Dust (part 2). And Never Hit Your Grandma With A Shovel (it leaves a bad impression on her mind. -Tiny Tim)

In all my days of begging, it's true that I never wanted much. It was always enough to get the small gains of each new day. No grand goals to hinder my movements, no overbearing desire to hold me to a course of action. Just a meal, a drink, and a fuck to keep me standing. But now I've grown old and am beginning to wonder just what it was that they were singing about back there in the days of whiskey and regret. Is there some larger stand to take that brings all of these tiny moments together? Do we, all of us tiny creatures, have an end to reach? Is it in us to become? It's a sore deal, this cycle of want and loss. Are we genuinely better than this want? It's all questions now with never an answer that rings true. How many days have I spent trying to deceive my love with a mask of laughter telling myself that it's an act of grace, the gift of apathy, the conditional habit of ignorance? I've seen men hanging from their balls, their livers, and their hearts.

Have you ever been to Kansas? Have you ever been to New Orleans? Have you sung the midnight down till dawn? Can you sing the sickness off your life in a clear, true voice? Do they believe you when you smile?

It's been a long time, but I know a hawk from a hand saw and I have seen the light. And this too is a lie.

See? Tricksy mind. Slipping up and going back into the old rants and ruts. Clinging like dried skin and feathers on the side of the road, desert dry and cooked to perfection. The perfect silence, the perfect meditative pose- ego finally dispensed with. But still waiting. What for now? It's only the remnants of habit. We wait in life, always, so when death calms us we'll keep waiting with a century long grin slowly spreading out on what remains. The revenant smile. Is it why we get sucked down river to this grave city where the dead will not stay under? Studying, we are. Trying to commit to some vague muscle memory that might outlast our flesh. Bone memory?

Festina lente. Make haste slowly. The dawning sun is the killers rose, set out on the curb with the piled high corpse dreams- another night without sleep and so many imagined cities aborted before conception. Struggling down through the seas of sleeping, but made buoyant with the misery of the day and yesterday, too. It bloats the heart, fills it with noxious gases. No sleep for you my dearest one, my own unremembered face pressed down into the stained pillow. The sun is coming for you again.

Lying here in the detritus of my death, laughing at my desire for love. For a lover. Who will be still beside me amidst the cigarette butts and ash. Carnival has ended, and now it's ash. I sleep in it, this bed of ash, if I sleep at all. I tell it stories and it returns them to me, quieter and more distant. Ashes, ashes. But already fallen, comfortable in broken repose. Waiting. This is not a suicide note, this is ash settling on the surfaces of my life.

It's becoming a story after all. A motionless tale of nothing. A waiting book. That's the whole story, yes? That all of this is wait. Crushing wait. Waiting without goal, waiting for nothing. Waiting for ashes to claim the last memory. Burning without light, without joy or sorrow either. Steady hands pressing back the memory of vision. Waiting for the story to begin so that we might work our way towards the end.The addiction has faded, only empty now but without hunger. I would like to see your face and hear your voice, but like old film, like talking to the TV in insomaniacal half dreams, the same movies every night without sleep or dream the rambling sentence of a life too long lived, waiting, waiting, waiting. This is not a biography, it's a killing of time, and time is suicide. Too much will surely kill us all. But we will not let it go, will not stop wallowing in it, collecting moments to measure our too long lives with. Comma, comma, pause, pause. Taking breaths and not returning them. This is not a song that can be easily sung. But I will try. See me dance to sound of my own voice, to all the voices inside and outside of my head that follow me while I sing too loudly and sometimes just speak to you out there in the streets by my lonesome? I would like to see you again, but safely. Don't get me wrong, I'm not waiting. Waiting, waiting. I'm only trying to not remember that there is a tomorrow after this and more and more and too many to count. Easily severed, these tomorrows. Festina lente. Hurry up and wait.

This is not a suicide note. This is only waiting.

~God Loves Tiny Tim~

Dust (part 1)- This is not suicide. And Shame, Humility, Revenge. Skin (Swans).

My body is devouring it's memories now, eating at the flesh that stores these lost sensations. Soon even the bones will fail, falling into ordered heaps of dust. The memories, too, are becoming nothingness. Me, biking down the empty streets, hearing voices just out of range who sometimes speak my name; or some word that resembles my name in the dead roads- shun, shun, shun... And all I remember is removed from me, behind sheets of plastic, only dull pains and aches that sometimes roar too loudly to hold in. This is when I split my skin open and bleed into my bed, getting colder with each heart beat.

I don't want to tell a story here. I am out of stories, done with them. And because all the stories point in the same direction, through laughter and sorrow and dumb founded awe, I don't need to remember. To what end? To say, this is something that happened and now is gone? As for new stories of some golden future, no. They all go to the same end. So I will sit here and wait. It will come when it does, no need for sympathy or ritual to guide it in. Every action between now and when just that. Blank action unattached to anything else. Ha, ha, ha. It's not a joke, but I enjoy pretending that it's funny. Another thing to do to eliminate minutes and hours from the path. This is not a suicide note. This is time sliding over glass.

I am violently addicted to the small moments of joy. When the despair laps up again on the shore, as it always will, I shake and froth and begin to hallucinate with the pain of withdrawal. I latch on to people who radiate joy. Strangely enough they are generally sad people who have glimpsed behind the curtain but cannot live there. I suppose I am the same. Kicked out of heaven I wander the earth looking for it's shadows. I don't think this is my life for success, only survival. But again, I am addicted. I need it like milk for survival. And like any true junkie I always need more and purer joy to get my fix. I'll go without food, spend all my money in the darkest places, those with the deepest shadows trying to not look as though I'm looking. The trick is, there is no trick. You simply have to be there when it comes. What I mean to say is that you cannot actively search out the moments. They'll see you coming with your desperation and your greed from days away and skitter around the corner before you've even caught the scent of it. I have no trouble divulging these secrets. They'll do no one any good who hasn't already come upon them honestly, trudging through the depression smelling of bile and chronic masturbation. The door to the church is directly before you. But you have to know that there is a church before you can see it. Go to New Orleans. At the corner of Bourbon and Music it stands, shining and singing.

But still, it is not a story. It's a song with no melody dragging itself down the street. Another false religion trying to simplify matter and energy into moldable structures. I spit these songs out like a dog barking at ghosts. He knows they are there but he can never, to his endless shame, make you believe him. They are rain against the roof, trying to get in. No more. I am sealed and only things go out now, in the usual ways. Shit and more shit. Where is it created from, when I no longer ingest from the world? The body eats itself. Sad but true, Saturn had no children- it was himself that he devoured.

I don't feel as if I should be here, not knowing where here is, or where else I might go.

There is a loss I cannot define, slipping into old reductions, the simplest terms that lean into fallacy . Is my first mind the paranoia or the beacon? I'm trying to tie my eyes more firmly to my heart, to use my mind from a distance- the casual observer. I need to know what it is I'm seeing. The input is spotty and unreliable. When is a chair not place to sit but a thing to get up from? What blankets should be kicked off, exposing skin to the cold and light, to the rain and clearing fog? Can these riddles be fashioned into new fairy tales full of caution and reward for the brave, innovative child?

Take out the last of your comfort and woe and pass them before the flame. See how they glimmer, see the light run over and through the flaws each hides boldly in plain sight? Listen now to the words they whisper, false confidence and tender, desperate need, vying for respect. How not to be seen, but recognized, as vital and alive.

The language keeps changing, sliding through the differences in time. Fucking time, eternal enemy. The only true eternal. And yet it will die with us too. Each of us laying down, and finally giving away all of our time. And language too. Just the written flesh out in the sand, always changing it's voice but never changing it's tune. Shun, shun, shun- washing back to the sea.

With the loss of memory I cannot believe the same thing for more than a few moments at a time. It all just swirls around, down the drain and vomited up again. I have lost even the concept of trust, which frees me to walk naked without fear. The loss of a concept therefore loses it's antithesis. No trust, no fear. No anything. Just silent waiting.

           ~ end part one~

Skin (Swans side project)- Shame, Humility, Revenge

1. (unlisted track)
2. 24 Hours
3. Breathing Water
4. Cold Bed
5. Everything at Once
6. I Wanna Be Your Dog
7. Nothing Without You
8. One Small Sacrifice
9. The Center of Your Heart
10. Turned to Stone

~døwnload~

Sunday Morning Coming Down. And Cacophony and the Velvet Underground.

Sunday Morning

He died there of a lonely heart/ stumped low, chewing the cemetery grass/ strapped to his dreams like a stone/ and so out into air he went/ the bridge from here to anywhere else leaving behind him/ the last desperate and grasping fluttering hands unable to hold his weight/ and waiting no longer an option/ dragging through the streets of another human city/ scrabbling at the locks of shuttered closets, digging for another bottle of booze/ fly out of here and into some other's dream/ and good night and good night and goodnight/ fuck to this hapless love of emptiness/ dig down into the soul of alone and shake your fist at God/ let go and wander past gravity to the stones below/ Cacophony on the rise sings us down/ this is the last good-bye/ with Sunday morning coming down like an open hand/ a bottle and a kiss to plunder the day/ I will wait until I'm sober/ and then I go/

singing this song

Rudimentary Peni- Cacophony


The Velvet Underground- self titled

The Box Shaped Head. And Delroy Wilson, Your Cool Operator.

Nothing new to say today so here's a story I wrote in New Orleans this past spring-

The Box Shaped Head




“My head is shaped like a box, Pandora...”, said the Monkey to the Flea. “Which reminds of something, though I can't say what.”

“What's eating you?”, said the Flea, “Hold still and quit your scratching! I think I'm on to something here.”

“You are eating me, and what it is that you're onto is also me”, said the Monkey, “and if you don't stop worrying that lock, we'll all be sorry.”

“Says you!”, says the Flea...

“And that's where babies come from. Now, go ask your Mother for a bowl of cream, a jelly roll, and a metal toothed comb. We're in for a long storm tonight.”

And there, under the Moon (it was a clear and windless night) and beneath the eaves, my Uncle told me a tale. And this is how it went.

“There once was a Man form Nantucket... No, that's not the one. How old are you again? Never mind. We'll save that one for another year, perhaps. In any case it's not a proper tale. More of an amusing anecdote...

Now where were we? Ah yes- There once was a Man.

There once was a Man who went to sleep. Now that might not seem strange to you. These days people go to sleep all the time, and many of them never wake up again. But back then (this is sort of a once upon a time thing too, though I don't think there are any princes and such) people rarely went to sleep at all. The occasional nap to be sure, but they had so many things to do and so many interesting things to talk about that going to sleep just didn't fit in. Even back then when time was much, much larger than it is now there just wasn't enough of it to spend laying on your back with your eyes closed dreaming about this or that. People then could dream with their eyes open, and then DO the things they dreamt... Am I rambling? You've got that look like I'm rambling. Well stories don't go in straight lines no matter what they tell you in school. Whatever...

There once was a Man who went to sleep. He went to sleep because one day while he was walking around town and talking to his friends he fell down and he broke his heart. Well, this didn't bother him too much at first, but as time went on it hurt him more and more until finally all he could do was lie in one spot, and that got so boring that he eventually closed his eyes and dosed off and slept for awhile. How long? Who knows? Do you know how long you've slept unless the clock tells you so? And even then, what do clocks know about time? And what moral code binds them to tell you the truth about anything anyway? Yes, I know- rambling. What a child!

Now when the Man woke up, he didn't see a single thing that he recognized. Even the bed he had laid down on had been transported from his house and been turned into the rim of a giant public fountain. (Why did he have a bed when people never slept back then? People do other things in beds besides sleep you know. Or maybe you don't. Never mind.) The bed had been turned to a fountain and his house had become a public square filled with busy people moving to and fro, and groups of women and men talking and laughing and arguing and such- but he did not know a one of them.

“Well, I'm not having a dream”, he told himself. “And if I am it's not one of mine. My dreams look nothing like this. Oh, well.”

He said oh well because the situation didn't bother him too much at all. He had been around a long time and knew that things liked to change, sometimes very suddenly. So a bed deciding to be a fountain and a house wanting to be a town square for a while didn't seem that odd at all. He himself had been many different things in his own life, and not all of them made a lot of sense.

“Well first things first”, he said, and swung his legs over, scratching himself and searching for a cigarette and a book of matches. Finding a cigarette but no matches he decided to strike up a conversation with one of the people he had seen when he opened his eyes.

“Say, Man, excuse me, but have you got a light?”, he said, and other things like that but no one seemed to hear him. Then he said a few things that were a bit rude and only got ruder, but still no one paid him any mind. “Hmm”', he said, “Now that's odd.” for he knew that as a rule when somebody started cursing somebody else would notice. (I've noticed that you've already figured that one out on your own. We'll have to have a talk about the etiquette of cursing someday. Sooner than later, I think.)

“Let's see”, he thought, and begin to dig in his pockets for something that would get the peoples attention. He found a lot of scraps of paper, some bent wire, a few Empty matchbooks with phone numbers and such written on them, a stub of on old pencil, and a wad of string that had wed itself to some old gum when he hadn't been paying attention- but nothing to gather a crowd with. He was beginning to get a bit irritated when he found in another pocket that he had forgotten about all together a collection of shiny things.

“Aha!”, he said, for nobody of any character at all can resist a nice piece of shiny thing. He began carefully arranging the things on and around himself in interesting patterns. Then he sat very still, the way you do when you want a particular bird to hop up on to your lap, and waited. But still, besides a few glimpses in his direction, he was getting no closer to getting a light, and now he was getting frantic. The morning cigarette is the most important one of the day, except for maybe the one you share with a love in the evening time. And his was now getting damp where it hung from his lip and producing absolutely no smoke at all.

Now, among the many things the Man had done in his years was work with a traveling carnival. (What did he do? You've obviously never been in the circus before or humped a carnival around the country on your back. He did everything. That's what one does in a traveling show. Everything that needs doing.) He began to juggle the shiny things and sing silly songs. He began turning somersaults around the fountain, and he began performing little prat falls and magic tricks like a clown does to keep the audience from leaving while the next bit of talent is getting they're act together. But as he had no audience to begin with, he had no audience to keep. Foiled again, he was.

He slumped back down on what had once been a rather comfortable bed and hung his head in his hands. “All I want is a damned light!”, he exclaimed, and then rather quickly added “And maybe some toast and coffee and someone to talk to while I dine.”

As he began to think of just giving up and going back to sleep until his house became a house again so he could just light his cigarette on the stove, he noticed three youngish men in shabby coats that they were trying to pretend were respectable sneaking their eyes at him and his obvious dejection.

He remembered a little trick by where a subtle symbol, a mark if you will, could be placed on the shoulder of some unsuspecting soul that would draw the attention of, if not the most desired company, company none the less. Dipping his hand to his vest pocket he carefully palmed a small piece of chalk that he always carried with him. (You should be paying attention to what's in his pockets, by the way. These are all things that you should never leave your house without- shiny things, string, paper, chalk. The list goes on. We'll talk about that more when you're Mother's not eavesdropping on us. Yes, Sister, just a quick bedtime story. I know.)

With the chalk secreted in his hand he reached up as if to scratch his shoulder and made a small X there, so faint it could barely be seen. Then he stood up, rubbed his head and turned so that the boys might see his back. He began to do an old act that he knew quite well. It was the half dumbstruck country boy in the city for the first time and half addled old man bit that made cops look the other way and their opposites prick up their ears as if pennies were falling from heaven. And sure enough a peek into the mirror on the brim of his hat told him that he had hooked some fishes. And the best kind of fishes, too. Fishes that think that they are sharks.

Patiently, patiently he waited, playing a game of “Red Light, Green Light” with the boys; turning towards them to watch them carefully freeze, then turning away to let them draw in again. Always let the fish catch itself, he knew, and played the line like a spring breeze- gentle and subtle, with just the hint of better days to come. Before long the sharks had formed a loose but inescapable circle around him, and putting a hand on his shoulder the littlest but sharpest looking one said, “Hey now Mister, are you alright? Are you lost? Need help getting back to your home? We'd be glad to help you home, Mister. Me and my brothers here were just now headed in that direction anywise to visit are dear old Mom. You'd like our Mom, you would. I can tell right away that the two of you would hit it off famously.”

And on he went, never letting up the patter while his companions inched in slowly as if they were being floated on a tide and had no say in which direction they were moving. The Man waited until he smelled a hand reach towards his pocket before he sprang.

“Doing beautifully”, he said, sharpening his eyes and straightening his back. “Just need a light for this soggy cigarette. And maybe some toast and coffee.” Before they could react the three realized that it was they who were surrounded somehow by this not so addled-after-all not so old Man. “Let's talk, shall we?”

Lit cigarette puffing now in his grin and arms around the three little fishes, the Man pulled them all down together on to edge of his bed. “So tell me gentlemen, what is it that you call this place? Or yourselves for that matter. And more importantly, where might we stumble upon a drink on this glorious morning. Or is it afternoon? Whichever. Shy now, are we? Don't be, little fishes, I don't bite much. Only what I can chew.”

“I'm Bob.”, said the one who could talk regaining his composure, “And these are John and John, Big and Little respectively. And this around you is Brooktown, where the three of us have been born in and raised. And you, good sir, are...?”

“A name is only what people call you and I've never called myself, so I suppose whatever name you give me will suit as well as any other. I've had a good few by now. I don't think another will tilt the cart.”

“I think I'll just call you Old Man then. A name of deepest respect, I'm sure you know.”

“Yes, I've known a couple of Old Men in my life and all of them golden. I reckon that will do just right. So, we were discussing drinks weren't we? At least we should be discussing drinks. If we're going to discuss anything at all it should be discussed over drinks. Yes, indeed. Wine, whiskey, or beer- something with some color to it. Where and how, young Man, will we get these?”

“I like you, Old Man. I think what we'll get from you might be much more worthwhile than the small change we were trying for. A story maybe? I'd trade a drink or two for the story of you got to this place, and where you learned to fish so well. Shall we? Come on Johns, to the Tavern!”

“It's not much of a story really, but given the proper provocation I could turn it in to one.” And off they flew.

The Tavern turned out to be a lovely place. It was dim and dusty. It stank of spilled beer and smoke, with an after thought of urinal cakes that had been on the job for far too long. The smoke stood around with no intention of leaving and the conversation was quiet though you could tell it would grow to fill this room and three more like it by time the night shift came on. The beer was warm but cheap, and the whiskey was really grain alcohol that some one had floated some wood chips in once. In short it was a perfect place for an afternoon of story telling.

“It all began, this part of it anyway, when I broke my heart.”, said the Old Man.

“ You broke your heart?”

“Of course I broke it. A heart's not like a nose. It's not like I got out of line at a social function and someone decided I had been conscious for too long. Nobody gets mad and punches you in the heart. No, I just fell down one day and broke my heart. Simple and plain. After that I found it harder and harder to stand, with or without drink, and finally I just laid down and went to sleep.”

“Went to sleep in the square?”

“Went to sleep in my own house, lying in my bed. It only became a fountain and a public square when I woke up. Seems perfectly natural to me, I don't know why you look so surprised. You've never gone to sleep in one place and woken up in another?”

“I suppose I have. But I always imagined it not so much a case of the one place deciding to just be someplace else so much as a case of being transported either by myself, unknowingly, or some sort of cop, usually rather rudely. Can't say my bed ever turned into a park bench or my house into a courtroom.”

“It happens. All the time. One thing get's bored or distracted and turns into something else entirely. I used to be a sober little boy and look at me now. I once knew a dream that turned into a little Man. Now there's a story.”

And this is how it went.

In the royal town of Bethlehem, strapped to the loving stone, a dream began to grow limbs. First arms with stubby little hands feeling at the air, wondering over the floor, reading things in the filth. Now little legs, shaky but strong, to bump it into the walls and trip it's fragile self over pails and benches. But the poor little dream with no head of it's own could not give birth to new dreams with which to feed itself. So it garnered what it could through it's cold, damp skin and began to make a map of all it knew. The world is a darkened box, soundless and wet. There is no other thing here besides me. I create all of this by the tips of my fingers and the soles of my feet, the skin of my knees on the rough hewn earth. It's mother now, with her dreams outside of her, had faded into mercy and been removed from the cell so no other flesh remained to give the little one an idea of others akin to him. Yes, him indeed for the little legs had met and parted, giving birth to a third- a lovely toy to whittle away the endless time of a poor blind dream. But, alas, with out a head to think of all the nasty and loving things that could be thought he had only the mechanical pleasure of friction to bless his little cell with. And so it went for quite some time.

Then one day (or was it night?) the little dream awoke with a pain in the place where it's neck should have been. Something was becoming. It scratched and rubbed the sore place, giving up it's game of stumbling about and jerking. And as will happen a sore that is not left alone will get larger and fester. And so it went with each scab pulled building up new tissue and new scars until it had grown into a proper neck. Now this was new. At first the young dream believed it had grown a new toy to match the one below. But when he rubbed it, though yes it would spasm and spew forth like it's smaller cousin in the south, it did not feel quite as good. Interesting at first, and worth exploring, but ultimately the tests were abandoned and the old games renewed.

In the midst of and afternoon crawl the little dream, with no head and therefor little capacity for retention, discovered (again) the length of flesh that had grown above it's shoulders and forgetting all it had learned began to squeeze and stroke it with fantastic vigor. And as it rubbed and pulled it began to feel a familiar sensation of impending spasm and release. It redoubled it's efforts sweating into like a mad painter on the verge of some new masterpiece. Almost there, it thought, and then suddenly with a force that knocked it on it's skinny ass it happened. It's neck had spit out a shiny new skull all wrapped in flesh and skin, with two little ears and a stubby little nose and pretty blue eyes all astare. And down below an angel's smile.

“My god!” it shouted, and the recoiled in terror. For it had never in all it's years uttered a word, having never had a mouth with which to do it. And more importantly had never had ears with which to hear them.

All at once the poor little thing was hit with the World. The stench of the cell and the screams of it's neighbors. And dear Lord the sights! Four dripping walls, all grey and spattered. And dark, dark, dark. Yes, dear ones, Bedlam indeed.

“So, this is where I have been all this time,” it thought, for it was too frightened to speak again. “How dreadful, how morbid, my tiny little world.”

But now some new dawn ran through the frightened beast. What were these things that that sprang from the new place above it's neck? These dreadful pictures, these... words. For it had never before had a thought and could not place it into the context of it's old self. So much new all at once. So much wonder. It stared and smelled and listened to the new world, thinking it's thoughts and trembling, sucking in more and more of the new world with each fresh breath of the stale and rotting air.

And in no time at all it became so full, dear friends, that it's lovely new head ripe with possibilities just exploded taking our sweet young dream with it into yet another world.

The End.

“That little dream ended up getting a job on a boat I worked on on one of those lakes near the place that this used to be. Good fellow, though not much of a conversationalist.”

“I think your pulling my leg Old Man. I think it's the one in the middle, too.”

“Whatever. Never let the facts ruin a good story. Let's have one or two more and you can tell me a story.”

And on and on it went, until they all got to drunk to tell a proper tale and started telling dirty jokes which just got worse and worse until they were justing making farting noises with their mouths, and other parts too. Eventually they all crawled off in different directions to sleep and in the morning none of them were where they had gone to sleep and none of them ever saw the others again. The Old Man went back to where he came from lugging his broken heart with him which never healed quite right and would always give him pains when the weather was just so, which as it turned out was pretty much every day. But he lived until he died, and that was the end of his story. The Johns went down to New Orleans where they started a horrible band that none the less made them a good deal of money down on Royal Street during the tourist season, and during the summer they biked around in foreign countries making everyone believe that this was what good American music sounded like and convincing young girls that they were really quite charming and talented besides. So it turned out well for them I suppose, after a fashion. Where they are now no one knows, but probably in a bar I would imagine.

Bob left town the next morning to see if he could find more good stories and good bars and funny Old Men who seemed a bit crazy but always had that little shine to them so that you could never really tell for sure. And he found lots and lots of them everywhere he went.

Then one day Bob looked up at the signs on the highway and saw the word Brooktown in big shiny letters with his own name underneath in chalk and realized he was at the place where he had started, or at least a similar place with the same name. So he got off the highway and made his way down to his Sister's house and found out that while he was gone she too had collected some stories, and a little child to boot. So he decided he'd stay a while so they could all trade the things they had dreamt since they had parted ways. And he did.

And the moral of that story is that is long since time for bed. So off you go and sleep well and dream of everything in the whole universe, good and bad, and tomorrow over breakfast you can tell me all about it. Good Night.

The End

Todays record has nothing to do with the story. It's just an awesome album for too hot summer days. Ladies and gentlemen, Mister Delroy Wilson!


Delroy Wilson- Cool Operator

1. Cool Operator
2. Suspicion
3. Better Must Come
4. I'm in a Dancing Mood
5. I'm Not A King
6. Riding for a Fall
7. Once Upon a Time
8. I Can't Stand It
9. Rain from the Skies
10. Here Comes The Heartaches
11. Trying to Conquer Me
12. Just Say Who
13. Sun is Shining
14. Closer Together
15. What Am I Living For?
16. Tune In
17. I'm Still Waiting
18. Take It Easy
19. Push Comes to Shove

~døwnload~

Bonus Track: Prince Buster's version of Take it Easy. Fuckin' rockin' ass version. The original, I think.

Todays reading list-

1. Clive Barker- The Great and Secret Show
2. China Mieville- Perdido Street Station
3. Seth Kantner- Ordinary Wolves

Free Drugs, the Movie (aka Exuma Has a Sore Throat.)

Ø This is dedicated for Papa Legba, Opener of Doors, Lord of the Crossroads Ø

This is what it feel like inside my head. This is why I don't sleep, and when I do sleep this is what plays between my dreams. My dreams are long stories. I send myself back down again, over and over, trying to see the end, and when I wake I'm sorry for being back from that other world.

My recommendation for this little video is to watch it top volume (headphones if you've got 'em), full screen and with the lights out. It's more fun than it looks.

 (Thanks to Miss Belle for showing me how to do these animations.)

Todays music (songs with an asterisk are in the movie):

Exuma- Exuma I

1. Exuma, The Obeah Man
2. Dambala
3. Mama Loi, Papa Loi
4. Junkanoo
5. Seance in The Sixth Fret*
6. You Don't Know What's Going On*
7. The Vision

~døwnload~

Sore Throat- Disgrace to the Corpse of Sid

1. Different Sides... (90 tracks)*
2. Different Sides... Of the Same Coin
3. Famine
4. Pride
5. Chapel of Ghouls
6. Desire (Peniside)
7. Truth
8. The Enemy Within
9. Prisoner
10. Living Hell
11. The Ballad of Mad Micky
12. Hsarht Drawkcab

~døwnload~

Todays reading list:

1. Comte de Lautreamont-  Maldoror
2. Doctor Suess- One Fish, Two Fish...
3. Nelson Algren- A Walk on the Wild Side 

What's The Point? And The Point!

In the past forty eight hours I've slept six. It's midnight, it's raining, and I have to be at the day labor office (which still hasn't sent me out for work) in four hours in hope that they'll let me go out to work some shit job for minimum wage which, after taxes and transportation fee, amounts to about fifty dollars a day. Subtract the cost of lunch, if I'm lucky enough to get a lunch break somewhere where I can buy a lunch, and I'm looking at just over five and hour. Which translates to sixty hours of labor just to cover rent and bills, if I'm lucky enough to get sixty hours between now and the first. To quote Dick Lucas, "And then you wonder why they burn you're buildings down....."

So, no story today, no poem, no rant; just a movie on the nature of pointlessness, narrated by Ringo Starr- the king high dog of pointlessness. This movie not only gave me the name of this collection of shit and music, it also reminds me of one of my favorite phrases which I will now dedicate to Mr. Starkey-

"God Bless his pointy little head."

Enjoy the movie, and then download the soundtrack. Ta.

Today's reading list:
1.  Norton Juster The Phantom Tollbooth
2 Arthur Rimbaud "Une Saison En Enfer/La Bateau Ivre" (which is apparently available at WalMart.com. WTF?)
3.  Jim Thompson Now and on Earth

Harry Nilsson

1. Everything's Got'em
2. The Town (narration)
3. Me And My Arrow
4. The Game (narration)
5. Poli High
6. The Trial & The Banishment
7. Think About Your Troubles
8. The Pointed Man
9. Life Line
10. The Birds
11. P.O.V. Waltz
12. The Clearing In The Woods (narration)
13. Are You Sleeping?
14. Oblio's Return

~døwnload~

Sidney Bechet. And no sleep.

Here between these third and fourth ribs, the tender portal in search of a knife. A solid blade to sever it from the aches of living. And on this neck a line to hold this heavy head as it surges out into the darkness that is the absence of light. Here on this bridge between nowhere a wind and a fall, fortuitous grasping at the air like a deep breath after one held so long in anticipation. Or this slow and subtle needle showing sleep in its dull promise and no dream left to disturb the morning light with bad memories.

Search the hours for an alternative. Try in all your wills and ways to discover some way out of this lane, this path that goes only towards its own end. Sleep and dream of something good that will not make you sorry when you wake, trembling with loss renewed and and in an empty room. Fuck the day that drags you into its misery, the miserable world upon your brow, the miserable stinginess of hope that passes you by wearing the face of those you've loved. Do not leave behind an unpleasant remembrance for those who linger on. If you must go, then go. But do it with charm and grace, and do not leave in the house.

I am tired as hell is tired, swollen with forgotten souls heaping torture on themselves, riding guilt and self pity through a million years. I am tired and I cannot sleep. I am tired and I cannot sleep and I do not want to wake up tomorrow to see this through again. But for those who linger still, I will wake again- tomorrow and all tomorrows, until the whistle blows long and last to climb the ladder and off in to the west.

And when I die, carry me, or barring that, carry my memory back down to New Orleans and make a parade of it. Then back into your selves and wonder no longer at what I will become- I will be dust and ash and fading, a story told round until it wears thin enough for the light to pass through it, and then I will be light.

Sidney Bechet and His New Orleans Feetwarmers

1. No song list today. It's all good stuff. The song titles are in the file.
2. ~døwnload~

A penny at a time. And Bright Eyes, too. (for Molly)

a penny at a time/ I'll wish and dream a new world/ for all of us old and shining few/to better ourselves through the simple act of dreaming/and then rise up with the sun to make it so/ (for Molly Miss and the Boys)


I have spent so many lives here
watching at the worlds turn
and waiting madly for ours
only to decide that it's true-


We are the reason to carry on
to bite and fester at the torn edge of hope
to make a dawn explode by waking to the day
to drown the screams in singing
to drink down the fucking glory and chase it with raw whiskey
to never give up even while we are giving in
to the thousand natural heartaches
that no longer shock a one of us.


So a penny at a time I'll wish and dream a new world
for all of us old and shining few;
to better ourselves by the gentle act of dreaming,
and then rise up with the sun
to make it all so.


And here's the album of the day, for Molly too, who gave it first to me-


Bright Eyes- I'm Wide Awake It's Morning

1. At The Bottom Of Everything
2. We Are Nowhere And It's Now
3. Old Soul Song (For The New World Order)
4. Lua
5. Train Under Water
6. First Day Of My Life
7. Another Travellin' Song
8. Land Locked Blues
9. Poison Oak
10. Road To Joy

~døwnload~

Papa Legba//Tree of Life

The trick is, there is no trick. And a Holy Mountain, Sleep.

I am violently addicted to the small moments of joy. When the despair laps up again on the shore, as it always will, I shake and froth and begin to hallucinate with the pain of withdrawal. I latch on to people who radiate joy. Strangely enough they are generally sad people, who have glimpsed behind the curtain but cannot live there. I suppose I am the same. Kicked out of heaven we'd wander the earth looking for it's shadows. I don't think this is my life for success, only survival. But again, I am addicted. I need it like milk for survival. And like any true junkie I always need a more and purer joy to get my fix. I'll go without food, spend all my money in the darkest places, those with the deepest shadows, trying to not look as though I'm looking. The trick is, there is no trick. You simply have to be there when it comes. What I mean to say is that you cannot actively search out the moments. They'll see you coming with your desperation and your greed from days away and skitter around the corner before you've even caught the scent of it. I have no trouble divulging these secrets. They'll do no one any good who hasn't already come upon them honestly, trudging through the depression smelling of bile and chronic masturbation.

The door to the church is directly before you. But you have to know that there is a church before you can see it. Go to New Orleans. At the corner of Bourbon and Music it stands, shining and singing. There is a train, too, that opens on the doors of the endless universe. Where you catch that train I cannot say, only that I have ridden it, alone and with others and when it passed through the gates we all became silent and laughed inside our hearts. It lives too in certain dreams, guided by the dead you've loved and the living souls who love you still.

Or stand beneath the dawn smiling towards Venus and say, “Good morning, Star.” Say it quietly and with the voice you'd give to an old lover. Sing to the Moon, “Bela Luna! Te Amo, mami, te amo!” in your loudest voice but not a shout or a yell, and throw your arms around her. She will show you then the world behind the world.

But you cannot stay there. It is not time while our feet are still stuck upon the earth to live anywhere but here, painful and wildly joyous, little human animals scratching through our lives like chickens. But if you know that there is a beauty in it all it may sustain you yet.

This story has no end.

Sleep's Holy Mountain

1. Dragonaut
2. The Druid
3. Evil Gypsy- Solomon's Theme
4. Some Grass
5. Aquarian
6. Holy Mountain
7. Inside The Sun
8. From Beyond
9. Rain's Baptism

~download~

The Idiocy of Labor and The Money Will Roll Right In (FANG- Landshark/Where The Wild Things Are)

    Up at four a.m. to walk two miles, up and down the hills of Lynchburg, to the day labor office. Delirious with stress, I watched the "How To Hold a Stop Sign" instructional video for two and a half hours, looping every fifteen minutes. I am now certified to stand at the side of the road and instruct drivers as to when to slow down, when to stop, and when and how to resume driving. I am also unemployed, still. Not even the barrel scrapping lovelies at Preferred Staffing can seem to find some use for me. Perhaps I should use the skills I learned today holding up other sorts of signs at the side of the road, though somehow no matter what I write on my sign it always seems to read "Local Police: Please Stop Here. Harass Me and Threaten Me with Arrest. I Am a Complete Piece of Shit." I love America.
     On the walk back from day labor I discovered that I'm so far around the bend that I can't even walk into the free Mental Health Clinic and ask for help. Visions of stern, unattractive women frowning down at me while I fill out forms and then telling me I'm ineligible for any kind of help and why don't I just buck up and be a man, go and and find a damned job. Or even worse; kind, attractive women saying the same thing only nicer. I sat there through three cigarettes until my paranoid visions had grown so large that I came right to the edge of full blown bag lady style hallucinations, complete with loud one sided conversations and violent hand waving. Again, I love America.
     So back to my cave and what album will best represent todays particular madness?

FANG - Landshark/Where The Wild Things Are

1. The Money Will Roll Right In
2. Landshark
3. Law & Order
4. Diary of a Mad Werrwoulf
5. Destroy the Handicapped
6. Drunk & Crazy
7. An Invitation
8. Skinheads Smoke Dope
9. They Sent Me To Hell C.O.D.
10. Red Threat
11. Fun With Acid
12. I've Got the Disease
13. Suck and Fuck
14. With Friends Like You
15. G.I. Sex
16. Road Kills
17. You're Cracked
18. I Wanna Be On TV
19. Everybody Makes Me Barf
20. Junky Dare
21. Berkley Heathen Scum

~download~

Another story, like all the rest. Masturbation. And Suicide.

   

   It's only when the night comes that I truly begin to slip, here in this dead city. Alone with just my voices to guide me I start to slip towards suicide, staring at every spot in the room with feigned interest, trying to distract myself from the obvious answers. Having never thought I would live past twenty-five I find myself with no plan, no ground to build on. So then, what are the choices? Continue on slowly becoming more and more unravelled, more and more alone? And with each new frayed threadbare day I'll grow farther from the chance of salvation. I do not want to wake up alone any longer. I do not want to lie awake at night reviewing all that I have lost. Even the music is getting stale, barely raising my heart beyond it's daily slump and slumber. And vicious masturbation has replaced the filthy joy of love. So again, what are the choices?

    I can not see myself leaving my mother behind to grieve, or all of the others to whom I've promised that I would not set my art to self destruction. Also I have a near catholic fear of death. Oh, what hell awaits, or what heaven? It is a doom that beats down on my neck pushing my face deeper into my hands, which smell of sweat and soured semen. I look back into the log of my memories and see so many dead faces, piled up and lost, wondering why mine is not among them. And lovers, shaking their heads and smiling at the potential that refuses to be born from these too tired hands. All the screaming and madness that burst out of my heart when I felt them slipping away, all the strangled attempts to cling to the end of the line. There are no answers here, or in any book on my shelves, any page written in light across this screen.

    Is it only self pity that drives the razor home, or is there a true justice in choosing when to leave the room, abandon the play and quit home? Drag out the hours, hour after hour, hedging all bets against the possibility of reprieve, one more miracle in a list of miracles that have somehow caught me here- stuck against this stupid world of loss and wait and blind pain.

    Then maybe this is it. To be a hermit in a cave scratching out lines in the dark like a mad arithmetic, adding up over and over all the parts to try to make a whole. Fractions and fractured masses strung out like veins of coal digging down deeper in hopes of becoming diamonds. A sick aesthetic monk saving up discarded skins to sew a new self from. A writer, in short, of the type that angsty teens quote to their mothers when all else has failed. Is that enough to hold back the ebb and tide of inevitable suicide for another year or five. Here's to hope then, and a new tomorrow which I fear will taste all to much like it's endless sisters. But maybe not. So until all tomorrows...

Papa Legba

 Suicide- (2002 reissue)

Disc 1:

1. Ghost Rider
2. Rocket U.S.A.
3. Cheree
4. Johnny
5. Girl
6. Frankie Teardrop
7. Che
8. Cheree (Remix)
9. I Remember
10. Keep Your Dreams

~download~

Suicide (2002 reissue- Disc 1)

Disc 2 (live at CBGB's):

1. Mr. Ray
2. Las Vegas Man
3. 96 Tears
4. Keep Your Dreams
5. I Remember
6. Harlem
7. 23 Minutes Over Brussels

• Ghost Rider
• Rocket USA
• Cheree
• Dance
• Frankie Teardrop

~download~

Live at CBGB's 1977

When the sky opens up... ((Swans- The Burning World))

Not an ending, a beginning...

Swans- The Burning World

1. The River That Runs With Love Won't Run Dry
2. Let It Come Down
3. Can't Find My way Home
4. Mona Lisa, Mother Earth
5. (She's a) Universal Emptiness
6. Saved
7. I Remember Who You Are
8. Jane Mary, Cry One Tear
9. See No More
10. God Damn The Sun

~download~
Swans- The Burning World

   Sometimes depression is a good feeling. And now it's time to sleep.

B-52's {self-titled}

Dance This Mess Around...


B-52's {self-titled album}


1. Planet Claire
2. 52 Girls
3. Dance This Mess Around
4. Rock Lobster
5. Lava
6. There's A Moon In The Sky (Called The Moon)
7. Hero Worship
8. 6060-842
9. Downtown

~download~
B-52's

     There is no rant for this one, no story, and no description. This is a just a great album that makes me smile and dance around in strange under garments like an incredibly sexy nerd. And it's a nice juxtaposition to the Missing Foundation shit. Because after getting paranoiacally violent and burning your city down, you need to go home and dance real silly like. 

      Stay sexy, people.

MIssing Foundation- 1933

Missing Foundation: 1933 & Demise-






Missing Foundation- 1933

side 1:
1.  Kingsland 61
2. Burn Trees
3. Invasion of Your Privacy
4. Go Sit on the Beach
5. Death of a Wolf
6. At the Gates
7. Journey from the Ashes


side 2:
8. Jameel's Turmoil
9. Your House is Mine
10. Martyr of the City
11. Message from Hell
12. C.I.A. World's Fair
13. 1933


~download~
MF 1933

Missing Foundation- Demise

side 1:
1. A hunting We Will Go
2. Humanity
3. 292 CC
4. Hate
5. When Right Was Wrong

side 2:
6. Liberty Under Siege
7. Pistol Archive
8. VKP
9. Conspiracy
10. Demise


~download~
MF- Demise

        The true sound of fighting in the streets. These guys actually did it(along with many others). Pete Missing would regularly wander about the neighborhood (LES, NYC) destroying property, blowing shit up, and generally causing an incredibly unwelcome and unsafe environment for anyone who sought to take strip the citizens of the city of their basic rights- housing, freedom, liberty. Look up the word liberty in Webster's. It says, "The state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views."  Now say the pledge of allegiance. What that pays lip service to, Missing Foundation and hundreds of others payed in blood. Fighting for our rights. Not the ones the government says we have, but the ones we take because they are ours.

         The song Burn Trees refers to a practice of dousing in gasoline and setting ablaze the pretty little saplings developers would have planted in front of the gentrified condos and apartments that they were trying to rent to the yuppies who were so desperate to move into the "cool" Lower East Side neighborhood, that they would pay outrageous rents thereby pushing out more and more poor and working class locals.

      This band made it onto every wanted list from the FBI on down for such fun activities as inciting to riot, mayhem, destruction of  property and just good old fashioned domestic terrorism. There were many of us who would have countered that the tactics used by the City of New York and the ever professional NYPD were the true acts of terror. Just watch the videos of the 1988 riots in Tompkins Square Park. Or read any newspaper article from the late 80's~early 90's about the police in New York, the treatment of the homeless, the push to clear New York of all it's poor huddled masses from the prime real estate on which they huddled. Or just listen to the opening track from Demise. The intro to A Hunting We Will Go is a real live recording from the '88 riot.  If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of New York's Finest beating the shit out of unarmed people for speaking their minds and refusing to cow to bullying.  And yes that is a helicopter you hear descending over the melee. What better use of city money in a time when poverty and homelessness was rampant throughout the town. And though you can't hear them there were snipers on the roof tops surrounding the park. Liberty under siege, your government is fucking you.

     The title of 1933 was meant as a reminder that history repeats itself. The graffiti that went up in the neighborhood was "1933=1988". And it's still happening today. Same shit, different bosses. Democrat or Republican their one job is to keep you fucked. Your job, if you listen to them, is to stay fucked and thank them for it. Or if you listen to MF, your job is live your own life however you see fit. Which one would you choose?

      In the end, if you go down to Avenue C these days, you may conclude that the battle for the city was lost. Indeed there is almost nothing to say that there was ever a war at all. But for everyone in New York, or anywhere else, who is feeling just a little bit pissed off at being fucked by your government this music may just inspire a little action. Here's to hope. After all, we may have lost the war, but we had a hell of a lot of fun fighting it. And those of us who survived came out with that most precious of all realizations- that no one has any control of you that you do not give them. 

                                                             The Party's Just Begun.
More fun music and self righteous rants to come! Send requests for any music you'd like posted. RTFW!

[{RIP-JP and Jamie Toulon}]