Hey, I Can Do Arson You Old Bat

Last night could barely get to sleep. Hearing noises and seeing things. This house I am in now, the last house on the left of a dead end. Woods behind it, some nosey old people in the neighborhood, It’s my grandmother’s old house, part of the family and hopefully it will be where I grow old some day who knows, maybe it will sell and allow me to grow old somewhere else. A nice big yard, a pool that is out of commission right now and a neighborhood any family would want to raise their little white kids in. The neighborhood feels like the kind of place where every other house probably voted for Obama, has at least two Norah Jones CD’s in it, yet if a black person was walking down the street they would probably call the police.



Trying to get to sleep here some nights is impossible. I don’t believe in ghosts or anything I can’t see with my own eyes that is/was scientifically proven to me. I’m sorry but it will never happen. I know some people become born again Christians or sudden believers in God and that kind of thing, but honestly, ghosts, monsters, demons, Jesus, God, magic, planets aligning, crystal balls and that kind of stuff, I can’t imagine ever believing in it. Forever I will just continue to dismiss it. Maybe someday I will have some sort of event in my life where I suddenly “believe” in the unknown, but nowadays, highly unlikely. As much as I like to talk shit and make jokes about it, I don’t think less of people who “believe”. I just think you’re all fucking crazy. Heh.



So yeah I am convinced the house is haunted. Or people/things from the woods are trying to get in through the basement. I hear them late at night scuttling around down there. They know specifically that I am staying in this house so they are targeting me as they have in the past. Seems like everywhere I have lived they visit, spy, watch ,all of that fun stuff. I’d like to think I am imagining things sometimes, but really, come on. In California this never happened. Maybe the nature of just not feeling settled in ever is taking it’s toll and now I’m seeing things. Hotels, floors and couches has been the norm since August 4th last year. Maybe they are following from years ago. I’ll get to the bottom of it someday I swear. In the meantime I do my own spying all day and all night and know where they are and where they watch me from. It’s a mutual thing.



So I had this once, I was walking through this series of buildings, this complex if you will. It started with me walking up a balcony in some sort of theatre. A real steep balcony, with soft lights on the stairs, and red velvet at the top, glowing from another series of 4 or 5 lamps of soft light. It was elegant, but dirty at the same time. Contradicting the red velvet on the walls was a dirty, grimy, sticky cement floor. Old dried up soda, and chocolate covered raisins. Cigarette butts, and dank beer smell. There was a group of people sitting in one of the aisles. 5 or 6 people that looked familiar. No faces whatsoever, but they looked real familiar. As I passed them, they started blurting my name out. Right at this moment, I was all of a sudden with a girl with no face, no personality, nothing, just “a girl”. We were rushing by them, and I seemed to feel particularly embarrassed by the whole situation for some reason. We made our way out into this courtyard type are that was real European looking. Lot’s of real old buildings with amazing stones, and windows and doors. The doors. The fucking doors. No, not Jim Morrison and his Doors. Doors I kept opening. Looking in the rooms and hallways for something. One doorway would open to a wall. Another doorway would open to a long hallway with more doors along the walls inside it. There was one door that held the room I always see in my nightmares. A big room with huge ceilings, and a floor that is basically big rusty beams. Real damp, and dark this room. I always end up in this room. Scaling the walls, trying not to “fall in”. This room is huge, probably 20 yards wide by 30 yards long. I opened this door and shut it immediately. The next door I opened there was a man there. There was a stairway that looked exactly like the one in this old apartment building I used to hang out at. Four stories high, old wood banisters. Doorways with apartments you’ll never see. So I open this door, and this tall blonde guy with a Hawaiian shirt on. I pick the guy up by the collar and heave him down the stairs. I run down after him swearing. I throw him down the next stairway. I run down after him, and do it again. I do this until he’s at the bottom, and start kicking him in the stomach over and over. I go back into the courtyard. The alarm clock goes off.



At one point in time, all of the best vacations I have taken have all revolved around me seeing a band, usually Phish, before that, it was the Grateful Dead. Most people who know me in person state that I definitely don’t seem like the type that would be into either of those bands. I don’t look like a “hippie”, but I learned years before, when I spent time in the punk rock scene for years, that it had nothing to do with what you looked like. Anyway, I just remembered my first trip by myself twenty years ago.

I bought this book listing every single Grateful Dead show available on tape from 1988-1995 or something like that. I opened it to February 25th 1990, in Oakland, California. I was twenty years old at the time. I was going to take a train from Boston all the way to San Francisco, and meet my best friend at the time, Derek there. He flew. I had never been away from home by myself for a long period of time, so this two week journey to see two Grateful Dead shows would prove to be a stepping stone to what I would still be doing ten years later, and define when I really feel myself. On the road, by myself. Previous to this show, I saw the band in the summer of 1989 and then a “famous” show in New Jersey in October of 1989.

So I get on this train in South Boston and I’m immediately feeling elated to be leaving, seeing the band, and seeing parts of the country I had never seen. I was a painfully shy person, but being on a train for four days straight will make even the most timid person a “life of the party”. I think we were maybe two hours into the trip, we stopped in Springfield, Massachusetts. The train was relatively empty, and I was lucky enough to score two seats, so I could sit at the window. In Springfield the train sort of filled up and I see this character walking down the aisle. About five feet tall, cowboy boots, denim jeans, a denim jacket, long black “ZZ Top beard”, and sunglasses (it’s 9:30PM in the dead of winter), a duffel bag in one hand, and a guitar slung around his shoulder. I of course make eye contact with him, and he immediately sits down next to me.

“HOW YA DOIN BUDDY, I’M JIM (I can’t remember his name at this point), WHERE YOU GOIN!!?”

“Ummmm, San Francisco.”

“WELL IT LOOKS LIKE WE’RE TRAVELING TOGETHER, I’M GOING TO DENVER!!!”

“Excellent”

Yeah, real excellent.

So he starts talking and doesn’t shut up about music and traveling. It was interesting, but his voice, and overall demeanor made it a little hard to take him serious. The best part was yet to come though.

“YOU LIKE VODKA???”

“No, I don’t really drink at all”

“WELL IF YA DO, I GOT PLENTY”

He opens his jacket and has two fifths in each inside pocket of the jacket, two nips in each breast pocket, opens his duffel bag, and he literally, no joke, had a little bit of clothing, and what looked like 6 more bottles of vodka. I got up and went to the restroom, and he showed up in there.

“OH THERE YOU ARE, HEY YOU WANT A SWIG OF THIS OR WHAT????”

“No really, I’m all set”

So we get to Albany and I know what I have to do. I knew that we would be switching trains in Chicago in the morning, but I really couldn’t deal with him anymore. I got out of the train and went into the station and asked if I could get a room for the night on the train. It would be eighty bucks. I forked down the money and got my upgraded ticket.

I went back in and told “Jim” that they fucked up, my ticket stated I was to be in another train. A likely story, as anyone who knows Amtrak, you buy a cheap ticket, you sit wherever the fuck you want. I went to my room, and it was literally about the size of a stall in a restroom…okay the handicapped stall (which begs the question I often ask myself when I perpetually use the handicapped stall, can I get arrested for using this, or get a ticket? I mean it does seem to me the same crime as parking in one of the handicapped spaces, but the room in there is great, you get those railings in case you’re sick, drunk, or handicapped; it’s a whole new world in there. I imagine the women’s room to have a similar affect on me if I was to ever walk in a “good one”[as opposed to the one I was in at Saratoga Springs, New York, which was so dirty I thought I was in the men’s room]). It was tiny nonetheless, enough room to stand, and fold down the bed which was right against the window.

Waking up in Ohio the next morning was an absurd feeling. Ohio. Who lives in Ohio? Guided By Voices. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and ummmm…some other people that apparently love corn. So Ohio is pretty boring…on the train at least. I won’t ever just say a state is boring if I haven’t stepped on the soil there. Driving through Nebraska is as boring as watching ice melt, but when you get out and walk around a little, late, in the middle of a chilly, damp night you realize there’s nothing like it in the world. Nebraska.

So we arrive in Chicago, where you get to get on the double decker train. Much bigger, much more exciting. I still hadn’t seen “Jim”, but I was aware we has around. I did see him in the middle of the night actually for a couple of minutes at the bar (“why is he buying drinks with all that he has on him?”…I figured it out, he was just making his drinks even stronger, that’s apparently what you do or something when you’re a big drinker. Up the ante a little). The next time I saw him was in Denver where he was getting off. I went up to him and, knowing he was getting off for good and said:

“Hey Jim, I was looking for you the past day and a half to see if you wanted to hang out, we were supposed to be traveling together and all that…well, hopefully I’ll run into you again…have a good life”

It’s funny, all of the people I met on that first train ride it always ended with “Have a good life” What a strange departing phrase. There was no internet, well, not that I was using anyway, so there was no e-mail exchanging, and I was certainly not going to write anyone letters. I met a lot of great people. The most memorable after “Jim”, were the two old black men from Mississippi who got me drunk and told me stories about segregation, and John Lee Hooker and that kind of stuff. I have an amazing picture of one of the men reading the newspaper at dawn that I will post on here some day when I remember to scan it.

The other guy was an African fellow who was with me from Denver to San Francisco. He didn’t speak very good English, and he had a ton of money. He owned farms, had a big family, and traveled the world from time to time. Sam was his name. When we got to San Francisco, neither of us had been there before so we sort of hung out for a little while, until we got our shit together. I took a good photo of him at the San Francisco train station that I’d also like to put up here. I love meeting new people. I especially love it when I’m traveling though. You can’t really rely on small talk at all. You don’t have to make impressions though either. I like to put on an act from time to time when I meet people traveling. “Yeah, I’m a policeman in Boston” So this first trip was the first of a dozen of these, most of them small ones with friends, but I did three summers where it was two week excursions by myself that were both healthy, and bad for me at the same time. I had this a little on the first trip.

The train ride home got tedious. “Shit, Indiana again”

For subsequent summers, I will probably not be going on the same type of excursions though. There are no tours to follow around at my age. I am going to go somewhere though.. Either way, I need it again, and it can’t come any fucking sooner. That’s it, I’m going across country again.

Summer - 1998

I took one good long look at the bizarre pattern on the rug of the hotel lobby, and realized I would be in for, at the very least, an interesting stay.

“Sir,”
she broke my concentration

“your room is around the back, 113. Enjoy your stay.”

“Thanks” I replied and walked out into the thick pea soup air.

August was a hot month for North Carolina. I had already withstood a week of this nasty hot weather, but today was extra brutal. I walked by the pool on the way to my room and noticed an old pale man sitting by the pool. We both made eye contact, and then broke when a young boy jumped into the pool screaming something unintelligible.
The smell of a new motel room is always nice, like a new car. After the stale ashtray of my cars interior, any new smell is always greeted with a pleasant sigh. One time, I was in Pittsburgh, or rather, outside of Pittsburgh. My reservation should have been changed weeks before, but I didn’t, so I stayed in some small blue collar town with all kinds of factories and Ford trucks, and men with mustaches, and white people with nice SUV’s and black people with dirty sidewalks, and fast food restaurants filled with acne covered Puerto Rican boys. This was the epitome of traveling to me. The people who lived in these towns I passed through. The people that live and breathe the towns always make me feel unwelcome. “People watching” is a favorite way to pass time when I have time between travel days. So I’m in this outskirt of Pittsburgh and I show up at this run down motel that is in between a Kentucky Fried Chicken, a McDonalds, and about nine other businesses recognizable from ten miles away(who can’t spot a Dunkin Donuts sign from three miles away?). I get the key to my room. Before I even open the door, I am greeted with an odor that makes me practically gag. It’s the smell of a room that apparently had someone smoke maybe a carton of cigarettes (in a row) in a room with an air conditioner blasting (with a dirty filter). Not wanting to deal with this for more than five more minutes I did what any smart traveler would do, I fumigated the room with steam. This was a trick I learned…that day. “Improvisational fumigation” . I turned the shower, as well as the sink on full blast and turned the heat all the way up on both of them. The steam started pouring out of the bathroom swiftly. First little puffs of steam here and there, until eventually I had the Iron Maiden stage set (during the pre Bruce Dickinson era, Killers [Paul D’ianno, vocals] tour of course. As later tours seemed to have specific themes, like the Egyptian/Graveyard mood on the Powerslave tour, or the Blade Runneresque Somewhere In Time tour The room started to get unbearably hot, so I opened the door, with a good weeks worth of facial hair, and an ironic cigarette dangling out of my mouth to discover a family loading into the room next to me. I made eye contact and said hello to the wife first, the young daughter, and then to the father, as what must have looked like a scene from a Fellini film took place behind me, and eventually around me. Smoke and steam can have a cool effect sometimes. If used in an original manner such as greeting a family from Connecticut in the midst of trying to fumigate your room from the smell of cigarette smoke (while yourself smoking), one feels like some sort of character. The smell did eventually go away, and I never saw the family again the rest of my stay.



I rested easy that night, as the stench was gone, and in a day or two, Pittsburgh would be a dim memory for me.

Back to North Carolina.

I get to my room and it smells wonderful.

“It's like that new car smell!” I think to myself

I throw the television on as usual, and go outside to get the rest of my stuff. A suitcase full of clothes, clean and dirty, a messenger bag filled with notebooks and journals filled with bad art, and worse memories, three CD cases filled with a total of 500 CD’s, and my trusty boom box. I can’t sleep in the dead silence, as my ears ring all the time and it keeps me awake, so I lull myself to sleep with anything from Miles Davis to Black Sabbath. Heavy metal is easy to go to sleep to actually. I set up the boom box and throw in the Duke Ellington trio CD (definitely one of the best things the Duke ever did in my humble opinion. With Charles Mingus and Max Roach rounding out the rhythm section, how can you get a better trio than that?) and immediately skipped to Caravan (track 8, which when one looks at the history of Track 8’s from tons of releases, you’ll see the attraction to this sacred home in album sequencing history, check it out: Bowie’s Man Who Sold the World: seven tracks before getting to the title track, Van Morrison gives us the beautiful When That Evening Sun Goes Down eight tracks in on Tupelo Honey, the Beach Boys Pet Sounds boasts the greatest song they did in God Only Knows eight tracks in, my favorite track on the brilliant Stones Exile on Main Street, Sweet Black Angel is guess what, track eight. Even the Beatles knew what they were doing when they put the creepy Happiness is a Warm Gun 8 tracks in on the White Album. The Smashing Pumpkins Gish offers the listener Tristessa at number eight, T-Rex gives us Telegram Sam eight tracks into The Slider, and the Sugarcubes give us their best [also most obnoxious] song, deus on Life’s too Good. This is obviously not an accident. Track 8 will be revered for years to come as the key spot to hook the listener and make a classic record just that, a classic record. One example of this not happening is on the seminal Replacements record Let it Be, where the weakest track on the record Seen Your Video is erroneously given the coveted track 8 spot. The albums best song actually opens the record as I Will Dare, or arguably opens “side two” with My Favorite Thing. There are good arguments for both songs. I Will dare boasts the best pop hook in the history of guitar playing this side of You Really Got Me, where My Favorite Thing presumably filled thousands of mix-tapes throughout the eighties. Both are great songs regardless.), one of my favorite songs of all time, made most famous by Dizzy Gillespie. I turned the volume down on the television set and started to fade off.



I dreamed of this big mountain I was driving on. It felt like I was driving for hours as my eyeballs felt like dry golf balls whatever that means. I was hot in the car as I drove down this huge mountain, and it surrounded me. There was mist and fog along the sides of the mountain that made it impossible to see how high up I was. My ears were filled with hot air. I felt all of this vividly in this dream. Perhaps it was the actual long hours I had been driving in reality, mixed with a steady diet of caffeine, nicotine, and THC I was living on for days that made me have such rich, alive dreams. So I’m on this thing driving not really knowing where I’m supposed to be going in the dream. Just following everyone else for the most part. Everyone is going just fast enough to make it uncomfortable, and unsafe. I feel like I am going to drive off the mountain. In the dream I am with someone else, they sit in the back seat, each time I look in the rear view mirror to see them they turn their head away so I can’t see their face. They sometimes obscure their face without turning their head confusing me even more, as I try to concentrate on gravity and speed at the same time. I picture the car driving off of the side of the mountain into the woods. Traveling at speeds well over one hundred miles an hour, this is a very real vision within a dream. I picture the car tumbling violently over jagged rocks and tree branches breaking, and the contents of my car being thrown around like balls in one of those bingo things. I picture myself landing though, and walking away from the car. Nobody is in the back seat. A bunch of broken picture frames and empty coffee cups litter the area in and around the car. I manage to get the crushed trunk open with the help of a piece of the bumper (?) and retrieve my most coveted possession, the boom box, and the CD’s. I start walking through the barren woods, knowing well I can’t climb back up the valley and make it to the highway above. I go through the CD’s and find Simon and Garfunkel – Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and put it in the boom box and begin my descent into the woods.

I awaken to what sounds like someone hammering nails into a giant aluminum silo. I look out the window, and the father from the family is actually packing things into his car. I can’t figure out what he was doing to make such a racket, but I keep investigating. Pretty soon the mother, followed by the daughter come out of the room and start talking to the father. What looks like an argument turns into a kiss on the cheek from both women as they leave the parking lot and walk towards the gas station across the street.

The family is a thing I will never really have. I can’t really imagine what kind of things go with being a family person. Here I am traveling around the country in my car to amuse myself. I have a ton of money to just waste on nothing but rare blues records and cigarettes, and this guy probably has an agenda each day. “Today we need to leave the hotel room at seven in the morning so we can make our way to Hershey Park by noon. At ten o’clock this evening we will go to dinner at this restaurant I found in the travel book. This is what will go down. This is how my family will spend their vacation” Me, I’m showing up in these towns and cities and grabbing the yellow pages and looking for used record stores, book stores, and whatever else to look at along the way.

I close the drapes in the room and walk over to the boom box, The Ellington CD probably stopped playing 7 hours ago. I press the play button and crawl back into my seven thirty in the morning bed hoping to hit the town later in the day. Wondering how I fell asleep in North Carolina and woke up back in Pittsburgh.

Legacy of Duality

Scenarios that creep me out Pts 1 & 2:

Little tiny hammers breaking teeth. Not only my teeth, watching teeth get cracked with these little hammers.

Holes, like weird looking ones. I can’t explain this.



So being in this area of Massachusetts. I love it, and I spent a good amount of time here as a kid and as a teenager, in my 20’s and now right at 40 years old...or “40 years young”. Imagine if I was one of those people “OH I AM FORTY YEARS YOUNG...LOLZ” As a child my mom would drop me off at my grandmother’s house for a weekend and I would spend time swimming in the pool, walking downtown to the store to buy comic books and music magazines and whatever else. As a teenager I would bring subsequent friends and girlfriends for swims at the house. The house now, faded paint, messy lawn and pool that no longer works. The room I spend time in, someone died there a month ago, and the park I take walks in down the road is where my grandfather hanged himself when I was a teenager. I was absent for the most part during those events. In California being kind of useless during this most recent one. I remember being stoned and 16 years old or so when my mom called me at my friends house to tell me about my grandfather. I feel like you are pretty much helpless with death and dying people. I never know what to say and am pretty much the worst person to talk to about the subject.

There was always some sort of melancholy feel about this area in general though, even without these events. I spent time driving the winding roads through all of these quaint little towns that seemed like they probably held more dark secrets than they led on. I think because drives would often take place after something shitty I relate it to that. Lately though, the last few years...and now after living in the mostly “can’t take a nice drive within five minutes” feel of Los Angeles I appreciate it more and am trying to give it a more positive identity.



My brothers and sisters...So I have been spending time at this place where white people congregate and drink coffee and sit on laptops basically looking at Facebook for three or four hours (not me, I sit there and write about how so and so wronged me, etc). In this particular store there are a number of people who are studying God or something like that. Bibles and that kind of thing all over the place. So today in there, I sit within three feet of a young lady who is literally reading a bible. I sneezed at one point. Not a “God bless you” from her or anyone in the relatively crowded place. A little while later this woman sneezes and I look her directly in the eyes and say “Bless you” She basically looks right through me and completely ignores me. WTF Jesus people, this is how you are? No wonder people like me don’t like the lot of you, you’re all so self absorbed in your world that you can’t even open your mind a little to other...wait, do I really care about these people this much? Oh yeah, no. What a bunch of stiff cunts though, really.



I am kind of missing California now. Well, certain things there and people and things I did and feelings I had. Yeah I miss those or something like that. Hrm.

------

Someone tried to get me involved. Well, not really...I read things and feel like there is a fishing line and I am supposed to take this bait. I mean people saying things to cause some sort of reaction, I know that all too well. When it is glaringly obvious though, how annoying is it. Take for instance people talking about music. As much as I love music and it’s a big part of my life blah blah blah, there are only about six people in the world that I ever want to talk to about music. So I read things on the internet from people I know and them doing the tired old thing about music they don’t understand or know, just dismissing whole genres and types because it’s popular or what not, it makes me just realize how shallow people really are with their tastes...or how stubborn. Like The Stooges and Johnny Cash are the only artists that matter. Or the “their old stuff was better set”....”Oh I didn’t know they were still making records”. Those kinds of people. Really, leave me alone with that shit and don’t try to associate me with it. As much of a music snob I kind of am, I am not at all. I have no “guilty pleasures”, and if someone wants to listen to something horrible like Vampire Weekend of Lady Gaga or whatever else the tastemakers are buzzing into your dome then so be it, but really, at the end of the day, I couldn't care less. Really though, what the hell are your ears thinking some of you?

Happy Anniversary

I have either horrifying dreams, or confusing ones, presumably planted in my head by someone or some organization. None of the dreams end up waking me up in a sweat sitting up or anything, but I do often wake from them and then never go back to sleep. I think for the last year or so since some shitty things happened and then I left Massachusetts and came back I get about three or four hours of sleep a night if I am lucky. Maybe once a week or every couple of weeks I will get a good sleep in at some point to “make up” for any lost hours. Even though I am doing nothing with my life right now, I still feel like sleep wastes time you could be up doing shit.

Speaking of sleep a number of times this week I have sat here with this thing open and a blank screen for long periods of time and dozed off with nothing to say. It’s always good to have nothing to say...especially since I say too much sometimes.



If there is a place and time to go completely mad, I think it is now. I feel it coming on. Not in a bad way necessarily, but enough that it will only get worse every day. This, as a result of this living situation and wherever else I have found myself sleeping the last year. I haven't just had a bed. Wait, why would I talk of this?

There are people behind all of this that will eventually have to face their situation. These people will eventually die. Well tanned and filled with what they thought was life.

The Toy

Back when I initially started listening to the Grateful Dead, or rather following them, a friend of mine somehow became friends with a man named Dan. My friend used to get all of our tapes from this guy. He was a taper, and the way my friend, Derek, explained him I was kind of scared to meet the guy. Often times, we would get tapes within a week of a show. This sounds crazy in an era when you can get a CD copy of a show you just saw on the way out of the venue. Also, listening to shit on tapes. Come on.

At one point, Derek took me over to Dan’s to pick up some tapes. The only reason I remember this guy and story is I drove by near where he lived last night. So we pull up to this small ranch house in Lynn, Massachusetts. Derek mentioned we were supposed to just “go in”. What Derek didn’t tell me is we would have to walk through the kitchen and see something horrible. There in a torn old nightgown was a young heavyset woman sitting at a table. Her face gave away that she was either blind, severely retarded or both. She was sitting there picking at a plate that had what looked like what a plate that used to have baked pork chops on it. It was all over her face and hands. Needless to say this was at a time when I was pretty much listening to The Dead and smoking quite a bit of marijuana. I was probably high as a kite when we walked through that kitchen and I’m sure I was probably standing with mouth agape, eyes half shut startled.

We made our way to the basement where Dan would be. My initial impression was he looked kind of like a cliche of a used car dealer...or “Artie Fufkin from Polymer Records” from the movie This is Spinal Tap

Derek had mentioned he was a bit off, and although I am not making fun of OCD here, this guy was out of control. His face up close was all raw and red and clean shaven. I noticed razors around the room randomly so I assumed maybe he was an obsessive shaver. The room was cluttered with piles of papers, little stacks of rubber banded index cards and of course boxes and boxes of Maxell XLII-S blank tapes everywhere. Amongst the clutter on the floor, in the corner of the room was what Derek and I eventually ended up calling “the toy” It was one of those fake vaginas that you plug into a wall. For the same reason I will probably never fuck a robot, I can’t imagine putting my rock hard cock into something that is plugged into a wall. That’s just me though. Anyway, the discovery of this thing surely brought on some elbow nudging.

When you talked to Dan about the tapes, he was one of the early audiophile type so he would be telling you things that would fly over your head fast like speeding bullet. I remember him being serious about the low end and making sure your levels were down as “Phil will blow your speakers”. Phil Lesh is the bass player for the Grateful Dead, and sure he has probably blown a speaker or two in his time.

Over the next few years we would go by Dan’s after a tour and get tapes of shows we heard were particularly good and that kind of thing. Oh, the index cards...I remember at one point Derek and I were going to Hartford, CT to see the band and asked him what the best way to go would be. He pulled a stack of those index cards out and flipped through them eventually finding what would be “Hartford Coliseum” with turn by turn directions listed on the card, exact time it would take to get there from his house, miles away, etc.

We eventually lost touch with Dan, and then CD’s happened, and then Jerry died of course so who knows what happened to him. I know he worked in the mental health field and that house he lived in was his parents house but they had died so it was him and his sister. Oh yeah, the porn. How could I forget about the porn?! The porn went hand and hand or perhaps “cock and electrical socket” with “the toy” The porn was kind of the whole point of this story. Also in piles all over the room were video tapes, still in their cases, out of the cases, flattened video cases on the floor and then...eww just thinking about this is making me upset....wadded up tissues all over the place in that room. It was like some sort of Orgasmic Grateful Dead Shaving and High End Audio Tapes Palace of Masturbation this basement room. And that is where this story can probably end I guess.

------------



Hey man that child over there is on fire

What?

Check out that little boy, he is on fire

I have no idea what you are talking about

Forget it, hey when are we leaving?

Maybe in an hour, why?

I think I want to go home and get my weapon

What weapon?

Well, it’s just this weapon I carry

What is it, I don’t want a gun in my car

Oh it’s better than a gun

July 25, 1980

Only one of these stories is true.

“Hells Bells”
In the summer of 1989 we hung out with a woman named Eileen. When you smoked drugs (coke, meth, crack, heroin, weed) with Eileen you always had to “sterilize” the end of the pipe with a lighter before taking a hit as Eileen had Herpes. I remember one night Robert forgot to do it and low and behold he contracted Herpes. Eileen died alone in her apartment.

“Shoot to Thrill”
In the summer of 1990 we hung out with a guy named Dave. Dave had tattoos all over his neck of Disney characters. He was tough as nails though. The thought of getting the shit beat out of you by a guy with Pluto tattooed on his neck was always such an odd thing to think about. One night Dave found out some kid fucked his ex-girlfriend. Not his girlfriend, his EX-girlfriend. He went crazy and threw a chunk of an old gravestone through the windshield of the kid’s 1982 white VW Scirocco.

“What Do You Do For Money Honey?”
In the summer of 1992 I was experimenting with different kinds of cold medicines. Crushing them up and snorting them to avoid ever feeling sick. I thought this kind of pro-active effort would put me ahead of everyone, like I discovered some new way to feel awesome. When I stopped doing this I had a splitting headache for a whole month, and threw up anytime I tried to eat. I was down to about 105 pounds when I got my first job as a security guard.

“Givin’ the Dog a Bone”
In the summer of 1996 I was driving home one night after attending a church meeting. We had a small meeting with about five us from the church to discuss the upcoming picnic in the park. I was in charge of getting the desserts together, while my wife who was home sick and couldn’t make the meeting was in charge of cold cuts and soda. I was driving home about a block from my house when a Golden Retriever ran in front of my car. I slammed on the brakes but it was too late. I got out of the car and found the poor animal taking it’s last breath. There was an episode of Murder She Wrote I really wanted to get home to see. I had some trash bags in the back of my car so I grabbed the dog and put it in a trash bag and when I got home I put it in one of our trash barrels to go with our trash the next morning.

“Let Me Put My Love Into You”
In the summer of 1998 we rented a cabin in Maine. There were five of us, all men. The idea was to spend a week in the deep woods in this cabin. By the end of the week, one of us was dead, one of us had rabies and I started to believe in God.

“Back in Black”
In the summer of 2000 we walked all around the city at night. Through the park. Down the piss soaked streets downtown. We inhaled cigarette after cigarette wondering where our rightful place in life should be. One night we saw a child about ten years old just walking down the street smoking a cigarette. I stopped the child and asked where his parents were he replied “go fuck yourself you fat faggot”

“You Shook Me All Night Long”
In the summer of 2002 I was living in a place outside of Nashville, TN where if you weren’t white you definitely were not all right. I got a place there because I was working for an old man. There was an ad I saw online somewhere looking for someone to come and work with this old man going through his journals and things in his house. His house was filled with old newspapers, books, magazines, photographs, everywhere. I spent the first two weeks there sick as a dog from inhaling dust. The job paid very little, and my rent was very little. By the end of the summer I had helped Frank write a memoir which we printed twenty copies of to give to various family members and friends at his funeral. Oh yeah. At the end of the cleaning and writing, Frank asked me to euthanize him. He had been alone in that house for years. I could tell he was happy when I was there with all of the lights on and all of his life being organized into boxes and written into documents on my laptop.

“Have a Drink on Me”
In the summer of 2005 I was driving down a highway in a remote area of Vermont. It was the middle of the night and I was going the speed limit. A car flew by me going well over 100 mph. Off in the distance I saw it fly off the highway, tumbling like a child rolling down a hill. I arrived at the area where the car went off the road to a smoking car upside down. A young woman lay on the ground about ten yards from the car not breathing, covered in red and sparkly glass. In the drivers seat was a seat belted man groaning, I spied a number of beer cans near him and outside the window of the car.
“Hey man, I think you killed that girl”

“What? Help me out of here please”

“Well, I’m not sure I can help you here”

“Help me”

“You killed that young girl you were with”

“Are you seriously.....not going...to help me?”

“I’m seriously not going to help you...you’ll go to jail you know”

“Just help me please”

“Nobody knows you two are down here”

“Please sir”

“Good bye”


“Shake a Leg”
In the summer of 2008 I lost my whole family to a fire. We were living in a two bedroom ranch house and my wife fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand and burned the house down. I was at a Nine Inch Nails concert with my ex-girlfriend that night. My wife and I had argued for weeks about me going to the show. She finally “let me” go two days before the show.

“Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution”
In the summer of 2009 I drove my car 3000 miles or so. I drove all over the country that summer. I lost one life and found another one. I left one life and found another. Like any long drive though, by the end of it I was tired, I looked like shit and I had hours of stories to tell. One of these days I’ll write all of those stories down and put them in a book. One of these days I will try to remember how it all happened. It is all written down in my head but it’s unclear what route I took. My muse on this journey was what kept me going and smiling and feeling good. Here a couple of months before the summer of 2010 she is there yet again. I don’t think I could ask for a better more beautiful one than her to be right there.

Blues in C#

How appealing, an empty room with great lighting, surrounded by your friends who wrote amazing books before you were born, wrote the best songs, played the best solos, took the best photographs and painted the best paintings. I spent so many years needing to go out and find something or someone forgetting all of the entertainment and comfort could be found right there. I got used to that after a while. Bringing more vessels into the house via express delivery and stoned trips to used book stores in the middle of the week like a bored housewife. Walking around in the sun wondering what lunch would be the best. The end of the afternoon would come and I would wind down and wait for the house to come alive again. Dinners cooked and TV’s turned on, laughing and yelling and cats making noise and then the snow would eventually come back. The warm indoor drinks and hot air filled lungs had some sort of comfort to it I can’t put my finger on. It got so quiet there in the winter. Then it got real quiet until it all ended.

Sleeping on floors and couches and hotel rooms is not my ideal living situation. It is indeed taking it’s toll on me, not being able to just grab that book over there to see something. I can’t just grab that Bill Evans Box Set. I need to find out where it is. It could be in a box in the basement, or in a storage facility thousands of miles away. I feel like I might as well be a homeless person. A small pile of possessions in my possession and a head full of rain and sunshine every fifteen minutes. At the end of the day friends and family make it all a little better. Ones close by and of course ones far away.



================


“The Lemonade Man”

The first time his grandfather played him that “Who’s on First?” skit, he didn’t laugh. His grandfather got upset and never recommended anything to him again. He had grandiose dreams of recommending his one and only grandson with great war books, and films later in life. Since the Albert and Costello didn’t work on him though, he regarded his grandson as tasteless. How a man could be so dismissive to his own blood perplexed the whole family.

On June 26th of that year the grandfather met up with me at the supermarket.

“Harold, how are you?” I asked

Surprised, he extended his open hand and replied “Great”

I hadn’t seen him since the party two weeks prior, which sparked the “Who’s on First?” fiasco.

Phone calls were made, gifts were presumably cancelled, and a bitter disdain for “Grandpa Harry” enveloped the family. This was a family fraught with drama for years. I was merely an outside observer, having dated his second niece for a couple of years at this particular time.

“Hey listen, I don’t want to get involved but, I think you should call Clayton, he’s upset”

“I know he is, but I’m deep in this now…you don’t understand” he said with a scratchy voice.

“Well, I don’t know you that well Harry, but I know one thing, that kid loves you”

Harold didn’t want to talk about it, and it was obvious something else was bothering him. I had no idea how to get it out of him though. There was going to be a get together that weekend, I know they weren’t going to invite him. I planned on going down to his house and seeing him beforehand; perhaps I could talk him into making some sort of amends to the boy.

Saturday couldn’t have come sooner. I made my way up the gray cobblestone walkway as crispy bushes left claw marks on my bare legs. His house was a small affair, with the usual widowed elderly person décor: American flags, television set with 6 channels, plates in their upright position on the mantel, afghan blankets on all of the couches and chairs in the living room. I remembered being under the Easter colored afghan one winter night with Denise watching The Guns of Navarone with Harold, and some other leftovers from a snowed in winter ham dinner.

Harold invited me in, and we made our way to the kitchen. The acrid smell of a spied open jar of vinegar peppers on the counter made me ill. I couldn’t stand the smell of vinegar.

“Want some lemonade, just made it” Harold asked

“Sure” I replied, taking a seat

“You going over Debbie’s?” he asked

“Yeah, later on I am going to go. I thought I’d come by and say hello and see if I can do any more persuading”

“Persuading?” he chuckled

“Well, I really love that kid, and I don’t want him to feel resentment, especially during your…golden years if you will”

“I was having a bad day, I snapped at him, and now I’m paying for it” he confessed to me as he sat down exhaustedly

“I think if you just call over there and apologize, they will understand” a simple but obvious idea.

“Yeah, I have-“

“You know Harold, if it’s pride that’s holding you, fuck it, fuck pride right now”

“You’re a bright kid, and I appreciate your concern, but I have to think about this, I’m not the only one at fault here”

“I don’t think I understand you”

“His mother, she does not like me, we didn’t talk for almost twenty years…I think she puts things in his head”

“Like what?”

“I think she tells him that I am not to be trusted”

“I still don’t get you”

“Listen, I can’t really get into this, but let’s just say that when her mother died, there was an issue with the will, and she thinks I had something to do with it”

“Oh…” this was all new to me, and I felt like I was getting too deep, so I relented,

“…why don’t you stop there, I understand…this isn’t my place to be prying. I just wanted to do the right thing.

I left with my heart in my throat, knowing I was just opening more wounds for the old man in his humble abode. I drove to the party with no music on in the car and thought of all the times Denise told me that her great uncle had helped her out of a jam. I arrived at the party as they were serving food in the backyard. Denise greeted me with a hug and a kiss, and I never mentioned the visit to Harold’s house earlier in the day. In fact, I never mentioned it to anyone at all.

Four days after the party, on a sunny Saturday afternoon a neighbor called the police after not seeing Harold for a few days. Harold was out every morning on his porch reading a James Michener novel, or the Washington Post with a glass of lemonade; after a lunch inside he would water the grass in the front yard and talk to the people of the neighborhood. The neighbors fears and concerns turned out to be true, as Harold was found in the cellar of the house, hanging from the floor beams, with an overturned milk carton a few feet away. A single piece of paper lay on the floor near the milk carton with the poem “The Human Abstract” by William Blake on it:

Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor:
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;

And mutual fear brings peace;
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.

He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears:
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.

Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the Catterpiller and Fly,
Feed on the Mystery.

And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.

The Gods of the earth and sea,
Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain



Guitar playing is coming along a little better now, and I am able to play some blues music to exercise my hands. Playing an electric guitar not plugged in is kind of like going to Kentucky Fried Chicken and ordering grilled chicken. Or like going to a bagel store and ordering an extension chord. Well, it’s not like that at all. Anyway, it’s making me want to play a loud electric guitar, but I still thank that is a little ways away. I did mean to spell that “thank” as I was typing it thinking I was the guy in the Commodores was typing the sentence. Imagine, hmmm...wow I wonder if I could start a band....”yeah it’s kind of like a mix between The Commodores and Celtic Frost”. “We’re kind of like a cross between early Aerosmith and the sound of your ex-wife’s voice”

"Stop, thief"

Looking at old pictures of yourself from when you were young is tough sometimes. Well, tough to imagine “what was I thinking?” I can’t imagine what my voice sounded like, what I acted like and that kind of thing. The thought of going back in time and watching myself is beyond horrifying. Every once in a while you will see a video of yourself and feel strange. Nowadays though, every last fucking thing recorded on the internet, thoughts, pictures, opinions. What will it all eventually mean? I guess you can just not be one of these people. I am this guy like 26 hours a day. I need to move out of it. I need to get away. Life in real time though, it is so plain right now writing about it and photographing it all feels like the right thing to do. Sometimes when I run into people from my way past and talk to them I realize all that passed time did nothing really. The only thing it really did was make it harder to talk about anything beyond small talk. At any rate, I look back from old pictures and think fondly of certain times in life. Most of the time though, I’m not one of these nostalgic fucks unless I start to feel old. Seems like so many people developed opinions and tastes early on and never advanced them. Thankfully I am able to avoid these people, but some of them show up on your social networking pages and you can watch them and their boring ass existence tell the same stories they told you in 1988. There are the friends that moved on, left Massachusetts and made something better happen to their lives. I admire these folks. I read what they have to say and they are always fresh and slightly different than before.


“San Leandro, CA - Summer of 2011”

Not the way I want to come across really,
I am going to blow my brains all over them
The social skills of a group of blind, dumb and deaf children
What are you talking about?
I tell you what I’m talking about
All of them
Look at them bicker and accuse
Try and fail
Judge and opine
Our most common trait is the color of blood
Yet it’s assumed I eat the same foods and drink the same wine
I smashed every last fucking thing in here tonight
I smashed every fucking reminder that I’m civil when I go outside
I think about it, them, etc and turn to fire
I turn to fire late at night for inspiration
I turn to strangers and try to move them somewhere else
I want them to think worse of me than they probably do
They see me and think I am someone else anyway
I see them and know exactly who they are
The subjects of lies of omission
Their disgusted scorned wives and husbands and boyfriends and girlfriends awake all night
They go out with eyes like caterpillars
Creeping all over whoever your favorite person in the world is
Standing at green lights in front of your car
Standing in line in front of you at the bank
Weak and full of shit
I see them and who they avoid
They can’t look you in the eye
They lack any kind of soul
They lack any kind of passion or truth
I watch them and want them to fail miserably
Watch their scorned better halves drag them through the mud and fire
Men in expensive suits sucking blood and cum from every single angle
Their crooked handshakes are gestures empty of anything
Gifts given to pay people off
They think they have some sort of handle on me
Watching me from all sorts of places
Towns I’ve never heard of
Places I will never go
I monitor them more though
I always need to learn and see
I spend so much time being this loser that I end up winning
In the end when I burn every last house down
When I put this sword through the chest of every fuck that ever got in the way
I’ll feel free then
I’ll sleep more than two hours in a night
I’ll move on to a better place
Where I am now
A labyrinth of emotions and feelings
A roller coaster that drags others behind it’s cars
I speed around up and down
I hope they just all jump off at some point
I don’t need any of them
I don’t need any of it
Wait, do I?



---------

When I think of this girl and how she makes me feel in person. It’s different than over the phone or on a computer. It’s the reality of her eyes and face and smile and the color blue and how she eats and speaks to me. All of these things, they arrive in dreams at night. My brief journey into slumber is often visited by how I see her. On the shore carrying her stuff for the day. Walking upright and poised so I feel intimidated with her. No way any loser could stand here where I am. What have I done right? Said and written the correct things? What did the ones who came before do right and what did they do wrong? After every horrible thing that has come before this it really is hard to feel secure and all of that. I have been trying to do this day by day thing. Sure it works day by day, sometimes though, the month by month is hard. When I think of how close we felt the last time we saw each other. How I made her cry when I should have just said goodbye. How I drove home with so many memories in my head. Was like a California shaped dream filled with all of the amazing times we spent. I’d never trade them or regret anything no matter what happens. On that burning crisp shore we often stood, not the exact places she wanted to show me but her efforts and eyes always make me melt so I can’t ever say no. Whatever fate awaits me I really hope I can always think of that smile as something that melted me and not burned me.

Zoloft

Some days you know, I don’t feel like discussing music or movies I don’t feel like explaining what a band sounds like. is there a worse question in the world than “What does it sound like?”, or “What does your band sound like?” I hate putting music into categories. Obviously the Rolling Stones and The Faces and Chuck Berry sound like rock and roll music, but wait High on Fire and Judas Priest are both metal bands that sound nothing alike at all. Anyway, it seems like I’ve had a few of these lately with strangers and others. I used to hate doing this with the band I was in as I didn’t really know what to say. The bands I always used to compare us to sounded absolutely nothing like us at all but really.

Oh yeah lets keep talking about that first thing there not my band...the other thing you have to take into consideration when describing music is what I call “The Thanksgiving Meter”. I call it that because usually this conversation will take place is at a Thanksgiving dinner. Lets say you are in a band that plays music that sounds sort of like Archers of Loaf. You find yourself at a Thanksgiving dinner talking to a cousin you barely know who starts asking you about your band. It is up to you to determine how much this person knows about music. The most popular band you can maybe throw out there is “Sonic Youth” but really, this is Thanksgiving and your cousin is from Connecticut and works as a milk delivery guy. You need to go a little higher on the meter and maybe try the Smashing Pumpkins, if that doesn’t work you can push it to Nirvana. If you end up in U2 territory you are most likely talking to a deaf person or to someone who is exactly 46 years old. I’ve managed to avoid using the meter for the most part by just saying we play “heavy metal” and they usually don’t know anything about it, and/or don’t want to. Also, I would love to be in a band that sound like Archers of Loaf!

I pulled the guitar out last week and started messing around a little, but there is something going on with my left ring finger and pinky which makes me think perhaps because I haven’t played the guitar those fingers stopped getting exercise. I had some ideas of music I would like to play with a couple of friends that I will hopefully get around to putting more thought into soon. I feel like I have been “home” for months already, but I have only been here for a couple of weeks now. My other thing with guitar is, when I pick one up I don’t really do anything on it aside from try to play Allman Brothers songs on it or whatever. I used to write actual songs by myself. After a while though, the band started just improvising and coming up with music that way. Traditional methods of writing songs was so foreign to us that I couldn’t imagine bringing in a pre-written song to practice and saying “okay this one is going to go like this” it almost sounds to ego-driven, which is ironic as everything I did in that band was pretty self centered aside from putting music together.

------------------------------




“If You Can Stay You’ll Eventually See”

The only thing this cup of coffee is doing for me right now

The only thing it does is keep me from reading the correct things

The right things I need to read

My eyes move too fast on the caffeine diet

Did they miss me?

Doubtful

What were they all wearing?

The gamblers

The thieves

I live amongst them

Just read what was inside of me all last summer

The way things are going now

There is nothing else that can happen

It is all uphill from here

Nobody understands this

They offer handkerchiefs and jokes

Come on, have you seen what my smile is all about?

I wear it inside out

No, actually I don’t ridicule

I don’t point my finger

I point my finger at myself

I take it out on myself

Not others

Never, right?

Obviously

I woke up this morning right

It was late in the morning

Talking to myself

Like this, and like that

Short little lines to myself

“okay”

etc.

When I cut my hair, I didn’t lose my strength like Samson

I lost my job, my wife, and my kids

I never had any of that

But I was assured I wouldn’t get it, ever

Hence me now using my fingers

Words

Honesty

They think it’s something else

What a joke it can be

Trying to explain things

When it’s all right there

When I have a secret

The first thing I do is

Record it into a tape machine

Then, and only then do I tell everyone in the world this secret


============================



Tonight it banged on the door. It's strange, most nights I don't see it when I come through the back door. I feel it. It overwhelms me. I don't mean to fumble with the keys, but I don't want any confrontation. I know what it's all about. I know why I'm being watched. Trying to get into my head and control me like a puppet on a string. Trying to push me over the edge. I know why you're out there. I do it. I push. I control just like you. Not to an innocent. There's a reason I do it. I don't stalk. Watch my prey first. Hiding out in the woods. Like I said the other night, just ring the bell, I'll let you in, I have nothing to hide in here, my space is yours. Just don't try and get inside me. I'm not going to let you. Not again. I spent half of my life getting rid of ghosts like you. Don't try and get your claws into me. I won't punch you. Try and win you over. We're the same skin you and I. We travel. We feed on some of the same things, yet you don't have the decency to show me your positive aspects. A coward hiding out waiting to take me over. Let me play you some sort of melody on the guitar and see if that makes you want to ring the bell instead of banging on the door. You come up right behind me like a leech. A monkey. A monkey ready to get on my back again. You always haunt me when I come home at night. You tell me that music will be heard from different ears if I let you inside me. You tell me the same bullshit I hear constantly. Try me on for size. Try me. I won't bite you.I just want to help you out. I just want you to get yourself a new friend. How many times am I going to tell you that I don't need you or them. How many times am I going to open the window and hear you out there laughing at me. It's not really that funny, you may amuse yourself, but you're far from amusing me myself and I. I'd love to be your little friend who visits here and there but doesn't sleep over. I'd love to be your friend that keeps me in the back of your head, knowing that you're there if I NEED you. But you know as well as I do that I don't. Either just come and hang, or get the fuck out.There is no room left in this head for you.

hornets

I can’t listen to what they are saying as most of it is all fucking noise at this point. Turned into a zombie with no real feeling inside. The more I sit on things the more they build and turn into situations that will eventually blow up miles away from here.

When I come home at night I feel great
I am a happy man
I have never been depressed
I like making pretend I am depressed
Nothing has upset me, ever
People who are constantly depressed are weak
People who cry are weak
People who suffer from broken hearts are weak
People who are always in a shitty mood are weak
Everyone is weak
I am only afraid of two things
Hornets
and
Becoming one of them
They are all sketchy
Every word out of their mouth is a lie
Every word out of my mouth to them
It’s how I feel
They surround themselves with blankets
and
ugly people
Like a fool I sit around and wait
Like a typical moron
Again and again I’ll fall
Fall into routines
I will punch every one of these weak fucks into next year
Why they need to be
Why they need to be inside my head
I don’t want to know any of these fucks
I don’t want to see their faces
I don’t want them in my head
Stop saying their names
Stop hiding
And stop playing fucking games, all of you
I’m supposed to look to the sky and feel good
Not like this.

Jim Morrison

Thinking back now, way back it all becomes clear and I should have known better. Sometimes I make decisions that are questionable. Sometimes I think people are different than what they are supposed to be. I need to start feeling bigger than all of them at this point as I can no longer look up to anyone for anything. They'll all let you down, the wise ones, yeah you know.

I know where they all hide back there.

Wait,

Sitting here watching Steel Magnolias again, wait, sitting here late, smoking, sullen, wait, sitting here at quarter to 2, ain’t got a dime and…wait, sitting here about to shut the tv off I hate tv, yeah…no, wait, sitting here trying to fall asleep, but the wind from one thousand lonely nights keeps blowing the shutters of my soul open, wait, siting here, ten thousand glasses of sad whiskey later, wait, sitting here in my room, alone, dead, no wait, sitting here like a bump on a log, no stupid, stupid, stupid, sitting here like a cocksucker in heat, that makes no fucking sense whatsoever, sitting here lying to the ceiling with the smoke coming from my unhappy cigarette, no wait, sitting here like a loaded gun, waiting to go off, no wait, sitting here trying to come up with a line, oh wait that’s what I am trying to do so you can’t admit something like that right up front like that so wait, sitting here like a river, flowing through my soul no that doesn’t make any sense sitting here, just plain fucking sitting here, no wait, sitting here drunk on a thousand moon lit nights in the labyrinth of my soul, no too stevie nicks, sitting here trying to understand the math equations…of my soul, no, sitting here, wait, no, wait, sitting here, I, sit, I sit here and I wonder, sitting self, why are you sitting there, what is the point of you sitting there, wait that gets confusing, wait, sitting here looking at the clock, as if it’s some sort of window, to my soul, no wait, sitting here with the cold metal barrel in my mouth, it feels cool, the hot, and cool steel in my mouth, will blow my brains halfway across the fucking universe, no wait, too depressing, sitting here thinking about you, although I don’t know who you are, your soul, is like a unicorn, flying through the universe of other souls that have unicorns flying through them, wait, sitting here a little depressed as I lost my mind today, a couple of times today, no wait, sitting here after a long day at work, I can’t concentrate, I hope they fire me, no wait, sitting here, me, bill evans, and a pack of wounded cigarettes next to my heart, no wait, sitting here, beaten, bruised, soulless, no wait, sitting here, just got done dancing, no wait, sitting here trying to come out on top of all of this, no wait, sitting here about to jerk off in the bucket next to my desk, while looking at pictures of that dyke from Three’s Company, Joyce DeWitt, no wait, sitting here, after just getting in from the Red Sox game, no wait, sitting here playing my guitar, the notes, ah the notes, they come out of my guitar, via…my soul, no wait, I sit here and I sit and I sit and I sit, and I wonder when the moon will cut through the clouds, and take me into the galaxy of life, togetherness, and ambient audio ecstasy star clusters, no wait, sitting here like a broken fucking record, just got molested by a priest, no wait, sitting here in a cave with some of my fellow Al Qaeda home boys chillin out, ready to crash Jeep Cherokee’s into fruit stands all over the Midwest, no wait, sitting here listening to black Sabbath on a cassette, no wait, sitting here with a violin in my lap, the violin, it plays songs that penetrate my ears, heart, and soul, no wait, sitting here trying to get started here, sitting here only once, not twice, sitting here trying to figure out when the fires in my soul will be extinguished, and when they will finally be tame, no, no, no, no, sitting here on a train, a train that travels through time, until it comes crashing through the barn full of American citizens who only speak in gibberish, no, wait, sitting here thinking about a time when we lived across from the baseball field, oh those were days, me and my cousin Timmy would go over and play catch on the hot days, walk over to the fire station and buy a coca cola (can I say that?) in the glass fucking bottle, how fucking good does that shit taste in a glass fucking bottle, for 25 cents at the time, we would play ball there, years later I would be involved in an incest incident in the same parking lot where I would (an incest incident, that has a nice ring to it) years previous, play an innocent game of catch with my friend Timmy, I think Timmy got leukemia and then died, so that kind of sucked for Timmy, sometimes I wonder if he was ever involved in any type of incest incident before he went and died from Leukemia because God didn’t like him anymore, itting here about to suck the cock of this one legged midget with Parkinson’s Disease and a lisp named “Santiago McDonalds Cheeseburgers”, no sitting here like a guy who just got bit by a shark, ooooh fuck, no wait, sitting here intense, tense, in tense situations, sititng, I mean, no wait, sitting here like a man who has just discovered his goldfish has passed away, sitting here like a pile of cocaine, expensive, and bad for your heart, no wait, sitting here like one-thousand dollars, won, no wait, sitting here like a self-loathing-woman-hating-republican-loving gypsy from Paris, no wait, sitting here, drunk, no wait, sitting here drunk on the night, no wait, sitting here messy, all fucking messy, my hair, it turned so fucking grey today, I know it happened within hours too, this is how it always happens, the grey develops over a couple of minutes, a little stress, boom, here’s your fucking grey hair, I kind of like it though, makes me feel dignified, sitting here, like a big April Fools joke gone horribly wrong, no wait, sitting here like a forest where no sound is made, because no trees have fallen, yet I’m sitting in the forest, so I of course would hear them anyway, no wait, sitting here attempting to kill someone in fifteen easy steps, no wait, sitting here, eventually dying, no wait, sitting here, waiting, waiting for the night to come, and sweep my soul off of this planet, into a vortex of erotic souls, and banshees of fire and sword wielding astro fairies, no wait, sitting here like the third baseman of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, a fucking loser, no wait, sitting here, like the whole recorded output of Charlie Parker on Verve, no wait, sitting here like a cigarette that’s burned down to the filter, like my soul, burned down to the filter, you know, no wait, sitting here, sitting here, no wait, sitting here, frozen, ice, frozen, cold, winter, death, no wait, sitting here like a bad Siouxsie and the Banshees song, no wait, sitting here attempting to see if I can completely go out of my mind without the medicine for one day, no wait, sitting here not wanting to tell anyone I have to take drugs to be well, no wait, don’t go there in here, no wait, sitting here not wanting to let any information get out, you should abort the mission, as things are generally not what they seem, I mean look at the history, when is the last time I didn’t hold a knife up to a back, I mean how much information is allowed at a given time, no wait, sitting here, no wait, sitting here no wait, sitting here, no wait, sitting here no wait, sitting here, no wait, sitting here no wait, sitting here, no wait, sitting here no wait, sitting here, no wait, sitting here no wait, sitting here, no wait, sitting here no wait, sitting here, no wait, sitting here no wait, sitting here, no wait, sitting here no wait, sitting here, no wait, sitting here no wait, sitting here, no wait, sitting here no wait, sitting here, no wait, sitting here, remembering the time I sat in the chair and spun around like a child, well, I was fucked up on something that night, the booze, the pills, oh yeah, the nights of pills, multi vitamins, and Advil, that was it, I haven’t taken a pill, you know, a real pill, I never took a pain killer in my life, sitting here trying to back this truck out of here, as I really, really, really, really, really, need to go home, no wait, sitting here, 20 cigarettes, one John Coltrane ballad, no wait, sitting here, French kissing a witch, that came from the planet Jupiter, no wait sitting here, completely normal, don’t say I don’t know what I’m walking about, this is 10 hours old now, sitting here, trying to pour whiskey into a Dixie cup, sitting here, no wait, sitting here, like a retired military guy, no wait, sitting here not wanting sympathy, or an explanation, but understanding that this is exactly what I needed, a vacation from the vampires and ecstasy dealers, I wonder if I cleared my head out with a bullet, but did it at an angle so as to not kill myself, just blow some of the dirty stuff that’s clogging up space in my head out of there for good, no wait, sitting here 900 words in, dead, no wait, sitting here with this CD, this is crazy jazz, loud, dischordant, I think if I continue with the rock band, I will play the loud dischordant guitar over the melodies and beats that the trio provides on the spot, they can provide the beats, and the underlying melodies for which I will play the dischordant guitar over, that’s it, new idea, I will call them three tomorrow and apologize over a couple glasses of tomato juice that we all hate, and tell them how it was a cruel joke, I never mean anything but good, I mean look at me, I run in the house as I’m scared like a rabbit, I mean look at me, I open up this book for all to see, and nobody pays attention, this is the window I will provide right now, this is the window, this time, and this time only, I will delete after 24 hours, I swear to fucking god, I swear to fucking go I once took this painting of a basket of fruit, I gave it to this old blind woman that lived in the coffee shop above the pirate ship sales office, and I gave her this painting, and boy you should have seen her, she loved it, absolutely loved it, you should have seen her, she said if she could see it, she would probably cry, but the sheer magnitude of it all was so fucking intense for the little old blind woman, that she just stood there grinning, almost like the Grinch who stole Christmas or whatever it was, I thought to myself that if I suggested to my friend that we pick up someone on the side of the road and murder them, we might win some points with the big boys, and then work our way up to vegetables, and various stimulants that help you figure things out, I mean think of it this way, I’m sitting here, it’s close to 3AM, I have a meeting in a few hours, I’m smoking cigarette after cigarette, I’m drinking this old cup of coffee, the tv is turned down, but Marlon Brando walks tall on the screen, all day today, I thought I had tinnitus, every once and a while the sound would go out in one ear, see, see, perhaps it was good I didn’t play the guitar loud like a piano tonight, see, see, and the reason I think of this now is, my ear aches, both of them, my cruel fate awaits me, I will go deaf within the next month, deaf as a bat they say, you’ll have to, I mean this is if I ever leave this house again, right now I am scared, I mean really scared to ever leave this house again and face anyone, I am embarrassed a little, but more or less, jealous of everyone else knowing how to do things right, I drive by the big expensive buildings late at night and hope at one point, they’ll at least let me on the roof, but I mean I sit here, like I was saying, writing to myself, trying to come up with the right way to explain this, and then I realize I just explained it, well, not in here, well, not in here where anyone would catch it, somewhere else, where the horses and the geese, and the ducks all run free, I mean I am petrified of them, I am petrified of the way things always work out for me, not the way I want them, I have been this selfish for a long time, but I mean, seriously, I sit here and wonder when it becomes evident that this is all worth it, then, and only then, will I realize that it doesn’t matter, none of this matters in the grand scheme of things, so I have some issues, I don’t have the issues some people have, consider yourself lucky son, consider yourself alive, and well, as there are people with real problems that make you seem like a walk in the park, I’m never difficult, I’ve never been, I’m easy to read, and I will never lie, I’ve never told a lie in my entire life, the only mistake I’ve made was that time I signed up for that thing, that thing I didn’t want anything to do with, does that make sense, I mean normally, like I said earlier today, I try to write as if I’m just talking to myself, a lot of the time you know, in the car, driving of course, I have these conversations, but for just tonight, an exclusive engagement, one night only, I write this stupid diary as if someone may be reading it, that is why this is honest, and right here for you to sleep on, if I had it any other way, I would be like the others, after tonight, I go back to the old me though, go out, go home, go to bed, repeat until you can vomit again, so I write this as if someone, just one fucking person perhaps, is reading along going yeah I get what you’re saying, that’s what I’m trying to say, I hope this is clear, as I’m still not comfortable, or able to come up with an introduction or good first line to this.

How Long Has This Been Going On

The weather here is dark and gray which is what I remember about this place in general. One of the things you end up growing tired of is that color. I hear all the time about not wanting to live in certain places because of the people or the weather. Can you imagine how horrible that would be, having those as deciding factors on where you lay your head at the end of your day? I grow attracted to and then turned off by what I see around me. Los Angeles, a sea of just strip malls and strip malls and places to eat and pavement. Everything feels like it was built fifteen years ago, including the smiles on the faces of men and women alike there. At the end of the day I don’t hold much value on where people are coming from or what their opinion of me and my cd collection is. I like the feeling of a conversation that intoxicates me so I forget where I am, Los Angeles, Salem, San Francisco, Albany, Oklahoma City. St. Louis, wherever. Everyone including me will agree with this, but all of them and I are shallow. Nobody actually feels this way. It sounds nice and feels romantic on paper, ahem, screen.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The things that end up ruining it for me though, every time.



The color green. How many awesome Radiohead concerts can these well read dudes take my girlfriend to before I explode? Why would I ever care at the end of the day, look at me. I kind of know what I am doing. I think I know her like no others do.



The color red. I never feel this way. I write it down well though. Weapons and rage and words to cut innocent losers down thousands of miles away for no reason aside for my own amusement. Seriously though, I do have a pretty well stocked arsenal here, so yeah. Watch out.



The color blue. I can sit here and listen to twelve thousand minutes of Gershwin songs and weep and feel like a pussy, or I can throw myself into a situation I invent inside my head that will put me three hundred notches below where I am when I am listening to James Brown’s Escapism (Pt. 1 & 2). Why I invent these is the same as why i feel like someone is out to get me. I see them. This house too, no shade to pull down in the kitchen where I am now. Outside there: the woods. Good Lord who knows what or who could be out there. Every time I am in front of that window (which I try not to be at night) I kind of brace myself for the impending bullet that is going to come through the window for me. When I realize it’s going to come in a different form than a bullet I breathe a sigh of relief and get back to researching things I never should have researched in the first place. Had I not though, life would be hidden in some closet somewhere in the midwest still. I never feel blue anymore. I haven't since I came back here. This gray, yeah I'll grow tired of it but it feels good on me. My eyes are sensitive.

------------

They will never pick up on anything, which works to my advantage.

Sorry I Missed Yours

We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. I can cross it now, I really want to see you. I’ll come by and see you late tonight, across old hunks of metal floating miles above us, through cables and across bodies of water and through telephone lines and all of those old school methods. You know how to dial don’t you? I only have this cell phone keeping me in touch. Landlines, they can find out. Let’s keep this going for as long as it gets old. How can I feel the same way every day about this? Oh, it’s because of the excitement. When you see the word NO in big letters, hanging from the rafters of the arena of morality it just feels awesome and intense and all of that. Nobody will ever know. Riding off into the distance and over flat and dry land. Riding off into a world of persuasion and the worst parts of every espionage story you haver ever heard about. I wonder how hard he could trick me into thinking this way? Think about it for an hour or so and realize where I live there are monitors unplugged for years now. Microphones that never worked in the first place. Binoculars that only see two feet.

That sun burns my face honey, what should I do? Hmm, I have no idea really. (sigh). I feel like I haven’t laughed in three days. Oh did you see last night’s South Park? Hilarious. No I don’t watch that show. Oh you really should. Well, I don’t think it’s that funny, anyway, this sun is killing me now. Well, let me see if I have something with me...I think I brought something. No I can’t use that. Oh okay. Jeez I tried. I know you did honey I know you did.



I walked into the field behind the library with my brand new metal detector. Boy was I ready to use this thing. My girlfriend bought it for me for my birthday. My birthday is in the winter, so this beautiful April day was a great day for it’s maiden trip out to the field, or “the frontline” as my other metal detector friends call any area you are going to “sweep”. I’ve been using a metal detector now for about five years. There is something calming about the metal detector. There is something that takes me back to the good old days when I have the metal detector out. My uncle had one when we were little. He would come back from the beach with pockets of nickels, and the occasional Timex watch. Now, I was the detector. Now, I was on the front lines. I was on the end of the metal detector I only dreamed of when I was a little boy.

About twenty years previous, a woman was murdered behind the library. They never solved it, as a matter of fact, they never even tried to. She was not a well liked woman around town, she had no family, nobody really knew her, and so they just sort of let the case go unnoticed. My friend in the police department told me about this. She was apparently stabbed multiple times, and was left for dead next to her a bag of heroin, and some beer cans. I had wanted to get behind that library for years now, but just never did. Perhaps I would find the weapon, or some other clues. What I did find was astonishing…a watch. A watch with the initials T.C in the back of the face. My fathers initials actually. While digging the watch up though, I found something more peculiar, but I can’t talk about it anymore. No more am I to talk about this. No, I can’t talk about this. I can’t let myself get involved with this yet again. Over and over it gets to me. Over and over I start telling this story, and then have to shut it out of my head.



“When the opponent attempts to attack, use both swords to strike him down” - how intense is this?



Kenny Loggins, naked, on ecstasy in a hotel room in Burlington Vermont, trying to coax a 23 year old girl to let him fuck her in the ass. That black lady from channel 7 news in Boston, ummmm Liz Walker or some shit like that. She looked like this girl I fucked. Or her brother rather. They were white. Wait, I never fucked that girl. This girl I knew once. Her brother looked like Liz Walker, the black lady from the news. I did want to fuck Liz Walker once. She busts into the room, and then I arrive. I arrive with a group of friends, and a well beaten James Garner on crutches.



So I’m on my way out of Walmart with a pocketful of new watches, and a head full of mescaline, when I hear a voice behind me. It’s the dog, he’s with me, and went invisible once we got into the store. He tells me that tonight, I need to kill someone for him. The notion of a dog actually talking probably sounds really funny to anyone reading this journal. The notion of a dog telling me to kill people is probably even stranger, but if you read, or have some brain…well then, yeah a dog tells me what to do. So I have to kill someone for the dog, and I haven’t even taken a shower yet.



I got that thing again the other night. We went for Mexican food. A table of a couple and what I assume were their two sons. The waiter brought some big dessert thing over for all of them to share. The father said something like “wow look at that!” with some big smile. I imagined just walking over to the table with a gun and shooting the father in the temple so blood goes all over his stupid wife and all over the delicious dessert. As the horrified people of the restaurant look on I tell them it’s all just some dream I am having and everything goes back to normal. They are all in this dream with me somehow. I wonder if there is a way to experience this.