New Jersey, Part II

Immediately after exiting the concourse, heading toward Newark International's baggage claim with the midday sun pouring in through fixed windows, bleaching everything, it is impossible to not notice that you are in New Jersey. New Jersey is (& might always be) New Jersey. Even after technology and quantum warfare and modern evolution and post-modern evolution and popomo evolution has changed the look, the feel, the size, the climate and the dominant species of the rest of the surrounding world, New Jersey will still be in red sweat pants, talking too loudly.

If you ever find yourself in western New Jersey without a car and needing to catch a mid-afternoon flight out of EWR I highly recommend you charter a taxi service and have them pick you up not at your shitty, cheap hotel but at a local pizza shop: the conversation on the ride will be better than it would have been otherwise and you'll get to the airport with ample time to get through security. Time that is best spent dozing off in an uncomfortable plastic chair outside your gate because EWR is a lot of things but a conversational airport it is not. Nothing even close to LAX where the friendly conversation of fellow travelers can easily get you through the forever-long wait your flight; especially if the fellow traveler is an Indian man who goes by the man Dennis, owns and operates a long-haul trucking company out of San Diego and is waiting for his flight back to SD, having just arrived from India where he picked up his mother (her first visit to the USA).

On that taxi ride from western NJ to Newark make sure to pay close attention to the surrounding environs because NJ is a deceptively beautiful place, but this natural beauty is something that can easily be missed (and is completely unnoticeable from the plane).

Save for the occasional plane going down and/or hijackers, airports and airplanes are relatively safe places to be, all in all. Still knowing this, we all still usually keep one hand on our carry-ons while dozing in our uncomfortable plastic seats, waiting for our departure and it's not hard to imagine that simple observation stretched out all thin and used as a metaphor for our entire lives. It is once we are on that plane that we usually relax a little which is ironic because it is once we are on that plane that the danger-slash-risk to our selves and our property heightens but it's not like you or anyone else can go anywhere or do anything else so why worry about it anymore, just greet the person sitting next to you, give casual attention to the flight attendant/drop-down television as they/it details out the federally mandated safety instructions and cross your fingers (again easily imagined stretched out and metaphorical and etc.).

After you have arrived home (maybe just maybe EWR to DEN, DEN to SFO, SFO to EUG), if you can, at all costs avoid immediately going back to your apartment/townhouse/condo/etcetera with your plants and your domesticated animals and your silverware and your (non-drop-down) TV and your bed. Instead go get some ice cream or a hard drink or a small bite. Tell some of your stories about Dennis or the red sweat pants or the woman from Helsinki who programs computers and sat next to you on the way to Denver. Tell these stories to friends or lovers, revel in it all for just a little fucking longer; talk about the beautiful trees and the taxi driver and all his wicked NJ stories, make it all last as long as you can because once your back at home, drinking some tap water from your own glass, about to lie down in your own bed and turn out the light, then it's over.

Cross your fingers.

the ways things go

the world sweats and it swells and then it steeps for too long it steeps far past the point of acridity and it sweats and it becomes impregnated and as it steeps it waits, it plans, it needs and it waits.

the world needs and waits and sweats so long it makes me thirsty and it sweats and steeps and swells so much it makes me hungry and i'm not sure if i'm either hungry or thirsty but i know what both mean and i'm both, i'm thirsty and i'm sweating, i'm in need and i'm hungry and i've got its game and it swells and joins forces and i'm both thirsty and hungry and i'm confusing the two, i'd drinking when i'm starving and i'm tossing away water when i'm parched and this is the way it goes

this is not the way it goes

and i'm counting seconds between contractions and the hospital rooms aren't like hospital rooms at all, they have televisions that swing on mechanical arms and pivot on mechanical elbows, nurse with 'time for our treatment' in the voice parents' use with their babes and asking me why i'm counting, if i'm counting up or i'm counting down and i'm always counting up because up there is an infinity and down you're only pointing to zero and the arm swings back unagreeably and you take your medicine with the same groan and i'm counting, counting

this is not the way it goes

life and the world and the universe swell and breathes our air and we together deflate because of it but we don't mind, we don't miss our old air, we file no complaints as if we even knew which department to bother as we cheer on its growth as we're counting

we're joined at the hip, this is how it feels, siamese twins that have seperate mouths, when we are hungry and we eat what tastes one way to me tastes a different way to you and we have seperate eyes though similar your blue is not my blue and my brown is not your brown but the conscious acknowledgment of these differences causes no distress as we're joined at the hip all the way up to the shoulder, sharing the same lungs and the same stomach and the same heart and this is all of us, every single last one of us joined together at the hip, this is how it feels, and so many of us reputable surgeons and not a single sharp edge in any of our pockets but we have lighters, some of us are smokers who have lighters and matches for their cigarettes and once the final push comes and we've all stopped counting and we burn the umbilical cord through because not a sharp edge and once it is finished we all let out that breath we've been holding in our shared lungs, holding and holding even while we counted and we finally exhale and the baby takes its first breath and it breathes in us, all of us, and we deflate some more and the universe and the universal swells just a little more and the nurse brings the baby back into the room that isn't like a hospital room at all and we all look the child up and down and your blue that isn't quite my blue and the child's blue that is another hue altogether but we're too tired to smile and the nurse requests some more, 'give the lady a little air ladies and gentlemen', too exhausted to say a thing and if we could we'd ask for a drink of water or liquor yes once enough strength has been regained we will give our best smile and say excuse me please but if you will, a little water, i'm a little thirsty

this is the way it goes

Years ago I wrote a song titled ‘The Golden Rule and How it Applies to Songwriting" and while I won't bore, bother or burden us all with the entire lyrics, I would like to quote the chorus right quickly:

“We only write songs about what is wrong and broken
So I must conclude: happiness is misery
Where you’ll find me on your doorstep singing
Songs about what is right and worth mending”

I guess I want to reference this song for two different reasons:

1. For the most part the songs I wrote (and my writing in general) have always been centered around those things both wrong and broken. In the prime of my lyrical outpourings (late 2003 to probably around the summer of 2005) I was a machine: I turned out song after song after song, with nothing to impede my path. My job took up only 25 hours of my week; I lived alone in a fourteen by eighteen foot studio apartment; I didn’t own a television, a bed, a couch, a cd player, a car or a cell phone. My body had to satisfy its need for nutrients via coffee, PB&Js, store brand potato chips and magnums of bottom shelf White Zin. My weekends were typically spent sitting in front of the world’s cheapest, shittiest microphone (given to me when I was fifteen and spent every other day at the only local music store playing little punk and hardcore riffs on guitars much more expensive than the Mexican made Strat I had at home; given to me by the owner of this music store because he felt sorry for me, of this I am certain) and my Tascam four-track (at the time one of the most expensive things I owned, all at $100 retail). Weekends that weren’t spent with the mike, the four-track and a couple pots of coffee where spent with friends, drinking and bar-b-queing and generally accomplishing little more than a unearthing more material for more songs for the next weekend. Yes, I’ve gone back through all those four-track cassette tapes and I’ve catalogued it all and yes, it is outrageously ridiculous: clocking in at just over four and a half hours, me sitting alone in my studio (with some other people-slash-places mixed in. And on a side note, any musicians out there with experience recording to four-track, alone, just you and your instrument, will undoubtedly understand that this four and a half hours is but a small (read SMALL) sampling of everything that occurred between those four walls. A pathetic a beautiful time capsule.) But so I’ve catalogued and transferred and half-assedly mixed down all these cassettes, and now I, a closer-to-normal-than-not citizen who does own a car, a (although it quite small and useless now with the digital switch) television, a bed, and a couch I found behind some random apartment complex last summer, along with all these typical things I also possess seventy-plus songs on my laptop all composed by myself, all lofi and all (mostly) genius. And all (mostly) about things wrong and broken.
   
   Wrong and broken choices (and is ‘broken choices’ understood? You have right choices and then you have those decisions that at the decisive moment, and for a while after that even, seemed so very right or maybe just a little right but right nonetheless and then somehow it all went haywire). Wrong and broken relationships, friendships, days and weekends. Wrong and broken family interactions. Drinks poured by cute bartenders but wrongly poured. Broken drinks that didn’t fix the night, didn’t fix everything and anything, even though the cute bartenders swore that they would. Broken guitar strings and guitars tuned wrong. Broken hearts and all the wrong reasons to even own a heart at all. These are the things I wrote songs about.
   
   And:


2. In the seventy-plus songs I found on cheap cassette tapes recorded during that time in my life the only song I’m regretful that I don’t have a copy of is this one. I have innumerable songs detailing the titillation and trial of love affairs, the fallacy and faultlessness of old friends; the semi-destructive idiosyncrasies harbored by my mother like a pipe-bomb unaware of its explosive power. Within these hours of songs and pages upon pages of lyrics that all waver between either what is wrong or is broken there isn’t a single song, a single page, about things right and worth mending. Sure in there some place is that one song about how the Minutemen re-band, instigate a political coup and because of this we all enjoy a new Golden Age and in there some other place is my horrible cover of F.Y.P’s Toss My Cookies, but beyond fantastical poeticism and bad covers, this opus of mine speaks of nothing else but pain, dejection and heart break.

How ironic it it that now, as I meditate on my past – a past only so distant as to be defined as my past’s future – I find myself longing, searching for and missing for lack of discovery the only song I know that I wrote that attempts to picture a brighter, happier future; a future that I didn’t ever have enough faith in to even commit its luminance to tape.

the new year and amicability

We suffer through our diversions. We wander down streets made sterile by our unceasing minds, our paths appearing aimless to those strangers whose eyes we do and those whose we do not meet, appearing aimless yet still full of aspiration (although direction, we will quickly and easily admit, might have escaped us completely). In what feels like the oblique loneliness of post-coitus we constantly stir, constantly, as if we were forever sulking or breathing or just causally biding our time on the furthest plateau of love and not lingering on a while there on the other side of love where everything is fresh and exhilarating and full of promise (though the hint of loneliness is already there, like how the pretensions to glory of summer already possess the odor of autumn, just the slightest whiff of the oncoming rot of autumn).

No we convalesce on the other side of love, the one whence the rot has began to run its course. We breathe the rot in, let it settle into our lungs where it creeps into our blood, finally putting up curtains over the windows of our hearts. Curtains not intended to block out the light but to accentuate it, to add an extra layer on to and over the light itself, to help make the light become more aware of itself, more aware of what and where it is, of what it is illuminating, of the world that is surrounding it, that it is a part of, that it will eventually die in. In a word: the curtains hope solely and innocently to dress the light in the same way that Adam and Eve dressed themselves after eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Still, we suffer through our diversions. We haven't given up on the technicolor world so much as the technicolor world has forgotten about us and our chiaroscuro dreams. Forgotten about us in the same way that a child will forget her imaginary friends or in the same way that a piece of untouched fruit, after growing too heavy, will forget the tree it has fallen from.

And this is us and how we suffer: too heavy, too ripe, too sweet.

holidays and mythologies

Waiting at a red light on the way home from work I find myself stuck behind a large, blue ford truck (and I'm straight-up sorry 'cause considering how much time I spent with beer guzzling thick necks in Northern Idaho (and yes, they capitalize that 'northern' shit up there) who can tell you the make, model, year and engine size of any and all pickup trucks simply by the smell of the in-question truck's exhaust (and this after said truck is 1.5 miles away) I should be able to come up with something a li'l more descriptive than 'large, blue ford', but alas, I am sans manliness) but so I find myself waiting for that aforementioned red light to blink ov'r to green, and no, eff that! the freakin' truck was something like a goddamned '03 450 Ford with a, uhm yeah an extended bed and cab and had one of them extremely tall Leer canopies on the bed and yeah! that's what I was waiting behind (I bet you can smell my parfum de l'homme wafting outta your friggin' monitor!!) and after I'd given up trying to stare down the driver in their rearview mirror, me eyes began to just randomly roam around, as bored, post-work eyes will do, and it was just as this large, blue ford pickup truck was pulling away that I noticed their (vanity) license plate: blu ox.

blu effing ox, I say to myself and instead of accelerating which the etiquette of driving demanded, I continue to sit there for a little while, chuckling to myself. Now those of us who sadly inhabit the northern hemi are all quickly spiralling into the winter months and if I didn't pitch my tent here this license plate probably wouldn't have affected me so much. If it were summer, even spring say, I wouldn't have thought twice about 'blu ox', but it's winter, and so I did.

First, and obviously, 'blu ox' takes us to Paul Bunyan. Good ol' Paul Bunyan and Babe and all the great things which that comedic duo did, Arizona and Oregon owing them especial thanks. May, June or July and I would have stopped there. December though? Yeah, I keep on going.

I go to what I assume must have been at first a quiet nagging that tickled at the back of Paul's mind, stopping him from time to time, and that later would become a debilitating depression.

I go to what I assume must have started as a fine ride for Babe, but later budded into feelings of misgivings and sour resentment.

I go to the perfect sadness that they must have felt on a daily basis. Out of place and perhaps out of time, but no less entitled for their displacement.

& this is so appropriate for these winter months we find ourselves in. I find myself at my most despondent and disconsolate during this time. & For what it is worth, I love this time of the year. I love my subdued, reflective personality. This despondency and disconsolation is Cathartic. (and we captialize that shit in these parts).

& so, to pull from my prolific (...) literary past, I recommend you review this old post of mine from december of 2006, it reiterates some of this, but in a much different way (probably better).

& doubly so, disconsolate and all, everything is good, save for the holidays. They can eff themselves. Except for new years and all that champagne guzzling, on which day give me a blindfold, start up your car, gun it for a while and just test me.

New Jersey, Part III

“I haven’t the gut for writing anymore,” I decide sitting in the stairway that leads up to the backdoor entrance of the Comfort Inn on Route 57 in Hackettstown, New Jersey; chain-smoking. Wearing a t-shirt in the lovely spring weather, seventy-degrees and clear, sitting lengthwise on a step halfway down the stairway, the backdoor propped open with an old piece of wood: and I’m always in and out; and I’m always start and stop. Sure, sure, I’m always expectation: on the bleachers rooting for some kind of found meaning, purpose, beauty or sympathetic set of ears. But I’m never agenda: on the field, giving one hundred ten percent for a scholarship I know I’ll just drink away anyway. I never espouse too much of anything when it comes down to personable barebones (at least save underneath the bleachers), but that most certainly never stops others from guessing-slash-assuming-cum-hypothesizing-cum-judging. And often the most rat-fink-fucked end of the deal is above all else I just want-slash-need to drip heavy and quick into a pair of foreign cochleae. To exercise some demons with some found meaning. To have those drips ripple and resonate. To have those ghosts meet me at the bar, fool me into thinking they are strangers, and then after I’ve bought them a few pitchers, they’ll buy me a cab home.

Let the one liners live again. Let truths be transmitted with truncated sentences. Death to fillibustering and ! Life to circumlocution (be it prolific or otherwise, I suppose) and onwards and upwards with half-answered half-questions we weren't half-concerned about ourselves anywhichway you put it (them).

The rigmorale of setting up a new computer can be so disheartening. At least in my case.... while the newer macBooks come all pimped out with the technologies that any web programmer would want, these sweet, internal programs don't come turned on. The first time around I found this a little frustrating. After having my brand new macBook stolen the day after New Year's in Vancouver BC, picking up yet another laptop & now going through the same process all over again.... this is effing hell. Apple, please, if you're going to ship your comps with all these whistles & bells, why not turn them on (especially considering that a good deal of people are buying these freakin' things just for this reason)? It isn't that we can't go through the process of activating all the features that we want, but why should we have to? This is like buying a new car, spending a whole day driving 'round & having fun with it, only to realize as the sun sets that you have to install the headlights yourself. poopid, i say.

The one thing I always find interesting 'bout moving my self to another computer is going through old files which you had left to rust on the old machine. In the spirit of a spring cleaning, when starting fresh with a new computer I like to go through all my old files, blowing off the dust, scratching away the patina.

In the melancholy vein of what I've been reading on some other Eugene bloggers sites, I thought I'd post this one file I found; I think I wrote this some eight months ago or so. Still, it pretty much sums up where I am any more.

I could have tackled it had it not been smarter than me. Being born from me, it knew how I’d work. So it spent most of its time hidden away. It would come around, make a day or two miserable, & then quickly disappear, taking all evidence of its self with it. & this is how we cultivate sorrow, or at least something synonymous with sorrow.

Now I study earlobe structure on the back of faceless heads ahead of me, waiting in line for a cup of coffee & some pasta salad. I eavesdrop on other’s conversations just to remind myself that people do things that I do not. People visit states like Illinois. People move across town to be closer to their grandmothers. People watch television shows on ABC. These people’s earlobe structures are never right.

I’ve never before so strongly wanted something to come home to. A pet, a roommate, a lover; a television show on ABC. Something that will speak to me, something that will empathize, something that I can take to coffee shops with me, to assist in the search. I wish crosswords could read my mind, I wish they could tell me Hot or Cold or Warmer as I attempted to solve them, giving me a clue, perhaps a “rhymes with” when I’m stumped. I wish crossword answers would acrostically spell out the names of people I love.

There are only so many times that I can find reminders of past passions & impetuses, of all these past lives, through re-intonating stranger’s laughs, by re-calculating the distance between their eyes, until I have recreated in everyone a figment of someone else. There are only so many puzzles & searches & games of Hot & Cold that I can play before I am the bet at stake. There are only so many windows I can look out remembering views shared with others before I forget what was looked at; there are only so many streets I can walk down remembering hands held before I forget the context of the walk.

(There is only so much that hyperbole can accomplish.)

Every now & then, I’ll buy Export A greens & relive my life one cigarette at a time. I’ll remember Sunday afternoons spent chain smoking in a rocking chair, a radio tuned into a two hour long first-wave ska program. I’m in north Idaho, Sandpoint Idaho, living in a singlewide with my surrogate punkrock mom & her three-year old child. As I chain-smoke the tray fills with ash & butts & Caitlyn, the three-year old, scolds me for not fully putting out my cigarettes. She goes through the entire process of snuffing out a butt, educating me, her still infantile hands more adroit already than my shaky ones. I watch her performance, humming along to Desmond Dekker, completely unaware of how many times over my heart will feel broken, unaware of how many eyes my eyes will search.

I’ve become an armchair anthropologist. In my dreams I’ve been published in a few note-worthy scientific journals.

i’m not sure what the specific reasons where or at what specific point along the drunken all-nighter this happened, but at some point in the evening someone had a bunch of Star Watch weeklies in one hand & a lighter in the other. & then immediately following me picking up the Star Watch weeklies & pulling my purple lighter out of my pocket, someone else has their orange lighter out & is holding it underneath the outstretched papers. & then this is certainly an example of those magical moments when drunk friends come to the same idiotic conclusion at the same exact time, but then someoneA & someoneB are dragging an old, sweat & semen & vomit stained mattress out into the road, Star Watch torches in hand. & then the mattress is in the middle of the road & the papers are underneath it & stuffed into the one ripped-open corner & then that isn’t working, no, not at all, not near fast enough, so then both A & B are holding their purple & orange lighters to the frayed edges of the ripped-open corner & then yes, oh yes, that mattress is on fire. & then as a fantastic example of how drunk strangers will nearly immediately agree & condone the stupid decisions of other drunk strangers, it wasn’t more than two minutes later, because yes, that mattress really was on fire, & it didn’t take long to get the neighbors’ attention, because it was seriously ON FIRE, but it wasn’t two minutes later until some strangers half a block away come carrying an old, sweat & semen & vomit stained couch to add to the pyre. & then all the bystanders & drunks went back into their homes & read books like The Velveteen Rabbit or The Berenstain Bears to their sleepy children by the soft, warming light of the burning furniture. like motherfucking christmas.

but then the fire department came & ruined everyone’s holiday. & to further villainize others whilst exonerating myself & my cohorts, i would like to make mention of how i once heard from someone delivering the Star Watch paper (this in response to my question of how in the effing-eff i could get my name taken off the Piss-People-Off-Every-Week-With-Our-Lousy-Shit-Entertainment-News-“Paper” list), that the Star Watch is actually brought into the community & paid for by the Baker family. & for those of you who don’t live in Eugene or who just don’t know, the Baker family owns the Register-Guard (is it hyphenated or not anymore?), Eugene’s local (& also lousy) daily newspaper. so i blame the Baker family for my stupid drunken decision to light old, filth-stained furniture in the middle of the road. the Star Watch enabled the entire thing. the Bakers are a bunch of enablers.

the Bakers & pabst blue ribbon. i’ve said my peace.

I ran into a friend & local blogger today at the grocery store where I used to work. Immediately following our hellos & hugs she says, “you haven’t blogged.“. wowzers. Though perhaps a bit of a long one here, Mrs. R — this one’s for you.

Her comment shook to the surface some ruminative thoughts I have been having recently, thoughts related to this blog yes, but also ones of a much broader scope. What she said would have probably stayed there, in the past tense, had I not also received a myspace message from a friend in portland, another whom I haven’t spoken to in quite some time, wishing me a happy birthday. First, these are nice (tongue-in-cheek-in-heart, if y’know what I mean) reminders of things I wish I were able to find time to relax in: blogging about my day to day, spying on friends via myspace; engaging in an online community that not only do I find rewarding, but a community that I believe has & will continue to, in ways we cannot imagine, completely reshape who we are & how we are. This online community (& hopefully you know I’m not just referencing myspace here) is tantamount to evolution, & survival is contingent upon evolution. If given the proper alcoholic stimuli & enough time, & I could bore you to the point of regression with my praise of technology, the interweb & the future in general. & then here I am trying to remember the last time I bookmarked something in Ma.gnolia. bother.

It is often a frustrating & quite ironic circumstance that I work so much on the interweb, that I haven’t the time to engage the interweb. With both of my jobs I’m currently spending the majority of my time building web applications. I’m honing my programming skills, rereading techie books. Those sites which at one time I simply used, used & enjoyed, I’m now examining, figuring out how exactly they might have programmed this or that element & how I could incorporate that into what I’m working on. I’m critically pricking & prodding the User Interface instead of allowing the User Interface to guide & enthrall me. & try as I might, I cannot pull myself out of this mindset.

& it is this somewhat beleaguered balance of paycheck to prowess that keeps me in this quasi-state of flux where while I feel that I must always be working, always applying, proving & promoting myself, I also feel that I have steadily begun racing down the path toward certainty. I work with a web firm in town, Blink New Media. Weekly we meet, typically from the comfort of our living rooms or porches, via Skype. At the end of each meeting, I find myself somewhat contemplative & mesmerized. I catch myself saying, “wow, this is what I do.” It still hasn’t sunk in yet. I am getting paid to do something that not only am I good at, I also exceptionally enjoy it as well. I’m not at a comfortable enough point in my life yet to quit the doubt in the back of my head, that fear that another dead-end job with meager pay is just waiting around the next corner for me.

I started Cleopatra’s Nose two & a half years ago, when I slept in the utility room of a ran-down one bedroom house on Monroe Street. I was just a few weeks off from being unemployed & paying bills on credit. I played in a band & borrowed wireless from my neighbors’ unsecured connection. I had just recently planted the start from an avocado pit. I was in a fresh, exciting relationship & was blessed with a deeply sincere, symbiotic relationship with my roommate & good friend, bgg (I’d love to link something to his name, but alas, he is interwebedly incognito). Things are much different now. Though I still don’t have a bed, I live on my own now, in a great little apartment downtown. I am the furthest from unemployed that I possibly could be (I know this isn’t true. Not even a year ago I was more employed than I am now, holding fort at three different places.) & my avocado plant is doing quite well.

Robin, I thank you for the gibe. It seems that oftentimes it requires enticing for me to sit down & catalog something here on Cleo’s Nose, but afterwards it always feels nice.

kasb — I will most certainly be your penpal, especially if by penpal you mean the person who crashes on your & Harv’s couch in Nashville during my upcoming late-summer-2007-drour-of-the-southern-states. (Of course you know, but a “drour” is the classic “drinking-tour”)