Re-acquaintance with the World on the Rocky Grohman Lakeside

I would be tired, but a mug of caffeinated sludge keeps me up. I'm roaring down the highway in my sport utility whatever, ten clicks over the speed limit. The road is curved like the contours of the Mona Lisa.

My genes are not meek. They inherited this system of roads. Genes and roads are structured enough for their purpose. The Ministry of Transportation maintains the highway, drawing from sales tax I contributed from this afternoon's trip to the convenience store, to impulsively purchase a simosa and a wonderbar. I don't know how many Chinamen died to pave this road, or how many Iraqis died to fuel my car this far. I'm not an activist so I'm not about to calculate the number. I got with the winning team. I can drive my car, not really mine, ill-gotten with the reigning culture of a hegemonic species, to the parking lot of the park.

I park. There are a few other cars here, a bit of a drag but what did I expect? Three or four people stretched across this narrow park makes for a lot of room, it's first class. How many people have such easy access to something like this? Still, it makes me a bit prickly. I must be, at least partially, in "social mode", I must be partially proper. But I also must do what I came here to do, which is smoke an outlawed plant.

I take three bong hits inside the car. Vapours swirl into the air.

The crumbs you clumsy stoner, you dropped pot crumbs all over the seat, what about the next time you cross the border, they've got everything on you, license plate in closed-circuit camera checkpoint will bring up your red-flagged file, cross-referenced with the report of the rent-a-cops who busted you with energy drinks and a head full of paddywhack in Lakeside Park after closing, they’ll know you’re not really “Mr. Smith” and that isn’t your “maiden name” (the stupidest lie you’ve ever told), they'll pull up your passport, go over your elementary school records, browse a breakdown of your last border crossing complete with drug dog, detainment, search... Oh Jesus, stop being paranoid and just vacuum the fucking thing later, don't waste your stone on paranoia, get out and get back to nature or something like you figured might happen if you got high enough.

I get out. Detail detail right away, the colors colors colors, so pure bright intoxicating, I'm colordrunk. I enter the westbound path, nervously sedate, the usual paradox of cannabination. I notice all the spiderwebs I'm tearing through. Sorry spiders. So arrogant. But it's not my fault. It's my nature. How could I do anything but?

Freaky woods. Hegemonic species my ass, we don't run shit. We’re a symptom of this planet, this woods. We’re food for viruses while alive, food for worms when dead, food for the earth, life feeds on life. We thought we got a Faustian deal to squirm out of that niche, we thought we would loot the future, that was something we could do. Reality is what we can get away with, we say, so why not, why waste time worrying, guilt-tripping?

That's why "liberal" has become a dirty word. Departing from traditional semantics, the liberal is now the priss who's staying sober at the party so he can drive us home safe. We'll chug beers and snort rails and poke fun – the kid hasn't learned the Dionysian mysteries and won't be initiated, the neotenic loser. We'll taunt him until he gets pissed and becomes an anarchist. He'll say, "Fuck you assholes and your society, you can save yourselves,” and then he'll smoke a joint with the spacey hippie chick outside, and then he'll pop a tab of acid and a hit of E and lose total innocence about the mind and the universe, he’ll enter paradise and come down in the slums of the People’s Republic of Planet Earth, the dregs of burned-out conscious civilization, the ass-end of the novelty trip, in the gutter staring up at the smog-blurred stars. But he’ll still enjoy television mob dramas like The Sopranos, and he’ll still enjoy his wonderbars, and gas prices will stay low enough for him to drive his parents’ car for another decade, and he’ll follow the political cockfight, the left and right pecking each other bloody, with interest, until the game becomes lethal and the issues become life and death, and the oil runs out, and the reality is unignorable, on a mass scale, bringing real anarchy – which will be the end of the line for the self-styled anarchist, time for the last act of will, the last perverse turn of phase, the last coping mechanism, the last binge, the poppy, renewable resource, he’ll alter his value system completely, chemically, disregarding consequence – it won’t matter anyway. And then he’ll… who? Who was “he” again, eh?

Woah, weird tangents... Woah, weird woods! So alive, demented facial fractals, hyper-real, gorgeous and frightening, reminds me of The Brothers Grimm and their dichotomy, divinity-canopy, horror-chasm. What a beautiful Kootenay glow, filtered through flapjack flavor-layers of foliage, May sunlight, edgy, angled, boreal. Natural intelligence as a force beyond human understanding isn’t superstitious, just receptive. There’s a power here that my values slip off. It’s better that way, makes worrying about apocalypse seem silly. I could piss anywhere I wanted if I wasn’t so neurotic.

There is an annoyance, an ache. I've got to drain my bladder but I'm fretting in foreign territory, paranoias, tickets, fines, worlds of damnation and toxicity, regulation, inferno, concentric circle, what did I do to earn this natural bounty when so many people live in such horror? My existential right to be here is in doubt. My presence is pretension, every footstep ill-gotten.

But finally, the path ends and I forget about the ache. I emerge from the density of the woods and my first physical sense is chill. But the feeling interlocks benign to the scene, open: Open to the valley’s paranormal panorama, lake bending into mountain twists at each jagged horizon. Fuzzy thickets of grass here and there, giggling sprouts of rock-hugging shrubs, an algae-brown eco-pool, and large slabs of grand rounded gray, candid, skinny-dip into the water. I want to embrace them. Can this all be for me? Really?

Total isolation from my sick social network. Total solo confrontation with the world, like there was never anyone else but me and it, this, what Adam must have felt.

I am reacquainted. Simple joy, for being alive at the rocky Grohman lakeside. It beats the hell out of synthetic rewards we contrive to offer ourselves for achieving certain objectives in our video games, like winning the battle of the bands, or scoring the next bag of scag. No, this valley is a planetary reservoir, renewable. I feel spirits here, ancestors, welcoming me. Not necessarily people. The garden is not severed but Secular, because there is no other.

Good energy here. I go to the edge of the craggy shoreline. Chillier, windier here, warm early summer sun muted by the force of the current, the water, the air, kinetic, sweeping, changing, Heraclitian, swirling bubbling face of the lake drifts by with its hydrogenic payload blue,green,gray gnarled patterns of liquid light, waterbark reflecting trees behind us, we must use the Royal We here, because We're surrounded by so much living energy.

The wind sweeps off the lake. I stand on the rock, insanely anthropomorphic. Colors scream to me from every direction. Faces in the waves, bodies in the waves, minds in the wavelengths, vibrations, everything strangely alive, weirdly benign, miraculous, vast luxury, microcosmic clouds, stratosphere bleeding out into space, pine needle patterns, lichen worlds.

BILLBOARD

on the highway, facing the bench.

This scene brought to me by Hillbilly Jambouree!

No illusions I'm not in a little penned up facsimile of nature but the outhouse sure was convenient. I’m sinking into the virtual human world again, that uniquely crystallized psychedrama: Drugs, has it become prepositional, dumb as a sack of hammers, bluntly up and down, plainly about chemicals? Is there no free lunch? Will I pay for this feeling of wonder with a grotesque stretch of malaise equal in time or intensity? Oh why get into that trip? Look around, reacquaint!

It's so trippy! I haven’t been to this park since childhood and these paths are barely remembered, but bound to the associative fabric of lost Atlantean vantages on taken-for-granted cosmic dramas, the zen surety of infancy, the dumb man in the beautiful dream. It’s journeying into my subconscious and having it manifest as woods. Paths beckon, every path a paisley pretzel, gleefully prefigured, not "random" at all but fine and graceful as a Mandelbrot, leaves and branches heaving, breathing soil, the "tone" of the scene an audible vibration, holy shit, synesthesia! Adventure beckons, total transformation available to ingest (just a question of motivation) and those crannies mimic the shape of every crack I ever found in the bedrock and forgot. It's all back, salvia trails, tryptamine rivers on the tips of my tongues and tentacles.

The highway above, surreal. Cars streak, sonic trailers hum, chrome flash reminding me of the billboard I refused to read, wonder if it was the one Clay chopped down once in legend. Too many reminders of the gritty human fractal to let my ego dissolve, but this is all nature. Can't I appreciate the human fractal as it interlox with everything else? Why must I hate my nature? Does a virus suffer self-loathing? Do viruses have viruses, or is that biologically impossible? Should I trust every damn thing to the scientific method? Extrapolation? Are metaphors more important than statistics?

Boardwalk, was there always a boardwalk here? How unobtrusive. How Dao in design, a shade of pale wood, goes with the grain of the marshland, and what is that on the end of the log in the pond? Oh my God, is it a turtle? No, can't be. Hey, it's a bird. But it’s not moving. A duck, gotta be a duck. But no, that's too perfect, almost ironic, like the Parks Department winking at me. A goose, like something out of T’s five methoxy euphoria? No, it's gotta be a duck. But it's still not moving. Gotta be fake. A fake duck? But that's so... so blatantly synthetic. Why go to that trouble? That's downright sarcastic. With the BILLBOARD sitting across the highway, laughing.

Oh but remember the lake, in the other direction. The rocky shore, so long, so unmovable. They dammed it upstream several times, but here is nature without human blight. There's that self-loathing again. I'm projecting into nature, limiting my awareness. Understanding is impossible when it's all just projection by this penned up value system. Nature is truly alien, inscrutable, what the Severed Garden’s all about.

"Dirt isn't dirty", brooksy once said. Shambhala was wonderfully filthy. Even the crudely synthetic MDMA felt at home. All forms of filth, spiritual filth, biker weed lit from the morning sun, a parade of record spinners and laptop DJs. We spent a lot of money there.

Get out while the getting’s good. Don’t linger and let the wave break, change the venue, switch the paradigm. I drive home, still stoned, jittery at the wheel, appropriately neurotic regarding traffic.

Home, straight to the piano, feeling like virtuoso king of the universe because the feeling is flowing through me in so many snowflake iterations glazing the moment, even if I'm objectively aware of the flaws in my technique. The well-manicured progression, the demonic dissonance, the dolce melody, the full-fledged fat groove gravy comes from shutting off the mind and letting the fingers do their work, but I can appreciate intellectually too, impressionistically, any way I choose, any palette of perception. If I could play this on a grand… No worries about state boundaries, that phrase was so last month, and maybe I finally am getting burned out on being burnt out. Or maybe I'm just stoned. Happy, to use Cobain's euphemism.

But I'm spottily happy and life is still strained and psychestained, and I'm still a whiner. But I'm enjoying life right now, playing music that I love, even if this is a wanky ego trip. If I die tomorrow - oh what do I need to think about that for?

The Lull Continues

I'm writing again, because it's that time in the cycle. Barely plugging the hole in the brain's chem bucket. I'll revel in recently exhausted tritisms, flash in the pan neologisms, soon to appear in the bargain bin of Fuck Your Town.

I can't remember how the cycle goes exactly. But I remember, there've often been lulls of this length. Environmental factors can get me out of them, changes in circumstance, but so far nothing powerful enough has come to pass.

And still that damn unspoken addiction, plaguing me even when I'm sick. Unfiltered drones.

I could go to that park beside the highway - that would be novel. I thought about getting rid of all my hair. Don't know if I'm ready for that level of novelty. Maybe I should save that as a reaction to severe trauma.

Still that damn unspoken addiction.

Times like these, drugs become appealing again, because if everything's fake and meaningless anyway, might as well go for guaranteed stimulation - even if it brings guaranteed depression fairly quickly. Times like these, chemical happiness seems realer than whatever paltry feeling I can get by twisting against the circumstances of my ridiculous life. Chemicals are real.

That damn unspoken addiction, what the fuck is it? Of course, it's not the root of any real problems. Or maybe it is, undetectable except through the harmonies of alien jazz. Like Jamie's licorice. From Chadwick's. A malevolent cosmic ray. The mistakes I made that allow me to love my own work and yet be eternally frustrated. No, not eternally. Transiently. In this little slice of life. Not all possibilities were realized. Not all opportunities were taken.

Things will be different in June. One way or another. Mr. Dilato might make a re-appearance. The Conjuring. The Clowning. Dilato in the X-ing with Medicine. I might get kinetic synesthetic calisthenics again. I might not. The thousand year epoch might continue. How that will jive with June I can't say.

I've got to stop going for that olfactory flavor. It's so easy. Doesn't seem to be ostensibly damaging, but I wonder. It disturbs me. I don't have anywhere near the energy required to de-condition myself. And it doesn't put me through the trite rock'n'roll life'n'death drama, so I won't be shocked out of it.

Chess, backgammon. There was a time when I would have latched onto those incidental associations - woven them into a glossolalic arabesque. Maybe if they were accompanied by the above mentioned calisthenics. Kinetic, natch. Chess on acid. Peter Griffin freaking out on Claymation. It's too real! We all had a good laugh at that. It was a happy time, why does it seem so sad in retrospect? Damn retroscope. And the fondest memories come from some of the crappiest times. I can harbor nostalgia when I know how it ends. When a rosy tint will support a linear bias. When I'm out of the shackles of the moment, the moment of paranoia and sickness.

Sick-itch, incidental to the unspoken addiction, or dendritically attached in sketchy cause-and-effect shuffle? I couldn't help acquiring cosmic consciousness - it's often a stone to drag around. Ironic, it came on strong in good stones, in the form of good stones, then in bad stones, sickness and health. But time seems linear, and sickness seems to win. Wavefront bearing frothing foam onto the dead beachhead, Beachedwhale-Upon-Anzio. I could bring Jonah into this, but I won't. I'll showcase lowercase artistic discipline, I'll be the pretentious prosecutor of pretense.

Funny how I had to force myself to write, and ended up not wanting to stop. Even though it's all bullshit. Well it makes the flowers grow, so the discordians say. I'll sing the discordian accord in the psychic warzone - the munitions manifest as landscape scarring explosions. Just another European dispute - they could have gone longer, that war weary collection of countries. They could have gone for the record. Would it have mattered? I hope my will to live doesn't extend to the point of the ridiculous.

Apathetic to Information

No energy to articulate. No desire to seek. It's one of those ebbs again.

I'm sick of people, sick of drugs, sick of art. I want to go off them all. I'd go off work too, if I wasn't addicted to my paltry paycheck. But I'm not going to be a slave to self-imposed social, chemical, or artistic obligations. And I'm not going to do stuff that doesn't inspire me. For now, I'd like to read, walk, and think. That's about it.

In case you didn't know

My girlfriend has been back on blogger... for a while.

If you're going to wobble, wobble well

I wrote some fucked up email, consumed with petty ridiculosities, making everything worse by twisting it into some lingual construct of grandiose emotional projection.

I took a walk outside, it was gray and gorgeous, a storm was brewing. Fit my mood like a glove. I was anointed in raindrops, swept clean by the wind.

I thought about going back and writing apologetic second guessing messages to blunt the impact of the original mess, but then I thought of that great old zenism: If you're gonna wobble, wobble well. Stagger like a fucking pro. So often, situations can benefit from the application of confidence, where conventional wisdom would dictate that it's inappropriate. It's okay to go off every now and then. So if I'm gonna do that, I'm not gonna second guess myself.

I was thinking, as I walked through the woodsy slope, toward a tasteful housing development cut into the forest like a bladerunner's incision: Let this storm turn into a full fledged hurricane, destroy these houses, flood the streets, rip trees out of the ground, send cars flying, smash, destroy! Maybe it will be good in the grand scheme, bring people together to rebuild, create a purpose that doesn't involve pettiness and politics.

But I did second guess that, because I get superstitious sometimes, and it occurred to me that I shouldn't whistle for the wind unless I want it to blow. No, I'm not wishing property damage on you, yuppies, I don't have the heart to fuck with the rich and powerful more than I already have done in my rebellious commie youth.

But I tell her, I can't not be rocky when I'm listening to Blue Oyster Cult!















I'm not consumed with bitterness anymore. I allowed myself to indulge in that for a few hours, but there are better things to do and think about. Like how much Blue Oyster Cult rocks - I'd only listened to the big hit, the one that everybody knows, don't fear the reaper (both cowbell and non-cowbell version), but holy fuck, the rest of their stuff kicks ass too. Got Tyranny and Mutation rocking the house tonight. Flaming Telepaths. Amazing how many musicians who came after ripped them off. Okay, not ripped off, paid homage. Cause if I get to pay homage to Prokofiev, Rzewski, Keith Jarrett, ELP, and the Mars Volta, all in one song - folks can pay homage to BOC.

I was wrapped up in some dramas. Felt like the vast majority of my attempts to reach out to humanity have gotten me nothing in return but a bad case of blueballs. Figuratively. It will be good for my mental health not to do that for a while.

I did a faggy thing once which almost had me babbling, like I was caught up in some congressional nightmare: I am not, nor have I ever been a member of the homosexual agenda. But instead, I decided to play it cool and not worry. It was a fun night, and I refused to allow people’s misconceptions to enflame potential neuroses. But Lord help me if I dressed well - there'd be enough misconceptions to fuel sitcom plots for a whole season, plus the DVD extras. And I still love my hair, it's almost as erudite as my prose. Hehe.
















Tasty hair topping a lucious face. My girl is the queen of the amazon delta. And sometimes queen of herself. She's great to write out the storm with. We got preserves in the basement.

She was gonna do a pagan ritual last night, but she thought her Frida Kahlo bling was blocking energies. No, she didn't say it like that. But yes, she is a flake, the finest flake I've ever known.

Sometimes we clash in catastrophic ways, but we’re more alike than any two people I know as far as being on the same wavelength, understanding certain human truths, being subject to similar frailties. Interstellar Mistress of Mystery.

dronefile

Yeah, it's the dronelife sutra. The apologia.
















Yeah, it's the apologia. File it under drone filtertips.

The tax-writeoff for dental work. It all combines to a beholdable jenga tower. Which is the drone drone dronal monotonal key we're jigging around in, the first recasting of the word in a 434 part series.

"Nothing is sacred when no one is saved"

I beg to differ, Nevermore.

But that's me. I recall your song the last time i was dilated, on the bed, a two-headed flowering split next to me. Those were the days.

A blondehead flowing statue of the rosemont benedictionary. Those were the days. Plumbing suger-glazed surfaces, slick with cotton-candy fog, solidified, tasting good to my sweet tooth, surely i still have sweetness receptors on my tongue, surely that taste is still possible.

And still, Gyro is a piece of park I feel as enlightenment - as I read to a gaggle of delightful drunks at the Royal one night. As we pride ourselves on telling it like it is, up here, in this blip on the radar - oh yes, blip me out of existence, or close enough to feel like a whimper wisping over the edge of the abyss.

And still, I hate how life stabs its hooks of censorship into me. We can't be watching Lawrence Welk all the time, things have got to go outside the margins. Even if a few TVs must smash through the upper floor suites of Mrs. Gualtieri's Retirement condominium.













"Stuff music", Lenny Bruce and his nuances, still kissing God's hand, protruding piece of his chemically reduced junk, molecules pixelating to atomic nuclei with their electron veil, to those stringy thingies in their essence, to scrap iron, emptied onto an east coast american yard, some mafiosi's asset, under the table, under the radar, that lower case filler that could feed a family of nine in Tanzania.

Yeah, it's the dronelife sutra. Darwin's hidden variable, the fish he never factored into his Victorian Lake.

"How cute", she says. Yeah, she's been hanging around Big Rock Candy Mountain, and I don't know how long I can dance on these rock faces - a metaphor worthy of Dali's back catalogue - yeah, sorry, I should have devoted myself to music, this literary detour is, well, living up to its sour seeds, and misdeeds, grabbing for cryptic descriptions of stimuli left 'n right - but then, improv is like that, we need a realtime literary equivalent of open stage - chat is that, but so vacant so often.

So many possibilities - still...

Why do I write these nauseating pastiches of stream of consciousness? I guess because when I'm in the right mindstate, the aggregate seems writable, worthy, meaningful in some Rorschach way. Like some stand up comic who's trolling for some less comedic but similarly hoodwinked crick in the collective conscious veteran of the psychic wars. Blue Oyster Cult opened for the space stand-off set, the star-speckled bag of celestial cronies.

"Finished with my woman cause she wouldn't help me with my mind" - Ozzy, "Paranoid"

"What I want most in the whole wide world, is a girl, just a girl, one who'll keep me from losing my mind - and she'll be the best girl, in the whole wide world" - Nomeansno, "Revenge"

Funny how often that theme crops up in rock 'n roll - sorry boys, there ain't no state of grace even with full assimilation of the feminine arts, and believe me, I've suffered for my art, not of my own volition by any means, I should have been a ski bum, by all rights, I should be travailing under the chairlift every day, heat-seaking altitude by the negative reading on my frigidometer, but i ain't hangin brightly, I dunno what she's done to you, whataya think that means? Break on through.




















Got called some names tonight. Too many. I know it was meant to push my buttons. I think I responded in a way that merged the best of machine mythos with that psychedelic mind-manifesting manna. Yeah, I've still got these cheezy reverences for certain clockfaces within the mind.

Anyway, I slipped a little too far off the dao tonight, this black rite of psyche-shredding thickets, tickets to palaces of neuroses - i'm close enough to equilibrium to munch my ice-cream sandwich with poise and premium posture (just kidding).