Earplugs, earplugs, my kingdom for earplugs!

I'M SORRY THAT I'M SHOUTING BUT CONSTRUCTION TYPES ARE BEATING THE HELL OUT OF STUFF EXTREMELY NEAR TO HERE INSIDE THE LIBRARY DURING SUMMER SEMESTER FINALS WEEK GOOD DECISION MAKING YOU CAMPUS TOOLS.

Ah, respite, quiet as a library Masterpiece Theatre, or a church.
















This is beautiful, what is this, velvet?

No, no, as a staunch supporter of Cthulhu, I care little for the spate of parish closings, mergers & reopenings, but in light of yesterday's post, gather around ye this small chuckle:










Strange women lying in ponds need somewhere to distribute their swords.

¡Escritura en las votaciones son el único camino a seguir!

Hang on sec.

Look people, move away from the new book shelf, can't you see I'm trying to sift through my pervert tumblr subscriptions? Sheesh.

Thanks. I'm back.



This is a joke. I say make the entire ballot Spanish alone. Because I care deeply about their sanity & thus, by extension, ours, it's in everyone's interest to keep wave after wave of crackers from carrying concealed Schlitz- & lard-saturated brain cell counts into polling places in lieu of their natural environments of the cubicle, workshop & couch. Whether 60%, 80% or 12% of the electorate vote in a given election, rest assured that the song shall indeed remain the same.

I couldn't eat another bite, Jeeves. Throw this mutton & duck out, let the skippers & dustmen fight over the bones.

Interior, Cleveland Regional Transit Authority bus.

The work environment is Tyrannosaurus-eat-King Kong atrocious, bien sûr, but when public transportation, unlike commercial, is as comforting as taking the waters, misery's thirst is easily quenched.

"Flying used to have ... well, class," says DeYoung. "It used to be exciting. "Now it's just like riding the bus. You get where you need to go. That's what it comes down to."

You dare proffer that screaming infants & parental counter-screams, suits bloviating into their cellphones, mall-bound teenagers nearly drowning out albums on eleven & the omnipresent stench of stale sweat occasionally peppered with the faintest whiff of urine don't represent class? And your band sucked, too.

"Lay on, Internets, and damned be he that first cries, 'Hold, flash!'"

I hope this doesn't get me killed.

Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to read is true. Only the dialogue has been eliminated because when one is in love, eyes are all you need except when compiling a grocery list or are about to shuffle off a mortal coil, just ask a Scot.

It didn't matter that the housing bubble burst because, staring beatifically, Bobby & Bambi McGregor beautifully brought back rambunctious residues of childhood rubber Superballs religiously bouncing over bramble & brick, G.I. Joes & Barbie dolls, bridesmaids & bills, all once thought lost to the dust of time 'til the pining overcame & they mounted a crusade to bring the Superballs back, finding them at last, neon colors in troubling toil, cramped in cobweb, a sublimity able to see the light shine one more time.

Burgeoning laughter split their sides open, memories flooding, pulses ebbing, Bobby disentangling the snaking cord to call 911, Bambi disparaging his aluminum foil hat, mad as an Art Bell regular, I'm fine, I'm fine she said & bouncing over table & chair, lost to the particleboard 'til the pain overcame & he mounted an expedition to the phone screaming dial dial dial & let the curlies queue in proper order we'll gladly pay you noday because we lost the house today do you like that line?

This post, like discothèques & glides through beauteous Cleveland vistas, is made possible, by you, the taxpayer.

I'm not lying, I wrote this at work. In fact, be happy/sad I'm a civil servant or you'd have one less blog to enjoy/avoid. Boy, do I have to be civil? I wish someone would serve me a sandwich, I'm fucking starving. This place needs a better lounge area.

















That balcony out back's gone unused for too long. No, I'm not going Black Tuesday. Plenty of space for a grill, mini fridge, comfy chair for flinging book sale rejections* at passers-by, like this guy.

Oh, who am I kidding. We're comrades-in-slack, this Mr. Bush (not that one, settle down, hippies) & I. Furthermore, 'tis a shame when such honesty as the below forces one to submit to rabid dogs masquerading as commoners & resign.

He said he cannot spend his entire day sitting in the county's administration building, where he has no office or Internet access. "I like to serve the people, but I've got to do stuff," he said.

You'd leave the office too if you didn't have internet (Internet? INTERNET!) access. I just hope these Osh Kosh Polygons have some. Seriously, what the fuck is there to do in Kyrgyzstan besides riot?

Oh. Your. God. Train kept a-rollin' all night long.

*we rarely, if ever, burn recycle items in lieu of putting them in the Perpetual Book Sale Machine. Once upon a time, you, yes, you, gentle reader, could have owned Walter Wager's Telefon in near-mint paperback or a copy of the 1970 Congressional Directory.

Oh, privately owned means of production, you scallywag!

On bus rides, joyous taxpayer-subsidized glides through beauteous Cleveland vistas, I glance past glass & get lost in profound serenity such as this:

















Where's Waldo? In the ravine, with the rest of Famous Ray's refuse.

But lo, yesterday evening, I found myself at the mercy of l'appareil sanglant de la destruction, ♫corporate advertising♪ (ed. note: pretend you hear the ominous soundtrack) & was pained with this:


















Oh, I'll pay. Don't think I won't pay low low prices!

Which came first, the poet or the activist?

One of the perks of being employed by a taxpayer-funded discothèque is all the unsolicited swag we receive, 100% of which takes the form of *shock* the printed page. We might have gotten a t-shirt once, but since it was for Transformers 2, we threw it out. Anyway, of these pages, some in Chinese, some hawking scholarly wares or office supplies, most come in the form of literary and/or poetry journals.

The summer issue of Fence arrived yesterday & the editorial caught my fancy. 'tis perhaps a bit long for you AD-addled youth, so I'll summarize: some organization/coalition/group of slackers calling themselves The 95 Cent Skool apparently declared a jihad on an individual poetry; social poetics is the wave of the futurama. The editor proceeded to go apeshit, but intellectually.

Given how 99% of my awful verse is individual, personal, I was, on the surface, inclined to immediately agree. I'm not a smartypants but since I play one on TV & the CRT, I felt it best to dialectically dive & see if the other side was as single-minded as 'down with The Man!' (a sentiment I share) or whether the situation was a bit more complex.

Thus, a response from a member of the school skool whose seminar is now scattered to the four winds. Shorter, encore: we know change is bullshit, we just wanna hang with folks who hate The Man. Oh, personal expression takes precious time away from imaginary revolution.














C'est-à-dire, slight miscommunication of a Three's Company variety, without Mr. Furley and babes in hotpants, of course. Aside: Joyce DeWitt was the finer; go play in the street if you disagree. Raging against the machine in bricked stanzas or chronicling on stray strands the beautiful & maddening genetics of the quotidian, you, I, both sides know the inexorable, unquenchable accumulation of capital & the wages of this sin being the fuckery of everything below the penthouse will continue unabated until an ostentatiously theatrical (I hope) apocalypse of our own creation.

Think global, act local? Perhaps. Let me steal & apply famous Benjamin:

Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.

The sphere of influence is inverse to the distance traversed. No one has more influence over me, someone I ostensibly have to know, than me -- except when the opiate of new music purchasing proves too strong. Well played, oligarchy. I have less influence over my wife & children (that's for sure), even less over city & county governments, state bwahahahaha. I won't even insult your intelligence by going any further in this mostly evidence- & anecdote-free demonstration.

My personal, obvious conclusion: write whatever the hell you want to write. The only thing you can ever hope to change is yourself & if you get lucky -- really really lucky -- you might be the spark for someone else's inferno. Marxist red, or lovelorn blues, that's their call.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to implicitly support the system by writing a love sonnet.

Two great tastes that go awful together

Thinking of stuff, was in the mood, but then I came across the below & had to static kill the gushing post that never did quite gush. You can thank the mud for sparing you yet another batch of incoherent cookies.

At least until the inevitable crack & you're drowning in oatmeal raisin, a generic, bland house brand with sharp, stale oat flakes & unknown objects disguised as fruit, a fitting metaphor for this blog.

And now for something completely different.







Don't scoff, he's lucky he wasn't killed:

Falling in flash

This week or any other, daredevil, watch your step.

"As with juggling, the key to life is to keep the procession moving steady and don't look down."

He wondered where they'd end their journey, primary colors tumbling over sidewalk cracks and crumbling curbs, red disappearing into a sewer grate or touching just enough of the rusted plate to bounce and be devoured, digested by the dark underbelly of a parked Toyota; yellow resting comfortably in a tree lawn, the cast shadow of a telephone pole transforming it into a lime that had slipped out of a torn grocery sack; blue, who knows where he would end up or if he'd ever be found.

He wondered if she'll remember to play that song, the one he never learned the title of but whose melody moved from cloyingly sweet to heavenly the moment she began to dance in her seat, swaying for who knows how many traffic lights, not even stopping as they stepped out, her ebullient laugh disarming his embarrassment with ease.

He wondered if she'll serve food on those plates, the ones from their first apartment that even after moving once, twice, thrice, they couldn't bear to part with, cheap, off-white china ringed with thin strips of black and something that was supposed to be gold but was more the hue of a daffodil slowly drained of life in the doggiest August sun.

He wondered if she'll forgo the whole goddamn thing because it'll cost and even now, especially now, they -- she -- couldn't afford such an expense.

He wondered if she'll be alri --

She wondered if his last thought was of her.

"I've turned these cans into can-dos!" "Well, you smell terrible. Good luck to you sir!"

If only they were an elected official.

Christyson said employees finding scrap metal on park grounds are under obligation to sell it to a scrap vendor, then they are required to take the receipt and cash to the park manager or another administrator. Metal includes anything recyclable, including cans left by park visitors or metal discarded by Metroparks shop workers.

You're under an obligation to kiss my ass.

And before any self-righteous wanker blurts out about how these taxpayer-funded employees violated the codes, legal *pshaw* or moral *bwah*, of their job, consider

• placing a wager on whether that $1200 will or will not stave off the inevitable cutback due to economy still sucking ass upon expiration of the current levy in 2014 my property taxes are going up I'm an overtaxed cracker that's 17 cents/day needed for mistresses and my wife's plastic surgery wah wah wah. Don't scoff at my cynicism, this is Callahooga County.
  

• your employment and how much time you spend pointing & clicking, including the 7.3 seconds wasted stopping at this scrap heap to leave a self-righteous comment, you amoral, bottom-line averse wanker.
  

Public, private, all of us shlubs are shambling for some sector of The Man and it's your duty as a member of the peon class to throw the occasional wrench in His vast works, especially in light of the inexorable expansion of cog surveillance.
















Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to steal some pens, which is even worse because they're not garbage.

Fists of fury

Celluloid or vinyl (or plastic or digitally-encoded bits), doesn't matter. The samurai, like the musical troupe, must strike with ferocity -- unless the troupe's instrument of choice is the player piano, then it's a case of ropes and pulleys and the hope that your intended victim will follow the candy trail to stroll beneath this not very ferocious rambling. In short (too late), too much work. A sword's sharpness & that of six strings must be quick & lethal. Thus, more than a passing resemblance between the movie & its diabolically over-the-top troubadour namesake, Lightning Swords of Death. The Extra Dimensional Wound, whose sonic quality is meatier than their debut (not always an artistically desirable mutation in the grimier of metal circles but, in addition to stretchier guitarwork, this fucking huge bottom end noise should off kvlt skepticism) eviscerates with the precision of a Masamune whilst deploying well-placed hammer blows to the skull and whatever body parts are within reach just to make sure the victim's pleas remain in pooling blood where they belong.

Simplicity is a virtue here, flushed through oversized Bathory/Entombed riffs & straightforward orthodox black metal text peppered with more than a hint of Lovecraftian slime, delivered with that same sore throat-on-steel wool rage we all know & love.

Sounds alluring, but when those are the elements of your template, the spine-into-powder power of the riff is beyond key; it's the very ichor of the beast. So, do LSoD pass the death test?

Generally. Making a statement on an album after only a few dozen spins isn't the most prescient hark! the herald reviewers sing! one can engage in. Heads: I know some of my all-time favorites became so only after having years to percolate in the grey folds lost in attic mildew. Tails: instant gratification chord progressions are like Cosmic Candy. They may give your tongue (or in this case, fingers) a colorful workout, but as the last note rings into oblivion, you realize it was only a sugar rush. So you tracks that I'm wavering on, rest easy. You've got plenty of time. The others make me giddy as a schoolgirl tee hee.

The title track marches the album out of the gate before striding into full gallop, occasionally stopping to step on your neck. A couple of speedfreak workouts follow, including the gloriously titled Nihilistic Stench (no, the song isn't about Washington, D.C., though it should be. Number one, make it so). Zwartgallig, Dutch for both melancholy & the national soccer team, is an apt title for a nimble, ambient bass piece & palate cleanser for what is the best track on the platter, Damnation Pentastrike. Gotta be that rubberband faux-stop/start riff stumble. A couple of predominantly (sort of) doomy trudges through the aural muck present the album's magnum opus & closer, the kitchen-sink, eleven-minute & thoroughly excellent Paths to Chaos.

The seeds germinating in the rotten earth of their inconsistent debut have finally begun to blossom, and though no minor masterwork such as the bleakly stellar Remember Your Death of guitarist/primary composer Roskva's (Jeremy Stramaglio to his mama) Endless Blizzard side project, The Extra Dimensional Wound is a trauma worth smiling about unless you hate metal in which case I hope you read this whole goddamn post muahahahahaha, etc.

Easy Rider

As I once opined, all posts can be improved with Putin.

"What about when it's already 100% Putin?"

Then, the fly, a desperate, daring, fast symbol of freedom. Hmm. Do these words decrease the percentage? Is it now only 99.9% Putin? What if I brazenly break national security protocol in mentioning Andropov or Chernenko, once decaying corpses, now rampaging zombies due to Chernobyl's lingering toxic soup aftermath & whose power the CIA hopes to harness to ironically use against their fellow, still living, travelers? Are you fooled by Russia's modern veneer, her meta Potemkin villagery? If not, is theirs more impressive than ours? Because of inherent brain-eating abilities, said organ being the KGB nerve center, is this post now down to 52% Putin, but up to 117% communist? And if so, how can I inject a much needed dose of free-market capitalism?

Sale on interoffice envelopes! Gently used!

Their leader rides hogs like someone who's suavely garroted a man, whereas our effeminate pretzeldent goes on a hysteric-laden teevee show.

C'mon, Hussein X, invade someone new & without a pansy handwringing epilogue. Killing a man & his family while making sure stray shells don't turn his china hutch into a block of Swiss? Being a good guest is hard.

"Psst."

This doesn't bode well.

INTERIOR, library.

Sexy female agent kung-fus office door.

Randal: Hey baby, is that an electronic communication transactional record demand, or are you just happy to reenact my browser history?

















A loud report rattles the shelves' contents onto the floor.

Sexy female agent: Terrorist down.

Randal: If only I had gotten my Norelco fixed...

Fin.

Humidity

I'm looking through a hole in the sky.

At the yellow & hot sun. Too yellow like a cheap Volume 4 import, too hot like last week, too bright, so blinding that it's black. Oh, be a fine girl kiss me won't find this class of gloss. And it's humid, but not claustrophobic. Aren't they the same? No. Though each shares qualities, each delineates disparate states. And though the latter's meaning is bloated with choking airs & catacomb cliche, in it's own way, it's far less severe. You always know where you stand: in the pit, looking through a hole in the earth, a shovel scattering Stygian glint past scabs of rust and torpor. The other? Anticipation of the expected something, an ambiance nudging, sotto voce, the self to document, to shoot stills of what can befall: hope laced with fear. Or worse, the inverse, the teasing euphony of the mercurial out-of-reach, the looking-glass ubiquitous hiding in blank days that end in y.

July 28, 1975 saw me as the weest of lads. Wouldn't have a clue for years about the existence of this compelling imprint, spit-shined grime (unlike their visceral first, more than a few hours and a more than a few hundred quid required) beginning with a propulsive riff that cynically snarls and wearily twists with each return. Was nothing but such adolescent angst, once upon a spin. The rent was never due for me, either, John. I was, after all, a punk kid with limited responsibility and a wandering noodle -- seems you big & famous rock stars & I have something in common -- but soon the plectrum would metamorphose into the punctum of memory.

Butler's bubbling bass entr'acte conjures a glimpse of breezy, eerily calm late 70s Salem's Lot before James Mason's stormy "Throw away the cross, face the master!" monologue. Shrug. Dozens of chill basement viewings color the processes -- what's this? A modernist gaze into hyperspace -- see the soul seller for even rootier roots -- symptomatic of universal disillusion. And healthy doses of sweat, dirt, stacked amplifiers, white powder. Ingested by those blokes, not me, for five-buck-an-hour high schoolers, soon aimless, major-less matriculators, can't afford to be strung out on anything past carbonated beverages, candy bars and cheap American beer. A love that never dies, wot's all this? It's certainly scream-worthy as I imagined love would be. Turn it up. While not as punctuated as misheard Purple Haze, the second verse's seven nightmare unicorn's fucking spectacular. I believed, and still lie, that's what he sings. Cokeheads have their white & I have mine, the amaranthine drone of high summer, cumulus climbing over the song's fading acres of acoustic blue blanketing spinning spokes over hillocks & down.

It seems to have been hot on July 28, 1988, but I checked, for truth's sake: 91 units of Fahrenheit. Humid. Stereo pan megAlomania -- don't toke so much, quality controller -- a collective of dreamily feral measures, bruising progression & substance- & celebrity-stained text, an athanor where I could incinerate teenage wasteland, transmute disaffection into a thing that had I been born earlier might have been in the form of nothing more than bitchin' Camaros, weed and suburban ennui. Some things never change, though substitute bitchin' 24". Why doesn't everybody leave me alone with my sketches, NES, verse that wouldn't fare any better two decades later thanks to an affinity towards indulgent purpling, the girl with the long brown hair, hours of long, fractured crosses, spiked shins and 4-4-2 laced with thoughts about the girl with the long brown hair (whatever happened to her?) while everyone waited for the poorly-struck ball to be retrieved from far afield, Walkman pre- and post-practice, audible to the posable statues masquerading as passers-by to the motionless.

Shielded by sepia-toned sabotage, I know better than you. I still do. Don't question, or I'll play it again, hit rewind & make us wait for evidence. Always waiting, but one can skip at home; the wonders of technology. We still skip in this digital age. Was it wise, to learn to disguise? I'll tell you on my deathbed. Always waiting.

What of ce lit (you don't know any French yet, pal) striving to stretch into wonderland, immersed in the thrill of it all, all that fear laced with hope, that blot, breathing its drowsy speech that pedaled me around town solitaire. It's not as humid, July 28, 1991 (I checked, for truth's sake) the gulf between entertainment and conflict having evaporated further, the spectacle carrying love letters twixt the illicit. Oh, there's love here, too, I suppose, a chorus exhales to say as much, its weapon the aforementioned fear, the choice of all tzars, super or no. I wield it, as do you, tzarina, next to me. Remember, I know better, I have the evidence. You doubt? I confess? I'll never tell, not even after wedding bells.

I know I'm going insane, this song isn't helping (whatever happened to crunch?), so tune my radio. Broadcast stimuli for years, nearly twenty. I know I don't sound very cheerful, but even megalomaniacs can listen. I(you) is listening, for once, for the thousandth time I(you) listening. Why are you(I) laughing? Am I Satan, am I man, have I've changed a lot since it began? Since, children, the second, comically enough, manifesting on this idée fixe twelve years ago, & an omnipresent, self-served writ. Same 99-cent notebook paper, same ink in line after line of stanzas bricked upon each other, our very own tower of Babel. I like to pretend it's served by you, over & over I pretend until at last sift the photographic evidence & see that I never understood more than a handful, & neither do you each and every July 28 and the 363 (remember those relics set aside) that lay beside. This album, this image of tribal fiestas of fire & flesh, ostensibly for many, is burned into a comedown of one ash.

Summer is here. What of the next July 28 and those thereafter? Blinding, sweltering, your fault, my fault, it will be humid. Only slick fingertips can keep those rare moments, the proof that we once could slip through the looking-glass, from disappearing into the escalating dust.

Taisez-vous Tuesday

The Afghan Wikis are slick, but you can't dance to 'em.

Only around 'em. Zing!

"Um, taisez-vous, idiot."

Le Oops. Here's some porn:

Anastrophy, Or, I Was Bored, Man.

Yesterday, and always: short, curt riffing, prose borne on long winds.
Today, a play: less long (yay! you say), long song (boo! you hoo).

Why?

Because I'm sniff too sad sob to chortle type wheez.

Wheez. Cheez Whiz. What a chiz!

At least Samuel's last name isn't Muhammad. Always more enjoyable being a social pariah than being dead unless you're Dracula.






















I vant to burn your flag!

Too bad he's not an American citizen. This dead guy'd give Dead Gus Hall a real run for his votitude. Oops, this is longer than I had planned. Sorry. Now listen.