Rediscovering Lost Loves & The Ones Proving to Be Left Lost

I have been slacking off my record collection (ok, cd collection...no vinyl supremecy here) in the last three years and my need to discover new music in general. In some ways I am completely at peace with this decision and in other ways I feel as though I am neglecting that little sweetheart to whom I once doted over. In my guilt I have rerocked the cd stack lately and because I have gravitated towards a person who now steals music (aaargh!) almost exclusively, I feel the need to pay homage to the forgotten and neglected.

Here is my woefully incomplete list of things that have made me happy (in no particular order)...

Low-When the Curtain Hits the Cast
---I am loving the slow dirges about heading to the lake and northern Minnesota in the winter

Hum-You'd Prefer an Astronaut
---Easily their best. Given the minor play that "Stars" got on MTV it is not my favorite/favorite song on this disk but I am putty for the songs about raindrop collections and insects.

Jawbox-For Your Own Special Sweetheart
---Again, easily the best Jawbox disc. Though I may have come to this late it defines a turning point in music listening for me. I never get the William Carlos Williams poem outta my head. Pickles of ecstasy indeed!

Jets to Brazil-Orange Rhyming Dictionary
---Truth be told, I don't like this album but "King Medicine" always makes me think of living in California (even though I never have). Jawbreaker was your peak, Blake.

The Sea and Cake-Nassau
---Pretty little rock ditties from a pretty little rock band.

Aarktica-...or you could go through your whole life and be happy anyway
---atmospheric ambient goodness that reminds you of late fall/early winter and the chilly contemplation of another winter spent wondering about love and life.

Yo La Tango-and then nothing turned itself inside out
---Yeah, just peachy.

Boards of Canada-Geogaddi
---if the entire album was predicated on underwater lava vents and high school Advanced Biology filmstrip narration I couldn't be any happier.

Fugazi-13 Songs or Repeater
---I spent weeks on cold floors listening to this circa 1997 Missoula, Montana. Thanks Colleen for letting us crash and Loki you were oh so small.

Also, big "yeah" to math rock (particularily The 90 Day Men), Icelandic isolation, M83, Petracovich for her pleasantness, occasionally E6-ing, Godspeed You Black Emporer, pretending the world was ending with William Basinski and his fucking pretentious Disintigration Loops (cheery!), namelessnumberheadman (where the hell did I put that disk?), blue screen life is so tired but hooky as hell, Brand Nubian is telling Punks to Jump Up to Get Beat Down Again, muthafucking DJ Quik in the house, Aquimini is getting way too much play but I missed a lotta "chuch" so my shit is also oft-confessional, Kristine thanks via Emily for getting me to listen to new music lately even though every song was written by the same pussy-ass white dude in tight jeans and ironic beard (I love it and you).

Winter used to come once a year

Nostalgia = Distortion
I'll never know the degree of contortion


Looking through the rearview mirror of past mistakes and triumphant happenstances sometimes is nothing more than a clouded version of an incorrect reflecting pond. In this I take much consolation. I can no more change that blurred image than I can grasp the next moments in my hands and sculpt whatever I deem necessary at those seemingly important times. This is a sometimes painful, perplexing and satisfying continuing lesson. I hope those that are most directly influenced realize that I undertake these endeavors with an intentional aim at trying to do what is best, though I often fail. But that is the most humbling. It is with both light heart and toughening skin that I realize it is OK to fail, that it is absolutely necessary to at least try. I wholeheartedly apologize to all hurt I have caused and resign myself to living each day firmly fixated on the search for what I used to believe was unreachable. I miss the vast and distant rememberance of the impossibly infinite skies on long drives. I miss the decaying brick and the ghostly steam of the chilly city in the mornings. I miss the hanging banshees clinging to the winter chimneys of my childhood, the crystalline snowpack so blindingly blue-white in the predawn. I miss believing and for that I will try. I will continue trying until I no longer cannot.

This is for me.

Just look hard and think hard and you will find it

Irreplaceable as the sun

could this feel any less warm
and possibly when I come up for air
no one will be angry anymore
til there is need for anger again

stonefaced and beatific
tomorrow is sure a stubborn mistress
only she always comes with repetitous force
perhaps then we will eat and drink the day

trembling is the dawn
held in mirrored dewdrops
in frosted meadows
hanging from limping fingers and branches
kings fall out of line
ill-tempered concubines are bound no more
no more to the shackles
gallows and the cross

attentions are always the first to go
bellow the flame bigger every single night
omissions are soon to follow
until time and rememberance march backwards
to this we are tethered

yellowing teeth are a just reward
of hidden meanings and times long gone
unless you figure this out before its gone too

Ask Me About Peak Oil

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It really has nothing to do with now but it was fun as shit to write

***some of you may realize that this somewhat fictionalized story does not take place at the Powers Apartments (pictured left) but rather at the bucolic Billmeyer Apartments (and some McApartment in South Fargo) located across the street in sedate downtown Fargo, ND. Please forgive me. Surprisingly I could locate no pictures of the Billmeyer Apts. Maybe it burned down with my memories because unlike the Powers it was not a fireproof hotel.***

With the buzzer ringing over and over all I could do was writhe around and emit a few pathetic moans. The door could have been a billion miles away for all I could comprehend. The one piercing memory of this blackening night was the vicious disapproval plastered all over her face and the menace of her tensed hands squeezing those beloved hips. She was a vision of steaming hatred staring at my limp drunken self through the kitchen window. Should’ve given her a key, I guess. I vaguely reached out towards the door like someone blind and caneless swiping at a dodging adversary. This was not going to turn out well I remembered stammering and spitting into the carpet. As it turned out this was the beginning of the end. But I moved in with her anyway.

The streets were mirages and the August heat pounded off the blacktop, a perfect day for moving. My parents had graciously donated various sundries from their house. I had assumed at the time it was a supreme haul of most treasured booty but it was probably all shit my mother didn’t want anymore. Regardless, a few castoff Oriental rugs and Malaysian wicker animals made me seem quite the fashionista and one surely capable of settling down to donate some sperm for babies. Yeah, she was amazingly impressed. She even gave me some stupid card with a Dalmatian on it thanking me for not filling the place with blacklight posters and furniture made from Busch Light Draft longneck cases (the Dalmatian card was an ode to the dog I didn’t have but wanted, more of a pat on the head saying, NO FUCKING WAY). Everything was off to a great start, I think I even got a pile of groceries the first day. For the first few weeks it was all naked prancing through the apartment. In retrospect it was most likely way too hot to wear any clothes anyway. We lived high up this triple-stacked Brownstone. Apparently this stately building was a haven of past ill repute and the ghosts of heroin addicts and lonely prostitutes scampered around the labyrinth basement. They never bothered us though because even ghosts weren’t stupid enough to climb the six thousand stairs up to our fledgling nest. Or maybe the ghosts had a pact with the forever bathrobed eccentric creature who lived directly below us not to pass the second floor. She certainly predated anyone who actually died or lived here. She was born of the brick and the mortar that we had always assumed was our rather mundane foundation. This endearing woman would always slide her body out her door and ramble such sweet nonsense to anyone who walked by. She was even there the night my fidelity crumbled away with that amazingly seductive Cuban goddess. As we danced, flirted and soaked ourselves in that steamy nighttime rain shower, that lovely old woman was crafting nicknames for us while watching us like Room With a View. Fred Astaire and Grace Kelly would frantically tear off each other’s clothes on their way to defiling my relationship bed. I thought I was getting even but I was merely beating the girlfriend to the punch. A shallow victory was hers but she never got much of a chance to exploit it. But that is jumping ahead a little bit.

I must have been crazy but on the way home from work I couldn’t stop myself from hitting up the bar. It was smack dab in the way between work and my increasingly naked girlfriend (on the off-night she wasn't shaking her ass at the lame meatmarket club I vigorously avoided). On more than one occasion I could look from across the street at my budding exhibitionist girlfriend strutting her admittedly gorgeous figure around the apartment. This show was definitely not intended for her chronically late boyfriend all reeking of the telltale grease from the bar but nonetheless I pretended it was. At the twisting of my key in the door she would quickly hang up the telephone and think herself clever for uncovering the mystery of why I arrived home two hours after my shift. Like any other rational guy who knew his girlfriend was way more attractive than he deserved, I feverishly ran awful scenarios of explicit phone sex through my buzzed-up head. All these Latino and black men she hung around with would be sitting on speakerphone plotting how they could dispose of me while masturbating to my girlfriend tell them of her unsatisfied sex life at home. While I worried about my prowess, her frequent cheating and the laughs they were having behind my back my girlfriend would finish her grand inquisitions of my whereabouts, somehow manipulate me to pleasuring her fully and yet again neglect to give me a blowjob. It was a good thing I only worked four nights a week. But there was still the upcoming wedding. Our polarity would finally and dramatically intensify, electrify and completely implode in on itself.

I was half-surprised that I was invited to this wedding and for sure my girlfriend was no desired entity at this blessed event. My ex-roommate and for all intense and purpose ex-friend was marrying a sudden and explosive ex-crush of mine who fled my silly life partly because of my soon-to-be ex-girlfriend. Heartsick of the horrible games my girlfriend would play at my expense, I withered and heaved into a state of pallid indifference. Fortunately at this time the friend circle was massive and escape (at least momentarily or drunkenly) was always an easy option.

More To Come…stolen credit cards, betrayal, longing, a crushing eavesdrop, darkened room drunken yelling, threatening late night phone calls, broken collarbones, more sex, a classic job resignation, angry abusive gay hotel managers and finally exit, then more hate-fucking...it's all here and true (sort of).