ratblast

Music: Not Drowning, Waving: Maps for Sonic Adventurers (2006)

grinding through dreams

This week I have had a series of unpleasant dreams, all of them thoroughly about me, and all of them about dying alone, whereupon I wake up---you guessed it---alone. Not even the kitties have been sleeping with me. And I cannot keep my night-guard in my mouth, which means I'm probably having even more nasty dreams than I can remember.

My ten pound companion Jesus---who sleeps in his crate at night---has been finding my night-guard in the mornings. I've usually recovered it, sanitized it, and simply used it again (the night-guard is super-hard plastic stuff, seemingly indestructible). This morning he found it and loved on it for a long time. Lone time. Long, lone time before I noticed he had been loving it. It is in shambles, a tiny, clear plastic heap of slobbery, tasteless calories. $400 down the drain.

Given the essay I'm rapping up, my dreams, and the dog, it would seem that abandonment, death, and destruction, are the themes of the week.

Speaking of destructiveness, the dream from the night before last. I am at a performance in a laboratory theatre painted black. It is not the HopKins Black Box at LSU, but some inferior attempt to be that (I think I'm at UT, but I cannot recall). There is a very self-reflective avant-garde performance going on, some very bad acting but highly theoretical conceptual art stuff happening. I am wearing one of my favorite outfits as of late: khaki shorts, a white dress shirt, a conservative blue and green tie, a Polo navy jacket with brass buttons, matching green socks, and brown saddle shoes. I call it my British Schoolboy outfit. As the performance yawns on, a young male performer over-smoking a cigarette comes off stage, approaches me, and puts out his cigarette on my neck tie, spouting off prose from Derrida about deconstruction vis-à-vis textiles.

I am livid and blurt out expletives, I start screaming about how inferior these performances are to those at the Black Box and that destroying the property of the audience is off limits, and then start demanding my money back plus cash to replace my

[The dog just literally peed on my feet and, it appears, a number of student papers I had collected on the floor. I have just thrown him outside and gathered some Simple Solution . . . FUCK!]

Where was I? Oh yes, I demanded my money back plus cash to replace my tie. And then I woke up.

brass buttons

Yesterday I wore dream outfit to teach class. I received many comments (to say these were complements would be a strain). At the end of the day, to my profound dismay, I discovered I lost one of the brass buttons. You see, this same button I lost months ago while standing outside of the lodge. It was night, and using my car headlights I searched through the sod for a half hour to locate it (as replacing it would be very hard). I found the button and was elated (insert Golem noise here). I carried it around for weeks in search of a drycleaner who would also tailor, but without much luck, until one of the office staff said she would sew it back on. She did a fantastic job, but, nevertheless, the button is now gone. I don't know what to do, which is why allegories are no very comforting.

At least I still have my striped tie, intact; it’s a relief to know that the cigarette burn was only in my dream.

letters from my mother to my father

(The days of begging, the days of theft. No nation that began for the sake of escape and by fire can be all that bad. Even if democracy is a myth. Myths make actuality, that's what myths do. Me, I've always been on fire for the sake of fire.

(Listen. They thought they could have their freedom through something called democracy, but they forget about knowledge, an no one's ever had freedom, anyways. So now it's all falling apart, this economy, and so-called culture and a society, so-called, and anyway, there's never been anything except loneliness, the days of begging, the days of theft.

Stolen from the late Kathy Acker's "novel," My Mother: Demonology (New York: Grove Press, 1993).

a flash of the susquehanna, burning loins

It is pretty much the consensus of sensitive men that hearing Dale Smith read his work can make you want him, to fall in love with him, but not in a dirty way. It's more of a spiritual "please [fuck with] me" sort of way. He's married, anyway.

the price of (forced) love

I'm not happy with Jesus, who destroyed my night-guard and who is, as I type this, terrorizing the cat for sheer boredom. He also just peed on my foot, which required fifteen minutes of clean-up. When you add to the destruction of my night-guard the $200 I've spent to replace the couch cushion he had an unfortunate liquidy bowel movement on, the oodles of bottles of Simple Solution and rolls of paper towels I've used to clean up his accidents, and the money spent on various sundry replaced things (slippers, the throw blankets, and the irreplaceable blanket my grandmother hand-made for me), all told I've spent probably a grand on his destructiveness.

In addition to night mares, after today's two incidents I also dream of returning to my "foster" status. Maybe I am just not a dog person and a new mommy and/or daddy is the better route to go here. Alas, we still have 10 pre-paid training sessions to go (thank goddess I didn't spring for the deluxe package). Tonight it is "beginner down."

a split and a squeal, burning hearts

I didn't know that James Brown recorded a Live at the Apollo, Volume Two, but he did, and its been recently released in a "Deluxe" version without edits. It's even better than the first, and I've been listening to it all week to keep my mood from jumping off the float of sad-but-hopeful into that dreaded pool of despondency (this is hyperbole, but you know what I mean). Mon Dieu! the album is most excellent, with one of the horniest versions of "This is a Man's World" I've ever heard; the audience squeals in anticipation, and when the song reaches the seven minute mark, Brown issues a series of "uh! uh! uh!" with suggestive comments about the ocean and motion and getting notions. This continues for almost twenty minutes, and one wonders why he just didn't collapse in a heap when the song was over. The lyrics are sexist, to be sure, but the delivery---man, it's something to hear. The sound of the entire album is so crystal, and the rhythm section is right on the cusp of wow-chica-wow-wow but still safely in the zone of R&B (this is not quite funk yet). It's simply a warm, upbeat, happy, pelvis pumping record. Josh likey.