Trust no one especially me

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Lunacy, masses smashed by a holy shit, or, almost twenty-five years of DSM-IV no. 295

Not until Halloween eve, officially, but since, A, this is the only sorta-finished draft in the queue, & B, I'm tired of this thus cleaning said queue out, here you go you undemanding non-metallic weenies. Today's socioeconomic lesson courtesy of Kerrang. Or Aardschok, Rip, I can't remember. Ain't gonna get them from a high school textbook, then, or now. Seems that Brazil circa Italia '90 was, sadly to middle class suburban morons like yours truly, more than joga bonito & bikinis, & after reading both a glowing bit on Beneath the Remains [ed. note: hagiography ain't new, kids, but is occasionally spot on], & an ad for the Roadrunner reissue of Schizophrenia -- Now With A Rerecording of Troops of Doom!, I got Perry's Rockpile [ed. note: RIP] to double my ordering pleasure. Jesus H. Cthulhu, all my stories are over twenty years old. Adult Randal is as milquetoast as the Beatles. [ed. note: stuff your vapors, I don't care]
 
Metallica was the template for musical swank in days of yore, so pressing play of course meant being lulled into false security 'fore chromaticism tore the goddamn heads off those within earshot, Psycho shower scene screech backward masked, or in Portuguese, or backward masked Portuguese. The whole platter has a weird, The Who-in-catacomb clarity contra the lo-fi, lo-budget muck of the visceral debut, hammered home via the triptych of From the Past Comes the Storms,

To the Wall (whose scaling runs wink & nod towards Ride the Lightning's colossal House of Hammett title track), Escape to the Void, all nearly as unbreakable as anything the so-called Big Four had yet conjured. Can you believe some folks actually tried to convince me that if I wanted to get my rage on, I should be spinning The Motherfucking Clash? Fuck off.

"Brains of armed lives hidden in pits." Such ESL fuckups are endearing, especially in light of my continued foreign language failures, though there's also the Byronic "the rose's smell corrodes me" of the machine gun R.I.P. (Rest In Pain) that concludes with a few measures of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze crashing through Marshalls.

There's nothing about love &/or bunga bunga on this record but there are cyclones of USDA grade A riffs, the essential ingredient in thrash, a spasmodic reaction to the symptoms of perceived, wish-fulfillment apocalypse: the proliferation of computer gizmos; war transmogrified from smokestacks, cattle cars, & black-and-white human pain to out-of-sight, out-of-mind video game remote controlling; the ubiquitous nuke. See: Nuclear Assault, Napalm Death, Killing Technology, etc.

Bay Area redux: new axman Andreas Kisser playing the Cliff Burton role in elevating the band beyond thrash and thrash alone -- in fairness, the immature Morbid Visions can't hold a candelabra to Kill 'Em All, one of the ten best power chorders ever. Even the cover's dominant color in each case shifts from red to blue, jumping out of the fire & into an eerie, otherworldly undercurrent. To further strain the mock parallelogram, both bands' fifth album was viable, if commercial, though let us temporarily shelve our aspersion casting & pretend 1996 never happened, dwelling instead on the ear-opening Inquisition Symphony,

seven-plus minutes of instrumental fanfare for the common hesher, proving that grime-proboscised punks from crime- & poverty-stricken Belo Horizonte could hold their own with any metal band on the planet. Check the genuine Lovecraftian creep of Screams Behind the Shadows -- or to be precise, the initial riff. Each smorgasbord has a baker's dozen of the goddamn things, so many that I could start pedaling & match local landmarks, such as they were, with each riff change, Dark Side of the Moon holding hands with Wizard of Oz before I had even heard of such dorm room occupations.

Septic Schizo Max was possessed. "Jackhammer" is among the most cliche metal writing adjectives, but the next time there's midday orange barreling, pay attention & spin this, or this. That's the rhythm, only now with the faint dweomer of death metal. So, of course the gentle, Bert Jansch-esque Kisser interlude The Abyss makes perfect sense, the calm before the double-barreled Venom storm.

Maybe Beneath the Remains and Arise are "better," but what the fuck does that even mean? There are a million fine sounding bands in the world, but they don't all bring you riffs at work. Most of them just HM-2 you. Find it at your local record shop then go away.

WE SEEK PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE

I warned ya. Though the official anniversary isn't until September, officially. Yet, since I do indeed have nothing else & I'd much rather talk Trek than the toxic strains of both news feedery & personalized jibber-jabberwocky interesting to no one, I present the wonder years & her slow creep of understanding: the world is a beautiful box sadly overstuffed with fuckers hemorrhaging cataracts of yellow & black bile, so let us hike away to the pleasant melodies of tunes, teevee, & trashing troglodytes. Some old geeks swear by TOS; a worthy choice, but for us not-entirely-greys, it was Gene's second (third, if we're counting the aborted Phase II) stab at interstellar futurama that fit the playbill.

To counter every

Space Irish

Space Beethoven

or The Worst™ introduction of an alien race in the history of science fiction either televised or in print go on find something more wretched I challenge thee [ed. note: you'll notice that I left out Flying Troi and The Where Are Yous, you're welcome], dig this baker's dozen plus one. A few favorites, yes. The best, perhaps, perhaps not. Hate them? You've got a blog, use it.

The Measure of a Man. Is Data one of us or no? This could have been so fucking heavy handed. It wasn't, & wouldn't work with Kirk who'd take a swing at Maddox, missing due to an uncomfortably crooked girdle, unable to do anything but watch helplessly as Starfleet trekked the android away to disassembly.

Accept the superiority of The Picard & move on.

The Best of Both Worlds, parts I & II. Once upon a time, I was a geek with skill. Now I'm just a geek with slack. Anyway, during the summer twixt junior & senior year of high schoolin', I was enrolled in a three-week computer class at Ohio State (stick your The, as tired as this guy using SOMETHING IST KRIEG) where, when not getting figuratively slaughtered by kind Middle Eastern kids at footie [ed. note: a clever ploy at imposing Sharia law I'm onto you] & hanging out for hours inside Magnolia Thunderpussy dissecting the merits of A Farewell to Kings & Show No Mercy, we butchered at birth bits of Fortran.

That Cramps poster was spooky, but their tunes sure as hell weren't.

Whilst my roomie was off somewhere making out with the RA assigned to the chick half of our gang, us less handsome devils, including Pink Floyd (no one, no one, boomer or otherwise, was as obsessed with that band as much as this guy) & Lou Reed (cool dude, especially since he, unknowingly, introduced me to the vast overrated-nesse of his last great American whale. Belated thanks) & some of the young ladies who weren't totally repulsed by us, gathered in our RA's room to watch the season three cliffhanger. The return of the Borg, manly man Riker poker faced by a woman, & Locutus? Game, set, & match.

After coming down from a rousing chorus of holy fuck what the fuck just happened, we preceded to watch Major League & drink beer.

Sins of the Father. I never kill anyone at the supper table, either, Kurn. Season one Worf was merely a vehicle designed to alternate growls & overreactions. Now he's the coolest mofo around.

Sarek. The title character cried during a performance of Brahms' sextet in B-flat. So did I, but then I'm not a Vulcan. Nyah nyah nyah. Good on Angry Wesley's dig at Angry Geordi being the most hapless guy around the ladies this side of M-33.

Family. As everyone knows, Patrick Stewart owns. When he's paired with a supporting actor who can match his intensity, that's happy fun Halloween candy.


 

Redemption, parts I & II. A situation that required a more Klingon response. Not entirely sold on Sela's backstory, but fisticuffs, Romulan intrigue, righteous Klingon rage, the return of Gowron & Kurn, Data putting the command smackdown on a punkass Timothy Carhart? Let the good times roll.


 

A Matter of Honor. Speaking of Klingons, let's practice our growling. Saved Riker's bacon, & it'll save yours during that next staff meeting.

 

All Good Things... If Not Fade Away is the greatest series send-off ever, & it is, this is a close second (probably along with this I don't care about Newhart or The Wire, thus). Oodles of all-over-the-map, Q, & though emotion-chipped Data grates, this is how you do a finale.

Yesterday's Enterprise. Yeah, it's on every goddamn list, & for good reason. Time travel is incredibly easy to monkey wrench, but when you don't, & toss a hefty dollop of emotional sprinkles on top, delicious & nutritious.

 

Conspiracy. More X-Files than Kolchak ever was, just as ridiculous as the latter, though stumbling across the Horatio's remains so soon was pretty unsettling. Dig those alien FX, a Satanic, melted Fraggle goof-thing but lordy, that hideous death yelp. But [SPOILER ALERT] what a missed opportunity in never following up.

 

The Offspring. Data builds kid, The Man wants kid ['cause Data ain't human, pay attention], kid dies. Maudlin? Try moving, you heartless sack of rocks. Fuck off.

Chain of Command, parts I & II. I'm not gonna do the THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS schtick. Shit. Still, Ronny Cox does dueling superiority/inferiority complexes with gusto, & David Warner's suavely sadistic.

Q Who. Once upon a time, there was no spandexed Jeri Ryan, no B-movie Borg Queen, only the bleakness of technosingularity robotnik circuiterianism.
  

Elementary, Dear Data. Yeah, yeah, easy to potshot the very notion of the holodeck, but I like Data, I like Sherlock Holmes, & this is a fun 45 minutes. Plus, Pulaski's a curmudgeon & that always gets bonus points with yours truly.

Live long & prosper far off my lawn.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

Before.

After.

No, I'm not that fat, yet. Before we proceed, if you hate this post, blame the Duchess; the kernel's hers. If you love it, credit yours ugly. So, lopped off the long(ish) because I was tired of it & thus sliced my morning prep time from 45 to 15 seconds thus tripling productivity thus tripling my winning the future winnings here I come Space Casino, which led to a smarmy yet presumably good-natured barb from guess who about whether the power of Metal [ed. note: but not power metal, that stuff sucks, & no, Maiden doesn't count 'cause they fucking rule. More on them later] lies in the coiffure.

All groups, cliques, drone operator knitting clubs, anarchist chimney sweep brigades, even if there isn't a heavy social element due to many of us being borderline nihilists who love life, an awesome paradox if we had all bought pot from Donald Sutherland, have a uniform that we at least piecemeal gravitate towards when not shackled by The Man, everyone au moins a little unless you don't in which case congrats Mr &/or Mrs Three Piece Pantsuit Grindcore teach me your imaginary iconoclast wisdom.

The residue from tribal conditioning's youthful birth still lingers; blame my hermetic tendencies, but 'tis vaguely straunge when mine eyes see The Kids of the Campus wearing Maiden & Cannibal Corpse shirts that picture albums released before they were born [ed. note: no one wears Tomb of the Mutilated ironically], & on females no less. [ed. note: shit like Let It Be threads doesn't count since that's as mainstream as Muzak in a shopping mall]. My concert going has run the gamut from nearly all-testosterone shows in the late 80s to now where the same, if not heavier, strains are a solid mix of dudes & chicks, so the world has indeed changed for the better for once you fucking hippies, because let's be honest, we hairy lumps ain't pretty.

Now, what of the workplace? Given that I, a 38-year old guy who on occasion still wears band shirts to the Towering Slab (which, according to the interneterati, means I've yet to become a grown-ass man), some properly assume that I've been grandfathered in; newer hires whose job duties also include a solid dose of public interaction do not arrive as if preparing for Wacken, troo. Et bien sûr, when the kvlt of darkthroning occurs during a full moon sweltering Clevelandia summer, buttons it is; I ain't TD Jakes, but due to sweat the rock tee morphs into a gooey second skin right quick.

So, what's my point? None beyond fulfillment of today's posting quota.

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.

Nostalgia

My great uncle Ralph once had a boat, which he could afford because he was a fireman for a very long time. Because he was a fireman for a very long time, he couldn't afford a big boat, but wee Randal & siblings (just one, actually) & cousins & their acquaintances various & sundry nevertheless got to oft motor (as passengers in hideous dayglo orange vests, natch) the north coast from perch-laden Catawba to mini-burg Port Clinton & back.

One fine spring day, Joe Carter, Cory Snyder & Chief Wahoo graced Sports Illustrated. They were twenty-three games out of first at the all-star break.

Still makes me chortle.

Staying absorbed in a Van Halen mixtape was just the opportunity one fine summer day needed to help refine my brilliant on-the-fly plan, the cosmic candy Erie whizzing 360°, the wind-whipped clouds & Kelleys' sun-smacked quarries starboard gifting further confident glosses. Come see your children, yeah, they're lighting up the sky/you won't recognize them anymore. So back on shore, my cousin pouring everyone some Cokes, & bolstered with a ballsy yet earnest confidence that came & went like a comet, I attempted to dazzle her two friends (especially the brunette) via performing a couple of card tricks. I'm guessing card tricks still break no deadly iceberg, though being an awkward, fourteen-year-old dork is an albatross heavier than any ill-conceived scheme. Comets are also known portents of doom, so I should have known better.

Mouse Island hermitage was momentarily considered.

But adolescent naivete, rocketing stop-start power chord bravado, & a truly refreshing beverage on a hot noontide prevented such rash decision making. En plus, no electricity meant no this:



Ain't no song sans that.



Catch as catch can't.

Yeah, blah humbug, heard every backhanded dis under the party-time arena rock G-type star from SST cultists to pop slicksters to art freaks. If metal was Satan, serial killers, nuclear war, naught but dear Mr. Fucked-Up Fantasy, a beyond beyond grasp choked with psychotic frost giants, unholy cabals of movers & shakers, the truly screwed-in-the-skull, not protest music but, in mythic terms, the world as is, fallen & most important, irredeemable, then Van Halen was something else, fast-talking three-ring grit, the wise, worldly elder brother who knew about players, prostitutes, & pimps; dealers, divas, & dregs; imbroglios, insouciance, & infidelity. & yes, the occasional boy-meets-girl heureux dénouement. Lastly, the brothers Halen hailed from the Netherlands, home of red light districts, pot, & Cruyff. This was heady stuff to a Parmastan kid.



Played like Johan, technical, sharp, beautiful, ruthless.

Strolling back to the islands (I feel like a poor man's poor Kennedy), let's get a little Spaceballs minus former roommates for a moment. Joined by the granddaughter of my great uncle's cottage ex-neighbor, the two of us partook of kicky footie (no keepie uppie, her control was far greater than mine) in the big field next to the roller skating rink, her blond ponytail swaying in back-to-back-to-back summers behind a face of dark, inscrutable mien, the whip smartest chick I knew for a good long while. Take that + claymation burgers + book geekery at Gem Beach + birdwatching [ed. note: Drop Dead Legs being particularly effective when heron hunting] & darkthroning (before I knew what that was) at Crane Creek, all rolled into a sublime three & a half minutes:



If you, gentle visitor, are noticing a theme, your reading comprehension membership is good for another year. But pigeonholing is for pigeons, & music is the finest of palimpsests, a new memory of an inside joke easily layered upon an accurate pass, a strong trap, a whiff of sand, that everything, for a moment, is pretty fuckin' cool.

There's a new Real Van Halen record next week, first in nearly three decades. Whether it's good or not doesn't really matter. Plus ça change, plus I'm still a dork, et plus those albums are still spun.



Dealers, divas, dregs, & that wistful crap 
we all wanna punch in the face but secretly love anyway. 
Don't worry, the odds are that tomorrow will suck more than today.

Gesundheit

High school, like the RC zeitgeist, was winding down though certain ritual trappings retain/ed their allure -- church in a box! -- as were, unbeknownst to both me & my fellow geeks, the hard lines of Colorform bodies, bulbous monstrosities & the careful oscillation of fleshy pastels & vomitory hues of Erol Otus' illustrations that accompanied twilight marathons of D&D, carbonated beverage IVs (& the occasional beer when the host's folks weren't home & that's how I became such a revolutionary), classic Maiden, Danzig &  speed metal.

Woe to you who suffer a merciless DM helming this sonofabitch.

Separate ways may be both a cliché & an awful Journey song but I repeat myself, yet such a college-bound teenage conundrum seduces one to matriculate down a different left hand path. Of course I'm not referring to the diablerie of chickdom (& fatherhood a scant year later, what mind-altering substance was I on), but death metal, dudes & said succubi, specifically, the Morrisound sound -- first hinted at on Earache's mailordered Grindcrusher fin-de-80s sampler -- of, among many [ed. note: how the hell did you not arise for the anniversary of Arise only the album of that year you stupid fuck soundtracking the finest electrical storm in North American local your history I plead senility], Obituary's unintelligibly subterranean gurgling; Death's ever more intricate riffwork; Deicide's supersonic blasphemy; Morbid Angel's Altars of Madness, all festering their sun-blasted viruses -- Tampa? everyone shuffleboarded in unison -- soon to infect in varying levels of wretchedness, but it was the atonal bastard linchpin of Lovecraft & ziggurats that of the Floridians burrowed the deepest. Even the cover correctly reflected, as sadly few covers do to the contents within, the devilish splatter/Hammer horror sorcery buried in the grooves, a slimy, metallic ooze, the oxidation of this grey, liquefied rust replaced by a terrible sentience bursting through dying, astral ocean blue at 666 RPM.

 





A religious experience to be sure, but that May jaunt to Perry's Rockpile (R.I.P.) twenty years ago today brought something soft at first glance -- angular band logo notwithstanding -- hallucinatory, yet equally violent & maybe more lethal. It was that cover, Les Trésors de Satan by Jean Delville as the liner notes kindly told me, a heady disdain of gratuitous gore, faux-clever thrills or Frank Frazetta barbarity as common as black t-shirts at a metal show. France (Delville actually hailed from Belgium as later library trips informed yours truly, lazy, languid days before instantaneous electro-access, you punk ass kids don't know how good you've got it, cloud-yeller said mailordered), birthplace of film, home of loose women, occult orgies, lubricated lit & a socialist prez.  



Oops, wrong trésor, though probably not to you non-metal weenies. At a particular rate, there's a regal quality to the painting & this spirit is shot through Blessed Are The Sick, individual riffs cohering in a whole of deeper majesty & greater power, aided by the beauty of occasionally slowing things down.

March, title track, march through grime & the disease-ridden corpse of Dionysus or whatever I was calling that journey into the bone- & joy-splintering gears of the infernal machine, never accurately labeled as such & lurking just over the horizon. A warning transmuted into a hymn, horizon long out of eye shot. Oh yeah, all couched in suspended disbelief doses of Satan, assorted bleorghs, fuck you big cheesy bearded throne & permutations on grrr.



The LP's meisterwerk & thematic overlord, the first section of our Fall From Grace [0:42 to 1:02] always manifested in my head as a spatial push against the domineering flow above, something I imagine would be extra mind blowing if either tripping or blessed with synesthesia, before reversing [1:19 to 1:27] & carrying the listener on its undertow towards sweet nepenthe on the rocks.



Desolate ways? Highbrow ways.   

Looking-glassing the postmodern curse of compression, the terror here's a thin, tinny grit that saps some of the cheese-grater-on-internal-organs spell inherent to the best produced death metal. Like wearing on onion on the belt, the style at the time? Perhaps, but the incense of Monster Manual irreverence wafting out of a thirteen-song temple complex proved to be one of the messiahs -- syncretism, motherfuckers -- less rapt contemplation of introspective musing, more Weird Tales lifeboat glee hee hee in a (still) expanding sea of routine, this horns-throwing itself a routine, a clockwork reply to the tides. Huh. Heaven & hell, always the twain shall meet, after all.

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.