baltimore
my word my word i have been needing to post on this thing for far too long but i guess it is an obvious sign of goodness if the living ousts the silicon representation of of the living. still, i have big value for putting it all down for to remember it by.
in big news i now have a sailing buddy. i had the privelage of heading out on the bay on the eastern shore of maryland in a wonderful old rigger made in the 60s which has invited many a person out onto the waters through its history before being owned by my boy mr adam himself. adam is not only the most kickass cello player in the d.c. area who plays with me up there and will be featured on the next album, but he is also an amazing guy with a grand life and perspective and a soothing happy vibe that is perfect for boat-hood. we sat out there on the waters and what got me in particular was how absolutely silent it is out there. just you and the sun and the light air coursing thru your hair and the fine stillness that i could spend my days seeking about the continent but just would not find. which is funny because we think of the land as still. anyway it was a good opportunity to just talk to him, to really have time to just slow down and sort things out, and it really provided some perspective for me. i got to hear about his big picture and mexico city and living attitudes and food and music and people and i got to tell tell tell of my own gistenings and betrayals. we finished with a great smallshop deli sandwich and some private reserve captain morgan's spiced rum that lubricated the conversation in its way and then we got back on land in the tiny lil town of mayo MD and i was contemplating how we were climbing from the old world icon of freedom and boundlessness on into the modern day symbol of such, and what an interesting feeling that was.
that night we headed on over to the funk box which is a really nice room in baltimore with great sound and lights and vibe, and who did we come across with the exact same idea of street-sushi-eating-and-waiting-for-the-mic-signup but none other than rob and heather from ilyaimy. it was kind of a hand-of-fate kind of thing, because we all played that night and got to see each other again and enjoy the musicality of it all and then i ended up crashing with them for a few days. It was a great opportunity for me to sort of catch a glimpse of their own plan and network with their people and see their machine. and believe me it was really nice hardware. ha i mess with them because they are such earthy people but if you can catch them at times in the house there are cyborg scenes of multilaptopdom with a whole roomful of matrixlike brains attached to their screens like in a lab or something. but i digress, it is good that they keep such habits of communication and modernity. and rob will beat your ass in scrabble. it matters not who you are.
i went to their show at the aforementioned venue, and there was a grand crowd gathered who all had a sort of inclusion to it, like a kinship within them. there was a guy who did all sorts of lightstick-like dancing but without the sticks, and at a prescribed moment in one of the songs there was a songbreak where he did this gymnastic leap with a couple flips in it, and the whole concert had a pulse, sort of a quickening and slowing, like a huge musical heartbeat that everyone was connected to and yet the insideness was not closed. it was like i was new but welcome. i like that and i kind of see it as an ideal for a musical act and its following.
anyway ilyaimy is a great and inspiring sort of rythmic musical gothic percussive roary group and i hope to now see the beginning of a long friendship with em.
i made the long haul back here to atlanta finally, and i drove straight thru in some sort of daydream. i know it was a damn long time in the car, but i don't really think it was all too bad with the shostakovich quartets and the cell time. and near the end of that road i got a call from hugh my b'ham friend who needed perspective and listening and distraction from his breakup, and so he met me at my pad at 7 in the am. we sank into hibernation like bears and then got up and watched a radiohead concert and then went out to kennisaw to play a gig of our own. the gig felt thick and creme like the walls and spontaneous and scattered and so afterward ben came along and brought us to dixie tavern and splattered us with rounds and rounds of more brown only a different kind until the spinning nature of this world and our text messages and our relationships where fully clear for the night and the band was too loud and bad and so we had to go to sleep like animated bugs that slowly become still after they've been sprayed with chemicals. hugh has gone and i think he has found some clarity after we've talked about every corner of his situation, and now i am left with silence.
i do need to make some noise tho, as i will be playing bass with josh and eliot at their gig thurs at eddies and also i'll be opening up the show. i'ma go practice with them and think about all that i left out of this entry.
l in the world of e
feel as though someone just punched me as hard as they could right in the middle of my gut, and someone put something in my drink to cloud my brain. i feel like as i get older i well learn not to build up bridges and towers of expectation. i don't expect, because noone gets anywhere with expectation. but it's the hope that kills me. there's nothing i can do about that- without even thinking twice it can bellow up like the biggest ballon there is and lift me into the sky. maybe that means that i'm not yet a cold boxed lemming of a person, but it's the hope that still bites me hard in the end.
i've become so accustomed to smiling a certain way. i have marvelled in the pleasure of diving backwards onto a cushion with the sheer goodness of warmth and understanding and connection. now i don't know where to dive. i will do a belly buster, and hit my nose on the bottom all in this same dive.
whenever you make a phonecall, and within the seconds of ringing you can sometimes sort of think for a second and establish what you are gonna say, you are ready to begin the conversation, you can hear yourself saying it in your mind, and then, the other person answers the phone and says something totally different than you even expected them to say, and you have to respond differently to that, and you are thrown way to the side and you don't even go into any semblance of the type of conversation you thought you were even gonna have. but i guess the distinct beauty of it is that it is just an interaction of two unique people, and no matter what you expected to share, talking to another person is better than talking to yourself.
anyway d.c. was fun. i recorded two songs in college park and i think they sound really good- it will be a really welcomed starting point for what i now create. i got to see parkton md and the fireflies and goodness therein, i got to go to an amish maket, i got to walk down wilson and talk with bernie, and go eat crazy mexican food with bernie and kay, i got to meet rob and heather from ilyaimy and hear how much they absolutely kick ass, i got to feel the random mass of humanity in motion that is the metro, i got to rock the hell out of dr. dremo's, and i got to finally see the movie i've been wanting to see forever. before sunset is absolutely everything i would have wanted it to be. when i first heard that they were continuing along the glory of one of my fave flicks of all time, before sunrise, i most definitely had my doubts and premonitions of how they could botch that idea, but the movie they came out with was done right and had me smiling, giddy, saying 'ah, yes' the whole time. and the ending is just too fabulous, too much. you must go see. we started out that eve going to see a play named bedroom farce, but by intermission when it was clear that it was a bit contrived, a bit too british, and a bit mildly acted, i was like, um, yea, so... before sunset?? indeed. i need to think about what truths that film has for me right now, right this very time when i am feeling like this. give me a shout if you feel the inclination, k?
recrudescence
really fabulous fourth. there isn't too much better than breathing in the air of simple luxury in the virginia highlands in the heart of the city that i love at the mac-daddy pad on the fourth of july. dave and matt were grilling, and their fridge was full of cold ones, and there were even strawberry daquiris being made, and it was a grand informal gathering where everyone who came was feeling relaxed and cool and pretty much like everything was exactly as it should be, for the whole afternoon and eve. we all shot the shit, ate, jammed some music, watched ferris, blew up things, met new folks, played with the dog, talked, and grilled some more.
and some of my old high school buddies have been in town. ben has been hosting them and showin em the different parts of the atl, and i have been along for time blocks only limited by my own ability levels of testoserone ingestion. apparently i had been slipping. but the daily doses of conversation about personal bowel activity, beer, baseball, belittlements, and primal objectifications of the opposite sex have been regulated good and proper for this healthy young american buck. i think i'm set for a good year now. did i mention i got bootleg seasons three and four of felicity in the mail? i'm so damn excited.
all the while, the particular feeling of perfection and absolvement and nostalgia generated by the fact that you can pretty much drive unto any main part of this city on this night and stop your car on the side of the highway overpass to watch dynamic bursts of colour in the beautiful atlanta night sky is not new to me. it gets my brain fluttering about what has driven on past me in this lifetime. i've had a lot of pauses for this world, but it has not had a lot of pauses for me.
i feel blessed to be where i am. i feel good today about being here on the east coast, in the mecca of the South, with a bunch of friends who speak my name not because of caste or duty or obligation, but because they simply want to. there are so many different histories in this land, so many hard times and struggles and sacrifices and perfect calls of the ironic hand of fate that i can learn about in the tip of the iceberg of known anecdotal family history of anyone standing around here, and yet here we are all standing around here. it's like we are given this huge ocean of humanity to soak in and learn from, and we've come so very far, but then again not really far at all. we could not have this day without the conversation inevitably tinkering at the haunting truths about the world that we all try to forget on a daily basis. but our collective conscious does not even begin to comprehend it. we are comfortable.
~~~~~~~~~~~
it's amazing the race of technology that i have known even in my little lifetime. i can clearly remember not so long ago when the general social perception was that ...you are sophisticated and truly hip and upper-class ...if you own a cellphone. and before that i can remember a time when cellphones were nill, when, if i wanted to meet somebody in the quad sometime after a class at lsu, it would have to be spoken about and arranged beforehand with a set agreed-upon time, and for us both to be there then was the only way that would work. before that was highschool, when people wrote checks and could be caught unawares if their favorite band was coming to town, and to find something by address one used a map of that city. in junior high we marvelled at the graphics on the new nintendo gaming system available right in our own homes, and before that, there was the atari. my 3.50 watch has more memory than that. damn the atari rocked. there's such goodness wrapped up in the simplicity of what it was, like an old model T or something. beautiful. well, now i'm all into this:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=8114730146&ssPageName=ADME:B:EOAB:US:6
yes i got a great deal because of bad titleing and such, and it's cool, they fit the whole dang thing, games and all, into the very joystick we used. this is gonna be the cool trendy gift for the gen x-ers yo. anyway they have an activision one too and also one by bally, the pac-man people. these rock my face off. and unlike newer video-gaming, i don't need a job at IBM and a few hours studying a manual as a prereq to understand what exactly i'm supposed to be doing.
anyway my old fart laptop is getting very heated now. i think in the wintertime i can just give it a few things to do at once and then place it in the center of the room. it is ancient; 4 years old. time to rest.
we've created monsters
so i have decided that i am really sick of physically attractive gals' conversations. you heard me right. people who have been bred their whole lives to think that they don't have to try, they don't have to think of twenty insights, they don't have to make me laugh, they don't have to twist the language, they don't have to be engaging, because why... well because they are pretty. that's always been quite enough. it supplies attention, it makes people try doubly hard and make up for the bulk of the conversation, it gives them triple decker fringe convo benefits, and to be honest, i ain't perpetuating this system anymore. i'm not saying there aren't exceptions, and i'm not saying this is a completely groundbreaking thought, but most conversations, IMs, exchanges with traditionally attractive females are just plain BORING. damn! get some spine. get an opinion. surprise me please..