granted reprieve.

100 word themed writing contest entry.
why not.

--

a lifeless stretch of quiet. the warbling of time and math. concepts eating concepts. gas the color of god or obtuse angles. there is no beauty in the vacuum light, just the substance of liquid black. no frost to build from moisture, no screams to hush. The Endless proceeds its surgery on the innards of a timeline. no womb, as this is motherless; no vector as there are no points.

pause.

and in the center of sudden ripples, a horror of organism billows forth. such is the moment of location. the We as We of planets and stars were born.

lost my first letter.

that would be the letter "a".
the only way that i now use this letter on my keyboard is by pasting it with ctrl+V.
seriously.
i don't know why i always have bad luck with things like this.
i don't "take good care" of all of my things, but i certainly don't trash them.

irrelevant.

i watched a documentary the other night about bukowski.
i have yet to read the man in depth. he's dirty and straight forward, and his poetry has no flourish, and his fiction is cold and poor and realistic. reminds me of the places selby has taken us. i didn't like the man, and i can't really say that i've found his genius yet. i only say yet because i know i'll find a line or two that unlocks a new image of him. something that makes me go back and reanalyze the things i'd written off. it's happened with dozens of records, and i'm almost positive it WILL happen with this author. i wait for it.

there was this one moment that i did completely connect with him on though, a moment that i know only too well, a moment that few people have seen, but people have seen. this is not my spotlight, though. he was reading a poem, one that found him in the shower with his version of her and she washed him. he reads this poem, and turns the page, reads a word or two and loses it, completely loses it. the kind of breakdown where you aren't sure if he's laughing or not. but he's not and you know he's not. he gets through the poem and he's rocked and he tries to play it off but he can't, he just can't.

i know that moment, that split-second,
that change of temperature, that feeling of her face between your palms,
that light in the room when you last saw her
and how it lights your blood up.

she's there and she will
always
be there.

he sums it up perfectly, and if i never understand the man's works, or never absorb the man's full repertoire, i can say that this is what i've taken from him and carried with me:

there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than
too late.




i'm trying to keep it
together lately, but
i've been someone else
entirely.

clean colors.

jason graham

oh, wow.

[also: 1 & 2]
[[ryzhov & andreyev]]

i thought we'd moved past this.

i've been trying to think of ways to talk about this,
to text about this,
to write about this,
but all i can say is

WOW, MAINE.
fucking. WOW.


--

OH.
and here is a way to feel completely different about bears. really makes me rework their genetic makeup in my brainbook.

antennae.

i've been on a crazy NPR kick lately. it really started with me having short-lived trouble with my zune, leaving me with only access to FM radio. THAT started in florida when i went through a car wash without being able to put my radio antenna down. i recently took the antenna off entirely, leaving AM radio a thing of the past, and intermittent signal pickup of the FM stations. the only one that does work on a regular basis is 93.9, WNYC. and with all the random things that i find on that station, i often will check out what's on there FIRST before going directly into music mode.

i've heard a lot about NPR, and i'd always sort of assumed i'd find my way to it somehow, but radio just isn't one of those things i'd ever really found myself getting excited about (except when Stephen A. Smith had a 1 hour slot on ESPN radio). but starting two or three saturdays ago, when driving home and hearing a broadcast of a prairie home companion, it's been something i keep finding myself coming back to.

some of it is hilariously overliberal. but for the most part, i enjoy the news that they give. my favorite moments usually end up during specific segments though. i listened to an interview the other day about a woman writing a book about cooking in gangster movies. WHAT. then two mornings ago or so there was a woman talking about republishing a french cookbook from the 1930s that weighed 5.5 pounds. so random. GTAIV actually had a station on their radio that mocked what these types of stations are about, and i'm surprised how accurate it actually was.

the point of this post though is to share a show i heard last night while driving home from work. the show is called Soundcheck, i guess, and the particular segment was highlighting the importance of mystery in music. they had a guest on by the name of carrie brownstein who was in sleater-kinney (i think the term riot-grrl applies here, but i'm not sure; it's been YEARS). well-spoken, intelligent, and very articulate towards many of the points that i found to be sectioning off music that i find LOVE for, and the rest of it. if you can, take a listen to the show, otherwise let me know if you want to talk about it. it definitely points to some issues that i know i've talked about making a clear divide between bands that i can love and bands that... well... you know me.