what do you want for nothing?

I spent this morning sleeping in, not wanting to wake up from my cocoon of blankets and my grandma's feather bed, staring up at the ceiling talking to God and trying to reconcile the workings of my brain with my soul and its frequent dark nights. There's a disconnect there so often, between the heart and the head, something not quantified by biology, the reconciling of the rational and the impossible to empirically explain.

I was too depressed to attempt to make coffee so I poured myself a bowl of cereal and sat on the floor because I really don't have a comfy reading chair, listened to a lot of 70's punk and general rockitude about being angry young and poor and such. Thinking about "Hiking Metal Punks" made me feel much better, due to my Parma teenage metalhead roots and corresponding absurdist sense of humor, which tells you everything you need to know about the state of mind I'm in. And damn, the Bellrays are a good band, especially live.



This weather and the constant struggle to not get sucked into the oblivion of working and sleeping. Now that life has become less chaotic, I've been painting on the weeknights when I'm not making bowls and dishes, and itching to start playing music again in a creative way.

Church music has kept me fresh in playing with other people, and having a bassist who also digs the sounds that I like makes it fun, but after listening to lots of power chords and waves of shoegaze guitars and realizing that yes I do have a singing voice that isn't totally terrible. My pedals are at my parents' house, and I'm thinking about borrowing my dad's reverb box that wires into the amp to make it even more echo-y and amazing.

And I haven't done anything remotely zine-ish since my early twenties but upon conversations involving pretentious literary journals purchased by academia, rejection letters, access to cheap printing, and the glories of poemetry and DIY ethics.

I miss the evenings spent with my Lorain County crew, staking out a table at Arabica with ample supplies of scissors and glue sticks, using a typewriter to make it look more authentic, thinking we had all the answers (damn I was a self-righteous as only a punkass 20-year-old can be), and loving that smell of fresh carcinogenic toner when we got our finished creation back from the local printer.

We put out about four or five issues, including one completely absurd one made on a Giant Eagle copier at midnight, but matrimony, writer's block, and general geography left us on a hiatus as permanent as that of Fugazi, and non-LJ blogging has enabled me to process out my thoughts in real time.

These fine ladies have done an awesome job compiling some of the Rust Belt experience, and have inspired me to contemplate the possibility of more culture in these parts. It used to exist, and definitely still does, but I'm so out of the loop both by slackerness and connections that it's making me want to create my own noise and invoke the glory days of "Our Band Could Be Your Life" that I never lived through.