I'm a lazy, lazy man, Roger.

Carry on, wayward sons.

JESUS FUCKING SATAN

GET YOUR FUCKING HEAD OUT OF YOUR FUCKING GAME ALREADY.

Drunken slaughter ought to carry a shorter prison term than wallstreeting.

Quarter pounder with cheese

Not this stink again.

AFC East: The Fucking Patriots have a quarterback, the Dolphins, whose new unis suck but don't suck as much as the Arena League circus threads of The Fucking Broncos or Seahawks, might, the Toronto Bills don't, and neither do the H-A-A-A HAAA HAAA HAAA.

AFC North: Geno Atkins doesn't live in Cleveland, he lives in Cincinnati, unfortunately. The tools retooled HEY FRISCO FUCKING RUN THE BALL, this is the year beefy scrubs at last toll the bell for Big Ben We Hardly Knew Ye, and I'd rather not talk about Browns 2.0.47.

AFC South: Never did a quarterback's surname and team results mesh so poetically, the Titans are a textbook 6-10/10-6er, and I'd lay five bucks that the Jagwires are worse(!) than the Clowns, which leaves Planet Hooston by the two greatest words in the English language.

AFC West: The Fucking Broncos walk the cake; poor Philip Rivers, forced to handoff to a guy with nine broken collarbones, a gassed retread, and a guy not much taller than yours truly; and I'd lay five bucks that Al Davis' Shiny Tracksuits are worse(!) than the Clowns, which leaves the Walrus's second rebuilding job to tooth & nail for a shot at the newest shiny ring of blood diamonds.

NFC East: A four-flaw, round-robin sock 'em up. Ball's in your jockstrap, Mr. Griffin.

NFC North: Unless Aaron Rodgers dies in a demon summoning ritual gone horribly expected, the Packers snooze to at least one home playoff game. I'm further convinced that I'm the only semi-fan of semi-head case Jay Cutler which says much. Keep him upright, and there are 10-11 wins. Adrian Peterson's a yin playing on a team of yangs, and the best reason to watch Detroit is the hope that Stafford chucks the ball 800 times.

NFC South: Fuck Atlanta, America's second worst sporting town I'm looking at you Miami. Geaux Saints. Remember those 6-10/10-6ers, there's two more here. YOU figure out what they're gonna do, smart guy.

NFC West: Clash of the titans, non-speed metal divison. Been a loooong time since one geographic stratum boasted the league's two (arguably, pistols at dawn, knave) best armies. Poor St. Louis though not really since they're a franchise that should be sentenced to outlawry for such thievery but since they stole from Los Angeles, poor St. Louis. Carson Palmer's still in the league? Huh.

AFC playoff seeds: Denver, New England, Cincinnati, Houston, Baltimore, Kansas City.

NFC playoff seeds: Green Bay, Seattle, New Orleans, Washington, San Francisco, Atlanta.

Super Bowl: Seattle over The Fucking Broncos. This one's for you, Jim Zorn.

The Fucking Browns: Double digit stinky cheese. Again.

Broken record

Another semester, another layer of lawn off-getting deposited on the gunk.

I have a really strong sphincter about the badness of really bad stuff.

Forest hermitage.

METAL.

Abysses and eyeballs

Fuck you dumb public
fuck you stupid work
fuck you humidity
now that's fuckin' poetry
hell no says you
well fuck you too.

Doing the right thing

Frogger, deconstruct D)all of the above*

*did jam ninja-ly** to a stack of Darkthrone discs this weekend so hail hail rock and/or roll for truth in advertising for once

**sans air guitaring and/or neck wrecking***

***one wreck's good n' plenty****

****do "they" still make these?*****

*****I know "they" still puke out the great taste of Charleston Chew******

******66, the number of the beast, ******66, the one for you and me

Trust no one especially me

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Am I evil?

Blood on Satan's Desert Island.

What's that nagging, needling, niggling Ipecac wretcher called when there's a billion blatherers dying to upchuck on a zillion chunks of this, that, t'other but, lo! out the black blood of the earth! a quadrillion don't cares have erected a Godzilla-sized Erector set bricked up with Lego bricks of adamantium that even a doped-up Ghidorah can't fuck with?

Albums make much better companions than people.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled egads-a-thon.

When it's cold, and when it's dark, the freezing moon can obsess you

Jesus H. Cthulhu, I hate summer. Fuck this fucking season.

Twenty-one gun salute

Yes, the marriage to the SBH is now old enough to drink. And drink I shall.

Slowly we rot, or, better late than never

Greatest DM (death metal or dungeon master, listener's choice) album ever?

Don't sleep on Altars. Seriously, don't, or you'll wake up the not-that-secret ingredient of a pentagram stew. Mmmm, stew. Bunch of crazy crap happening in meat world, but fancy gizmodic contraptions aside, new shit same as the old shit YEEEAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH. 'twas vaguely Daltrynstic no? though I'm more skilled in the Axl arts, not the paparazzo face punching bit 'cause I love you all like Ozzy. Reference your own frontdude/chick for three easy installments of 39.95, please allow 6-8 weeks for delivery.

Been cleaning [read: attempting to maybe possibly try] out the house 'cause like every firstworlder, got too much garbage even for Oscar, and came across a shot of the fam post-arrival of the alien known to interwebzians as Offspring the Elder, mom classy in a Justice tee, yours truly nattily clad in a Seasons, both sporting giant glasses which was, along with onions on the belt, the style at the time.

No, I didn't wallow in any of that stupid "woe to you o earth and sea what a world what a world we leaveth with thee" shit because are you fucking kidding me, life expectancy and an end to feudalism aside though I hear that's making a comeback in select markets, see above.

In the past, you couldn't ignore what was stabbing you.

Thanks to cheap anesthetic hawked by the real Satanic cult, now you can, but you're still gonna end up as someone's meal.

Midlife, no crisis

Look man, adrenaline junkie shtick's fine for vapid hacks surfing vapor trails to nowhere. Me, I dig a grimy rut slicked with oily mope. It's right there, points the skeletal digit, hand hallucinating over a shaky ticker, ears flapping as yours truly breezes wearily through discarded puns on the band's name and/or the Cretaceous. Eureka, that signifies old, and lo, a couple more greys than yesterday.

So what? As we learned last time out, "maturing" is for musical halfwits, but aging fully graced, a magically different ballad. Once upon an Angus: "I'm sick and tired of people saying that we put out 11 albums that sound exactly the same. In fact, we've put out 12 albums that sound exactly the same." Here, a stretch, but it's new Alice, they've been at it since before my kids were born and so know what the fuck they're doing, the unbreakable Motörhead of mood metal.

Don't get naming the entire album after the sole "topical" track, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here for the under-a-rock adjacent, but everyone's brainwaves are different. Song's certainly eerie, though, though Hung on a Hook, whoa, Layne or no, see despondency through a glass, darkly. Funny how Chuck Woolery infernos used to blast open proceedings, but a deep (ten of twelve tracks clocking over five minutes) Hollow has good n' plenty of a sticky, bendy gait, defiantly smacking away one of the album's few flaws, namely that a speedy, let 'er rip once in a full moon would be keen.

Contradicting myself, brick wall drones are wheelhoused, but second single Stone hasn't stuck yet (neither had Lab Monkey, which I already like thrice more than Monday), but the Jar of Flies-worthy Voices, lordy, 'tis No Excuses horizontal harmonizing with a daydream haze, birthing their love child. Opposite, 99 44/100% pure facelifting with the chromatic, rambling, ergo self-titled-ish Phantom Limb, and har ye har ye, new guy getting more turns at the mic this time around beyond righteous and mandatory two-parts.

We all wanna tap our foot, crack open our skulls on the stage, feast on the goo inside. It's why pop craft welded to brontosaurs riffs makes overcast barbs like Low Ceiling soar, whilst Scalpel is cut primarily out of the former, a chorus of pure fucking ear candy. Being either moody or cranky or both, this stomper of a record, peppered with singer-songwriter longhair jams once strung out so lovely in Cantrell's solo oeuvre, perhaps less black and more grey, riffs that once lopped off bloody chunks now grinding gobs of weathered flesh instead, still guards the sound of a cold, rainy day. Like today! (sadly, not that cold) Brings an invisible ink smile to my face.

Paranoia is just a kind of awareness, and awareness is just a form of blotto

No album cuts cuz Metal Blade's gang of Patrick Batemans says nein.

Animals are blissfully ignorant of our gold star acid banging till we leave a pile of garbage on their house 'cause we if we know anything we know shit, and in the sun that motherfucker smells like civilization.

No wonder stray folks hither and tither self-medicate, murder.

The previous platter drunk from grindhouse Hammer teats. This latest treat is rotten Spahn ranch dressing, leaves ripped from mellow yellowing, vomit-pocked copies of Helter Skelter and Mindfuckers stashed under the seat with empty wrappers, undies. Opener Mt. Abraxas, contra the last first strike, climbs molasses slow, sand dune stumbling for a couple of warm beers and pocket change 'fore channeling God, i.e. Sabbath circa 1970-75, hypnosis wielded like a drugged wizard unable to just say nyet. And we've all taken turns as that Mind Crawler hammer, if not convincing someone to go all Tex Watson then certainly to fuck with the psyche of the ones we love, a word redefinable by the happy hour. Celebrate good times come on.

Jonesing for a blood lusty fix, Poison Apple b/w Under the Spell are a pair of Buck Blackmore rockin' holes in the sky metal pin punched by Desert Ceremony's active Iommi octaves oh so mesmer, and dig Uncle's eerie un/intentional Robin Zander Evil Love tribute complete with T.V. Eye submission and name-drop shout-out over Maiden/Priest axework.

The ante's high in Death Valley Blues, Marshall stack psych hiding from piggish sobriety along with the rest of the worded weirdos, anxiously kicking the on sale! today only! bobblehead down the road with the droning, lysergic Follow the Leader. The burnt So Cal concrete and dusty Chevy van monochrome of Valley of the Dolls is at first tab the only (slight) misfire, but patience, grasshopper. At last, at last, our crazy kids land a gig doing the Devil's Work, the knife blade broken garage rock endgame that, like every idea good bad or ugly, stutters to nothing under the bleaching sun.

This stack of oh yeah ain't a carbon copy of their oldies, yet there's blissfully none of the lobotomy promoted by onanist music critics,"maturing" -- c'est-à-dire, agitprop praising the sacrifice of The Holy Riff for "atmosphere" -- just one more thorny hike through one more nuclear-baked shithole. Play that funky music white boy and sing how every wasteland, whether gated Swiss bank silicone, upper lower middle class timebomb, or dumpster diver felony, is run by variations on a nutjob, as it was, is, and always shall be. Amen.

A portrait of the catharsis as a middle-aged man

Space Casino junkies before, Space Casino junkies after, but where's the valet parking for the discerning headbanger, Comic Sans, where, I ask?

The Boys from Sweden parlayed their mood music for mopes into conjuring a joyful sadness. If only they'd fold the electro-noodling in the spaces twixt and bet on guitar runs à la Tonight's Decision or the new platter, they'd be always ace.

Katatonia @ House of Blues: Buildings, Day and Then the Shade, My Twin, Burn the Remembrance, Soil's Song, The Racing Heart, Lethean, The Longest Year, July, Dead Letters, Forsaker.

Dear Mr. Mike, didja notice the crowd, polite nodding for the smoking jacket rock, raging pits and fists of fury for the death man's hand? Take the hint.

Opeth @ ditto: The Devil's Orchard, Ghost of Perdition, White Cluster, Hope Leaves, You Suffer, Atonement, Deliverance, Hessian Peel, Häxprocess, Demon of the Fall, Harlequin Forest, Blackwater Park.

Ebb tide

Was unofficially saving this, the riffyard where I lifted this dump's subtitle, for the final whatever, but whatever. Kinda struck me the other house on haunted hill, mind and matter meeting over reruns and free beer I forgot about: I'm tired, out of shape, dead & bloated minus the dead but the bloat's a boat not far in the harbor, a place to go in the quest for firing negative reactors because doing so saves lives, or so we're told. Easier said when the Surround Silence isn't 'round tick tock.

Should be a bit o' yay honey since the oh-fer's now a one-fer, but you know, so? Brain's still a tumescent sloth happy to pine box space out, too, see above. Leave summer blockbuster clawing for the undead and characters from Poe.

Hell ain't just them but sing song, yingless yang -- hey, I should use that -- Newton's cradle stuck on static. Okay, five minute rule: sucks. Fine line between yabba dabba doo. A wonder anything's scrawled with this screaming quiet.

But hey, that's on you. J'accuse, accuser. You all through two of 'em, base ten. Seems this is how it's gonna be until we're worm's-meat. Yippee.

Maybe it's got everything to do with me.