click and clique

Less nervy this time, showing up and plugging in. No worries of doing cover songs for which I have disdain that smacks of unadmitted musical judgment. She has demos on her laptop recorded with a synth, like larva waiting to explode the chrysalis in glory, and my hands stretch into chords, coaxing out reverb-drenched riffs, bending strings, fingers gliding up and down the frets.

I love that it's not just verse-chorus-verse that there are pieces and parts and interludes. Having to keep time and remember how all these go together is a new thing compared with Peter-Hooking basslines to try to make pedestrian suburban punk sound more interesting. Maybe I'm more of a prog-head than I'll admit, but I love that I have the freedom to let out my inner J. Mascis that it's more than three chords. No vocals yet but hopefully those will be forthcoming and something beautiful. I'm more into catharsis than aggression these days, and if this all falls through the ability to string chords together and maybe pair those with some verbiage seems like a less mysterious art now that it's been tried.

We are still shaping, trying to figure out the sonics, turning notes into chords, and I'm scrawling out chord progressions, codes of letters and numbers on pieces of notebook paper, adding minor chords, attempting to flesh out these skeletal ideas into something I hope I can say I love as much as what I've heard others do. I'd love to do something this beautiful.



I saw this band open for Agalloch earlier this year and wasn't expecting something so incredibly beautiful with a name like that, which is probably the point. Really should have bought the album then, but there's a new record coming out, and I fell in love with the cathartic crunch and shimmer of guitars and sinuous basslines and I'll make good I promise this time.

I guess one never knows how these will work out, but the act of stepping out and getting over the nervousness to see what happens has been liberating in itself, and gives me another thing to look forward to after sitting at a desk and pushing papers, ivory tower style, negotiating the tricky terrain of a world of grownups who still jockey for position in the pecking order, whose words and demeanor belie an ultimate dishonesty and embarrassing insecurity.

My circle has always been open to some extent to those with some degree of compassion and a lack of pretension, as I try not to judge others based on tastes or initial appearance, but when someone wants to join the Order of St. Drogo, someone who's denoted other compadres as being "weird"(if you think that about him, than I'm sure you're saying it about me) and seems more interested in gleaning workplace gossip and being in good with the Powers That Be, I'm not inclined to extend the invitation. It's not the economics or the upper echelon with which I take issue, but the lack of trust. Besides, this is the coffee pot of Peonage not the water cooler, no juicy gossip, just the indulgence of lifelong geekery for the stranger side of all things. And, of course, that's just too weird.

More and more I find myself putting up walls, weighing each word so carefully, smiling wide to distract from my narrowed eyes, because I know that if I don't care for someone, it's really hard to hide. I don't know how to truly be dishonest.

And I sit in the halls of power, listening to the conversations of those above, as wording is shifted and the dialogue is not born out of genuine feeling but a constant mental calculation, and I see the masks drop enough to recognize them as such, finding what is underneath so distasteful that the coverings seem like they make sense.

sculpted

I wasn't happy with the results of some of my last projects, but this last kiln batch had three gorgeous drinking vessels in it, one dramatic with its red and blacks, one swirling with blues like the ocean, and one with the perfect drips of white and orange over dark blue. Reinspired to pound out clay and shape into more graceful forms, incising and rolling, immersed in the act of shaping. These were meant to give away but they're so pretty that I have them sitting on the dining room table as inspiration while I plot future projects and refires of the duds.

It was so beautiful out that after dinner we walked down to the carnival where the life-sized cardboard cutout of Pope Benedict stood watch over the revelers singing Italian standards, eating greasy food, and screaming on gloriously creaky carnival rides. Bad tattoos and cutoffs, hipsters and guidos. There were even quarter games for the kids, gambling for the grade school set, colorful ducks floating in an inflatable kiddie pool.

I didn't have my camera or any cash, but one of my good friends from the suburbs to the east is coming over for a night of chillness that will probably consist of what most of my hanging out with anyone consists of... some combination of random discourse, loud music, food, and hanging out on the beach or wandering through the city. I'm easily entertained and like it when others are just as easily amused. It's the pleasure of the company after all, the destination is the afterthought.

I've set up a kitchen chair on the balcony, to pick up the neighbor's wireless signal, do some writing without being social and listen to Dead Can Dance while being the premature old lady watching the world go by. I've loved the sky these past couple nights, the way the moon ascends through a lace mantle of grey clouds tossed across the sky. I tried to take pictures off the balcony last night but they didn't come out so well, so I just try to remember, and think of samurai writing haiku about cherry blossoms in the twilight.

The inspiration has come from so many places, from stained glass and the myriad hues and shapes of leaves and flowers, wisps of sky and glimpses of sun, reading and listening and trying to soak in everything. There is only one true creator, and we made in that image have that impulse, but can only document the beauty of the light and what it reveals and rearrange the matter already in place, repurposing and recycling, taking ink and paint to paper, shaping the clay of the earth into things of use and beauty, painting with chemicals and flecks of glass and crystal, to catch a glimpse of vision and be able to hold its gaze for just a moment.

if I get to choose I'll take something real...

Processing my frustration through conversation and creation, sculpting clay, scrawling verse and prayer, ripping out crabgrass in the garden, supplanting it with tropical-looking hostas and things that smell lemony, and maybe my standoffishness towards certain individuals has no small part to do with what they do.

I'm out of here in an hour to cook dinner for some friends and their kids, create, be in the sun, drive home listening to some good tunes and just to be gone for a little bit. I don't take many vacations, sometimes an early exit is good enough.

golden

There's more people than I'm used to here at the usual coffeeshop hangout, as I finish up my take-home quiz, drink ginger peach green tea, attempt to restructure the purgatorial novel along the lines of 'Dubliners,' scrawl feeble attempts at verse, and relish the solitude among texting teens, undergrads studying calculus, and a crew of middle-aged regulars.

It's nice to be somewhere where nobody knows your name but it's not unfriendly. The only person who's tried to talk to me was a bum who said I looked like a writer and tried to sell me a four-color pen in exchange for bus fare.

I keep thinking it's warmer than it is, not looking forward to going back outside because a thermal and a hoodie doesn't cut it yet. I don't want to go back out into the cold when it's so warm and golden in here, with the Christmas lights and the buzz of caffeine, the hum of indistinguishable conversation and muted music.

blood and coffee.

Having received a snow day call from the place of employment and the heat having been fixed, it was lovely to have a day at home to get things done and also do some superb slacking of the drink tea on the couch wrapped in blankets, listening to shoegaze, and reading.

I picked up 'The Tale of Genji' awhile back but didn't get through the first section, but this translation I got from the library last night is way better and I'm enjoying it so far, with its depth of detail, the inner life of the characters, and a culture and time period that I know little about make for good reading. It's over a thousand pages long so there's a lot to transpire.

Also started carving some wood blocks too, but I sliced my finger with the v-gouge and realized that I had no bandages in the house and that paper towels really don't do a good job. So after helping my downstairs neighbor shovel us out, I went up to the drugstore to get some.

I didn't realize I was still bleeding until I was standing line and all these tough guys behind me were like "Dang somebody got fucked up in here look at all that blood man" and then I look down and there's a trail of it around the store and big drops of it all around me. It's still pouring out and everyone is looking at me weird. "That's from YOU? You been playing with knives again or what?"

The lady there gave me another paper towel, and a customer card that I'm supposed to bring back but I am now That Girl with the Bleeding Finger All Over Rite Aid and I'll probably go to the Walgreens on Clark now instead. I bandaged it up in the car since one of the side benefits of being a former art student is that I'm damn good at DIY first aid after unfortunate incidents with etching acid and utility knives.

I've migrated to my favorite coffeeshop to do some writing before meeting up at the art center for creating and then dinner. The music is the Amelie soundtrack, the coffee is good (can I go a day without coffee? Yes, but not well), and I've done some revising and an extra page of writing so I'm not feeling too badly, and I'm snarking with the good Lady Pebbles Montoya (an old friend of the family from way back when and also a should-be-more-famous personage on the Internet) about what the Jane Austen Fight Club would involve.

I never thought I'd get snow days as a grown up but these are beautiful things.