Texas

Like a ten thousand foot tidal wave coming over me, here it is again. I’m never able to stop it though. I can’t really control any of it and then everything turns to shit. I am trying to stay away from anything and anyone when this happens as I just end up saying the wrong thing. It’s easier this way in the long run. I think?

In the meantime. Had a dream I was trapped in some gray colored city, buildings as high as the eyes could see, temperatures as low and uncomfortable as you wouldn’t want them to be. Not a person or sound anywhere. Like one of those apocalypse scenes in a film. You spend so much time listening to other people as well as yourself going “boo-hoo I want to be left alone” until you experience having a nightmare about it. Sort of frightening and peaceful at the same time aside from the lack of nice colors.

So this place I hang at, this national coffee place. I guess I come in here almost every day. There are a couple of colleges nearby. One of them, is a big Christian college. A good amount of the people hanging out in here on a daily basis are students from there. At this point I just assume everyone in here is a Jesus person. Whatever the opposite of one of these people is, I guess I am the opposite. I don’t believe in anything I can’t see or that hasn’t been proven by science. Generally though, I just don’t even think about this stuff at all, and the fact that people study it seriously is beyond me. Perhaps someday something will click with me and I will get it. Regardless, there are thousands of books written about all of this stuff by people far more intelligent than I am so maybe there is something about it. It just doesn’t really interest me I guess.

I come in here during the week and write and umm, “work”. I have gotten to know all the people who work here, some of them are also students from that college. Recently a couple of people have chatted me up and asked what I do while in here. Seems a little odd to ask someone what they are doing. What if I worked for the government (maybe I do!)? What if I was some kind of a fucking asshole who didn’t look like I liked being talked to? I kind of look like that, so it always surprises me when this does happen. Usually when I am by myself I tend to put on some sort of “mean” face so I don’t get strangers talking to me. When I am traveling, sure. But if I am a regular somewhere, I sometimes don’t want to make regular friends with anyone beyond a “hey” You run the risk of conversation starters that are uninteresting or some sort of running joke. This phenomenon has recently happened on Facebook with a line I use quite a bit over there. Some people will comment randomly using the same joke and while some people usually are pretty funny, others are just beating it into the ground and making it harder for me to continue using it. I guess everyone can’t be as funny as I can be.

A few weeks ago a young man came up to me. I always see him in here with a group of friends, male and female studying. A friendly looking kid, good looking, outgoing and generally someone you would want in the kind of situation where I don’t know...if you just got shot in the neck, this might be the kind of dude you want cradling you on the ground telling you everything will be okay. Also the kid you’d want helping to rake leaves in your grandmother’s yard. So I told him I “write...and am also looking for a job” The latter part of this is true to an extent, but I hardly do that while I am in here. Sometimes though. I asked him what he does and he mentioned he is a student and is studying, etc. Exactly what I imagined. Nice enough guy, and now every time I see him he asks me how the job hunt is going and I ask him how school is going and that’s that.

I love heavy metal music. Selected stuff though...I think if I was to label myself as something it would be a metal/punk rock guy which obviously could mean hundreds of things. As much as I love metal and wear heavy metal shirts all the time I don’t listen to it as much as I used to. One thing newer bands have been doing is doing spinoffs of other logos or fonts and adapting their band’s name to them. I’ve now seen two bands use the Boston first album cover (two great bands: Unearth and Torche). Torche are one of my favorite bands, and although they get thrown into the metal realm I think of them as something beyond metal. I can’t explain it. Last year they were selling t-shirts that were a take off of the one of the bands responsible for inventing death metal, the Bay Area band Possessed.

I of course had to have one of these. Aside from loving both bands, the thought of having a shirt with an upside down cross on it seemed like an awesome idea at the time. I even wore this shirt when I drove across country a while back. I literally stopped before I got to the Texas border and put it on. My original plan to wear an Eyehategod shirt the entire time in Texas but it didn’t work out as I couldn’t find it, so this was the next best thing. (now that I am remembering that stop, hmmm...I stopped for three things: to change a windshield wiper [obviously wasn’t rain, but to clean bugs], put that shirt on, and get high on medical marijuana I had taken back from California. In the fifteen or so minutes I was there I literally saw a tumbleweed, a guy in a cowboy hat and a cactus. The following picture is from that very stop

I got all my shit together and drove on)

So I stopped by this coffee place the other night, not to stay though, just a quick stop. I was wearing this upside down cross shirt under my jacket, but you can still kind of tell what is going on. I saw my buddy in here, and waved to him as he was across the place. He got up and came over and started talking to me. Asking about my job hunt, I asked him about Halloween and then briefly wondered to myself if these students even celebrated Halloween, or is it not allowed? Apparently it is allowed. At the end of the conversation as he was walking away he told me he would pray for me for an upcoming job interview and then winked at me. During that whole conversation which was all of maybe seven minutes I kept trying to keep my jacket closed. In a way I can’t imagine anyone would care. I guess if I was a Satanist (which in a way seems even more ridiculous to me than being a Christian/Catholic or part of any organized religion) I wouldn’t be talking to this young man in the first place. I did feel slightly guilty though when he mentioned he would pray for me. Not as guilty as walking into a temple with a shirt with swastikas on it, but I was self conscious about it. The end.

Oh, here I am with the shirt on a few hours later...

Estimated Prophet pt II

At the same time my ears ring, my eyes burn and my sixth sense is heightened to where an alarm will probably go off fifteen minutes from now. There has to be an alarm going off somewhere fifteen minutes from right now anyway, I’m sure of it. I can’t imagine why, but then I realized as much as I am into letting you know how much I like you or don’t like you via secretly recorded conversations about my third cousin I’ve never met anyway, I still notice this shit. I notice it all though and it’s why I can’t even relate to here anymore.



Sometimes you can have a memory of a scent from when you were a child ,someone’s house, a food you used to eat, whatever. The other night I randomly remembered the scent, and then the lighting and whole atmosphere of where I went to what we called “CCD”. I have no idea what this even stood for, but it had to do with preparing kids for confirmation in the Catholic church. The only thing I really remember about these classes is, they were maybe in the early evening once or twice a week, they were boring as hell and you basically just spent your time memorizing these stupid prayers....Our Father, The Lord’s Prayer and maybe Hail Mary. I couldn’t recite a single word from any of these at this point in my life as I guess because of the timing of it was during a formative time in my life when it was kind of hard to trick me. I was being taught to talk to someone I never met, someone I couldn’t see and someone who lived in “the sky”.

I never received my Communion or Confirmation as a Catholic as at one point or another I complained so much to my parents that I hated it they took me out of it...I went to Penance once to tell a priest of my recent sins which in retrospect seems just wrong to do to a ten year old kid. How many of the Ten Commandments can you even break that young? My parents weren’t church people, and with my dad in the music industry in the 70’s and the nature of what I was involved in during the early and mid-eighties, worshipping someone I could never see or touch seemed more absurd by the second.

With my dad in the industry, we were able to go to quite a few big concerts, often going backstage to meet these rockstars like Styx, Supertramp and later on in life New Order, Robert Plant, and then countless musicians in the punk rock scene. With the ability to meet and see these people as real humans my idea of idol worship and that kind of think was more dull than most people I know. The fact that I spent so many hours with records by bands and musicians that I could someday meet made the notion of worshipping anybody or any entity a ridiculous thing. This isn’t to say I still don’t do this to this day though.

I can have my mood and attitude completely changed within minutes if I hear certain musicians. If I need advice on something I can consult a musician or an author for advice or inspiration. Where I live right now, there are quite a few “Jesus people” as I like to call them. They are some of the most unfriendly, close minded people I have had the pleasure of being surrounded by. Sitting in this coffee shop playing music loud into my ears and watching them is like watching a movie. Starring all white people, they’ve all stepped out of a white picket fenced world of backstabbing and weird ideas of how things should be and well “leave us alone anyway”. Every one of them probably own a Golden Retriever and a minivan, watch Everybody Loves Raymond on a nightly basis and have about two orgasms a presidency.



I have this plan of slipping out the back door without anyone seeing. Without leaving a note, without slamming the door shut. A quiet sneak out the back door with one knapsack full of ironic t-shirts, sneakers and books about dead people with hard to pronounce names. I have the ability to drive a whole day without feeling guilt. I can leave blank pages on the ground, a trail of crumbs that leads nowhere but to me sitting in a hotel room waiting for the sun to come up so I can bore myself to death for nine hours again with deserts and forests and hills and white people with ridiculous accents. Not a single drop of poison needed, not a single piece of anything. If they need to wonder where I am they can, but at the end of the day I don’t owe anyone anything. It’s sunny enough here that people can figure everything out on their own. I don’t think anyone would even want my advice. I hate giving advice, nobody takes it, I never take it either so. Mostly though, if I can never hear another person complain for as long as I live, if I can never read another person complain again as long as I live, and I can slip away to some small place on the Pacific Ocean I’ll be done. Nothing here but noise and noise and that kind of thing, well it’s easy to slip away without anyone even noticing. I hate cakes anyway.