017: Not Suicidal...

I should probably clarify a comment I made in my last blog... The intention of my statement that buying sleeping pills would put an end to my writing career was supposed to suggest that my insomniac tendencies are the reason for my obsession with writing. The obvious double meaning, encouraged by the words "One way or another" that taking a great many sleeping pills will not only kill my insomnia, but the rest of me as well was probably in poor taste, but that's ok... Gallows humor has always been a favorite of mine...

But fear not, you worrisome humans. Suicide is far from my intentions; I have too many people to offend before I die...

And now, just to waste both time and space, I will type a list of some of the songs that I've been listening to today. I suggest you go to Google (or whatever your searchy-thing of choice may be) and look up every band I mention here because that are wonderful... If they weren't wonderful, I wouldn't listen to them...

POINTLESS LIST DRAGON FIST ATTACK... GO!

The Shins - "So Says I"
10cc - "The Things We Do For Love"
The Faint - "Desperate Guys"
The Jesus and Mary Chain - "Nine Million Rainy Days"
Scarehead - "Ha Ha"
The Need - "Pony 4 Honey"
Killing Joke - "Asteroid"
Download - "Omniman"
Moses Williams - "Which Way Did My Baby Go?"
Men Without Hats - "The Safety Dance (Extended Club Mix)"
William Orbit - "Water from a Vine Leaf (Acid Bath Mix)"
The Cubby Creatures - "Up Song"
Bright Eyes - "Down in a Rabbit Hole"
H2SO4 - "Cacharelle"
Ultra Vivid Scene - "The Whore of God"
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks - "Water and a Seat" (which is playing now...)
and the I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning CD by Bright Eyes which I just bought this morning... Bright Eyes is excellent, whether he's doing folky, acoustic, almost-country crooning or freaky, electronic, psychotic, gothy rock. I don't care which style he's raping, it's always interesting and his lyrics are ALWAYS thoughtful... Check out the Bright Eyes page on the Saddle Creek website. Then, check out the rest of Saddle Creek Records; almost everything on their label is fantastic...

016: Test... Test... Is this thing even ON???

Most of the time, when I'm writing on this blog, I feel like I'm having a conversation with myself... I've never had a comment posted on this site, and the only email that I remember getting about it was from the news-writer who plastered my face all over the Sunday edition of the Daily Nudes... (Ruining a perfectly good paper, and undoubtedly some people's breakfasts as well...)

But, on the OTHER blog that I post to, I get comments all the time. Granted, THAT site has interesting people who write for it and not just one lazy whiner with nothing better to do (but homework...) Still, I find it interesting that, no matter what I write here, I never seem to be getting through to people...

In this spirit of empassioned, yet stifled, expression, I cross posted last night's little exploration of feelings to the Vision? Nary! weblog site, hoping to get a slightly larger audience than the poor little Electric Sedative pulls in.

Amazingly, the very next morning I already have a comment posted, and by the FUROR of V?N! himself, Herr Raffin!!! I shall now reproduce his comments before your very eyes:

It's amazing how much you've toned it down since becoming a city councilman.
I know that some call you a sellout; but I have often suggested to people that they read between the lines. "Is he a sellout?" I ask them, "Or is his mild-mannered conformity a clever ruse, lulling them to sleep snuggled warmly in a blanket of false security- and then he STRIKES."

Yes, it's nice to think that my words-o-wise'dumb are actually reaching out into the real world and doing something that I myself hope to never do again... WORK...

By this I mean that it's satisfying to have someone comment on what I've written. It lets me know that I'm not just spinning into a vacuum like those women in that painting in The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon... As I'm sure that everyone has read the novel, I don't feel I need to comment on this subject any further...

The moral to the story is this: Writing at 1:am is a lonely business, but knowing that at least SOMEONE out there is reading what you've written makes the whole thing worth while... (Or, I could just buy some sleeping pills and put an end to my whole writing career... One way or another...)

Ta!!! And NO, I'm not really on the City Council...

015: Insomnia = Insanity

I envy you people... It must be nice to be tired, lay down in bed, and then fall to sleep... I don't know how to do that...

Instead I come downstairs and plug into this machine, drop a set of headphones onto my ears, and type until my hands go numb... (That takes less time every week... Soon I won't have to feel my fingers at all...)

Today (tonight, whatever) I'm less thrilled about life than some days (nights.) I've been reading Arundhati Roy's An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire and I'm feeling ashamed of being an American citizen, although it doesn't appear that anywhere else in the world is worth a shit either...

(I HIGHLY recommend reading some of Roy's essay's if you get a chance. A nice chunk of her writing is available here. She is a very courageous person that has even been jailed in India for contempt of court. That's pretty cool in my book...)

So here I am already feeling bummed when I notice the discombobulated pile of pages from my wife's Sunday paper on top of which is sitting the most recent issue of Parade, an insert magazine which I think you can find in most Sunday papers. The title of this issue: "Who Is the World's Worst Dictator?: A New Ranking of the Contemptible." What surprised me most about this article? There was no mention of George W. Bush...

This is insane... The article lists a number of reasons why this group of people are considered terrible dictators. The reasons include: having and using a death penalty as a means of punishment (Wasn't that George W.'s favorite hobby back in Texas?); controlling the media (we all know that OUR media is unbiased); imprisoning people who speak out against the government (can we all say PATRIOT ACT); and, in the case of the number one "bad guy" in this article, Omar al-Bashir, "uproot[ing] 2 million people and kill[ing] 70,000." Is it even possible to count the number of people that George W.'s sanctions or military actions have killed or displaced??? Not without a big goddam computer. If you ask me, old Omar is a fucking AMATEUR compared to George, who comes from a long line of psychotic American dictators that somehow, by some means that I don't quite understand, manage to charm the majority of the population into thinking they are promoting DEMOCRACY by their terrorist activities... In my humble opinion, NONE of the people in this article can come even CLOSE to touching OUR boss when it comes to genocide, thinking of dollars over bodies, and the casual stripping away of the civil rights of individuals in the name of freedom and democracy...

It's a pile of shit, really... and I couldn't get to sleep tonight without sitting down and typing this out... I just HAD to get it off my chest before I can go upstairs and watch Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid in peace. (Why don't I just go to sleep you ask??? Because I haven't had enough to drink, and I already brushed my teeth...)

By the way, my wife and I have officially been together for TWELVE years tomorrow... That seems like a long time, doesn't it??? But, honestly, I can't remember very much of it. I was "AT WORK," which means I turned my brain OFF so that I wouldn't yell at so many of the INCREDIBLY STUPID and ANNOYING people who used to come into the music store and ask me to find things for them that I really didn't think I should have a hand in selling... It was only the one thirty minute break that I got during my ten hours days that allowed me to keep my sanity. I would hide in the break room and read Albert Camus, Bertrand Russell, or Plato, and think to myself, "Why can't I just kill everyone??? I mean, really... They ALL deserve to die..." Yeah, those were the good old days, weren't they...

That's enough drivel for tonight... Tomorrow's entry: how to plead the 5th amendment when the F.B.I. comes to the door and asks you about your blog posts...

014: I found some stuff...

Now that my brush with fame has come and gone (I bet I can count the number of regular readers on one finger) I can go back to treating this site like the personal journal that it really is...

In this spirit, I found a sheet of paper dated 4-6-98 with some stuff written on it that I'm going to transcribe here:

"That night I half slept half stared. I had been doing a lot of that lately. Too much sleeping seemed like such a waste of time. Dull. If it weren't for the stereo babbling away all night at the foot of the bed, I probably wouldn't bother at all.

Don't get me wrong. I was tired. Some nights completely exhausted, but I had begun to question sleep. It seemed so... ridiculous to just lay there..."

Most of that had been crossed out. I'm guessing that I was trying to write a story about a guy with insomnia, although this is almost exactly what going to bed is like for me still... I have never slept well. I was even a colicky baby, preferring to scream all night than just lay there with my eyes closed...

Here is another bit of writing from that same sheet of paper (remember from 4-6-98):

"Life is not the 'happily ever after' at the end of the book; or the 'this is how he ended up' that most people seem to regard it as. It's the accidental bump into a stranger and the toothpaste spilled on a shirt and the smoke in your eyes as it escapes from a cigarette. The ending is never interesting, it's just the end, and the beginning always starts from zero. It's the middle, the beautiful, random, chaotic middle where all the action happens that you've really got to pay attention to..."

Hmmmmmm... Not sure what to make of that one. I guess I was in a "Seize the Day!" mood...

Yeah...

In a post from a few days ago I mentioned that I had written some NEW stuff for the blog, but I was feeling too lazy to type it in. Here is the first part of that stuff:

"My first proper girlfriend was a feral creature who was eventually tamed, perhaps BLANDED DOWN would be a better way to put it, either by my own wild nature or by TIME itself, to such a point that we could no longer relate. At the moment of our final parting I predicted that we would never speak again and, to date, the power of my curse has held strong."

The important thing is that I stole a lot of music from that girl before we finally broke up...

Here is another bit that I wrote a few nights ago specifically for the blog. This is one of many blurbs I've written about the happenings at Café Forum, a coffee house and nightclub that a friend of mine opened here in town back in 1992. For many people in the Longview-Kelso alternative scene, the Café Forum was the one thing that all of us had in common. I intend on writing a book about my experiences during this time and this little bit is typical of the notes I've written on this magical time. For some reason, I changed the names of the people and the café this time:

"A time that many in Longview, myself included, have mythologized into a virtual GOLDEN AGE occured in the very early 90s. Our Mount Olympus, our Neverland, our Xanadu was a creation of my friend Mr. Lovejoy (and his family... and yes: all names have been changed to protect ME from lawsuits...) called The Metropolis...

Our Met, designed as a coffee shop and café, quickly solidified itself as the meeting ground and 'home' for every punk, skinhead, pothead, waver, raver, goth, and grunger within a 50 mile radius when, on our second official day of business, Green Day materialized for an impromptu performance and, with no advertising and only a few hours warning, our unsuspecting staff of about six people were instantly transformed from cashiers and servers into fetish workers, distributing fantasy, underground entertainment, drugs and alcohol. Technically we weren't licensed to sell any of these things, but for a brief moment in history a doorway to some subcultural utopia was opened right here in Longview and those of us that chose to pass through it were forever altered by the experience.

So much was happening all at once, so many streams crossed in that one building... It's difficult, and probably unnecessary, to sort them all."

Boy... what a pile of crap... If I had any self respect at all I'd just erase this whole post and forget about it... But, I don't...

The point of writing all that terrible prose about Café Forum is that it really was an important time in the formation of my identity. I, and several other people, practically lived there for several months. I met people there became life-long friends.

Now, I just need to discover a way of distilling the essence of that experience into a novel. There are some great raw materials there to choose from: Death, drugs, bizarre love triangles, crazy underground performers including: Beat Happening, Heavens to Betsy, Jack-knife, Small, All You Can Eat, Bung, (probably The Jimmies, although I don't remember them actually playing), Snowbud and the Flower People, Big Daddy Meat Straw, Just Plain Bill, and Green Day (when they were still an indy band on Lookout! Records...) There were a bunch more bands that played but I got fired just a few weeks after the cafe opened and I spent the rest of the summer drunk... (This was the only period in my life where I drank on a regular basis... I eventually got tired of it, but not EVERYONE has moved on...) Besides the bands that played we also had crazy drama: the owner's mom died, we would run out of groceries but not have any money in the till to buy new ones, no one ever paid to get into the shows, and someone even blew up the plumbing for the whole block after one particularly nasty party... I'm telling you, this DESERVES to be made into a book, or a screenplay or something... It MUST be told before everyone involved ends up dead and the whole experience disappears from the universe... Cuz that would be a damn shame...

I really should be doing homework now... (Maybe I'll come back and fix the spelling errors later... We'll see.)

013: Number 13 BABY!!!

There is a song by the Pixies called "Number 13 Baby." I expect that everyone reading this post today will be listening to that song while they read...

Well, the newspaper article came out today... I expected the story to be tucked away, safely, in the "This Day" or "Area News" sections of the paper... BUT NO!!!

Front Page, stop the presses, there's my ugly mug staring out of the cover of the Longview Daily News... Crap... Now all those people that I tried to avoid at my high school reunion are going to know that I eat like a horse and exercise like a statue of one... (That's pretty funny, isn't it???) Oh well...

Besides, now I look more like the Happy Little Buddha that I've always felt myself to be instead of that anorexic skater-punk I always pretend I was... (Once I had a kid I stopped skating as much; it's tough to ollie down five steps while carrying a baby in a carseat... Then I got a car, got a job that actually let me buy FOOD, and then it was all over... Now I'm a stand-in for the Blob when they do 50s sci-fi movies as stage plays at the local theater... I'm hoping to play Jabba the Hutt in the upcoming off-Broadway production of WOOKIES IN LOVE...)

The article was pretty good, (my Grandma seemed happy with it; I actually made the paper without being in the police blotter!) and, as far as I could tell, the only misprint was the fact that they listed my friend Dave's web site as Visionary.com instead of vision-nary.com, but that's my fault for not spelling out the address when I mentioned the site to the writer...

So, there it was: My Andy Warhol... My fifteen minutes of fame... My brush with celebrity... And, luckily, I only have one phone line at my house so, by being online all day, no one is going to be able to call and bug me about it! HA!!!

That's it... Chow!!!

012: Exploring the Psychic Plumbing...

Anyone who has ever crawled under a house will know that feeling of not really wanting to see what you are going to find, because you only go under there when things go WRONG... And you keep thinking that there are spiders or rats trying to get into the legs of your pants... (Which is particularly nasty around this neck of the woods because we have the dreaded BROWN RECLUSE spider that does nasty things to you when it bites you...)

Oh jeeze! I just remembered... I was sitting on my favorite old chair, a burnt orange number with a huge ink stain on it, no legs, and the stuffing falling out of the cushion (my wife made me leave the chair in our old house when we moved... I shed a tear...) where was I??? Oh, yeah... I was sitting in my old chair with my keyboard in my lap typing away on some writing assignment when I saw what I thought was a mouse run by my feet. I squealed and jumped up onto the seat and looked around the base of the chair and realized what I thought was a mouse was a spider the size of a fucking BASEBALL running across the floor.

Now my wife's cat, a fat, grey, moldy sausage of a cat with no tail, and I have never really gotten along that well. I try to leave it alone and, unless I'm messing with it's food, and it stays away from me... But, back when this gigantic spider came strolling out of the woodwork to rape and pillage, the cat and I had a rare moment of understanding: I was freaked out by this huge spider, and the cat (who also must have thought it was a mouse) came running into the room and beat the CRAP out of this eight legged interloper... By the time the cat got bored and walked away, the poor spider was terminally crippled (and still the size of a silver dollar, even with all of its legs scrunched up to its hairy little body) but still twitching... I delivered the deathblow with my shoe, clubbing the creature into oblivion, although I really wish I hadn't... After annihilating the corpse I had no evidence of just how massively huge the thing was and, as it turns out, the next morning my wife thought I was exaggerating the size of the thing and called me a sissy...

Well, that's about it for that story...

Here's a report on the music that I've been listening to while typing (because I'm SURE you care):

NOW PLAYING - "I'm Not in Love" by 10cc
BEFORE THAT - "I Believe" by Buzzcocks
Before that - "Walking in Memphis (Club Mix) by M R M
"Don't Worry" by The B-52s
"Smart Enough" by Dorkweed
"So Says I" by The Shins
"Yellow Fever" by Rasputina
"Strawberries" by Chester Copperpot
"Here Today, Gone Tomorrow" by Dada
"Video" by Buzzkill
"I Feel Love" by Messiah
"Cheese" by Less Than Jake
"Lenny and Terence" by Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine
and since I started typing this list 10cc has ended and now "Heartbreaker" by Sugar Boom is on...

See, isn't it fun to read lists of songs??? Of course it is... And I get to feel hip because I know all these nifty bands like Buzzkill and Rasputina and The Shins... Don't feel bad if you aren't as hip as me; I've been practicing for MANY YEARS... (That's supposed to be funny by the way... And now "Thank God" by Storm Inc. is playing... Maybe this would be a good time to talk about Storm and the Balls...)

My new favorite local (Portland, OR) based band is, BY FAR, Storm and the Balls. Do check out Storm's super-cool web site here:

http://www.stormlarge.com/

Storm has one of the best voices I've ever heard live and her backing band includes two ex-Everclear performers and one ex-Motherload dude. She sings in a sultry lounge / barroom style, the band (bass, keyboards, and drums) chops out slick jazz / rock, and the group as a whole pump out quirky cover tunes and hilarious originals that amuse the hell out of me. At a recent show at Dante's in Portland, opening for Nina Hagen, The Balls belted out fractured versions of "Tainted Love," "The Star Spangled Banner" (which lapsed, at times, into "Paranoia" by The Kinks and "The Pusher" by Steppenwolf), a medley of songs by Bauhaus, Nine Inch Nails, and The Cure, and a wicked rendition of "Dancing Queen" and "Take a Chance on Me" by ABBA over the top of the music to "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." The original songs were also a treat. My favorite was the psychotic "I Want You to Die" which took the love ballad into areas that only David Lynch has really explored before. Anyway, I HIGHLY recommend checking this group out as soon as possible. For the over 21 crowd that's easy enough; just drop by Dante's on any Wednesday about 10:pm... If you do stop in, tell her I sent you, and maybe she'll send me a free, signed, poster!!! (And don't tell my wife I wrote that, please...)

That's funny... My REVIEWER mode just popped into gear... I used to get paid 25 bucks per ad to write positive reviews of CDs I really didn't like at my old job. It's really difficult to find something good to say about most bands that have record labels with enough money to pay my ex-boss $200 to $600 per ad for a review... I should note, also, that regardless of how much money my boss got for the ad, I made $25 bucks a shot, and I did all the work. He just cashed the checks... Thank the Gods I'm no longer a wage slave... (Now I'm just indebted to the government for about $20,000... I love student loans. But, damn it, college students, and their families, have to eat too...)

That's probably enough...

011: Living in the LOW Numbers

I wonder if I'm the only one who thinks so, but to me living in the LOW numbers (this is '05 now... we just finished up with '04...) is just not as exciting as life in the HIGH numbers was.

Now, because I'm feeling fragmented and weird tonight, I'm going to change the subject and talk about something unrelated: But I don't know what...

I have a little pocket notebook (filled with paper, not electronics) that I write notes and ideas into when I'm walking around or sitting in class, and in this notebook I've written down a ton of THINGS for me to write about here on the blog... But, after I've written them down in the book, I usually tend to lose interest. I guess the jotting down of the note takes all of the fun and spontenaity out of it for me... I think of this site as my own little slice of whatever the smurf is on my mind at the moment, so planning ahead never seems to pan out...

Remember a few days ago when I said I was planning on copying some of my old (I mean "CLASSIC") journal entries into here? (Probably not, if this is the first entry you've ever read...) Well, if you'll notice, I DIDN'T... I even wrote some NEW stuff (when I should have been doing homework a few nights ago) but I never bothered to actually type it into here... Either I'm just a lazy person, or I have an overwhelming sense of apathetic irony. I LIKE making a liar of myself...

New thought: Can we ever really have a NEW thought??? I guess... This is pretty boring isn't it... If Seinfeld can make an entire TV show out of nothing I suppose I can make a blog about the same thing...

I'm not even going to bother re-reading this chunk for spelling errors... The quicker I post it and move on to something else the better...

Actually, I did encounter something a few days ago (no... it was yesterday) that I found pretty interesting: I am currently the poetry editor of the Salmon Creek Journal, a literary publication put out by Washington State University at Vancouver, and an interesting phenomenon was brought up at our last meeting. Apparently, someone who had some materials, either a story or a poem, published in a previous issue of the journal contacted the editor and asked to have her work removed from the archives. I don't quite understand why someone would do that... I mean, I would think that a publishing credit would be a GOOD thing for a writer, whether it's in a college published journal or in a slick trade magazine. So, why would someone want the record of their work REMOVED???

Maybe she thinks the story or poem (whatever it was) is terrible now and doesn't want anyone to see how bad she was when she started. Maybe the materials were about a particular person who she no longer wants to be associated with or reminded of... Maybe she has recently sold the story to another magazine, said it had never been published before, and doesn't want the new company to realize they aren't getting "first publication rights." I don't know.

As far as wanting old CRAP that you wrote destroyed, even if it was really bad compared to your new work, SOMEONE on the editorial staff of the journal apparently thought it was good enough to be included in their issue. Isn't that good enough? Regardless of the reasons behind her request, we decided not to take the work out of the archive. The main reason is that the archives are PDF files, so to "take out" her pages would be a bit of work, but we also worried that removing one persons items might open the door for others to ask to have their stuff taken out as well and then the integrity of the entire archive would be compromised... And I guess that's a bad thing...

I write long posts, don't I...

Moving on...