From the Dead

This is what? A century later? Who am I? What has happened to me? What have I done?

C2AR=0 "Klimt"

It has been a long time since I have participated in this endeavor. I just spent what it costs to deliver a baby to have my computer repaired after spilling wine on it a couple of months ago... The first night back with me, I have already had a bath with the thing and now I am attempting to listen to Daniel's recent postings and write a post for the NAP... before the music dies. Currently, King Crimson is playing, and I recognized the song at the first note... and I gotta say- I can't stand this song. It reminds me of when I prank called someone on a landline at 13 and they told me they liked YES. I thought they were exciting until I sought ought an education about YES (at the time a joke without technology, I know) and realized that I had probably prank called the most boring person with the sexiest voice in the entire RedNeck swamps of Magnolia Texas... Before Kingwood featured a Gondola at their Mall... I mean, Universe.

I am aware that I have poor grammar. Moving onto the second song.

"Coming down from a rock show music..." Yes. I can see how this would be a good choice. I like that tinny/guitar high end fuzz that doesn't get drowned out by the horns. Ahhh, yes. It really is all about the singing on this one. It's one of those songs that never feels dated even though there is a ridiculous kind of over production that pegs it's time stamp square on it's head. Socially, I think about the way color television of the era was pretty much like a cloudy day on every station. Was it the clothing? Is it the years later? Is it that, television now totally lies to us and feeds us ultra saturation and contrast? Is Hollywood lighting how an apartment complex sells you their shithole, because they have tricked the eye by making you look more saturated than you actually do when natural sunlight hits your factory outlet smile? Ending with the strings in this song really makes me feel like an asshole for ending up thinking about balding denim and pocket conveniences instead of following Curtis into the woods and being there for him from beginning to end.

Song Three.

I like the song starting at about 2:43. That's when they finally caught me up in it. I listened to it more than once to be sure. At 2:43- it just worked for me. The bass, the rhythm, the snare... the phrasing is perfect. Made me want to hear it again. Then at 3:52- smoky, confident, and flowing. The chorus bores me to death to be perfectly honest though.


FOUR ( first GZA track)

I am not looking into any of the music I am hearing for the first time as I listen to these. I miss what it was like to listen to radio, before video came along. I could actually HEAR music then. Much like my daughter. She can hear a song twice and know the chorus and the melody and switch gears right into the song as soon as she hears a couple of beats. I liked the way this song started, but I just feel like the artists are privileged. The poetry comes across as forced. The song structure has no surprises. Maybe it's a great song. It started that way with the static and samples and melancholic piano. They lost me with the spoken stuff. All I could picture was some kids with buffed nails treating their girlfriends like crap because they had made this song. Disclaimer: I said I wouldn't educate myself about the music before listening.

Five. GZA SECOND CHANCE

I see poets reading from a piece of paper and one of them hits the same key on a keyboard over and over again. The greatest accomplishment is the hand off from one vocal to another. The rest is totally unforgettable for me.

Dirty Projectors track:

The mistake I have made with this one is that I can see some of the video. But, I think even if I hadn't seen the video, I would have the same reaction to this song. It makes me uncomfortable. Hearing every nuance is not always a good thing. I have some recordings of myself singing and playing guitar with a friend a century ago in Austin. How painful it is to listen to it now and it would be horrifying if there were a video to accompany it today. It's like having a psychic imprint of a depression clinic's group hug. There's talent in the room in so much that they all get behind some patterns and melodies... but for the most part, all I can think about is how it must be a total pain to talk to the male singer about shit basic like... stop staging the coffee table with books you want people to think you have read or worse than that- books you HAVE read.

Sleeping People song. I am tired, so maybe this will wake me up. This music is just not committed enough for me. The interesting time signature work almost halfway in is good, but there is a tightness in the room sort of sound to this work and it isn't exactly one that is absorbable. It's the kind of music I would try furniture polish out to. It would keep me interested and going and I wouldn't be emotionally attached enough to sit down and think about anything that mattered to me. Maybe when the vocals kicked in I'd actually dust and beat the rugs on the patio. This song is called "Stay Up" and they'll have to do better than that mellow and tone tight Crimson sound.


Pinback:

Like the vocal phrasing. Why do bands have to film themselves? Shit... If you have a decent song, why screw it up by boring me with footage of you staging a performance where you probably aren't even hooked in to actual sound for the video. This music is dormitory peaceful and uncomfortable to watch. You miss me, Touch & Go, because I left your ass.

Crap... another Pinback song. I was just outside on the patio, trying to understand why I just can't like any kind of music. This band and this song in particular don't do anything necessarily to make me dislike it STRONGLY, I just do. I feel like I am in the middle of a pharmaceutical love scene on set and this music is being played out of the Buffet stand, and the drug company funding the infomercial/video put up a 30 something couple coloring in an insurance policy in a tightly manicured back yard with everything to lose and no chance of losing it. Just not buying the plan.

That completes my first post on this site in a million years. I would like to rate this piece on how it makes me feel or how the music inspires me to paint, by giving it an C2AR "Create 2 Ability-rating". I would not paint to this music very easily. It is distracting and does not flow in the kind of direction that frees me to lose myself in the music enough to want to respond to it by reflecting and working at my own craft without changing the dial. The CTAR rating on this one is kind of KLIMT-ish, which is just above mediocre in influence. Successful in standing out, but really just makes me uncomfortable looking at it- trying to act like it's amazing.

C2AR= 0 if 0= Mediocre Effect.



The C2AR assessment is just something that I pulled out of my ass. It represents my reaction to my environment as a whole. When listening to music, I find myself wanting to learn or create or break things. There is rarely a tuning out or neutral zone. The forces in nature that drive me to learn or create in a way that is meaningful to me have been the same my whole life, I think, and I find comfort in knowing that regardless of any new music I hear, I am still touched by the same type of sounds. This post made me want to learn about music and also break things.

The song you loved the most

Your body is probably being cleaned by someone right now, or it's laying on cold aluminum with a white blanket tucking you in for looks. It's only called bathing when you are still breathing. If a medical examiner wasn't in the same village, then maybe your jaw was tied shut when it locked up 2 minutes after you passed. Your face was strangely no longer yours- losing waves of microscopic patina in a tsunami of violence and saying goodbye in a way that I don't think you would have approved of.

They are scrubbing you with loofahs and alcohol, and then they are drying you off with hospital blue- tight woven towels which they have used on body after body before you- which will be laundered and thrown back into the circuit tomorrow after your hard skin has been released to family.

Maybe they are being gentle with you since your death. Maybe they aren't. If they liked you, I imagine a lengthy and beautiful ceremony- where they gingerly turn you and treat your genitals with dignity and sponge them with some kind of rich bitch salve, as if your now dead eyes could still see and your heart could still pump blood into your brain hard enough to make you shame them for taking short cuts with the final shower of your life- and only using 99 cent store vaseline to slick your unkempt hair back.

With a spirit squinting dead-like through eyes that shine no more, let me ask you... would using old roses from someone else's sad goodbye offend you after all you have been or would you laugh and thank us in death for treating you to your own funeral with limited funds?

Does it matter how they handle your flesh when you are dead?

I didn't wait hungrily for you, grandfather, to come home to us from my makeshift backwoods crib, bored and wanting to learn- like my father did. I didn't watch you scrub the kangaroo blood from your elbows in a gasoline tub out back. I didn't smell the whiskey on your breath when you threw me up in the air and telepathically conveyed that you loved me in some way. I never heard you sing the song you loved the most.

I took a nap today. I stopped by a party and saw old friends and strangers who looked like old friends doing the same shit that old friends did, but they were stand-ins in a dream. It was raining and I was fucking around with some umbrellas in a mud room, trying to figure out if I should even be at the party. The juke box had this one song that I had to play though, even if I knew I should be getting the hell out of there... Everyone was an asshole. Everyone was wasted. Everyone was on their own path. I became frustrated and left after making sure there would be no violence because of me. I left there with one regret. I never made it to the song.

You were there though, in monumental fashion for the first time, and I rowed you out into a night tide with my daughter. You made me leave you both there in the waves, and I had to find the strength in my despair to make it back to land without dying in my grief.

I assume that I made it back in a pitching midnight madness.

I wish you could have heard the song that I loved the most, before you had died.

A couple of weeks ago, I watched about 5 episodes of the documentary series "Hoarders." First I watched it alone, and then one morning, Electra hung out with me and we watched it together. I was a little hesitant about her seeing it, because she is so young and because the content of the show is actually very disturbing. At least to me.

Hoarders takes you into a world of 3 million people in the United States who suffer from the obsession and mental illness of hoarding. They are people that you bump into at the grocery store or flea market, who seem to be HAPPY about the fact that they are shopping and finding deals and accumulating things that they may or may not ever use. In most cases, they never use what they buy. Sometimes they buy several cases of perishable items and put them somewhere handy- for when they need it. They also save garbage, afraid that if they were to throw anything away, it will somehow curse them. To throw away the pie your mother gave you two years ago is very much like stepping on your mother's back.

Small pathways are cut through the debris piles of their homes in a horrific representation of what they do every day. What they do everyday, is try to reason away all of their problems by collecting everything that falls into their path. Good as prey you are if you live with them.

One woman explained it like this. One reason why she was a hoarder, was because when she was a little girl, her father was the garbage man. She was ridiculed and harassed in grade school by other children because her father was the garbage man. She would go home after a long day of torture in the learning of all things worldly- to discover her father loading more found objects onto their plot. She went from one to the other, day in and day out for about ten years at least...

Who wouldn't be a hoarder after that?

The alternative is to be someone who is obsessive compulsive.

Have you ever seen this behavior? Do you know anyone who can't leave their house, because it takes them 3 hours to complete the ritual they are committed to by mental illness.. Their goal? To take a shit without getting feces on their hand while they wipe their ass. If all goes well, they can leave their house within the next two hours, if they didn't get shit on their hand. Sometimes, their houses are so sterile and clinical that no life should be allowed to exist there at all if they had their way. The most insane example of a sterile and completely whitewashed home I saw, belonged to a gay man who had been the victim of some kind of unspeakable abuse as a child. You wouldn't just think he was clean and worthy if you went into his home. You would be looking for the exit and denying your thoughts.

Ironically, both hoarders and OCD people suffered the same affliction. They were never made to feel worthy, an eternity after they themselves had been victims.

I can be both. I can find sentiment in every scrap of every crappy inch of my day- just to hold on to something. I can also over-analyze every stain on the muddied ragged pulse of the "sinless" Universe around me... and SO discard it in fear, awe or ignorance... and repeat - by either throwing away or saving ALL I ever do. Balance is as balance can measure. You follow?

Today, Electra climbed in bed to wake me up, and asked me if she could look at the shoe box under my bed of my grandmother's possessions. She is a grandmother I met once as a baby, and that was the last time we met. My daughter knows her as I do, from this box of trinkets, of depressingly personal and average artifacts that you have tried to draw the energy of a matriarchal bloodline's soul from... who's voice once rang clearly through your skull.

I think Electra took something magnetic from her great grandmother's box today. I don't know what it was, because even though this box is so important to me that I keep it, and I keep it in the original condition that I received it in.. I let her take it.

I don't have every object memorized that she could have run with, because I am afraid to disturb this box of artifacts and equally afraid to keep the box under my bed and take no risk with airing and scattering it's contents. It means so much to me and equally so little that I cannot face either sentence.

What does this box mean to my daughter?

We all live under a microscope, regardless of how it pays off.

I read to my daughter- the fairy tales that my mother read to me. I saved or recollected them and she and I repeat them together. Sometimes, she brings home the capture of one I have forgotten or a new one, which I fully embrace.. and sometimes I choke it trying to memorialize it.

And so we hoard.

dear cousin. fight season is on hold... you're bored....

How about... get wasted, jerk off into a puddle and then cap it off with a torrent of self reflective tears in the back seat of your hot rod?

hahaha. just kidding.

Careful

Your tread is as delicate as a factory needle and your wise guidance is as bloodless as every other man's attempt at conquering his dreams without ego.

Careful.

I am over fathers. Fathers are all the same.

Dear Child

I am afraid to write. The tapping of these keys will surely wake you.

Tomorrow I will see my daughter.

I have been like a prisoner that no one cares to hear the pains of.

I am a bad mother to allow separation at all.

I am the Earth and the depression of the sky is my dutifully accepted failure
while the night is my scrambling apology.

Microwave your puppies in my dream time.
Destroy lives with the flip of a wrist and have your heart broken over endless knees.

Love.

Just let me love you as your mother and all will be right.

I have destroyed myself in every way, on every night since you said goodbye

And tomorrow, I get to make it right.

Charred lemons and Vented gas cans

My second stepfather accelerates carefully from a stopped position and makes a relaxed dumb face as he doo wops notes and echoes the sentiment with his thumb on the steering wheel. "Boy, I'll tell you... the Moody Blues were underrated... "

My first stepfather would roll down his window at an intersection and tell the guy next to us that he was a jackass. There wasn't any music playing, because it was an older vehicle and the radio was never needed.

My mother may have played the radio when we took the car. We only took the car so that we could buy groceries. We drove from the country to Kleins grocer and sometimes we had two carts, and I always felt strange about that. Like, why are we buying so much food? We bought so much food because we were only allowed to go into town once every two weeks with my stepfather's permission. I would be rewarded with little debbie star crunches. Not a box of 12 to last 2 days... A box of 12 to last two weeks for all three or four of us.

My escape was scooping a bottle of powdered gatorade and licking it slowly out of the scoop in front of the television afterschool. There were 7 channels. Scooby Doo was the real deal.

Stepfathers have nothing to do with the struggle I am facing right now. I only mention them because.. they do matter in the scheme of processing wtf is going down here.

My younger brother is .. well... my little brother is very ill. I don't like to say ill. I don't even like to say what his affliction is, because if I say it... then no one knows wtf I am talking about and even if they do-- they have no fucking idea what its like to deal with a loved one who suffers it, let alone try to relate in any real terms....

I am a mother.

I am a ripped apart mother.

I replay images of my daughter touching me with practiced reassurance to let me know that she is my only daughter and I am her only mother. She is miles away, with her father as we institute this visitation for the first time with me losing since a dissolution.

She is amazing.

I know that I have done the right thing to be here. I cannot imagine being without what I have gained, but every day that passes seems to bring with it haystacks of loss that needle me with incredible guilt.

I maintain at a job where boys a decade younger than I exercise their "superior" fine dining talons and humiliating me is par for the course. It's not an easy surge for them, because I will scrape the walls of any sewer if everyone can breathe easier and I will pretend that a beet is a radish if it means someone else will feel bigger for just one second in a day, because I know what it means to feel as if you have lost.

I received a fortune today when I ate. "Your love of Life can Carry you Through any circumstance."

What will my hate do for me?

With a daughter thousands of miles away, and a young brother who depends on me because the entire Universe is trying to capture and torture him.. (and I do mean the entire universe).. it's hard to swallow a bite.

I can though. I can swallow, and I continue to bite, because I have you.

Tomorrow.. Anger and the usual, until I talk to you or see you.

Do what you will with my memory. Everyone will know it was yours to do with whatever you wanted by the time it matters.

Handsome Thoughts

I think that one of my favorite things to learn about a new friend, is that they don't have children... because their dogs are their children. You know. Because having a dog is the same as having a child.

Leonidas

A thunderous applause leads our hero down.


like a wrestler with harder drives than the road allows
take my love--raw edges and all, with romantic abandon,
into the catacombs.

I will not only allow him to hate you, but I encourage him to destroy you .


and not an invalid swallow inside his throat, could scratch it like I will.

I advised you. Just then.

I can't put my finger on it.

The people who say certain other people shouldn't write, are fucking dumb-as-shit A Holes.

Topic change.

Next, you'll be mowing down whole tribes, but first you hunt the community.
That's original and you can eat your own proud shit over it, all fucking day.

Topic change.

You'll roll over and play dead. And I will revel in that fantasy with you.

Am I angry? Is that poetry? Is it news? Is it, I'm sick to fucking death of being the cause of every inch of pain around me for miles on end? Bet on it... and what would you bet on it, by the way?

You want to drive me to a reaction?

I would die in torture before throwing out a fraction of the bile you did yesterday in the name of loving him, but I'm not you.

And you sure as fuck ain't me, Sugar.

Cry over that. Its all you'll get.

Make your way.

Sometimes you have to be beaten within an inch of your life, to appreciate the days when you just get your face kicked in.

gulls

It takes forever for the sun to set.

There are no street lamps. No stars. No moon. Just blackness. In the distance I can see a red light and a green light at the entrance to the harbor set out for navigation. I catch glimmers off of the water when a cloud ends, until the one right behind it takes that glimmer away.

It would be peaceful were it not for the sounds of a riot taking place out in the blackness. Hundreds of birds from different families are talking to each other. Fighting over resources, fighting for dominance, fighting for a mate, fighting with their babies… Fighting. Their intensity is so strong, that I wonder if they couldn't just kill me if I crashed their tribal council this evening. If I just walked up the beach, with my pupils fully dilated and me still stumbling through the ebony, then out into the frigid sea-- right into the thick of them, what would they do to me? What would I allow? Would I have any control at all?

I heard wolves the other night. No chance of seeing them because it was so dark. A wolf howl seems to come from no one direction and limits itself to no harmony. It goes right through you and you feel it as much as you hear it. Every howl has a visual story accompanying it. The sound immediately arrests you and you want to hear more. The hungry choir stabs at your illuminated shadow in the doorway and you can make out nothing before you. So beautiful. So eerie.

When I turn to go back inside, I am like a child again. Chilled when I turn my back, I close the door quickly--as the heart races. It seems an eternity with the Unknown screaming rapidly toward my defiance, and I leave the night to work its potent magic without me, before the sun comes to radiate resolutions and exchange pains.

AAOx4

I bought a house on an Aleutian Island, on the first island if heading south down the chain from the mainland. I bought that motherfucking house.

Midnight and Dusk along with Tonight, crash delivered to me, a pitch black entry way. I peered out into the heaviest of ebonies..

I war intensely for keeping the glow within me going steady but still I find myself rapidly growing dim.

Drowning out the thud of an exposed and defeated tell-tale heart... I sacrificed my turn at Oblivian, under that blackness and I reluctantly headed out into that chill, because I was not prepared to be grateful if I had to wait around another 8 million eons and play cozy.

Voices coming from the cave behind me were swallowed into the fog as I listened and wished them each an eternal well.

I delicately fingered my way along that poorly illuminated razor wire into the safety of night. I didn't care who had sights or illumination on me. I do constantly imagine that I am in your salvage yard, and that's all I am willing to give on it right now.

Rust was my favorite color and navy blue.

I like the way light could always break through corrosion, and how the blues appear to be never overtaken unless by their own.

There is no love and no shade as volatile.

Now, every color and every silence drags behind it a Universal army of
Embers from you.

Embers of you.

You.

sea monster I

There are things about me that I have yet to discover.

In the past year I feel as though I have been all around the planet
swathed in clear & gauzy duct tape
treading muddy waters with heavy salt on the lips
keeping me and holding me hard against riding the waves
deaf to the rush of violence around me
every action peeled out is a thunderous sound-off
of richly technical eye witness.

Not quite drowning but sickeningly sure of the meter of every inhalation.
Seeing but not hearing the tentacles of enormously brave and destitute creatures beating
and battering static blue hued and vacant civilizations beneath a storm of torrid tides
just off of the shoreline... the jagged edges that smoothly outline my stabbingly desperate embrace, mean nothing-even if beautiful. Though my perimeter could be cried out as horrible when activated, at least it is certainly fragile. Inside, I am not truly terrible. I am soft. I am comfortable. I am sitting at the fire of my will. I am sure.

The creatures, their battle and their targets... are all my own. My very own. I call them.

Every exhalation is a drawn out pain that threatens each peace and me as it strokes into slumber the paranoid beast--with careful and crude tenderness... sleep. forget. die. and never return.

My God, My hope, My Word... and their dashed and peppered muscular atrophy grow imaginary limbs and pierce the sky with red red arms... in my head.

In pieces and eternally restless.. regretfully weakest...

I move with the sway. I step aside against the tide and it still goes right through me. I scan the horizon for landmarks. I prepare to die in my sleep, (though not from flooding) so that tomorrow I will be reborn-- after a night of battle in nightmares.

Fuck the ride. I lived to drown in this. I die with every dive but for every night that I have to sleep without you tucked deeply into my side

I rage and I kill and I fly heavy handed on heartbreaking rewind

into wall after wall after wall after wall believing that time will for once be kind and find me again, forever in your grace. Wrapped up in your perfect pulse and enveloped in your divine skeleton, I am forced alive and to wretching a distinct perfume from every pore. All the seconds I am given to convince your every cell, I run from, afraid of the last moments we will share. I am a factory for you.

Here I sit around the bonfire and dank comfort--fearing the blade of invaders--holding hand wrought spoons to the salty lips of our babes... swallowed by cottonwood smoke, and waiting for you under the weight of every last universal disaster.

I will take bullets and faithfully return to your chamber.

You are the roots in my clouded sky.

Demolition

The salt in the air has corroded every vehicle here. Each house sinks into the Earth at alarming speeds that the eye can see. Each year an inch or two of drenched and wind battered wood is swallowed into the ground. The owners of all these eyes who stand in front of all of these houses just watch the mud grow up the wall. Further away from the sky and working into a grave, they sleep at night.

For the years that I have lived here, I have struggled with the depression of the villagers. I have held my head up high and tried to bring light and warmth and generosity and humor into their homes. I gave what I could here. People say that they can't read me. Say that I always appeared to be content. How they can say this is easy, if they had no fucking clue who I was at all. I was despairing in my own home and behind my own eyes and under the same sky.. again.

I have never in my life made a decision or a move that carried with it such a gigantic fucking swell of effect, with the exception maybe of creating a life.

What I do here now, what I move forward to accomplish, run fast to receive, tear through years of memories and toss aside to capture IS something that I refuse to let escape me. I risk everything, but that everything in perspective-held against this amazing love is nothing at all. I do feel out of control and out of my mind at times. If I can just last long enough to fall into pieces in your arms, then I have done what I needed to do. What I always needed to do.

I have been taking pathetic swings to carve my way through a solid mass of greedy and selfish fuckers for a long time now. So long that I do it without thinking or recognizing that I have remained on the frontlines of this war for far too long. Now that I can communicate, can feel what I need to feel, can give what I need to give and be held completely captivated and in awe of a man I could never let go of... I'm not swinging any more, I am kicking that shit down. And as the bodies throw themselves around before me in a display of feigned loss and conceit, I will step over them and keep my eyes on you. Moving faster and closer to nights in our bed, in our house, in our city, in our love and allowing nothing to stop me from being yours.

Not functional

The end the end the end the end.

I am staring at this screen. Wanting to vent. Wanting to spill my black frothy guts all over the fucking 2 dimensional gulf that stares back at me with no dimension at all. I want to rip every chord out of every wall attached to every piece of hard and inhuman technology and cut it into thousands of pieces with my teeth until I have decapitated myself in agonizing.... ineptitude.

I swim in a sea that makes no bones when I am at "home". I flatly deliver goods and sentiments. I comb hair and clean up chocolate milk. I revamp a piece of paper that terminates 10 years of life with someone, and then I make noodles and pick up crayons, and cut off 4 inches of her hair... Her first hair cut, and I just bunch it all up in a ponytail and cut it off. I pictured her first hair cut to be so much different than that. I could have stopped myself. Could have built it all up high on
ceremony. Could have taken pictures. Could have had a scrap book ready with easter colored ribbons on the edge of a clean table. Not a table covered in things to distract her as I drag myself through this hell of divide and conquer bullshit that no one should have to endure.

But now, away, I can imagine laying beside a fire in the rain. Listening to each drop sizzle and evaporate, watching each drop steam and disappear, and the fire never dies and it never stops raining.

Until about ten seconds ago.

sweet

I just ate an after dinner mint.
I wondered what it would be like to have you feed it to me
with your mouth.

The Water

I have spent my life on a shoreline.

Creeks, rivers, lakes, ponds, oceans... standing at the edge of the bath. Each time I am with the water, I am filled with a sort of peace and sadness. I am always putting my hands in. Sometimes seeing my reflection when the water is calm. Sometimes just looking into it and seeing all of the tiny residents of life float with stagnant or wild currents.

I have been looking for you in the water forever.
I am a desert without you.