I have to laugh when comes down to something as trite and cliche as booze and pills but all of the would be, could be, should be critics can go get fucked. Sometimes you just need to throw yourself into the volcano, to stare into the figurative abyss in order to get grounded again, in order to find anything but nothing.
I'm full of nothing right now. I'm a soviet warehouse, a banker's soul and a politicians conscience. I need to dive in to see how far down it goes, to plumb the depths so to speak.
That's not exactly true, I'm just missing some of my more vagabondish traits. I'm dragging sea anchors with me the older I get, possessions, obligations, responsibilities and I keep looking for something sharp to cut them away with. Therein lies the problem. I miss my old life but my old life was fairly solitary, no responsibility means exactly that, off the grid, off the books, off the radar but it's hard to get someone else to do that with you and I have someone else who wouldn't survive that kind of life for long.
Maybe the cliche isn't far off, I am a "lost boy". It's not that I won't grow up, I can't, there's nothing for me. Just like most of the people that I relate to I'll probably end up a teacher or tradesman, ekeing out a living on the fringes of polite society, participating just enough to avoid suspicion and savoring the bitterness that I was never meant for this world.
Regret is a sour word and a bad place to live, fortunately I have little to regret.
Honesty kills me but not quite as fast as it kills everyone else.
That's the regret, I never learned to play nice, never learned to fake it, to hide the weird. I never learned social niceties beyond that you lie to people all day long just to get by the legit world. It gets me, the lies, the glad-handing and the submerging of the self in the greywater flow of the normals.
I'm part of the fringe world, proud of it too. The bar-folk, the bike nerds, art kids, musicians and weirdos. The lost tribe that you walk past every day, the ones who don't get it, who don't play well with others. The ones who drink the sun into the sky, who pick through your trash to find our treasure who live hard and fall harder. We take the bruises and scrapes home with us and make them into our monuments, quiet memorials that are lost while we live only to be found later and wondered over. Graffiti, demo tapes, paintings and journals. Sculptures and sketchbooks. Gravestones for the taunts, the shoves, the rapes and beatings that we have suffered to be who we are. Tributes to our loves and heartbreaks, the drinks, the drugs, the stolen kisses and borrowed sex that mark as well as our tattoos and scars. Welcome to the land of misfit toys, population us.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
1000 yards
I don't sleep more than a few hours a night anymore. I can't, it's like there's this intense manic drive behind me no matter how exhausted I get I can't make myself sleep. Someone must have put some shark DNA into me when I wasn't looking or something.
Insomnia leads to strange revelations, like the fact that I can't stand a word that I'm writing right now but I'm going to keep writing because eventually I have to write something that I'm happy with...
Blogging is just a journal that everyone gets to read. An invitation to voyeurism.
There's no such thing as a sentence fragment, they are the solid state of thoughts when transcribed. It's physics not grammar.
I'm the only one in my immediate family that can't play the piano which may explain the odd fondness that I have for piano music. It has to be punchy though, not so much the Kate Bush for me thanks.
Like any music for me there has to be kinesis, an undertow, something that puts a hook in your guts, plants the seed that germinates into full-voiced yells when you see them play it. Head back, eyes closed, the drinks you've had becoming a conduit to the energy stored inside every body in the room, a furnace within you shaping that energy into the heat in your lungs that pushes its way out of your throat at full volume, unashamed and ecstatic. Ignore the looks from the scenesters and be-seen-sters, they don't matter. It's a culture war between those who see music because it's a thing to do and those who make music because it's what they are.
As I'm writing this I'm listening to a song that a friend told me is about fucking on acid. I don't know if it's true or not but thinking that's what the song is about gives it a cool shade of meaning.
...Nothing stands against the ocean.
Nothing. All I can think of is the grey green waves, their onrushing fronts glassy. Untold tons of force driving them to shore, the pulse and blood of the planet. The direct line to the rest of the universe, tides pulled by the moon that's pulled by the earth in turn pulled by the sun who is pulled around a spiral arm of a galaxy pulled around untold millions of other stars and galxies.
Whew.
I'm pretty much out of (semi)coherent thought for the time being.
Later kids.
Insomnia leads to strange revelations, like the fact that I can't stand a word that I'm writing right now but I'm going to keep writing because eventually I have to write something that I'm happy with...
Blogging is just a journal that everyone gets to read. An invitation to voyeurism.
There's no such thing as a sentence fragment, they are the solid state of thoughts when transcribed. It's physics not grammar.
I'm the only one in my immediate family that can't play the piano which may explain the odd fondness that I have for piano music. It has to be punchy though, not so much the Kate Bush for me thanks.
Like any music for me there has to be kinesis, an undertow, something that puts a hook in your guts, plants the seed that germinates into full-voiced yells when you see them play it. Head back, eyes closed, the drinks you've had becoming a conduit to the energy stored inside every body in the room, a furnace within you shaping that energy into the heat in your lungs that pushes its way out of your throat at full volume, unashamed and ecstatic. Ignore the looks from the scenesters and be-seen-sters, they don't matter. It's a culture war between those who see music because it's a thing to do and those who make music because it's what they are.
As I'm writing this I'm listening to a song that a friend told me is about fucking on acid. I don't know if it's true or not but thinking that's what the song is about gives it a cool shade of meaning.
...Nothing stands against the ocean.
Nothing. All I can think of is the grey green waves, their onrushing fronts glassy. Untold tons of force driving them to shore, the pulse and blood of the planet. The direct line to the rest of the universe, tides pulled by the moon that's pulled by the earth in turn pulled by the sun who is pulled around a spiral arm of a galaxy pulled around untold millions of other stars and galxies.
Whew.
I'm pretty much out of (semi)coherent thought for the time being.
Later kids.
the winter of my discontent
I think my grandmother said it best; "Living in Minnesota in winter is like being trapped in someone's sock". The grey clouds seem like they're about ten feet above your head and they grey from the sky seems to leach out and mute the whole world.
Here in the city winter is like a meth-rotted tooth; brown, jagged and nasty. The D.O.T. dumps enough salt out onto the streets to mummify all of Egypt and the soot from the exhaust pipes of ten thousand cars seeps into the snow and reduces it to smoker's lungs. The mercury dips into the science fiction zone, wind jerks tears from your eyes like smoke and the cold becomes a frozen ghost that can pull the breath right out of your chest.
Winter means all of my little shortcuts dissappear, that if I wear the wrong piece of clothing parts of me will start to freeze off and that at any moment my bike may go out from under me and I'll go under the wheels of someone's car that they can't stop because they're on the same black ice that pulled me down.
Winter means long nights, withdrawing into the percieved safety of blankets and piles of rented movies. Winter is lethargy, having to fight to get on my bike everyday and make my sore muscles do the work of turning the cranks. Winter hurts; frostbite, depression, isolation, feeling the walls close in on you, breathing the same stale air for months until all you can smell and taste is claustrophobia.
Winter is hell without fire and yet still beautiful. Sterile and stark, leafless trees stretch imploring fingers to the gunmetal sky as if pleading for the return of the sun. Fresh snow softens the unrelenting lines and angles of the city, buries the cars and makes every lampost show the way into Narnia. The silence while snow is falling is profound, like the whole world is holding it's breath. The cold is bracing and the air is sharp and clear. When the sun makes an appearance the air itself seems to blaze blue white, so bright you have to slit your eyes or go glare blind.
Winter is that girl who knows she is so pretty that she'll get away with it when she hurts you. And that you'll always be there, rapt and dazzled, the next time.
On a related note, A.F.P. has been the bottomless bottle of booze that is getting me through the dark, ice crusted ass-end of the year. Her and this.
Here in the city winter is like a meth-rotted tooth; brown, jagged and nasty. The D.O.T. dumps enough salt out onto the streets to mummify all of Egypt and the soot from the exhaust pipes of ten thousand cars seeps into the snow and reduces it to smoker's lungs. The mercury dips into the science fiction zone, wind jerks tears from your eyes like smoke and the cold becomes a frozen ghost that can pull the breath right out of your chest.
Winter means all of my little shortcuts dissappear, that if I wear the wrong piece of clothing parts of me will start to freeze off and that at any moment my bike may go out from under me and I'll go under the wheels of someone's car that they can't stop because they're on the same black ice that pulled me down.
Winter means long nights, withdrawing into the percieved safety of blankets and piles of rented movies. Winter is lethargy, having to fight to get on my bike everyday and make my sore muscles do the work of turning the cranks. Winter hurts; frostbite, depression, isolation, feeling the walls close in on you, breathing the same stale air for months until all you can smell and taste is claustrophobia.
Winter is hell without fire and yet still beautiful. Sterile and stark, leafless trees stretch imploring fingers to the gunmetal sky as if pleading for the return of the sun. Fresh snow softens the unrelenting lines and angles of the city, buries the cars and makes every lampost show the way into Narnia. The silence while snow is falling is profound, like the whole world is holding it's breath. The cold is bracing and the air is sharp and clear. When the sun makes an appearance the air itself seems to blaze blue white, so bright you have to slit your eyes or go glare blind.
Winter is that girl who knows she is so pretty that she'll get away with it when she hurts you. And that you'll always be there, rapt and dazzled, the next time.
On a related note, A.F.P. has been the bottomless bottle of booze that is getting me through the dark, ice crusted ass-end of the year. Her and this.
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