Ben's California Adventure

this week: where did you go? if memory serves me, saturday before last i went to see nux vomica and hellshock, while waiting for the bus i was regaled by an older black gentleman with the following tale: "maaaaan the other day i was just sittin here and i seen this mexican runnin from the po-lice and motherfucker dropped a bag, so i picked that shit up seen what it was snorted the whole godamn thing, i didn't sleep for 12 fucking days man!" nux vomica was incredibly incredible, jon came and picked me up and we went out for a night on the town, i drank an unholy amount and was thoroughly crushed in the morning when i had to open. when i got off work i took a nap, then hung out, then went back to sleep and slept untill 230pm monday. i don't believe i did anything of note tuesday, however Wednesday i hit up the dollar corndog night, where dogs and drinks ensued, and went to the east end to see wildlife, who are always great.

one of my truely most beloved friends of my life, eric eisher, came to town thursday, we went to karaoke, i did Yes's roundabout again, with choreographed dance moves and all. when i was done the karaoke DJ was so blown away he insisted on making me sing more songs even when i'd signed up for none. after that we went dancing at soulnite at rotture and i saw pretty much everyone i know in portland and it was truly an amazing experience that doesn't' lend itself well to retelling.

friday was the big day, first i went to a potluck thrown by my literature professor. i went with some girl from my class who asked for my number the last day of class. she's attractive physically but shes a stoner and is into snowboarding and spoke ill of heavey metal while we were hanging out so i do not imagine much of a future there. the potluck was strange, it was a very adult "party" i got the feeling people were trying to out-intellectualize each other, a strange contrast to the usual party competitions at the kind of parties i frequent like who can shotgun the most milwalkie's best. it made me wonder if actually i'm boring, but its those people that are boring not me.

after that was the main event: my stage debut rapping as Ill Repute, it was at this uber hip bar called Dunes, so hip they don't even have their name on the outside, you just have to KNOW, so hip they have a fucking one drink minimum and they're not a strip club, who does that? it actually got packed with people there to see the headliners, and if i do say so my self i totally killed it, i had all sorts of strangers coming up to me afterwards to tell me they loved it, it was encouraging and i expect to continue with the ill repute thing in the future. last night it was lindsy's house warming party, we danced and laughed and argued about heavy metal and h.p. lovecraft as one is prone to do when blissfully in the company of those he loves. lotta fun going around these days, the weathers warming up, i'm coming home to south Carolina this Wednesday, thats all.

Current Music: emerson lake and palmer - bitches crystal

i had a dream last night i was lying face up at the bottom in an open grave on the beach in south carolina at night time, smoking a joint, while miles davis shoveled sand onto me. after a while arthur rimbaud's drunken boat crashed on the shore, he stumbled out bewildered, peered down at me, mumbled something about a gruel of stars, and dissapeared. after another few shovelfulls, william faulker showed up hammered, attempted to help miles, but eventually resigned himself to rolling about in the surf. the next person to peer into my quickly filling grave was for some reason dolly parton, who also contributed a few shovel-fulls before noticing faulkner in the tide and running over to him. finally charles mingus came and helped miles fill me in. he threw a shovelful in my face putting out my joint, then turned to miles and said, "imagine this miles, two black men burying a white boy." miles looked up at him and grumbled, "its not like that man, its two black men doing the work while the while folks are fucking" and pointed to faulkner and dolly parton making love in the sea. then i woke up.

Current Music: sacrilege - fear within

last night i had one of those sort of time milestone moments while Yob was playing at the ash street saloon. I had spent the evening making tacos and doing tequila shots with friends, maybe too many tequila shots, culminating in me adding a little bit of tequila and taco and stomach acid to the willamette river over the edge of the burnside bridge after getting a bunch of guff from a bus driver about my potty mouth. They dropped into a song off of "elaborations of carbon" that i used to listen to all the time when i was 20 and living in san diego when i had to get up at 5am to walk miles to work because i didn't have a few bucks to park my car and there wasn't a bus, because all my money was going into my plan to destroy myself but have a good time doing it because i didn't place much stock in staying alive. it was a combination of the liquor and the amplifiers i guess, but it was a strange moment, remembering exactly the smell of the fleshly watered grass in balboa park, the newness to me of the sun rising not out of the ocean, the perpetually clear san diego sky in the strange lapis of dawn, my misery and all consuming hunger, and yob in my ears. here i am at 24 in portland, believing in my self and life, having gone through so much between now and then, i don't have the car anymore and theres allot more clouds here, but theres still yob and they're still good, and thats a positive thing that the enjoyment of something has stood the test of time and my suicidal tendencies did not.

Current Music: yob - universe throb

i can't express how much of my life i feel has been lost recently in the fear of joining up with the mom n pop job no matter what it be. thats the most insidious part of the whole economy debacle. i feel like i have to stay at a job that, if i could escape with impunity, i would lock the doors burn down and incinerate the whole staff. that is not how a human life is meant to be spent, in the company of those he'd rather be killing. is it worth it to keep oneself from dying to spend time with people you'd rather be dead? i'm a little drunk right now and i don't have the answer to that question so i love american apparel!

Current Music: shitty disco and the cocaines (american apparel house band)

i'll try and piece together the shards of whats been happening to me in the last week, i think it was monday that i met deaner at the tube after school, and we went to ground kontrol with his friend from south dakota, then went home and got stoned and debated about hawkwind or other such life-pressing matters. Tuesday adam/ripley snell and me/ill repute recorded the first of what promises to be a long running collaborative hip hop jams with our friend minh. keep your ears out for that shit because it will be a banger. Wednesday i drank too much coffee and yerba mate and had a crazy panic attack in class, necessitating me leaving school and getting a beer to calm down. after that i went to dollar vegan corndog and pbr night at hungry tiger, where i played the best game of sopranos pinball of my life, i literally was out of breath when i was done. kelly met me there, we had corndogs a plenty, then went to a black metal show at Rotture. the first band was really good, but the rest were mediocre at best, awful at worst. i met jon there and we went to do some afterhours drinking at laganu and i stayed up way too late.

thursday chuck and kelly and i went to see Diesto and Cull at mississippi pizza, Diesto keeps getting better and heavier, it was a major treat to kick it with chuck, and the pizza at mississippi pizza is fucking BOMB and the beers cheap, luckily the bands were slow enough that i didn't get a bangover. i also noticed with satisfaction that there were more baldspots than mohawks in the crowd, stay punk, pdx! friday i had to get up early for work, and couldnt' muster the wherewithal to go see criminal damage and MDC at plan B, a very under-attended bar in my life i think. so i kept it fairly low key with jon eggy and adam drinking whiskey and watching on demand cable, then adam and i walked home, got some Rainier and grass, got stoned on his roof cause it was nice out, watched a fela kuti movie and had really good talks for how under the influence we were.

right after work saturday adam and i got dropped off at the liquor store, acquired a bottle of Matador tequila then got hot dogs at zach's shack. amanda, adam, deaner, and i finished the bottle pretty quickly and went to see rabbits in a basement off burnside. rabbits killed it as usual, they were born for the basements. after rabbits we got vegan gravy cheese fries at potato champion because portland really is that awesome. this morning i woke up for work unable to speak and barely able to walk from the week long bender taking its toll on me. but if you wanna get to heaven, you got to raise a little hell.

i'm hanging out with a girl from my class tomorrow afternoon, its almost an experiment on my part to see how i get along with people who aren't in my subculture but aren't idiots. i get the feeling that i'm limiting myself allot by centering friendships more or less around our respective dedication to music, we'll see how that goes. then tomorrow night i have plans to hang out with i guess what you'd call an old flame who burned me once before, so i approach with trepidation. tuesday is another recording sesh, and FUCKING YOB IS PLAYING THIS FUCKING WEEKEND.

Current Music: emerson lake and palmer

i tried to do the master cleanse this week, but due to a preponderance of school work requiring more of my mental facilities than a fasted brain could offer i called it short. i got drunk two days later at my district manager's boyfriend's birthday party, there was a cassette dj which is an interesting and inherently stupid idea. i enjoyed white wine and robatussin and danced for a while, then returned home about midnight. around five am it occurred to me that the recreational robotussin abuse was perhaps the underlying reason sleep was so steadfastly evading me, i guess it was daytime tussin. i had to work the next day, and i was just drifting off into sleep around 830, beginning to dream that i was playing a crane game, and had picked up some particularly fluffy stuffed animals with my claw and it was about to drop them down the chute to me when my alarm went off and i literally awoke with a loud cry of anguish.

the next day i drank a bottle of sake and went to a decent grindcore show at Plan B and got entirely too drunk but had fun nonetheless. i still find life boring and a tad stagnant but i can't put my finger on why, the fun i used to have and why i'm not having it anymore lingers around my head like the scent of an ex lover on your pillow. i don't know what i find more awful: three more years of school to get my masters or the job market being such that its in the interest of my self preservation that i have to keep working at american apparel. to a certain degree it has to do with the fact that i can't guiltlessly live in the moment any longer. its no secret that thinking too much about "what you're going to do with your life" more often than not ruins what you're doing with your life. but not thinking about what you're going to do with your life at all doesn't work. maybe it was just the california sunshine that made everything ok back then, but it isn't anymore. there's decay in the air, or defeat maybe. everyone's getting poor and serious, everything doesn't seem possible anymore.

i'm supposed to be recording some new ill repute tracks soon. spring is getting closer, which means gnarbeques and being drunk at the river and camping and bikes, that should be nice, but bigger problems loom.

Current Music: albert ayler

not quite drunk enough to listen to neil young
i dont think anyone still uses this medium to connect with people, i kind of miss updating it. i go to school now, full time, its an interesting shift in life-paradigms, i have a "direction" now. since my last post i've turned 24, and its terrifying and depressing. there has been a palpable loss of youthful vigor in myself, i'm extremely thankful of the years i've had since 19 thats taken me across countries and oceans, thats given me love and friends and so many of the positive things in life. but its also imbued me with the feeling of where now? i've done so many strange things with life because it never for a minute made any sense to me to be living it. i've always been of the mindset that everything is choas, most of all life, and to live in any other fashion is denial. but these outsider lifestyles haven't brought me closure on the fact that being alive doesn't make a drop of sense to me, they've only accentuated it. so i stand painfully aware of the futility of order preparing myself for it five days a week. maybe i don't feel prepared to take the insane risks i did a few years ago, aging is horrible. i'm terrified most of all of mediocrity. this might have been better suited for a diary entry. time marches on...

i drank a great deal of cough syrup last night because i had a cough and now i've woken up and i still feel like i'm listening to a screwed and chopped master p album in my brain, loudly. i'll write to salvage my brain from the dextromethorphan stew. i'd like to preface this recount with something that i've begrudgingly come to accept about myself, which is to say that i am completely enamored of the consumption of liquor. i was reading about scientology recently, and their core belief is that a galactic overlord named xenu killed hundreds of millions of people with h-bombs around a volcano on earth 75 million years ago, captured their souls somehow and made them watch a movie clock work orange style that pre-programed them to think like we do today, then encased these conditioned sentients into us. so to overcome our shortcomings we need only free these trapped brainwashed souls from us, goes the dogma.

which leads sort of into an entry i made earlier about the concept of entropy in the universe, or that the crucial feature of something being alive is its ability to wrench from the senseless chaos of the earth's matter some kind of order. the only reason we're able to not be rocks is that we can suck in the chaotic oxygen from the air and impose the will of our lungs upon them, crushing their bonds into energy for ourselves. on a metaphorical level it would seem to lend itself to the idea that life is at all time battling the tendency of all things to escape back into the ignorant bliss of chaos.

i'm pretty into the idea of life and its continuity, i'm very pleased with the high level thinking of the human beings and our ability to fight a different sort of entropy with art, taking the chaos of the world and crushing its bonds to become paintings and poetry and metaphors and beauty. but just as the most domesticated of lap dogs still has buried in its subconscious some sense of the alluring dark glory of its feral days, many people have a predisposition for a time prior to the often cold mechanical nature of our logic. and if you are someone with an overworking brain already, this beckoning can be more intense. so just as l. ron hubbard would hope we can somehow overcome the conditioned souls of galactic miscreants slaughtered 75 million years ago and trapped inside ourselves, i hope to, temporarily, tap back into the essential non-order than is the improbable foundation of all of existence. and nothing refutes your logistical noodlings and restores primal urges more than Old Crow.

this weekend there was a tremendous four day crust/metal punk festival in portland, and true to form i got pretty liquored up and moshed like a man possessed. when my coworker was picking me up to go to work in the morning after i was covered in nasty bruises and bloody noses and nearly knocked out teeth, hung over as a slug taking a salt bath, she understandably inquired just what was fun about getting what foreigner would call "that double vision" and having the shit beat out of you while some homeless people with guitars are on a stage above you screaming. i was really at a loss at being able to justify what is one of my favorite activities, but i thought about it a spell and this was the best thing i could think of. all of my waking hours are spent with tornadoes of bullshit raging through my brain thinking god knows what (see above paragraph about entropy for example) and any decision i make is immediately met with a thousands excuses as to why i shouldn't do said thing, i kind of feel like its me vs. my brain in many instances. i'm thankful to not be a boot licking flag waver in kansas somewhere content to watch the corn grow and the paint dry casting my GOP vote every four years and having even my vicarious living through sitcoms be pitifully mediocre, but i'm also thankful that there is a little liquid vacation available to me from the oppressive logistics and reasonable decision making that will, if only briefly, reconnect me to the neanderthal that is my lineage.

Or i'm just a drunk.

Current Music: harvey milk - old glory

i've never spent a great amount of time mulling over the possible meanings of certain steely dan hits, but this last week in the waning summer time i've found myself in a state that could perhaps best be described as reeling in the years. i like to think of it as less of reelin as one would do if he caught a fish, and more reeling like feeling dizzy. i guess it might have something to do with the humidity causing my brain to sweat out memories that have sat dormant for almost two decades in the recedes of my grey matter, or that it reminds me of the sticky quilt of atmosphere that accompanied the summertimes of my youth. i feel like one of those russian dolls that gets progressively smaller which each one you open, except my dolls don't fit inside one another and aren't in the least identical, yet somehow in defiance of all logic and physical laws they're there inside me. the absurdity of the different phases of lives ive passed through until now is so overwhelming that sometimes i wonder if its true. i suppose it might have something to do with having survived long enough to have remembered things that are no longer. this feeling is certainly exacerbated by growing up in an anachronistic place like rural south carolina and residing now in arguably the most progressive city in america. could it really have been that i was there at a family reunion with a gaggle of ancient simple country folk who are all dead now in the same muggy air fifteen years ago, drinking sweet tea in houses that are no longer there under trees that have long since been removed, and now somehow i'm thousands and thousands of miles away arbitrarily living a life i never would have imagined for myself even six months ago. i'm only 23 and i feel like this, i can't even imagine what it must be like to be 60 or 70, i hope i live to find out.

Current Music: dolly parton - my tennessee mountain home

i just got back from spending 4 days in san diego, a town which as come for me in retrospect to be the cocoon or incubator of sorts, i guess the best metaphor would be decompression chamber, between being a teen, blossoming into a dude, and catapulting out and slowly beginning the transmogrification whereupon one ends up being a man. being such a mobile person, returning to places i used to live is akin to going back and reading old diary entries. just about every nook and cranny of that town has some kind of memory for me, it was almost overwhelming to wander around the dusty sunny desert streets where ghosts of my past lurked around every corner, but it was reassuring because in most cases i can judge that ghoul with a clearer line of reasoning than was lurking around my 20-22 year old brain.

i can go back and dwell and the abysmally idiotic things i did that clutter the road to who i am today like so many road kills and hit and run corpses, but i love those things the same way a parent loves their child no matter how bad they fuck up. its strange and marvelous to think about how totally fucked i was when i showed up in san diego at the tender age of 20 like an orphan dropped on someone's doorstep. my brain was clouded and minced by two decades of living in one of the most backwards and hateful places in the continental united states. the possibility of beauty and happiness being a part of life was foreign to me. being a part of life myself was foreign to me. coming from that background with my mental temperament, to paraphrase a certain midwestern punk band, insanity is a sane reaction.

i was fortunate that it only took about three years to untangle the mess in my head to get to where i'm at today (though theres still some kinks to work out). allot of people i guess go to therapy and take pills, but what i needed was an unwavering insistence on the splendors of existence that i'd been more or less void of in my native surroundings, and san diego and the people i met there gave me that. i needed 70 degree weather and blue skies for 2 years straight to heal 20 years of humidity mosquitos alienation and hatred. i needed the companionship of the most wonderful person i've ever met for close to a year to remind of how amazing people can be. it struck me to think of the fate of my friends who'd left san diego, graduating college and working on masters and doctorates, becoming successful photographers in brooklyn working with sheryl crow, becoming pro skaters or filmers and traveling the world, living with me in portland playing in 3 touring bands, etc. etc., i can't believe how lucky i was to chance upon people of that caliber. when one considers that since i left south carolina i've had one friend over dose and one commit suicide it can lead to conclusions about the relative merits of the two cities, and where i might have been if i'd stayed.

so here i am in portland, 23 years old and determined to not find myself as dissatisfied with myself as i was when 23 replaced 22. i don't want to be 25 and still be working at fucking american apparel and drinking too much. as an enthusiastic 16 year old i swore and oath to myself and to 7 seconds that "i'll never work a 9 to 5 and drink to stay alive / i'm gonna stay young until i die!" and guess what i've spent the better part of this year doing? i applied to Portland state university for full time for the fall semester, and not only was i accepted, but my credits from USC transfered over to cover every single general education requirement so i'll only have to take major courses, AND since oregon doesn't spend all its tax money fighting the lottery, oppressing minorities, and keeping its rebel flags crisp like a certain other state i've lived in, i'm getting A FULL FUCKING SCHOLARSHIP for the entire year. i know what you're thinking, so what ben? a liberal arts degree is worth less than having been a prep cook at TGIFridays on your resume in this day and age. that may be true, but if one plans to leave this sinking ship we call the united states, legally, one is going to need to have a degree. i'll be able to teach over seas, i'll eventually be in a position to give myself and my kids health care, and most of all my ability to broaden the scope of what my existence is will be heightened tremendously, which is what i consider progress. i just hope that i can keep my enthusiasm high through the winter and the work, check back in january and we'll see how my faith in the university system as a middle man to adventure is holding up.

Current Music: nachtmystium - depravity

the house show went pretty smoothly, i'd estimate at its prime there were 150 or so people in my back yard, i'm glad i could provide a bunch of strangers a good time. there was full nudity in the pit, a rapidly cashed keg, 90 degree weather and ceaseless BBQ, crowd surfing in the basement, teeth lost and cops called The first band were a bunch of 16 year old punk kids playing the kind of punk 16 year olds play, they brought a little gaggle of 10 or so friends who knew all the words to the songs and sang and moshed, and i have to admit i got a little misty eyed watching them do so. i remember being 16 and playing in a stupid punk band and having my 10 stupid friends sing along and it being the only thing keeping me sane on the weekends when the weekdays were spent with a congregation of simpletons and racists at my high school. i gave myself a little pat on the back for staying punk, these kids couldn't rent a five bedroom house and open it up to a bunch of drunk degenerates like i could, they can't even buy cigarettes. Since i maintained the embers of punk rock in my soul i can keep the flame alive and give the next generation of glue huffers a hand up and way to blow off steam in between being called fags and told to buy stuff.

i recently finished capote's "other voices, other rooms" i would recommend it, the way he captures the way a child views the world struck a chord with me, and the cast of characters and setting is very magical realism or something, i think that might be a term i remember from literature class. i'm stopping my streak of books about the south now because of the heaviness of my homesickness. adding to that there was a tremendous summer thunderstorm two nights ago over portland, it was the first one i'd experienced in several years (desert climates are not known for their precipitation), the electricity and primal violence in the air hearkened me back to the days in the woods at my parents house, watching the lightening and counting till the thunder, feeling the tangible tension in the atmosphere, and just waiting until that terrifying force bears down upon you, reveling in its violent magnificence, then watching it drift away sewing terror with it down to the coast. since i live in a city i couldn't really do any of that except watch from my window and curse all the cars that drove by drowning out the dance of the thick rain drops and the thunder. it made me kind of question whats important to me. is it the vegan food and shows and awkward camaraderie of the urban setting, or the unforgiving unfathomable ethereal reality of the woods? i'd like to reconcile this and many others things in myself.

Current Music: robbie basho

tentative line up for this friday, its supposed to get up to 90 degrees! corey and i rode our bikes to flyer this show at the fleas and lice show last night, but upon entering the show i realized that i didn't know a single soul in there, which is pretty unusual for me at a punk show in portland. upon closer examination i noted that everyone had LIFE SUX SCUM FUX tats on their necks and needles half full of dope sticking out of their arms and slowly it dawned upon me that the show was all traveler punks kids, and not the kind of traveler punks that have read too much keruak (sp?) and have a trust fund so they ride the rails, but the kind of traveler "punks" who are fleeing rape warrants in their home town and feel that gg allin was the most exemplary human being to ever defecate on a minor on this great blue rock we call earth. so i didn't hand out fliers there because those types of people aren't known to be the best house guests. we went over to rocky's apartment afterwards, he lives in a totally righteous converted warehouse where they have shows and weird rave things often, i went there on 4/20 and they had outfitted the whole place with sod grass and it was full of hippies with henna tattoos on their face, but it was just him that night, and we knocked a few back then corey and i rode home and called it an evening. this update is dumb but i've been drinking weird sorority girl flavored vodka because this summer is the summer of tank tops and vodka and i'm bored.

tell me how you're doing all livejournal readers, for reals please.

Current Music: hank williams senior, not junior senior

these last two weeks have been eventful as portland thaws out and the sun tentatively appears. i've been doing pretty well with substance abuse, or lack thereof, but this weekend was a triathlon of brutality. on thursday wade runner and i drove out to the base of mount hood and went on a really amazing four or five hour hike through the pacific northwest incomparable rain forests. here are some pix:

on the way back through the pacific northwest's totally comparable suburbs we spotted a little establishment called 2 MARGARITAS in some nebulous shopping mall and couldn't resist the draw of a promise such as that. i ordered a veggie burrito and the el presidente margarita, the el presidente was fantastic, but my burrito turned out to be a mushy tortilla with STEAMED broccoli cabbage and carrots in it, and thats it. no rice, no beans, no guacamole, just a handful of stuff you'd get on a veggie tray in a snotty flour tortilla. the waitresses were super bummed on two crusty looking dudes coming into their "family" mexican restaurants and promptly took the menu away after wade took a picture of its majestic horse graphic. they were super horrified with wade had to take his insulin shot and injected at the table, but i think i'll be going back next time i'm in Sandy, Oregon.

i kept the margarita party going pretty good and pretty late when we returned to our punk rock sanctuary in pdx and had to open the next day, much to the chagrin of my body. after work friday i got to experience local neo-melvins doomed out rip ragers RABBITS play with three guitar riff worshipping battle masters ANCIENT AGE for FREE at the east end. i've seen rabbits probly close to ten times now and this was the best time i've seen them hands down, they closed their set with a cover of the misfits static age and promptly brought the house down.

i was pretty hungover after 2 nights of charging and 2 days of opening the store at 830, but there is no rest for the crucial, and the metal show of the year was set to go down at satyricon ENGORGED, FUNEROT, SKARP and THE GOLERS were mobilizing to wage a four front war on wieners all over the city. rob and i had the misfortune of drinking an entire bottle of dr. mcgilicutty's cinnamon infused whiskey, which is in fact as atrocious as its sounds before the show. all of the bands positively murdered, golers were a real crowd pleaser, if you enjoy back woods crossover thrash played by a sweaty troll-man that will make you squeal like a pig by all means

check them out! the pit was a total he man-fest, and my reckless disregard for my own welbeing the cinamon whiskey imbued me with resulted in me getting totally wrecked by beefy bangers who were obviously mad i am prettier than they are.

i felt so awful after day three of heavy drinking and light sleeping coupled with the fact i was bleeding out of my face and covered in bruises that resembled rotten mutant grapefruits when i woke up at 7 am on sunday i had the bright idea to take of my left over percesets from my surgery. i felt pretty cool for about 45 minutes but then i got so dizzy i couldn't stand up and spent most of my shift trying to convince my boss i was cool in between dry heaves and wet heaves. i was way too squashed to see the TRAGEDY HELLSHOCK and SYSTEMATIC DEATH show that was sunday night, unfortunately, but i got to see a decent spacey pop show for free that was much more mellow where i saw allot of my "not winter" friends. since i reckon alot more people that read my journal listen to indie rock or whathaveyou, you should definitely peep the NURSES they've been staying on my couch and are really amazing musicians so dig on what they do, please! they just got a write up in the local paper from their show at my basement, they're about to blow up, get on the bandwagon and don't have myspace tom leaving you a comment about them be the first time you heard of em!

this is getting too long, but autistic youth and wildthing from the bay area are playing my basement on the 16th if you guys wanna fly to pdx for an incredible show, BBQ before hand, kegstands afterwards, punk rock in between!

Current Music: autistic youth!

if robert smith drove a tractor
winter just wont give up in portland, i remember when i visited here last year around this time of year and the weather was stupifying enough to convince me to relocate, if it had been this year i'd visited and not last year i might have formed a very different first impression about the northwest. the prolonged darkness and rain has got me a little homesick, and like i do to cope with most of life's little jabs i've turned to books. I just read a complete collection of flannery o'connor's short fiction including Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it away. Now i'm about 3/4 of the way though Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, with Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms next on the que. i'm knee deep in southern gothic literature, giving myself the sort of class that i guess would cost me 500-600 dollars to take at the university but since i've got Powel's bookstore a few miles away its cost me about 15 to get all the those books so far. Factor in the fact that i get my coffee for free at Tiny's now and i'm a fairly frugal freelance bookworm.

i really like the southern gothic style of writing, at least the two authors i've read so far, because it really grasps how heavy the south is to me. comparing it to the west coast, i feel like the past is almost tangible in dixie, its a yolk on everyone. theres a stirring in your blood when you kick the appalachian dust that was the dust of your forefathers for generations long gone and forgotten except in the traits of yourself bequeathed to you by a long line of hard living sonsofbitches you'll never know in this life. out west everything's new, and everyone looks forward, its "progressive", no one except the mexicans really care too much for their roots on the west, because the west is no one's but the mexicans and the indian's and the indians are all dead. the southern blood is a blood that wants to flow backward, the south is a land who's glory days have long since past. its a land that has endured the shame of defeat in war, then the scolding of the rest of the nation for its actions since then. the south is mean and spiritual and scary and beautiful. heres a little passage from the faulkner book that i've read over and over again. an old man is talking to a child who believes he's seen some of kind of spirit in the forest:

"think of all that has happened here, on this earth. All the blood hot and strong for living, pleasuring, that has soaked back into it. For grieving and suffering too, of course, but still getting something out of it for all that, getting allot out of it, because after all you don't have to continue to bear what you believe is suffering; you can always choose to stop that, put an end to that. And even suffering and grieving is better than nothing; there is only one thing worse than not being alive, and that's shame. But you can't be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth don't want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again. Look at the seed, the acorns, at what happens even to carrion when you try to bury it: it refuses too, seethes and struggles too until it reaches light and air again, hunting the sun still. And they don't want it, need it. besides what would it want, itself, knocking around out there, when it never had enough time about the earth as it was when there is plenty of room about the earth, plenty of places still unchanged from what they were when the blood used and pleasured in them while it was still blood?"

thats a sentiment that i think people who've lived in the south can understand, but people existing on virgin land like the west maybe wouldn't.

the other night i went to see deathcharge, the estranged and specters at satyricon, a 60 year old woman with 4 teeth was there sloppy drunk talking about how she was enamored of all the "hot punk dick" walking around the club and after a few formalities offered to buy me a drink and ask me in no uncertain terms "wanna fuck?". the estranged were awesome, they're touring the US right now check and see if they're gonna play your town. Vancouver BC'sspecters headlined the show, between deathcharge and spectres i got high so my appreciation of them might be a little skewed, but they were also most enjoyable, very post punky gothic joy division derivations, and a respectable stage prescience. a few days after that i went to see the sword, who i saw a few years ago and thought they were pretty ripping, but since then they've gotten a track on guitar hero, and the crowd was pretty similar to a frat party kegger, most humiliating was seeing people actually doing the guitar hero air guitar during the song featured on the video game. another one bites the dust i suppose. on the horizon in PDX we've got japanese 80's hardcore legends SYSTEMATIC DEATH playing with tragedy hellshock and one of the most slept on bands in portland, autistic youth, and ENGORGED is going to explode portland with skarp and funerot. good times ahead, good times behind

Current Music: specters

when the catfish are in bloom
for posterity: the twilight of winter and dubious spring we've been having in portland has treated me extremely well. its almost as if this winter i just put my social life on pause, i went out for one of the first non raining non bone chilling nights of the season a few weeks ago and rather miraculously saw like 30 people who comprised the periphery of my friend group for the first five or six months that i lived here that i hadn't seen at all since december. my twenty third year got off to a rocky start, i sort of found myself adrift in the sea of portland without a focus on what i wanted to be willing my life into, in the crowley sense of the word "will". then winter time blindsided me and left me attaching cans of hamms' onto my waist line and drowning brain cells and happiness with a gusto that would impress andrea yates. then i shattered my wrist lost my job and had to wait out the darkest months doped up on painkillers unable to leave the house.

well now the cherry blossoms are in bloom, my cast is a thing of the past, i've got a band together tentatively playing heavily electric wizard influenced downtuned metal under the moniker Macrocosm, i've got myself a pretty ripping bicycle and i'm soberer than i've been in quite some time. the portland show calender is telling me that for almost 2 months straight there are shows to go to ranging from sweet to life changing seven days a fucking week, and i'm going to go to all of them. my job is stupid but i'm having enough fun outside of it to balance the life-equation. next month we're having the first house show that i booked here at Mount Brolympus featuring wild things who boast members of warkrime from the bay area and local crust giants lebendan totem. if the house doesn't get burnt down by rabid punks, metal and punk shows should become a pretty regular occurrence at my house, which is pretty outstanding considering thats something i've wanted for myself since i was like 16.

in news of times past, i've been going to some really really incredible musical performances recently, most notably seeing Wolves in the Throne Room for the third time. i would very seriously recommend this band to anyone regardless of musical taste, its definitely black metal, but the amount of seriousness and passion they deliver their 12-15 minute long opuses with is truely unparalleled in any genre. Its two brothers who both play guitar and live on a farm in the Cascade mountains, i read an interview recently where one of them stated that the reason they didn't tour or play live often was because the harvest was of utmost importance to him. They are probably the only band that can write songs with titles like "behold the vastness and sorrow" and "i will lay down my bones among the rocks and roots" and be entirely serious and it not come off as anything other than fucking dire. "Black Metal is the cleansing fire that frees us from the bondage of rationality, science, morality, religion, leaving us free to choose our own path. The deep woe inside black metal is about fear that we can never return to the mythic, pastoral world that we crave on a deep subconscious level" if i may quote. They played Rotture for almost an hour and a half lit only by candle light, it was one of the greatest performances i've ever had the fortune to witness. i felt like a puddle afterwards, totally drained in the best way possible, just mumbling to myself how ridiculously lucky i was to be in the northwest and to see bands like that.

the day after that was a grindcore/noise show in this weird basement bar that had side project or new project bands from such heavy weights as Plutocracy, Deadbodieseverywhere, Engorged, and Man Is The Bastard. it was totally ripping. then one day after that shredathon was british crust/grind legends Extreme Noise Terror with Hellshock at the satyricon, who ben aficionados will remember as the venue i broke my wrist at. Extreme Noise Terror really hadn't lost any of the brutality in their now 20th (!) year of playing the most seering pressure washer enema crust ever. it was also perhaps the most violent mosh pit i've ever been in, when the smoke cleared both my shins were bleeding, the back of my pants were ripped and a 6 inch gash peeked out of the hole, some crusty's studs tore a hole in my shoulder which was bleeding everywhere, my tooth was loose and the inside of my mouth was bloody, my nose bled and some four foot tall girl in municipal waste shirt socked me directly in the eyesocket. Tonight i'm going to see The Estranged at satyricon, sunday theres another black metal show at rotture, then monday the Sword will chop portland to pieces. so there it is, an update. i hope everyone that reads this is doing relatively as well as me, let me know, it seems like no one updates anymore.

Current Music: The Observers, i cant stop listening to this fucking band!!!

My friend was telling me about a documentary about a group of mathematicians he watched recently. they kept pondering to themselves the concept of infinity, and the idea that there was an infinity was jarring enough, but then when they considered that there was an infinity of numbers between one and two and it got a little more convoluted, then when they reconsidered that even between 1.1 and 1.2 there were an infinite possibility of numbers that could occur and so forth to the conclusion that there are infinite infinities it came too much to bear, and several of them ended up loosing their minds and committing suicide because of their inability to come to terms with the implications of this. when i think about that i find it sort of interesting but i can shrug it off and go about my day, it isn't the kind of thing that so consumes me that i have to blow my brains out.

which makes me wonder, is that how most other people think about the existential conundrum that plagues my mind relatively constantly? that infinite mystery of being a human being that nags at me most of my waking hours might elicit but a shrug from most people, does that make me insane or just a little more in tune to life? i work in the suburbs now, in this fucked up uber-mall that i'd sort of forgot that existed living in downtown portland for a year with my blinders on, and the people that hang out there mystify me. they're so passive its insane. their idea of a day well spent is to browse whatever commodities are available to them in this mall, being sure to make some sort of purchase thereupon to "stimulate the economy" then eat some shitty food, maybe take in the new martin lawrence movie, and call it a night. i have a hard time even thinking of them as people as they stroll around Bridgeport Village with a shit eating grin and a thousand yard stare patting their too full guts and gazing with the stupefied wonder of an infant at whatever new ipod is out. these people are like extras in the movie of life, as the credits on our era roll, they won't even be "showering inmate #6" at the very end of the list, they will be unnoticed filler, and they're ok with that. living your life like that is paramount to being at the louvre and reading the same faded Cathy comic strip you've had in your pocket the last few years. Theres so much unfathomable beauty and incomprehensible possibilities right at our finger tips, but we resign ourselves to the same old boring bullshit day in day out. that being said i'm about to go spend eight hours in a 15 by 15 foot room as i do 5 days a week taking sweaters from one box and putting them in another. if sisyphus were around today he'd work retail for minimum wage.

Current Music: sun city girls

So i had a job working at marketing strategies international, which is a market research firm that compensates you the least amount they can without being arrested or fined. Most of the people working there were homeless or mentally handicapped, and all i did for eight hours a day was bother people all over america on the behalf of such great organizations as taco bell and outback steakhouse to gauge how much more they could charge for their barely passable edible commodities. so in a nutshell i was a phone line terrorist for capitalism, greasing the wheels of commerce, and everyone i talked to was either someone who would curse me out and slam the phone in my earpeice or old people who are so crushingly lonely and desperate for human contact that they would lie about where they've eaten and how they feel about it so someone, anyone will talk to them for half an hour, then back to dementia solitude and wheel of fortune. needless to say that being an agent for companies that i wouldn't patronize if i just smoked a pound of grass and hadn't eaten in a week and had a gift certificate is unsettling in itself, and compounded with the mental trauma the human contact associated with the job gave me, i found to be an employment situation most unfavorable to myself.

so now i work doing backstock at that great grate that catches all the hipster refuse so it doesn't clog up the drain of society, american apparel. i got a two dollar raise from MSI and all i do is sit in the back room listen to death metal and pack clothes into boxes, but its a rampartly sexist company, and its in the suburbs, and theres a pretty heavy stigma associated with the job, rightfully so. its in the middle of "bridgeport village" about a two hour bus ride from my house nestled firmly in the safe counterculture breast of pdx, nestled firmly tittyfucking the passed out sorority girl's breast of humanity on the alter of the fetishism of the commodity in "middle america". I'm twenty three years old now and its becoming clearer and clearer that the vinn diagrams of people who can afford to feed themselves and people who are not accomplices to organizations i'd give even my life to dismantle do not ever coincide. i'd kind of repressed the memory that most people who are lucky enough to be reincarnated as a sentient being who's existential possibilities are only as limited as the ones they prescribe for themselves, the lone beings in the known universe who can dream imagine and love, the sole creature capable of passion, spend most of their "leisure" hours browsing shelves and shelves of things they can trade their unfathomably precious and limited time on earth for that they haven't any need for. theres really no apt metaphor for it. its like using the most powerful computer ever devised as a paper weight, but unspeakably worse. on the way to work yesterday a bum took a shit piss on the seat two seats up from me subjecting all the commuters myself included to the horrific stench of his discharges, and for this man living deranged on his own terms i have infinitely more respect than what i have for anyone spooning gelato on a pleasant afternoon at the fountain of the "town center" of the post modern hell of bridgeport village.

Current Music: fifteen - we will win

portland is really an absurd town. tonight there are three REALLY good shows to go to, i could go see Israeli garage rock band monotronix at satyricon, theres a five dollar doom metal tour rolling trough dante's, and lola's room is hosting two of my favorite locals for a rip roaring record release show. i got to see sanctum kick off their american and then european "crust crusher" tour last night at the know, and i skipped seeing wykked thrashers vermifuge with local brutes reeker on tuesday cause i didn't have a ride, and you can read my previous entry concerning my weekend show schedule before that. as if that weren't enough tomorrow ex-cavity 2 man wrecking crew BLACK COBRA will reduce the east end to rubble. the sun's out and i took a walk around town today and just took in how awesome the citizenry of portland is. most of the houses have murals or banners pronouncing which house this is, everyone's out biking, the coffee shops are spilling over with good people talking about good shit with great art on the walls EVERYWHERE. sometime i flash back to living in a town with one or two shows a year that were the caliber of shows we get every week on a slow week; that had maybe 2 restaurants that served vegan food, and where art and creativity and humanity in general were regarded somewhere just below mountain dew and monster truck rallies. every day i'm thankful for being in portland. ever since i saw the smashing pumpkins in sixth grade, and to a larger extent when i saw burns out bright (!) at my first like "underground" show and decided that that was going to be it for me forever, rock n roll, my life has been headed into this utopia. everyone, and i mean everyone, should move here, period.

also, if anyone's interested local pdx giants DANAVA just released their new album of incredible space rock, if you have ever liked anything that rocked just a little bit, its imperative you obtain it. if you're bit torrent savvy you can get it here, enjoy.

Current Music: danava

This week has added another notch to the morbidly obese belt of my unfathomable love for the northwest. The sun is back out from its hibernation under the thick gray blanket we've all been enduring for so long, theres an almost palpable feeling of well being all over the city. as i'm typing this right now i can look out my window over mount tabor and see unearthly hues of purple and pink covering the sky completely as the sun sets. I went to see legendary creators of heavy music and self proclaimed "louder than god" band, Blue Cheer decimate Dantes on friday. I've been in love with the band for years, they were one of the first things i ever listened to under the influence of grass, the opportunity to see them would not be missed by me. They mercifully stuck mostly to their classic late 60's material, and were still playing at a volume that would likely be around that of a deity, had he some Sunn amps. I had a total fucking blast and essentially destroyed my vertebrae.

my neck was given no time to recover, as saturday rob wade and I took a long, hungover trek to our snobby big sister city to the north, seattle, to behold one of the 666 wonders of the unholy world NEUROSIS play live in front of our very eyes. We got up there in time to enjoy my favorite sandwich ever "the wizard" at the anarcho-delicious punk run vegan Wayward Cafe, then we hit up a mexican wrestling themed dive bar called cha cha's for some pre-neurosis tequila. The show was nothing short of monufuckingmental, Neurosis is, as they have been for 15 years now, the heaviest thing ever. Global warming would stop if neurosis went onto a glacier and played for them to remind the ice blocks how massive they could be and they'd stop melting so as to not have been shown up by 2 dudes with incredible beards. if jesus was a bong, and the stigmata the carb, and you loaded him with Shiva's tusk weed and sprinkled the sweet hash of muhammad's beard on it and cleared the christ chamber, you would maybe be as transcendentally intoxicated as one is experiencing neurosis play sober as a judge.

The next day we made vegan sweet potato quesadillas for breakfast and went to the best bar in the continental united states of america, Shorties. We started drinking around 2 with our chicago style veggie dogs and i played my favorite pinball game, which i've never seen anywhere else in the world PUB CHAMPION, where you use your silver ball to "train" by jumping rope and hitting a punching bag, then "go to the bar", whereupon this guy

comes out of the machine at you swinging his arms and you have to bash him with the ball, this may sound lame and me like a dork, but its unbelievably entertaining. After shorty's we went to some goth bar with 1 dollar beer happy hours that had the ultimate mid to early 90's ipod on shuffle, so as we libated and enjoyed all the seven mary three, live, and alice in chains our ears could stand, a conversation about the merits of contemporaries The Crash Test Dummies that we'd have a week or so prior came up. on a whim we slipped the goth bar tender a saucy note urging him to play their classic hit "mmm mmm mmm mmm" that we were hoping beyond hope was on what must have had to have been the worst ipod of all time. Lo and behold cascading from the speakers like god's glorious fury on the rapture from the sky a few songs later came the beautiful opening chords and stunning baritone of just the song for which we so hungered. it was a glorious victorious moment made perhaps more triumphant by our sloppy drunkenness.

from there it gets foggy but we went back to the cha cha to see matt before he went to see neurosis (they played two nights in a row because they are way too heavy for just one performance) and it was as fun as it always is, UNTILL some fuckface hipster with an ironic mustache and a moog starting playing awful sassy electroclash really loud. it was so awful that my heckels of "turn down the vice magazine" and "the faint called they want their shitty music back" got more applause than did his garbage tunes. Two gangster looking dudes behind me kept screaming fuck you! over and over again and gave my negligible wit thumbs up. as soon as our drinks were done with us still determined to keep our proverbial train a rollin' we skeedaddled to another far divier dive. naomi and i did UFO's "doctor, doctor" for karaoke and were about to leave when who should walk in but my brothers in heckle the two gangster dudes from the cha cha. They bought me beers and we talked until naomi and i could barely sit up anymore and we miraculously made it home.

elsewise in my life as some of you may or may not know i broke my wrist stage diving at an oakhelm and book of black earth show. i saw legendary fagpunk supergroup limp wrist after my 10,000 dollar surgery and people were doing double backflips off the speakers and climbing up the one pole in satyricon to dive from like 12 feet up and i could only gaze with tears of jealousy at how awesome it was. i spent the first sunny day of the season at a park a while ago playing frisbee, and the second sunny day sitting on my roof watching the sun set drinking a 40 and listening to the ramones. i start my new cripple job calling people and asking them to do surveys wednesday and besides that and my unthinkable new debt situation, life is pretty killer in my chilly gorgeous little pocket of america.

Current Music: deep purple - space truckin

i've been listening to the first bob seger lp allot recently, the late seventies & early 80s were really a golden age for the working man, it may have been the beginning of the end for the american working class but godamn did they ever go out with a bang. before subhuman avatars of the void which all mankind battles everyday like ronald reagan and maggie thatcher crushed millions of lives and countless of generations of human beings with the opening of the free market, the working man had such dignity. they had bob seger and bruce springstein, they had merle haggard singing the workin mans blues and rush singing the workin man's praise. they had dudes like rambo pushin back against the man on the big screen and a solid job at the factory to pay for it all. what has the 20th century been but a degradation of labor in the first world?

the moral of all this is the opening track of the seger album is "rock n roll never forgets" is really a lost classic in the pantheon of rock n roll songs about rock n roll. its long been an unspoken requirement that if you're going to play rock n roll, you have to do at least one PSA for rock n roll in your career, to give back to the mysterious force that gave you so much (see "for those about to rock" "its been a long time since i rock n rolled" "i love rock n roll" "you can't stop rock n roll", even more recently "rock n roll is the only way" "i wanna rock" maybe to lesser extent "rock you like a hurricane" etc etc) but few musicians do rock n roll such a great service that seger does with this gem. the gist of the song is a plea not to those about to rock, but for those who rocked once, but perhaps rock no longer. i'll quote the first stanza:

So youre a little bit older and a lot less bolder
Than you used to be
So you used to shake em down
But now you stop and think about your dignity
So now sweet sixteens turned thirty-one
You get to feelin weary when the work days done
Well all you got to do is get up and into your kicks
If youre in a fix
you can come back baby
Rock and roll never forgets

this is paramount to carter pardoning people who fled the draft into canada during vietnam. if you fled the rock after high school in fear of becoming a burnout or because your girlfriend was a bitch or whatever, rock n roll is not here to judge you, rock n roll remembers your fond coors soaked evenings seeing molly hatchet at the fairground probably better than you do, rock and roll does not remember you turning down seeing van halen three years later because you had a big project at the office, rock n roll loves you unconditionally, like a parent loves their progeny no matter how bad they fuck up*. rock n roll will be there for you, and someone needed to make that clear and bob seger has does that.

i go under the knife tomorrow to fix my broken wrist, i'll be getting a metal plate screwed in and will officially be a superhuman cyborg with vastly increased shredding ability in my left hand and will be able to perfect my signature wrestling move the "metallic wrist poser krush" to crush posers in the octagon and the pit. wish me luck.

*it should be also noted that this principle does not apply to heavy metal, it is a much more dire commitment and it doesn't forget, but the way charles bronson doesn't forget in death wish, not like benevolent president carter doesn't forget.

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