9:51 AM *

i'm in print here more than anywhere else. fortunately, this time they got a good quote.

 

7:25 PM *

i am a boy but

i am going to grow up big and strong, just like my daddy.

he's sweet and stong and

helping me along.

8 weeks is not a long time but

it can seem long.

8 weeks more is even longer but

not much longer.

i am difficulted but

i am determinedly lovely.

i have veins on my biceps and

when i see them i want to do more.

i cannot sit still when the sun shines because

the ends of my chest sweat in my shirt.

i want to go home and

write while naked.

my chest and arms stretch my shirts because

they were purchased many years ago

for a different me and

i flex that symmetry.

 

11:58 AM *

life forced to drive us
spent the whole trip
tryin to go my way

pity for me
tattoo a wow
what a mile
where are tonight's crimes going?

[jonno, you'll be happy to know that this is the lesbian favorite in our favorite coffee shop for a month now, even though it wasn't released until this week.]

the sound that kim deal engendered with the previous breeders albums was never tight, and for me she took the best of the pixies into her new band: a talent for believable looseness, where the spontanaeity of the performer keeps the listener on edge because they are talented and they will always do something interesting. even a goof will never appear unintentional. a gorgeous mess.

[i had a parallel experience this week, but someone else had the chance to write about our front-row viewing of kiki and herb before i could.]

but pod took the sound where the pixies messiness would never go, a place positively miasmic. i am thinking of tunes like "iris" or "metal man", or even the brilliant cover of "happiness is a warm gun". her cover of a white album song cemented her as the heir to the early-pixies sound. the more popular last splash moved away from this to a tighter, seemingly radio-oriented sound. honestly, when they quit making albums, one of my impulses was to be relieved that they weren't going to be forced by celebrity to start making clean-sounding albums, and suck whatever life they had out of what they did, completely erase the very thing that made them, her, unique.

then came the amps, an album i didn't find until 1998. it was a shifting lineup behind kim. it was poorly produced. it was recorded around the world and near my house in ohio. the songs were open, asymmetrical, lyrically wonderfully opaque but still charged. the listener was given a structure by which to connect the dots; it was because of this i recognized why kim deal is a master artist: her impulse to resist music business, song-ness, popularity, propriety, and discrete structures was manifest in an open-ended sound that made the listener a participant. but this was no post-structuralist construction: it was the album where she is fiercely having fun. it was in her hand, her guitar, her voice.

title TK continues this impulse, in a different way. we arrived and missed listening to her 1996 album. sorry you didn't hear it, but where did you go anyway? she is now interested in a sparer sound. the band members are credited by first name only, echoing the depth of their participation. her voice sounds older, mature, and tired: she will only sing what is really important. the lyrics are even more impenetrable and charged. the songs seem collaged of shards of other categories of songs. there are guitar-rock bits, or small synthesizer bits, or lesbian folk bits (these are new bits), but the overall project keeps these pieces in suspension, never coaelescing even in a single song. and yes, the album does sound like there are a few pieces left over from the 1998 album, even if it's only a latent potential, the sound of not hearing the thing that led to this thing. but even that is subsumed into the work, left intact to affect you too.

i want to fall in love to this album: it will last.

 

3:54 PM *

you were so fortunate. you could grow up looking across a river at a fantastic marvel: an island-city that would one day claim you, and help you escape.

ah, but i didn't always have new york. i never fathomed, never inkled, never knew such a place could exist, because i grew up in a place where there was little between the farmland, the woods, and my television on early summer evenings, just after bathtime, well before bedtime. and what you don't realize is that despite ignorance of anything else i grew up believing in that equally real universe, occupying the same place in my mind that the city does today: a place that would eventually claim me too, bust me outta that place (that remote desert-planet where i looked across the street and saw farmland). the equally-real was a place that evelopped one with technological surfaces, made my strange religion seem agnostically believable, and let me dream that anything can be created or destroyed. and, most significantly, that my world can be named, object by object, sensation by sensation.

and this week, i dared to give myself over to that again, become the adult i wanted to be as a child, complete with leather holster and playfully swaggering gait, despite a previous episode filling me with momentary cynicism toward this whole situation, and despite being in the center of new york, fourth floor theater, 12.01AM on opening morning.

 

3:29 PM *

Fuck, in one word, fuck: 'twas for that you were brought into the world; no limits to your pleasure save those of your strength and will; no exceptions as to place, to time, to partner; all the time, everywhere, every man has got to serve your pleasures; continence is an impossible virtue for which Nature, her rights violated, instantly punishes us with a thousand miseries.

there is so little more to say.

except that you may strike number two from my list of the previous entry.

and philosophy in the bedroom made me, alternatively, hard and nauseated. the ideas are so true, my own so aligned to them, that when they cut a deeper swath than my own do, bringing many twisted things with them along the way, i became mildly horrified.

but one may also take sade's sinister turns, the ones involving serious damage, not as a physical assault, but as an assault on the reader's sense of moderation. sure, libertinage is a wonderful idea, and pleasure is always sought. but is bodily harm the logical extension of this? he forces one to ask difficult questions that are only triggered by the explicit writing about sex and harm. is moderation a form of cowardice, or is it a crime? is cowardice itself a crime? what is the relationship between human society and human nature?

how, the fuck, did we get to that?

 

10:24 AM *

my lids were drooping, eyes rolling back, my calves felt like they were being burned, or needled, from the inside out. the third set of twenty repetitions of ninety pounds hurt.

to get me through these things, i say something to myself. i won't tell you what it is, but it's something a family member would tell me when i was little, and the displacement motivates me.

when i finished, my eyes fluttered back to front, still not able to focus on much (not wearing my glasses does not help). i felt good.

the reader may ask (or perhaps it's me asking myself) if i really meant that. good?

okay there are a few things to list, a sentence that says i
1. don't give a rat's ass about going out and drinking or whatever else except to see friends
2. but haven't needed anonymous sex in several months
3. yet completely over treating strangers as strangers, especially if they're cute and at the gym
4. and goodness how an intense workout regimen can focus your attention
5. and recently discovered that people at certain social gatherings love me, i guess i'm charming, but i write about this elsewhere and you can't read it
6. because taking to writing a lot of stuff that isn't posted anywhere
7. and begun to enjoy washing dishes and cooking at home and seeing a lot of films
8. and beginning to dream about flying again
9. while having mapped out several new things that i've never done before.

my job stresses me out. yet again, i remind myself: the first step in not letting the anxiety get to you is acknowledging it's actually there, it's real, it's what is actually the source of your displeasure. your unhappiness. for so long, like avoiding my reflection, i could not admit that the majority of my waking hours had a major impact on my emotional health, when in reality they were entirely responsible for it. when i first saw this picture, about four years ago, i found ways around it. but i forget from time to time, generally during the months of january, february, march, and early april.

i even forget that my confident self always emerges, when it's ready, as if it never left. in fact, the dulling properties of winter only lend a protective patina to that self. it always emerges stronger, better, unwilling to fuck around.

i'm counting on
a heart i know by heart
to walk me through this war
where memories get stored

and indeed this week the remaining obstacles to professional bliss were removed, along the way me facing my self-appointed adversaries with politesse, as if we were all throwing a dinner party in a couple of hours. only the normal course of difficulties remain, but these challenges are what i adore; they are the reason i am an architect, the reason i love what i do. first, the persuasion required to convince clients that your ideas are worth spending money on, and they will fulfill their needs in a way they had never realized, is a skill i giddily still suck at. but i'm improving, and at the same time it amuses me to think that it will still be hidden from most of the people who taught me in graduate school. second, the difficulty, also a form of persuasion, of having another business with different goals actually build your design, even though their relationship, contractually, is with your client. this challenge for months on end can make one feel like an isolated dick, but potentially is the most satisfying, because it's also something one can't pick up in a degree program. but more importantly: because the final built work is a direct (albeit greatly delayed) reflection on the extent that an architect was unfailingly consistent with his persuasion. and finally, the courage to be ambitious enough to appear talented, knowledgable, and accomplished in the eyes of your employer, without appearing like a self-promoting jackass, is something that requires a clear idea of why you're doing what you do, and knows that the (to others) hubris required in making it clear you did a good job is really not something to get worried about.

sitting in the seated calf press machine, i wiped my face with my towel, tossed my head a little, and held my face up to the florescents as if they were the friday afternoon sun, to catch a breeze in a field of metal, lineoleum tile, and mirrors. my mind was skipping on itself, ready to get to work. it's friday evening.

 

10:47 PM *

something new to read, called the jobsite. enjoy.

 

9:09 PM *

after a long pause, something else happened.

 

9:52 PM *

they may not have any other name, but they certainly have some kind of secret, some personality trait, that would transform them into someone completely different than they appear to be. in fact, you can go through your day, your night, without believing in the suface value of anyone's appearance, no matter how much they intend this appearance to be them.

is everything in this town weird? does adolescence, combined with meteor rock, potentially lead to violent misfortune, even when the hero always does the right thing?

as she reached for the book, you looked at her tattoo, on the back of her wrist, something you've never seen, because she never wears short sleeves, and you wonder what that's doing there. the icon has nothing to do with her. but apparently it does because it was not there when you met her years earlier. remember holmes: a deduction follows the facts, not the other way around. how seamlessly it was concealed from you up to this point.

where and how away do other people go when they turn the corner?

the conversation you take hold of and make revolve around a small turn in a pun about a gay porn star, and one of the crowd, the one you are for years absolutely certain is closeted, is the only one of the others, hetero people, who laughs, but then blushes. are you more shocked that he got such an obscurity, or that your theory about him, after years of patiently watching for a crack, has so astoundingly been covered by playing along with him? or perhaps you simply cannot interpret the message he's sending.

have you ever seen your friend run, get sick, bleed, or get tired?

and up to this point, you were of the belief that the other personality, the hidden one, was simply one that was named and revealed in other circles. you know how it goes, and it's almost painful to re-explain it: he wears a costume, removes his facial accessory, and he's someone else. but after recently watching and thinking and dreaming (not to mention years of jacking off to it before coming out) you are beginning to realize, young child, that the hidden self is much more fascinating before someone comes up with the alternate name, the double or triple personality, and tries to encompass it within a single person. sometimes hidden to everyone, and at occasional moments to ones' self, and never named. it is this naming-that-eludes that drives the entire action, or, i mean, drives your life.

on television, people with wonderful bodies don't need to work out, because no one will notice that they magically have amazing bodies even though they never work out.

you've slowly come to realize that a friend, has become someone else. you both are proceeding with the assumption that he is who he was before. it's a convenient relationship. it's nothing sinister, because life works like that, but you'll never call him for advice anymore.

but your friend does amazing things when you're away, and why can't you?

in fact, the idea has crossed your mind that this naming of the hidden self eludes the people supposedly writing this whole drama, so to speak, and that the action is only there to generate the potential avenues it would go if you were in control of it. but, universal truth of truths, what can we control, so why write it well?

a friend told me why you got sick, after you left the bar.

how can people be so beautiful and flat, yet so completely complex, if you really took the time to notice?

you've even noticed that your own tastes in lovelies has shifted. you're getting older, and as your identity expands, so do your proclivities. and by you i mean you you.

 

ps all work in this domain is copyright chad the minx.