apt
i have been welcomed back home in proper fashion by the beautiful lull of two or three cars outside the apartment complex's parking lot arena competing for levels of bass during prime catchup sleep hours on the weekend.. i give them all the gold medal, with dollar sign medallion, if they would all simply offer me the privelage of sleep. it's amazing the walls here and how they are built; you cannot hear anything from room to room but i could be a transcriber for any conversation that goes on outside our building. my dad says this is all because of architectural regulations regarding fires and the way they spread, and so another of course passes in the wind with regard for everything legal and dictated by cost-effective stiffness. twill be very nice to again live in something built in the 20s or before. but then again my dreams do not involve houses or things.
but i also think this is quite the symbol for my head sometimes. it is so ultra aware of what is going on outside of it, it hears all the little conversations and sees and reads into every expression of those people around it, but when it comes to communicating with itself, and for the emotions to line up with the logic, for the different rooms of feelings and reasons why and what it knows is good and bad, there is no clear unity or path of coherence.
i feel like so many people in my life right now are telling me exactly what i needed to know except without words; by that which always speaks so much louder than such. it is good and bad to have this right now.
yesternight was late and everywhere and just the return to atlanty to induce the sunday sleepy grey apartment journal banter you are reading. i sat in on hugh's gig up north of the city and then we came on in and hit little five for good measure and afterwards we followed some folks to atkins park so i could remember exactly what has been happenning to the highlands that makes me sigh so large. it's amazing how uncool money can make things sometimes. pleeeeease highlands don't become another buckhead...(i think it is listening to that from the next room and not from outside the building) then late night delerium at majestic diner finished off a night with the boys. i am playing the limerick tomorrow night so i hope to see some other familiar atlanta faces.
cincinnati was truly fun and much needed and warm and wonderful and too short but just what the patient ordered. and then the meandering long alabama way of getting back here was a nice change from familiarity. i have gotten to see many new faces in the past couple of days, and i wonder how many of them i will see again.
i hope for the return of the wayfaring, safe and sound into the places they are loved.
keep the 'na(s)ti clean..
baton rouge was good stuff all the way until i left. went to the glamourdilly with my parents and bro and remembered how simple life should be. there's something good about a place where they talk like "ok baby, i'ma get you some more o that gravy as soon as they make it up back there.." i wonder if that kind of language is in the handbook when you are first employed at picadilly. i think i like the ghettodilly better than the glamourdilly in b.r. bc it's a bit more laid back and has more old people.
where was i? mrazzy has a new live dvd out, and i knew not. it's pretty fabaroso with a humongo band behind him and not always so great random personal clips in between the songs. you and i both is just such a good song. i could eat it.
so i went on up to birmingham and had the prescribed heart to heart with hugh-daddy, and stayed at taylor's new pad and got to write a bit whilst listening to him create walls of other-planetary looped guitar ambience and push the limits of what sound can come from an electric guitar. taylor needs higher life forms to appreciate his music. anyway it was a beautiful place with a landscaped pool in the back and only after i had gotten all decked out and ready to swim, i went down the steps and discovered it was arctic water and i'd be leo at the end of titanic pretty soon, so that was to no avail.
i finally got to play that moonlight music place again, and the audience was pretty smurfy. there was a standing ovation at the end of my set and it took me with about as much surprise as that gary coleman "whatchu talkin about?" face, considering i'm getting over this strange throat thing that al-queda gave us all. but i got to follow these karioke-style middle-class hip-hop thugs who thought that marketing to an audience of cracker folkies was key, so that was a good contrast. yo. i actually stayed awhile and got to breathe in the freshest air i had in forever, soaked in the tapestry of complete serendipity, and left with one of those smiles you couldn't wipe off if you tried. went with the boys on over to the oasis which is pretty much the direct opposite in venues, but still pretty cool nonetheless. we got to act all hood-like and congregate in parking lots by our cars except in a complete suberban fashion with singersongwriters streaming out of forerunner speakers before taking off into the night for cincinnati.
i think everyone here exists completely oblivious to the fact that they are in the state of ohio. because you think, yea baby, i'm in cincinnati, let's hit the streets, and somehow that thought is not congruous with, um yes, i am staying in ohio, would you like some beef jerky?
still, i am staying at the grand party household with a whole crew of exciting people i say this not because they are all at this very selective place training to try for careers on broadway, but because they all pretty much feel that they are on broadway right now in daily life as well. it is quite the goodness to feel the extremities of silence and human festivette, and i am so glad i'm around. there seems to be a nice appreciation of music up here, so we'll see how it translates.
wanderlust
my, where to begin? i believe this journal entry will be a lil bookmark to position the Upswing of Everything (vers. 6.2). well of course the most important part would be the locating of my signature blue pleather amaze-o jacket from heaven by my friend bernie who lives in rosslyn(dc) and doesn't mind my company too bad every now and again. yes i know that it is oftentimes an unflattering a trait to find oneself crazy attached to a ::thing:: but i truly think that if i were to ever lose that masterwork of 70s design that dons the inside cover of superfish and has seen many a party, city street, stage, smile, inner warmth, then it would be a true sad cloud to hover somewhere in my brain for a while. dumb, i know.
and the mook who hacked into my e-bay account and changed my password, got all my banking info, created a false debit card, and proceeded to make various ATM transactions in a foreign country, well.. um i think he probably got away with it but dammit i have filld out all the paperwork and tomfoolery it requires to contest the fraud and i think i can see the sunrise where i actually see the money i already owned in the first place. is this some sort of cosmic plan to inadvertantly help me save my money??
and i think not only am i down here reorganizing tangible things and giving them good tidy storage spaces in my old room down here in b.r., i am also doing the same thing in my head. it is good to sort of let the things that need to rest in my mind, the inconclusiveness and memory and frustrations and all the things i need to leave behind right now, do so. i am forming a new plan, one that will let me thrive and reinvent the boone in a new place.
and it looks as though at least in theory i will have the company of two amazing creatures. adam, the person with whom i grew up musically and way otherwise, and who mastered and played on my CDs and did my videos, and brandi his wonderfully sweet and artistic girlfriend who makes him realize himself so well and who is beautifully flutterish. they will be joining me where i go.
i am in the lsu computer labs right now, and it is amazing how i can feel this place changing every time i come back to it. i used to have this useless job at these labs, back when there were a whole lot of x-philes and trekkies and mostly people who wanted an organized way to do their homework. now the crowd here are the insta-geeks who know how it is, the dreadlocked white girls and the gold-teeth stoners spinning like a discoball world. ok it's not exectly the scene from the d.g. song but these people could be drinkin forties before the night is thru..
twas pretty cool to have my atlanta peeps down here for labour day mixed in with the old baton rouge crew. it is always pretty mystifying when people from two different eras, walks of your life come together and it actually works perfectly. i was in some conversation being told by most of the people how i was sort of the one who indroduced everyone and was the reason they all knew each other, and it gave me this weird sense of peaceful purpose for a moment. twas nice to see scott mckinley out on the curb consoling his sister kristin about life and boys and listening to her every detail, and i thought how lucky they were to have that relationship, to really understand each other. i always wanted a sister. a sis and bro that are close has got to feel like cotton candy sometimes.
the gig down here was at chicago's, a place normally reserved for people who have a taste for caviar, and where at ten o'clock is expected to be instantly converted to a place where live music can feel natural. well i won't say how smooth that transition was, but i did at some point think to myself how very much i was back in the state that french king sold. adam played some percussion, so at least that helped pierce thru the blanket of white noise. josh and eliot experienced a lot of the same frustrations, so i didn't feel too crazy. but it pulled on another kind of string bc i got the feeling that it was to be the last gig i played with the inventions for a while.
got the chance to hang with my cousin cheney to whom i really relate and his vunderful ex and quite the hip louie's gal and her girlfriend, and we ended up in a dogified house listening to rasputina's cover of 'wish you were here' and i left with the moon sometime late when i had no concept of a sleep schedule. i think the best places are the ones where the refrigerators have funny awkward old unflattering and candid smiling photos of loved ones and occupants with drink stains displaced every now and then. and of course where they offer you a drink when you get there.
the d.c. trip was full of fruity flavors. twas mostly filled with details, and i had a three camera one minidisc production at two of the shows trying to get daniel lee dvd footage. i think life without gail would sometimes be too frustrating to scream. in baltimore i had the dynamic trio with adam and monty on cello and percussion respectively, and it was all for a crowd mostly made of ghosts, who wantd to hear wish you were here NOT by rasputina.
i had quite a bit of time with jonathan, and i'm determined that he is going to take over the world with pinky. the dude has accomplished more by the beginning of college than most do by midlife crisis. and we ended up playing on the swings caffeinated at a park in MD in the middle of the night where we were probably unwelcome. but the swings told us, 'you must come and fly and remember that most things don't really matter in the long run, because you will return right back to the same spot you started from.'
spent a day back in atlanta catching up with jules and sending her out yonder, and then came down here in a long drive of delerium. the atl didn't even see me come and go. i did have enough time to see how well polyester burns without preplanning of any sort, so luckily i didn't leave any permanent marks on the hood. nothing i can't fix with wax and a little glue.
i met greg my roomie's new gal, and i am glad to find out that at least some people indeed use friendster for its incantated purpose. nancy is an impressive gal who i do not believe will add greg's head to others stored in her downstairs freezer. once again, back to the fact that normal people do indeed use the internet for more than everyday purpose.
and back here is good for now. adam and brandi took me to this old secret warehouse where there are endless minions of thrown out old school equipment, and it was like somewhere you could maybe find fraggles if you looked hard enough. i am constructing my art piece of motherboards and human kisses, and it has become more true to reality than i had even imagined it could have, riding in my car along with me.
so i am soaking up the familiarity before the wanderlust again takes upon my spirit, and i can throw myself happy into all the wilderness i can.
surrender
i'm still learning how not to take things personally. it's a really good skill to be able to just let things go, understand the limitations of your own control, your own perspective. and it's good to understand that everyone has their own unique bag of challenges, struggle, baggage, shit to sort thru that i as a human being can only try to begin to really comprehend, but everything beyond that is simply speculation.
still, i feel like part of my own unique insanity is that i feel like i sometimes only remember the good stuff. i'm so entranced by the beauty of the moment, the immediate power of foolish abandon and dropping all guard and surrender and the sweet enamoured naive wonder-filled intoxication of love-forging and soul sharing that i can visually see them before me forever, remember them as if they happenned a mere hour ago, smell them and taste them.
i usually however feel isolated and branded when i seem to be the only one who molds these formations so stealthily into the side of my urn. they feel so important to me, so close to me, and i hold them up in the sky, and i am then told, 'wake up, you shouldn't dream in such colors, there are things in the tradition of this world that are of greater importance, and we must all tend to our proper tasks and there is no purity of kinship, there are things wrong with what you are that you can't even know. strum your lyre and make it light, because there is enough sadness even in a day's work to sift through, there's no need to dwell on what ails us.'
i also know of the sheer power of the will to live. the thing that affects the elderly, makes them have that last bit of health for as long as they can hold on for their loved one(s) or makes them ready to go from here is just a health of mind, a sense of purpose and peace with all that is, and we can't really be scientific about the way that this works. but there is a reason that the souls that really touch us are unstoppable.
it's amazing how human creation tries and tries to be as beautiful as nature's creation, and in my own sense of it, it only is in the same ballpark in moments of extreme greatness. like sometimes i could watch someone in the very act of painting, and no matter what is being laid out before me there isn't much chance that what is on the canvas is as beautiful to me as the humanity of the hand itself that is painting it. still, i am taken aback all too often by our very will to try to forge meaning out of our chaos.
i will write soon about my daily courses in cruise-control of late, but for now i must grab some sleep.