Listen here, or read below...Part IMusic is cut like a grid of urban streets – connected, unmoving, and planned by researchers who study the past and future practices. Why is this when mountains and rivers are cut and shaped at random, never to duplicate. Somehow they all fit together in one giant sphere while interacting, colliding, conducting science experiments on each other constantly for those who choose to observe. Non-stop Chemical reactions; wreaking havoc, all the while perpetuating serenity and perfection; and life for all will continue, so long as the law of conservation applies.Rappahannock, Blue Ridge, Northern Neck, Appalachian, Accotink, Mount Vernon, Luray Caverns Chincoteague, Sandbridge, Great Falls, nor-easter,  Hurricane Sandy, T-Storms, that big river that runs through the capitol and out to the Atlantic. And so, “The Sun Also Rises.”Part IIYour spring Saturdays were spent pulling sheets of plastic over thick metal wires that arched over beds of sweet potato plants in need of incubation.  You had to wrap your fingers around it, digging your knuckles into the wet sand that stuck on its surface, because the plastic created a giant sail against the stormy wind that wanted to lift up with the work you already completed.  You had to hold tight, keep it down low, and sandwich it between the ground and a thirty pound sandbag to secure it.Summers were spent walking up and down the rows of plants in the hundred degree heat looking for weeds to pull.  Once in a while, if your older brother was able to get out of going to the farm with an excuse of having a church, school, or scout activity, you would be in charge of managing the irrigation.  You learned how to bleed water into the furrows by starting hand-pumped siphon pipes that curved over the side-mounds of irrigation ditches they drew from.  While you waited for the water to flood the length of the field so you could move the pipes to the next set of rows, you could take a nap in the shade of the large wheel on the tractor.  Or if the plant canopy was wide enough, you could lay down just underneath the leaves in a dry furrow until the alarm you set on your watch went off.After harvest, the crop would be taken to the packing shed, where there wasn't much for you to do except watch the workers sort the produce, listen to the holiday music playing over loudspeakers, and stay out of the swerving forklift's way.  The railroad tracks ran behind the facility, and you and your brothers would find pennies in the ashtray of your father's truck, lay them across the track, and scour the surrounding rocks trying to find the flattened coins after the train, blasting its horn, rolled over them.  At the end of the week, a few large wooden bins filled with sweet potatoes, too small or blemished for the market and not spoiled enough for livestock feed, would be loaded into the bed of your father's truck for delivery to church on Sunday.  After the services, families would crowd around the truck and fill their bags with as many sweet potatoes as possible, shake your hand, thank you and your family, and for weeks to come, tell you how delicious they were.Some consider Fresno the heart of agriculture in California, midway of four hundred miles between the metropolises, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and hugged by giant Sequoias to the east and the salty-cold Pacific beaches.  Growing up in a farming family, you used to think you wanted your future to have nothing to do with agriculture.  Sometimes when you are sitting at a desk in a cubicle, staring at a computer screen, you want go back.Part IIIWhen you finally went back to visit your hometown you couldn’t help but feel disconnected, and the way things were made less sense to you than they did when you lived there.For example: You planned to meet a colleague for coffee at 7:30 a.m. at a place across town from where you were staying. As a dedicated pedestrian you decided you would put what you remembered as an often trampled bus system to use. In your twenties you bicycled the same distance in less than an hour, and could easily drive it in ten minutes. You figured if you left your host’s house by 6:30 a.m., you should make it on time. Good thing you examined the bus system’s website the night before. The closest stop operating that early in the morning was three miles away, and the schedule’s timetable said it would take an hour to get across town.So you got up early and left at 5:15 a.m., jogged the first half of the distance to the bus stop, and walked the rest of the way, getting there ten minutes early. You were the first passenger to board the public limousine, and as you climbed the red carpet steps you made eye contact and solemnly exchanged “hellos” with the driver and dropped your exact dollar-twenty-five fare in the mounted mechanical piggy-bank. About ten other passengers were collected through the duration of the trip from different stops, where the driver was presumably ahead of schedule because after the passengers boarded, he would pull out the sports section of the local rag and read in three to four minute segments before rolling it back up and putting the vessel back in motion. These pauses allowed you to take notice of how peaceful the town’s main drag seemed at that hour, and how well the sound of fingernails being clipped travels from the back of the bus, and how furious Coltrane can make the color blue when you finally attached your headphones. You made it to your stop after a forty minute ride, twenty minutes ahead of schedule, and hiked your final mile to the café and arrived with another glorious ten minutes to spare! Using this free time you realized that it didn’t matter that things didn’t make sense to you because you didn’t live there anymore. Miles Davis left what one might perceive as mistakes on his recordings, but you call those moments “personality, soul, human, and beautiful.”Your Twitter is to you as my blog is to me, as  her photograph is to her, as his song is to him, as our painting is to us, as their movie is to them, as its book is to it.You headed to the train station - on foot, of course - by way of some of the most desolate streets in the city. You always found them desolate getting to train stations. You and a man gave each other the right of way while passing on a sidewalk. He was wearing royal blue house-slippers whose color seemed exceptionally vibrant in the low angled sun’s morning light. The belt for his oversized gym shorts were his two hands, each clutching fistfuls of the synthetic and porous cloth at the base of his crotch. Your eye-contact and “what’s up” head nod made him turn his head away from you toward the other side of the street, as if something had just then called for his full attention.You finally caught up to who you speculated was the bread-winner you had been trailing for a half-mile. He stopped walking at his public limousine stop and turned to face perpendicular to the street. He wore a generic back-pack over one shoulder of his security guard uniform. As you approached him, you fantasized one of those great, old-fashioned, early morning greetings you’ve heard legends about. So you encouraged out loud, “good morning!” The worker bee made no movement except for his neck as it slowly pivoted his head, allowing his laser beam eyes to penetrate through his sunglasses’ lenses and follow your UV blockers as you continued walking by, willing to wait forever for that exchange.Two talkative and tattooed ladies jumped into your foot-stream. You caught up to them when one stopped to remove a hitchhiking rock from her shoe. A little discouraged, you mumbled, “morning.’” The non-archaeologist of the pair quickly responded with a “Good Morning” as clear as you ever heard it in your life! All was right with the world! It was as if that reliable and consistent chain café popped up to spare you from having to drink train coffee, and they still sold bran muffins so you could finally get rid of that horrible case of traveler’s gut before you boarded the train with all the other princes and princesses and kings and queens of the valley. That train; for which you would still be ten glorious minutes early!

Switching Title

Big Trucks, Low Morale, and High Speed Limits

Listen to the audio here.I realize by now that not publishing a creation quickly after its birth can have some problems. The writings from this chunk trouble me, and are compiled from the previous year. When I was putting them together, and especially after I read them out loud for the recording, a lot of it didn't make sense to me.I suppose a person's terrestrial formulas can morph, adapt, recede; or just plain evolve over a year's time. Chances are, the state of the rest of society will likely wander about in the same amount of time. I'm not saying contemporary creations can't be relevant in the future. I am saying the strong winds of eternity blow the relevance boat quickly past the "now."But knowing when something is done is another challenge.(Apparently, all I needed this time was a preface!)Here's something I don't want to give a chance to miss the boat:Original thoughts.I wont transcribe the rest of the readings at this time. It's too much work that feels weird to me, so listen to the audio if you like, which is also weird but I'll allow it in this context.Special thanks to the film Howl - about Allen Ginsberg's writing of the same name - for the motivational spark. I'll go warm up the coffee and finish watching it now.My Hand, My Grandmother, and a Spider

Ketchup

(Listen to audio here)Mary took another job in retail. Before her first day of work, she read online reviews of what current and past employees thought about their employment experience.  Common statements from female reviews said something along the lines of, "it's not the typical 'Boys Club.'"  A co-worker later told Mary how strange she thought it was that she made more money than anyone else at the store, and worked the least amount of hours.  She chortled as she said she was hired by a manager who loved women.  Another co-worker replied that she had heard about that.Mary trained for one hour with a large male co-worker on the basics of stocking the milk gallon shelves.  After that, she only entered the cold storage room if a desperate customer wanted something that was not on the shelf.  Often, she didn't even have to go through the door because she was able to ask the male working in the section if he could see any back-stock of the item. And if it was a male customer asking, when Mary tells him she will go check if there is any back-stock, usually the man will tell her to not trouble herself.  She'd tell him it would be no trouble at all, and the man will insist she forgets about it. She spent many of her mornings, early in her employment, training in managing the flowers that were for sale.  Her trainer was a small, middle-aged, and single mother named Linda, who wore modest amounts of makeup and kept a manicure.  Linda introduced Mary to the other employees who passed by the floral section.  After each introduction was over, and the passing employee stepped away, she would mutter a few words to Mary out of the sides of her unnaturally colored lips.  Usually, the comments were about which co-workers they were sleeping with.  Linda would say, "hands off him. He's dating So-and so."  Or, "don't worry about her, she acts like that to everyone.  She needs to get laid, if you ask me."  Or "forget about him.  He's a queer, and he's sleeping with the regional manager!  What's weird, is that he seems so normal..."  And, "why are the good looking ones always queer?"Mary thought her floral trainer resented the other co-workers because during each introduction, the employee would say jokingly, "whatever you do, don't listen to Linda!"  Mary would always smile awkwardly, and glance back at Linda.  Linda would always respond by saying something like, "Oh, go to hell!"  Or, "Blow it out your ass!"  To Mary, Linda's tone always sounded like she was saying more swear words than she really was.After not-too-long, Linda was able to spread the word to all the male employees that Mary was single, and had no children, and was definitely out of their leagues, so they could forget about asking her out.  They all started hitting on her any way.  She turned them all down.  Mary didn't understand why everybody else in the world only seemed to care about fucking everybody else.  She felt uncomfortable every day at the store, and when she thought about quitting, the thought of getting good health insurance and a 401k made her reluctant.  Then she remembered that she would have to wait five more months to get them because she would still be within the probationary period until after then.  She concluded that everybody will die sometime, with, or without health insurance, and retired, or not.  Mary quit her job.Soon enough, Mary found another job in retail.

Before April is Gone

(Listen to audio here)Tonight:Fiction, fact, dream, and waking life all translate to media."Stuffy," is the word I thought of when I walked into the auditorium.  This is after the phrase I mouthed to myself when I stumbled upon the place, which was, "holy shit!"I saw a man in a slick suit open up his wallet, pull out a twenty, and blow his nose on The President.  Marble pillars, and on the podium, a wooden gavel, and the table next to it, a laptop computer with an embedded glowing piece of fruit.I left the mansion after the lecture on a new three dimensional sound reproduction technique, and ended up at bar called The Big Hunt.  I remained standing as I drank my I.P.A. and watched a feather-weight boxer on the flat-screen.  He was called Kid Blast, and he taunted and roughed up his opponent.The pliable and synthetic hand-rail that accompanied the descending escalator to the metro station rubbed against its mechanics and honked like a dissonant saxophone solo.Coltrane, where are you?The capitol is where money is, and the sons and daughters of money get to play there.I'll go back tomorrow to blow some more money.I know how to pretend,and how to pretend not to pretend,and so on....

Coltrane, Where Are You?

(Listen to audio here)He was in a green room for a show that wasn't his own.  Drinking the the six pack that belonged to the performing band, he realized each one of his friends was in love with his girlfriend.The wind was stronger than the air conditioner.  A stronger urge to return home hovered over his consciousness.  At least as strong, it was, as the knowledge that home was ordinary and he would want to be somewhere else in a matter of weeks.  A few weeks, if he's lucky, only because the length of time he was away might have allowed a different season to approach and take residence, and allow an opportunity for a change of scenery.  Even if there was no change in the weather, he was headed back now, with no plans of drastic destination changes.  He simply checked in online for his return flight, including the midway connection flight. He might just walk out of the layover airport because he had never visited the state before, except on previous occasions of layover.He noticed it was a bit warmer at home than when he left, which meant the winter that everybody was holding out for, being late and possibly extremely snow-storm ridden, didn't happen, and probably wouldn't.He went to his coffee house to read and drink amongst the other locals, but he had no friends there and could only have short conversations with the Baristas that knew how to answer simple greetings with words instead of blank stares.So he thought about his feelings of music ownership, creation, and piracy.  These beliefs of his would rotate about every six months from thinking everything is free, to the complete opposite, and everywhere imaginable in between. Currently, he was sick of the iPod experience, except for listening to albums he physically owned.  He like the idea of buying CD's and holding on to them... again.  Soon enough, he will give them away or sell them because they are merely objects, and replaceable.  This act helps him move on to new music; being forced to, because he doesn't have the option to pull up something familiar and nice.And to the Barista's defense, the job must suck!

Green Room

(Listen to audio here)The slower you are, the lower you are.  You can own a jet.  You can own a car.  You can own a bike.  You can still have your legs and feet.  Maybe, one day, you can own a rocket-ship.If the day comes when people can teleport, we'll see how many of us still choose to walk.I always tell myself not to write when I have something I want to write.  The urge is to share it, but the fear is that it wont be good enough to share.  Then I tell myself to go read Henry Miller and learn how it's done.  Then I'll be able to write well enough to share.  But then the moment is gone.I wanted to write about a the first coffee shop I went to when I moved into the Outer Richmond District in San Francisco.  Now I don't remember much.  But the longer I leave it unwritten, the more soul escapes the experience.It was small.  It had my favorite breakfast: eggs, hash-browns and toast with a coffee for four dollars and ninety-five cents.  That price seems about fifteen years old in a restaruant.  An  Asian lady ran the counter while, what I can guess, her husband cooked and her son did everything in between.  Every inch of shelves and surfaces were used.  It didn't look dirty, just cluttered.  It looked like they used the cheapest ingredients.  Canned coffee, bulk mustard...I sat down on a stool at the counter next to a guy.  He immediately got uncomfortable and sort of scooted over as far from me as he could without falling off the stool he was sitting on.  That was okay to me because I felt a bit uncomfortable as well.  It was either I sat next to him or the only other guy in the place at the other end of the counter.  He looked grungy, near his sixties, with greasy long hair slicked back, which must haveonce been blonde; now it was grey with only the slightest gold where it shined.That's all I can say for the coffee shop now.  It seemed more interesting when I was there experiencing it.I go out looking for inspiration, and it always comes, but usually I am unprepared to docuemnt, reproduce, or express it properly.Anyway, the old guy left right before I did and I noticed he got into a shabby landscaping truck.I planned to take my late Grandfather's old thirty-five millimeter camera out and take some pictures around my new neighborhood for the rest of the day.After hiking about for an hour or so, I came to a place called China Beach on the North-West edge of the city.  There was the old guy from the coffee shop.  He was stripped down to his underwear on the roof of the bath house that sat at the  head of the beach, bronze as a god, basking in the sun.It wasn't until I left the beach that I noticed his landscaping truck in the parking lot.  Then I thought it was somehow a profound moment.  So I went back and took a picture of him.I thought he might be what I will be like in thirty years.Now I should go read Henry Miller.

Bronze as a God

(Listen to audio here)I had many discussions about creating media with my family this past week during my visit to the cold East Coast of the United States of America.  What we always decided was to always go through the motions of creating and not to worry about what will come of it.I had at least one coffee every day there.  One cup was not from Starbucks.  It might as well have been, except it was in downtown D.C. where we sat inside at a cramped table with a giant wall-window view of the street-corner intersection.  We watched men and women walk by in P-coats as taxis almost hit them when they crossed the street so they flipped the taxis the bird.I always take the lid off the to-go cup so the coffee has time to cool before it hits my lips.  The froth was rippling on the surface of the drink more than I had ever noticed.  Swirls of small paisley patterns whipped fountains of steam into the cool room temperature.  When we left, the fahrenheit of the coffee was low enough that I was able to chug it down so we could enter the Ford Theater to watch "A Christmas Carol." 

Back in sunny California...

(Listen to audio here)I received an email from a friend about her upcoming first art show.I made bacon and eggs for breakfast, like I have been all week.  I mixed a punk-rock recording I made with a friend of mine on the previous day and sent the mixes to him in an email.  I walked down miles of Ocean Beach with my shoes off.  I noticed more sand dollars than ever in my life.  I saw one that had a pinkish color to it and picked it up and realized it was alive.  It had dozens of little feelers reaching out to grab a hold of something.  I put it back in the sand.  I got back home and watched the second half of the Alfred Hitchcock movie, "Rear Window."  I napped a few hours.  I bought a half pint of whiskey and some rolling tobacco and caught the bus to the mission district where the art gallery was.  I met my friend and talked to her about her exhibit.  It was about going through a process, hoping to find something, and finding nothing at all.  I jumped back on the bus to return home.  Between transfers, I urinated in a dark corner between buildings.  I ate left-over pasta, rolled a cigarette and sipped a bit of whiskey on the back porch and watched the fog lurk through the gardens behind people's houses.I will watch another movie now.  Probably "Walk Hard - The Dewey Cox Story."

A Day in the Life

(Listen to audio here)A man walks out of the coffee shop from which I am sitting down-wind.  His perfume is vulgar-sweet and un-natural, and smells like the shopping mall across the street.  He stalls at the patio table next to mine and fumbles in his pockets.  What's this?  The scraping sound of a match being lit, then the odor of its sulfur.  It battles and begins to nullify the department store stench, when soon, the acrid smoke of the man's cigarette hits my snout.  This is bliss!  He walks twenty feet down the sidewalk, finishes the cigarette, jumps into his red and black Smart Car, and drives off.  I plunge into my bold cup of coffee.With musicI'm trapped!Like a worker beein rhythms,in patterns.If you find yourself at the coffee shop at seven in the morning, you are received with the sun on your back, keeping you warm in the cool breeze.You may also find that you can't get a word in with Miller because every printed sentence of his makes you think he wrote it for you, and you think why, and by the time you're done you may find yourself with eyes glazed over, staring somewhere between the page and the street twenty feet away.A passing gentleman says, "morning" to you, as if he knew you were lost in your memories, and you snap back into the present, observing the worker bees, rushing in and out of the coffee shop.I will acquire a synthesizer.At a coffee shopa conscientioussmoker discussesthe etiquette ofsmoking.Then, after a finaldrag, she throwsthe butt into thesidewalk's gutter.Just me and my tea.I don't even like tea.I like coffee.Finally Punk

Coffee, Tea, and Misery

(Listen to audio here)Biked to a closing Borders Bookstore to scour, but I was still too cheap to purchase anything. Had pizza and beer.  And salad. And watched football.One coffee. Started listening to metal.Metal and churches mix.Insomnia.  Add the Relapse Records Sampler.

Biking, Add Metal

(Listen to audio here)The crow is the first and the loudest of many birds to perch on top of the tallest tree in the morning.This if preceded ten minutes by the Sun's early arch rising above the treeline.Which comes after dozens of pairs of legs cross my view of the sidewalk between the brim on my baseball cap and paperback.Which was given birth by a bloody sinus and the thought of the necessity of raking leaves.Now I will rake leaves.

The Early Crow

(Listen to audio here)The reasons for which half the leaves on a tree remain in Summer, While the rest turn into Autumn may be scientifically explained, just as to why the sky is still grey even when the sun is up.  But as long as I cannot explain it, the observation is a youthful one, a wonder.Classic beauty is easy to distinguish.  Watch the trends in T.V., art, fashion, music, architecture, radio, automobiles, technology, literature, movies, interior design, photography, web and graphic design, cuisine, hair styles (including facial and body), and pornography.Shape and color, sound, smell, feel, and taste.Can beauty bypass the senses?  Beauty may be experienced by the mind using representations of what the senses can interpret.It is classic beauty because a majority agrees it has represented beauty for an extended period of time.Other types of beauty include: original, unique, "in the eye of the beholder."A unique or original beauty may only be perceived by a unique or original mind.  This can only occur upon some thing in existence, either physically or mentally.  A unique or original mind may then perceive the thing as beautiful and attempt to translate its perception to others as beautiful.  If there is any agreement, the thing has a chance of becoming classically beautiful.It's colder tonight than it has been in a while.Even in Suburbia you can hear the sirens wail at night.It's about all I hear, aside from an occasional Big-Rig hauling down the freeway a half-mile away from the house, and crickets in the yard, and the second hands of clocks, ticking away at sixty beats per minute.I lay in bed, my eyes reading a book to my brain, regularly distracted with thte question, "Is what I do important?"I also miss my friend who gave me that book.  And now that I mention it, he's an asshole.  So I don't miss him much any more."Symphony of Souls" by this guy.

Symphony of Souls

(Listen to audio here)The cop in front of me in line at the coffee shop said, "I'm sick," in response to the barista's auto-greeting-question.  Then he got free tea, as usual, I'll bet.  Or maybe there are a few, kind, working-class baristas left in the world, who give free drinks to cops, on their dimes, in exchange for a little extra security for the rest of us at the  cafe.The only thing more interesting is the potential meeting happening with the owners of two vehicles in the lot, who happen to parked next to each other, who's licence plates are LIECHSR and (handicap-symbol)RUAGOD.And the only thing that could top that would be if the DMV randomly issued those plate ID's.Goodbye cops.And by the way, that's what you get when you drink tea.

Are You a God?

(Listen to audio here)Jumped on the horse.Up hill and against the wind.At the stop,Sweet and sour cologne found my snout,Leaves approached and passed,As did automobiles.Circled the castleAnd stormed the wallsAnd slay a beast.Retreat to fight another day.(An abstract mall poem)

Up Hill and Against the Wind

(Listen to audio here)Four nights ago:I listened to an of album of hers on the train ride out on my iPod.  I didn't like it much at first.  It was something else that made me want to hear it.  Her voice and words.  A drunken night in her apartment a few years ago sums it up.  So drunk, I couldn't remember how it ended when I woke up the next day, and soon after when I was at work, I had this feeling of bliss.I tried to preserve my hearing by keeping the headphone volume low, so the crushing and sliding sounds of the train and its track mixed into the music, so much, so that when the album ended, I didn't realize it....And the youth catches on to doom.  As a music and art genre.  It used to be that people would tell me about these styles that were new to me, saying they've been around for a while.I think the next act will use loop pedals.  I saw that ten years ago in Seattle, and it was boring.  Merrill Garbus did it right.  The loops on her recordings sound nice, but her voice was the meat!  Every chew squeezes out more flavor.The DJ just Put something on that shut the crowd up.  If you didn't guess, it's some really cute music, with melodies that could be in a children's song, and loads of arcade game sounds.Next, a recording of a guy I knew played over the speakers.  In fact, I received a Facebook friend request from him earlier in the week.  I felt important, and relevant for only that brief moment.You get shocked once, and then you're numb.  You realize it's the same from coast to coast, in the land of the free.  But you'll never be satisfied until you've seen it all, which is impossible.  So you keep going, hoping for something new, or for something to stop you....And what a beautiful spring night it was, for the last day of January.  Finding the buzz, the pulse of the city. Nobody ever writes romantically about D.C.  It's the same as every other city; late twenty-early thirty somethings trying to find mates, and telling each other intellectual jokes to prove they are going to college.  Everybody else building families.  Poor people seemingly lounging about.  Widows and widowers occupying their time with work, the fitness club, church, and maybe, if they're motivated, one other activity they like to call "a hobby."I sat with Coltrane all the way home.  After I pulled up the driveway on my single speed bicycle, I popped a beer from the shed and sat in the back yard with it and the warm air, and finished "A Love Supreme," and pretended to be in a time of sixty years ago, with Kerouac.

Romancing the Capitol

Fiction, fact, dream, and waking life all translate to media.

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Switching Title

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