indecision clouds my vision...

I drove from the east side to the west in the rain with earplugs in my ears, a roaring engine, a continual metallic grind that turned out to be my exhaust pipe dangling on the ground. It was so loud that when I got to the shop, the mechanic came outside to meet me because he could hear it all the way down the street and gave me a ride home so I didn't have to walk in the cold and wet.

I appreciated it, but ended up going back out, bundled up in layers like winter, to pay rent, circle around a block of streets I once frequented more often. I keep hoping I'll see my old Puerto Rican neighbors because I kind of disappeared last year, but it's still too cold. Kids were getting out of school and the old men were sitting on park benches like they always do.

Having a couple extra hours for hibernation has been good, spent in classic single chick style with the neighbor's kitties, episodes of Daria, tea and mango ice cream. Any attempt at creativity has eluded me for awhile now, and it seems I'm only good for snarky asides and I'm going to try and conjure up a painting for some friends getting married next week though I can't decide what I want to do with it besides some colors already laid out and some designs to work with. I hope the inspiration comes soon because it's just not there right now.

stillness for now

I've been everywhere this weekend yet I finally feel less exhausted, restored by art-and-dinner-talking-past-midnight, new tuneage from the library, good hanging out at a birthday party cut short by duty calling at the radio station where I definitely kept it rocking in the free world, though I told the guy who called up and requested the Doors that he could see if Michael Stanley would play "Texas Radio and the Big Beat" for him since I had goodness by way of latter day glorious noise to get to.

playlist half recalled:

Ataxia - The Sides
Afghan Whigs - Beware
Kyuss - 50 Million Year Trip
Kylesa - Spiral Shadow
Sleater Kinney - Steep Air
Sonic Youth - Purr
The Bellrays - Stone Rain
Bad Brains - House of Suffering
Fugazi - By you
Throwing Muses - Pandora's Box
Isis - In Fiction
Hoover - Route 7
Ameseours - Faux Semblants
Les Discrets - Svpijagr & Freya
Mira - Space is my middle name
the Dead Weather - I can't hear you
Mark Lanegan & PJ Harvey - Hit the City
Mudhoney - Hate the Police
MC5 - I want you right now
The Stooges - 1970
Soundgarden - Overfloater
Jesus & Mary Chain - Snakedriver
Jawbox - green glass

It's another coffeeshop night, and even after a mug of tea and a mocha, I'm not feeling inspired enough to do anything epic even though I'm doing everything I can to get into writing mode. I did work through a few designs in an old how-to-doodle-your-own Celtic knotwork book I got from the library and scribble some poetry so it hasn't all been for nothing. Sometimes it's just good to get out.

incoherence

I had all good intentions of staying up late last night to get my creative juices flowing since I go late in the next day, but Slowdive left me passed out on the couch next to a cup of herbal tea. Shoegaze was my first musical foray into the realms of non-corporate radio, thanks to older and cooler friends who used to be into the goth scene and introduced me to the likes of My Bloody Valentine and other Brits who preferred making glorious noise to having charismatic stage presence.

If I ever start playing in a band again, I want to do that too.

The sun coming through the windows and the faded green of the front lawn has me restoring order to my domain, talking on the phone with my mom, plotting gardening options, what can I grow on my balcony in containers (all that southern exposure), and will the next people downstairs be bothered if I get adventurous on the side of the house or the front yard.

And despite giving myself a self-imposed deadline for art/writing pursuits, I've been an even worse slacker than my creative partners. Too much L7 and giggling at the absurdity of post-Gorbachev Pravda. At least I can write better than these people, with the heady combination of Putinista propaganda and Weekly World News-worthy items that remind me of Calvin's show and tells and book reports in the greatest comic strip of all time.

It's an "Epic in Emergencies" when people dial 911 for frivolous reasons, three giant spaceships are evidently heading for Planet Earth, while the comments are full of weirdos talking about vengeful Greek deities, the usual conspiracy theory cabals, and general strangeness.

Meanwhile on the homefront, the brave Russians are struggling against Killer Icicles, the Olympic Bear of Discord is causing all sorts of drama, Moscow lavatories are a real test for Western tourists. Not only that, but the defense industry is revealing "striking novelties," and the Kremlin considers the space program "childish."

Any chance of a revolution here anytime soon? Nyet.

I know it's a matter of time before the inspiration hits again, and it'll come, it always does.

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.

a surprising masterwork of total mediocrity

After the onslaught of Creepy Old Men last night, I'm thankful that the new student worker shares a similar sense of humor in regards to matters of the geopolitical. I also began working longhand on some sections of what will probably be my very own literary work with the timetable of Chinese Democracy, since at the very least Kevin Shields created a masterpiece of a record before eternally shelving that lost My Bloody Valentine followup and I have not done so.

I've got notebooks dug out from the parents' house last weekend full of jottings of conversations and stories from my senior year onward, that I might dig back into. Much of it was terrible writing of the quick documentation variety, capturing trivial conversations and awkward social dynamics for posterity that I would have forgotten otherwise.

There's some splice and dice action so far, mixing fresh prose with reworked other writings that have seemed to work decently upon reading. It's not great literature but it's not total trash. I'm just hoping that it can be something solid and believable. I'm trying to render details and not waste words, piling on layers of description and emotion, calling to mind the smallest details like album track listenings and coffee mug sayings and the patterns of 1970s linoleum.

Few writers have tackled this territory, with its strange culture of its own, and I want to do it justice in a way that's neither sentimental nor cruel. Too much fiction does that already, and I don't want to do it too.

through the looking glass, through the windshield...

3 cups of coffee and I'm still trying to awaken, and best be kind yet firm with the onslaught. It bothers me to no end that those who are in theory going to teach the next generation of children and take care of the down and out seem totally clueless most of the time. "Those who can't, teach" has a whole new meaning.

It seems unfair that Snooki can get a book deal but people would probably rather read her ghostwritten tales about the Dramatic Shores of Jersey than my own particular strip of coast.

I'm trying to start over on the Great American Rustbelt Novel because I can't seem to get anywhere with what I've written. It's not for lack of source material, but a lack of ability to string together a cohesive narrative with characters that remain interesting and seem somewhat believable, to write something that I would want to read, because there's a gaping void when it comes to describing the landscape that I call home, with its general strangeness borne out of existential despair in cheering for losing sports teams, fatalism with a gnawing sense of Catholic guilt chased with a bizarre sense of humor. "Through the Windshield" came close, but was too Bukowski-ish for me and it'd be nice to have a tale that wasn't a murder mystery or bland boosterism.



So I keep trying and observing and trying to keep writing every day even if half of what's in here is totally lame, seeking revelation in writers far superior and the general weirdness of the everyday.



And this needs no comment.