If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to ignore it, does it still talk to itself?

Blah blah blah.

Woulda coulda shoulda

Woulda seen those guys last night, save for a litany of rust-adjacent couldas & shouldas both short & long term and since I don't lay out my entrails for the zero haruspices I've got in meat world, no fuckin' way I'm gonna for you jokers and hence furthermore since my head still throbs, here's some fuckin' High on Fire, here in less than two fortnights, so pictures the following morn, or something.

Flibbertigibbet's thingamajig of prestidigitarianism*

Chicks, man.

*Almost one more case of the title outswanking the contents, but Uncle Acid fucking rules enough to temporarily halt the devilish effects of summer, the unspoken CHORTLE, & the holy fuck I'm so fucking bored with this.

Roll d6 for rumor control:
1. Wotan's bolt killed waiters dead.
2. Sacred cow scoffing exhausted in a ditch.
3. Olly olly oxen markets up 545%. 
4. All this food talk makes one hungry too late.
5. Is off campaigning for Cthulhu.
6. Found a scroll with Rip Van Winkle's Improved Sleep.

I can feel the wheel but I can't steer

The summer before the first video game war, yours truly was browsing at Peaches, later to become Coconuts then FYE then abandoned, ready to blow whatever hole-burning scratch my meager shit job threw in my pocket when the craziest, acid-fuck cover caught my four eyes & I was smitten before I heard a note. Filed in the metal section, so no Bell Biv DeVoe danger, Facelift lifted them; not tearing as thrash, but a creeping, painful rip. Pulling the Band-Aid slow always hurts more. Never getting as much love from the gatekeepers as other acts only added to the fuck you, plus it was & is good brooding & bike-riding music. Cue time travel: blind date success, the U of Akron, Clash of the Titans, far too early domesticity, & a sickly haunting curveball of solace in the form of Sap. 1992 was my K-T Boundary.

I want you to scrape me from the walls

North of the future Via Popearosa, I strolled to then fro from Disc Connection & its proprietor who bore an uncanny resemblance to a brutal Skynyrd or 38 Special roadie but was actually a swell guy beneath the perpetual shades. 55° that late September day the papers say, remember it being warm, was 82° as close as the 17th & hit the high 70s the following week. What's with the heat mapping of doddering memory? 'tis more than its cracked orange cover image. Heat births sweat which in turn births conscious acknowledgment of something awry, at least for me.

Here, i.e. then, I was 19 with no skills save a local Tecmo Bowl mastery & hashish-less heshering & I haven't expanded my repertoire much since, no loot past meager "work"-"study" [ed. note: verily, quote marks are apropos to both] scratch, & a new wife whose oven was bunn'd. Stupid adults aren't ready, so stupid kids sit behind the 8-, 9- & 10-balls. Despite having no first-, second- or third-hand experience with the ravaging stampede of white horses, Dirt became a security blanket.

To the non-idealist drowning in a sea of sorrow stupid with no island in sight though if there were it'd be populated by a cannibal holocaust, all is melodrama. Being predisposed to emotion over reason, like eating ten too many poem-stuffed pizza rolls with a cough syrup chaser & regretting the paralyzing numb when I should know better, Layne was singing my song. Now who's stupid, you query? Contraceptive failure rates exist as numbers on packaging & who hasn't always wanted to feel that special joy of existing as a statistic. What of Roe v. Wade, you inquire? A dozen nanoseconds, & nein. As with everything, until you're wearing the clogs, you ain't dancing. But this isn't about that divide & conquer bone so fuck off, but the whole I feel so alone/gonna end up a big ole pile of them. Like I said, melodrama, much preferable to the Sominex of coolly detached irony, & I haven't even hit on the still-omnipresent shadow: Brother, but not, from the aforementioned EP, chorus, first line.


Got me wrong

This was the original pressing with the proper song order, i.e. Down in a Hole as penultimate track. Such scene cred was important, I imagined, for those carousing & chording in a scene. When Bowling Ball Keith (liked to & looked like) & Rabid Mike whose woman done him wrong like a country music song [ed. note: no joke, crazy attracts crazy I guess] refused the shape of things to come, the former high school scene shrinks to two though feeling more like one, oft darkthroning before I knew what the hell that was. Candles pissed upon, proof of who's a fake. Exaggeration? For a time, just a time, the river was dammed indeed, comfort found in claustrophobic spite spackled over with its sonic expression & a predominantly forest green flannel & USC sweat pants [ed. note: beats me, so don't ask; wish I still had that Marijuana Pickers t-shirt handed down from gramps], the ensemble a walking vomitorium that I of course wore on my first day of student employment inside the Towering Slab.

I wasn't high on that chilly October afternoon, merely gorging on inattention to surroundings & others, a theme recurring to this day. Selfishness or safety? As with all things, a bit of both, & part of the problem.

Shocks to the system make one feel like a fly trapped in a jar, & those ghostly tracks plus the slow-burn death spiral on the self-titled a few years later sealed the hermetic deal. Frogs still pierces without remorse.

So, ten years later give or take, today in fact & the reason for this post, Layne's a syringe masquerading as a corpse, & ten after that, I'm still here, the bun out of the oven & into the frying pan-on-low-heat of misleadingly-labeled higher ed, just like yours truly was when Dirt first spun, a timely coincidence of marking out invented miles along an artificial road.

Looking back on all that, the causes of antisocial behavior, characters tuning in, dropping out as a tree's April buds (some have stood out, still do, & will because they're the rarest of creatures), wondering whose fault(s) was/is this spooling aftermath lip to silent lip, a thousand words for every one, more than one supporting or no, I've my suspicions which are probably less fault & more it is what it is, what shall I do, rooster snuffed yet animate?


If I would, could you?

To mope, to mope, sawed-off shotgun riffs choking dead meadows, fetal in the curling smoke of primal brooding, necks arcing, whipping, bending in the wind of dissolution, never breaking in time, this kind of crumbling takes time, rebuilding even longer. I have never felt such frustration/Or lack of self control. Aural scrawlings on repeat about drug addiction & darkness & the attendant figurative holes left after each step on a mine still harrow twenty years on in their hallowed comfort. There are other kinds of addiction, of that I'm versed well. So, desert island gaming at gunpoint, the works of this band. There can be no other choice, because there's always something to rebuild, preserve, & put off till later both home & abroad & what better fuel for hopeful lungs than an air of destruction?

We humans are storytellers, sure, & most are boring, mine included. But it's the only one I know well. & Down in a Hole is still the most beautiful song ever. Thanks, Layne & Co. Could've done it without you, but it would've sucked a little bit more.

Thirty days of suck XIX: radioactive

This shit would be a piece of pumpkin pie if that most beloved of holidays wasn't so far away & why don't we get a day off for Samhain dammit for what does this nation celebrate more than death, either little, bloody, or both?

Given a)the inherent difficulty of capturing grumbling on film, & b)the fact that neither of us are orange, here's the spookiest bit I could come up with.

That's kind of orange. My eyesight sucks. You tell me.

The mug is dead, long live the m -- that's not a mug.

That's a mug. But it's not orange. Fuck off.


Tomorrow, bokeh, Danno.

Silence is pyrite

Speak? No. Me? Too much, it seems. Wordiness shalt remain
wordless, for today, at least. Snark, quietly sleeping.

 

Warrior, weekend & armchair

Duck, duck, it's Sepp an ostrich, same thing.

After spending Saturday evening post-Towering Slab & post-Wheelie Bus drowning (yes, even such a behemoth cannot stand up to suburban tidal waves) & toweling water out both the basement closet & the edge of Lunatic Offspring the Younger's Batcave -- disturbing to be actively in favor of sunny skies; not sure I'll ever recover from that descent into practical madness -- I was ready for some non-roto-rooting for a cherished side, world stage David, Uruguay, home of 37 people, eleven of which were seen sprinting on my computer screen.

Decades ago, it was a story, a picture, & an improbable script (from which book or magazine, that knowledge has slipped deep into the ether), a childlike fascination with how a soccer match could conjure the twin, beautiful extremes of a romanticism beaten too often these days into silence by a club of dry, efficient jade.



The Drive silenced eighty thousand. This, nearly in triplicate.

That black & white grit soon moved in color television, modern, industrial, punitive, for Uruguay at the 1986 World Cup put on a medieval (what happened to modern? As une amie is fond of saying, correctly, nothing really changes) torture clinic, thirteen(!) bookings in only four games, a hypnotizing grimness perhaps still unsurpassed save the Argentinian horror movie marathon a scant four years later. Their coach even got sidelined for the knockout stage, if memory serves, a suitable companion piece to a 50-odd second red card.



Scary as José Batista.

Despite such grotesquerie, Uruguay (along with the Netherlands, a story for another time) remained the team of choice to launch hyperbolic arcs, every pass floating as the most erotic dreams of Charles Hughes. English, this bottle, some Soccer Digest scribe said, & the occasional copy of When Saturday Comes; how that found a transatlantic current into a late 80s Parmastani bookstore is still a mystery worthy of Holmes. Today, such grit sprouts maximized from the fecund mind of Tabarez the Alchemist, festering pustules of controlled violence transmuted into talents of helpful gold, spirited in Diego Forlán who, unlike in the World Cup, hasn't finished with aplomb (cue the agreeing screams of Atlético fans)

 












"What do you call this, Yank? "

whilst doing everything else, a mop-topped Jason Kidd, all pitch vision & effort. & then there's Luis Suarez, totem of deception, of artful histrionics, football's answer to, since we're referencing the world's second most popular sport, Dennis Rodman. A motherfucker gifted with technique & annoyance, to be punched in the jaw until he's on your team & you love him dearly for every foul, every yellow card he pulls out of the ref's hat on the way to one more goal. Now he just needs to dye his hair like a stick of Fruit Stripe.

Love that do-or-die football. Sure, tiki-taka is indeed gorgeous, but everyone conveniently forgets it's available only to those with the resources of empire, money &, above all, time, the jewel national associations no longer have stashed next to Blatter's goose in their back pocket. 

The limitation of a month-long tournament to reveal the truth, especially one including lockbox Paraguay, be damned, the beguiling possibility of random lightning strikes paints a kind of allure, a summer fling, a snapshot, a poem, that the moneyed bloat of a hundred-side, nine-month club competition designed to weed out all but the financial elite cannot.

The skeleton of pleasantries & silence, animate

Nothing never gets the chance to be burnt away.

I've always been a sucker for melodramatic statements, & I'm imagining Hollywood re-imagining poor young Werther -- no, Troma, & instead of dying via self-inflicted gunshot, Romantic rage causes his head to explode, supersonic wavelets of blood & bone & brain oozing down the linden tree, said rage now giving birth to a hideous new head, one filled with nasty, big, pointy teeth he uses to great effect in righting the wrongs suffered by the peasantry, this folk hero entering the international stage music video style to beat Napoleon back single-handedly & when all the glory was heaped upon that coward Wellington, suicide solutioning (or so the audience thinks, direct-to-video sequels, man) into the North Sea, though what truly rankled this lonely German Hulk if one could peer into the chambers of his heart was not having a delicious beef dish bearing his name for posterity.
 

Here there be a monster.

Indeed. Or, monsters begetting monsters, who made who existing in that one electro-limey zip-it but unlike them, no one enjoys & we know where that leads.
 

Or is it simply a case of acids & bases & you know what happens --

-- when they're mixed, of course you do.

Baby basil, you're next. Huh, he pondered, text doesn't fit the music, does it. Damn dollar-store aegis. So what else do I know? Conversation & subsequent, occasionally self-plagiarizing, composing (still waiting to pen my Seventh, should just settle for unearthing the Parmastaniad) is always a balm even when believing in its surprising quality (relative, of course) only means that a temporary gold has been transmuted from the permanent base metals of innocence & experience, this drip drip drip of sentiment being the precursor to dropping hammers on my toes so I should probably read old crap instead.

Enough of that silly place lying beneath my epidermis. 

Let's bring contemplation full circle,
dispensing the monochrome of the drone
for some technicolor darkthroning, solo.

Quite a fungi, or, cold war redux

The only thing scullery maids squires have to fear is Zombie Warsaw Pact itself.

-- some guy

Punch-drunk arrived fully formed due to the latest continual hallucination of ever becoming un-unfinished & between the irresistible allure of surfing the electrons for strangely inspirational Russian paintings & coffee-less coffee talk, laundry load #2 nearly ended up a D&D fungal disaster. Witness how casually & expertly I deflect the blame from myself to the cruel, Stalinist exploiters of this proletarian flaw.

But the sweetly burning aroma of rosemary makes up for the near-horror of having temporarily misplaced my +1 skillet.