Below are the 25 most recent journal entries recorded in Sammi Shredd's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, March 29th, 2007
7:54 pm	The Palantir Have you ever heard of a magical object called the Palantir? There is no such thing in reality of course, but in certain certain circles (or should I say in certain rings) they are well known to the nerdy and bookish. It was a magical seeing-stone, something like a crystal ball, that allowed glimpses of the future and the revelation of secrets. It was a way for whoever posessed a palantir to communicate with any other possesor regardless of distance or time. A handy thing! Less widely known is that the Palantir was in fact not a gift but a curse, as that it would only reveal enough information as to create the maximum mischeif. Never lying outright, but providing such truth as was readily bent and misshaped by human fears and doubts, and the bringer of great misery to all who sought to use it. I have one. Chances are so do you. It is becoming more resolved in my mind every day that I might soon cast mine into the sea, and so should you. For so many years I resisted the urgings of my friends and family that I should have a cellphone. Why? Why should anyone have a cellphone? What harm is there in being unreachable, after all I cherish solitude, and why must I relent the luxury of time spent away from the people who I care about. When loved ones can thrust themselves upon you without restraint they become very like enemies. I survived all my life without a damn cellphone, what's the big deal? Well, I got one. Or rather I should say, one was foisted upon me. A certain someone in their infinite wisdom and generosity took it upon themself to provide me, free of charge, a fully paid phone, as a no-strings-attached display of endearment. Well, with great reluctance I shuffled with some defeat into the 21st Century and was soon enrapt in the novelty of this technology. Text Messaging! Data storage! The freedom to contact people anytime, anywhere, without having to just hunt them physically down and bang upon their door! Experimenting with cute little smiley-icon thingeys and the creation of text-art thingeys. Personalised ringtones and alarm clocks and VIDEO GAMES! I fell into the spell of the device and was ensnared unwittingly into a large and menacing web that I could not see for all my enthusiasm and rapture of the newly converted. My problems began only once I had sold myself entirely into allegiance. Though at first I had closely kept this possession a secret it was only a few months before the whole world heard the news: Sam has a cellphone! I was now carefully placed in a position where, with just a bit of mischeif, the whole world could be turned upon me. And it did. One fateful night my Palantir fell into the hands of the enemy, a recently scorned lover, and infinite wrath was wreaked upon all whom I hold dear. Who in their right mind would question the sincerity of a text message when it is clearly sent from my phone number? Why no one of course! Thus for some weeks I found myself apologising to deaf and semi-deaf ears. Though most of the betrayed were convinced, with some skepticism, that I had been framed, there remain some who are lost to me forever, and that is a fate I sincerely regret. Somewhat less important, to my thinking, was the suddenly perfect attendance I enjoyed at work. Being a transient I am always at a loss for how to wake up on time for anyhthing, short of buying alarm clocks for the living rooms of every person I know. I never know where I will spend the night and I never give thought to how the hell I plan to wake up. But the cell phone came to my rescue by offering customisable alarms settings for every day of the week. I was prompt and punctual to band practice, my stupid job, and any other imaginable appointment. At least until the phone started "forgetting" my appointments, or more mysteriously still, to set off its alarm in "silent" mode. How the hell is a flashing picture of a clock supposed to wake me up exactly? Should I hire a seeing eye dog to monitor the tiny quartz screen? But I learned no lesson from this tragedy and clung with fervor to the imagined benefits of the Devil's Cell. It slept in my pocket with dangerous knowledge that I had become dependant. I am addicted. And in this pocket it dreamed of further mischeif. The only problem was that I had nothing, at the moment, worth losing. The Cellphone conquered that obstacle easily enough by throwing wide the doors of dating and landing me, blinking with disbelief, into the arms of the most beautiful, the most dazzling, the most kissable woman ever to bat an eyelash. I am far too mean, old, and ugly to deserve such a sweet and endearing turn of good fortune and I should have suspected foul play from the get-go. But hope springs eternal, yadda yadda yadda. Sarah and I raced along at breakneck speed, hurdling over the usual bus stops and careening straight into Grand Central Station of the dreaded "I Love You"s scarcely before we even had time to learn each other's last names. Things were going well, frightfully well even. The digital trickster in my coat pocket smelled that there was blood in the water and it attacked me with carnivorous rage. First it chose to suddenly stop sending or recieving any information, which gave me the appearance of someone standing someone else up on a date. It did this long enough to infuriate my beloved and an otherwise very romantic evening was utterly demolished. Then it began to ring, or not ring, on its own whim. This gives me the appearance of someone who is screening his phone calls, and the situation worsened. Next the poor phone seemed to develop a sort of low-blood-sugar problem with its battery, needing to be constantly plugged into the wall lest it suddenly deactivate. Once this happens it will not be resuscitated for some fifteen miniutes or so, long enough for all sorts of terrible imaginary things to cross my girlfriend's mind. Also I am confounded by my constantly misplacing the charger or having people swipe it, beleiving it to be their charger. It came to pass that mine quit working and I have currently stolen someone else's for fear of losing my girlfriend over it! How is it possible that when my dearest is chatting away about her favorite television shows that her voice is clear and musically resonant as a bird's song, but when pressed on more important matters she suddenly seems to fade like a signal broadcast from the far side of Pluto? The more sensitive the information she is trying to confess, the quieter and smaller her words become, and the more and more annoyed she feels at my constant "what?" "what?" "what?" as if I were masking hostility through indifference or worse. But it gets better. Also the phone will create illusions of time and space, sending me several messages out of order, inverting the meaning of multiple messages, and cutting short long revelations and leaving me hanging with omissions of the most diabolical sort. It will hold on to messages for hours at a time before revealing them, causing me to miss windows of opportunity. Worst of all is the colorless shapeless form it gives to all that we say to each other. One particularly painful one which I must censor for its explicit sexual content was something like this: Dear Sam. I want to sleep with someone else. Reading those words split my heart in two and I despaired with more tears than I suspected could fit within my skull. For hours I agonized on how it could possibly have come to this so quickly when we have shared such passionate happiness together....then when I could feel no lower she wrote back and explained herself, and I saw that I had misread the message, which was supposed to go something more like this: Dear Sam, I want to turn you on, so I want to sleep with a woman. The fact that any normal sane male would be overjoyed at hearing such a thing only made me feel all the more foolish and emberassed. But I mention this only because it is somewhat humorous in hindsight. There may be already near a full hundred text messages we have sent one another nopt nearly so funny, and reading them through the eyes of fear and doubt we are able to decipher such hidden cruelties and insults as I have never before endured in face-to-face conversations. Although the catalyst for these injuries are eternally proven to be imaginary the reality of the result does not easily sponge away.... so each time we are more and more prepared to greet each other as enemies no matter how plainly the olive branch is displayed. Our current fight seems to be spawned from my saying "See you tonight" which she interpreted to mean "I don't want to see you tonight." It has gone so far out of control that today she told me, in static-obscured half-heard words, that she no longer wants to be my girlfriend because of an indescribably convoluted moebius strip of misunderstadings. I cannot beleive it, I refuse to beleive it. And now the phone invents some new treachery, where it seems to be updating my address for over the past 24 hours and I cannot access the numbers stored therein. I have long been notorious for my inability to recall phone numbers, and now that I have discarded all my little notecards and abandoned myself to dependence upon the cell, it takes away my ability to call anyone and set anything straight EVER. For the moment I have the damned thing outwitted, as that I can look up old text messages and call those numbers back, but it is only a matter of time before this too is somehow turned against me. Damn you, accursed cell phone! Damn you and all your smoke and shadow! Dont even get me started on fucking Instant Messaging. (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 17th, 2007
7:29 pm	(1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 6th, 2006
8:31 pm	Calcium About a year ago an idea came to me that a great conjunction was approaching. The month, day, and year would all be numbered "6." What a perfect opportunity to put on the most Satanic concert of the millenium! My original plan was that I should not invite anyone locally, except perhaps Demoncy. After all, no one comes to see local bands. They certainly don't come to see me, so I will need some famous fuckers to kick this thing up a notch. Rigor Mortis said no. Mortician said no. Everyone I asked said no. When I finally got around to asking Robert if Demoncy would play I had pretty much no-one lined up. Black metal is very incestuous around here, so with a little re-arranging of instruments between members the one one band was actually four. Though my intention was to book six bands, I finally wound up with seven, only one of which was not from around here. I decided to make this show as unforgettable as possible. Explosions! Fuck yea, we need flashpots! I applied to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms for several forms and two books of laws and procedures so that my friend Susanne could get certified with a Type 19 License for Proximate Explosives, and then began shopping about for two single-use electrically fired flashpots. The companies were wary of selling me anything without a letter of consent from the Fire Marshall of our district. OK, so I found the Kennesaw Fire Marshall and we talked it up. He was nice, and went over the requirements with me. I had to notify the Dept of Public Safety, and inform the Fire Department, and schedule an appointment for site inspection and draw up a form of "Content of Intent" being basically "What I Plan To Do Here." These forms I would have to first petition for from the City Council of Licensing and Permits. I went and spoke to each of these people, and their secretaries, and lost about twenty pounds sweating in traffic as I searched for these offices. Now with a lapful of papers and contracts and still being re-directed here and there I got the really terrible blow: I would need to provide documentation for a $250,000 insurance policy paid through the month. Since I am so charming, I did squirrel out the news that this need not necessarily be MY policy, but anybody's. So I asked, hey, who has been fronting the money for the town's fourth of july gala? I got the phone numbers of several professional pyrotechnic companies and co-coordinators, and began an immense game of phone-tag with he most rude and insulting fuckers of all time. It turns out that unless you are Cher playing new year's eve at Caesar's Palace or possibly sponsoring some sort of Superbowl Halftime show, these guys won't even look at you. They want $6,000 just to show up and look at the place, and then go home. To hire them for a night would be inconceivably expensive. So no flashpots. Thank you, Great White, may you rot in hell. I made a special shirt for all the bands that would play that night, with all our logos on the back, and although I got the screenprinting company to allow me to IOU on the bill for this thing, it is nonetheless a great deal more than I could afford, also. Eh, do what you gotta do. I went to a bait shop near my mother's house and bought 6,000 live crickets which came in two cardboard boxes filled with potatoes and creeping chirping little buggies. The were noisy and sme-e-lly. i also invested in about 40 packs of "Go To Hell" cigarettes. These I would throw out into the audience. Oh, and some old biology class skeletons, mostly ribcages. As I spread word via flyer about the upcoming event I noticed a great fear being placed against this day of days. When I put up the flyer and turn around someone has torn it down. Also in the last minutes of May it seems that many other people also began to get the idea that 6/6/6 would be cool to do something, and cobbled together shows of their own. Just to prevent anyone thinking they had the evilest act in town I printed up hundreds and hundreds of new flyers, red on black flyers that said only "666 BLACK MASS @ SWAYZE'S" with a giant pentagram in the center, and covered the city. As I was finishing up this two-day task I noticed I had misspelled the word "Swayze's". The Day Of The Beast After a little sex and breakfast I scooted over to meet Brann at a recording studio nearby where the soundtrack for the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie is being created. This was my second time sitting in but I still felt as if I did not belong there, even though I had been asked to sing on the theme song. It certainly beat the pants off the facility where my own album was recorded. The people who work on this project are as funny in life as they are on TV and it was a great time for me. It was particularly funny to hear vocalization advice coming through the sound booth from Meatwad himself. I got to see firsthand what it is like to collaborate with Brent and, yikes, I don't envy that as a career. I love him, he cracks me up, but he also is a bad listener. I scarfed down all the free gourmet pizza I could stomach, and after marveling at the number of laptops and Blackberries that everyone except me seemed to have, I had to bail before they were ready to record a second cameo for me. I am glad to be in there at all and I can't wait to sit in a theater and try to pick out my voice from everyone else's. That will be wonderful. I went home and transferred the 6000 crickets to their new home: a black waste basket. I went to LFPizza and ordered two large Pepperoni and Mushroom Pizzas with extra cheese and hurried over to WREK, where they were playing metal all day in honor of 6/6/6. The pizza was for Tim, who would be stuck there all day and unable to leave for lunch, but I guessed many people would be in there schmoozing and I was right. I popped in, dropped the pies on the table, and left. Although everyone seemed to enjoy this display of generosity, no one bothered to mention it on air, and i thought it would be gauche to complain about that. But I did. And when I called, I was assured that they had been playing my band all day and would continue to do so all night. The I corrected them about the lineups for the concert that night, (because I had caught them mispronouncing the names on air, and forgetting the rest) and then commenced my final band practice before our big show. Something had been bothering me, a solution was suggested, no on liked it, we decided to stick to fucking up and fix the problem after tonight. I drank about two gallons of water by the time everything was loaded up into the vans and trucks. At Swayze's I first hid my crickets behind the dumpster out back and then began the long wait until showtime, during which I drank around nine bottles of Evian and one hawaiian punch, though my throat still seemed too dry to sing. I was pissing it all back out every three minutes. Everyone seemed very appreciative of the shirts I had made for them, which surprised me. It is no secret that we, though not shunned outright, are on the fringe of the local Atlanta Black Metal "Clique," and occasionally mocked, and five bands that night were all "in". I was certainly stunned when I handed Robert his six shirts and he said thanks with a grin. His smiles are rare indeed, and I was expecting that he would throw them on the ground or something. Well, if he had, it certainly would have been the properly evil thing to do anyway. A great deal of my friends were there, which is cool but then again none of them like heavy metal so it is like getting polite applause from your mother, and I always wish the room was full of strangers. Well it was full of strangers actually. I'd never seen so many people come out to Swayze's before, unless it was a punk show. For once, they actually outnumbered the familiar faces. A few people inquired as to the availability of my girlfriend. She certainly cleans up good. I was proud to smack her ass in front of the would-be suitors and assert my position. Smakkity! There was something of a cluster fuck going on, I suspect because Alex Cox is on tour with Arsis instead of here smoothing everything out for Evan. I could be wrong. Anyway, there was no sound engineer. Our roadie, lil Corey jr, stepped up and manned the controls. He also brought recording equipment, both audio and video, to preserve the night for history. He had three cameras on tripods set up, and surprisingly no one bumped them. Also there was no one to "run the door" so I did that. It is somewhat awkward without a counter of table or anything, to simply stand there taking money and handing out change while drawing crappy lopsided pentagrams on people's hands with a sharpie. I have never liked Ecryptus. I probably never will. I don't even like Mike that much, perhaps because he is too friendly. But I must admit, they were better than ever, and their drummer was on fucking fire. Many were outside making fun of their appearance. They do look silly. Decay The Astral Self was next, and damned if one of them wasn't wearing assless chaps. I must take a moment to say that there is little in this world that is less "metal" than to critique fashion and accessories, but it doesn't seem to keep anyone from doing it. Whether it be the capri pants and platform sandals of the girl in Ecryptus or the assless chaps of these Carolinians, some things just scream to be mentioned. I salute you, assless chaps man, for having the balls to sport those fuckers onstage. That is truly fearless. I didn't like their stuff live as much as I did on Myspace, but I was impressed with the degree of bloodletting they endured. It is standard for metal bands here to engage in a little bleeding from razors and such, but this fellow I was sure must be in danger of running dry. It was everywhere. Afterwards he bandaged his arm up with cotton cloth and his girlfriend drew a lil pentagram on it. That was the cutest. I threw cigarettes out into the crowd and we fired it up with hellish force. I broke a string about ten seconds into it, and for me the energy level dropped to zero and never again got back up. I stopped the song, borrowed Dan's red flying V and we started over. Playing a strange guitar is a terrible idea. I was constantly turning the volume off by mistake, and reaching for things that weren't there. And I didn't like the sound of it either. But no one gave me indication that things were going badly, and I actually saw people singing the words back at me. How is this possible when no one buys our CDs except overseas? I gave my speech about the dawn of the new Satanic age, to some hoots and hollers, and called ourselves the plagues of Egypt. At this point I tried to fling the 6000 crickets as far and wide into the audience as possible but sadly they mostly hit this one person, this one cerebrally palsic person, square in the face. He looked very sad and confused, but there was no time to worry about that, we played Tearing Haven Out Of The Sky and I did my best, with Carey's help, to lead the audience in a chant of 6-6-6 while shredding, and though I could hear somebody singing along that wasn't in the band, I couldn't see anything. People were throwing the crickets back at me and they crawled all over my face. The zombie contacts I wear are uncomfortable enough without cricket footprints on them, and then they got all over the microphone and I kept accidentally licking them. Arthropod entrails were smeared all over everything, and the room really took on the aroma of Hell itself. It was unbearably stinky. On top of that, despite the fact that I had spent around fifty dollars on bottled water throughout the day, i couldn't seem to really conjure up the beast the way I always do, and I was frequently out of breath and cracking. No one wanted to believe that I was giving away skeletons so whenever I would kick one out into the crowd someone would place it back onstage. How polite. Our closing number is En Espanol, and once again I was chagrined to see that none of the mexicans had shown up. It seems that once you dedicate a song to someone, they stop coming to see you and never get to hear it. The song is "Tambores De La Guerra" and it is an all-drum song. We beat the living hell out of those drums, it was like doomsday in there, and our roadies affectionately known as slavegrinder 1 and 2 where hammering on oil barrels with terrifying abandon. At the end of my vocalizing we get into the serious drum-solo stuff and the slavegrinders set the oil drums on fire, which was a beautiful sight in the dark room, and then crammed grinders against the steel shooting thirty foot arcs of sparkling hot flint out into the audience in time with the music. There is one final horrifying verse at the end that I was spitting out like venom, and then the closing THOOM of our final strike, and we looked out into what looked like prisoners of war on the day of their release. They were frightened, awed, and speechless. I think it went well. The police came of course. You can't just light fires and get away with it, especially not indoors, but all was straightened out. After we played the audience was suddenly cut down to about a quarter of what it had been. ? All these people came to see us, and then left? Who were they? Why did no one talk to us, or buy anything from us? I staid until the bitter end. Demoncy wrapped up their final song at 3:am, with only five people left standing in front of them. I gave Robert his cut of the door and thanked him for playing, and he did that weird thing with his mouth again that on anyone else I would say was an expression of good cheer. I still feel terrible about my behavior on tour with him, and sometimes I wonder if I ruined a good thing, but it seems not to matter in the least. I like the music of Demoncy more than any other band I've been a part of but it seems he has opted to go in the direction of unlistenable noise. It was difficult for me to recognize all but my most favorite songs that he has written, and those seemed filtered through buzz saws. But then, that it the appeal of kvlt necro, and I've never been a fan. I gave the one band that had driven from out of town the most money, but only ten dollars more than anyone else. My own band, of course, received nothing, because its worth it to me to do that. What would we do with $30 anyway? That's not going to put a dent into the fees for all the shit we did for this show, it wouldn't even fill Corey's gas tank. On the long drive home I suddenly had to pee. I didn't entirely make it, and pissed on the inside of my car door as I scrambled out, and then flooded Seminole avenue with what was probably still pretty drinkable Evian. Hm. And I didn't have so much as one beer tonight. Megan, who had dressed up as a dead nun in vinyl for the concert, was already naked and truly dead when I got home. She was even too sleepy to yell at me for waking her up, which she likes to do. I ate my favorite Sam-recipe of buttered rice and peas with fish on the couch with two cats who were curious about my insecty sweaty smell, and watched a tv show about how alligators rip zebras up like strands of twizzlers until I fell asleep. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 6th, 2006
11:18 pm	Potassium Six months. Two hundred hours stolen by piece. Eight thousand dollars spilled from three shot glasses. A tectonic upheaval in the landscape. Introspection, depression, despair, atonement. The clouds have passed. The sun is out. November 14th is finally over. (Comment on this)
Monday, April 24th, 2006
8:25 pm	Argon How many times have you ever wondered to yourself, hmm... I wonder what people are saying about Sam's band in Japan? Or maybe Russia? Poland? Germany? Coming soon: Australia and Madagascar! (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
12:30 am	Chlorine I love these Alabamian flyers. this one has the wrong date on it. No triskaidekaphobia here. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 28th, 2006
10:08 pm	SULFUR!!! This album is available at Deathgasm Records and Criminal Records. As if you would want it. (Comment on this)
Monday, August 8th, 2005
8:00 pm	Phosphorous I do not want to ever hear anything from these bands ever again. Seriously. The next person who plays this crap is going to get a telephone pole in their ear, a telephone pole which is on fire and filled with stingrays and army ants. 1. Blondie 2. Metallica 3. The Ramones 4. Led Zeppelin 5. Johny Cash 6. The Clash 7. The Violent Femmes 8. Brenda Lee 9. AC/DC 10. Anyone from the Marley family, but especially Bob This is not a joke people, cut the crap and find something new. Current Music: NONE (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, August 1st, 2005
12:51 pm	Silicon Another skin slithered out of. Another sloughing away of dead flesh. Another New Year's Day. Another immolation, another birth, another blinking emergence into the light. The sky looks different today,... it seems that Mars, heavy with rain at last, has fallen into the sea. Xelac, Susanne, Brann, Leslie, and Megan. The five points of the beloved pentagram. (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 3rd, 2005
4:54 am	Aluminum The countdown to extinction resumes. By the next time the moon has circled the earth, I will have lived for thirty-two years. Here are the changes I have noticed. I am cultivating fat where there was none before, particularly around the navel. Although a cross section of my hips would reveal nothing but skin and bones, the pants I wore last Christmas are hellishly tight. My skeleton has widened. I am getting drunk more easily. Sometimes after only two beers. Two weeks ago I got so fucked up at a concert that I jumped onstage and tried to lead the audience in a chant so that the band would come out for a second encore. I fell off the stage and landed straight on my knee, which swelled up and is killing me even now. I wasn't even together enough to feel emberasssed. It hurts to kneel. My back hurts. Terribly. Even having a wallet in my pocket is too much for me to tolerate. One of my wisdom teeth resembles a bear trap and sometimes cuts my tongue. During band practice last week I was screaming my ass off, as I always do, and was suddenly crippled by a "Cluster Headache" (according to WebMD, anyway) that was maddeningly debilitating. It has recurred every day since then whenever my heartrate goes up, making it pointless to attempt to masturbate. I'm horny as hell but lack the will to alleviate it... I need a slow blowjob for maybe three hours. I have always mocked headache sufferers as being whiny babies because the worst headache I ever had was scarcely more than a minor nuisance. Well, I take that all back. If this is what everyone was bitching about, I guess I had no idea that they were suffering something I was inexperienced with. I thought I was fucking going blind, it was terrifying. I wear a seventy pound guitar with 250 half-inch spikes on it. Always have. Lately it has been really hurting my shoulder. I don't really enjoy smoking cigarettes anymore. Out of one pack, I wind up throwing away fifteen of them after one drag. But I still have that urge to ligh up. That thing that I always thought was just my balls rubbing my leg raw is actually jock itch? Scrubbing with soap has no effect on this type of skin fungus? Where was I when this part of personal hygeine was doled out to 20th century civilised man? Fucking gross. Well, at least this is easily treated. To every girl that ever noticed this and were too polite to mention it to me: you were not doing anyone a favor. Its like seeing someone in a dress that makes them look fat, just shoot straight and end it alreay. My toenails are not naturally thick and unmanageable, THATS A GODDAMN FUNGUS TOO. Its like I've been living under a rock. Thank Satan I was bored enough to pick up that copy of Ladies Home Journal and read the cute ad with the little yellow creatures living inside the guy's toe. Also easily treatable, but damn, still gross. The idea of organisms herding my cells together for their own mitochondrial agenda is creepy. I moved into a friend's place for about one week and was allergic to it. I had to move out. I was wheezing, my eyes were crusted over, snot bled out of my nose like a melting snowcap, and I itched all over. This is little help added on to my natural state of insomnia. I am sexually meaner than I have ever been. When I was eighteen all I ever wanted to do was kiss and kiss and kiss some more. I suppose after so many disappointments, I have now switched my focus to degradation and ownership. All I ever want to do is just throw a girl around and worse. Of course, if someone actually allowed me to do that, they wouldn't be the sort of self-respecting person I would even typically be friends with, let alone feel some sort of affection for. Even more frustrating, although I can easily ejaculate, I have almost no sensation of orgasm unless I am lying completely still. How many people are there in the world willing to flex their hips or necks long enough to make that happen? Keeping in mind, of course, that I am not very nice to be around. I can't read street signs at night anymore. My eyes are important, but really I'd rather spend money on my band than have some contacts. Oh, but I do own seven hundred dollars' worth of "theatrical lenses" that completely block my peripheral vision. I almost got crushed beneath the elevator at the Maquerade last night. After about four songs on stage, I get so consumed with anger that I can barely hold onto my pick anymore. I first noticed that last year playing with Demoncy, but I just assumed I was shitfaced. Well, I try to get drunk alot less often and I'm swallowing about three gallons of water a day now, and I'm almost completely off the soft drinks, but I seem to be feeling shittier most of the time. The one good thing, I suppose, is that the things that used to seem really heavy to me are pretty easily jerked up in the air lately. This might be psychosomatic since I only noticed this since Megan let on that she thinks I am a big strong person. I never thought of myself that way. She thinks I could beat up Alyxx Wilson, ha ha. Maybe if I had a golf club and he was sleeping. There's a place in my right hip that always "pops" when I'm working out, even without any weights. My right ankle pops alot when I'm wearing my favorite boots. I used to pluck disgusting wiry hairs out of the mole on my face twice a year. Its like twice a week now. I hate every single goddamned song that was released in the past three years, except "Scars Of The Crucifix" by Deicide. The last CDs I bought were the Stevie Wonder boxed set and the complee re-mastered remixes of the Megadeth catalog. Only old fogeys would buy that shit. I love them though. The Radio is my worst enemy. I finally sprung for a CD player in my car because I just couldn't find a damned thing to listen to anymore, except for "Tales from Lake Wobegone" on NPR every Sunday. OLD! In summary: waah waah waah. Poor me. What else is a Livejournal good for? Nobody is interested in your posts if you only have positive things to say. I'm already an old man, and I just hit middle age. HEY! You kids get out of my Azaleas!! I'm going to go work on a crossword puzzle........ (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 30th, 2005
9:36 pm	Magnesium Where am I exactly? Has anyone seen me? (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 11th, 2004
10:32 am	Sodium When will this rain stop. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 1st, 2004
8:54 pm	Neon Assemble the wreckage. (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 31st, 2004
8:52 pm	Fluorine Destroy it all. (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 24th, 2004
8:42 pm	Oxygen Why can't it be me? (Comment on this)
Friday, October 1st, 2004
8:47 pm	Nitro! I cannot afford my own life. The day begins at Susanne's house. Or possibly Stacey's house, Lael's, or Anna's, or Jessica's, Michelle's, Stephanie's, my mother's. I have keys to all these places, though I rarely use most of them. I have never been asked for a dime in rent, nor even to replace the food, soap, or laundry detergent that I deplete during my stay. I also frequently find myself sobering up at Mike's house, or some member of my band, though the males in my life tend more to retain full posession of their house keys. If I happen to be coming from my mother's house I might stop by the Circle K where Akij will give me a free tank of gas, a kindness he extends to repay me for the one time I saved him from an asswhoopin. He is totally cool, and has what I like to call the world's most powerful moustache. Often I am late to work but there is almost never any mention of this. A brief visit to the Starbuck's Coffee down the street might be necessary to bring me fully to life, and when I get there Sheba refuses to allow me to pay for anything I might want,(which is always a Venti White Mocha with whipped cream.) Although we playfully hit on each other alot, the truth is that we are completely not turned on by one another and I have no idea how all that shit got started. When I get hungry enough for some lunch it is a rare day that I do not immidiately aim for Little Five Points Pizza. Alena makes a delicious slice of pie and never asks for any money unless someone is with me, in which case she will make me fork up half the price just for appearances' sake. She also sometimes bakes cookies or chocolate at home, and will bring some of it to work to give me. On birthdays the haul is upped to an entire large pizza, which I couldn't possibly eat even in a three-day weekend. In fact, throughout most of the neighborhood in which I work the nuisance of paying for things has been sponged away, tattoos being the notable exception. All my cigarettes, jewelry, and clothing come from the Junkman's Daughter, where the prices (for us employees) are whacked from forty to sometimes eighty percent off. Once I leave work there are few places I am not admitted into for free. The Star Bar is one of them. The Masquerade, Swayze's, Nine Lives, and most places I am interested in just look the other way as I come in the door. At most bars the bartender will sling me my first drink on the house, and more than half of the ensuing debauchery is funded by whatever rabble I happen to be talking to at that moment. When the number of generous friends seems particularly low there is always the wealth of trickery in my faculties for obtaining the kindness of strangers, which I will employ without remorse to the bitter depths of my patron's pocket. If the spirits move me to Mulligan's then these things are all inconsequential as that Mike will let me drink there for free until my liver breaks loose and escapes to Mexico. When at last I stagger back into the night in search of a hollow place in which to forget whatever I just did, solitude is only as far away as the place I parked. There is a bed there with enough fuzzy blankets to cook a Jew to death under even in December. It does help to have another person in there with me though. Fools daring enough to sleep in the car with me are a sparse population, but they do exist, particularly in the winter when I seek them out more aggressively. This is not to imply that I am boinking these people either. The novelty and adventure of "roughing it" can be irresistable to those who own homes of their own and fend for nothing. I own no home, nor does any home own me. I do tend after a staggering debt knitted together over the years from several small misfortunes, that totals now some twenty thousand dollars. Almost every penny and farthing I get my hands on is mailed away to some beast that only "counts" a fraction of what I send him. Though my student loan is finally defeated this month, and the CarMax threatens to breathe its last this December, there is still a wide ocean of debt remaining to drain before I can move on, staking my claim on the world in those moments before I die and it all is primly returned to the government. But while I am still here I seem to live fairly expensively, without any bills handed me,and sneak by with this crime of theft endured in silence by all around me. I am grateful, and sometimes also resentful that I depend upon them in the first place. I cannot afford my own life. Yesterday The Junkman's Daughter filmed its third Halloween commercial, starring all the employees. It was a hectic day to say the least. I was dressed as a pretty convincing Jesus, right down to the crown of thorns and some stigmata painted on, and Wes was a hilarious-looking bottle of Jack Daniels. Feeling like a couple of hams we left the store and I chased him around little five points screaming and trying to drink out of his head, which was a curious sight indeed. We went in and out of restaurants and blew past crowds of bewildered pedestrians. Many people cracked up with laughter but none helped me catch the elusive bottle of whiskey. Once I began screaming Wes felt afraid that I had disappeared into character and might possibly tackle him for real, so his running was not an act. That little fucker can haul some ass too. Afterward I nearly had a heart attack from the unusual exercise. The costume endeared itself to me so much that I bought it. That night I went to a friend's modeling debut in a fashion show and drew some more stares as the bastard son of Nazareth sidled up to the bar at Teaspace and ordered an imported ale, and then proceeding to chain smoke. The cool thing about this outfit is you can grab anyone's tits or ass and then say "I forgive me..." and instead of getting slapped, you get some rolled eyes and hee-hees. So this morning I woke up, after a full day and night of blasphemy, and found this peculiar wound on my hand. Seriously. Kitten shown for scale. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 7th, 2004
7:15 pm	Carbon Jessica Harper She is the mother to twenty thousand fools. Though I repent and resolve I am granted no reprieve from her inexorable tides; I wade eagerly into the beautiful and inviting waters where my feet find no purchase, drowning again and again. Each time I promise I will have learned my lesson, to be mindful of the descent, but the compression of my skull makes me giddy and the bends threaten to burst my heart in two. Am I really such a fool, or is this the common fate of all who hear the sirens on the waves? How many small men have lost their minds in her fingers, already spinning anxious words together for their imagined Penthouse letter featuring this mythical party girl of their repressed fantasies, not even guessing the enormity of the forces involved or the accidence of their inclusion? Jessica is no man's aquisition, no wet dream come true, no brush with greatness to elevate the no-ones of this world. She is a war machine cutting down the weak and the sick, spitting out the bones of simpletons and sycophants and answering only to herself. Though loving her batters me to unpitiable remnants I tell myself that it isn't my fault or that she makes me this way, but I could quit anytime really. Couldn't I? Shana Wood In the far off kingdom I lived in as a young lad, herding goats and delivering blocks of salt, there were two classes of humanity. The wise and all knowing Nerds on one side, and the beautiful and popular Debutantes on the other. All I've ever known was that you were either brilliant and wore goofy pointed glasses or you crawled around in heavy metal videos with black lingerie. Shana helped me to see past all that, because she does both. Of all my Hos in my stable, dis be da breedin stud. Que Bah! Accursed woman! How I despise the womb that unleashed you upon the earth! She is a fumbling oaf who has been the ruination of my ingenious schemes! Many is the time I would have her in my clutches, the death ray in hand, poised at the cusp of victory and exhiliated with full knowledge that this day I would triumph at last! Oh, how I would dance with reverie upon her hastily scratched grave, and claim that which is mine, THE WORLD OF MAN! But heavens be damned, the witch doth somehow wriggle free my devices each time and conspire to thwart my moment of greatness with her insipid meddling. CURSE YOU AGENT Q, WE SHALL MEET AGAIN! AND YOU SHALL DRAW BREATH NO MORE!!! The Clermont Lounge When I was a mere shaving of a lad my aunt hustled washingtons out of the Clermont, and was friends with Blondie if anything either of them says can be believed. Now, in the great wheel of Ka I have become one of those reprobates skulking in the dim shadows myself... though I prefer to concentrate on liquor dispensed from Halley's delicate hands until I am so sotted that I can scarcely even recall that there are naked ladies in the room. I once got so hammered that I curled on on the filthy carpet beside the mens room and took a nap, and some fellow barflies trundled me outside like a sack of flour. I was lucky no one mistook me for a urinal. Sean Morrisey The kitchen light comes alive with a dim electric hum, the cricket-song of phosphorescence. mpty, square, aligned. Each napkin in quarters, each chair tucked neatly in parallel to table-edge, silverware stacked militarily into the drawers. My ears stand high from my skull, reaching out into the air with invisible fingers feeling for the unfeelable. A ticking litany from the wall clock, low breathing of the refrigerator motors, the familiar symphony of a lifeless apartment at six minutes to New Years Eve. All the world is reeling in undisciplined tomfoolery, but not so here. All is as it should be. Propriety, organization, protocol. There is no champagne bottles cluttering the vacuumed carpet, no confetti or streamers to suffocate the seventy degree air conditioning. There is no blood rising up from the sink drain, fingers still motioning around thearoundt he aroun around and around Stand straight, four short paces to the medicine cabinet. A sober face, exquisitely lined peers out the mirror. Behind, a pharmacy of remedies for the afflictions of man. Here, 32mg of Oxycontin to steady the nerves. A steady hand is a saintly hand, fidgeting is in such poor taste. The convulsions of a weak mind. There. Conformity, obedience, distinguished. Outside, the unwashed are making such asses of themselves. The rabble. The human vermin. Here, high above, in the precisely ordered apartment, there is silence and dignity. Knock, knock, the faucet comes on. Inacceptable! The landlord will surely hear of this, such carelessness, such shoody workmanship, such pools of blood striping the cabinet walls and spilling ont pillingo onto the linle onht linleuoulum linoleum red with Sean. Nonsense. Fix a cup of coffee, two tablespoons, no sugar. The knocking echoes, of course an echo, or a neighbor's damned radio. No, in the sink, a voice, a finger creeping out, waving hello like an insect's antennae. Re rheminds he inds you of the night, long forgotten, with party hats and kazoos, that you struck him down and his blood soaked so deep into the carpet you thought it would never shhhh.... come here , here to the sink, the seank, seank, in with me, sean, crawl into the drain with me and forget. I'll cut out tht vce that voice, in the third cabinet a carving knife, your'e 're dead dead dead you'll stay down there, the blade sinks into my throat and I'm killing you again Sean, my clean floors my clean clean head you're in my head I'll cut you out Sean, never neevr never again youre head your dead now be quiet be clean be quiet iet i shhhhhh TROY Here I am R- A- W--- a terrorist here to lay trouble to phony MCs I move on and seize to conquer and stomp on other rappers with ease cuz I'm at my apex and nothin I'm below nothin but a millimeter and I'm a Kilo second to none makin MCs run so don't try to step to me cuz I am the one I relieve rappers just like tylenol and they know it so I don't see why-ya-al tryin to front perpetratin a stunt when you know I just smoke you up like a blunt I'm genuine like Gucci raw like sushi a stage of rage is what rap is to me I go with flow and soul on every note I'm a damager not an amateur but a pro fessional unquestional without doubt superb so full of action my name should be a verb I make a muscle grab the mic and hussle while you stand dazed and amazed I bustalil' rhyme with authority superiority incarcerate the whole crowd's majority the rhymes I use definitely amuse better than Dynasty or Hill Street Blues my voice while float on every note when I clear my throat that's all she wrote screechin like a reverend rap is severin' and in my lifetime believe I never been beaten or just tooken out come to think about it people start lookin out and gettin nervous when I'm at the service so gimme that title boy you don't deserve it homies is illin chillin like a villian the meaning of RAW is Ready And Willin Allen Suh King Menes had issued a command that all the sons of Israel be cast into the Nile, so I lit out fer better fortunes in the western sea. I discovered America and named it Murphysville back in them days, and damned if the first man friend I come across weren't a filthy unwashed savage redskin the name of Allen Suh. We wrestled up an awful peice fussin and a feuding, and kicked up a whole mountain range and stomped out the great lakes and such, afore we settled on jes bein friends. Well, I reckon we had a lot of inventing to do ahead of us if we was ever going to get television up and running so a feller'd have some football to watch, so I invented corn and Allen sorted out a way to cook it and before you know it we done had ourselves a first Thanksgiving. Come next harvesttime we already come up with Democracy and railroads and like that, and about a week or two later Allen come up with this idea he had called the Eighties which I was shore wouldn't fly but folks sure did cotton to it. Didn't make much sense to me, all them skinny ties and funny red leather jackets with zippers everwhar. Reckon Allen knows best though, so last I seen him was on them MTV awards speechin up about compassionate conservativism and all, and I jes slipped quietly out the back and fetched up my old canoe outen the reeds. Yall take care 't one another, spose I'm due for adventures out in the western sea. Anders In the summer of 1803 at the Glimmerpool University of Philosophy I had the unique pleasure of aquainting myself with Sir Anders. I was a proffessor of International Law at the time, and he was a fresh, bright young lad with both a firm grasp of the established principals as well as a shining light on the path of knowledge yet to be discovered. Having eventually entered a partnership together and winning our first Nobel Peace prizes jointly for a paper on the Juxtabranchial Distribution of Contextual Solipsism in Higher Apes we enjoyed a life of status and means until the Belgian War, where we served as lieutenant and commander together in Her Majesty's Seventeenth Division. It was there in the debris of steel and flesh that we established that true bond of one man for another, as God was so gracious and wise to bestow upon creation. Anders is a fine gentleman, a scholar, a mighty hand at the billiards table, and it is my honor that I should call him my friend. Hip hip! Mahjula Bahkamara Damn. I mean damn, just look at her. Feel that shit. What's she talking about? I don't know, but it makes me want to go wreck my car. Maybe get laid up in the hospital a few weeks, get some good hoses running in and out of me, anything just damn let me get that woman out of my mind for a second would you? I don't want to see your boobs no no put them away put them away let a brother get his head together I got bills to pay I can't just be trippin all over you. Go on, I got a wife, hell I got three wifes, go ruin somebody else. Mm! Damn. Cher Walker Hold, what blessed wind beguiled of sin from North and East doth blow, That bears aloft such whisker-softened intimations low, With winter gauzed and icing frost to lick along these lengths uncrossed, And pattern her with scattered turns of light upon the snow? What fires forged this perfect bone, And curious kilns formed hot and honed The shape and curves that drape and swerve throughout these delicate zones? My lips are split to speak a word And swift are gripped and sealed to hers With snaking pink I shake and sink to murmurings and purrs. A name! A name, a frame to hang and pin to earth this dulcet pain! Yet ere I ask doth swiftly fasten love's embrace again, And silenced find the voice that warmly whispers this refrain: Thou knowest by the spilling cold That straightens hard your spine And willful holds the thrilling roads That heat your other side The cloud breaker The earth shaker And shaper of the skies I am the dream, the dish, The velvet-wing'ed wish, Air walker, and your bride. Lael Pastore She is the sun generating a trillion trillion megawatts of electricity per second, illuminating the world and warming the seas. Her heart pulses with nuclear heat and through her veins there are solemn rivers of volcanic lava coursing with ancient jungle rhythms. She is a familiar object in the sky that I see every day but can never hope to reach; gently melting the wax from my wings should I come too near. Where there is darkness she follows chasing shadows across across the skin of the earth from east to west, from Terminus to Hawaii and back again. She is quiet and beautiful. It is difficult to look directly at her without being dazzled... which can make her quite grumpy. If you could in your mind eclipse this surface and draw the moon across the blinding disk, then a corona of light is revealed more wondrous and far-reaching than most have ever seen-- a depth I cannot truthfully claim to have completely known. But there are other ways to measure the sun, to read the movements and climates of the bodies closest to her and infer from them the influence of her gravity. She is both solitary and affectionate. Sympathetic and patient with a fortunate few, quick tempered and unimpressed with everyone else. An invaluable woman to call friend, if you can only get near enough. Chalmers The first time I ever kicked Chalmer's ass was at the East Dunwoody Outreach Center For Runaway Girls back in 1983. I was there reading uplifting stories of hope and faith to these downtrodden unfortunates, and this drunk ass stumbles in the door wielding a mackerel on a stick and generally being a nuisance. His name was Chalmers and it was immidiately clear that he was saturated with whiskey and vodka. So I tore loose a chair leg and wailed him into a bloody mess for about ten minutes or so, crumpled him into a garbage can and kicked it down the hill outside, where he rolled into traffic and was run over by a limousine full of fat rappers. The second time I kicked Chalmer's ass was at the 1996 World's Fair in Seoul, Korea, where I was stationed as a marine at Ft Tientziek for the summer. I was assisting elderly attendees and performing other beneficial services to the disabled when this guy fucking swoops down out of the sky in a hang-glider drunk out of his mind and pissing all over the place, and dropping buckets of creamed broccoli souffle all over the crowd. Well, I fashioned a catapult out of two old walkers and a bra strap, launching myself into the air, where I collided dead-on with Chalmers and commenced a fierce battle in the skies erupting like Godzilla vs Mothra or something. Despite his attempts to wipe his boogers on me, I managed to get his pants off and wrap them around his face, thus blinding him, and then punched him in the asshole until he fell unconscious and plummeted to earth, where he landed in the gears of the ferris wheel and was ground into a pine powder which we later used for Manwich fixins. Now, the third time I kicked Calmers's ass was at his grandmother's birthday dinner just last month. Everyone was dressed in their finery and diamonds, we had roast beef and red wine, and the occasion was carried out with great ceremony and refinement. Just as I was about to toast the old woman with a tribute in sonnet form, Chalmers leaps upon the table and begins breakdancing and spitting pre-chewed banannas upon the lot of us. This sort of outrage I simply cannot abide, particularly at so formal an occasion, so taking up a dinner fork I lit upon the table and challenged him to a duel. He had nought but a candlestick in hand, but lunged and parried like a fencing master giving me a good whipping across the backside more than once. When at last it seemed that dignity and civility would fail to this oafish lout, Chalmers paused to announce to all that he had long awaited this day, preparing thereby to smash in my face with an enormous baked pie in a glass dish, but this gave me time enough to snake my hands up his pants leg and give his wedding tackle a good turn for the better and twisted them right free from their lodging. He fell upon his back screaming oaths and unprintables, whereupon I jammed the testicles into his mouth and hot-glued forever shut his yapping jaw with a handy hot-glue gun I keep on my person for just such an emergency, and struck him square in the face with a Rhesus monkey which I also keep handy in my breast pocket... also for just such an unfortunate event. Not yet sufficiently convinced that he had learned his lesson, I strapped him to the back of a southbound train to Biloxi and ripped off both his arms, stapling them inside his buttcheeks, and burned him alive. If ever I should see Chalmers again, no doubt we will match blows again, but for his sake at least I pray that it not be for a long time. He's a drunken lout and as want of a spanking as any precocious savage you would ever care to meet. There. Mary Brock Mary is dead to me. For twenty-seven years I wore this albatross around my neck, this Tauntalus Stone, until the weight of it threatened to crush me into madness. How cruel is the creator to have enslaved me so, in that desolate loveless prison, innumerable light-years from the shape I knew was rightfully mine? How unjust the universe that would yield such ill fruit, the banana shrouded in the peel of a pear? Long hours I would lie barren in my gulag, peering out into the world through the soulless eyes of woman, casting over the vicious curves of what by rights were my victims but spread before me in the bonds of sisterhood. Where my blade should hang, there was but a fallow sheath. Such emptiness, such directionless want of purpose, such wretched racking shambles of humanity! I spit in the eye of the sun, and eat apart the roof of the clustered womb that formed me. Oh, the innocents I vengefully did smite in repugnance, the indignant wrath met out upon those born to fortunes denied me, the bathtubs of blood showered upon the shores of charity to beseech my freedom... these treasures found no purchase in the ears of Man. I fled into the desert, into exile, to contemplate my fate and to undo the sins of assignment. Long years I appealed the sands, and spoke into the winds. In the eve of Reaping I came into the tribes of three fingers, and they took me as their miserable servant. I watered horses, hauled brick, and was made as unto a whimpering dog. In the night, I rose up and slew the men of this people, taking their throats into my jaws and grinding out their shriveling breaths. The mother of these slain was also as a mother unto me, and here took pity upon the circumstance that would drive me to such lengths. She instructed me in the ways of the Hidden who lie beyond the sea, saying I might find the quiet of my soul there among. I sailed out to find these people, and in two years squirreled them out from the dense rainforests. They took my pleas into their council, and agreed to free me from my sorrows. There were strange incantations, and blinding fires, and pain as no creature can know released upon me, that ensued throughout the cycle of one moon, and I emerged from this jungle for the first time, as I should be, with my pillar erect and my purse closed forevermore. This woman, this Mary, whom I suffered beneath, was lain to earth in that forest, and I will know that name no more! I am no longer a woman, I am a MAN, my seed is hot and furious, and shall fill the bellies of every land... hereafter you shall know me by my true name... Kylee I have cullied among the vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, midst catacombs unkempt and those unspeakable libraries decorated in settling dust of ages turning slow with wondering eyes the crackling parchments of texts both sacred and profane. However authentic in these extracts for veritable gospel did substain, and illuminate thereby, was nothing promiscuously written, fancied, nor sung in these many nations nor generations as should suffice compare to that infinite description set down by the poetry of your contrivance. Such a harmony of dimension spun in skin and bone elegant and unrivaled of any precise proportion revealed in the intricacies of flower or insect, nigh e'en the terminating spirals of the conch. That hopeless sallow tribe which no wine of this world shall ever warm doth grow convivial upon tears at the inclusion of such silent discourse; that intimate rapport that present itself to each man in his most gaurded of chambers with but the most shadowy and wordless turn of your smile, and cause think that theirs is the ceaseless connection borne of autumnal companions. How much more pains thou takest to please the world by invisible detail, how magnified the intensity of sunlight become upon thee, how staid were death at the galley when news your arrival had besaid. Tis the most wicked medicine this joyous poison, the most fortunate tragedy of chance position my providence to behold and shivering breathe the air that fell curling in sweetened currents about your neck, to press softly the hollow arcs and hesitate fearfully and agonizingly, giving pause upon the lightless entrance and recognise the apple in the coils, knowing its fell intent; and faultering as had Adam in the garden. How dear and inevitable the price of innocence misplaced, and with such tenderness regretted. Had I the means of return upon the closing of my years to forge again a path uncompassed I would ineffably bend as the lodestone to North, drawn by taunts and beckoning, navigating by the scant starlight of your foundless promises, spilling tears across the blade traced from your hand to my heart even as you bent to kiss the wound. Ever would I suffer that little death without complaint, and yield to thee the sum of my facility. Would that I were posessed of a score such incidental souls, and cast them as barley before the wind become scattered providence. I am the broken motion, and you the tacit completion. Kylee, I am ever yours in all that I will, that I am, and that I create. I love you. (Comment on this)
Monday, September 6th, 2004
7:32 pm	Boron As a young man attending the University of Walamazoo in the autumn of 1932 the world seemed a fat oyster brimming with fortune, whose pregnant wealth was ready to spill in gushes for the right person with ingenuity enough to jimmy it out. The whole of humanity caught its breath. The industrial revolution, as it was being called, had thickened the air with anticipation. There was nothing we could not do, no force that would stop us, and this was the last truly magical time ever to be alive. I was as caught in the swarm as any other fellow... my notoriety was already such that it was drawing attention from the most prestigious corporations of the day, and daily letters were received from investors anxious that I would include them at ground level in my endeavors. This promising exposition was wildly rewritten however, when a scheduling error landed me in the wrong lecture hall at the precisely right moment and I stumbled into a discussion on Assyro-Babylonian civilization and into the presence of the most singularly intoxicating vixen I should ever find providence to behold. The room was eerily illuminated by unearthly light eminating from this slender figure whose exact shape was as difficult to ascertain as a mirage wavering on the horizon-- like perhaps she had been sketched in the ripples of a pond. Her silhouette seemed thusly contrived so that light itself bent around her smooth form, or perhaps that the photoreceptors in the backs of my eyes could scarcely make sense of what was presented them, so I stood in the doorway gawping like a fish. In this manner I was introduced to Professor Burak, or Jill Darling as I later came to know her, and my heart was stolen away in that moment never to return fully to me. We got along famously in the most literal sense. I joined her on an excavation of the Valley Of The Kings the following spring and we together translated the Papyrus of Ani and other ancient Coptic texts we freed from the sand, earning us our first Nobel Prize. I declare that woman could peer through the vieil of ages and read dead tongues as if she had been there to speak them herself. We married with great celebration and gaiety in my hometown of Kiev among icicles and towering old cedars, serenaded by congregations of curiously intelligent Siberian white wolves beneath the singularly large moon as seen from North Asia. Our honeymoon was all the more exciting in that we discovered a fully intact wooly mammoth in the ice outside our cabin on the third day, when she "just had a feeling" about this snowbank, and soon our pictures sprouted in the scientific journals of the time. We had our first child-- Johnathan Lupus Depp Burakuadra, (or Barracuda as we affectionately called him at times when he was overly mischievous,) in a bungalow in South Brazil along the spine of the Tinhuotonec mountains where we had been mapping out the incredibly precise galactic calendar of the Metzopuactlihochi indians for a number of years. It is unavoidable that the chemical machinations of childbirth leave a woman altered from her original composition, and thus in the lee of parenthood did we abandon archaology for astrophysics... a natural enough progression given the amount of stargazing we had endeavored in among the rainforest mountains of late. We commenced the construction of a terrifyingly deep tunnel beneath our home, that stretched out beneath the mountains into an oppresive depth, and opened in the shadows of the earth's crust to a large chamber holding a peculiar artifact Jill had thought up in a dream: a hundred-thousand gallon spherical tank of ionized water encased in a net of photomultiplier tubes and a dizzying array of monitoring equipment to capture the "chekov rings" emitted by neutrinos originating outside the solar system, colliding with electrons in the water. The genius of this location was that all other subatomic particles and background radiation were long since filtered out by the innumerable tons of rock above us. It was through this supreme effort, and the toils of our mutual love of discovery, that we were awarded our second Nobel Prize in 1958 for establishing the age of our Sun, the precise weight of the previously assumed massless neutrino, and the rather accidental detection of the -W particle. As we crossed the Pacific in our small plane bound for Sri Lanka to accept this prestigious honor, even as I was busily penning our speech on the back of a napkin, we were beset by a horrific tropical storm and dashed into the roiling waves. Lashing together a raft from seat cushions and curtain rods, we drifted into the Indian Ocean and were laid ashore on a remote featureless island where the waters were clear as glass to seventy fathoms, and watermelons grew the size of sea lions. Our afffections were put to extreme duress in the weeks after this tragic mishap, not the least of which was the seperation from our firstborn, but we weathered the ordeal and in a slow procession of season to season afterward came eventually to never speak of the lives we had known, becaming silent aboriginal people carving out our tiny womb in the harsh elements and holding fast to our love of one another. It came to light that Jill was a natural born architect and she erected magnificent halls and temples of bamboo and knitted fronds in the throes of what possibly had been avoidance behavior, with some marginal assistance from myself, and we developed several new techniques for primitive construction. Or rediscovered old ones. Who can tell? Perhaps it was six years, or maybe seven, but as our warm little cottage expanded into a vast empty city, she grew more and more despondant beyond consolation, and distant from me. She consumed isolation and converted it to lethargy, eventually not even rising from bed for anything except to occasionally bathe in the lagoon, the only indulgence that seemed to still bring her any measure of respite. In desperation I confronted her about this, pleading that she puzzle a way out. How often her wisdom had carried the day, and why not now? Why here, in this seeming paradise, was all lost? She bubbled with tears and confessed to me at last that she was not the person I had come to know. Her real name was something I could not for all the provocation of earth recall to pronounce, but she was in fact a rain god, older than man, who had descended to the mortal realm out of curiosity about the tiny creatures that had sprung up beneath her. This I found hard to believe, but in my heart of hearts I had always known it to be true. When I asked then how we had come so unfortunately deposited to this remote location through device of weather, I saw in her face that it was a fool's inquiry. It was not her lot to die here, nor to die at any place nor time, neither would she wait to mourn my passing. For all the luxuries and beauty of this island it was naught more than a well-decorated coffin in my honor. And so there, as the fat orange sun fell behind the sea, my beloved Jill shook in my arms with tears, and frothed and boiled, and slid loose from my grasp in a cloud of steam that dissipated into the wind, dampening my forehead with its tender caress before evaporating altogether. I was left to die in anonymity and old age. Ironically enough, I was soon rescued from that forsaken latitude by drug smugglers in the following weeks, and not before having discovered a concoction of local berries and roots that would reverse my age by decades, thus ushering the grim spectre out of my sight for some lifetimes to come! After a brief stint with the East India company I came at last to American soil in 1973, a man of sixty-three years who could easily pass for a boy of twelve. There was some fluctuation in my age throughout the seventies, but seemed put aright by the mid eighties where I adopted teendom as my new official history, and kept mum about my discoveries of eternal youth for reasons that themselves must stay secret. Fate is a kinked and serpentine mystery, and saw fit to keep Jill at the horizons of my influence ever more, for she too took residence in America and I see her still now and again. She remains as beautifully ageless as she ever was, and sometimes looks curiously at me as though we've met before, but the memory of gods for earthly amusements is brief and already I fear she has forgotten me. I wonder whatever became of our child, if he kept his home here or in some clouded pantheon, and sometimes in the sweating August nights of southern Georgia I creep out into the rain, stripping away my shirt, letting the drops fall upon me in tender sheets, listen to the water gurgling softly in my ear like an old familiar voice, feeling that somehow in the vast riches of water borne aloft in the stratosphere my shape is still sketched out faintly among millions of molecules; smiling that she remembers me. (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 5th, 2004
7:31 pm	Beryllium Our first encounter came in the summer of 1981. I was eight years old, living in the sad-colored brick apartments in the shadow of the interstate where my mother and I had burrowed in like stowaways, sometimes peering out our barred windows with fear at the world that seemed to give no purchase to hope nor faith. With my father gone to a place from which he could never return our only chance of survival it seemed was to crouch low and silent in the reeds. We had no neighbors, though people certainly lived next door. A neighbor is a fanciful thing I read about in my Little Golden Books, a kindly sort you could call upon for a cup of sugar or to watch your dog while you went to the beach. Behind our walls there were only scratching and whispering things, unfriendly shapes that fought with each other in the night and shook the picture frames from where they hung. When strobing blue and red lights spilled out across the kichen walls my mother would huddle me into the windowless hallway and clutch me to her belly like a firstborn child of Egypt until the trouble had passed, rocking me and sometimes crying. I was slight of frame even for my tiny age, and more often sickly, and an object of much cruel amusement even to the most excluded children. In every hour of every day my stomach was heavy with fear... the only respite was the small hours of morning where I would watch my mother's sleeping face slowly painted from grey purple to orange. It was the only time her mouth was not drawn in worry; the only time that light of the sun would penetrate into our home. Yet in the lonesome hours before breakfast were my greatest fears realised, for I never was much of a sleeper even in childhood. All the harmless artifacts of daytime would come alive in my imagination and leer at me, daring me to hide under the blankets so they could sneak up and do their worst. And it was among these changelings and shapeshifters that I first came to meet Morgan Engle. It was raining outside, and the patter of raindrops was muffled by the windows into a low mumbling overheard conversation. Above this melody crept a crisper rhythm: the unmistakable pattern of dripping upon the unkempt carpet. A soft sound, too, but sharper than the sounds from outside. Nearer. The wriggling veins of water across the glass twisted the low light of my room in the most horrible way, giving me the impression as I leaned into this tap-tapping repetition that the clothes hung in my closet were slyly swinging back and forth. Yes, there must surely be a leak in the ceiling, rain falling into my very room, falling in the closet actually. Maybe there was a hole above the closet, some opening that lead to the attic where slight wind was gently pushing my snowcoats and overalls with its quiet breath. Perhaps, this opening might be large enough to let in any number of things, say, from the menacing ribs of the attic, and I imagined a long churchlike hall above my bedroom that joined all the tenants in the building. Someone could come up through their closet, and skulk along the rafters, and descend into any place they chose. Down into my room, or down in the obscured safety of the closet, and crouch behind the coats. These mad thoughts were a nightly routine for me, and with knowledge of the many real dangers all about me I was often scolded by my mother for introducing nonsensical ones, but there is little difference in the neurosis of a child's perspective. Here my panic had risen into my throat like a swallowed egg, such as it never had before. This night the danger seemed so much more plausable than ever, it echoed with reality and gained in volume. Drip, drip, spat, pat, I could scarce hear anything else. Knuckles bound to the bedpost, I peered into the dark and willed the shapes to come into view. Nothing, or nearly nothing. In such times, it may be that blindness is only lifted by movement, and in time I did see movement. Two feet, large like a man's in heavy shoes, had twitched ever so slightly-- just a fraction, but it was all the commotion necessary to light up the banks of rods and cones in my little head. Someone stood in the closet, dripping his rain-drenched clothing onto the floor, waiting behind the jackets and pants for the sound of my sleep so he could step out. Could he see me? Did he hear me lean from the edge of the bed, was he now thinking the game was up and he should leap upon me? I shrank away from the stretching jaws of the doorway, pressing back into my pillows and blankets, and shuddered with indecision. A great long time spanned out between us, and finally he grew restless. I saw the hangers parting faintly, and drew shut my eyes but a hair feigning sleep. Perhaps all he wanted was to leave, and this was my only salvation, so I play dead. Satisfied that I was witness to nothing, his wretched face stepped into the moonlight and spilled ice along my spine as it did. He was horrible to see, a nightmare freed from the depths of dreams, scowling such that his lips all but hung from his jowls. My heart hammered away in the blankets, surely shaking me about with its furious meter like a motor in an old car and I steeled my little muscles to stifle this scant motion. To shut out the horror I drew my eyelids over that last sliver of an opening left... and could see nothing. This I immidiately regretted, for though it is easy to close one's eyes in tiny increments it is near impossible to command the reverse. The lashes are sticky things that cling together, and will stay so until the lids over-stretched will pop open all at once. So I condemned myself to darkness and curiosity. His feet shuffled ponderously across the rug, and circled over to the side of the bed. There was a sensation of tilting, and I knew that he had leaned upon the mattress with one hand, or leg, and was somehow inspecting me. There was warm air upon my face, old and sick like the heat from beneath a refrigerator. An ancient breath that seemed clogged with peeling rags of filth, he must surely be mere inches from my face. He knew, I thought, he knew I was not asleep, how could he know? Somehow he knew, in his breathing I could feel it, breath like a throatful of sogged cornflakes pressed through a sock, breath that was indignant...he--- Breath! It was the breath! At once I realised that I must have held still my lungs for even now there was no sound from my nose nor mouth, and what child sleeps so with his air caught in his chest!? I opened my eyes in a panic and as far as my vision would allow was the eclipsing expanse of his menacing face, a cruel landscape of teeth and grin, hovering over me as the moon might before it someday collides into the earth. His wormy lips slid around the corners of an obscene smile, and shaped these words, "Call me Morgan, little boy." A knife came into my mouth as I opened it to scream ,and then easy as pie lifted my little tongue out one-two-three with a fine spray of blood tailing it all the way into his shirt pocket. So it began, and continued many nights and years since, but I have never been able to call him anything. (Comment on this)
Saturday, September 4th, 2004
9:13 pm	Lithium I thought I owned everything that Sanrio had to offer. Mine was the labor of a lifetime; a rewarding one that afforded me the prestige of archaeological hobbyists across the moon. Some had quipped that the pursuit of completion had stretched my head a bit, but what little frazzling around the edges I had experienced was long since meticulously mended. I obtained a moderately succesful and admirable life with my spouse and children after having regained confidence of the School Board Of Trustees and entrusted with regular lectures at the University Mare Imbrium on subjects pertinent to my field . Miserable thoughtless troglodytes they are. But in short, all was back in order, and the golden years of my life were casually strolling by in placitude and contentment. Such a happy ending was not to last of course, as they never are, catalyzed on the unassuming day when a colleague had returned from excavation with a haul of twentieth-century periodicals largely intact but not without regrettable damage. There was among them a particular article of note concerning some obscure starving hack. Hardly of importance, yet what was singularly arresting was the reference therein to a Hello Kitty Dentist's Chair. This particular page was smudged and decayed beyond recognition, so much so that it fairly swooned apart in the fingers, nonetheless here remained these four breathless words printed pristine as the day they were minted... as though specially preserved in anticipation of my aquaintance. Magnificent. The old hunger stirred in me again, the scent of prey on the wind, the desire to track and hunt. Miriah, my endearing if somewhat pudgy wife of these many years, had many times over badgered my sworn assurance that these boyish whims were behind me, but such a primal instinct is terrible to ignore. Already I felt my nostrils stretching out to comb the air. I cradled reverently in my white acid-free gloves this trembling scrap whose age may have been greater than anything to be found on this dusty white planet, save for a footprint and a flag in the unpopular Museum Of Lunar History. My first clue. My damnation, but ahh such welcome tingling immolation. In the following days my disappearance from public life was swift and notorious, illiciting interrogations, investigations, rewards and frantic search parties. There was a great commerce of knowing looks and tut-tuttings from the academic community who congratulated themselves smugly upon hearing that Miriah, timid but fearless, had committed to opening the sealed door of a glittering chamber at the center of our home and marked with her calculating eyes each detail among the dazzling tableau of hydrocephalic characters; the couch cushions, pencil cases, keyrings and coffee cups, and garishly in their midst like an insect on a wedding cake was the unmistakable swath of an anticipated aquisition. The reserved opening for one last trophy. Though she dismayed at its vacant dimension and the comparable vastness created in her picturesque domestic tapestry the revelation did not serve to disrupt her singularity of purpose, for which she was renowned. The suspicions and inferred confirmations were mapped out in the morning's papers, my reputation ruined, priveledges revoked and fundings withdrawn, but not a sharp-toothed turncoat among them was swift enough at the floodvalve to extinguish my strategy. While they clucked about like fools I had already plundered those resources available to myself and in secret arranged discreet passage down to the old battlefield. To earth. Much has been written and retold around the fireside about the perils of this wrecked wasteland, but it held for me an incorrigable charm. Hostile, dark, wet and hot, with wild storms and menacing tangles of collapsed architecture that protected in miles below an exhausted little plundered husk. The winds here carried a rich mixture of murderous organisms, and the ground crawled with parasitic nematodes that slept lifetimes in wait of opportunity. A mere millimeter of exposed flesh was all they asked to burn through your organs madly transforming the entire human anatomy to a brief combustion engine of cell division and consumption, a fantastic process so swift and violent that your protective suit would seem to rattle you to peices inside as it shook to the ground and spent offal out in every direction. That so brutal an environment once cradled the fathers of the human race seemed unthinkable to most, but not so to me. This place merely demanded a certain level of respect not common in our modern luxuriant conditions. And to the faithful, the reverent, and to the worthy, there were unspeakable rewards granted. Somewhere in this carnivorous atmosphere I knew there had to be this last white whale to be harpooned. I searched, and pried, and squinted through the debris of centuries, finding after some years a scant handful of evidence that the trail though cold was not yet lost. A shipping order from Belgium first, then a catalog advertisement in New Kentucky. A family photograph poked into the barrel of an umbrella stand, likely fallen from a coat pocket or such, displaying a child at her first visit to the dentist with one elbow half concealing what could only be the corner of a red hair-bow design. The very balloonlike hairbow that was the trademark accessory of the ancient voiceless cat herself. It was eleven years more of suffering and toil before my fixation had drawn me all the way to the caverns of Katmandu, and to the shambling ruins of a common hall once called Dr Phinnigans Phantastic Phishquarium and Stellar-Stupendous Steakhouse. The lost wonders of earth never fail to amaze its acolytes, and here was the most spectacular menagerie of curiosities beheld in any lifetime since the atoms were first hammered together in the primordial forge. The walls themselves seemed almost to have been purposefully blanketed with a hodgepodge of randomized knick knacks and whatnots. That I had chanced upon some primitive temple of worship was without question but to what purpose one could scarcely imagine. The beckoning arrangements drew me within to a central chamber culminating in a magnificent throne adorned with glittering dust and trinkets. In its heyday this must have been illuminated in a bath of colorful lights befitting its majesty; recognised even in its lifetime as the marvel that it was. A high backed chair of porcelain and steel with animal skin cushions, a banner overhead proclaiming in ancient anglic text "BIRTHDAY KING", belying the reverence bestowed upon ceremonies of initiation. No matter, all that I needed to see was emblazened in glorious red and white across the arm rest of the sacred seat... a hand-sized emblem bearing a checked cloth dress. Wise yet innocent black oval eyes, the symbolic absence of any form of mouth, and the patrician disdain from manipulative digits at the termination of each limb.... this was the Hello Kitty Dentist's Chair. I was overcome with joy until my bones shook with it and skin sweat fell in draped curtains of excitement. And then--- despair. Disillusionment. The chase was over again, the prey had fallen into my posession, the game at completion. What was there now? To turn my scavenging mastery to the re-construction of normal life, to track down the woman I had married and then in tedium reassemble the career so thoughtlessly abandoned. This was ultimately my reward for tireless effort and dedication. Suddenly the dentist's chair seemed deprived of luster. It was a dull and insignificant object that rotted in a grave of infinite obsolesence. Not even an object, nor even skeletal remains, mere powder and mold clinging to crumbled debris. Before I could follow this ennui to its inevitable resolution there came to my attention the faint crunch and shuffle of heavy boots across the terrain. Having listened to this same dismissable metronome for the last decade as it slithered up my suit from feet to ears this was a tinily dizzying experience to hear-- now for the first time creeping in through the microphones on the exterior of my helmet. I was earth's sole occupant no more, had been followed, myself now the subject of some stranger's fixation. Backing up against the decorated chair as if it were a maternal protector, a malformed manga spirit animal, my thumb pawed across the light switches at each side of my visor and I peered into the recesses of the room. A lithe and menacing figure poured forward that for many breathless moments refused to conform to any identifiable outline, being of approximately my height and posessed of an indiscriminate number of arms and legs. The fretful knot of cortexes and ganglia perched at the apex of my spine tortured themselves attempting to bend this sight into some familiar shape while contrarily suggesting a rapid succession of frightening possibilities. When the encroacher arrived at such proximity that denied further uncertanties I deflated with a sigh and nervously glanced about to assure myself a secret audience had not witnessed my comical state. Not man nor beast, but woman. It was Miriah, bound in a clinging diver's suit adapted for this terrestrial atmosphere, tangled with a squidlike display of clear plastic tubes and hoses trailing behind her. Did she design this contraption herself I wondered, more than surprised at the ingenious engineering and certain that the money I'd left behind would be sorely lacking to afford a genuine Earth Suit such as I wore. And to have shadowed me all this way, all these years, to finally arrive at this serendipitous moment! Two predators in reach of their quarry at last, standing like gunslingers in the fading sunset and dust, speechless for the occasion. I saw in her eyes a murderous triumph. She had dreamed of this day, fantasized my comeuppance until it had been exalted into a glorious climax in her imagination, feeding on it as she pressed across the foreign lands, enduring hardships and setbacks, hoping against hope and fueled by the old coals of wifely indignation. No doubt she felt she deserved an explanation or some such female nonsense, but it was important enough to have transplanted her all the way to this dark corner of nowhere. She tensed to spring upon me, then hesitated, and I saw in those wearily beautiful eyes a softness ripple throughout until the anger fell away from her face. Few things can be so magnificently disappointing as the penultimate aquisition of one's desire. Metroplex........gone Omni.............gone Wreck Room.......gone Somber Reptile...gone The Point........gone The Cavern.......gone The Wrecking Bar.gone Nocturnia........gone Backstreet.......gone Jizzomat.........gone 513..............gone C-11 Warehouse...gone Club Anytime.....gone The Stein Club...gone The Ozone........gone Visions..........gone Club Velvet......gone Nine Lives Saloon...nearly gone Masquerade......auctioned off Evil people of the night...unite now or never (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 2nd, 2004
9:09 pm	Helium Life in the coastal waters of Irkutsk can be deceptively peaceful. On the surface a chapterless history repeats an uneventful litany of soundless snowfalls without measure; annually erasing the footprints of no one with their blank weights and pressing their forbears patiently into the sea. It is only the sunless subglacial hollows below that betray the violent toeholds of life where fortunes are wagered and lost in the ping and echo of ceaseless war. The currents exchange rich unvoiced sufferings of each day with the infinite miseries of the past, stirring blood and parasites together in a thick disorienting murk... and it was here in the dim coral boneyards where destinies are penned with teeth and spiny fins that I first fanned my delicate gills into two tiny poker-hands and wriggled mechanically into the world. My vast family was soon whittled down to such scraps that our strength of numbers was betrayed into a hindrance, and the last of us split apart never to see one another again. I took up residence in a small elbow of bifurcated spiraculae and ventured forth not so much as an eyestalk for some days while nibbling upon drifting errata in anticipation of unnamed fortune. This fortune finally arrived in the form of a wise old crustacean who introduced himself as Elijah. Well, I say introduced himself, but in all reckoning of truth it was a name I only became familiar with through virtue of proximity, for having spied an inviting looking niche between the hinges of his filigreed carapace I endeavored to exercise that peculiar talent of my race and flattened comfortably therein, marveling with wonder afterward at the natural proliferation of accommodating new limbs that so rapidly introduced themselves to my anatomy forthwith as I can only imagine was their predesigned intent long since scripted into the apocrypha of my spiraling amino acid chains. Elijah was a solitary and ancient sort prone to decorating his companionless hours with an autobiographical narrative and wholly ignorant of my stealthy accompaniment but his predilection for autonomous conversation served as an excellent classroom with which I could become versed in the ways of ocean life. And death. Slow moving though he was, and impossibly old, his sedentary grazing was occasioned by the infrequent subduction of lesser creatures with inexorable precision and wrath, and in these brief skirmishes I held court to a variety of tactics with which the denizens of our cold depths had armed and defended themselves, ingeniously calculated yet largely to no avail. In my formative years I arrived at many insightful cognitive leaps about his relationship with his neighbors, and indeed even with myself. There was no accounting for the nature of this connection yet neither was there any denying its manifestation, for surely whenever his spirits were high I felt in myself a proportionate euphoria, and when his troubles drove away his own appetite I too became morose. Though by this point my growth was such that a large portion of my head dangled out from his backside, and smooth hairlike fingers waved in every direction like a fearsome corona, he remained as ever unaware that he played gracious host to anyone. In a similar fashion I was unable to crane my own neck around to see whatever had happened to my own hindquarters, though I trust they were still securely nestled into the chink of armor that my entire body had once occupied. It seemed to me in a curious fashion that I shouldn't accommodate with any extremity that cozy reticule, as if I trailed away far and deep into an expanse that I don't recall having existed. Some nights I would dream that I was not merely hitching about, but that I were by some effort actually steering this generous vehicle, and on such nights I would awake to find that Elijah was in peculiarly disoriented sorts. He would stumble about and behave in a confused rhythm barely recognizing his surroundings and behaving generally confused. My dismay at these displays was a genuine one for it seemed inarguable to me that we had become by such devices so irretrievably connected as his demise would surely trigger my own, and though his days may have been many and full I was as yet unprepared to yield my resources to the banquet of all. At last the terrible day arrived where Elijah ceased his constant prattle and merely swayed absently about in the currents like a somnambulant sleeper. He was alive, somehow I could feel this, but that knowledge was of no comfort. If he did not eat there would consequently be no drifting debris that I could filter through myself. At once a most terrible hunger consumed me. Surely there must be some means by which I could abandon ship, find another hospitable benefactor or perhaps strike out on my own as so many other sea creatures had done? How hard could it be? This hysterical reverie was only interrupted by a sudden commotion from Elijah, who thrust his claws upward and back toward myself, as if pleading for help. Had he known of my presence all along? He had certainly been mum on the subject so far. His claws, large and fearsome, snapped loudly a small distance from my face, a careless maneuver which he must not have considered the dangerous measure of. Were he not careful I may have been easily torn right in two. His thick shell began to creak with stress as he reached further and further out; I must confess my compassion for his condition was largely eclipsed by my own rising terror until the most unusual thing occurred. It seemed I really could fit back into my old hiding space, and all at once I did with a slithering pop eliciting a great painful noise from Elijah. There was a confusing whirlwind of commotion and the entire exhausting ordeal at once caused us simultaneously to collapse into slumber. I dreamed again that I was at the reigns and swept across the ocean floor with Elijah's mighty footspans, covering great distance with untiring ease. I imagined I could see with his eyes, hear with his ears, and think with his thoughts. As we campaigned through the depths I came in small increments to realize that I was not dreaming at all, but caught in some filmy existence unlike I had previously known. My lifetime friend was still here, but at the ends of his purpose, whatever that may have been. With narrowing clarity I focused on what seemed suddenly of intense importance, to climb as high as I could across the coral before--- before what? There seemed no time to ponder these minutiae. It was even with only the slightest interest that I noticed the abundance of tiny wriggling things crowded all about, those very things which Elijah was so fond of crushing and consuming whenever they could be found. Pity he was in no shape to notice them himself at the moment. I concentrated on maneuvering the complex mechanisms of his locomotion, scrambling up the rock until at last there was no place left to go. In all my short life I had known the sky to be a black expanse of ice but today a was not such a day. Here this firmament had been split and a terrible light was creeping nervously down into the world, too bright to behold. I turned about and peered down into the valley below, staggered by miraculous illumination, and seeing for the first time with my strange eyes this infinite majesty as can only be known from such a precarious angle. Seemingly against my will, Elijah bucked and convulsed, and I struggled to still him as I goggled with awe. Animals I had never seen before, a staggering number of them, were swarming about in the clouds of squirming Elijah-snacks, threading the water with their claws and stuffing globs of them into their feathered mouths. They resembled Elijah to such degree that I knew at once they must be his brothers and sisters, whom I presumed to have long ago died out, but here they were. Scores of them who from this height were so small and distant as to not seem fearsome nor ancient at all. My shadow, or Elijah's, well our shadow, spread out across them like a titanic blanket, and as we shuddered about with the worst of Elijah's illness I grasped at last what I had never before been able to piece together. Elijah understood as well and writhed with a horror that I now saw was of no concern to me. I pressed him down, farther into himself, digested him, changed him, became him, and in this final struggle we vibrated terrifically inside the exoskeleton until it toppled apart plate from plate and we were freed like seed on the wind. And seed is exactly what we had become. A fine cloud of dark potential burst in all directions and scattered through the water, it billowed throughout the still water and fell toppling through the corals and algae, filtering inexorably onto those who unwisely gathered below. Many of me were snacked up, crushed underfoot, or lost in the cold sea. But many found homes.... and exercising that peculiar talent of my race they flattened comfortably therein. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 1st, 2004
9:02 pm	Hydrogen Throughout the bus ride my knees shook against the seat in front of me. Two dollars! I couldn't imagine it. My first tooth was a welcome surprise all right, and the quarter I discovered that morning was the only riches I had ever owned. A prideful sensation that seamed to gleam out of the shiny disk in my short fingers held me captive all that day. Later I finally surrendered to the grim fact that a quarter can't buy much of anything, not even for a six-year-old. Perhaps because the tooth wasn't much of a tooth in the first place, (had a low market value, of course.) But then today! Who would mind losing a silly old tile from their front grill when it wins you two whole dollars? The ornate papers burned in my corduoroy Osh Koshes until I had to switch them to the opposite pocket. When my yellow stretch limo groaned into the school lot, I sprang out from the accordioned doors and bustled down the hall to our meeting place. Amber was there, like every day, and doing that thing where she pretends not to see me coming so she can act natural. How cool would she act when she found out that I could buy ice cream after lunch today, I wondered, ice cream FOR TWO. The picture of our huddling around a single mountain of improbably tall ice cream made me feel dizzily pleasant, as if I were teetering atop the ice cream myself, a fat emberassed sphere of candied red. As luck would have it my good news was trampled underfoot. She turned to face me suddenly with a twisted miserable expression, and sobbed slimily all over my shoulder. Girls have so much more snot in them than you would guess, and it gets everywhere. Being unable to think of anything to say I stood with stiff action-figure hands robotically held out in front of me, not daring to actually close them around her. What would everyone think? I did not see her at lunch that day, and had forgotten completely about my tooth fortune by the time I tromped single file back onto the bus in the afternoon. Eddie Spaghetti heard that Amber had gone home early from school, and that she had to go to the nurse. I didn't beleive that. After tub time, (a term my mother used that I absolutley despised,) I paused long in front of the mirror that night to inspect the new hole in my smile. Was this deformity what had upset my old buddy so much? Maybe she hated me now. I tormented myself to sleep, and woke the next morning just as cranky as a boy my age could manage. Mom had to wrestle me out of the blankets, and I stomped as loud as I could down the stairs to the laundry room. Honestly, everyone else's mothers folded stuff up for them but I have to do everything around here. I waded into the heap and hauled out some decent things to wear, then plopped onto the ten-gallon bucket of detergent by the door to start working on my socks. My fingers froze in position at the tips of my first spread-toed foot, and I stared horribly. One, two, three, four... where was five? I swung my other foot up to compare. All clear on the left, but a piggy was missing on the right. What in the name of --? How long had I been missing a toe? Seems like mom and I used to play a counting game long ago and they were all accounted for. This reverie was snapped apart by that shrill Mom Voice that was reserved for only those occasions when I was really asking for it. Still hopping in one pants leg as she ushered me to the front door, I tried to complain about this treatment but all to deaf ears. I simmered on the topic of unfairness all the way to school, and forgot for the moment about my odd-numbered toes. Amber was strangely not in our spot that morning. My throat seemed to swell to the size of the emptying hallway. I waited and waited, even until after the bell cleared the last stragglers from the corridors, and then dragged my bookbag into room 103 where I was again harassed for lateness. Give me a break. What a rotten day. When I finally made it back home I had hoped to just duck straight under the porch, one of the places no one had ever found me yet, and just puzzle through all this mess in peace. But Amber was there sitting on our front steps with white knee socks and all, looking as alien in front of my house as a thing can be. I dropped next to her and we sat in silence for a long time. I thought to ask if she wanted some pop rocks, but she opened her mouth first. "Do you know what divorce is?" she began, and by the time mom finally called me inside and offered to drive Amber home I understood many things that I had never even wondered about before. One of them was this: that when Amber and I grew up we would never do anything stupid like get divorced. Grown ups didn't understand anything, I thought, angrily jabbing my hands under my pillow and waiting for sleep. Some nights, you just can't get the pillow fluffy enough, like tonight, and I squashed and smashed it thinking about poor Amber, poor Amber. Which one did she get to live with? Would they move away? Take her somewhere I couldn't find her maybe, and I kept on punishing the guiltless pillow while I stretched out the possibilities. My fingers closed around a soft peice of paper. I brought it out from the bed, and held it by the window. For a moment everything else stopped mattering. Ten dollars. How long had that been here? Did I not notice this last bill yesterday? I laid it out flat on the blanket and regarded it like a biting snake. I shouldn't have ten dollars under my pillow, no tooth was worth that much. Somewhere I fell asleep, and had new dreams like I'd never had before. I saw white knee socks, stretching along Amber's legs. They were alive, they were swallowing her thighs like Boas in revolting contractions, inching up and up. They pulled her in two directions, tried to split her apart, each one racing to swallow more than the other. I wanted to stop them, beat them away with my fists or try and pull them off, but I just watched. I wanted to see... see what she would look like disappearing into their cotton mouths, and see what parts would come next. The memory of this dream came back to me the next morning as I stood in front of the toilet rocking on my heels and waiting. Ever notice how sometimes you can't seem to pee even when you really have to go? Just as the stream grudgingly began the tiny muscles inside clamped tight and I stopped peeing at once. There had always been this thing, sort of like an eyelid I guess, that wrapped around my, you know. Okay my weenie, alright? I don't care. There was this skin thing on my weenie, like a turtleneck sweater, and it always got in the way and pee would go everywhere. Well, it was gone. The pee came straight out, shot the back of the toilet lid, or I guess it's the front, well you know what I mean. The point is that my thing was gone. All at once I remembered that I was short a toe too. The most awful kind of fear crept into my belly. I looked down at my naked thing, and past that to my cartoon foot with only the four wiggling toes sticking out. The walk back to my room was longer than it should seem, and my mind raced. I had a dream last night, right? It was about Amber, sort of a grown-up dream I guess. Well, my dad was a grown-up, and his thing didn't have a thing on it. Maybe this was just one of those what-do-you-call-its... like the caterpillar we had in Mrs. Russel's class last year. Babies lose their baby teeth, right? So maybe boys just lose,... other stuff. I stood by my bed a while, thinking of babies and teeth, and afraid to look under the pillow. As usual, it took mom screaming to get me moving. I glanced to the door where I should be hustling on out to the bus, and then looked back to the bed. What the heck. My arm shot out, grabbed the pillow, and quick as a blink threw it across the room. You might have thought I was turning over a wasp nest. This was worse, so much worse. I didn't even want to touch it, didn't want to see it, but there it was. A worn, dirty, terrible rectangle of greenish paper, with ornate little numbers printed in each corner, and across the bottom the words TWENTY DOLLARS. Mom yelled at me again, and I charged out to the bus without even considering gathering up the stupidly staring money. That day, fortunately, Amber was back at school again. I felt a new awkwardness after my knee-gobbling sock dream. It was not easy to look her in the face without prickly shame nibbling me all over. Silliness; it was only a dream and she didn't need to know about it. I never mentioned it. Her parents were going to pack for vacations today while she was at school, she told me, but they were not going on vacation together. Her dad was going to Vegas with a new friend and her mom would be visiting Gramma. The new friend had been trying to get Amber to call her "Mom" but Amber refused, and confessed that she hated this stranger. Despite all this there was some really great news she couldn't wait to tell me. Her parents had talked to my parents last night, (evidently no one thought to talk to me about this of course,) and it had been arranged that until her parents got back Amber would be staying with us! Things sure had become exciting lately but this took the whole darn cake. Amber living with me and mom and dad? Maybe they could adopt her, maybe she could live with us forever, maybe she wouldn't have to ever move and we could be friends until we were old and toothless... ugh, I didn't especially like to think about teeth anymore. Amber grabbed me and jumped up and down squealing, talking about how much fun it would be to move in with us a while, and for once I wasn't too mortified. I grabbed her back and we hopped like frogs in the hallway until the bell rang. Instead of doing any real work, I pulled my crayons out of my desk and started drawing up plans for couch cushion forts and other stuff we could do tomorow. After all it would be Saturday and I wanted to get a head start on working out all our activities so's not to waste any time. This was going to be first-rate! But when I brought my fistful of blueprints into the cafeteria that afternoon, she was once again absent from our favorite seats. That was twice now I had to sit alone. Or I would have sat alone if dumb old Ricky Chambers hadn't horsed his way next to me. He was pretty gross and dorky, I alway thought, and though he got beat up a lot he never tired of picking on bigger kids such as myself. "I heard your girrrl-frieeend got arrested today," he sang, and made some wierd smooching sounds while poking me with his spork. I told him to scram before I fixed his face for him, but he kept on, "The police came and got her right out of class this morning, and she was taken away to jail! Maybe for kissing in schooo-ool!" This struck him as pretty funny, but he had a hard time laughing with a straw jammed into his fat nose, and soon after I was being dragged to the principal's office. Principal Guffman gave me the usual boring soft-talk, and then switched to something more interesting. The police really had taken off with Amber. It turns out that before setting sail for Vegas, her dad decided to pack up some last minute things he had forgotten, like his daughter for instance, and tried to take her straight from school to the airport. There was some kind of argument with the teacher until Amber's mom showed up and a fight erupted between all three of them. Amber wasn't arrested, merely given a lift to a safe place to stay for a while since she'd had enough excitement for that day. Well, I knew that the "safe place" was my house without having to be told, but when Guffman used the word exhausted I immidiately recognised that this was the most unsafe place she could possibly be. Few kids at my school were unfamiliar with the stories of last year's Field Day races, and maybe I was even famous at schools in the next town over, but I promise you this: the smoking I gave those sixth-graders on the track was nothing compared to the smoking Guffman got as he tried to chase me that day. Yours truly was down the hall and skipping stairs in groups of four before he even realised I had escaped his office. My feet skidded around the bike stand out front where I hopped onto the nearest Huffy and dug in. The monster was a little too big for me; my slow start gave me just enough time to see his red face come exploding out the front double doors. There was no way he could chase me on foot even if I weren't on two wheels so by the time he found his car and got it started I had disappeared into the woods, flying down the trail that I had always heard was a shortcut to my neighborhood. I'd never ventured here because the big kids used it, but they were all in school now and the forest was empty except for some intriguing artifacts: playboys and cigarette boxes. A dartboard nailed to a tree, with dirty words on it instead of numbers. My ankles ached and my ribs bunched up, but I couldn't get home fast enough. How long ago did they take her? How long would she have been in my house? I imagined my mom dabbing Amber's face with the corners of her dress, saying things would be alright, fixing her sandwiches and making everything better like moms do. Amber would be exhausted, that was the word that I kept hearing over and over, just exhausted from all this trouble lately. She couldn't nap on the couch of course, because mom would be watching Oprah or something in there. I'd stayed home from school before and knew where kids would be sent. Up to my room. Amber would be in my room, maybe going through my stuff, but more likely flopping across my bed to snooze or have one last quiet cry. I raced and raced until my lungs were white with hurt, and hopped off the bicycle without stopping. It cruised into the side of the house and I crashed through the front door. "Sam!" my mother cried out with surprise, but I ignored her. There was the Pokemon Gold backpack by the table and a half empty glass of milk beside a barren plate. Amber was here all right. I flashed through the room and up the stairs with a flustered mother hot on my heels. She was much faster than Principal Guffman, collaring me just as my mitt closed around the doorknob. She jerked me around into the center of the hall and leaned into my face, using her super mean closed-teeth whisper to demand just what the bluebarry hill was I doing home from school and running through the house like that, am I deaf and other maddeningly pointless questions. I fished around in mom's grip and my eyes were squeezed up getting fatter and fatter until they spilled open with hot frustrated little boy tears and she let me go all at once. I had frightened her enough that she took a step back. Like she didn't recognise me anymore. Maybe this was another one of those what-do-you-callits, another change thing, one she'd known would come but dreaded. Well, I hadn't meant to make her feel like I, I mean it wasn't my intention to pull away so hard, or to, you know really I'm uncertain what was going on here. But I couldn't let this whatever-it-was distract me. My crazy little face turned back to the bedroom door. Really though, would Amber have just sat in there not wondering what all this racket was? Would she be afraid to open the door? No, that wasn't like her. Amber would have sprang out to meet me on the stairs the moment she heard my mom yelling, and probably thrown me down on the ground like she always does on the playground mondays and after holidays. I hated when she did that, especially where Ricky could see, but I desperately wished she would do it now. No one would have to open the dumb door at all. I could just stand here another second and wait until she'd come barreling out and knock me right back into my mother's shins. But she didn't. So I stepped up, swung the knob around and pushed. For a wonderful second I could see her silhouetted against the window. She perched on the edge of the bed kicking her feet idly out and back-- her feet that ended in clean white socks and a perfect set of ten toes inside-- grinning at me like she was just so much older than I was and laughing inside that she had caught me crying for something so silly and babyish. I wanted to see her there; wanted to feel like a fool; but I couldn't. Because I had been right all along. Amber was gone. Vanished right down to her socks. My mother let out a gasp as she stepped past me and into the room, then looked down at me in confusion and made about the stupidest observation I may have ever heard before or since..................., "My goodness there must be ten thousand dollars in here!" (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 1st, 2004
7:46 pm	Revelations This is the last book of the New Testament, and the end to my thirtieth trip around the sun. I am now old enough to never again be trusted by the young, and the path on the far of the hill, the one that leads down and back into the earth, is now visible. Enough fucking around. Let's talk about God. The common understanding of him is as an interloper; a being that shapes history by giving guidance, reward, and punishment. Can it be proved that such a thing exists? Assuming the reality of god can be proved then he is by definition a rational occurence. Contrarily if he were irrational then any proof for or against him would be without meaning, because his existence would be independant of meaning. In the case of a Rational God, if he is confined to the laws of reason then he can be understood. If he can be understood, then he is not uniquely seperate from man. If he is then, not so unique from man, then he is no better than us either. If he is no better than us, he is not god at all. This familiarity between man and deity is exactly what pushed aside the old fallible pantheons of Chinese, Greek, Norse, Egyptian and many other religions (now insultingly filed under "mythology",) in which it was taken at an individual's word that he or she was "god". The same argument is true for any peculiar theories that god is an extraterrestrial. To rightly acknowledge any influence as god requires that this influence not be a rational one. In the case of an Irrational God then, he is necessarily impervious to scrutiny and there can be no assumptions about him whatever. This Irrational God is the more popular view in which we cannot pretend to understand his "mysterious ways." A good example would be that just because you cannot judge the souls of the billion microbes that live on your toes does not mean that God cannot keep track of us. He need not be analogous to anything, posessed of motive, nor in any capacity make the least bit of sense. This seems exactly to be the case given the paradoxical nature of his varied descriptions. So if god cannot be understood by any man then it follows he could not be correctly explained by any man either, which invalidates the teachings of any spritual liason such as the Dhali Lama, the Pope, Mohammad, Moses or anyone that ever wrote any account of divine intervention who all seem to disagree with one another anyway. Having ruled out all other possibilities it then remains that the only knowledge of god that can be obtained must be aquired directly by the individual. With god's will expressed into each person's subjective reality solely through their own perception and independent of any other influence the distinction between deity and man are again invalidated, equating god with the self. The only god that exists is you. This is not to be confused with sudden license to do whatever you want of course, because every other living organism should believe themselves to be god also. This may seem unfair if you are either very tiny or somewhat stupid, or worse, both, but with any luck you will be bred out of existence in a few generations so your misery is fleeting. Having identified God The Interloper and establishing the manner we should conduct ourselves, there remains the matter of how we got here anyway? To find purpose there must first be a perpetrator, so we turn to the possibility of God the Creator. Could such a thing be shown to exist? The common conceit is that the universe contains too much finely organized complexity to have been an accidental arrangement; that it must have been purposefully designed by a Creator. This idea, called the Anthropic Principle, falls apart when we realise that this universe was not the first ever to exist, nor the last, but merely a single pop in an infinite stream of created and destroyed realities. Many of them, perhaps billions or trillions of quadrillions of them, may have been chaotic and nonsensical mishmoshes of uninhabitable nothing. Given an infinite quantity of trials there was bound to have eventually arisen a universe in which it was possible for life to exist and for something akin to order to have prevailed. Not even necessarily a perfect "order" because we still have glaucoma, uranium-32, mosquitoes, telemarketers, and jury duty, but we have at least chanced upon a tolerably imperfect order where most molecules are stable, ice floats, and radiation dissipates. It is not necessary nor rational to assume that this mish-mosh was orchestrated by a supreme mind. Another assumption is that everything has to have originated somewhere; that for any observable condition there must have been a causal relation with a previous condition. However, a paradoxical leap of faith is allowed concerning God's origin. He supposedly comes from nowhere, and was created by no one. Why should that be? Would it not be simpler to cut God out of the explanation altogether and merely say that the universe itself came from nowhere and was created by no one? Causality is limited only to events in this universe because time itself is a property of matter, like height, width, mass, or color, and it follows that time did not exist until the moment of creation. Either all events occurred simultaneously or they did not occur at all, assuming there were anything we could describe as an "event", So before there was a universe there was not even such a thing as "before" nor could there have even been a causally linked "creation." This explanation may seem awkward to human minds because our direct knowledge is limited only to phenomena within this universe, but it is no less fantastic than anything preached by any religion. There is no Interloper. There is no Creator. Those who shun reason and choose to cling to faith are suspending thier belief in exchange for emotional security, or possibly freedom from responsibility. Perhaps they can cite some transitory and immeasurable quantity as their imaginary proof, such as the Aesthetic God or the "beauty in the details". But for every rose, seashell, and breath taking sunset there is also carrion, syphilis, and fat italians in speedos. There need not be an underlying theme of wonderment called upon to invoke god from these random flotsam lest you equally argue for the ugliness in details. Both sides cancel one another out. The more esoteric God of Harmonies argument is likewise baseless. Because there lies a fantastic pattern in the spiralling arms of a galaxy, a repetition of ratios between strange attractors, or symmetry between electrons and planets, it does not follow that such beauty is evidence for God. Humans are specially adapted animals with an incredible capacity for pattern-recognition. We see patterns everywhere at the tiniest provocation. Even the slightest smear of ketchup across a luch table is sufficient to conjure the image of a face in most people's minds, or a horse, or a car. We think everything looks like something, and why not? It is a byproduct of our evolution to identify the characteristics of a system, to learn, to remember, and thus survive. The reward for this behavior is an electrochemical one. Appreciation for beauty and the joy of discovery are arbitrarily decided human inventions. For example the same forces that bind the radiating branches of a snowflake together are at work in the convoluted innards of a dust bunny but no one ever submits the dust bunny as evidence for divine intervention. It is not that the universe is a beautiful place, we have merely come to see it that way. The only God that exists is you. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 18th, 2004
7:40 pm	Hey Jude Naomi Brown has made a fool out of death. She drank, got high, cursed, fought and fucked at every opportunity, and in the hundreds of years that she has been alive there have been many opportunities. She was largely hated by her aquaintances out of jealousy or impatience, and that did not bother Naomi in the least. She was crazy. Annoying. Pushy. Loud, self-righteous, short-tempered, short-memoried and scatterbrained. I found her easy to get along with. Although she had cluttered her attic with a hodge-podge of eastern mystical rubbish, her actions reflected a philosophy more akin to my own: Do what you want when you want and do it as much as you like. Then, if you have time, be nice to a few friends. Though she would snap like a hive of bees at nearly anyone, it was only because they were stupid... not because Naomi was mean. She always took time to tell me something nice about me that she liked, or to share some story she thought I would appreciate. She often brought me newspaper clippings of obituaries so that we could share a laugh about how some fool had wasted their life and then their family mispelled the entire account. She was funny and fearless. Even after I turfed her yard, left her wandering at the airport for hours, and burned down her kitchen, she was never upset with me about anything and would pish-posh the whole affair. It was hard for me to be angry with her, too-- these things were trivial between us. Her opinion of doctors was unprintably malevolent. Three years after her prognosed demise she was still causing her caretakers endless vexation. She broke out of hospitals and galavanted about town in a smock, squirrelled liquor away in her tiny house, and would bang other patients the moment the nurses left her unsupervised. Once, when Naomi was for the dozenth time "certain not to last the night", she still had the wherewithal to charm some fool in the critical wing of the hospital into such a tizzy that when she escaped he followed soon after, searching her workplace and frequent haunts she'd mentioned until he tracked her down a week later. He wooed her with opera tickets and finery.... from which she bled him dry. Keep in mind, the woman was wrinkly as an elephant's knee and bald from chemotherapy. Could you get someone's digits without a few hours in front of the mirror first? Naomi made the ultimate fool of death, time and time over. She told me that a Lady doesn't go until she's damn good and ready. Not to the movies, not to dinner, and not to the grave. After these many years she conceded,(ever the gracious victor) allowing death to finally have his way on July eleventh, her birthday. And the bastard had the audacity to be late. So today as I was nearly leaving work I heard the news I'd prepared myself for so long ago that I was caught completely unawares. My friend is dead. She will never affectionately call me "Schmuel" again. I could get in my car and drive a half dozen blocks away to her house and see her, but this type of tragedy will flush up a sudden wealth of "friends" who merely want to attend social events and capitalize on the dramatic rewards of making asses of themselves in public. I do not wish for my memories of Naomi to be cheapened by sitting through all that bullshit. There is practically nothing left of her body to visit anyway, and without her lunatic smile leering out of the casket I could hardly be expected to beleive that it was really her lying there, and not some elaborate hoax she'd staged to laugh at our expense. The world is a better place without her of course, she was a cantankerous bitch. I admired her, and I miss her. I wish she was coming in to work tomorrow, I really do. I saw the funniest thing in the paper today. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 13th, 2004
8:09 pm	John III Further chapters in the Daathumentary... Saturday July 10 Cleveland South Carolina What we were told was that we would be playing a massive all-day outdoor metal festival hosted by Volume magazine. What we found was an ostrich and duck farm snuggled between the antedeluvian foothills of the Appalachians, attended by only a half dozen kids ranging in age from two to fourteen. There was a snack booth called the Corn Cob Crib, a Hells Angels booth, three outhouses and a wooden shed with a pavillion that looked like it was constructed for quaint square dances and would be used, tonight, for our awesome destructive sermons of metal. Har de har har. We played, it was great, and the two year old rolled around suggestively in front of me the whole time, often flashing me a fat balloon of diaper while she stood upside down. Who could ask for a better reception? One kid, about eightish, was wearing a Daath shirt and I tried to get him to join us onstage for some air guitar but he was too shy. I offered him the fierce looking BC Rich Beast and he froze to the spot, saying "I don't know how to play guitar!" I assured him that I didn't know how to play either but there was no convincing him, so we went on without him. Oh well, that would have been fantastic if he'd gone along with it. There was something like a shower in the back of the barn, so I grabbed my camera and staged an impromptu hommage to Psycho with Mike that turned out really well. We left as the Seven Fenders were taking the stage, beginning by riding their Harleys through the audience. The audience of small children, remember. At the liquor and ice cream store next door Mike suddenly went into some kind of hissy fit because he had surmised that Eyal was screwing him out of money. I made some attempt to circumvent the problem by offering to give Eyal the money that Mike thought he was owed, but in the end I got out of the thing debt-free and I think nothing was really settled, but Mike shut up which was the important thing. Hell I don't get paid, and I don't deserve to, and if I did I still wouldn't care. What am I going to do with my share of twenty bucks, or a hundred, or even two hundred? Now when we're making a thousand a night, I might start fussing. Maybe. We drove twenty miles in the wrong direction to get to this very fancy hotel with marble columns, oversized ferns, and a cunning pool in the lobby which our room overlooked. We got two rooms, we didn't need to, and dammit they were both nonsmoking rooms too. For some reason Eyal put one of the rooms in my name, which I was mindful of when he later came into "our" room wanting to smash everything and spitting beer all over the walls. What kind of a five year old is he? I guess the same kind as one who would put his dick in a sand sculpture shaped like a dolphin. Except no one has to pay for the dolphin, or clean it up. Or sleep in the room smelling it. My point is, though I do not have concrete reason for justifying this, I feel like Eyal is a spoiled brat who likes to misbehave in silly emberassing ways. Me, I'm a saint. Never done anything wrong ever ever. We wandered to a Waffle house with the worst service possible and encountered a police officer who was mentally retarded. I wonder how a retard was able to swing that, unless the folks who hired him were even stupider. There was a convention of lost sheep wanting to blow their money on a get-rich-quick sceme in the lobby, and Eyal wanted to go hassle them for no good reason. What's more is that he wanted me to go and do all the talking. Pure nonsense. Sunday July 11 Thee Imperial Jacksonville Florida Corey's truck was falling apart and we nearly cancelled the entire trip. We pulled into a garage for semitrucks where a friendly mechanic diagnosed the problem using nothing but his ears. He assured us we would not be blown to the moon or catch fire, but that we should have the engine fixed when we got back home. We passed many signs for Manatees Crossing but I did not see any manatees. Corey finally asked toward the end of our journey how it was possible that manatees could cross the road so I explained that the signs I was seeing were not for us, but for people in boats riding the rivers below us. Oohh, he says. That was ridiculous. Ever seen two interstate exits for the same street? Like for instance, Moreland avenue Exit 27A and 27B. Well in Jacksonville they go all the way up to E. Fantastic. We were seriously lost for an hour and arrived late, with fifteen minutes to get our shit onstage. We did. We played great, and I got a lot of compliments on my Metroid shirt, for whatever that's worth, but not many for rocking the Casba. I like the members of the other bands we've been playing with so I filmed some of their acts, hoping one day to give them a copy. Arsis' drummer is a brutal fucker alright. I think I'm a pretty good film director and I wish I could find someone like me to film MY bands when I'm playing. I get right up in everybody's fucking way and make a giant nuisance of myself, which results in really excellent dramatic angles and interesting footage. There was a girl there as cute as a newborn rabbit I wanted to talk to, but we couldn't hear each other over the racket in the joint. There was also an awesome mural of Bender from Futurama painted on one wall. Mike and I interviewed a homeless man on the sidewalk outside and got him to freestyle rap for us. The bartender was a sucker who found himself short about eighty bucks by the end of the night. We had our pictures taken with some dishy old broad named Wild Childe for her semipornographic webzine. I called her Mrs Childe for short. I still haven't found her website. Her boyfriend was fat as a goldfish that accidentally swallowed a snowman. What, you've never seen that happen? The hotel we stayed in was the first one so far to be a complete fleabag. It reeked of mildew. I crawled under the sink and tried to sleep. I have been under many hotel sinks in my life, they are a good place to sleep in my opinion. It eliminates the iritating jokes about boys sleeping in the same bed not to mention that I am a serious wiggle worm at night and will make fast enemies. It is always pleasantly cool under there, and I have become something of a field observer of the cryptograms that appear beneath these things. Since I suppose no one else in the world ever sleeps under the sink in a hotel, I will tell you a secret: they are all made of a single piece of material, by which I mean that the sink itself is also the counter, and not a construction of porcelain and wood as they appear from above, but one large molded piece of fiberglass. More interestingly they all have something written on their undersides in crayon or magic marker. Some things I remember reading are SBRVENSCHD, DWTF, BMTVM, 42\78/36\-/, and my favorite, WENDY IWNFY GB --MARTIN. After seeing so many different things, and noticing how certain parts of them repeat, I think I might have an idea what some of this means. These ones I have mentioned for instance, are most likely Single Bedroom Venetian Sink with a hole for the wire to the Coffee maker and one for the Hair Dryer, Double Wide Two Faucets, Black Marble Top Vanity Mirror, I'm not sure about the next one though I do know that the second number is the width in inches, and the last one I beleive is WENDY I Will Never Forget You Good Bye --MARTIN. Saturday July 17 SoHo Bar Columbus Ga I ate my first Taco Bell Beef And Potato Burrito today. Surely something this delicious will be outlawed soon, so I plan to eat many of them while I can. Again it was just the band and Dave. I really hate SomewhereGone, or whatever their name is. Their music sucks balls. The singer is a nice guy though, he helped us carry our stuff in. And then he sang like ass. We tore the place up with our fantasticness and Corey was provoked by some rowdy audience members into throwing together a drum solo, and then two. After us was this really funny band called E X Vortex who describe themselves as "Ghetto Metal". They're black, which is a rare treat in the realms of heavy metal, and their fatass drummer played onstage with two hooded sweatshirts on at one time. They gave an amazing performance, and I didn't like their music either. I did like the posterboard signs they slapped together to help the audience sing along with their songs. Funny. Some old woman and some big loser sat at a table with Corey, Mike, and myself, and rambled in an incoherent and somewaht amusing fashion. The woman couldn't get our names straight, and to make it worse we were intentionally referring to each other with our own names. She became very confused. Corey himself became confused when he saw that I was drinking the expensive beer, because the bartender had told him they didn't have any. Maybe she didn't beleive he was in the band so was being stingy with the Band Beer. We all got really drunk and played a lot of pool until I met this girl, uh, whatsername. We went outside and talked for a very long time until she finally agreed to let me see her nipples, which were cute, and I also got to see her magnificently stapled stomach, which was not all that cute. The storm of the century poured down on us but I liked her a lot so we just stayed out there and got soaked. She gave me her phone number before she left, and once her car had disappeared around the corner I dropped it on the street and watched it float down into a drain, hoping I would never likely see her again. When I came back indoors Eyal observed that I must have just fucked that whore I had been talking to all night, and his blithe assumption that he could call her a whore nearly got his face poked in, but before my anger had gotten the better of me I decided I didn't really care what he thought of her. I like the way she looked at me, and it was worth the way everyone else must have looked at us. On the ride home Dave made us pull over because he had to throw up. He apologised about it for most of the trip, which was unwelcome noise. He was very nearly fired for this transgression but I suggested that instead, we just ask him not to drink so much. Friday August 13 So Ho Bar Columbus Ga Well who knew I would ever be coming back to this place? We came in seperate cars this time, and Mike road with me. That boy can talk as anyone who has met him will testify, and I am hardly the strong silent type myself. The result was that upon our arrival my throat was a little sore from shouting over him. We passed the most enormous Burger King I have ever seen. It was like a blue and yellow three-storied pagoda, with a parking lot bigger than a soccer field. I had never heard of this "SoHo Bar" before in my life, until we pulled into the place and it all came back to me. We just played here! The stapled stomach girl was there. I still don't remember her name. Tell you what though, she isn't even a fraction as pretty as I had imagined her to be, nor as fun to talk to. Within a few minutes of conversation I decided that she was a stupid whore and wished she would go away. Dave had agreed not to get tanked, but he did anyway claiming that the bouncer at the door made him drink. We played a little joke on him where I stole all the merchandise from the table while he wasn't looking. He sat there a very long time without noticing anything had disappeared. I let Mike in on the joke, so he went over and asked where everything was. Dave panicked. When we weren't splitting our sides over that Corey and I were beating the Christmas ham out of two losers who challenged us to a game of pool. We cleared the table of every ball in two moves. Bam! We started discussing how we should really sharpen up our billiards skills so that we could take this little show on the road, sort of a side project to Daath, wiping out suckers' wallets everywhere we went. The stage was much cleaner than it had been the previous time, and they had removed the TV from the wall-mounted stand in the corner above and behind us, which Corey complained about because he was watching that TV all night the last time we were here. Also, the mirrored wall behind us had been covered up, making it look less like a strip club. I'm fairly positive that this used to be a titty bar. Man, I want to play a show in a titty bar! Who cares if we get ignored? While we played there was a single man in an imaginary moshpit going apeshit. Poor fella. Eyal left early to shmooze it up with Arsis, and the rest of us stole SoHo Bar t-shirts on our way out the back door of the club. We decided to go to the nearby Waffle House, and what do you know Arsis and Eyal were there. I drove at about one hundred miles per hour the entire way home, because I was ready for some snooze. Saturday August 14 Breakers Jonesboro Ga My little brother actually came out to this show, advertised as the "Utter Destruction Fest", which Susanne re-named the Otter Destruction Fest. That joke did not die easily. The list of bands playing that day and night was enormous, and Lamar was infuriated over his exclusion and so he stayed home to stab chickens or something. I had hoped he would come too. Amanda, or Amandatory Suicide as I sometimes call her, is a little pinpoint of a girl just barely eighteen who I have recently become friends with. The first time we had ever really hung out together was when Demoncy played at Swayze's, when I gave her a ride to and from the show. She is the most bashful and awkward female ever to break out into a snorting laugh and then cover her mouth, and has cloaked herself in the dark shadows of metal music. She rarely speaks. My coworkers at the Junkman's Daughter have nicknamed her Tomato Nose because she has such a big red schnozz. Perhaps that is also what endears her to me, because I had a bus park on my face when I was young too. Rena was there. I forgot about her. She zeroed in on Amanda immidiately and inquired if we were an "item". When she learned that we were not, she moved in on me and tried to get me to buy her a drink. For one thing, that drink swindling business is MY department, not hers, and for another I don't like her, and on top of that she was squeezing my fat with her damn fingernails in some attempt to be affectionate so I punched her in the stomach. I spent much of the concert avoiding her and hanging out with Richard "Laddie" Dinsmore and his old lady, shootin snooker with Corey, and juggling beer coupons out of easy marks. Eyal was hellbound for leather that he would score himself some strange and had latched onto a somewhat attractive female. Not as pretty as his real girlfriend, and where has she been lately anyway? Naturally the moment he got up to use the men's room someone asked her if he could take a picture of her titties and she flashed the whole room. Then other people pulled out cameras and she refused, getting into a far worse mood by the time he returned. I had always assumed that Burial Rites would be a good band, but I learned otherwise. They emptied the room of customers, and it was a large room too. A very nice stage, just a class act venue all around by my reckoning. When it was our turn to suck we instead played like demons, and this was our first show that I would actually rate as burrito grande fantastico. No one was adhering to the Daath dress code, and I had looked over at my bandmates and hated their outfits just one too many times. If they can do things I hate, then I can do things they hate, so this show was a return to my more traditional onstage appearance right down to the white contacts and eyeliner, though I did spare them the platform heels. I just felt less like a schmoe who works at a clothing store and more like a creature of darkness, and this was reflected in my performance. After every song there was a larger and larger crowd watching us, until there was no one left hanging around outside or at the bar. I even barked out at them in a voice I have not heard myself use in years, the ol' Apocalyptic Visions kill-all-humans voice. Another thing that really helped the entire concert out was Amanda, who was right there in front of me pressed against the stage all night, thrashing her head up and down and throwing the goat. Except for Mark Stopper at the first Daath show at CJs landing, that spot in front of the stage has been empty ever since my divorce from Laura. It is the most important ten square inches of floorspace in the entire building to me, but I guess I am merely spoiled by Mike, Darlene, and Laura. They would always crowd right up where I can see them, perhaps because they knew that because of the stage lights I can't see anything else, or perhaps because they just really wanted me to know that they liked me. It works, every time that my eyes caught Amanda's I got another twenty feet taller and became even more venomous. I was very glad that she came. Also, I realised that I thought she was very beautiful, and suddenly had a very difficult time not looking at her. At the close of our last song, there was thunderous applause and a few weak chants of "one more!" that quickly withered away. They didn't like us quite so much as all that, they decided, but I felt like a warrior fresh from battle all the same. It was fun. Many is the time while writing that I wished there were another word for "fun", that sounded more serious. For instance, if you just had a spectacular fuck that was everything you wanted it to be, you couldn't really describe it as "fun." Oh, it was a blast, a good time, swell, whatever. It was, uh, it was really prafnosh. After the show I tried to film Amanda setting fire to a box of one thousand books of matches. I expected a mighty sulphurous blaze and instead got a pitiful sputtering little nothing, and then the battery went dead in the camera. The girl who was supposed to be handing out copies of Volume Magazine came over and threw them into the fire, and a small crowd of pyrophiles gathered around before the owner of Breakers eventually came out and put the fire out, calling us a bunch of mean jerks for burning the very magazine that was promoting our band. Well, I didn't put the damn magazines in the fire, and I'm not in the fucking magazine anyway, Eyal and Mike are. A caravan was organised to a nearby house party, and we all schooled over there. It was a dismally unfurnished hovel with an igloo cooler filled with hunch punch in the basement. Amanda busied herself snuggling up to Justin, which was cute because he's about four feet taller than her, and I set about insulting everyone who lived in the house. Hey, their band sucks, I call em like I see em. The hilarious truth was revealed about the piece of ass Eyal had been hitting on all night: she was a serial tazer. Few in attendance were not old veterans of the Jonesboro Metal Scene (?) and they all had the scars to prove that this woman loved to lure men back to her house where she would brand them with a tazer until they fled for their lives. Not one brave suitor had ever succesfully closed the deal with her, and one guy admitted that he actually had a restraining order against the girl because she sometimes would sneak into his house at night to burn him some more while he slept. Eyal did not see the humor in this, and muttered something about how he'd like to see her do that to him. Fuck I'd like to see it too, one of the guys she fucked up looked like a bald gorilla, only musclier. Friday August 20 Sluggo's Pensacola Florida Good goddamn, this was absolutely the worst show ever. No band ever sounded so unlistenably shitty as we did that night. Sluggo's was an old Mexican restaurant recently transforned into a vegetarian bar with a flea circus stage and a criminally insane sound engineer who gave us howling feedback throughout the night. Nobody liked us, and we didn't like nobody. I actually saw someone with a Demoncy shirt on. He said he knew Alex. After the show I went with the Brewer twins to the strip club next door. As soon as we sat down one of the girls bought us all Jager Bombs. I had never drank one of these before, after all I hate Red Bull and I hate Jagermeister, but I was intrigued by their beautiful luminescence under the black lights, and I must admit they were most delicious. Every girl there was busted looking except for one who I convinced to come sit with us. She had a pleasant demeanor and a scar on her lip that she would not admit to when I asked about it. I found out the hard way that in Pensacola the girls are not allowed to show their pink, but the lap dance was worth it anyway. She was an excellent tease who could thrust her hips out in a novel fashion and then bit my ear with just enough force to make me melt and coo, after which I snapped my mouth shut and nervously checked to see if she had heard me. She heard it all right because she had pressed her lips together like she was trying not to giggle, then bit me again and cooed back, and seriously I actually started to doze off a little before she snapped her fingers under my nose and said "Hey!" It was really nice. Sleepy nice. Everybody was having a grand old time until Eyal finally stormed into the place and chewed us out for "ditching" him. He threw a magnificent fit about being left out, which did not inspire anyone to try and include him ever again in the future. What a brat. I was pretty drunk and tried to speak soothingly to him about how sorry I was that we had misbehaved so, but Corey erupted at him and threatened to quit. It would seem that Corey had had enough of being the guy who does all the work, and the idea that he might have abandoned every one else and left them to move all the equipment by themselves seemed not only fair, but inconsequential. He did not appreciate being scolded in public. As I have said before, everyone always feels like they get stuck doing everything no matter how the labor gets divided, but it is only the assholes who complain about it. Eyal was being that asshole. In time, we consented to loading up the van, and afterwards returned to the strip club. Eyal was much more chipper when we all entered the place together, but the place soon closed down and we had to take our shitfacing elsewhere. We got a hotel, and I stayed out on the balcony most of the time with Eyal so that Corey wouldn't possibly say something I didn't want him to. I told Eyal that Apocalyptic Visions was going to be playing shows again and that it might serve as a pressure valve for some tensions that had been building up with everyone. Meanwhile those very tensions were at work inside, where the twins were picking on Mike all night. I tried to play some Samurai Jack on my game boy but all I could do was lie under the sink and stare at the thing. The writing under the sink was SSTRCM78. Single Sink Towel Rack Coffee Maker 78 inches. Saturday August 21 Wired Dothan Alabama This show was either cancelled or I got so wasted that I cannot remember anything about it. Friday August 27 Hangnail Gallery Augusta Ga Corey rode with me to this show, which gave us a lot of time to discuss our visions for the apocalypse. The new bass player, Jeremy, drove Eyal, and Mike rode with his gal Claire. Dave had not been fired but he did resign his esteemed position because of conflicts with school. The moment that we arrived a gutter punk came straight up to me and offered me a beer. He carried with him an unbreathable fog, and so with my lungs somewhat constricted I tried to explain that I couldn't really have anything just yet. Then he pestered me about Satanism while I tried to pack all the drums into the venue. The hangnail gallery really is a gallery; a black-walled retail space hollowed out with uninspired paintings stapled to its sides. There was no bar and no kitchen, though there was a small dish rack in the cramped bathroom with a few dirty bowls caught in it. The first band started playing if you could call it that and we had to run for safety. It was decided that we would seek out a local bar, and we were careful to kindly mention where we were going to Mr WorryWart so that he wouldn't go bonkers again. Mike and Claire were left behind to guard all our stuff. On our brief tour of downtown Augusta we saw many palmetto bugs, and also a roving congregation led by a man with an appropriately scaled crucifix dragged from his shoulder. I wonder, when they get where they're going will they pin him to the damn thing or not. Pretty meek symbolism if they don't. They tried to hand us some pamphlets. We found a place called the Game Room and had just cracked open our first round when Mike called to say he would soon be joining us, and that he had Claire with him. Well, that makes sense, this way everyone can steal all our stuff. We met Mike halfway and all came back to the Gallery, where we had evidently just lost our place in the lineup for being late. Another even worse band started playing. From across the street came the welcome thrashing of some seriously bitchin' metal, and I moseyed over to check it out. Some really young fuckers were in a rehearsal space with their door open, and shredding the night air to pieces. I just walked right in and watched. Everyone else was behind me, but they listened from the doorway. When our new and later timeslot finally came around we battled the tangle of wires and cables that littered the stage. It was covered with crap. Mic stands, switch boxes, carpet samples. It took a very long time to set up. Someone had smashed a wheel on my cabinet so it wouldn't stand up straight, and I stuffed debris under it until it was level. The house reeked of unwashed punks, and if I'm not mistaken they were requesting songs and singing along. This was our first time here, how did they know any of our material? While we packed up our ammunition Eyal conspiratorily took me aside and asked if I would like to do something evil. My dork alert was instantly increased to orange and I cautiously inquired what he had in mind. The previous band had left a pedalboard behind and he wanted to steal it. I suppose what he really meant was that he wanted ME to steal it, or else he would have just silently packed it up himself. What a cunning and devious plot this was, to rip off people we barely knew merely because we didn't like their music, and take something that we have no use for whatever and would likely not even work, removing it from the people who clearly lived in a destitute cultural wasteland with nothing to offer and thus robbing them of the one slight material reward life has granted them. I told him he could do it if he wanted to, it didn't make a difference to me, and hoped that would be the end of it. He kept on about it but never mustered the gumption to go through with it. I suppose if I had giggled and egged him on he would have. What a brat. Saturday August 28 Burrito Jones Carrolton Ga This was meant to be a Lust concert. They cancelled and Susanne invited us to take their place. I imagined a burrito restaurant with no stage nor P.A. where the tables would be politely scooted aside so we could play in one corner of the establishment provided that we didn't interfere with the customers. I was right. Also playing that night were a band called Big Yelloe Mama. Why the e at the end of Yelloe, you must be asking. Well, the explanation isn't worth the time it takes to hear it, so just forget about it. In the beginning I had decided not to allow Stacey to come see us play anymore because Skinhead Chris had tried to rough her up. Then he was fired, so she was only briefly allowed to attend before I changed my mind again and decided it wasn't worth it. She doesn't pay attention to me and just makes me feel unimportant. Well, this was supposedly just fifteen minutes from her house and I presumed that not one person would be watching us anyway, so I permitted her to attend the show. She would have to pay attention to me, because she wouldn't know anyone there, right? Also, she strangely claimed that she had "learned her lesson," and knew that I wanted her to hog my line of sight all night. When she says things like this, I wonder if she is even aware that she has said something. She did know someone there it turns out-- she knows Claire. So while Claire was busy trying to gush at her boyfriend's singing, Stacey sat in front of her and tried to talk to her all night. Put more simply, Stacey had her back to me the entire time. Not that I could even see that back, because while Claire had picked a great spot to get a clear view of Mike, it was impossible to see me from there because of the enormous speakers between us. And another thing, this was not even the closest table to us, they were behind the booth where RENA sat. Cripes! That round bitch is from Carrolton, and was very excited to see that I had come all the way out to her hometown. She explained to me at great length how pretty she thought I was, and how pretty Stacey was, and tried to bring this suggestion to its logical conclusion but I made myself too busy to hear it. Stacey hardly said a word to me. Oh well. She looked great, and at least I got to leave with her. Somehow at the last moment the entire restaurant filled with people and it was a very good show. I played slide guitar with an empty beer bottle and borrowed one of Corey's drumsticks to play guitar with, too. I got that trick from Ted Lathangue. They seemed to like us I suppose. Afterwards I wanted to go out somewhere but sadly we were lost in the wilderness. Stacey claimed to know a shortcut, and somehow her house went from being fifteen minutes away to being twenty minutes away. Well, the actual journey stretched all the way out to over an hour long, and then we had to drive another half-hour from there to Atlanta. We went to Trackside Tavern and Eyal got to meet Daniel and Jessica, the latter of whom very nearly kicked his ass. I do not remember if we ever said goodbye or not, but I remember that at some point I looked at Stacey and it was time to go. We raced over to Lael's house and humped like bunnies. Thursday September 9 Masquerade Atlanta A big deal was made about ticket sales, as if that would have ever made a difference, and in the end no one sold anything except Eyal. And it still didn't matter because all ticket sales were refunded when Suffocation cancelled. More than half of the people who had come to see them decided to go home, and the remaining stragglers got in for free. I had brought Amandatory Suicide with me so that she could film our performance, and encouraged her to get on stage with us and move around a bit. In particular I wanted some proof that Corey was in the band. The problem with being the drummer is that no one ever gets to see you, there's always some cymbal in the way or something. Well, Amanda must not have understood what I meant because she filmed a great deal of Cymbal Head, but never got his secret identity on tape. Also she mostly seemed to get Eyal's guitar sound recorded since she just stood right in front of him all night, and it sounds like he was having a heart attack or something. Sure enough when we got offstage he plunked down and did not get back up for an hour, looking like he had terminal cancer or something. Vegetarians seem to get that a lot I have noticed. I feel like the real spark of life comes from killing and eating things that are smaller and cuter than you are. Plants are there just to flavor up the dead animals, like the rice in sushi for instance. For me, it was my best performance ever, even if no one even glanced at me the whole night. Everyone whose faces I could make out were all concentrating on Mike. During the silence between songs Inebriated Soul Shane screamed out "Get off the stage!" and later chastised me for having joined such a shitty band. The get-off-the-stage comment was directed at me in particular, he wanted me to leave them. Check, no free t-shirt for him. Alex unveiled to me the greatest news ever, that he had finally printed my article in the Deathgasm Magazine. It has been so long since it was written that I had forgotten entirely what it said. Reading it for the first time, I must say I was very impressed. Other than Motel666 I am my own favorite author. He says he wants me to write for the magazine more often and I am very excited about it, but I only agreed on the condition that he sing for Apocalyptic Visions. Hooray! Robin was there, and she looked fabulous. Not the good Robin, the crooked-nosed cupcake who moved into my old room at Barry's, but the ee-e-vil Robin, the hispanic bombshell who somehow keeps a great figure and marvelous complexion despite her insatiable appetite for heroin, crystal meth, and cocaine. I do not like her very much, but even so the spanish inflection has always held a fearsome power over me. She had come to see Suffocation of course, because she often pretends to be very connected and was very good friends with them. With heavy narcotics addicts such as herself I am never certain if I should beleive what they say. It certainly is likely that someone who looks the way she does would have no difficulties selling drugs to famous people, but it is equally likely that this is all in her head. Like Ceceil. No, not like Ceceil, because she has all that empty liposuctioned skin hanging off of her. Yich. Well there was no one else there that she knew so Robin was stuck talking to me all night, and I didn't mind that.. She loved our performance and was gushing in my ear, sometimes brushing it with her lips, until I was mesmerised. Before long I forgot that she was annoying and started wishing she would kiss me. She did. I should really sharpen these mind tricks. I got a lot of nice little smooches out of her from then on, though only the last one was on the mouth, ever so quickly. If she weren't such a waste of life I think I should like to introduce her to my girlfriend someday, hmm. Before she left I put my fingers into her hair behind her neck and asked if she would give me all of her money. She did. I was in booze like the emperor of China for the rest of the evening. Amanda turns into a pumpkin at midnight on school nights, so I had to sling her back home quickly, and then returned to the Masquerade because I had promised the fine people in Arsis that I would show them around Atlanta. They had decided, of all things, that they wanted to STAY at the Masquerade and go dancing downstairs. They were very funny dancers, and I snuck my videocamera in so that the moments of sidesplitting awkwardness would not be soon forgotten. At Waffle House at five in the morning, we were joined by the members of Set Ablaze. I nearly started a fight with them because I said that hardcore sucks. We started arguing, one of them actualy got up to sit somewhere else, then the food came and we all quieted down. Then I drove them all out to Yoel's house where they crashed. I slept in front of Junkman's. Thursday September 16 Swayze's Marietta Throughout the months of August and September the sun plays out its last poker hand with a flourish before retiring for the winter, mercilessly steam-baking the northern hemisphere one final time. The ocean charges up with heat, stockpiling energy below its depths in ways that the armored dry land cannot. With a hint of things to come in the fall months, a vast blanket of cold wind recently splintered off from the north and crept across the Gulf of Mexico, pinning the ocean beneath. The natural order had been reversed onto its head. In the failing moments of twilight the sun was taken from the sky and the waters of the ocean took their chance to right this imbalance, ballooning with pregnancy to high above the typical sea level before vomiting out great megatons of thermal energy. This bowl of angry wind cupped the nor'easter against a starry ceiling and squeezed it into a ball over a hundred miles across, condensing water into rain and molecular static into enraged whips of lightning. The heavy bundle of Ivan's womb grew fat and wet, plummeted out of the mesosphere and slammed into the sea like a gaseous meteor, drilling through the air with a towering cavern behind. The eastward spin of the entire earth rushed the southern and northern walls of the storm along the world's axis at two different speeds creating a counterclockwise vortex of sheering pressures. This effect is subtle enough to set a spin into even the smallest drain from a sinkful of water, but at meteorological dimensions becomes magnified into a devestating coriolis involving millions of tons of air. The hurricane howled into life. Ivan was a category five tropical storm batting boats and fishermen around at two hundred sixty kilometers per hour. He set foot on the shores of Alabama at eleven p.m. and consumed all that wasn't anchored by bedrock, rearranging beaches and flattening the works of man. Still, what others call a storm I say is just a change in the weather. Throughout the day I had to endure the panicked clucking of fools who were preaching for the apocalypse. With nearly four hundred miles separating us from the monster there was no possibility of him ever making it here in time for dinner, or ever. At a top speed of forteen miles north with every hour it would take days complete the journey, and as I mentioned before the entire fuel for hurricanes lie in the water, not the land, so by the time Ivan made it to the treeline he had already settled down to a mere category three. No joke for the chumps selling seashells for a living, but no concern to us city folk in the least. The most we endured was some pleasant rain and the typical power outs that come with any storm. Idiots. Amandatory Suicide's mother didn't want to risk driving through the horrible terrifying life-threatening raindrops so I had to schlupp forty miles east of nowhere to get her. Coming back into town we got to see something I had never witnessed before: what a blackout looks like from outside. For thirty-one years I have always been indoors when this happens. When viewed from a moving vehicle on the highway the eclipse of nocturnal illumination is disquieting, like watching a black hand sweep aside the conveniences of modern life. The dark ages suddenly returned and scenery only flickered dimly back into view one cande-lit window at a time. Except for those of us huddled in gas-powered cars of course. After an hour of threading between nervous traffic we arrived at what appeared to be a ghost town. Several bands had cancelled, one was lost but circling somewhere nearby, and most of my own band had not yet arrived and possibly would never arrive because no one wanted to go through with this engagement. Well, I assumed Eyal would cancel this show but I meant to come anyway to see Misery Index and pick up the new Psyopis CD for Brann at his request. He had planned to appear in person but was exhausted from his own recent trip from Florida that day. I finally got to really be introduced to Black Metal Adam, whom I have marginally known for many years. He is a very self-important posturing skinhead who may be drumming for Demoncy. I liked him, and when no one else was interrupting talked to him as much as I could. Mike's introduction did not fare so well and within moments Adam had threatened to shoot him with a gun. Whether playfully or not no one was certain. Soon afterward they seemed to get along fine. I suggested many times that if Corey never showed up we could just have Adam fuck around with us onstage, just for the hell of it. No one ever really took this idea seriously except for Adam himself. Following a prompted call to Corey's house he shortly manifested from his truck where he had been there all along, sleeping. As we set up our gear onstage I recognised the members of Withered and asked when they would be playing. They had just finished up. Strange, I remember them being such a great band but what I had heard from outside was so bad that I never came indoors to see who it was. We were not using our own equipment this night. We had borrowed gear from Misrey Index, and though this was no problem for those of us who stayed on their feet, it was disastrous for Corey. He was lost behind this drum kit, nothing was where he thought it should be, and he played terribly. Well, he never plays terribly, he did great, perhaps faster than I had ever heard him play before, but what he was doing didn't exactly fit with the rest of us and was barren of recognisable cues so we were completely out of time with one another. I haven't been party to such a fiasco since the Demoncy show in Tampa. I would galloup into the end of a song, then hear Eyal pulling in second, Corey would come smashing into position with a flourish and leave Jeremy behind to realize in his own time that the rest of us were done. What a mess. The alleged storm of the century luckily spared us a very tiny audience who were oblivious to our failures. Really, unless people have heard your album a thousand times and can air-guitar your compositions it hardly matters how well or badly you play. What they react to is the ambient excitement of the room which is ignited solely by the behavior of the people on stage. If we cram it down their throats, they will swallow it. For me the show hinges on Amanda who stands right in front of me banging her head and occasionally horning her fingers into the air. If I can see that then I can make even the worst sounding songs seem great. The illusion was created; I was congratulated individually by nearly everyone in attendance afterwards. Amanda was surprised to hear me complain about Corey's timekeeping, insisting that we were better than ever. Well ta da! This was no consolation to Eeyore though, who pulled me aside to discuss his plan to fire our drummer. I was against this move but did little to protest. The seperation is inevitable. I managed to calm the situation down a little, hoping to stave off the death rattle for at least one more show, but the next day the stake was driven home. After twenty-three shows Corey is fired and our planned concerts are cancelled. He was the one member of this band who I unconditionally appreciated, and my mind is sandbagged with dread for the future. I have no intention of quitting Daath though. Alcoholics will drink whiskey even without a chaser. The suffering and rewards of liquor are what they really crave, not the respite of harmless cola. There is much high-falootin talk about our replacement drummer, little of which I give credence to. We will begin recording the second album soon and come hell or high waters I intend to be on that fucker. I don't see the necessity of having rehearsals anymore, since there will be no live performances. The innumerable takes that will be recorded should be rehearsal enough, until the album is finished and the new drummer is baby-stepped into position. When that happens, we will have plenty of rehearsals trying to get him to play the material correctly. I do not look forward to this. Still, what other people call a storm, I say is just a change in the weather. (Comment on this)