The Ordinary Times

CBO: Doesn’t Just Stand for Congressional Budget Office Anymore

Check out my friend Sarah’s website called Cute Baby Otters. Make sure you’re ready to go “aawwwwww”.

Cosmos

Just found this remix from 2 years ago that my friend Cosmos did of a Morals’ song from our cd, The Warming Light Of Dawn.

It’s an honor to have someone make something so beautiful out of something I made.

Listen here, but go over to his “neverending album” site to hear more remixes of the likes of Typhoon and Starfucker.

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The swirly syths are so summery. You know how partial shadows near a summer sunset can tug at emotional strings you didn’t know existed? How when you’re climbing a mountain or a hill and you get near the top, so you can see where the ground levels off and the sky seems to leap into view with each step? Those things are what this sounds like to me.

Command

File under: instant messages I’ve sent.

the command line is more humble — it avoids the faux-omniscient hubris of the “window” or “desk” metaphor and ultimately is more powerful for its humility

or if not more powerful, at least more pure

the command line is computing before man deified himself

it is the garden of eden

Found

A poem my aunt wrote for me 5 years ago after my first (and next to last) poetry reading:

POEM FOR MY NEPHEW

The stone set quiet against the green,
And the young poet, in garlands,
Pleased as any stag or ox.
The priesthood smiles
Waiting for the rush of blood.

But no, that was
An age ago. The crowds
Had beat the square to dust beneath their feet,
And danced in great chains, spilling half the wine.

Now it is a lonely thing
A man, a rock, the wind,
Remembered notes of but a single flute.

How will he learn, then, to shake his horns, consenting,
And come whole from the madness of the God?

-Kathleen Piper

How?

In the summer, on Thursdays, I would often go to Crow Bar, down on Mississippi, for Karaoke. The walk’s not bad if the night is warm. When you don’t use the microphone you have to sing louder, so that’s what I’d do: drown out my thoughts with my own voice.

One night, closing my tab at the bar, while my head was turned, someone slipped a torn photograph of a woman onto the bar in front of me. The right third of the picture is tinted orange from some error in exposure or developing.She smiles softly, sitting in a bar (out the window behind her you can see a tiny piece of an Oregon Lottery keno sign) head turned three quarters profile. A red-eyed Mona Lisa.

On the back, in the functional cursive of a pharmacist, is written: “If you could live your life exactly as you’d like, how would that look?”

There is a line below that, and then an empty space, perhaps inviting response.

When I got home I taped it up next to my bed, woman facing the wall. It’s still there, reminding me that I haven’t figured out an answer to that question.

Pirates

From the Wikipedia entry on Somali Piracy:

Local fishermen in the Malinde area of neighboring Kenya have reported their largest catches in forty years, catching hundreds of kilos of fish and earning fifty times the average daily wage as a result. They attribute the recent abundance of marine stock to the pirates scaring away the large factory trawlers of foreign fishing fleets, which it’s claimed have for decades deprived local dhows of a livelihood. Marine biologists agree, saying that the indicators are that the local fishery is recovering because of the lack of commercial scale fishing.

and, from the mouth of a pirate:

Pirate leader Sugule Ali said their motive was “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters… We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.”

Missing

“Much More Than That” by Sharon Van Etten.

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6-30-1981 from Jamie Livingston’s photos of the day.

Tyranny

This, a song called “Tyrants” from an amazing band called Black Mountain. Most of the same folks are in another band called Lightning Dust which is also good.

I haven’t been able to make this song stop playing. My hand can’t move the mouse anywhere but the play button. My finger can’t do anything but click. My ears can’t do anything but fill up with power and restraint in equal measures.

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There is a forest, maybe. There is dark, but light filters through the trees in shifting dusty rays. There is a thick carpet of ferns, and moss coats the rocks and tall firs. There is a majestic buck, horns sharp, hooves heavy with his weight. There are various woodland creatures that serve him, cosmeticians: his woodpecker manicurist, his field mouse stylist.

There are hunters. There are guns. There is fire and smoke. The stag bolts, his servants scatter. There is no safety. There is nowhere to hide from the clatter of rifles. He is laced through with warmth. He is shot. Blood leaks from him like a sieve. He staggers.

There is a place not far off, a quiet glen where he once fell in love. He might make it there, to breathe his last breath in still sweet air, to drink once more from the softly burbling stream, to lay his head on the thick carpet of moss and slide into sleep forever.

For Sarah

Tonight, just a song I wrote for Sarah called Sarah’s Song.

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Walker

So I just discovered Scott Walker. What the fuck? Why didn’t anyone tell me?

Anyways, in case you don’t know, here’s “Bouncer See Bouncer” from his crazy as shit 1995 record Tilt. He hadn’t released a record in like 15 years, and he just drops this.

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