Son of a Bitch

I am suddenly struck with the idea that I could call a few of my friends bastard sons of bitches and be entirely accurate. I would call them motherfuckers, but it supposes a sort of depravity I would prefer to ignore.

This particular post was given to me to read. It is probably no relation, were you concerned. At least not that I know of. that being said, the name predates the adjective.

Speaking of family, I am given, upon the demise of a very nice and extremely good person, a flag of this country that is sparse in the star spangling department. My great-great-grandpa was apparently a man proud of his affiliation to the Union when he enlisted in Meeker, CO long ago. I asked about the flag and was given a fairly heroic story. And so I did some research.

He spent some years in the Missouri Partisans, an infamous rabble. I believe they are vilified in a Clint Eastwood movie. Maybe justifiably.

Decades after the tumult, he walked into Colorado Springs from Pueblo, a pretty long hike, and ordered his coffin and final resting place before ending himself with the pistol the army gave him. His note read, “I hope everyone treats the Civil War veterans with kindness.”

And so it goes.

But the article referenced points out something to do with food. Specifically that our treatment of meals infers the divine, it seems. It is a sort of nonsensical ramble. And in that I do see a possible familiarity.

But really, the fact that humans live through their comestication is a pretty weak proof of any divinity I can think of. except maybe the most minor divine, the possible ethereal of every person. I guess I believe in God, such that God is diffuse to the point of minor justified worship.

The cats living in my alley treat their food totally different than do the dogs in my house. I forget what that proves. Hooray for beer. And gin.

Because: I have seem things miraculous occur, but they just don’t seem to stick. All the praying and speaking in tongues makes a knee quit hurting, but does not delay it’s replacement with titanium. And in that final morass of mystery that sticks to the treads of the Believer, I have seen someone die of a cancer easily treated and seen children die of ridiculous causes in an age of technology. And it was because of religion. Not the sort of religion that you acquire and lose on some weekly basis. It is the religion of the Believer, a horrible and ensnaring belief that there is reward past this life. And that snare chokes you to death. Dying for religion is like fucking for AIDS.

And so it goes.

But: I enjoy gospel music. I wish there was more of the good old timey stuff around instead of the bullshit Jesus-is-my-friend nonsense. Give me blood and sacrifice and anger and sex and creepy predatory love. That is true religion.

I forget how I wanted to associate this with tube amplifiers. I am a failure.

Rocket falls on Rocket Falls

I have been running a lot lately. Nowhere near the running I was doing in the Bad Old Days. I don’t run until my nose bleeds or I churn out whatever i have not particularly digested completely, at least not often. Anymore, I run because I need to. My body requires such things. My mind is somewhat uncooperative. 

And so I run. And somewhere in the miles, I hit that same familiar place where I hate what I am doing and find it to be that sort of painful simultaneous to boring. And that is an angry boredom. The sort that eats away at your mind and gives you thoughts of the self entire. 

Running is a path of self development, they will say. It is a path toward self enlightenment. But it is not like self development or enlightenment. 

I always say to myself, which is an existential complication many fold, “Push through this and you will never feel this pain again in your life.” And so I do. And I grind away on joints mistreated and bones broken and titanium and other exotic metals holding me in vague anthropomorphic symmetry and I hate it. I hate running. There is no runner’s high. There is no enlightenment, just the point of hypoxic ambivalence toward the bleeding and writhing mass of days and years that is a life. At least a life worth writing home about. Or a life worth its eventual annihilating. 

This is not a self improvement. It is somehow opposite. I remember the times where I struggled most in my life, against whatever. The times I was on a team. Losing one’s self was the ultimate. When the self was lost and immolated completely on that alter to the Team, then you would find yourself as something great. Accomplishments unthinkable would happen by the hour. And probably because there was no self, you learn who you are with great fear and trembling. The loss of the square box of ego through hard, hard physical and mental labor, devoted solely to the accomplishment of mission,  was something like a crucible. 

The bullshit that you really are not would be away in a flare of screaming pain. The husks of who you think you may be, the heartbroken, the bleeding, the dying inside, the ever important pilgrim, would be filed at by the rasp of God almighty. And his tool was the simultaneous burning of everyone else. You are indeed a tragic hero. Just like every goddamn breathing person on this tragically dying planet. And in that similitude, you lose what you could talk about to strangers for hours. You lose anything that would go in a singles sight profile. And you gain, in the baptism of struggle, the holy and god honored blackened hull of resistable matter left after the fires fell to find any further oxidizing candidate. 

It is not the development of the self but the destruction of it that tells you who you really might be. Burn away all the bullshit you have in common with every other tragic barroom drama queen and that coke oven scratch left is about all you can ever say that you, individual you, can ever be. 

And that is how you are like nothing else. And how I, around mile three, or wind sprint seven, become something like a deity.

And those are always some cocky, egotistical sons of bitches. 

Noble my ass

I think lately of the mistakes I have made in my life, related very specifically to females. 

And I think of the way that one girl was all slicked up with her sweat on the dance floor of a shitty Country bar and the way the red and blue lights caught the rivulets coursing down her neck and into her shirt that was creeping open the more she was close to me. And I think of the girl who’s name will probably elude me until death in some pretentious theme bar in California. And the one who followed me around from bar to bar when I could be tracked in such a way. 

There is something about bloodshot eyes in neon lights. 

I remember when I was a kid and my dad would take me on his route to the Bloomfield refinery and we would stop at some roadside burger place along the way. There is one all night burger place that rings heavy for me somewhere out in that stretch of New Mexico where we sat at two in the morning sharing a basket of fries. And a woman I found unreasonable pretty came and refilled my coke. but it was more than that. 

It was the cold black window behind me and the heavy pall of the time and the implied intimacy of one night person to the other. But maybe it was just the way the neon signs in the window behind me lit up her exhaustion. I fell hard in love with her. I believe I may have been six years old. But I knew I would marry her, even if I never saw her again. 

And sometime everything falls away into order and an occurrence is perfect and reciprocal. And you know that life is a cycle of the related and shadowed future. And the red and white of the neon shined into her drug addled eyes and it could go no differently. And the failure of the bulwark of truth and other such nonsense holding us apart failed and I married that waitress in the form of another night person who was not yet born when we first met. 

And when we play and the music is going somewhere with us all, there is always that one in the crowd with my number. The one who doesn’t look sickly in the bar room light the way the rest of us do, but who thrives and glows and flourecses it back. Luckily I have always met them before and I am so much smarter than I used to be. But I still feel the well of their spooky force at a distance working on me. 

 

I’ve Lost My Heart it Seems

I get all shitty and listen to Hank Williams songs often, as should a just God intend.

I also get incredibly tore down on Veteran’s Day, which is also the work of a just Cognate in the sky. I dread some universe where I may not get drunk on a day originally celebrating the silence of the big guns by throwing rocks with the dog and pulling hard and cold from a bottle of Kentucky lust and hate. Goddamn you Austin Nichols, you ruined my life.

To put it in perspective, that life was goddamn pointless.

And ambulance just went by, rending my good writing to dust. Or bad writing. It can be hard to tell when one is this far into it. That is the tao of Wild Turkey. Am I drunk? Asked the master. I don’t know, asked the student, I am, after all, just babysitting your fat Buddha ass.

And I sit here, more than through that bottle starting in on something Russian, clear, and probably awful chatting on the old Facebook with a buddy in Sometypeoffuckingstan. And I wish i was there. Indirect fire would be good enough. Live rounds under my pillow would tickle me fucking ridiculous.

Of course, it is tough to be in a hot band when you spend one (1) year in a desert. Or, you know, whatever it would be. It looks a whole lot like Colorado.

And so I sit here, thinking about all those good times. Small groups. Heavy weapons. And I guess the time I had in Bahrain with something Russian, clear, and probably awful.

Always Gotta be a Fucking Train

I would absolutely be a liar to say Hank Williams has not effected my writing, both prose and song. If you plan on writing songs, ignore the guy at your peril.

A lot of people, I believe, accidentally cover his cold trails. If you have the word ‘lonesome’ written anywhere in anything at any time, Hank probably covered whatever subject you’re working on. Which is not to say you shouldn’t keep going.

And really, if you write a song about a train, you should really google the title of your new genius super-original idea.

Case in point:

Jay Farrar and Benjamin Gibbard wrote a pretty decent, if mid-tempo and saccharine song about my favorite Amtrak train, the California Zephyr. They entitled it ‘California Zephyr.’

I did not know of this song until a few minutes ago, when I was searching for a beautiful Hank Williams song called ‘California Zephyr’ that is, predictably, about the same train. Only fifty years ago.

I first heard this song sitting around a run down Honky Tonk waiting around to play and having a beer. I was worn out from the road and staring at the mirrored wall of drinks I haven’t drunk and thinking of what it would be like to not have to carry my own gear into the venue. Of what it would be like to get paid more than a meal, a bar tab and just enough cash to get to another town where the payout was guaranteed. I miss sitting in a smoky bar, but those are going the way of the Buffalo. They will be around, just rare and inbred.

I heard Hank come on the Jukebox and didn’t recognize the song. I’m always curious when I hear his songs come on as to who picked it out. I saw only a gaggle of college kids at the pool table and the sexpot waitress near the machine. Maybe it was just the gods of autoplay.

At the end of the first verse, I chuckled to myself, but not so much as to alarm the other lonely drunks sitting in a bar when the sun was still up. ‘California Zephyr.’ I had those words in sharpie on the setlist sitting in front of me. But it was a song I wrote. I wrote it drinking Coors and throwing rocks with the dog. Sometime last Spring. It’s decidedly more aggressive and probably inappropriate than either the Jay Farrar or Hank Williams songs by the same name, but they are incredibly similar.

They all rattle off a quick geography lesson and relate it to a train.

This is my version (note rowdiness):

http://www.reverbnation.com/artist/song_details/9746842

So, before I let this seeming singularity or spiritual connection or vibe relationship or some shit ride, let me point this out:

The songs are not the same song.

Hank Williams was not writing about an Amtrak. I researched the actual California Zephyr (nerd alert!) and the train has been discontinuously operated by several different companies. The Zephyr I rode back and forth across the Continental Divide all those times is not the same train that Hank saw in Los Angeles. In fact, the California Zephyr I rode doesn’t even go there anymore. I realize the Jay Farrar Zephyr is probably the same train route I’m talking about, but he seems to have a different association. And the train I was riding was retired shortly after my trips and was replaced by a newer machine.

Which means that in some way or another, we all wrote about the same train experience, but it was a completely different train.

And really, every asshole with a guitar and some train riding experience in the twentieth century would almost certainly end up writing about the longest, most traveled route in North America. I am proud to be one of those assholes.

And all us assholes, just like everything else, are all connected, but not by anything particularly special.

I Guess I Was Too Young to Know

Were there some Great Uncomplicate running this operation way up in the sky (I submit that there is not), then the questions I have would be no easier.

Today somebody told me how something (getting cash from my bank) was like shooting fish in a barrel, and I remembered my favorite notaphor from an old blog. It is no easier to shoot fish in a barrel than it is to shoot fish with a barrel. Namely, because no one I know shoots fish.

Though I did once, in desperation on a particularly fruitless winter fishing trip, start shooting fish out of a shallow creek with my Ruger 10/22. I realize that there is a funny story potential, which I will ignore because of my greater concern.

Shooting Fish with a Barrel:

Were I to rig up some sort of cannon that could shoot a barrel that was loaded with lead, and I shot it straight down*, I could probably kill a pretty big fish.

Which doesn’t exactly make the notaphor work. I assume the barrel/cannon idea would require an AC-130 gunship or probably a heavy bomber that could deal with the inertial stress of shooting a cannon that size. You could also possibly launch the barrel from a satelite cannon in orbit. The gravitational potential energy would be huge. It would probably vaporize a large amount of water on impact, along with the fish.

Shooting Fish in Barrel:

Even though no one else I know shoots fish, I have indeed shot fish. In fact, I got about twelve. I could have got more, but I was concerned that dead fish (catching fish implies they are still alive until cleaned or ate) would not keep, even though I had only to leave them on the bank for an hour and they were frozen solid. Were it not for the ass pocket of Wild Turkey I consumed, rampaging among the tamarisk,, I would probably have frozen solid also.

I think that, given the proper caliber rifle, I could easily shoot fish in a barrel. I assume, though, that this was at one time** a carnival stunt of some kind and the game was appropriately rigged. The fish could have been deep. I did notice that no matter how dead I could aim through the clear water, if the fish was deeper than maybe an inch, the bullet would miss. Probably because of the deflection when the bullet deformed in the thick water.

Which leaves the question of what kind of ammo you would be packing on a barrel/fish hunt. I would be a little worried to shoot anything bigger than a .223 into a barrel of water. If the deflection went wrong, the bullet could hit the shooter. I could see using a large heavy round with minimal powder being perhaps the best option, i.e. a .45 Short cowboy load. A shotgun, I think, would be useless shooting anything but a slug, though the pellets would be least likely to escape the barrel. Judging by the flying guts and such from a poorly placed .22 LR when I was a fish shootist, I bet that carnival goer went home disgusting and alone.

The barrel/shooting metaphor requires an awful lot of thinking and planning about caliber. And I assume one would have to find a time machine, then a carnival.

Conclusion:

And since walking across the street and cashing a check for money is really pretty easy, requires no gunships, and I won’t end up hit with a ricochet covered in fish effluence, getting cash is exactly nothing like shooting fish in a barrel.

Stupid.

 

* I noticed the angle of impact was as important as the depth of the fish

** No research was attempted.

Shotgun, Rifle, etc.

 

The original intent of this space was to be the opposite of anything I’ve done. Metaphors have irritated me greatly the last couple years. Analogy makes me cringe. This was going to be a writing space devoted to the way nothing is ever like anything else. Thus the name. Everything in the other pages were anthropomorphic to a fault. And nothing is ever anything like anything else when you look close enough. The national debt is nothing like a stack of bills to the moon. Dogs are not people. Rocks are not like people. I am not like you. The whole world is inherently not the same from second to second, everything decaying away to nothing.

The other night, we were tearing down. I was tucking my guitar into its coffin and thinking of something else when a kid came up. He introduced himself as the something player in the something band that had opened for us while we were pregaming in the green room. I’d seen him around before. Their band is big among the too young to get in most venues crowd. He liked us, liked our influences, etc. He got it.

And I thought of him and his band again when he walked off into a sea of like-clothed children milling around offstage. And I have never been like him.

I played last night at the latest iteration of an old venue in this town. The first involvement I ever had with any sort of professional music was setting up and running sound there when I was a teenager. I would like to say I was hooked, but I wasn’t. I bought a guitar a few months later because I couldn’t afford another violin or a bass. I didn’t pick up guitar to get girls. I didn’t tell anyone I was playing guitar. I would go out into the desert, nothing like a prophet,  and try to learn Nirvana songs on an old Eko piece of shit.

And I had friends in bands. We made a couple bands when I got over a fear of playing music for people. But the bands I was in never did what I thought bands our age should do.I wanted to play the coffee shops (it was the 90s) and the parties.

The kid at that show told me all about their latest gig at a coffee shop in town and I remembered wanting to play coffee shops. But I never did.

Whatever I tried to do to be a nice kid strumming nice things to nice girls failed immediately and greatly. I ended up playing Muddy Waters covers way too loud in the roadhouse out on the highway and in the Honky Tonks I was too young to get into otherwise. I never experienced playing music to my peers. I still don’t. We try to play the trendy places and we try to get on the local hippy community country radio that has a hard on for Ryan Bingham. Instead we end up killing in towns like Council, Idaho and Dove Creek, Colorado. People that know how to re-ring an engine love us but the cool kids with their dripping irony are not impressed.

And I still end up in the Honky Tonks playing Muddy Waters loud as shit.

Not sound like I’m complaining. That is just the way I’m not like that kid. And never was like that kid.

And not like anyone else.

No Trespassing

I. Let it roll, baby, roll.

I am no longer convinced of the health benefits of home made wine. Not wine, necessarily. Some sort of Mescal sans worm. Mescal sin…worme. I am sure that must be the proper spelling of the phonetic pronunciation.

Lately I have been drifting toward the concept of JazzMetal. I feel that Metal is at a point of stagnation and general irritation. A sort of repugnant muppet ridiculous. It needs a kick of something new. Something old, really. It has too long been dominated by Jesus-looking psychopathy Odin worshiping buffoonery. And seriously: Odin worship (Odinrath) as a religion is purpose built for buffoonery.

Metal has its Eric Claptons and its Jimmy Pages. It needs its own John McLaughlin. It needs to be burned to the ground.

I would start something true and awesome (literally) were I to venture into Metal. Not JazzMetal, but MetalJazz. I would invite one drummer and one organist who would play on the Salt Lake Mormon Tabernacle Choirs vicious beastly thing some great and awful tones instilling dread. We would be named:

The Immolation of Desolation.

Obviously.

II. The Immolation of Desolation

Boom, bitches. That would be our name. We would tear the temples of power chord wrestling pap from the cocaine grip of the benighted androgynous and festoon it about with lanterns and writhing magnesium flare topless bitches.

Fuck yes. We would rewrite the words of long ago into a power trio of crazed improvisation, still devoted in minor ways to the root, third, fourth of our origin.

And breathing in the end of all that is musically real, burning away the Ionic, Aeolian, and Phyrigian nonsense of worlds bashed apart in the Kuiper Belt of long dead mortal moral rising, we would end that pussy shit.

Thus sayeth IOD.

III. I might be drunk.

ASDFJIfhniargujrtgunte49/

And so on.

Fuck you to death, you lame ass Eurometal horseshit. You trounce graves with this shit. What the hell is wrong with you?

And why do I have a friend so in love with you. He brags about liking you, proud of having heard of you first. But he also brags about banging Mormons. That’s like shooting fish in their face with a barrel.

Hard Again

It’s not a good friend that offers me the hard stuff. But real friends are rarely good friends.

Know that, friends.

And so I sit here, staring out the window, wondering how much of this pain is psychosomatic. My rotator cuff, destroyed by guns, both mechanical and steroid swollen biological, is angry and seized hard.

There is a passing torque offered by most tractors called a power take off. PTO. You engage the PTO, torque from the engine passes into whatever implement requires it. Brushhawgs, hydraulics, etc.

You know what the difference is between me and most of us? I don’t live in fear, haunted by the crazy shit. I loved it. I love it in me. I miss it.

Who gets to rock and roll like that? One percent? Not even that. Couldn’t be.

Part of me, the part where chemistry becomes torque, was fed well. I hate the diagnoses. I hate the sympathy. I am better than you, and I know it. I know it the way you know you are taller than a child. Don’t look at me with your doe-eyed sympathy. Don’t offer me a shoulder to cry on.

It is unfortunate that all things end. And just when I was learning to enjoy it.

I had a dream that I kicked around in my head and developed into a concept and now I went and asked a question and they hit upon it hard with answers. They caught the vehicle maintenance and zombie aspect. And now I am committed. But I’ve been committed before.

Just never to a zombie apocalypse.

I don’t believe in any of this

I have an idea.

What, if anything, would consciousness be if it were encountered in something without our idea of a brain? If it had no serotonin saying nice things and dopamine making it love or a perception of red on an old GTO could I specifically (really, who else would matter?) be able to communicate anything at all?

More specifically, if it had no visual perceptions, I couldn’t light up a huge equilateral triangle across all of Siberia, as was postulated by some Russians a while back. If it had ability to sense vibration, I could not communicate through any algorithmic interpretation of sound through music, as Max Weber thought. Smell, though possibly hilarious, would most likely fail quickly.

That leaves some very simple dregs.

I think it would play Blackjack. Maybe not with cards, but definitely through some sort of positive/negative effect riding on possible responses to given random occurrence. That is the basic premise of consciousness.

I hate card games. They pile up unfairnesses and run luck until you believe in things that are not real. They make you believe in an anthropomorphic universe angry or benign or benevolent making itself manifest through the oracle prophesy dealer and next thing you know, you’ve invaded some neighbor country or married the wrong woman or built an immense temple in a place somewhat unsuited to further human habitation along an unreliable watercourse and then you’re just like the Anasazi. Or the Egyptians.

If I am ever a billionaire, I’m going to build a casino in Vegas called The Anasazi. It’s going to be rad. Thematically, a mixture of high chiefdom and low state/kingdom. And no one could question it, because those assholes never wrote anything from their kiva smoke sessions down. Always write things down.

I’m reading a book called “The Case for Faith” by Lee Strobel. It is sort of enlightening. He is making waves in the Christian apologetic community as of late. That is easy, as the stagnant pool that is modern apologetics is more of a shallow puddle. His claim to fame is that he was some sort of hardboiled crime reporter in Chicago who examined the existence and divinity of Jesus with a cynical eye and came away convinced. And then he wrote a book about it, which I have read. I was not impressed. His proofs are not proofs. His citations are misleading and often not related to the claim he is supporting.

See, there is a deep and abiding well of the right way to make an academic treatise on anything. Then there is an ocean of horseshit. He is rolling and dunking in the horseshit. He loves it. And he pairs it with some crappy crime novel writing and it leaves his target audience, which I assume is the already religious looking for talking points, atwitter.

He ignores the rigor needed to thoroughly convince very disciplined minds. But he is convincing in the same way a hot streak at the Blackjack table convinces you that you are lucky. It’s bullshit, and you know it, but you believe it. And when I’m down, I want to leave the table, which makes no statistical sense. And I think in a world beset by nebulous bogies of the spirit world, there is a real draw to change tables.

If your current set of ghosties isn’t working, you want a new deck. And his kind of apologetic is nothing but a new deck, but no new chips. The gamble is still the same. I think the first people an extraterrestrial would meet would be missionaries with pamphlets by Lee Strobel. Who knows, maybe they’d get it.

This post is longer than I intended.