May 20th, 2019.

The first boy I generated into this world turned 14 on the day of this post's title. I've been tardy in posting this as the usual slump of depression around his birthday has tolled across the clockspace of my head. I called him on the day, vidchat, and he answered in an unseemly location. I bid him bon chance and later, called back on a different day to find him en route with his bros, in the back of a minivan, to some swimming pool based venue. Motherfucker did he look beautiful, all burgeoning man and squaring jaw, his hair pulled back and thickly glorious. I killed the call on the quick so as not to impose. He presumably had a rad time. 

The day prior to his birthday I biked loiteringly around town. There was no objective, no mission. The day was fantastically summer, clear and windy, the insects were about and I paused by some communal roses and snapped this. I think often about the flowering of plants, their (plants, that is) history, the altogether unsure future of pollen based reproduction and the unguaranteed persistence of their evolution. I mean, shit, plants fucking flowered, man! 160 million-ish years of perseverance. Jesus.  

I was mega lifted for the bike-venture and found myself tooling up and down the old haunts of the river by the elementary schools near the old apartment. I used to amble regularly there, alongside the river bluffs and was surprised, stupidly, to find erosion had taken her toll on the well remembered outlook. Sitting down in the grass like a hobo, past the concrete barriers, I found this petition spraypainted on the defilade from the main trail. Who knows the outcome of this request? Mysteries.

Facing the river, I found her all the iterations of deity that she rightly was. It's said that Narcissus was borne of a river god and a nymph, Liriope, raped by said god. Looking into the deepness of the flowing, from the remove of the bluff, I could almost see all the chaotic surge of the river that would precipitate the creation of such a myth. Narcissus would himself go to perish under the spell of water and another, different goddess irked at him. We're a record on repeat.

I finished ("finished") a story this morning, 28th May. The other day I was in the arboretum where someone had sawed spruce trees into seats and this happy crab graced one of the chairs. The absurdity of stories is something never far from me. The crab bears witness, the tree rings too. My own constructed things, organic and written, flail about in selfsame record. The destructed sign and garden bed of the arboretum entrance was a shambles, evidence of some new owners perhaps, all folks unknown and churning, much the same as I. 

Christ does it all hurt deliciously.

Springtime Depression and a Thickset Woman in an MLP Onesie

Joke's on you, bronies, the title was based on a scene I saw and did not photograph in my local cafe and designed only to hit search algorithms for clicks from your horde of slavering basement dwellers. Your friendship is magic bullshit can take a hike. Shower already and stop fapping to rule 34'd children's cartoons, you filthy troglodytes. 

Here's the memorial to Doris at the Moosehead. If you squint, you can see her hat in the back on the touchscreen for amusement only video game crouching at the end of the bar. I've been thinking a lot about death and this stupid body I'm housing and how I'm doing many things to shorten its timeframe but am somehow unperturbed by this. There may be a message in that but I am at a loss to know what that would look like.

We took in Captain Cat some years ago (2? 3? The speeding never stops, never stops.). He's a testament to the gritty and foolish persistence of life in the face of ultimate absurdity. A true Sisyphean hero of the Camus variety, struggling uselessly up that slope into nothing. I'm glad he's found a relatively easy place to shoulder on toward death.

Christ, am I becoming a fat bastard. Ulybear was sick recently; a stomach bug laid him somewhat low. Myself too, although with none of the youthful resilience of being able to jump around for hours then crashing into a heap on the sofa in a languid mid-morning haze of recuperation. As he laid on me, we talked about the window to the outside scene, the mountain, the budding trees, youtube videos. I'm the age now that my old man was when I was born, roughly, and all I can think about is that countdown timer that will snatch me from this grand boy, my youngest. Maybe we'll be able to have beers together. Maybe not.

The chickadees have inhabited the birdhouse for a second consecutive year. I don't know if it's the same pair, but like to think that way. At work, I found a bird nest, possibly a magpie's, and now it lives in my office. It is broken, suffering a fall from a security light, but would still work if the birds had returned. This ruin will fade, much like our own fantasies of stability and future. 

Sanity seems fleeting. Beach House. Jesus. You ever wonder about those people who say things like "No bad days" or some such? Must be a treat.

Alleiluia, Alleluia, Alleluia

The women went down, found the tomb empty; or so the story goes. 

We went to mass under a crumpled aluminum sky (not the one pictured here but maybe more on that later). The place was packed, natch, with all of the faces of the faithful and the ripe young fleshes of men and women alike in their fineries and all the olds and the crusteds stolidly in attendance and the children, impish, among the pews and howling unimportunely. Uly asked about the elevated crucifix and remembered that image from the story we told him at Good Friday's dinner table about Christ's Passion. Later, we dined on brunch at Klondike Mike's - omelettes to order, biscuits and gravy, cornbeef hash, home fries, sausage, fruit, beer, hockey. The "chef" was a young man in a RVCA hat on his last cooking gig in Alaska, on his way to greener pastures at a potato chip factory in Ohio. All to think about was absurd impermanence and biological decay. 

On Friday, I learned that one of the Moosehead regulars, a woman who had signed on as witness to A's and my union, had perished. Doris would sit at the end of the bar and drink Miller Lites in between cigarettes and playing pulltabs. Her native face drooped and sagged like viscous putty as she ripped open the gambling tickets, the losers she piled into a basket on the bar surface before her. Her husband, Lon, white, equally wizened, sometimes drank iced tea and othertimes beer with their smokes, Winstons. We went to get beers at the store later and A went in as Uly and I waited in the car and listened to The Cardigans. When she came back, she said she had run into Carol, the other witness to our marriage and barkeep at the Moosehead. Carol was with her grandson and when A gave condolences, Carol reportedly said it was all for the best and that now, Doris was in a place where she could finally breathe again.

I'm in this motherfucking cafe, this fucking hell of a fucking place, crying like a bitch.

Biked into town for a beer recharge for A and a little alone time for me on a blustery Easter afternoon. Earlier, we had tie-dyed shirts with the leftover homemade egg dye A and Uly alchemized. The wind was brutal, magnificent. We had poked about at the last year's decay of our flowerbeds and tried to piece together what had been spared last year's culling and what had been introduced, new. Uly cut at the shooting grass with his child's scissors. The fat orange cat huddled by an exhaust vent. We discovered two starts of baneberry that must be dispatched another season. The cranberry stalks bore sign of summer sproutings. Now, it's this, and writing here, and another uselessly entropizing plunge into nothingness and the begged for storage of memories of a day wherein the baptismal renewal of Father Joseph's slinging hit my own and Uly's head and there was much experience and the sky remained and the earth persisted and this fiction keeps rolling on, rolling on, rolling. 

Do I reject Satan and all his works and all his empty promises? I do reject them. 

Feet don't fail me now.

NO BOOZE LIVE BLOGGING LENT, Holy Week Episode

14APR-20APR2019 - Holy Week

Palm Sunday

Spy Wednesday

Maundy Thursday

Good Friday

Holy Saturday

Eastertide is almost upon us. The cafe hums. My sanity feels tenuous at best and this, all this reality, seems too much to bear. Things are shaky. I spent some time at the bar yesterday, watching hockey and holding Uly on my lap while we listened to the jukebox and I low-key wept at that goodness. Later, we went home where A made falafel sandwiches and tabouli salad and we ate olives and dolma with our greasy fingers as the world melted outside.

Every day is a question of whether or not things can persist.

NO BOOZE LIVE BLOGGING LENT, Penultimate Episode

08APR-13APR2019 - Week 5

Sitting in the cafe and waiting for the funicular of this chocolate to take me to elevation. I've been thinking a lot lately about death and human history and Jesus Christ, watching people eat things is terrible absurd and infuriating in this miasma of funk cafe nightmare with photographs of birds on the walls and this woman flicking muffin crumbs from her fingers with her ape hands is fucking disconcerting in the utmost right now. There is the barista with the black hair, long, curled up on her skull like rodentia homes and the other one, the Catholic, blonde, with the Marian medallion and the crumb woman is blonde also and there too is an older man, Cenobite-like, wearing sunglasses as he eats a breakfast burrito with sour cream. Insanity. Every direction. Send help.

Playoff hockey started this week. What a grand time to be alive. Lord Stanley's cup has been around for 100 years and it's the determination of men to put knives on their feet and a club in their hands and venture out onto the ice to engage in combat that really puts the hooks in me. I can't, as I think I've noted before, even roller skate and these actors on their frozen stage is drama of the highest order. We repaired to the bar yesterday in our failure and watched the contestants engage and there was a dog and Guy Fieri on the other tube and no one in the place judged us for our lapse in abstention and later, there was ramen shrimp and movies with Julianne Moore and much crying about beauty in the face of absurd violence that is, seemingly, the default condition of our hilariously maladaptive race.

I am supposed to go to confession this afternoon but heartily doubt that I'll make it. At AWP, I was speaking with a woman about our shared and bad Catholicity and we were unperturbed by this somehow, relishing almost in the assurance of God's graces that we'd somehow make it out okay if the afterlife is what it has been said to be. 

I worry a lot about dying. Not about the fact of it looming, but the terror beforehand, the drop from altitude, the catastrophe that necessitates a grueling slog into the tomb, the fear of holding your children close and lying to them in the run up to non-existence. Sometimes, I wish I could get out of my own head.

I've been writing, natch, futilely and forward into nothing that matters. Each time I try to explain this to someone else I embrace frustration. I'm 37 and I'll never be on any list of anyone under a certain age as a writer and this reality is much like the muffin eating woman above in her vexation. Again, maybe I'm just insane or, at the least, vastly in-equipped for life's current projection.

There's that funicular. Vaya con dios, hombres. 

NO BOOZE LIVE BLOGGING LENT, Episode 3

01APR2019 - April Fool's Day

Crazed notes found on the northbound Cascades train that was the third leg of my journey home. Seemed appropriate for the "{PIC}" designator I had inserted into the text as a reminder of where I was going with this. I couldn't decide if this was a novel outline or, as Nick put it, "a life plan". Either way, it's one of those things that you find that are the briefest of cigarette pulls of illumination of a face in an otherwise gloomy alleyway, as if you could see everything of the smoker's existence in that one flash, time present, past, future. For myself, I couldn't decide whether the script was tragic or comedic or scornful or empathetic. In that way, I suppose, that author had at once failed and succeeded in engaging his reader. The train conductor ignored the open sheet yet picked up the slim rectangular and yellow boarding pass left by a departed passenger on the seat next as he passed among his rounds. Something, something metaphor.

02APR-07APR2019 - Week 4

The return to work and Lenten sobriety was a welcome embrace after the near psychotic break feared and barely held at bay from the failed assault into Portland. The first day I was on benzo-flight stress-exhaustion hangover autopilot of disagreement. Sleep that night was less than ideal and in the morning of the second day, after A took Uly to daycare, I lay awake in the silent house and listened to my guts churn and roil (borborygmi, for Dan if he's reading), a disgustingly present memento mori. I rose and biked down to the cafe where there were the open carrying veterans at their morning coffees and the advance scouts of the tourist season crowding up the aisles where I must walk.

Later, A and I would have a conversation about our differences in opinion about the tourist pilot fishes. Agree to disagree indeed. I thought about cursing their journey, pointing out their sins, and wishing them ill, cancerous lesions, heartbreak, malaise, suffering of the highest order, yet I refrained. Probably should go to confession about that regardless of my withholding those invections.

Today I arose at a strange hour after troubled dreams of love and love unrequited and death and absurdity and music and terror and terror and terror. I had the day free from PTSD guy and I decided to get fucking busy. A went downtown to work and for a "meeting" and Uly and I motored for home improvement digs and yardwork things and it bore us to Wasilla proper which was right trash as she is wont to be. I saw a former student at the Lowes where we stopped for potted crotons and ficus and South African succulents. He, the student, lamented the waste of his life Job Corps had been. I refrained from indicating his common denominator in that waste. Uly said hello. We shopped.

At home there was, sans A, activity. I repotted and potted plants and rearranged and thoroughly peeved the kitties. Then came a garage tidying. Car detailing. A car wash about which Uly said, "I'm going to have to tell Mama about this!". Police call. Hanging basket seeding. A returned and we ambled to a garage sale, defunct in the chill wind of April and turning breakup skies of gray and blue and gray and blue and white and eagles thermaling over the roadway in pursuit of food or mates or both. Back home, we cobbled pizzas (With kale. Wait, kale?) and ate and read stories. Uly went to bed. A persisted some venture, yet retreated and left me and the fat orange bastard cat to our mountain without and the tunes within and the tubes withal. Blame naught. Lean in. 

I have failed in my Lenten aspirations. 

A-W-P

24MAR-31MAR2019

Oh my God I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee.

A and Uly left for PHX after a dinner of Mexer food and a solitary beer each for A and I before the airport then I drove back in the rain without them and listened to Dwight and sang along sadly and then got faded as hell on a little vodka and played video games and was alone. It was good.

Cruising altitude on the way back home, somewhere over the Pacific and I am a messy wreck of a psyche. I saw a man follow around his daughter in the terminal at SEATAC and on the train up from Portland there was a woman with her son, maybe 5, 6, and the way she loved him in those three hours of train travel made me know that he was ruined forever. Fuck all that. Here are some photos from AWP.

Street art, of a type, from the commissioned to the graffito. A large part of me is shifting, internally, on the nature of art and what that means and the awful terror that you get when you see something old, even if its shitty, but a shitty-ish thing that human hands wrought and yet persisted. Today, in the PDX Amtrak station there was a display of shit dug up from a century ago during a recent-ish renovation of the station and it was trash, all of it, broken bottles and ceramic toys and bones and metallic pieces of offal much abused by oxidation and it was the same as a 5th century BCE curved bronze and early Attic scraper that ancient and uselessly dead athletes used to rip the grime of their labor from their skins after their contests that I observed as part of a "collection" in the Portland Art Museum. I felt very afraid and on the border of disassociative most of my time in PDX.

AWP itself was a terror. Filled with what I'd heard was 12K shuffling souls (mine included) in a convention center wholly grotesque and itself on the verge of a cataclysmic geologic event that would usher in its own destruction and NO-ONE seemed to be aware that we were all that Kurtzian invertebrate sliding, slithering along the edge of a straight razor. I believed, as fervently as I ever have anything (love, God, beauty, women, liquor) that irony was a thing not in anyone's wheelhouse who had bothered to attend the conference.

 
Outside the local church. A and I tried to get in but the doors were locked. I picked a bloom and walked about the streets of Portland.This was where a Mary should have stood, her outstretched arms welcoming. Later, we encountered many homeless and the evidence of their passings. Later still, when A was not with me, the homeless would not bother to ask for alms. Sometimes, this world. This fucking timeline.

 

There are many words to describe the time, hell, all of my times, in all aspects of my lives, as if I were some DFW chronicler but I prefer to go the Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra route and speak in ill informed metaphors. This does not bode well for the writing career, it seems, wherein editors require more exposition, more spoonfeeding to "engage the reader". I am rambling. The bunnies were from the PDX museum of art and they were terrifying, but not nearly as much as the other things I beheld there. A darkened closet of childhood. A night I spent at an aunt's house, my mother's fraternal twin, where there was a ventriloquist dummy in the closet whose room (my cousin's, Wesley's or Alex's, or maybe they shared a room?) in which I was supposed to sleep. Dead people and dead people and dead people and the funerary marble portraits of accusing eyed man and daughter who were immortalized and judging forever as I looked at the man's curly beard and the woman's hand uplifted and gesturing and the Roman epitaph of a man to his wife and myriad portraits of Marian visions with children in a love I'll never know, at least from my end.

Guys, I may be losing it. My sanity feels very fragile. The Sneaker Pimps are not assisting.

Jonah, when instructed by the Lord to go and prophesy against the city of Nineveh said, "Nope on that, Yahweh" and fled from God and went on to be eaten and regurgitated by leviathan and then had an unfortunate interaction with a gourd before relenting and doing as God had said and then, when the Ninevites repented only a day into his prophesy, he was bereft. 

30000 feet plus. Here's hoping this gourd of a vehicle doesn't wither and die as the shade of my homecoming. 

Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison. 

Back to the grind.

NO BOOZE LIVE BLOGGING LENT, Episode 2

17MAR2019 

We went to the mountains and me in a chemical haze. A drove. There was hiking and Uly remembered a dog on a sled from our previous visit on the trail. Then there was skiing and sledding and the requisite meltdown upon learning of the need to leave. We journeyed home to a dinner that I can't quite place at this remove save to know that it was good and filling and nutritious and all the doing of A. I had tutored PTSD guy but even that reality failed to blunt the crest of goodness that the day held. Later there was reading and untroubled sleep.

20MAR2019 - Vernal Equinox

Two weeks sans drink.

21MAR2019

I made a trek into Eagle River to meet with a doctor who has previously roto-rootered my colon. The way in, after a trip to the gym and some Taco Bell breakfast, was a blaze of Bach cellos reaching up my spine and ripping chunks of shivers from my temporal lobes. I arrived 30 minutes early.

The doctor is a specialist, liver, GI tract. He wears an orange-ish salmony colored shirt and a pinkish tie in a loose half Windsor that dangles undisciplinedly from his top button, as if he has loosened the noose for comfort. His shoes are similar to mine, calf leather, brogue-like. Creased slacks complete the look. His hands are meaty and soft, the way I remember my old man's being. In a different light, we could be almost contemporaries, him in his late 40s, early 50s, and me stolidly plowing through what is my own middle age. 

The exam room is spare, thankfully, denuded of those posters of the human frame with layers peeled away and artistic renditions of all the grotesque and hidden abnormalities a body can hide, at great length, until they gather the needed resources for a final assault. I feel good, my blood pressure's down, yet I pace the 10 by 5 room like an animal shelter inmate.

We, the doctor and I, chat benignly about all the things that are likely wrong with me. I minimize, defer, unwilling to change behaviors. He can see this and I freely admit this is my tack. Tests are ordered, blood, CT scans, and schedules made to review/interp the reconnaissance. 

I'm probably fine and would be wholly ignorant of my situation and possessed of the ego-less drive to hurry up and drop dead at 55 if I'm lucky were it not for diagnostic procedures and all the concomitant mental energy devoted to knowing just enough to be anxious about the non-consensual and absurd machinery of my life cycle. Fuck modern medicine. 

The drive back is sublime.

23MAR2019

HIPAA violations up in this bitch like a mother. I can't imagine anyone would want my white cell count, but hey, look at that badass AST level. Fuck yeah within normal limits. 

I went to the doc this morning again. It's absolute horseshit. I biked down under overcast battleship skies and chilled air with grimy puddles in the gutters and sad effigies of snowbanks crusted in gravel and filth. After the doc, I walked to the cafe and as I crossed the road to my ultimate destination, there was a woman holding her baby with a toddler in tow coming across the street in the opposite direction. The child saw me and smiled, waved, her wispy hair a cyclone in the street's backwash. I waved back, swamped with all manner of emotive chemicals.

This morning I awoke in a decent-ish mood but this quickly turned as the realities that I've been tamping down encroached - packing for AWP, the terror/anxiety of kissing Uly and A goodbye as they prep to ascend to cruising altitude, the uncertainties of condominium pools, rattlesnakes, scorpions, et al. in a nightmare scape Arizona of my imagining all conspiring to murder this boy in his beautiful curiosity and nascent independence. Christ is he a magnificent aberration.

They leave in 8 hours.

NO BOOZE LIVE BLOGGING LENT, Episode 1

This isn't really a live blog, more like a, I scribbled some shit down as it happened or in retrospect or maybe some crazed and meaningless sludge from my sleeping subconsciousness that I've plastered the digital walls with prior to and during my Lenten pilgrimage this year.


Weekend prior to Lent, 28FEB - 02MAR2019

06MAR2019 - Ash Wednesday

Mardi Gras had come and gone and I went to work, early-ish and hungover properly to struggle through the hours before it was time for one last pre-Mass debauch with A at the Moosehead as we'd not gone in previous to alert the staff (Sarah, Kelsey, Carol) that we were abstaining from our usual Wednesday night hockey pints and Sunday NASCAR vroom vroom day liquoring and not to worry. We sucked down pints like arrant and sunburned tropical sailors. Mass was scheduled for 7PM but Uly got too squirrelly and we had to repair home for tea et al. before the long slow dryness of this year's purgatorial Lenten progression from sinner to penitent to forgiven.

11MAR2019

Today I decided to go to the gym after seeming to catch up on all the sleep I've ever missed. The sleep without booze was my biggest fear for this Lenten season. I've abstained before, sure, but recently it's been a daily encounter on the field of substance use with my favored weighted blanket of alteration. In its absence, I've been supplementing with tea and smoke and edibles and it's been a bit of an amelioration to the longing for that which is forbidden but not something I'm altogether okay with in its execution. Questions arise, in this state, about my long term drinking's feasibility with respect to liver enzymes and an already scarred and fatty liver and all the health rot my provider parrots ad nauseum. Almost as if she doesn't get that I've got to get through the next 12 hours with a minimum of suicidal ideation and what happens to this frame when I'm 60 takes a backseat to my continued churning into the present. Why don't more folks understand this?

Notes: 
1. Dreams are absolutely insane and memorable and nearly always nightmare.
2. Two older middle aged white dudes wearing MAGA hats and holding a Corgi puppy named Thor stock up on copious amounts of weed of a 1030 Monday morning at the shop where all the cute lady shoptenders know the puppy and benignly look away at the red ribbon of these dudes' political leanings. What a world.
3. Yesterday, did it even happen?

12MAR2019

Flight and lodging logistical horseshit with train and plane timetables and scheduling and all the inane horseshit borne from a lack of a truly integrated public transport system. Like, why in the fuck can't I just get on A train and have it ferry me to AWP. A, as in a singular, fucking TRAIN. This can't be that difficult.

Sober sleeping. Wouldn't recommend it.

The problem as I've come to understand it, and I've not read so many substance use narratives but I've asked around enough to the shades who dip into escape's gravity well, is the inimitable boredom of quotidian horseshit. Wake up, dress, work, small talk, moil, drudgery, small talk, home, dinner, diversion, wait to sleep. It's absolute bullshit. Why go through that with full on pain and reality? It's like speed running a video game on legendary difficulty. Dial it back to merely hero and you can actually get some enjoyment out of all the PvP and NPC content. Hell, download yourself a bottle and really amp up the fun buff of your living stats. Sure, I could revel in the utter terror/goodness of watching Uly and A play Chinese checkers while stone cold but why do that when I could do the same twisted? Makes little sense. 2 weeks until the oasis of AWP.

14MAR2019

Blustery day. Proto-spring. Waxwings are about and furiously chittering as they lap from pools of snow and ice melt. Self-worth plummeting; sense of fraud rising. Libido is trash. So many hours to fill.

16MAR2019

Saturday. Loneliest of all days of the week. Normally, I'd wait until noon and amble to the Moosehead for socialization by proxy with all the old drunkards there backslapping and guffawing and pull tabbing and sportsing and bell ringing and all the chintzy and low-rent sparkle-light thrills of the poor. Bottles of top shelf whisky never touched, gathering dust. I'm in the cafe right now, perusing the drama of flesh. I'm aware that Lent is supposed to be a spiritual journey and that none among us can shoulder it alone and therefore the need for supplication to the divine in our period of bodily abjuration but this is missing on the current Lenten adventure. Probably accounts for the difficulty level. Team Sleep, the soundtrack. 

The cafe is all bougie white folks while outside in the hallway a team of Southeast Asian ladies janitor the facilities, stony faced, enduring.

I've been reading Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad. I do recommend.

I Unabashedly Am Ecstatic about Patrick Stump's Vocalizations

Ain't gonna lie, Stump really kills me. Maybe I'm perpetually 12, as A messaged me this glorious pre-spring crispy day but maybe I'm just possessed of a poor taste. Analysis of anything withholding, I'll let you think of that one what you will.

Last night (several nights removed now) I ate spicy kukkik with chicken from the local Pho and Thai place native to the burg. The fallout (get it?) from that has yet to be endured, but as I finished, the bliss-agony of the inflamed broth was wholly worth it. I keep going on, doing things to this body, dulling its newness, down into decay. I'll miss it when I'm gone, but there is solace in that reality as well.

This cafe is full of beautiful women in various modes of conduct. Good Christ, send help. Last night, we made home pizza and I sat on the barstool at my kitchen island and watched A draw out the piping discs and rest them on boards and a rack and then she took up the copper accented and wooden handled pizza slicer that her parents bought us and she hacked through the crusty bread and molten toppings steaming up and up and up and I loved her more in that image than maybe ever before and she asked why I was looking at her like I was. The spell crashed.

 

I walked downtown today on a bad Achilles tendon (Christ is that older woman statuesque. I'm in a real time PVP art museum.). This morning I cranked up Dax Riggs and I saw one of the pictures of my old man and Mom on the wall in our trailer in Mississippi and the music truly grooved with that scene. Mystical and dark, Satanic, Mom would have called him, solely for the titles of his songs (Cassie Eats Cockroaches, Demon Tied to a Chair in my Brain, Living is Suicide, et al.) and various groups with whom he's been frontman (Acid Bath, Agents of Oblivion, Deadboy and the Elephantmen, etc.). There was a connection to a place, phantom I know, that infuses yet my crippled psyche, a vision of a vast river and wetlands and rot and completely divorced from the frigid sterility of the mountains.

Today I also prayed the rosary for the first time in a while. Joyful Mysteries, not necessarily my faves, but ones that focused me on the hyperperturbing nature of parenthood. I feel like there are things that I continually learn anew, in terrible and intimate ways. I could picture the surge of relief as Mary rushes to embrace the pre-teen Jesus on the steps of the temple. The other day my IRL bro posted a link about a possible extinction level asteroid strike at the end of this year and my brain went to the place where would I kill Uly and spare him the agony of obliquely starving in a post-human world or would I strive The Road fashion and shoulder on into the ashy dark of his being alive, in the current instant, in the obscene hope that he would survive, somehow. 

Like my friend Nick says, "The trouble is being a writer."

Pon, Pon, Pon-pon-pon

Been listening to a lot of J-Pop lately and I've got to say, it's akin to immersing yourself in a GameCube, or perhaps the even more retro-ly Sega Genesis platform, Sonic the Hedgehog title. Just the other day I was in the bathroom, cleaning for the advent of A's parents, brandishing my spritzer bottle of organically formed cleaning solvent as I danced, manically and with great joy, blasting the counter tops as if with a pistol and jigging wildly to the strains of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's absolutely infectious track "CANDY CANDY". I described it to my text bros as being in a real life video game but the level that was the fast one. Later, I'd watch the YouTube vid and the coronal mass ejection of cute Japanese women in absolutely baroque and garish costumage dancing and singing in their saccharine altos blew me the fuck away.

There's this little dude at work who resembles a gnome but a clownish one, one that would mistakenly dig up your radishes and apologize with a catch phrase, after which the studio audience would laugh. (A befuddled glance at the unearthed roots then pan to the camera, slack-jawed.) "Why that's just sour grapes!" (Applause and laughter followed by a contented group sigh.) This guy was carrying around a Japanese-English dictionary the other day and presented it to me and I was all, "Get that shit away from me. I ain't tryin' to be no otaku bitch." He laughed, a high pitched, disturbing staccato before mumbling something in gnomish and wandering away. I swear it was a fairy tale, IS a fairy tale, one at which I am continually amazed. More on that later maybe. Here's a cat with a field expedient rain cover lashed to his dome. HE IS LOVING IT. (SWEETY SWEETY GUMMU DROP. CHEWING CHEWING CHEWING CHEWING CHEWING. SO CANDY LIKE, CANDY LIKE, 'quack, quack, quack'.)

I've been wholesomely surprised at the high quality content of the memes the Trump presidency has generated on the tubes. I heard/read something the other day about how D.T. is the first president to understand the internet and virality, not in a studied way, but in a creature rolling around in the shit of his home environment, born to him from God, an instinctual way. It's been a great ride, one that can't last. Grab your memes while you can, even the ones that make no apparent sense to the uninitiated.(PON, PON, PON-PON-PON!)

All joy for me is gone in trying to write the serious, the Artistic. I could bemoan the loss of "meaning" in the meme age but that's vanity. In its absence, I've begun watercoloring again. The result has been absurd, grotesque, poorly executed, but cathartic in a way that slamming out 1000 words used to be but is no longer. In a similar way, reading has become extinct. So many monkeys, so many typewriters. Useless.

Uly turned three on Thursday last. (CRAZY PARTY NIGHT, PARTY NIGHT *musical score* HALLOWEEN, CRAZY PARTY NIGHT.)

Please, God, kill me.

Right Mix

This past year I completed a memoir, among other things. Now, memoirs are absolute garbage for the most part and this manuscript of mine is rife with pettiness and obscenity, a brazen open-laying of my current and past life for gawkers to behold. It's absolutely stuffed with all manner of illegal and unethical behavior and a fairly good amount of the time I wax stupid about the amount of drugs I'm currently metabolizing. The glorification of flesh and all its abuses is a key theme, a stabbing toward the Gonzo, a vault at making a beast of oneself. Oh man am I high right now.

I won't post more text, or any of it here, on the offball chance that one day someone might like to publish it for real, but if you know me at all, you can simply imagine. 

This year also saw many changes. No, that's incorrect. (Wait, you said you weren't going to do an year end post. Okay, fine. I won't.) I thought I had maybe had something to say but that was vanity. Here's a list of thoughts I had in addition to that previous sentence as I was considering what to dash off for the tubes. 

1. Plate tectonics, the earth's core, the magnetosphere, Mars's magnetosphere, Venus's magnetosphere, rate of atmosphere loss on Venus due to lack of an active magnetic field pulsed out into the solar wind from the dark belly of our sister planet

2. The Best American Short Stories 2018, trash, Raymond Carver, Miranda July, "Cat Person", Wordsworthing, Nick, Dan

3. Fermentation, especially those first fuckers who stumbled into booze and must have believed themselves to being their own god for such a creation. Civilization as an extension of such a basic idea. Fuck the wheel, without fermentation you'd never get out of caves and Art, certainly, would stand no chance of arriving.

4. Watering plants

5. Wanting to do a piece about the earthquake but remembering that Murakami already took the nifty "After the Quake" as a title. Man, fuck.

Government Peak

The route.

The objective. 

 The approach.

The view. 

 The crew.

The stalling point. 

The descent.