, I'll paint my soundscapes. You're a tall drink of water for sure. Like a thunderbird. Kimberly, infinitley. Good guy, best of luck. Jabbed stupid in a state of trance, like a first dance, pulling myself away. Sold in a market next to the peaches. You have to be soft. I know you are. Bullets for the gun, but the gun shoots through the paper thin transparency of pulling punches. Radio voice you tell me I have. Well it's been heard, but not by enough people. They tell me, "If you have a story to tell, open up your mouth and say it."
Coward is a heavy word, which has been tossed my way by the most cowardly people I know. Everybody's problems on a platter for everbody to see. Poor people and their poor problems. Cowards mirror themselves in the most selfish way. Casting their own sticky curse on others. They don't own it. They don't own it in the way they should own it. It's easier for somebody else to carry. It's easier to sentence condemnation to someone else for the muddy river that runs through their own murky veins. It's somebody else's problem. That's the way the world spins in it's madness of reckless kissing other people on the lips like some kind of disease with a laughing sneer. Central American countries don't hold a cure for it...just so you know.
I feel it necessary to offer a bit of social commentary on a particular subject that has pained me for quite some time. I've remained silent, and kept opinions on the backburner of discretion, but I can be silenced no more. For several years now, the gears have been slowly grinding my indifference to a slow pained "fuck all" for this particular subject at hand.
Pitbulls.
What the fuck?
I'll start by saying, unless you're this guy, or you fall under one of the following self-defining categories, you should never...I repeat NEVER claim ownership over a pitbull:
~ White ~ Middle-class ~ NOT a rapper ~ College student ~ NOT in a music video featuring rappers ~ Child-rearing parents ~ Expectant parents ~ You work at a Fortune 500 company NOT called Bad Boy/Rap-A-Lot/Death Row, Inc. ~ Preachers ~ Michael Vick*
*With regards to the latter, you might even want to give dog-ownership (any breed) a second-over.
I see no regalness, nor choice-affirming endearment in the breed AT ALL, actually. I think it's been made widely understood by prevalent hip-hop culture that these animals are not to be confused or mistaken as heartwarming companions. I believe it's been shown to be blatantly obvious that these animals are a respectable substitute for your firearm...should it go missing or become defective. Also, in special circumstances, they've found themselves to be successful instruments for gambling. Sharing the characteristic of inflicting wounds, that can only be deflected with a bullet-proof vest, is not something I am looking for in a personal companion of the natural world...and I don't know why your dumb-shit ass is either.
Labradors, Boxers, German Shepherds, Golden Retrievers...these are acceptable breeds.
I run through Zilker probably 5 to 6 times a week. I run the trail at Town Lake almost every day of the week. I've seen more pitbulls than I've seen the Stevie Ray statue. It's fucking unbelievable!! Every time I pass one of those savages they stare at me with those beady eyes and I know what they're thinking. "I could dismember you in 2.5 minutes, shit in your carcass, and skull fuck you when I'm done." AND THEY COULD!!! What is appealling about owning something that can make splinters of your bones???? Who needs an animal that can bite with 742 million pounds of pressure per square inch????
Not a week ago, Robert comes in to visit Austin, escaping from Hurricane Ike. He drops by for a visit at my apartment and says at the moment of his arrival, "Did you know you have a baby downstairs?" I say, "No, I did not know there was a baby downstairs. Those folks are a little strange, and I've never really paid much attention." To which he says, "Well when I was walking up the baby opened the blinds and there he was."
Not five minutes later we're sitting on my balcony sharing a smoke and swapping a few stories. All of a sudden, underneath our feet we hear something reminiscient of the scene in Jurassic Park where the T. Rex has his way with the plexiglass in the "dino-flaged" Explorer. I look through the cracks to see what hound of hell has taken residence on the second-story balcony of my apartment complex and I see a three-foot tall, 150 lb. bag of muscles in the shape of a pitbull. His head was the size of an NFL regulation football. He's apparently not a fan of our conversing above his head, which leads me to believe that if he is irritated by something he cannot see, nor most likely smell, or even get an exact bearing on, he is probably not a fan of anything else. What lays beside him??? A turkey. A fucking whole, cooked turkey is resting half-destroyed (I assume as his meal; by the way, it was 400 degrees outside...it ain't turkey cooking season) in a rusty basting pan right beside him. Wanna know what's wrapped around the basting pan?!?!? A fucking 20-foot rusty tow-chain. A. TOW. CHAIN!!!!!
Pitbull? Check. Dead turkey? Check. Rusty tow chain? Check. Baby inside? Check.
Cursory words. Action verbs. Running, sitting, wanting, choking. All of it heard, You ain't the first, Working, hurting, laughing, you're joking. Paint. Write. Sing. Tonight. Stop with the shit, Just quit, Pick up that song and put your heart in it. New. Blue. Get it right. Some birds say, Even though they're in pain, "You don't know what you're doing." I don't pretend to disagree, Or even have a clue. And I hate to mention this, But neither do you.
There are puncture wounds in the middle of his arms that elicit questions regarding drug use. He almost wishes it was that tragic, but they only drew his blood because he needed a physical. He's at that point where reflection and action find themselves to be awkward bed mates. One is always looking one way, while the other is looking down a short road. On recent trips he's reminded of that time when there was a wolf in his veins. When his fangs were killer. Razor sharp. They tore rips in the fabric of the universe. They bit through the most durable of hide and disarmed any obstacle that stood in his way. Now they find themselves dulled, and the wolf lies lazily in the sun, unable to find the top speed in a stride that used to bring down the most formidable of prey.
Twice divorced. In love once. He washes the wine out of the coffee cup that he drank the night before. And he washes the coffee out to make room for the wine in the evening when he sits and thinks. He finds his art to be quite like a hair cut. He cuts off the excess only to find it growing back. In fact, there's been times when he's wished it would stop growing and he'd find other things to fill the mass that grows from his head. He prays that the thoughts stop appearing and that a bloodlust for material, or women, or hobbies would take it's place. That would be manageable. That would be copacetic. That would be structure. It would be a sterile environment instead of the bloody volcano of ash that spews in a fit of chaos out of the top of the summit; raining down and covering everything in sight, making it hard to find your bearings. He's lost his faith over and over again, only to find it waiting patiently around the corner each and every time. He's sentimental, and it bodes well for him.
He types by looking at the keyboard; never the screen. He never learned much about the particulars of typing, but then again, he never learned much about the particulars of so many things that beckon those unlike him. Business, money, pride, conceit, television, cars, greed. He missed out on several of these things, and he feels it to be to his detriment. But he is a machine. He's a machine of memory and recall. And he's a machine of words. He can paint with ten fingers and no brush. His canvas is a blank page, and his reward is tangible. It sits in front of him to be reviewed and analyzed, examined and critiqued. It's his. He made it. He did it. It was owned by nobody but him. He thinks. He thinks. He thinks. He thinks. He thinks. He thinks.
He thinks about self-awareness and what that means. He watches the sun rise and what that means. He watches people chasing people and what that means. He runs and he runs. He appreciates good advice and what it means. When he finds himself listless he finds ways to escape it; shedding all that drags him down. He's an escapist of sorts.
He's held jobs. He's ditched jobs. He's held women. He's ditched women. He's seen the heights of certain hills, and seen the depths of a few valleys. So he chooses his direction of travel carefully. His body grows old, but his mind won't let him lose any edge. He has a difficult time making the two connect on an operative level.
Drugs don't help. They excite, but they only delay or further the confusion. He wonders what the hell he's doing. When ideas race, he writes them down. Napkins, mirrors...he leaves himself voicemails. He finds that it's easy to be aware of inspiration, it's easy to be inspired; almost a natural instinct to him. But funneling that inspiration is a violent process.
Sure, he's thought about checking out, but that's not his way. It doesn't fit...in any way. He doesn't want to be remembered as "tortured," because he certainly wasn't.
Sigh...forgive me....this has been a long time coming....
When those looks you've got have run out of gas, good luck finding yourself in the ashes that remain. Good God...you stupid fucking idiot. You're a nothing girl. Nothing whatsoever. A fucking bookend for my interests. Tonight I normally would've called to talk to my loved ones to get me through the stress, but the simple fact of the matter is I just don't fucking care. Because you're forgettable. In fact, I would purposely not bring you around the people I cared about the most because I was fucking embarrassed by you. Because you're a vapid, shallow shell of a woman. You drink TOO MUCH. YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO HANDLE YOURSELF. And you drink too much because you can't handle the cards that life dealt you. It became too much. I remember the exact moment in time when I was done with you, and there were several. Something inside me tells me how fortunate I am to be rid of your methods and bullshit pandering. Actually, you're despicable. You're everything I've tried not to become throughout the whole of my life. What was tricky about you was the way you hid everything behind a mix of attraction and pseudo-humility. But you don't give a rat fuck about anybody other than yourself. It's your world and the rest of us are just paying rent. So you could possibly come at me with the dissent that is offered for those who know they're getting (and furthering) a situation that is wrong for them. Save it. I know all of this. I know where I went wrong. I guess we all do with some people. It's the great fault of everyone of us. I wrapped you in a package of something that ran parallel with what I was looking for because you were so good at talking the same speak that I wanted to hear, but you placed yourself into that category of people I despise when you opened your mouth on one too many occasions. I don't really blame you. Trust me, I blame myself more than you know, but I've got to say...blessed is how I feel to be out from underneath your love for the insane. And you are insane. The shit that would come out of your mouth...shit man. Someone telling you how pretty you are and the attention you need will get you through any day. YOU HAVE NO DEPTH. You use the things close to our hearts to draw people in, but you FUCK THEM over and over again. Even your best friends. Fuck...even your family. I can't even look at you the same way. You're fucking ridiculous. To think that I even gave you a tenth of redemption and encouragement to get over the stupid decisions you've made makes me cringe. Yeah, I judged you. Even though I wouldn't let you know that. Because people who do what you do deserve it and rightly so. We're not young and blissfully blind anymore. So you think I'm the asshole. Because I was honest? Honest about everything. But you hide, and you take, and you take, and you take, and you take, and you take. The best part of all of this is that I couldn't really care any less (other than the five minutes its taking me to write this), but I've let you say the things that you've wanted to say. All the while staying quiet and letting you live your life the way you want. You might even be able to group me with those people who don't have the balls to tell you what you need to hear, but I don't care because it's really not worth it. I don't want to hear your excuses and your pleas for forgiveness. I don't want to invest myself in a lost cause. So yes, I'm not saying this to your face, but it's because it's not worth the effort. It never was. I rolled my eyes then; I roll my eyes now.
Okay...I feel better.
Now we smile, and we put one foot in front of the other.
Do me a solid and throw your flares in the air every now and then, so I can scour the western horizon and know that you're still fighting the good fight. My overpour of emotion always makes people react differently, but I've become more adept in accepting it as the fiber that stitches me together. I also know when to rapidly punch the off button. Both have been valuable tools in times past, and I expect their usefulness in the future. I just recognize your smile and I'm golden.
Bowling. 130, 119, 145...satisfied. Work people are crazy. Crazy blind. Anyways. Johnny Cash bar. They don't serve nothin' but beer and wine. The ex keeps rattling off shit about things that don't mean shit. Why did I come here? Some client shows up, I chain smoke mostly cause I'm bored, pop my knuckles, slam beers, sweat in the sun. The ex keeps clamoring about nothin' that shows nothin' ever changes. God, what a waste of time. Good etiquette and charm keep the desire to stab her eyeballs out with a wine corkscrew in check. Drunk and discordant. Try to pay. Credit machine doesn't work. It's 4 million fucking degrees outside. Good etiquette and charm make me walk to the nearest ATM to pay the nice bartender who always remembers my name and never even asks me what I want. She always just has my beer of choice ready when I walk in. I do it cause I might ask her out someday. I do it cause I'm not quite even with my bearings. Swerve home a bit. Shower up...call the buddy...he's already high (of course). Give it a coin flip if he shows. -----------> Head out to meet the sister and her fiance and an old friend. Find the old friend at the bar where we were supposed to rendezvous. See her mom drive off. It's closed. Some homeless vagrant yells warnings to me about the dangers of crossing the road. I tell him to fuck off. See my friend. She crosses the road. Vagrant yells. We both tell him to fuck off. Irish bar. Mexican beers. Sister and fiance show. Buddy sends text as to his whereabouts and estimated time of arrival. I'm gathering info on the caravan proceeding to the concert. GIVE ME YOUR EYES, I NEED THE SUNSHINE. -----------------> Opening band. Not bad. Beer line. Bad. Meet up with the buddy and another work buddy and another work buddy. Someone who looks a little like Harmony Korine (of course) wanders up with the most intricately-rolled weed cigarette I've ever laid eyes on. I take four or five pro-style rips. Pass to the sister's fiance. Back and forth, forth and back. Sky high. Drunk. Music. My 5th to 11th favourite band (depending on the day) launches into their set with new haircuts. New songs. Wolf. Parade. Is. Fucking. Awesome. Texts flying again. Running into people I sort of know. My favourite person from work (she's an angel) sends word that she's here with her husband at the back of the bar. I'm in fucking outer-space. Which direction is back? I spill my guts in a text message to her about the shit-fucked cycle I'm in. Would later rescind those words in a bout of sobriety. Besides...I'm in no shape to put a face to this circus music I find myself in tonight; for I know that she's hanging out with the girl of my dreams tomorrow. The girl who could halt my ramblin' ways. Settle me down. Calm my mind. Go the distance. Float in the ether. Or at least, that's how I envision her right now. She's perfect. Right now. She's her friend. I wouldn't be a very good report if I were to show face right now. I'll pass. Wait till I'm on top of the game. Spring like a cobra in the tall grass. One leaves, another leaves. WHY'D SHE LEAVE??? WHERE'D SHE GO!?!? I yell. I'm told to stop. The ex keeps sending texts. Relentless. I keep drinking more. Drunk girl drives down from Dallas. Keeps sending texts. Some folks float, some are buried alive. Sweaty. It's hot. Beer is cold. Limes are sour. Cigarettes are burning. So am I. --------------> I launch into a diatribe to some poor fool who unfortunately was standing within earshot and who hardly reasons to hear about how Wolf Parade are "transcendent." Or how "their music speaks." Or some shit. I don't remember. Another leaves. I can't find the sister, or her fiance. I squint ALOT. I stand on tippy toes. Someone asks me if I'm high. HA! Yeah man. WAY up here. ---------------> I hear the closer. Satisfied. I leave. Sweaty nights. I respond to the texts. I respond to the pull. I respond to the cycle. She comes over. I take her home. I leave. I turn up the radio and look at myself in the rearview mirror. I lost my fucking glasses. ---------------> It's god-awful late. I intend to scare up some trouble. No answer. The darkness falls over me. ----------> I find myself surprisingly lucid the next morning, and surprisngly adept at exerting self-control, when my intentions may have been nothing but the contrary. I pat myself on the back. GUILT FREE MORNING!! Then I respond to another text. I laugh at self-control. It's literally 7am. Good shit, I just went to bed. She comes over. She cries. She doesn't like the panic. She doesn't like the anxiety. She doesn't like the existential rambling I wrote up on my mirror at her expense. How she didn't see it last night is beyond me. She erases it. Writes "you're beautiful." Whatever. That ain't the tune you were singin' three weeks ago. She leaves again. I erase it. Now there's smears. Fingerprints need to be introduced to Windex. Drunk Dallas girl lets me know she's in town. Great. I lost my fucking glasses. --------------------> I boomerang to all those things I try to run from. Nothin' changes. I rig up the rod and reel. Stop at the grocery store. Fresh shrimp catches the fish. I stop and pick her up. She wants beers. I want beers. Lake Austin is inviting. In some carpet-grass green patch in the shadow of some oak tree in the shadow of some corporate monolith, we sit on a towel in dry swimsuits casting shrimp heads on the end of hooks into the green water and stare at our red and white bobbers. We watch the bare-chested boys and the overly tan girls speed by in their ski boats, pumping the late-90's hip-hop under the Capital of Texas Highway bridge. Wake-boarders carve up the lake. The waves push our bobbers back into shore. I swat ants off her back and legs, she tells me stories about scuba-diving. We walk in chest-deep to pee and cool off. We talk about renting Juno. Renting jet ski's. Drunk Dallas girl secures time with me the next night. I get a text from the ex's roommate. Apparently my apartment complex is on fire. AGAIN!!!! News crews, firetrucks, policemen. Life's cycles completely amaze me. I need my fucking glasses. --------------> We catch no fish. WE EAT SHRIMP. WE BRING RETRIBUTION TO ALL SEA-GOING ANIMALS WITH HUNGRY VENGEANCE. WE ARE TO BE RECKONED WITH!! Cajun spices are yummy. They filmed Office Space here. South Austin's own. We rent Juno. We SLAM beers. We smoke on the balcony. ----------> Dean Moriarty texts me on his way to Monterrey, Mexico. I check his BLOG to see his travels. He's really doing it. He ain't lyin'. I toast him a fair hand with luck to be had, and send good vibes his way. Farewell amigo!! They always said something was chasin' you. Here's to outrunning it. ------------> Juno gets pregnant. Michael Bluth is a dick. Dwight Shrute moonlights as a convenience store clerk. Diablo Cody watches too much TV. -------------> I backslide too much. -----------> We "pretend." Bottle up that feeling for one more hit. I need my fffffffffffucking glasses. Oooooooohhh. Stomach turns. Raw nerves everywhere. Cramps. Thirsty. Drunk Dallas girl texts me stupid drunk Dallas texts. Eyes roll. --------------> Sunday. She looks good in the swimsuit. 7 foot aerials. Hot sun. Tossing each other off the back like Tornado. This fucking jet ski gets up to 42 miles per hour? Is that safe? Lake water is too hot...need a pool. Arms hurt, smiling faces, stomach is showing signs of going south on me. I almost break my wrist and her finger with an olympic-size vault off of the outside of a wake made by a 40 foot house-boat. Serious wicked air. Wish someone had a camera. Her boob fell out. Decide it's time to call it quits. Carlos and Charlie's for a beer and a meal. Stomach is fucking killing me. Drunk Dallas girl is even more drunk. Tells me how much she can't wait to see me. Can't say I feel the same. -------------------> Try to get into The Dark Knight. When the hell did Batman become so popular? Am I missing something? Finally remember where my glasses are. Arrange deal to secure them. Burned cd's. Deal. Stop to get Imodium. Can't. Handle. Seafood. Stomach. Malfunctions. Losing. Fluids. Rapidly. --------------> Instead of Dark Knight we go to Stubbs. Beers and barbecue. Just what the ol' stomach needs. Good etiquette and charm allow me to cancel (politely) on drunk Dallas girl. Start immediately fielding barrage of text messages from a woman scorned. Misspelled words, cursing and damning me through text message, incomplete sentences, inane ramblings, why? She calls me a "deutsch bag." Drunk Dallas girl is brilliant. And mad. Leaves a slurred voicemail where I can hear her call me a "fucking idiot" before she hangs up the phone. This is utterly hilarious to me. Drunk Dallas girl is a fucking idiot. Always was. ----------------> Forego suggested bar time for imperative stomach rehabilitation. Donnie Darko again. Guilty feeling comes back. She leaves. I shotgun medicine. I growl and moan and double over. I try to find sleep. -------------> 3:30am. Someone is knocking at my neighbor's door. Loudly. I'm in cold sweats. I peek outside. David Berkowitz is standing there staring oh so scarily into the lights on our front doors. I think he knocked on my neighbor's door...I think. He walks slowly down the stairs. Turns around. Walks back up. Paces. Then disappears. My deadbolt doesn't work. Hasn't for awhile. You'd think I'd learn, but I haven't. I have cold sweats for a different reason now. -------> I heave my mattress into the living room floor; place the revolver and phone by the side of my newly made bed. Door. Fucking. Knocks. Again. -------------> I'm at the peephole. Different guy. Hispanic guy stands outside yelling "maintenance." I obviously don't believe him. I remember the fires. I hold a weighty revolver by my hip. He pulls out keys. Inserts them. Opens. My. Door. I stop him from doing this in a particularly violent way, and explain to him in a manner completely void of all politeness and taciturn that he is more than welcome to come back tomorrow to fix whatever malfunction seems to be giving trouble, but that he absolutely will not pass through my threshold on this moment in the wee hours of the newly made Monday morning. And if he does so, he may deeply regret it. He walks off. I don't know what to do. Stomach has knives in it. -------> I call the sister. I need a place to stay. I call the ex. I need a place to stay. I pack the six-shooter in a bag, put on the shorts and running shoes, swallow more medicine, and head out into the night to find somewhere convincingly more safe than my apartment. ---------------> I sweat out 3 hours in my ex-girlfriend's parking lot. At least it's a gated community. It's so hot outside, and infintely moreso in my truck. I'm miserable. I have to work tomorrow and my brain does a bang-up job of reminding me of that fact every sleepless five minutes. The backseat of my truck makes a piss-poor bed. She calls as I'm on my way back home. I tell her the events. She apologizes for not answering. I reach my door once sunlight clocks in for the day. Email the boss...I ain't comin' in today. Throw up. Pass out. The shrimp are victorious. Food poisoning. ----------------> "Slow Night, So Long" sings me to sleep.
Parents call. They're in a state of panic. Appears, word of the burnings have reached the little hometown. However, the prairie fire that should concern them is inside their son.
Raising swords and waltzing around with four eyes locked in a line was never the best strategy. That's how the cool blade takes off your limbs in a slow painful deconstruction. A blitzkrieg-style, forced attack would've been much more effective...at least tactically. Footwork is the groundwork. There was no groundwork, which means there was no foundation. Which means there was no...
No, there was. But it wasn't. Trying to make yourself more imposing is something that made it across the land-bridge between animal and man. And woman. But it's unfortunate. Everything seemingly gets solved in an untouched foreign land. For fuck's sake. Again? Life is full of recidivist patterns that for whatever reason make themselves so blatantly obvious it's comedy. There's all these geographical solutions for problems that have nothing to do with environment. For the first time, honesty fell from the rafters and dripped all over the floor last night. She tells me, "we're all holding our breath, Cory."
What am I supposed to do with that???
You see, the whole world has seemingly revolved around this for the past year and a half. But it's been shaken from it's axis and now it rolls madly, like a loose marble down a spiral staircase. The only sound being the vacant "clink, clink" as it hits the next step downward.
Ahh hell. Line 'em up so I can knock 'em down old boy. The room is spinning again. Let the fiddle spin that high lonesome sound. Let the pedal-steel wail on into the night.
~Previous Comment From the Previous Night Was Ridiculous ~ I've had my own Joan Baez, my own Audrey Hepburn, and my own Edie Sedgwick.
Seriously. Sorta.
I couldn't be more ffffffffffffffffucking drunk right now. The lights always flicker in Neverland.
"I say ahh c'mon now, you know you know about my debutante. And she says your debutante just knows what you need, but I know what what you want..."
"With her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls...she aches just like a woman, but she breaks just like a little girl..."
So I googled myself again (I know) because my Interweb browser was fucking up and the results prompted two immediate responses from me:
1) Sweet. I'm not on the Jew-Love site anymore 2) Wha??? My THESIS is on the interwebs now???
And it is...all 78 fucking pages of it! Someone at Tech took the time to PDF the shit out of my thesis and threw that bitch up on the information superhighway...for whatever reason. Just to cross-reference and see if I was part of some library-wide digitizing project, I googled some of the names of the people I went to grad school with and there was no other thesis present from these people who I know for sure defended. So while my study produced no academia-praised paradigm shift, it's up there for some reason. I'm kinda digging this in a way.
Soooo, if you wanna learn about the theory of agenda setting and how (I alleged) it affects the music industry, have a look-see....I must warn you though, there's no thinly-veiled references to girls, or drunken midnight musings, or bleeding heart whining, or introspective blahty-blah...whatever.
I've accepted it. I certainly didn't ask for him, and for awhile didn't want him, but I don't quite have the heart to part with the furry little bastard.
I've ALWAYS been an insomniac. My Dad used to walk into the living room at 3AM when I was three years old with the TV on and me in the middle of the floor. The TV wasn't on because I was watching it, it was on because it gave me just enough light to see what kind of monolith I was constructing with my blocks.
Insomnia is an affliction some say. It's a friend of mine.
I just finished Jack Kerouac's On the Road for the second time. I read it once in grad school, and it's amazing how much I've forgotten about it. I'd rank it as one of my top three favourite novels of all time. It's wild and it's unhinged, and it resonates throughout the generations. It's still so relevant. It's America. I've always agreed with the critic's sentiments that it's the defining novel of the post-war Beat Generation...just as Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (which is what I'm reading next...again) effectively serves the same role for the generation that followed-up...the counter-culture and the hippies of the 60's. What's amazing is that so many of the central characters that you find in On the Road, also played a pivitol role in ushering in the generation that followed their own, and you can see the reverence that many of the central figures of the counter-culture held towards the Beat writers and their comrades.
But one thing that makes me identify so much with On the Road, was something that I completely forgot about until my recent re-read of the novel. It's such a treat and in some way, it's a connection to me, no matter how slight. As their final trip unfolds, Sal, Dean, and Stan head to Mexico City to meet up with Bull Lee. On the way, they pass through Texas from Denver, and the way Kerouac describes this journey he goes into great detail about the Texas landscape and the towns that he passes through. The fact that in 1949 Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady passed through my hometown, on their way to meet William Burroughs in Mexico City, on the highway that my house sits on, even referring to Brady (my hometown) as it's fitting colloquial dressing (the heart of Texas), taking notes for his masterpiece, brings a smile to me. I mean, my hometown...which is so small and so lost...it received a fitting description in one of the great American novels of all time, and it's author passed literally yards from where my house sits en route to his greatest journey. Nothing's ever from Brady. Nothing ever goes through Brady. Sometimes, it seems that nothing ever leaves Brady. But for once, I can identify with Brady and feel pride, because it is so exclusive, and it is so unique, and it is so tangibly small. It's mine.
It's nice to know that about the place you sprang from.
INVICTUS Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeoning of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how straight the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
~ William Ernest Henley
Wikipedia's initial explanation of Existential Crisis: Existential crisis is a concept in existentialism describing a state of panic or feeling of intense psychological discomfort about questions of existence. It is presumably more common in cultures where basic survival needs have been overcome.
No fucking shit.
If you know of this place...this forum for my self-described peaks and valleys...where I document the particulars of this little life I own, you are amongst a very small handful of people who've been invited into the long hallways of my mind and the courtyard of my heart...and for whatever reason, there's a certain amount of trust given with that, I suppose. I say that because I have a fully aware cognizance of the shit I put up here. Sometimes it's awkwardly embarrassing, and not meant for my entertainment, but rather to help me fucking cope. That should speak about my feelings towards those people that I've allowed into this personal realm. Hell, I couldn't even bring myself to permit my ex-girlfriend (of a year) admission to whatever this thing is, and I guess that probably speaks volumes about all of that...and all of this. So if you read, you mean something to me on levels that I can't possibly put into well-conceived, or carefully chosen words...levels that I seldom reach with most people I interact with in this world. Oh how fortunate you must feel! Even as self-serving as this palette of words might be, it still doesn't do any justice to uncovering the things that confront me...or anybody in this life, in any of their internal experiences and the way they deal with them.
I feel strange in these moments. Being in the ownership of underlying optimism, serving as the foundation of stressful chaos is some beautiful poison. Even at 29 I still find myself locking horns with angst at times, as it wraps it's hands around my neck while I brandish my knife...tossing and turning, pitching and rolling, dirty and polluted at the end of a bloody scrape...dead to rights. We always dance in the ring and tap gloves.
I guess I'm in a transitionary period again where I can see the opportunities in front of me, despite existing in the face of a certain amount of sorrow and a great amount of uncertainty. I've always desired to truly feel every emotion and thought that I've ever produced with every single fiber of my being, no matter the struggle, or despair, or euphoria, or infinite joy that rides shotgun with it...it's somewhat akin to creating a sterile environment for being everything I ever am. I see it as a certain type of metallurgy that my conscience induces, and sometimes it feels like a curse, but sometimes it feels like a complete blessing. Someone of utmost importance to me (who I regard as one of the most intelligent, in-touch persons walking amongst us) said something very recently that resonates to my very core, "The world seems to be making itself into someplace that is not meant for those who are self-aware."
I just don't know how else to be...and believe me I know how this sounds. Also, you can trust that I constantly plead with myself to somehow become one of those people who passes these things like an elementary spelling test, or floats it down the river like a newspaper sailboat to let ride, wandering into it's destination unknown. But I don't do that. I analyze, and I dissect, and I peruse, and I diagnose, and that's the only way I've ever been, and the only way I know how to be. At times, it's been a mightily uncomfortable undertaking. Because essentially, it's looking directly at yourself in the mirror and seeing what truly stands in front of you. I've seen the hellish side of holding yourself accountable to this inspection, but I've also envisioned the boundless existence that it might bring to the table. I just want to OWN it. I feel myself growing more into myself, and the day that I actually stop feeling the desire to grow is the day that I'll be more than alarmed.
I can tell you this with a pure heart; if you're selling me tomorrow, I'll buy it. Because we can be strong.
When I hung up the phone, I went out to my balcony, and saw that the crested Tuesday sun was peaking it's waking eyeballs over Southeast Austin, ready to usher in the day, in total disregard of the lack of sleep that I struck out on. I'm still (as I type this) in the same clothes I was in when I met up with these cats at Doc's around the stroke of 9:30pm for one beer, where I promptly left after the final sip of that single beer...heading home by myself to dig in chasms...or something like that. So I just got back from the Shell station where I put the necessary gas in my tank (of the ghost white truck) to get through the day, and bought 3 Red Bulls which are going to be a nice compliment to the final effort that I can muster for the next 12 hours; which I can only hope will at least get me through lunchtime in a state of mind that hopefully avoids any utter physical and mental collapse. If I can make it through the first half of the day, I'm fairly confident I can soldier through the remainder on cruise control...with much needed sleep following very, very close behind 5:30pm on a lazy early-summer Tuesday evening.
So as far removed as Sunday night's sleep is, I hear my shower calling my dirty-ass name, with a much needed shave to follow closely thereafter, only to greet the day about half the man I was yesterday....with no regret's...an effortlessly fluid conversation, all things considered...and possibly an inspired story from my hard-wired brain under my belt.
Geez man....I've been listening to "Handshake Drugs" (Wilco)NON...STOP...ON...REPEAT...for about 2 hours now.
And it's never made so much sense...but it has absolutely zero to do with mas drogas...but rather because of quite literally everything else. I'm so unapologetically insomnia-ridden.
No...I had a shit day...I'm allowed that. One day, when I come to the realization that being a rich, patronizing fucking shit-blazing asshole benefits me better, I'll make the paradigm shift. Trust me, you get further along in this great race of madness it seems. No rest for the weary. I'm too Godamm, mother fucking, ass-raping sensitive for my own good...why did God curse me with that BULLSHIT response to the inane? You try to appease people and the shit that they fling at you on a day to day basis, when the realization of it all involves the complete disregard for anything humane and rational. You do something for someone, and it comes flying back in your face as the penance for your under-performance in areas that you skinned your ass for, it's quite disheartening. I've only obversed through experience, that this world is only out for itself, and it conditions each and every one of it's creatures to do the same. One of my favourite movies tells a great tale. In Trainspotting when young Renton is spouting about his mate Tommy, he says, "You could always get the truth from Tommy. That was one of his major weaknesses." I've no patience for clarity right now. This is my intense existence I should embrace. I know how to handle my meltdowns. I plow right through, and wait.
Fuck everything. Just plain mother-fuck the whole damn lot.
"They rushed down the street together digging everything in the early way they had which has later now become so much sadder and perceptive, but then they danced down the street like dingledodies and I shambled after as usual as I've been doing all my life after people that interest me, because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing...but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night."
...you spent the first five years trying to get with the plan And the next five years trying to be with your friends again...
I spent most of the day behind the bottle, and the open glass, and the orange and the champagne. I spent the cloudy day relaying how humid it was to everyone, and how the atmosphere is bringing more of that recipe to the table. I spent 4/20 listening to the reggae music that filled the air at Auditorium Shores, and the masses of people passing thinly-rolled masterpieces, hand to hand. I spent the day with those who make me feel warm, and high, and quite like a masterpiece.
Sometimes I'm an abandoned book sitting on a picnic table. Sometimes the wind blows me open and it lands on certain pages that tell a completely different story than that which the cover lends itself to. Sometimes I'm written in sanskrit, hard to understand and jarring in context. Sometimes I'm written in blood, bloody and unhinged. And sometimes I'm written in braille, where the words can only be felt, not read. I like to look back at some of the chapters. Revisit some of the characters, the arc of the stories, the denouement and the fringes left in their wake. The morals and critical analysis that is all that I'm left with like a silhouette on the side of a wall after a nuclear blast. I miss some of those characters. I miss them for the roles that they played and the dialogue that we shared. I miss them.
There's an unspecified number of blank pages that still remain before the back cover of this book. I can only speculate how the story goes...wanting to skip chapters to see if this is worth the read. But I hope against hope that it is interesting and fulfilling, and poised for fluidity.
We're all continuing to write those stories, and interacting with those people, and hoping for those people, and wishing for those people, and missing those people, and loving those people. My little sister now wears a ring from a boy who wants her to wear it like she'd wear it around her heart. He wants to write pages in her story, and she hands him the pen. An unexpected character who found his way into the tale and became more than a footnote.
This story has been a good story so far. Sad at times, elation at times, boredom and vitality, Winter and Summer, loud and silent, wet and dry, near and far, sand and grass, foggy and clear. This story has been a good story so far.
You've got to try to understand where you came from before you understand where you're going. I've been a lost long shot.
My light does not raise the plants to full bloom, nor does it evaporate water in the puddles of the world. But my light can outshine the sun. Blistering white. Warming red.
My light can not be turned off. Electrical currents and voltage, watts and fuses are unworthy cages for my light. My light elevates above these things. There it hovers.
The rising sun greets me as each day adjusts in my sight, brushing off the fog of my sleep, collecting my thoughts.
I hear the voice and I feel warm.
Rolling over to the side of the bed puts me at ease and gives me strength for the day standing before me.
I hear my name called.
I see her busying herself for the world.
She holds conversations with the cat as he looks up trying in vain to respond.
I put these things in my pocket and carry them till the moon replaces the sun on the clock. Punching in to take over the celestial duties. The sun closes its eyes. The moon has coffee. Black as night.
My light is a little girl, and my light is a strong woman.
I tire of the civil war that is fought behind my eyes. It exhausts. It penetrates. It drains.
My light fights for the good guys in these skirmishes.
I employ my light like a mercenary-for-hire to ward off the demons and hell hounds that pursue me.
My light is sharp as blazes.
My light is soft to the touch. Like hanging my name on a cloud.
This town sets backdrops, and it makes scenes. Silver scenes that feel and touch and breathe...they come alive.
I found my light in this town.
The skyline is brighter because my light radiates. Overt and undulating.
I want to stand atop the structures and yell with beautiful resonance that I have this light accompanying me on my journey to wherever it is that I am going.
My light stands like a monolith in the plains and valleys of uncertainty.
I use my light as a directive compass. I point direction towards my light when I'm lost and confused. Finding my way home is walking a beaten path now that I have my light.
When a scared boy calls out to the empty space that surrounds him because he's haunted, the light appears to calm his fears.
My light sends fire to my skin. My senses are acute. When I touch my light, my blood pulses like a churning river of red. My veins open up and my fingers pulse. I feel like a man.
My prayers for light fell on listening ears, because He has illuminated the dark corners and unknown chasms of uncertainty by sending light to the doorstep of my life.
My light is a blessing brought to me that I can't repay.
This is a debt that can never be paid in full.
My life's work, and what is to be added to it, is brighter because of the light at my side.
God waves His hands. God gives and God takes away. My light was right on time.
I would journey through the trenches of Hell, armed with only my two fists if my light was waiting on the other side.
I have foresight. I can foresee how powerful and beautiful light can burn. The colors that surround me beam with more fluidity when reflecting my light. I beam when enveloped in light like a blanket that transcends time and the bindings of mortality. Minutes, and days, and weeks...months and years...they hold no power over me. Moments are the units of measurement that I record my light. Moments that pass, but continue to last.
I stand outside the realms of touch and consciousness and sight.
Okay...I decided to check out this song by The Weakerthans.........so I just got back from the bathroom where I've been crying for the last five minutes. I couldn't be more serious, like some pretty serious tears. I had to tell someone that I got the sneezing fits, and it was making my eyes water.
I remember one of my earliest memories of music being sitting on the living room floor and one of my parents records was playing on the record player. It was some sad 70's love song and I was too little to comprehend any of what was being said, but the melody and the tune were enough to make me feel sadness. I just felt raw emotion. I started crying in the middle of the floor. I just had that exact same reaction again, and I was sitting at my desk (at the age of 29) listening to this song on my headphones. When I read the lyrics, I had to excuse myself to the bathroom.
This is the saddest song I've ever heard in my life.
I feel like our brains are sometimes like a CPU hard drive. Saving and copying and backing-up information. Always writing and adding new shortcuts to memories and policies, and dress-codes, and prayers, and recipes, and pains, and ecstacies, and profanities, and eulogies, and sports stats, and calorie counts, and whatever the fuck it is our eyes, ears, nose, and touch process to fill up the database. I think the everyday American fills their hard drive up to the brim with shit. Meaningless, meaningless shit. We've been programmed to think that even that which is perceived as important is important when it's really just shit. What does it matter if you move 15 units of SoBe Life Water from the shelves at HEB? What does it matter if you form two new engine parts for the transmission on the new Toyota Tundra? What does it matter that you inputted 4,000 client contacts into your company's sales server? What does it matter that Tide came out with a new Febreeze scented fabric softener? What does it matter that your tortilla soup had too many corn kernels at Cantina Laredo?
It fucking doesn't. But we're told it does. We're programmed to think it does. I think these things own space in our hard drives, and I think there's a limit to that hard drive. I also think this is scary.
I wish I had enough time to do shit like this....to think like this, in frame-of-mind-day-to-day-streams-of-conscience....to roam freely and get scary....
I've been battling the fevers and the flus since SXSW wrapped up. It drained me good.
From the dirty hipsters pouring into the Driskill, to the corporate-badged executives, to the indie-film pirates, to the struggling bands, to the next big thing "hype machine" bloggers, 6th Street and the rest of downtown Austin offers a cozy week-long home to the festival that offers so much of what is great about Austin.
Armed with a badge from my company (the highlight of my employment there) I sought to take full advantage of my "all-access" status, and did so with admirable diligence. Knowing full-well that I would never drop the requisite $600 for a badge at any point in the future, I decided to let it be a badge of honor and adhere to my musical curiosities. I won't play music magazine correspondent, or indie-blogger and give you a detailed rundown of each and every band I saw, but I will let you in on some of the things I witnessed with my own eyes, and give a few highlights...
~ MGMT ~ Lou "Fucking" Reed (as he ascends up the ladder of legend) ~ Moby ~ Cut Copy ~ Thurston Moore ~ Joseph Arthur ~ Lucero ~ The Black Angels ~ The Cribbs ~ These New Puritans (who were hands down the shittiest band I've ever seen in my life...only worth noting because of said shittiness) ~ Kate Nash ~ My Morning Jacket ~ Hymns ~ Chester French ~ Man Man ~ The Vines ~ The Airborne Toxic Event ~ Sea Wolf ~ The Von Bondies ~ Be Your Own Pet So on, so on, and so forth...
I also stood eye to eye with Billy Crudup outside of a 6th Street Bar (not as tall as I thought), watched Tom Morello give an interview to SPIN Magazine, and I walked under a crane that held a two-ton Matt Pinfield as he conducted an interview with quite possibly the hottest girl I've ever seen in my life...no fucking clue who she was or how scared she might have been that Matt Pinfield probably wanted to eat her. I'm about 98.5% sure that I saw Caleb Followill walking (sauntering...I guess the Kings of Leon saunter, don't they) down 7th Street. I worked a party at Lance Armstrong's house for a benefit he hosted for the film portion of SXSW and met (a still unbelievably hot) Morgan Fairchild, an aging Dan Rather, Paul Mitchell (the hair guy), Lance Armstrong of course, and my personal celebrity highlight of SXSW...one Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top at Lance Armstrong's party and then again during SXSW drinking a mojito in the fucking Brown Bar (the most unlikely of places to see Billy Gibbons, or anybody associated with ZZ Top).
Some friends came into town and we went nuclear for lack of better phrasing. Sneaking in and out of shows. For a more detailed explanation of the underbelly of the week, you can go here.
The great thing about SXSW that separates it from other music festivals (such as the notably more top-heavy ACL) is that in it's truest form it's meant to launch the "next big thing." It's a mecca for industry execs, A&R reps, bloggers, filmmakers, and hipsters, to be a part of and/or witness the showcase of unknown talent. Obviously, it's become a bit more than that, but at it's roots it still serves as the record industry's largest event (worldwide) for uncovering new talent. Austin swells to become the hipster-music-snob-indie-entertainer capital of the world for one week, and I think it's quite lovely.
Massive hangover and week-long battle with the flu from the fallout aside (wasn't helped by being kicked out of one of my favourite bars for almost fighting the bartender which resulted in my night-long slumber in the backseat of my truck in the basement of a parking garage to wrap up the week), I was impressed with the spectacle...no matter how far it's strayed from its origins. Late night stumbling down 6th in a drunken-dizzy haze, you can feel a sort of energy. I think it stems from the hunger that drives the artists...you can feel their desires and aspirations tangibly. It's an excitable energy. I think it's a great garment that fits well in the wardrobe that dresses Austin.
I'll be impressed if Vampire Weekend can sustain a lengthy and healthy career, as they were the darlings of the festival. Asking anybody though, you were told that they were "played out." The modern age is a cruel age.
