KERES

Sarah’s Song

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.

Bouncer See Bouncer

I looked around the room, feeling intimidated by the large group. It was mostly women and teenagers, aside from the serious metal head to my right. I stared at him, wondering what his dog was like. This guy must have a dog. He also had a neck tattoo and long ratted hair. I spaced out on his shirt for a moment and then forced myself to focus on what was being said.

Five hours later, Jerry was leading my group through the inner halls of the Dog Pods. He kept repeating himself and I was agitated. He showed us how to clean out the kennels and scoop the mess into a giant flushing hole. He spoke of the proper way to get a dog out of their kennel and leash them, and the danger of not latching gates behind us. As we walked I spotted Kimmy. I remembered her from the website as one of The Great Eight; the eight dogs at OHS that have been there the longest.

She was lovely. One blue eye, one brown, sweet faced and complete with a bright scarf knotted around her neck. There were notes written by her caretakers tacked to the front of her pen, all stating how amazing she was. I drew closer and peered over the gate. She was calm and held my gaze. Her eyes were peaceful and they searched mine, seemingly asking me why she was there and if she had a chance. A lump welled in my throat, and we sat like that for a few minutes studying each other. I imagined what her life was like before she got there. I wondered how she could still be up for adoption since June, and what her previous owner had said to her upon giving her up. Did they apologize? Did they pat her head and tell her she would be better off? Or did they simply tire of her?

Kimmy contemplated me for a bit longer, all the while her expression hopeful. I didn’t need Jerry anymore to remind me why I was there.

Today when I wrote this I went to OHS’ website to find her on the adoption page but she is gone. It’s my turn to be hopeful.

This is what I’m struggling with: is the cell phone a social necessity? Am I, in effect, casting myself out of society by rejecting this norm?

I cancelled my Myspace page the other day, and true to form, there was an error and I’m not sure if it actually deleted my account. I’m sick of technology. Sure, I’m overlooking all of the ways technology has helped me, but – again – I’m certain that the problems have outweighed the benefits.

A very reasonable solution suggested to me was to get a pay-as-you-go phone, which would be useful for trips out of town, etc. That, and a watch.

I’m just over all of it, really. My only concern is coming across as if I think I’m above it all.

1) The Gossamer Thread You Fling

the gossamer thread you fling

I was in love with Megan for a long time. We met when we worked the same bullshit job in the town where I grew up and where she moved when she got sick of her bullshit parents. We never kissed, but we shared a few moments of magic: phosphorescent algae tracing our footsteps behind us on the beach at two am, an empty mountain lodge with fire still roaring, glow worms on Mount Tabor.

I drove up to see her in the Vagina Monologues at PCC Sylvania and wrote this song about it.

A while ago, almost a year, I sent her the album and told her the song was about her. It’s funny because it’s not really a love song at all. Just a song about a thing that happened and she happened to be involved.

The title is from Whitman — “A Noiseless Patient Spider” — and actually relates to the subject of the song, unlike most of my pretentious literary titles.

2) The Pastures of Heaven

the pastures of heaven

This one, for example.

3) One Year In Every Ten

one year in every ten

I envisioned this song as a letter from my self to myself, almost a resolution or call to arms, telling myself to live the life I want to and stop being a turd. I’m still not sure what a lot of it really means, and I get really embarrassed about the “fountains of immortality” bit, but I like it.

Ironically, the title is from a Sylvia Plath poem about suicide.

4) Man Versus Machine

man versus machine

It’s “I Hear America Singing” set to music.

5) I Pour the Cream

i pour the cream

I wrote this song about the time a girl flew me to Spain to make me fall in love with her and then ran off to Vienna to see the opening of her Austrian boyfriend’s opera, leaving me alone with no Spanish to speak and no idea of where I wanted to go. I ended up in a little town called Antequerra. We met back up in Madrid and careened across the city in a mad two day dash and fucked awkwardly in a too-small bed before our planes whisked us out of each-other’s lives pretty much for good.

The title is a reference to one of my favorite poems ever, “Vacation” by William Stafford:

One scene as I bow to pour her coffee: —

        Three Indians in the scouring drouth
        huddle at a grave scooped in the gravel,
        lean to the wind as our train goes by.
        Someone is gone.
        There is dust on everything in Nevada.

I pour the cream.

Funeral Song

A poem by Adrienne Rich called “Song” from her excellent book, Diving into the Wreck:

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn’s first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

Often, when deciding where to go for food or drinks, I find myself paralyzed by perfectionism, unable to settle on even the most obvious place — there is always somewhere better to go.

Often, when putting on music to work to or walk to or shower to, I find my thumb yo-yoing back and forth across the click wheel, scrolling infinitely without stopping — there is always something better to hear.

Often, when talking to you, I find my mind fumbling a little clumsily for the words, like an old carpenter’s worn and trembling hands sifting and casting off not quite the right tools — there is always some way to say more.

Letting go is good, but a positive attitude keeps the ship from capsizing. Arriving at a destination only to find the event is well past finished can be frustrating. Turning on one’s heel and heading for home to sulk is not the answer (as was my first impulse – I don’t have my phone, and I don’t have her number; goddamnit, I’m gonna have to go back home to call her). By sticking it out I had a great evening just being in the city, feeling alive and part of something wonderful.

It is behavior that is changing inside of me (though I have a pamphlet that says it is my DNA as well, caused by the cell phone). Because I have to think about other people’s plans and when they are expecting me, etc., I am getting much better at communicating clearly what I am doing, what I plan to do and what I am hoping will happen. The tough part can be extracting the same from others.

I was at an event last week where a phone rang and it did not even cross my mind that it might have been mine. I see this as a sign that my Pavlovian response to cell-phone action is waning. I say Pavlovian because I am certain that upon hearing a ring (or even more so, a text message) my brain juices me with some sort of pleasurable chemical. The connection was made long ago that the sound of a text message meant someone was thinking of me, and I was a junkie for it. Also, the ‘phantom ring’ that I used to hear so often has ceased.

The last weekend of the month is approaching, and I feel good. I have plans, and that is comforting, especially since the moments when I am alone and I can’t get a hold of anyone are trying – I am still pretty bad at enjoying alone time. I feel lost and lonely when I want to hang out but can’t. I ran into this hard when I moved back to Eugene in 2005, and I thought I had it tackled for good. That even-keel business comes into play on this one, though, so I have to just take a deep breath at times and take account of what I have that is good: I am warm, I have a place to live. I have friends near by. I have books to read and pants to mend.

I know it’s growing less and less about the phone, but I’m going to bring it back around, I swear.

Forget about the woman that cut you off twice this morning on the way to work and how fiercely you gritted your teeth and considered, for longer than you’d like to admit, considered stomping the gas and ramming the shit out of her tiny car. You will shake it off. You feel guilty now for the hatred and you are surprised by how it boiled up inside of you so quickly, but you allow yourself that feeling.

You want the afternoon to arrive when everyone else will leave except Randle down the hall, and the two of you will watch Youtube videos and drink cherry cola and put your arms behind your heads in relaxing poses.  

Randle will stretch his bum leg and talk about what the tides will be like on his fishing trip tomorrow. He will ask you when the last time you went fishing was, and you will reply the same you always do because the answer hasn’t changed since 1999. You will pretend not to notice the hole in his sweatpants because your outfit has a hole in it too, and it is, after all, Friday.

But the afternoon is still two hours away, so for now write a list for the coming months. Eat less hot sauce, order Colorado Bulldogs, stretch when you are lying down and remember to be kind. When the list is finished you will fold it in half and place it deep in your wallet, knowing the best part of forgetting it will be finding it again.

Then you decide to write some more, only this time you type the words on the screen and let them fall from your finger tips without care knowing spell check is polishing each one.  The first words come together to form a sentence that reads: You have made it through my darkest hour more than once.

In the course of reading the book, towards the end, after the part where our protagonist and his friends go and get blown by some uptown Boricua trannies for drug money,  the professor asked who supported Mr. Carroll’s lifestyle. After some snickering and some wise-ass hands being raised, he asked why the conservative side of the room did not unanimously support Mr. Carroll’s MO.

The right side of the room spat out the usual excuses, ‘Duh, he’s a deviant, junkie, chauvinist, thief, bum, poet etc. etc.’

The professor did not disagree. ‘But,’ he noted ‘he did it himself.’ All-City basketball (which at that time in NYC, would have been regarded as All-World), teenage poetry savant, hustler, drug addict, recovering drug addict, relapsed drug addict, artist.  Fuck, read the book.

And read his poetry.

Listen to the ‘Catholic Boy’ record and ‘Pools of Mercury’.

He did it himself. And made it work. Most of it is very good, some of it is great.

Jim Carroll died on 9.11.o9

I get the impression he was more comfortable writing than reading

he could also talk some ball.

Alex and I trudged through Farragut Park, past a baseball game and across the bridge covering the train yard. To our left the late afternoon sky swirled with breaks of blue and a large cluster of charcoal colored clouds. It was moving. Not the sky, but the mass of weather, in an autumn manner.

The Columbian Cemetery lies tucked beside a giant warehouse, practically unseen beneath a canopy of elderly trees. The first time we ventured there, it was nearing the witching hour on a chilly November night. On that visit we opted to drive, rolling up slowly to unknown territory.  The only sound to be heard was the crunching of our tires across the dead foliage, even though an I-5 overpass lines the west side of the graveyard.The fog curling in front of the headlights made me nervous.

“Whoa…this place is scarier than I was expecting,” I said quietly. We spent a few moments trying to focus our eyes on what could be waiting further in the dark. At least that’s what I was doing.  Then we stepped out of the car and I undressed quickly. We had hoped to snap some creepy pictures of me naked, wearing a bird mask Alex had made, but once onsite I think we were both too spooked to focus on aesthetics. The whole twenty minutes we were there, I felt as if something was watching us, lurking on the edge between darkness and light.

I smiled to myself as we walked now; sure this two mile jaunt would be much less unnerving. As we rounded the corner from Vancouver onto Columbia, traffic roared by and horns honked. We joked about how we must have looked: two misplaced girls plodding a path on an otherwise pedestrian free road.  The further we got the more uneasy I began to feel, recognizing the same sensation in my gut from our previous trek. I blamed it on the greasy factory workers leering out their windows and the distinct odor of welded metal.

Our destination certainly looked different in the daylight. Garbage lined the cast iron fencing at the entrance, and one of the massive trees had crashed to the ground destroying a few more with it. The grass was taller than before, and seemingly grabbed for our feet as we wandered.  Dusk was arriving quickly and inside the wooded area was darker than desirable.  We meandered to the back of the plots, making small talk to ignore the now very constant feeling of otherworldly presence.

“Man, this is just as scary as I remember,” I finally admitted. The look on Alex’s face said she couldn’t have agreed more. Toward the very back corner I noticed a strange square of shrubs, all trimmed and growing together in tight rows. I started to walk toward the patch and then saw a blanket, and remnants of occupancy. Alex squealed and my heart pounded in my chest. “Let’s get out of here,” she proposed, already heading back toward the front gate. I tried to be peaceful in thought and reassure myself we were alone. We read a few headstones aloud and the dates etched in stone. All in all I think we only spent twenty minutes there, just like our last visit.

As we retraced our steps back to my house, the uncomfortable pit in my stomach slowly subsided. We paused at the bridge overlooking the trains to admire the view. Alex pointed out the excitement of visiting a cemetery and the rush of adrenaline from fear, which is clearly why we are both intrigued by these places that house the dead. I like to think a graveyard provides the doorway for those who’ve passed on, to continue their journey, or not.  In any case, the Columbian Cemetery is still the creepiest one I’ve set foot in.

It’s funny that people assume that by not carrying the phone with me, I’m inaccessible. I check messages and return calls! It wasn’t too long ago that we had answering machines waiting for us at home. It really feels like I’m swimming against the current, but what if that current is taking everyone down the drain?

There is the distinct possibility that I’m an asshole. That I just don’t want to be bothered, and I only want to communicate with others on my terms. That I am insensitive to others’ needs.

But isn’t that a modern construction, demanding to have someone instantly accessible?

A friend was just telling me about a Milan Kundera novel called Slowness, which contends (second-hand paraphrased, of course) that when we are living rapidly, we are running from our past, and when we live slowly, we are contemplating it. Are we running from something? Shame? Change? Either way, I ‘d like to take more time to make dinner.

How you are doing can go downhill pretty quickly. Finding myself newly single, I took a day off work figuring my boss would rather I stay home than drench my desk in tears. While I was away, the cunt that sits directly across from me tried very hard to get me in trouble. Or fired? Who knows. Who fucking cares. Thankfully everyone in the office is fully aware that she’s a lunatic, and that work drama is the last thing I need in my current situation.

Saturday night I panicked. It was 3:30 am, I was absolutely plastered, and I could not find my cat anywhere. I stood barefoot in the street calling her name repeatedly, straining my ears in hope for the jingle of her collar.  My fantastic ability to worry set in and I began to imagine an assortment of horrible events that had occurred. Of course she was torn in two by those pit bulls that had been seen scouring the neighborhood. Either that or she had been bitten by a raccoon and had crawled into the bushes to gasp her last kitty breath.  Or she had gotten ran over by some other drunken asshole.  But most likely, a neighbor had noticed she wasn’t just your run of the mill cat and had catnapped her for himself.  Now she was certainly trapped in their house, doomed to live out the rest of her years wondering why I abandoned her for the bottle.  I was positive I had lost my best friend and that bad things do come in threes. Come to find out, that little shrimp was actually sawing logs in the basement, oblivious to the meltdown taking place outside.

Today came around. I had quite a large hangover on my plate, but the morning was scooting along alright. While I was waiting to pick up lunch, I got a wild hair to call my dad about a financial matter since those are the only matters that matter enough for us to interact. I had forgotten that my sister moved in with them, as per my dad’s only email of the year stating so. She answered. The two minute conversation that followed ranks with the worst I’ve had, and definitely didn’t help the five years it’d been since we last spoke. I hung up and considered barfing. Instead I walked the two blocks back to work in a daze, only to get a phone call from the one person I would have dialed immediately if it were last week and not this one. Losing seems to be the only thing that sticks around.

I did just break up with my girlfriend, and whether it was a result of the experiment is debatable. It would be ridiculous and disrespectful to suggest that this study was the cause of the dissolution of our relationship, and though there is no doubt that it played a part in it, this is neither the time nor the place to examine that. This is a Scientific Study, after all, and I must carry on.

The experiment does not allow for mistakes. Mr. Kevin Stone and I attended the kickoff event for the Time-Based Art Festival at the Works at Washington High School with the intention of seeing Gang Gang Dance do their wacky thing, but they were demanding identification at the entrance, and I had, unfortunately, forgotten mine at home. I took off, leaving Mr. Stone in line, with the intention of returning with his bike key (our bicycles were entwined), realizing only as I bounded down the steps and on to Stark street that it was possible that there were a multitude of obstacles preventing me from returning his key to him. What if he got in? What if I couldn’t find him again? Luckily he came bounding around the corner shortly after I had unlocked my trusty steed from his, but if it wasn’t for his foresight, it could have been yet another frustrating event in a night teeming with such events.

All of this said, it has been surprisingly tranquil in the moments when I’ve realized that I’m not checking my phone or feeling its presence. Though I do struggle with this duality: part of the point of the experiment is to pay attention to how I feel and behave without the phone weighing on my consciousness, but that inadvertently adds to my awareness of its absence and therefore disrupts the study.

I have no idea where this will take me…

My girlfriend, Liz P., said it was real dumb that I am doing this. I told you that and I tell you this to point out that folks are reacting strongly my plan. I’m not convinced that we can’t break free from this crazy thing, this mobile phone business.

I’ve been having trouble determining my limits for this experiment, but I’ve come up with this. The phone can’t leave my desk, except for charging (outlets in my room are woefully placed). I will not respond to text messages except by actual voice call. Though I haven’t decided for certain, I imagine I will refrain from checking my voice mail messages from away, but might also end up in a sticky situation where I need to. I am DJing weddings on the next two Saturdays, and there is always something to fetch, or fix, or some other fiasco pops off during the event, but with enough foresight, this might be overcome.

The experiment seems to be a little flawed because my experience isn’t what it would be like if things totally changed and lots of people went back to land-lines and answering machines – my experiment is one person using a land line in a sea of mobile phones, i.e. I’m still counting on a network of cell phones to be able to contact people. I must return to my hypothesis: I predict that by using a land-line the pace of my life will slow down and I will less stressed, more productive, and more present in my every-day activities. I needn’t be confused with revolution; I’m not going to change anything. This is a scientific study, after all, not a polemic. I shall try my best to follow my rules and record the results without intent.

For the entire month of September I will leave my cell phone in my bedroom, tethered to the wall.

I’ve become convinced that life before technology was somehow better, and that our brains can’t deal with – or haven’t had time to adapt to – so much stimulation. I thought a lot about this on Saturday when I was working in the garden at my house. My housemates and I installed another raised garden bed and I must have thought about checking my phone for calls or text messages three or four times during the time we were out there, pushing our hands into the soil.

I’m not certain that my theory is true, that life was better before technology, but I’m going to give it a shot. I want to slow my life down and enjoy my time, rather than speed through my days, wondering where else I could be, or what I’m missing out on. I’m going to have to make plans with people and stick to them. Brrrr!

It’s not going to be easy. Already the lack of the convenience is showing. I can’t call long-distance from many phones because people don’t bother localizing their numbers when they move. I don’t have a timepiece anymore. I wrote down a few, but I just don’t know people’s phone numbers.

I’ll let you know how it goes. If I don’t call you back right away, you might have to just drop by the house to say hi.

A Clearing in the Woods

by Thomas P. Lynch

You have come into a clearing in the woods

and want to live your life out, here, alone,

joyous and remote among the catbirds

letting the light fall on you and the shade

in hourly changing angles as a grace

endlessly descending among tree limbs

while growing in you is the will to grow

mindless of the niggling everyday

profusion of detail by which you know

uselessly the names and dates and shape of things.

After a while, you will begin to sing.

Harmless and plentiful you make the sounds.

Bent on nothing that does not bend with ease

you and your song rise in the leafy air

chancy as bass spawn in a mallard’s underwings.

[Love Will Tear Us Apart performed by Dragging an Ox through Water from an unreleased performance on the Jimbo Show on KWVA 88.1, Eugene, OR]
Love Will Tear Us Apart

It was a few blocks back to the hostal, the Paz, just off the Puerto del Sol. Their shoes clicked a lilting time on the cobblestones, an easy polyrhythmic metaphor: the musicality emergent from the out-of-time-ness of their footsteps paralleled the wonder that seemed to emerge from the out-of-time-ness of their lives.

The whole thing was crazy; they knew it deeply, as one knows colors. But they didn’t have the words to say it. Just the galloping click-clack of a slightly longer stride meeting a slightly shorter one.

He drifted forward through time, seeing places he’d go now that he knew he could: the Manhattan Bridge at sunset, the wild ferocity of a thunderstorm in the Rockies, the T over the Charles and down under Harvard Yard to see the ghost of the old Harvard stop, and just days from now when she’d be gone back to Vienna and he’d catch a bus south to a little town in the hills and stay in that sparely beautiful room with a balcony overlooking Calle Toril and the clouds rolling like a constant wave over the mountains, El Torcal de Antequerra, and the old man who called him crazy for eating breakfast in the courtyard in January, but who would shake his head and bring out a basket of pastries and a cup of coffee all the same.

He saw the end of the week, when she’d return and they’d trace this same route back to the Paz, their steps still out-of-time but now also heavy with the urgency of leaving. They’d eat chocolate and drink wine on the rooftop balcony, watch the city shrug and shift and settle in for the night.

The world would be out of time with itself. There would rise a sharp shuffle from busy hammers of laborers, the doleful bells of all the endless churches, the horns of cars and thrum of the occupying army of motorbikes.

And they would dance to and around and through the cacophony. The world would suddenly hit those same beats, the one and the three, for a few moments.

The mushrooms made me nervous. I thought the water was considering taking us with it.  That morning I had finally noticed how the left and right edges of the cove arched into the ocean to form the shape of a dragon’s head and tail. We were nestled against her mountainous side and I imagined her giant sleeping belly rising and falling with each breath.

There had been a curious sea lion earlier in the day watching us from the bay. He would poke his shiny head up out of the waves and stare for a moment before disappearing into a crest. I hoped he was still out there watching us; taking breaks to snatch mussels from the tide pools.

My companions’ conversation drifted to the faces they could find in everything around us.  They spotted a Japanese soldier in the sand and a chubby woman’s face curling into the foam.  I told them I used to find faces in the ceiling of my bedroom as a child. We all agreed face finding was a sign of a healthy imagination.  Then we sat silent as if we had spoken enough words to fill the night sky. It was an extraordinary feeling for three bodies facing west.

When I’m Gone

This is a song my parents used to sing. I sometimes cry now when I hear it and think of them, Mom strumming her 40-year-old Yamaha her mom bought her and which my brother now has, dad plucking at the mandolin and singing those high, mountain-style harmonies.

Once, on a family road trip to California, we stopped at a cafe somewhere in southern Oregon. Through some bribery or nepotism with the highway department, the sign at the exit reads, in plain white block capital letters on standard highway-sign green background, “HEAVEN ON EARTH” with the exit arrow pointed right. Maybe they get away with it because the place really lives up to the name. Cinnamon rolls the size of your head, steaks and potatoes, big mounds of greens. It’s the only thing there. It seems to sit on its haunches by the freeway, waiting for something or someone maybe. Watching the cars get sleeker and brighter year by year. Watching the people get more hurried and harried, less curious. Watching more of them drive straight past the green sign and the block letters, unconcerned about missing something the Oregon Department of Transportation deems truly to be Heaven on Earth.

We weren’t there yet, my family. We lived in some bubble of anachronism, a little sphere of public radio, 80s era Bob Dylan, road trips and cassette tapes. We stopped for dinner.

As we were eating, a somewhat beat looking woman, a waitress there, recognized my folks. Apparently they had been in a christian commune together. She was living there now, at Heaven on Earth, having left the commune, drifting on and off drugs for a while, and landed somewhere south of Roseburg and north of Grants Pass on a bend of I-5 as lonely as any place can be on that strange strip of concrete. She lived out back, there was a farm with goats. My brother and I petted the goats. She asked if my folks still played music. They did. She asked them to play some songs there, at Heaven on Earth.

So they did.

And I won’t be laughing at the lies when I’m gone
And I can’t question how or when or why when I’m gone
Can’t live proud enough to die when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

Woman: Well, I guess I’m going to be fucked up forever then.

My Jeep is half dog, half jeep. His name is Jupiter and he is looking at Melissa and I, wagging his tail, brimming with excitement. We decide to ride him to a gravel road by the entrance to the freeway. Jupiter switches back and forth from giant Malamute to 4×4 on the ride there and then speeds up as we go over dirt mounds and mud puddles. We are having a blast.

I wake up in my childhood bedroom. The chalk drawings are still scrawled across the fake wood paneling from my years of pretending to be a teacher.  I feel funny like something isn’t right. I really have to pee. I go to the bathroom, and as I situate myself I realize something is terribly wrong. My vagina has been sewn shut. I look down at my stomach and see a large incision 5 inches in length starting at my belly button that has been sewn shut also.  I feel sick to my stomach. I glance in the mirror and see that my eyes have incisions on either edge also. I quickly look away knowing my reflection is too frightening to handle.

I can hear voices down the hall and a TV blaring. I search for something sharp in the bathroom drawers and find a box knife and a book of matches. I burn the tip of the box knife to kill any germs and then try to cut myself open.  I am dizzy with nausea and disbelief, but somehow instinct has taken over. I stop. Is my stomach moving? Or is it just my imagination? The overwhelming sickness is making my hands and legs shake and I begin to give into the fear.

I think if only I can get to a hospital they will be able to correct all of this. I scramble back to my room and see my cell phone sitting on the dresser. The 911 operator has the most soothing voice. She speaks gently, asking where I am and if I can get to a safe location. I promise her I’ll try. I do not provide details of my condition, only that I need an ambulance.

I sneak down the hallway to the backdoor, knowing that if I make it outside I will be ok. I see a woman in the living room talking on the phone in front of the noisy television set. She is black with purple lips. She looks like she has been dead before.  Our eyes meet and she is surprised at first, and then lunges for me. I make it outside to my car, which is a bright blue two door Sprint hatchback that my parents had when I was a kid. I am still on the phone with the 911 operator and she assures me I will be safe once I make it home.

I woke up at two completely terrified, suffocating from the heat. I ran outside to the front porch where Monday was lounging. The night air was cool and I let myself breathe, my mind still racing from that nasty dream. When I looked up at the sky there was one huge bright star directly above me. At first I thought it was a plane, but it did not move and neither did I. I stared at it for a while until I felt normal again.

Somehow, it’s come to this: watching the life gurgle out of me from two feet up.

I didn’t see the other guy, didn’t anticipate the glint of metal, the sudden sharp invasion of the flesh. I didn’t hear, or heard but didn’t listen, when you said to be careful. This neighborhood, you said, this neighborhood is no place for a fuckup like you.

A fuckup like me. An artist like me. A child of privilege like me, living his days in denial like me of his class. A coarse, loud braggart like me, mouth like a missile launcher. A dreamer like me, of wild landscapes and dull people, of twisted pasts and tortured metaphor.

No place.

But I walked out anyways, threw my pride and my cigarettes in my shoulder bag and shouldered the screen door open with studied nonchalance. You could fuck off, I told the street, loud enough for you to hear. But I was the one fucking off.

Cabs are a mathematical abstraction here, odds to short to try for.
I didn’t know which way to walk. Towards the city, I guessed. The buildings leaned in.

Maybe I conjured them, these secret assailants in the dark. Maybe my guilt and my fear got together and manifested themselves a pair of somewhat scruffy human bodies. Maybe I told them what to do, handed them the winking blade, retraced my steps and rounded the corner again.

Fear blocked the way, told me to hand over my wallet. Guilt lurked behind me with the knife and as the steel split my ribs he whispered in my ear. I’ll never forget what he whispered as long as I live.

[image from leena on Flickr]

Here’s a song that kills me:

Kind of Like Spitting – Line and Sinker Line and Sinker

despite what you recommend
despite what you implement
this just can’t stand anymore
3 A.M. at my door
with no one to tell you that it’s wrong

drugged for some seasons
sure we were pure
like cancer’s quick miracle
or resin chalk spectacles
party after party
the laughs they just told you that you were on
and the luckiest asshole I’ve ever met
is playing music on my bed again
sharing wings and boulders
bringing me back in

those who all give advice
those who all recommend
those who know everything
kitchen philosophy
those who speak quietly
words wide and sympathy
they don’t know of your eyes
six inches from mine
or the taste of your hips
with the windows wide open

so here we hang loosely
and dry on the vine
I put my hair up and think of us marrying
this garden’s the same but these fruits have new names
I have wanted you for so long
and the luck of the lasso, for once I wept
never seemed to get more than a glance
and the feathers and boulders I once possessed
they found a home in age and circumstance

I have such high expectations of every person I come into contact with. You’d think by now I would be used to selfish disrespectful assholes but it never ceases to blow me away. Maybe I just forget. Even though we spend ten hours a day together, they don’t owe me a thing.  They are not my family.

The sun dipped low in the west and I gazed at the feathers dangling from the overhang. They danced and twisted around each other in the light so delicately it was mesmerizing. Monday followed my stare and watched with me, falling into the same peaceful reverence. We sat like this until dusk arrived.

“I want to show you something!” Monday finally said. Her tail was gently tapping the ground beside her and I grabbed at it. “Don’t. I’m serious. I’ve been PRACTICING.” she placed a lot of emphasis on the last syllable. I shrugged. “Show me then.” We were always very good at indifference.

Monday drew in a deep breath and began to concentrate. This in itself captured my attention, as she was never one to focus particularly well. As I watched she placed her front paws on the edge of the hand rail and gently pulled herself forward. She was squatting much like a kangaroo and I laughed at her furry rear end until she slowly rose on her back legs.  From there she carefully stepped forward, one paw in front of the other. “What are you…,” I trailed off.  My cat was walking on two legs.  

She grinned at me deliberately, her front teeth peeking out from her little black lips. Then she strutted in a circle, down the stairs and into the lawn.  ”You’re blowing my mind,” I murmured. Monday pointed at me with her left paw. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this,” wagging a claw. “Meow sing a song or something would you? I’ve got moves.” I thought for a minute. “Uhh like what?”  Monday was swishing her tail side to side and shimmying her shoulders.  She motioned at me to hurry it up.    

“Hey pretty baby with the high heels on, you’re just a product of loveliness….. I like the feelin you’re givin me, just hold me baby and I’m in ecstasy,” I began hesitantly.  

She started pumping her paws in the air and bouncing in the grass shouting, “Yeah! Oh yeah!” Monday danced this way all through the yard clapping her paws and air pumping as I sang, our silhouettes illuminated against the hazy backdrop of the night.

“The way you make me fee-el, the way you make me feel,

you really turn me on, you really turn me on,

you knock me off of my feet,  you knock me off of my feet,

my lonely days are gone, my lonely days are gone.”

There is one thing I found I couldn’t help thinking
As they pried me free with the Jaws of Life
None of this disaster would ever have happened
If I had not been driving my neighbors wife

To the Alta Loma Days Inn
Where I’d registered us as a couple with a name
I’m sure some other couple somewhere has

And the last thing I saw before falling unconscious
Was your right hand tracing a heart on my thigh
And I thought my God what an infantile gesture
and I thought my God what an indescribable high

The autumn air was sweeter than a slice of wedding cake
As I overshot the exit and I tried and failed to find the brake

Rosemary infusion lemon drops (thanks Bye and Bye!)

Bloody Marys

Balsamic kale with spring onion over hash browns

To come:

Shitake and Chard cheese sauce over wide noodles

Fried tempeh portobello sandwiches

Braised baby artichokes and garlic spears

If there were a chance that you or mom would read these letters I don’t think I’d be so honest.  If your eyes ever do skim these words please take them to heart.

I showed some friends how to crab a couple weekends ago. We went to our old spot in Winchester Bay out on the pier. I looked for my name carved in the post but I think it was gone. Remember when you let me use your knife to whittle away at the rotting wood? It was your hunting knife. The one you used to gut deer and cut fishing lines and clean your nails.  

When I saw you in January that was the hardest thing I’ve done in a while. Do you think poorly of me? I was on my best behavior and tried to hide my tattoo, even though it’s meant for you.  I can’t finish this. There are many things I’d like to say but it would take years for me to get there.  You are the biggest mystery in my life and I’m so afraid it’s going to stay that way.

Lucky Charms Lucky Charms – The Moldy Peaches

“This is kind of a unique case,” Severe said. “Her convictions were all misdemeanors. Obviously, there is an issue with her hoarding rabbits but she does not pose any danger to the community.”

This is definitely my new favorite movie. Adapted from the book in 1982, Plague Dogs is about two dogs that escape from a test lab and try to survive in the English countryside. It’s said to be one of the greatest animated films of all time. Visually the movie is absolutely beautiful and the storyline will break hearts; not to mention the music is trippy as hell. Rolling a j is totally in order.

You can watch the film in its entirety here:

 The Plague Dogs

These are three things I’ve been unable to stop listening to lately. They share little, yet all have been those songs for me that you love so much you feel obliged to play them for everyone you’re around. You hi-jack stereos, force headphones on unsuspecting friends, scream them into the rush of a passing train as you walk along the tracks. Those songs. These have been those.

Ok, so they share one thing: this crazy galloping drumming that I can’t shake loose. I love it.

Lake – I Look Up To You

I Look Up To You

God this is rad. It’s off Lake’s first, self-titled record, which is awesome. They also have a newer album called “Oh The Places You’ll Go” which is awesome in a more 70s pop way. The drums sound almost like they’re being played by a 5 year old, but somehow the clackings and thumps hit in the exact right wrong way to make glorious cacophony.

Margo Guryan – Someone I Know

Someone I Know

My coworker Chris (of Chris Robley and the Fear of Heights) recommended this highly on his awesome 60s pop podcast. I love how her voice barely exists. Like gauze. Or a spider web. I also like how the drums exist very much. Also I am in love with her.

Mount Eerie – Don’t Smoke

Don’t Smoke

An awesome list of possible reasons to smoke. I like songs that are phrased interestingly, and this: “is it because?” is pretty interesting. Also the way the drums are completely insane is pretty interesting.

[photo is Margo Guryan, from her MySpace.]

I first heard this song on the absolutely incredible Himalayan Bear album called Lo Lonesome Island, an epic paean to loss and island life. Here’s another of my favorite songs on that album, I’m On Sorrow:

I’m On Sorrow

There were ghosts, certainly, in the voice of the man by the window, asking for leftovers, and ghosts in the eyes of the thin boy with the ball-cap, just sitting there. There were ghosts in the motions of my brother’s arms, scars of over-medication in his musculature, surely, and ghosts in the tired voices and tortured steps of the nurses and assistants.

I came with gifts — two Mountain Goats CDs and a cheeseburger (apparently there is something of a fast foot black market in there — the woman with wild eyes and always headphones came into the kitchen as we were eating and placed what I assumed was an entirely fictitious phone call to a friend to order a Whopper). I came with expectations, vague ideas about what the place would be. I have been there before, but never in the main areas, and never by myself. I came on the bus, with my music loud.

I met Jimmy, the big man with the small voice who follows my brother around like a puppy, angels in his eyes. I met my brother’s budding love interest, whom the nurses said I resembled, much to my embarrassment. It was our cherubic cheeks, they said. I blushed.

We played cribbage and drank decaffeinated iced tea. A man yelled in broken English about Catholic church. Jimmy wanted a dollar for a Diet Coke.

I spoke about you to my therapist once. She asked me to list traits about you that make you my mother. That was easy for me because lately I have been noticing you in myself.  I think she was writing them down.  Actually she could have been writing anything. I said you were silly, very silly. Quick to laugh, likes to dance, loves chocolate, sentimental.  Judgmental, impossible to please, hardest on yourself.

How is Dad? He looked well when I saw him. I worry about his health because of all the Rocky Road and clam sauce linguini.  Maybe he doesn’t eat like that anymore. Remember that time you brought home Café Yumm and were so excited to eat it? You ran down the steps into your bedroom and dropped it all over the forest green carpet. I liked the way you let it go even though you had your heart set on it.

I really miss you. I think I miss the hugs the most, and that empathetic face you’d make when I’d fuss. When I called the house last Sunday I felt sick to my stomach upon hearing your voice. It sounded sugary and far away. I hope you couldn’t tell I’d been drinking.  I guess I was overcome with liquid courage but when you answered I had no idea what to say.

I don’t hold it against you mom. I never did, and I never will. People have to have faith in something and I admire that yours is so strong. I just wish there were room for me.

By William Stafford

1
Many a time driving over the Coast Range,
down the cool side–hemlock, spruce, then shore pine–
I’ve known something I should have said one time:
“If we hadn’t met, then everything would have to change.”

2
We were judged; our shadows knew our height,
and after dark, exact, the air confirmed
all with its move or stillness:
we both were trapped on an odd-shaped island.

3
Sleet persuades a traveler: I all night
know no under the earth escape
even when the sky goes back remote.
Walking till the stars forget, I look out

4
And watch the smoke at Astoria and Seaside
cringing along the coast, and barefoot gulls
designing the sand: “Go flat, go flat,”–the waves;
the little boat, the mild riding light,

5
The sand going democratic, trading places down the wind,
everything distancing away. Finding this
took all this time, and you’re not even here.
Though we met, everything had to change.

No amount of John Darnielle or Songs:Ohia will help me comprehend how your head and my heart fight each other. If I could I’d put you in the front left pocket of my plum colored jeans and take you with me. I’d sing to you and kiss your face and hold you closer when it gets cold. We’d eat sandwiches together and I’d even buy you donuts but look away while you enjoyed them. You could get a horn like the one in your favorite Frazetta, and we’d ride a horse across the planets while I spaced out for a bit. I’d hold your hands but not for too long. Then we’d sit in tall grass and count trains passing by and tell everyone your glasses are prescription. Instead of texting you xoxo’s I’d just draw them on your arm, and Baby Mon would be furless.  

I type notes to you when you’re not around. I guess you are the only person I hope accidentally reads them. I never think you are weird even though I say so all of the time. My side of the quarrelling is always drenched in self conscious worrisome doubt about our relationship and where it stands and what you think of me and if you’re happy.  I am sorry. That day we made the cave in your bed and poked our fingers through the holes in the ocean blanket was the day I fell for you.  I am scared of saying these things.

I hope this suit don’t tear up, baby.  

That said:

Dumi & Minazi III – Mweya Dumi & Minazi III – Mweya

Sunshine is exploding out of the ocean, and the fishes and dolphins are all spouting little jets of water from their mouths in intricate patterns. You’re on a boat sailing through it but you don’t get wet, just tan.

John Nzenze – Ninamliya Susana John Nzenze – Ninamliya Susana

One guitar, some clackity sticks and two voices somehow become an orchestra. Every song on this album is between 2:30 and 2:50 in length. Presumably that is approximately the capacity of a 78 rpm record?

. . . miss you

“You know what sucks? Due to global warming the world’s spider population is probably going to grow, as is their SIZE. Take Wolf spiders for instance. They live an average of two years and eat meat. Yes, MEAT. Thanks to the warming of the planet, these spiders are having longer summers and thus able to consume more and grow much larger. One more thing you have no control over!”  (Not a direct quote.)

Now here I sit, palms sweating, thinking about how that spider in my basement yesterday seemed unusually large and nimble. Who’s to say these spiders aren’t going to mutate as they grow larger and live longer and spread more revolting offspring? Let’s say the Wolf spider ends up living an extra year. How much human meat does he eat in those 3 years? And how much smarter does this guy become? This is the sort of heavy shit that keeps me up at night thanks to global warming. I can’t even save the Polar bears, and now this. 

Which brings me to how it seems the human race is an experiment gone awry. If there is such a thing as a higher power that created this whole fucking mess, we are sure spinning out of control. Perhaps they are just sitting back taking notes, watching as we star in our very own reality show and slowly kill ourselves off. That way when we finally do blow up Earth they can start all over; only this time it will be very scientific, with lots of proven data.

There are many reasons this song is good. Unfortunately, it is not a Smashing Pumpkins cover. If, the 3xYeahs started off their much anticipated new album with a Smashing Pumpkins cover, it would be the most bad ass thing to ever happen ever. But they didn’t. It is a downright kickin’ dance number, however, and no summer dance party will be complete without it.

While I have not been a huge 3xYeahs fan in the past. I like this new album very much. As many people know, the 3xYeahs do not have a bass player. It is a completely unforgivable sin to be in a rock band and not have a bass player. No exceptions.

To circumvent this immutable law of the world, the 3xYeahs have made the wise decision to create more synth-based dance songs. It is A-OK for a synth/dance band to not have a bass player. The new Depeche Mode album is really good, too.

Did you ever go to a coffee shop, maybe when you were 18, 19, or 20. Maybe after drinking fruit flavored St. Ides malt beverage in the alley down the street, and see some folksy singer-songwriter girl and think she was pretty cute, but wish she would drop this whole Goddess/Faerie folksy trip and hang out and drink some fruit flavored St. Ides malt beverage in the alley down the street from the coffee shop and have some fucking fun for once. Well, Karen-O singer of the 3xYeahs is that girl. Yeah, she gets a bit sensitive now and again, and is probably still a vegetarian. But she can hold her own at a party. Or in the alley down the street from the coffee shop.

There are also other songs. Some are good, some really good, some not as good. But, brevity being the soul of wit, I will spare us all.

For those who wouldn’t otherwise. Here is the Official Summer Jam of 2009, in a video which someone made using some 2nd Life type BS.

If you think you’re wasting your life, give this a whirl. You’re doing just fine.

Now is that something, or what? Killer song, though.

Don’t fuck this one up.

Marc Ambinder is a political reporter for the Atlantic, a card-carrying member of the Gang of 500. He writes insightfully, if somewhat conventionally, and I enjoy his blog casually. But his post about the recent White House news conference is absolutely phenomenal, the kind of insider-baseball I go gooey for. Here he is talking about the credentialing process:

Sometimes, if we’re interviewing senior officials, we’re given “A” passes. There two types; “A” alone, and “A” with the words “ESCORT”.” The regular “A” pass can get you anywhere in the West Wing except for the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room and a few other corners and crannies. Last week, as I sat waiting in the West Wing lobby for an appointment, I noticed that Ret. Gen. Scott Gration, the President’s point person on Sudan, had the same pass as I did. Richard Holbrooke, the increasingly powerful envoy to Af-Pak-everywhere else, rushed through the lobby. He wasn’t wearing a pass. He yelled at an assistant that he “needed to go catch up with Hillary.” Also — somewhat weirdly, as I waited, I listened to a Marine guard and the uniformed Secret Service agent on duty quietly argue about the torture memos.

And then this: an exchange between two white house correspondents:

There’s a moment — usually with about two minutes to go — where four or five network correspondents, standing feet apart, talk over each other, saying much the same thing. Then you hear the voice of CBS’s Mark Knoller, who gives a last minute radio update. Then the same from ABC’s Ann Compton.

Ed Henry finished his stand-up early. Only NBC’s Chuck Todd and CBS’s Chip Reid were left standing.

Chuck groaned. He knew that he and Chip were about to stumble over one another.

Chuck then realized that everyone was looking at him. He informed his producer of this.

Then he joked that someone was going to Twitter the conversation. (I did.)

Chip, who has sworn off Twitter and has never been on Facebook, dryly wondered how many people would read it.

Chuck misheard Chip, thinking that Chip was talking about ratings.

So Chuck struck back, saying something like: “Do we really want to get into a ratings comparison?”

Everyone from the photogs to members of Obama’s staff said “Oooooh.”

I don’t know why this stuff appeals to me so. Ultimately, none of this matters in big picture terms — no decisions are being made here, no policy crafted. But the machinations of this small cabal of politicos somehow seem to bear a deep relevance to my life. I follow them on blogs and tweets and podcasts. I know their names and who they don’t get along with. I can identify Chuck Todd, Mark Halperin, Ana Marie Cox (my love), Chip Reid (total dick), and dozens of other DC denizens not merely by sight, but probably by voice or writing style.

The way I follow politics, and more specifically political journalism, seems somewhat similar to the way some people follow sports. Yeah, I’ve got my team, but I also have an appreciation for the style and stories of players all around the league.

A blade, a single blade, spanned two train cars’ length. Count how many – six, seven, eight, nine. How many are on the hills? How many are alive on the hills? Some churn slowly, quickly. Neighbors defy each other’s will, holding when it makes sense to let go. Is it their will, or are there brakes? Have you heard them? “Like a passing train that never does,” they say. How can something so big, so graceful, be anything but gentle?

There’s a town in a hole. A town downwind from a depot. There: a town on the river. It’s volleyball, it’s wrestling, it’s softball; not football. They try to compete, but they know not to push too hard.

Every home has a remote alert, a small, gray box with a stubby antenna. If the VX or the Sarin gets out from the depot (they’ve destroyed the Mustard), everyone will know. On New Year’s Eve there was nothing happening in town at all.

Few choices for commerce are unique to the town; most places are the same places that everywhere has. One is a diner with a bassinet in the entryway and strange photos of all of the staff above the cashier. One of the cooks wore an eye patch. One of the patrons talked loudly about Jesus being present, very present. One of the sports cards that came out of the trading-card machine was of an old man, kneeling.

A junk shop has old paintings, old cast-iron skillets and an old man who likes Juice Newton. The woman across the street at the Tienda de Ropas doesn’t know that man.

Don’t Stop Loving Me Now by Floating Action

What is that thing that happens when a song ambushes you? There’s usually not one thing. In this case it’s the whip like guitar lick that curls around the sharp edges of this driving chorus and slips into your bloodstream like mercury. It’s the tambourine that doesn’t stop. On this recording (available for free from the Park The Van Records website, where you can also buy their phenomenal new self-titled album) it’s the way organ and guitar shamble in almost sheepishly under the sounds of the club before building into a whole clattering mountain of high harmonies and southy guitars.

It’s the audience member who you can hear at the end of the song yell simply, “Good song!”

I’ve been thinking a little bit about songs and poems and about how line breaks can refine or create meaning.

Think of the song, “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons.” Sam says,

IloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIIloveyouIIloveyou,

and you fall into his spell. You could marry him.

You think about the life you and Sam will live–him singing “You Send Me” at your wedding and looking all the way through your eyes into your quiet places the whole time. Your honeymoon: Barbados. White sand. Your children’s glowing faces as you drop them off for the first day of school.

Aging, and the smoke that begins to cloud his voice as the years pile on. Your wrinkles, gentle at first and then severe, that his trembling fingers trace when you make love in that relentless tired way the elderly do.

His funeral, the tears carving canyons down your cheeks. The white rose you leave to wilt in the dirt by his headstone.

And then Sam says, “for sentimental reasons,” and it’s all gone in a flash.

“Please believe me,” he begs.

10) Hold your horses
Not strictly speaking a command to relax, but often used thusly. Question: in this allegory, where are these horses located. If I’m holding my horses, where should I lay my hands?

9) Simmer down
Simmer Down

8) Take a chill pill
Man, I just wish when people said this to me they had a Xanax in an outstretched palm.

7) Don’t get your panties in a bunch
I don’t wear panties, so I really don’t know about this. But if getting your panties in a bunch feels anything like getting your zebra-stripe butt-floss in a bunch, this is probably pretty good advice.

6) Cool out
The classics will never go out of style.

5) Don’t flip your lid
Among the most visual of the collection. Makes you think of Grover busting the fuck out of his garbage can and being all “GRRROWR!” That dude was a total dick, right? Grouch is just another word for “asshole” but the Sesame Street tried to pawn it off as some kind of charming eccentricity. It’s not charming, Oscar. Stop being a dick.

4) Keep your pants/shirt on
Some traditionalists insist on the more staid “shirt” as the article of clothing one is being urged to not remove. To me, pants tell a much more interesting story.

3) Don’t have a cow [man]
Bart Simpson implores you not to experiment with animal husbandry.

2) Cool your jets
You are burning me with your exhaust, and here you are, already on the deck of the aircraft carrier. Can you please turn down the gas a little? KTHXBAI!

1) Curb your dog
King of chillax, because it makes the recipient feel ridiculous for getting worked up. Your anger? It is a yappy little chihuahua. Kindly keep it from pissing on my sneaks.

Bonus Material:

Honorable Mention) Get a grip
Would be in the top 10 if the top 10 hadn’t already been written when we remembered it. For the perfect visual interpretation, Aerosmith has you covered.

Also, here are the original lists of our favorite idioms that were the point of departure for this wacky list:

Deafkitties:

“Now we’re talkin!”
“Hard to say”
“Jump the gun”
“I’ll be damned” [often preceded by "well", commonly shortened to "I'll be"]
“Up shit creek without a paddle”

Ben Moral:

“Flip the script”
“Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes”
“Throw it against the wall and see what sticks”

and the consensus pick for greatest idiom of all time:

“Put that in your pipe and smoke it”

Ceci n’est pas une peep by ~Amantxfantome on deviantART

note: click on each image to get the full fuckin’ effect.

“Redonkulous” I think this was around the time I thought donkey jokes were really funny. I kind of hate a lot about this one aside from the facial expression.

“Untitled” A narrative piece. It tells the story of how I crashed my bike and destroyed my own dinner in downtown Eugene one evening on the way to a party. The buildings were sad for me.

“Weedhead” True to life portrait of a friend’s cat. Weedhead actually had hearts for pupils. He was also quite the jittery fellow, which is noticeably conveyed in the rumpled fur. I am that good.

“Crackcorn” Undoubtedly my best work. Funny enough, Crackcorn was the first in the series. To this day when I peer into his eyes I still see God.

“The Legend” The least detailed of the five, The Legend was dedicated to two of my good friends Nathaniel and Matt. For one long summer we were inseparable. The conversation drifted and titillated, but always returned to one topic. Ryan Adams. Those two truly believed Ryan and his music to be otherworldly. Although I never agreed with this notion I did take delight in their never ending banter. We would sit for hours contemplating the deeper meaning of life, disc golf, and Ryan’s many lyrics. Those two have since moved on and lost touch but the memory lives on. And now Ryan’s banging Mandy Moore! Way to go, big guy.

I have an entire other blog dedicated to bad photoshop projects, but this particular one was inspired by Ben, so it’s only appropriate that I post it here.

I was the guy who calls you, the guy who asks if you’re a registered voter, what kind of scotch you prefer, how much money you make, whether or not you were aware that Al Gore is a communist, etc. One of the most common questions we would ask is this:

“Overall, would you say the country is headed in the right direction, or are we off on the wrong track?”

I had a lot of time to ponder the construction of this, as it appeared on almost every political poll we would run. Word for word. Right direction. Wrong track. This is the extended metaphor we use, as a society (or at least the one used by the political media that represent our society). We are some kind of locomotive. There are two ways this locomotive could be going: the right direction, or the wrong track. The question turns what is clearly a fuzzy and gray issue into a nicely black and white answer. There are no shades. There is no maybe.

For a long time, the train has been seemingly irreversibly on the wrong track. Things have been bad. But they are better. Even in the midst of the worst economic collapse in generations, they are better.

But despite the binary formulation of the question, things aren’t suddenly better. Disbursed across the aggregate of the mass of American thought, that shift, that very real moment of epiphany becomes a curve of discovery.

For me, it all flipped on November 4th, 2008. In one joyous moment, or one joyous evening, the sins of the previous eight years were washed away and America was born again, into this brave new world mewling and wet. For some it probably flipped on Jan 20th, 2009, when we ogled Aretha’s hat and cried as the promise was kept. I guess for some people it flipped some time before or since. But look at it. That is awesome. That is people believing again. That is progress. Shit man.

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
- Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

I feel blessed to know so many people as good as spring itself. Thanks for being wonderful, gang.

My fingers are positioned above the letters, curled at the knuckles, prepared for anything. They began to type wildly. Occasionally a rogue pointer finger slips to the wrong key producing a shadowy typo. These I try to retrace with X’s. I am drunk though, and there is no consistency in my thought aside from the anger. My cheeks are burning. The sentences I am typing only make sense to me. I already know this will be tossed out tomorrow but tonight it’s all I’ve got.

These streets have names, but to be honest, I never learned them.

A few months ago I got a lovely surprise gift; a whale songs CD. Fourteen peaceful tracks filled with whales and guitar melodies.  You can pretty much do anything to this album. Read, write, sleep, hump. It’s awesome. It also inspired me to write a song of my own.

Go ahead and try to tell me this baby Beluga isn’t smiling. Go ahead…I dare you.

whale song.

There was a time

When all I could see was free

And my world, it moved with me

I turned circles on my back

While gliding with the pack

I broke the ice with my own tail

proved to others I was truly a whale

I shined onnnnnn

While shining them on

I swam the ocean beneath me

Beneeeath my bodyyyy

I donned a cape of kelp

And lent the smaller ones my help

Because what are the fish of the sea?

If not for meeee-heeeee

(whale solo)

You will need:

4 Whole Chicken Legs (or 2 of those game hens they sell at New Seasons, which are WAY BETTER than regular chicken) Cut the thighs and legs apart or halve the game hens.

1-2 Butternut Squash, or whatever kind you’ve got, but butternut works best

1/4 lb of Bacon or Pancetta cut up into 1/2 inch pieces

A large yellow onion, chopped

Handful of Sage

1 Bag Gnocchi (or make your own if you are a true baller)

A small piece of REAL Parmiggiano Reggiano  (don’t half-ass this and get the cheap stuff!)

Rinse of your chicken, pat dry, rub with olive oil, salt and pepper. Put it on a pan, cover it and put it in a 325 oven for about 15-20 min, ’til it’s not quite done. Less time if you got the hens.

Peel your squash and chop it up into shapes resembling large french fries, like the kind you get at Red Robin. Line them up next to each other so they fit snugly into a pan. Toss the onion over that and the pork product. Drizzle of olive oil, salt pepper, cover with alumium foil and bake it at 325 for 45 min.

Get some water on the stove, make it boil, add some salt.

Crank the oven up to 425.

Take the foil off your squash pan, add your sage, put it in the hotter oven. Cook for 10-15min ’til the edges of the squash start turning brown.

Put the chicken in for 10 more minutes, ’til it gets nice and done looking. (I lay the chicken on top of the squash for this last part, so the juices drip all over your squash, but this is totally optional.)

Most importantly, don’t overcook your chicken, but don’t be afraid to cook the hell out of your squash. Just don’t burn the onions.

Boil your gnocchi. They only take like 1 minute. Drain them. Mix them into the squash pan, don’t stir it too hard and mush up your squash, just enough to get the gnocchi mixed in. Top with some grated parmesan.

Serve with some bitter greens (sauteed kale or brussel sprouts go well, really well) and a decent bottle of fruit forward red wine, (think Cotes du Rhone, Grenache based Spanish red or something from the south of Italy).

A city of glass and steel, built vertically to challenge the mountains. At war with nature, who had her way with the city by sending in her coldest air to sit among the buildings and wait. It did not leave as it saw no need to.

The sun returned, and the wind moved the gray and the mountains showed themselves to the city, which yawned and rented bicycles.

At night, the old part of the city rolled over on a wet mattress and drifted into a deep, narcotic sleep as young men dressed up and played their instruments like Marc Bolan.

And in the morning, the gray returned, but the mountains were clearer than ever, peering down the long avenues.

I’m going to make some kind of baked pasta dish with sautéed kale, tofu, tomatoes, rosemary, and peppers. Garlic, of course. Cracked black pepper. What else should I put in?

Mozzarella! A splash of red wine!

I’ve got good paesano bread and herb salad greens to go with.

The problem is, once I open the wine to put in the sauce, I’ll have to drink some. Alas.

I’ve got this delicious red wine with a pun in the name:

Anyone hungry?

If you have ever written about love or acted out for love or weren’t sure if that throbbing delicious ache in the pit of your stomach was love, take an hour to listen.

The third and final act had me in a bawling blubbery mess.  I hope it reaches you there too.  

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=93

[photo by Phil Gilston]

Iraq’s Swords of Qadissiya (aka Hands of Victory)

[photo from the fairly incredible abandoned blog, Survivor]

but not hard,
not brittle, a crawling and writhing
neon

anthill. My head
is far from clear and these shifting lights,
almost incomprehensible

except taken as a whole,
signify nothing but themselves: Portland.
I want to shout:

“Here I am!”
and have the city scream back at me,
or maybe just nod.

These woodwinds are legion.
An invading army, they liberate
large tracts of reverie. The strings

have pushed out awkward memories
and staked claim to
certain expanses of hippocampus.

Timpanis and tubas thunder,
honk and rattle back by where
my spine meets my mind.

A chord forms and rises,
swells almost to bursting,
and recedes. Tuning complete,

silence ripples like a sheet and drapes
over them. As he raises
his baton to begin, the conductor’s

tails brush the floor,
the roof of my mouth. I wake
with trumpets bragging in my ears.

We were in Philadelphia, Lindsay and I, on the second night of our ten day East Coast vacation. It was great to see Lauren and we were really tearing it up. At least I felt like I was. By the time we left her friend’s house I was pretty much blacked out. I am not proud of this but it is true.

Apparently we went to a bar and a couple parties that I do not remember. I do remember the warehouse party and dancing with a hippy dude that kept spinning in circles. Mid-moves I realized there was not a familiar face near or far. I wandered around the building looking for someone I knew. The space was massive with many levels and rooms, or at least that’s what I recall.

Finally I ran into Lauren. Where the fuck is Lindsay? This became dire. Lauren pointed out this wasn’t an area where you run off into the night alone, so we began searching for her.

We are outside. The street lamp beside us is glowing, almost throbbing. We round the corner because I need to pee and see two guys and two girls standing there smoking. This is the part that is fuzzy. Someone begins to talk shit. Lauren and I run our mouths a little and then start walking away, but one girl hurls a bottle at us. Next she has her hand in Lauren’s bag; digging for what I’m not sure. There is shoving, and then the larger man of the two pushes Lauren to the pavement. I run up to him in some sort of defense for my friend, which is when his fist connects with my face.

I am sitting on the ground underneath the eerie light, holding my mouth. There is blood everywhere. Way more blood than necessary. Lauren is beside me yelling as the four fuckers run off down the street. People start pouring out of the party toward us and I can feel warm blood dripping down my chin. I rub my tongue on the inside of my top lip and it is split wide open, but thankfully not through to the skin. Lindsay appears from a side door, wide eyed and disheveled. “Those assholes stole my purse!” she shouts.

The next morning my lip was swollen up pretty big. My jaw hurt and my teeth were sore, but all in all I was a-ok. It was quite the experience. We do not know the circumstances surrounding the hijacked bag, or if those fuckers were also the assholes Lindsay was referring to. I did receive a text message the other day saying the dudes have been identified and are basically in for an ass beat.  

Thanks for having us, Philly.

Want to join my new bands?

Dead By December – Emo. I need tight trousered screamers and criers.

Gato Perdido – Swelling, discordant orchestras. Hushed fingerstyle guitar — you can hear the frets. Songs about open spaces. I need strings and horns and timpani drums.

Vancouver, This Is It! – Big clanging singalongs. Lots of percussion, lots of fun. I need ten rowdy kids with things to bang on.

Sans Bros – Math rock. I need patient polyrhythmists.

[image from this incredible collection of medical pictures in the creative commons]

The Ordinary Times is on Facebook, if you’re nasty.

In a way, a strange, new American dream can be found here, amid the crumbling, semi-majestic ruins of a half-century’s industrial decline. The good news is that, almost magically, dreamers are already showing up. Mitch and Gina have already been approached by some Germans who want to build a giant two-story-tall beehive. Mitch thinks he knows just the spot for it.

There’s a group of street artists painting condemned buildings “Tiggerific Orange”.

Jimbo sent me this article about the collapse of newspapers and what will replace them:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

The internet has made newspapers the new Detroit — hulking, condemned skyscrapers. People will inevitably start painting them orange.

In one theory of the ultimate fate of the universe, known as the big crunch theory, it is hypothesized that the universe will eventually collapse under its own weight. One possibility is that from the resulting singularity (the point at which the universe collapses to a single point with infinite mass), a new universe is formed from a new big bang. Because of the nature of singularity, this new universe can have entirely no relation to the universe that preceded it, in fact it is almost certain not to. Events that happen within the first nanoseconds after this second big bang will determine the ultimate shape and composition of the resulting universe. The smallest shift of atoms or electrons can mean the birth or death of galaxies.

It makes me feel that in this collapsing world, I should be out doing things. Big things. Little things. It doesn’t matter.

I also saw this poster (via. Boing Boing):

He orders gospel CDs from us occasionally. I imagine that he is tall, stilt-like, that he embodies his name.

My curiosity gets the better of me, and with a little digging, I find out he is the organist at Trinity Episcopal Church in Hartford, CT (pictured below).

I went to see Phosphorescent last night at Holocene and Casey was good enough to let me write about it for Local Cut:

From whispers to bombast, late autumn frost to spring thunder, they stomp and clap, strut and shiver their way through a two-hour set (including encore). Houck’s quavering and cracking voice flutters above the fray, buzzing and sputtering, here and there alighting on notes that seem almost unable to bear his weight.

Read the whole pretentious thing over there.

Here is a different song from the same album. This song is about abortion. I think the whole album is, actually — and about the failed relationship that caused it. Uplifting.

City Song

I guess this Herman Düne song is about New York, which is a city about which many songs have been written. But maybe this one is about leaving somewhere and then leaving it, and that moment when you realize you’ve fallen in love with a place.

I like the horns. A lot.

Take Him Back To New York Ciy

Phosphorescent is playing tonight at Holocene. I am amped on this show. He just recorded an album of Willie Nelson covers. This one is about knowing why you should be good, but not doing it.

Reasons To Quit

How many numbers would it take to describe me? How many numbers to pinpoint this circumstance, this awkward hallway waiting zone and these 4 people with whom I share it?

You’d have to know my shoe size (13 Mens) because you’d need to know what sound those huge shoes make as my feet drag them back and forth across the floor. You could perhaps draw useful information from the price ($1.50) of this salad purchased for me by Josie, my dad’s girlfriend, as a sort of gesture — sandwiches and vitamin water used for words in this clumsy argot of comfort. The supposed start time of the commitment hearing (11:30) seems pertinent, as does the actual start time (3:30).

My experience of this particular manifestation of my brother’s illness has been, on a purely percentage basis, mostly waiting. In with him in his apartment, waiting for the crisis response team (1.5 hours, ultimately they weren’t in time) in the ER (2.5 hours) and now here, in this hallway by the elevator that goes up, for 4 hours.

I read some number of pages of my book (50-75).

The Sheriff, brushing down the hall in his forest green, gets me thinking about uniforms and about how we all wear them. This morning when I was picking a shirt from my wrinkled laundry, still unfolded in the basket, I consciously avoided the Johnny-Cash-is-flipping-you-off shirt and the more strident of my political shirts (e.g. the vaguely threatening Longshoreman’s Union shirt with the slogan “AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL” and a picture of a very sharp looking gaffer’s hook.) My brother, when they bring him out of the elevator and nudge him past us down the hallway to the makeshift courtroom, is wearing the uniform of the damned — thin blue hospital pajamas. Josie is wearing all black except for her green tassled riding boots. My mom has a scarf with patterns like expensive rugs. She compliments Josie on her boots. My dad wears his usual uniform — a tee-shirt from the bins, tennis shoes (one an inch taller than the other due to the therapeutic lift he must install), and a vague sense of indignance towards the world that is so clearly treating him, all of us, unjustly. Miller, who is in a way the catalyst for all this — the initial contact point between my brother and his amazing network of concerned friends who ultimately reached out to my mom — wears a brown embroidered pearl-button shirt. He is nervous, perhaps. He fidgets.

This building hosts the burn unit on the bottom floor and the Behavioral Health unit on the upper. We talk, the 5 of us do, about those words — “Behavioral Health” — the ones printed above the elevator and on signs throughout the building. If the illness is mental, the symptom is behavioral, and it seems odd to explicitly advertise this facility as one addressing merely symptoms. They will make you act properly, they say, but promise no treatment of the underlying disease.

What then is the difference between this and a jail, my mom wonders — what have those we call criminals done but to prove that they are a danger to themselves or others? We ultimately are incapable of drawing a solid, unbroken line between the two.

The judge does not wear a robe. She has straight, greying hair. She really likes to have things stricken from the record, mainly hearsay. She instructs me, immediately after I take the oath, that I am only to speak of things I saw or things my brother told me. Everything else is hearsay, and inadmissable in this court. I talk about a bottle of champagne my brother stole and she has my words stricken from the record — it did not happen because I did not see him steal the bottle, merely heard from my mother (who heard from the storekeeper) that he had.

As I try to rephrase my testimony to avoid those things I know but have not see, I think how wonderful if things could be stricken from my record so easily. This pain in my lower molar. This string of failures I wear like pearls. This incessant and nagging and unpleasant feeling I get in my stomach when I think about my ex girlfriend with other men. Middle school.

The things I can see can stay, but the hearsay — the things that live at the edge of the truth — must be stricken.

Back before Josie brought the food, in the hallway, we are very hungry. I think about my job, how I need to keep it. I think about the free lunch I am missing. I think about the air that exists in between things, how it flows silently out of the way as objects approach each other. I think about, and poke at, the scabbed burn on my left index finger knuckle. I joke that since we are in the burn unit, they could maybe just take a quick look — slap some fucking aloe on it for me or something. We laugh, the 5 of us do, too loudly for a hospital hallway.

My dad’s leg is getting worse, while we’re addressing injury. He broke his femur when he was 20. He was in the army and driving a truck but he wasn’t driving it very well because they found it wrapped around a telephone pole and him with his leg looking Not Quite Right in the way that things do when they are broken very badly. He got it fixed then, by the army doctors. They put screws in his leg to hold it together. When I was 8 or so he had it fixed again — the original screws were rusting apparently and needed replacing.

But they botched it. In removing the screws, they broke his hip again. He spent the hottest summer in years in a full body cast, reaching for things with a mechanical grabber stick and pissing in a plastic jug. When it finally healed, all was well for a while, but it has regressed some recently and is apparently exacerbated by stress, of which we all have full burdens. He says it twitches or spasms sometimes. He doesn’t sit down because standing up again is difficult.

I think about on Sunday when I ran off towards the train tracks after my brother, the fire alarm still screaming behind me, and felt the bump and flutter of a spasming muscle in my jaw. I stopped in my tracks, tritely enough, and just put my fingers to the spot (just below my ear) to feel the dance of tissue.

There are moments, in the hearing, when I find myself trying to turn my testimony into an explanation or an excuse, or to turn it towards myself. Maybe because at first, when the state’s attorney asks why I’m there, I can only manage to express that I am scared:

“I am scared.” I say, and I am sure they can hear it in my voice — the fear tearing off the edges of my consonants and shattering the fragile shells of my vowels. This is not an explanation of anything other than why I can’t say anything else. The machinery of my mouth and throat is Not Quite Right and the words that normally pour so eagerly forth have flowed up against some dam or stoppage.

But as it progresses the picture I paint is more elaborate, and more sympathetic to myself. I guess maybe that’s the (or a) fundamental flaw with our system of justice — witnesses always have their own interests in mind even when they don’t intend to. I probably perjure myself when I say I saw him 3 weeks before the day in question. It can’t have been less than a month.

Or this: at times I think I am using the setting as an opportunity for therapy. I attempt lengthy explanations of behavior in paragraph form with metaphors and hand gestures. I have to stop myself, remind myself that this hearing has nothing to do with me, except to the extent that I am a vessel for information which these professionals need to extract from me.

The professionals need this information as fuel for their machinery of expertise, they must refine it into these scrawled notes, these nonsensical marks and numbers. Ultimately, they must process and distill it into their product — expert opinion. My brother is, or is not (in their expert opinion) a danger to himself. He is or is not a danger to others. He is or is not capable of meeting his basic needs. I know these answers. He is. He is. He is not. But my answers are not professional answers. These doctors, these attorneys, this judge, they are negotiating the truth between them. The sheriff behind me, he and his gun make it real.

My brother coughs up mucus on the table when I first come in. He’s coughing up mucus because they don’t let him smoke in the hospital, and that’s what happens when you stop smoking, ironically enough — you cough up all the nasty tarry mucus your lungs have accumulated. The judge is not pleased, tells him to stop. He says “you think between the two hospitals I’ve been in, they’d have fixed this!”

One of the medical examiners and I share a quick and furtive laugh between our eyes, hands covering our mouths to emphasize the fundamental seriousness of the proceedings.

Before this, in the hallway, we are waiting for the hearing to start. Sgt. Hogan joins us in the hallway. I thank him for coming. This is the man who shot my brother with a taser. When they pulled him out of the squad car, his feet and hands bloody, his lips stained with vomit, he had turned his wild and wide open and Not Quite Right face around to yell at me: “does it bother you that the Portland police almost killed me?”

I know he was exaggerating. But I don’t know if he knows it. The molded plastic of the back seat of the squad car was a mess. Vomit pooled in the indented seats.

We talk with Sgt. Hogan, the 5 of us do, in the hallway. We talk about the crisis intervention training the Portland police force was recently required to undergo. Josie, who is on the police review board, drops names of commanders and their secretaries. Hogan testifies first.

The skittish state’s attorney comes out after his testimony and seems thrilled. “He might just do it himself!” He says. Sgt. Hogan hands his card to my mom.

“If you have any questions about what happened, please give me a call”

The Sgt. looks scared. I feel for him. I feel for all of us.

We are here to testify and to witness this commitment. Excerpt those words, cut them out of this muddle and paste them into a reflection on another experience, and maybe we are at a baptism, at a wedding. Maybe these ceremonies aren’t that different. That promise of fidelity and devotion in the interests of a relationship, this removal of personal freedom in the interest of societal harmony, that acknowledgment of fealty to the divine. The state’s attorney even asks us if any of us has any objection to his commitment, offers to prompt us in our vows, to guide us to salvation.

We lower our heads in thanks, in reverence, in prayer.

The best stories, of course, come from clinical. Unscripted, unpredictable, blood and guts, this what we’re in it for. I shall save these stories for future bloggings, so stay tuned.

Her hands traced and amplified the dirt and wrinkles on his skin — a needle hissed and crackled over the dust and scratches on an old record.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/todays-tangled-metaphor/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/free-drugs http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/free-drugs#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:26:32 +0000 Mathew http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=305 06-psychedelic-tits
Harlem, Psychedelic Tits

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/free-drugs/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/in-the-wilderness http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/in-the-wilderness#comments Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:10:39 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=296

I’m loving my long fingernails. I’ve grown them out on my right hand to serve as plectra. I’ve found, though, that I like them for all sorts of reasons. I rap them rhythmically on the table. I scrape them through my ever-growing beard. I scratch my itchy back. I slice through packing tape on boxes and shrinkwrap on CDs.

They give me an extra layer of the inanimate to work with — a little more me that isn’t me. I guess it’s comforting. These are made of the same stuff as shells.

The commitment officer wants me to testify on Friday. There is a lawyer whose job is to convince the judge that my brother is not a danger to himself or to others and should be released from the hospital. Our job is to convince the judge that in his various discordant acts on Sunday is contained a thread of danger or threat and that the thread is still bound about him.

I understand that commitment is the best thing for him. I understand and know this. It sits in my head, and sometimes in my stomach, this knowledge, this understanding. It is a domesticated but moody animal I live with. Mostly it sits around and suns itself, but if I get too near it, the offending hand or face gets clawed. This knowledge is edgy, sharp.

Here it is, I suppose, the claws on that cat: I am betraying my brother. I am testifying against him.

Today at work I answer the phone, “You’re talking to Ben.”

It’s wonderful. People hear and appreciate my need to get down to business.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/in-the-wilderness/feed 1 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/dream-sequence http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/dream-sequence#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:16:44 +0000 Deafkitties http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=281

The house was giant, each room jutting out as if it were in mid-climb of the room beside it. The siding glimmered golden in the unearthly light. I was crouched down beside a planter filled with rhododendrons. Above me churned clotheslines slowly moving to the left. There were so many lines. Dangling from the clothespins were all sizes of lingerie. They were very lacy and different pastel colors, hundreds of them bobbing with the measured movement of the line.

I stood up and stepped over the planter I had been hiding behind. There were many planters leading up toward the house, staggered beyond each other. I climbed them. The negligees skimmed my arms and back. The glare from the house was blinding at times; such golden light reflecting off the flowers and silky garments. It smelled like a hot bath. When I finally reached the door I went inside to a giant marble entryway. To my left rose an elaborate staircase and a few small elderly women dotted its steps.

Where am I? And where did all that lingerie come from?

They were smiling at me. They said the underwear belonged to the guests that were staying there. That was when I saw they were wearing lingerie too. Sea foam green and lavender nightgowns sagging off their wrinkly little bodies. This is kind of weird, I thought, but they seemed sincerely friendly.

I followed them up the stairs to a theater room. Or it was possibly a conference room, I couldn’t quite tell. I got the feeling we were going to drink tea and hang out. They led me past rows of seats placed there for viewing films. I knew this without anyone telling me so. We reached a balcony that overlooked the rhododendrons. They had grown since I’d been walking through them. They were now very tall and even lovelier than before. I sat myself in an Indian style position on the floor and began visiting with the women.

Suddenly we heard gunshots. I turned in time to see men coming towards us wearing black stockings over their faces and spraying the room with bullets. They blew away two of the three women beside me. There was more blood than necessary. I jumped over the edge of the balcony and woke up with fear in my throat.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/dream-sequence/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/polygraph/2009/quick-life http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/polygraph/2009/quick-life#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 04:27:02 +0000 jonjon http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=269

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/polygraph/2009/quick-life/feed 2 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/at-the-club http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/at-the-club#comments Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:11:17 +0000 Deafkitties http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=263 I showed up to the club wearing my new brown leather vest. It has leather string woven around the edges that I can fumble with when I’m fidgety. I hadn’t been there in a while, probably three weeks. Shane the bartender gave me a big hug. His girlfriend Kendall made me a hot toddy in no time. Her hair is black now. I think it looks good.

In the back room I saw all the regulars were there, just how I remembered them. Brett playing pool in his flannel; guy with tattoo sleeves whose name I never remember propped against the wall. Ryan and his new lady friend. “I hear they just lay in bed all day long.” The other Ryan with the strange fashion sense. I usually just stare at his clothes and wonder who kisses him. We don’t talk anymore because all he ever spoke of was making out.

Tim has a giant beard now. It’s pretty cool looking. We said hello and really meant it. Rob was there too, with his fruity drinks and knit beanie clinging to his blond curls. I like looking at his face because it makes me nervous. Someone called him the giant albino Norseman once and that’s all I’ve pictured since.

Johnny had his red Levis on and a brand new haircut. He seemed happy to be where he was, holding a pool stick and nursing pints of Pabst. A girl I hadn’t seen before slowly shimmied around the pool table. Her eyes scanned all the boys to see if they were watching. I realized how hungry I was and that my bedtime had passed by an hour ago. Mckenzie sat beside me in a cute dress she got at Goodwill. “Shane got Kendall lingerie for Valentine’s day! Awwww,” We both cooed.

I leaned back and felt self-conscious. Joey was getting drunk. He measured the length of his hair with his fingers and held up his hand to show us. Rob was asking everyone who they thought the greatest rapper of all time was. Ben arrived good and buzzed, sporting a hideous purple hat. “Mark Wahlberg, obviously. I mean it’s a double entundre! ‘I’m anti druggie, my body is healthy’. See what he’s doing there? I’m anti drug, G, i.e. my body is healthy!!!” Rob and tattoo guy busted up over this. They laughed and laughed while Ben smiled triumphantly.  

I went outside to the heated patio and climbed on top of a picnic table. People were smoking and stamping their feet for added warmth. A guy I sort of know was there, being generally creepy. He has a shifty gaze and a somewhat uncomfortable presence. Last time we ran into each other he pretty much spilled his beans to me. “I gotta tell you this…its just so crazy. Man this is some really crazy shit ok? I knocked up this girl and…and she didn’t go to her abortion appointment. Like we weren’t dating or nothing you know just fucking. What am I gonna do? She says she’s keeping it. She even named it already. I cant handle this shit…I cant be a dad.” I just stared back at him trying to come up with an appropriate sentence to follow such a revelation.

Back inside, tattoo guy’s girlfriend showed up with Little Brother Kyle. Kyle is a total fox, and I think it’s obvious to everyone. But he’s someone’s younger brother. Three drinks in and I was telling myself you’re done. I wanted to eat a hot dog and said this out loud. Mack asked if it was because of so-and-so’s t-shirt. Sure enough, he had a drawing of a hot dog on his white tee. No. I am actually starving.

After that people just kept rolling in.  I didn’t even know what I was doing there anymore. It felt like family, this crew of people who can flip each other off and high five and never stop playing pool in between cigarettes.  I spilled two Simpler Times and Brandi asked me to write my number down for her. She seemed something other than drunk. JP appeared out of nowhere, grinning and slapping backs. I guess I kind of hate that guy. I hugged Matt Gilligan and left. I thought about how he lent me that Moldavite stone for clarity a few months back. How it made me feel was the opposite of how I felt.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/at-the-club/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/daily-bread/2009/estacada-part-5 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/daily-bread/2009/estacada-part-5#comments Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:30:17 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=258 continued from part 4.

View Larger Map

Maps. Oh boy. Fucking maps. If you know me, even a little, you probably know how I feel about maps. Even if you don’t know me, you can probably guess by the way these entries have begun. I fucking love maps. A shit load. I love old maps and new maps. I love star maps and ocean maps. I love the maps on Family Circle when Bobby gets in all the trouble. I love topographic maps and temperature maps. I love CIA world factbook maps of GDP and infant mortality rates. In books that I own, when there are maps in them, they will always fall open to that page. I love Google Maps, MapQuest and Yahoo Maps. Although Google Maps is the best (true that. Double true.) I can literally waste hours just looking at it. For Christmas 2 years ago, my mom bought me a book called You Are Here that is just full of interesting maps, personal maps and unusual maps and to this day I think it is the best gift I’ve ever been given. This year she got me a topographic atlas of Oregon. This is how I know my mom loves me. I love elevation maps and property maps and political maps and blueprints. I hate malls, but I love maps of malls. I love maps of the body, maps of hell, maps of cities, maps of rivers. One of my favorite poems follows:

FICTION
- William Stafford

We could get a map of our farm as big
as our farm, and unroll the heavy paper
over the fields, with encouraging things
written here and there–”tomatoes,” “corn,”
“creek.” Then in the morning we would
stick our heads through and sing, “Barn, be cleaned.”
“Plow, turn over the south forty!”
But while our words were going out
on the paper, here would come rumpling
along under the map Old Barney,
just on the ground–he couldn’t even
read–going out to slop the hogs.

I was indifferent towards one of my now good friends until I saw his BFA project involving mapping people on buses, at which point I decided he was one of the good ones. And I love these very maps before me, the glossy tri-fold brochures — one of the disc golf course and one of the various trails, campgrounds, model airplane fields, equestrian areas and boat-ramps of McIver State park.

Now, you should know, these are not lovable maps. They won’t be seen to don such fineries as compass roses, keys to the scale, or indeed any indication that they are drawn to scale at all. They are laid out awkwardly, with no indication as to the relative sizes of their various components or the distance between. But still, I love them. These are maps. They comfort me with their labels and certainty, their quiet and passive assurance that whatever might happen, wherever I might end up, I should be able to reason out where I am and where I need to go. Twenty yards down the entrance road I stop to do just that.

You can see what I’m looking at here [pdf]

The park is separated into two areas, northern and southern. The northern area according to the map, hosts the disc golf course, a small network of hiking trails, the model airplane field, various picnicking areas, and a boat ramp. To the south one finds the park maintenance offices, equestrian parking and trails, a boat ramp, campground, and a fish hatchery.

I decide to head south first, then loop through the northern area. The entrance road slopes down to a fork. I turn right and walk towards the offices and equestrian parking area. Just a few feet down the road is the “viewpoint” which seems to be a pretty mundane little view — the Clackamas river valley spreads out a hundred feet or so below. One can glimpse landmarks here and there — the frisbee golf course, the lazy curve of the river — but nothing much special. Then my eyes pan up and catch sight of Mt. Hood.

Estacada isn’t that much closer to Mt Hood than Portland — just 30 miles or so — but that 30 miles adds such impressive size and detail to the mountain that it takes my breath away. Maybe I’m just used to seeing it from Portland. I know first time visitors are often overcome by the sight of the mountain, maybe from this angle I’m seeing it again for the first time. But wow. The glacial scars tracing down her left flank, the casual shrug of her uneven shoulders, the soft swelling of her winter coat. A man could fall in love.

I fall in love quickly and quietly, and head down the trail. The path I follow is clearly a horse path. It’s deeply rutted, scarred with hoofprints and pocked with piles of horse shit. I remember not finding horse shit very offensive, but maybe that’s just dried old horse shit. In this case, fresh and fly-covered, it’s bad. I have a few near misses.

The path follows a ridge. To the left the ground drops off sharply in two shelves down to the river — about a half mile away. I can hear the gentle soothing sounds of leather and metal and hooves below me — the trail must loop around down below. I look at the hideous map for confirmation. Indeed.

The trail forks again, and I bear right again, intending to make a longer loop which will bring me up along the riverbank before following the Clackamas down to he fish hatchery and meeting back up here as the lefthand fork. As I near the horse parking area, it dawns on me (as it may have dawned on you by now, dear reader) that the trailers and metallic clankings I heard earlier, from the road, were none other than the horse trailers and saddle buckles before me. Back to the despicable map. It looks like the horse trails south of here probably lead all the way to the road, perhaps even the precise spot I stopped. The brown metal gates of the park match precisely the gate I saw up there. I file this away — perhaps I’ll return this way and shave some miles off the walk back to town!

For now I keep to the left around the earnest equestrian folk and their four wheel drive haven, heading for the river. The path stays level for a while, and forks — the other end of the loop I’ll use to exit the park branches off to the right. The left-hand fork is host to a hinged orange sign declaring the trail closed.

Crap.

I read the fine print. “Bridge unstable?” Bah, this trail doesn’t cross the river. Must me some minor tributary — I’ll have no trouble fording it. I take the left turn with artificial certainty of a snap decision in my step.

continued tomorrah

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/daily-bread/2009/estacada-part-5/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/two-sporting-items http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/two-sporting-items#comments Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:50:10 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=248 Firstly, the matter of Sir Charles. Bethlehem got me thinking with his latest Sporting News column. Regarding Charles Barkley’s ascendance, Shoals writes:

Barkley could get away with anything because he made no bones about who he was. He wasn’t a lightweight rebel like Rodman, or the kind of surly bad boy who would soon invade the NBA in droves. Barkley was an antihero, who, in both his impulsiveness and authenticity, made the rest of the world look like hypocrites.

But what kind of antihero is he. Despite his amorality, Barkley is no noir detective. He doesn’t have the casual disregard for the suffering of others. His amorality is born not so much of selfishness but more of an active disdain for morality itself. “I am not a role model,” is not merely Charles’ abdication from the crown of moral rectitude, but an active refutation of the right of others to bear that crown. At the same time, Charles’ world is not the fragmented nightmare or amoral wasteland of the antihero, but the ordered and fundamentally ridiculous world of spectacle. The universe of Celebrity he inhabits is analogous to the circus of the Renaissance court — larger than life figures defined by their hollowness and hypocrisy. It is not the “rest of the world” as Shoals suggests whom Barkley shames. It is the shallow and ultimately non-real ghosts of Celebrity around him.

He is stubbornly, manifestly real.

The antiheroic character perhaps most analogous to this Barkley is Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Ultimately a tragic figure, Falstaff nonetheless is the most sympathetic of Shakespeare’s fools and was his most enduringly popular — his appearance in the Merry Wives of Windsor (and indeed, some scholars suggest, the very play itself) owes to popular or even royal demand (it has been postulated that Queen Elizabeth herself requested an encore for the buffoon). His role, and the role of most of Shakespeare’s fools, is to speak for the underlings — the poor people in the “cheap seats” — in criticizing the nobility and their exploits. Just as Barkley, despite his foolishness, consistently makes others look foolish (especially “stuffed shirts”) Falstaff parries the verbal rapier thrusts of Henry IV’s nobles with drunken and misleadingly clumsy ease. One wonders, just as when one watches Barkley (or another master of the form, Dean Martin) how much of his buffoonery is show, and how much his “true nature”.

I suspect in the end that Barkley may surprise us all with his savvy.

Secondly, the matter of Boom Tho. Rod Benson is a basketball player in the NBA’s Development League (basically the minors for Basketball). Nobody would know who he was outside of North Dakota except someone gave him a blog and he got famous. This is the kind of thing he got famous for doing:

In this, I encourage you to find your own meaning.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/two-sporting-items/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-4 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-4#comments Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:51:27 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=242 continued from Part 3

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They don’t sell pens, it turns out, but the clerk gives me one. When I first walk in she’s talking to another customer about puppies. Seems
the customer has a pregnant dog and the clerk is interested in one of the litter. When I ask for a pen she squints a little.

“Like for a horse?”

I laugh, “No, like an ink pen”

She holds up the one in her hand. I nod. She holds it out to me.

“Can I give you fifty cents?” I ask. She shakes her head. I take the pen.

“What you need a pen for anyways?” she asks. I almost laugh again.

“Writing.” I say, “I’m going to the river to write.”

“Writing what?” she asks, apparently rhetorically, because before I can answer she piles on another question, “You from Estacada?”

I look at her again. She’s got a square but pretty face, a casual mouth that she talks out of one side of. She’s short.

“Portland,” I say, “Just took the bus down for the day.”

“To . . .” she pauses.

“To write, I guess.” I answer her implied question, “or just to get out.”

And all of a sudden I’m actually trying to explain.

“I guess the city is just too comfortable sometimes. Or not comfortable, but it holds you anyways. I mean, the noise. You don’t notice the noise until it’s not there.

“Sometimes I take the train up to the zoo and walk up into the woods of Forest Park. As you make your way up these gullies, the sound of the city retreats, becomes two dimensional. You can hear where it comes from, a direction. You go further and further into the woods and pretty soon it’s just a point. You can point to the spot where the city noise is, that noise that surrounds you all the time.

“I guess that’s what I’m looking for — just to get the noise outside of me.”

She is looking at me, nodding a little. “The city scares me.”

I shrug. We talk a little while longer, about the city, about where to eat in Estacada, about all the great spots she knows about on the river, none of them within walking distance, about the legendary Safari Room. It’s clear she’d be happy to talk all day.

“Better get going,” I manage to squeeze in at some point, “gotta get down to the river.”

I push open the glass door, bells clatter together, and step down the thick wood steps. My feet make great satisfying deep clomping sounds. I am wearing a flannel. I have a bandana tied around the handle of my backpack. My pants are dusty. I can, if I want, strike them with the palms of my hands to loosen and brush the dust off them. I do it. I feel pretty country. And now I have a pen.

It’s just a quarter mile more to the park, I cover it in just a few minutes. The sign says $3.00 per vehicle, but I don’t think my feet count. As I’m strolling in, past the tollbooth for cars, a park ranger is leaving. He nods at me knowingly. He understands the illicit thrill I’m about to get, traipsing in, beating the system. It feels good. Especially watching two cars pull up, their drivers get out and stuff worn bills into envelopes. Not me, man. I am free. Ha.

I grab two maps from the toll booth and saunter past.

more tomorrow

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-4/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-3 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-3#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:29:17 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=237
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Hayden Road immediately begins to climb. I’ve turned off the music now, my ears need a break. The relentless thrum of passing cars is growing tiresome though. My legs are getting sore, and the knee I’ve been worried about (the right one) for some time is beginning to hurt with a sharp pain that is somewhat unsettling. I am very hungry, but have promised myself I’ll make it to the park before eating lunch so I can sit by the river.

I climb past tree farms. So many tree farms. Christmas trees for miles. This must be the world Christmas tree capital. Looking at the trees I imagine the different Christmas each is headed for. Which tree gets starved by the dysfunctional family? Which tree gets strung with gold ornaments? Which of these will grow up to tower over Pioneer Courthouse Square some day?

The ground slopes away to the right, and at a clearing in the trees I stop to take a look. there is a barn, looking abandoned, and what look like campers or RVs. Is this a parking area for a campground? I hear metal clang on metal and men’s voices. It feels good to stop.

A few hundred feet further, there is a heavy metal gate blocking a road. No signs. Looks like picnic tables? Odd. This clearly isn’t the park, there aren’t any signs and it hasn’t been close to 3 miles. But whoa. What the fuck is that?

A twisted wreck of a red sedan has wrapped itself lengthwise around a tree about 20 feet down this gully. I head up the road to get a better look. Fairly new yellow caution tape flutters from nearby trees. The driver’s side is completely flattened. Someone died here. Recently. I imagine they’re still in there, that I can smell the rotting body. My stomach churns. I am not so hungry.

I keep trudging up the road. Station wagons usually give me a respectful berth. Big trucks are more likely to drive fast and close. I can feel the air they shove out of the way. It whips my hair in my eyes and blows eddies of road-dust into my face. Assholes.

Hayden Road finally crests the hill and intersects Springwater Road. The sign says “McIver Park -> 1″. Almost there.

Springwater is much nicer to walk along. The shoulder is wide, the road straight, and traffic light. I can see a farm supply store ahead — they’ll have a pen, right? If I’m going in there though, I should probably change out of my beadazzled carousel horse sweatshirt and into the flannel in my bag. It feels good to stop. I drink some water.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-3/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-2 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-2#comments Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:12:46 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=223 This is part 2 of my serialized adventure tale. Read part 1 here.

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The suburbs slide by the windows and slowly fade into farmland and trailer towns.

I am squinting at the other people on the bus, trying to write their stories. The long thin man towards the front, the one with leathery skin and a bass-like mouth, is gibbering excitedly to a very quiet Hispanic man with a Genghis Khan style beard. Occasionally the tall one leaps up, grasping a pole for support, and crouches close to the silent man, eagerly explaining how DNA is like a mighty flowing river. We are all in tributaries, evolutionarily speaking, but soon enough our children will join into rivers, our grandchildren spill into the mighty Columbia, and our great great great great great grandchildren will roll gently into the great genetic sea of the distant future. At least this is what I imagine he is saying — I only catch incomprehensible fragments and attempt to piece together some lucid story from them. He may be mad. I want to write it down, but I realize I’ve forgotten a pen. Fuck. I’ll pick one up in Estacada.

When I’m not listening to his chatter, I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver — the first volume of his absolutely massive Baroque trilogy. It’s interesting enough — seems to be largely about the birth of math and money and how the two interrelate. A bit too clever at times, but Stephenson is a very capable storyteller. The ride, while bumpy at times, is never slow.

I have two possible adventures in mind. The first option would be to get off in Estacada proper, at the end of the line, and walk out to McIver park. It doesn’t look too far, and it’s on the river. The other option is called Eagle Fern park and is up Eagle Creek a little ways. I could either walk the Wildcat Mountain road, or try to work my way up Eagle Creek. Either way, it would be a couple of miles. Eagle Fern looks a little wilder, but smaller, than McIver. I consider these possibilities, and put my nose back in my book. When I look up again my dilemma is solved for me: we’re a mile or two past the Wildcat Mountain turnoff.

Estacada has a worn down but homey feel. The air smells like not-entirely-unpleasant burning. A huge sign forms a Romanesque gate over a gravel road “ESTACADA LUMBER” – 50 feet in the air. This place once had a purpose, I suppose. Trees felled for miles around would come here, to Estacada Lumber, and be stripped, cut, planed and stacked into neat piles. Builders would drive down from Portland.

Now Estacada is “The Gateway to the Clackamas”, which I guess means it’s just the place you stop for gas on the way out of town, or the place to get dinner after a day on the river. I get off the bus on Main street in front of Estacada Middle school and head south, towards “downtown”. As I crest a small rise, heading down into Estacada proper, I see the towering sign for the Safari Room — Estacada’s legendary taxidermist/karaoke bar. I plan to stop on my way back through if I have time, but they’re not open yet.

I haven’t brought a map with me (uncharacteristically) and I’m not entirely sure which direction I’m supposed to go, only that I’ll cross a bridge and then try to find the park. The highway forks at the edge of town, the right hand fork crosses a bridge; it’s a pretty safe bet. So I cross it.

The Clackamas is wide below me and a deep blue-green. It looks cold. I think about where it comes from and where it goes, wonder if you could put a raft in here and float all the way down to the Willamette, then float the Willamette all the way into downtown. Maybe get out at the waterfront and stumble, sun-burnt and dripping, into some hoity-toity Southwest Portland bar. Portland City Grill has a great happy hour. Mentally bookmarking this for the summer.

On far bank of the Clackamas, the thin sidewalk I have been following disappears, and it looks as if I’ll be walking on the shoulder of the highway from here. At first it’s not so bad. I put some tunes on and my step is light.

I realize I’ve forgotten a pen. I knew I’d forgotten a pen. I knew it on the bus and I meant to stop in Estacada. Fuck, man. My eyes scan the garbage strewn roadside. It’s possible. Empty Gatorade bottles, cigarette packs, bits of upholstery, shoes. No pen. But I’ll keep my eyes out.

Soon, as cars shoulder past like that rude asshole at the Crystal Ballroom who has to be in front, the highway wears thin. A sign says “McIver Park – 3 Miles”. Ah fuck. At least there’s a pony, a little Shetland in the front yard of a small house across the road. I soldier on past junk-strewn trailers, some so ramshackle I’m reminded of shanty towns.

Still looking for a pen, I spot some huge pine cones. Sugar Pines, right? Sugar cones? That’s silly. I pluck a single seed from one to bring home with me. Roughly triangular with the fat end light and the thin end dark. Looks like candy corn. I think I’m hungry.

I judge that the park must be somewhere to my right, as the river is over there. Presented with the opportunity to take a side road headed in that direction, I nervously do so. It doesn’t say “Dead End” so it has to go somewhere, right? And as long as I’m between the river and the highway, I can’t get too lost.

This road crosses a small creek and climbs sharply before connecting with Hayden Road. Looking left I can see the highway, and imagine I can see a brown State Park sign pointing this direction. Eh, what’s there to lose. I turn right and trudge upwards.

continued tomorrow

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-2/feed 3 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-1 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-1#comments Mon, 23 Feb 2009 07:17:24 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=216
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I don’t get started nearly as early as I would have liked. I had planned on catching the first or second bus, 6:30 and 7:30. The red wine I drank last night, however (along with Sparks, C-Note IPA, Beck’s Dark, and more Sparks) ensures that I feel ten kinds of terrible when I roll out of bed at 9am. I needed coffee. I need eats. I stumble to the coffee shop down the street.

I get back, drink the coffee, eat some toast. Better.

I shower. Much better. It’s 10.

Check the bus times. I can catch a 10:35, transfer twice, and be in Estacada by 12:30. Not bad. Time to pack.

First up, clothes. It looks warm, but it probably isn’t. I pack my christmas-colored thick flannel and put on my hoody. Good enough. Next, water. One 32 oz Nalgene, one 42 oz Crystal Geyser bottle. Check.

Now food. I have a third of a load of Ciabatta, an avocado, some leftover pasta, an apple and a banana. Looks like I’ve got lunch and dinner!

I’m out the door at 10:30 to catch the bus at 7th and Fremont. The bus is a little late, but I’m still on schedule to make my transfers. I’m listening to the Radiolab podcast. Jad and Robert are talking about how they make the show. Jad is illustrating his sound editing techniques, which are completely mindblowing. He’ll string together bits of sound culled from the actual interviews and manipulate them, twist them, distort them, stretch them to make almost all the ambient sounds you hear. It’s totally unreal. I get off at 57th and Fremont to switch busses. While I’m waiting at the stop, Emily drives by and honks. She rolls down the window and we have on of those obnoxious conversations people have when one of them is driving a car. She hollers for me to swing by her work tonight. Pizza!

I switch buses. The 71 takes a torturous route southwards, traveling almost as far east and west as it does south. We bounce back and forth through northeast, then southeast, into my old neighborhood (what, what Creston-Kenilworth) and finally into the grim expanse of Milwaukie. I’m off at 70th and King to transfer. Some kind of ruined structure slouches in a field just off the road, adorned with a faded red and black “KEEP OUT” sign. Abandoned clothes and bedding litter the grass. People have lived here. A squat stone wall lines the other side of the street, shading some squalid subdivision. I call Tri-Met to see how long I’m going to be here. 14 minutes. Not bad.

My friend Marie in Colorado texts me. I try, and I think ultimately fail, to convince her to come visit.

The 31 crests the hill.

The idea that a city bus goes so far out into the world as this one does (more than 20 miles!) is completely enthralling to me. I always wanted to, but never actually did, take the McKenzie Bridge bus from Eugene to spend a day hiking by the river and growing slowly older with the trees. I think I’d like to. Maybe I’ll live in Eugene again.

continued tomorrow

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-1/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/polygraph/2009/heat http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/polygraph/2009/heat#comments Mon, 23 Feb 2009 04:01:08 +0000 jonjon http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=214

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/polygraph/2009/heat/feed 3 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/essential-reading http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/essential-reading#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:41:50 +0000 jza http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=205 Apparently we can’t write html links into this

Joe doesn’t know how to write html links. But this article is totally rad. Battier is a bad ass.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/essential-reading/feed 2 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/time-to-man-up http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/time-to-man-up#comments Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:27:43 +0000 Deafkitties http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=188 This morning the sky was doing that thing where it looks like melted sherbet. When that happens I kind of space out a while and admire the orange and pink bathed buildings.

Today is my 8th day of owning this cold. Yesterday I thought maybe this is it and I’m just going to feel this way from here on out. I think that’s how people feel when they get Lyme disease or cancer. Or maybe I’m really naïve about that sort of thing. I called the doctor’s office today for some test results and the woman on the other end had a sugary sweet voice. I imagined her sitting there, really good-looking and healthy.  She told me I’d have to wait until tomorrow when my doctor was in. I was being a huge baby and I think I even sighed in her ear. That’s the sort of behavior I find extremely rude now that I’m reflecting on it.

When you stop reading and stop writing and start spending all your time in bed watching Intervention marathons on cable while wishing you had the number to a cheeseburger delivery service you know it is time for summer to show itself and dry out everything winter has wet brained.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/time-to-man-up/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/polygraph/2009/hi http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/polygraph/2009/hi#comments Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:34:54 +0000 jonjon http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=177

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/polygraph/2009/hi/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/first-term http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/first-term#comments Mon, 16 Feb 2009 01:15:55 +0000 JIMBO http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=172 Dear Mom and Dad,

Thanks a ton for the care package – the cookies went fast!

Classes are going pretty well. I just got through midterms, and I think I even aced my Shakespeare test. It’s been tough to get up early for that grammar class, though.

Living in the dorms is crazy. I keep meeting all kinds of people in the lounge. I’ve been doing most of my studying there because my roommate makes the room smell pretty bad. He leaves food out and has some pretty gross habits. His name is John, and he’s an exchange student from the 1600s – pretty crazy, huh? I think he’s the only guy on campus from the past. I end up having to catch him up on basic things all the time, and it’s kind of a pain. I mean, I’m sure it’s tough to live in a different time and all, but I have my own stuff to do to – I can’t hold his hand all the time. I might have to see about getting moved if things don’t change.

Last week, John came back to the room drunk and puked in the trash and didn’t clean it out until I asked him to. I had to complain to the RA about that – and the bedpan thing. He uses a bedpan, which is totally gross. Our rooms are pretty small – I’ll leave it at that.

On the plus side, he did help me with some of my Shakespeare reading, and he’s teaching me how to play guitar (he’s really good). I tried showing him how to use the ipod speakers you gave me, but he’s not really into my music – he mostly just plays his guitar, which is cool.

So, overall, things are pretty good. I’ve been staying busy, I even joined an indoor soccer team.

Wish me luck!

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/first-term/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/bolder http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/bolder#comments Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:42:57 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=169 Bolder

Just for whatever. This might be on the next Morals record, but probably not this version.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/bolder/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/biblical-biology http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/biblical-biology#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:09:25 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=151 Jayber Crow – Two Short Stories

I wanted to write about how this Jayber Crow borrow not just their band name, but also their thematic gestalt from the work of Wendell Berry. But presenting the complexity of this text through the lens of a simple comparative literary analysis probably would short-change what might be a great album on it’s own merits. Great in the sense that one refers to the literary canon as “the great books”. This might be one of those.

There is a lot here:

There are two stories, one called “Freeze and Thaw” and one called “This Wilderness”. There is a point, about three quarters of the way through, when you almost get bored. There is a drawn parallel between the life, death and rebirth of Christ and the cycles of life, death and rebirth in the natural world. There is sincerity. There is a voice like a less self-conscious Colin Meloy. There are almost no drums. There is glorification, and condemnation, of the works of man. There is history. There is a possibility that I will hate this album in 2 weeks. There are beautiful, open-throated harmonies. There is the last temptation of Christ in the voice of the devil. There is a looseness to the performance, a galloping imperfection, that might turn you off or might freak you out (in a good way). There is a song on their previous EP called “Eugene, OR (Manifest Destiny)” which made me smile.

There is this, the opening track “Saint Anthony”:

Saint Anthony

There is Two Short Stories for sale on their website.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/biblical-biology/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/daily-bread/2009/my-bitchin-short-ribs-recipe http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/daily-bread/2009/my-bitchin-short-ribs-recipe#comments Wed, 11 Feb 2009 23:21:05 +0000 jza http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=143 The first of an occasional series:

Short ribs – about 2″ in length, just like in the New Seasons butcher case, I cooked 8 pieces
Red Wine – Something not very tannic (tannins get a little sour when you cook them for a long time so save your high falutin bottles of Nebbiolo and Burgundy for when yer grillin a big fat steak) I usually stick to Italian wines, Barbera is a good go to for this, a decent Cotes du Rhone would be nice too. You’re gonna dump about 1/3rd of the bottle into this one.
2 Yellow Onions – roughly chopped
2 Carrots – peeled, rough chop
4-5 peeled Garlic Cloves (yes you have to use fresh garlic, none of this pre peeled BS)
Beef Stock
Some oil (preferably olive)

Seasdon your meat on all sides with salt and pepper and leave it out for 10-15min so it gets closer to room temp.

Put a big pan on the stove on med heat and let it get hot. Add some oil, add some short ribs (don’t crowd ‘em) and brown on all sides, do this in batches until all your ribs are browned (i like to get ‘em pretty dark). Set the ribs aside. Throw away the rendered fat.

Lower heat to med-low (maybe just low depending on your stove), add some fresh oil make sure the pan has cooled down and add the onions garlic and carrot. Cook these real slowly until the onions are nice and brown and the garlic and carrots are nice and soft. For god sakes whatever you do do not burn the garlic or onions.

Once all the veg is soft add a big glass worth of red wine and the same amount (maybe a little more) of beef broth. Let this come to a GENTLE boil and reduce for about 15 min.

Once this has all cooked together, you’re gonna need to blend it. If you have one of those hand held salad dressing makers that looks like an immersion blender that will do nicely. Otherwise just use a regular blender, but be sure to leave the plug off the top and hold a rag over it cuz that bitch will be ready to blow.

Once the mixture is blended strain it back into the original pan. (Straining could be considered optional, but if you’re gonna be impressing anyone you’re gonna strain the shit out of it.) Add all the meat to the pan, cover it with foil, put the lid on and bake in the oven at 325. Leave it for like 2 hours.

After the slow and low, crank that oven up to 400 and uncover the meat. Cook for another 30-40 min turning every 10.

Once that’s pull it out and take the meat out of the pan. Pour the broth into a bowl and let it sit for 5 min, skim off the excess fat. Now you’re ready to fucking eat. You can just dish up the meat and use the sauce like gravy, or just pour the sauce over the meat and then serve.

This shit is delicious and should be served with roasted potatoes and other roasted vegetables and the rest of the bottle of wine.

Short ribs are bad ass and kind of expensive (they also have the bone still in which is always a bonus) you could substitute stew meat or a big ass chunked up roast if you wanna slide by on the cheap (and spend more on wine).

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/daily-bread/2009/my-bitchin-short-ribs-recipe/feed 1 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/this-day http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/this-day#comments Wed, 11 Feb 2009 01:11:23 +0000 nurse hurts http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/uncategorized/2009/this-day It always rains on laundry days, and sometimes it even snows…

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/this-day/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/the-last-2-albums-i-listened-to http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/the-last-2-albums-i-listened-to#comments Tue, 10 Feb 2009 06:58:56 +0000 jza http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=134 Hello,

I like to ride my bike, often times at night, after work. I usually like to try and ride with other people, but usually I’m alone so I listen to my ipod*. Which is nice because it keeps me up to date on the latest tunes.

Tonight I listened to two albums:

First I listened to Morrissey’s new record ‘Years of Refusal’. It is bad-ass and bitchin’. Mr. Moz is basically at the same point in his career as Bob Dylan, his new songs will not be the best songs he’s ever written, but they can still be really really good and his band kicks major ass and fuck everyone else ‘cuz he’s making plenty of change, and his tour is gonna sell out every night and he’s doing just great.

To drive this previous point home, Moz has been using his current residence as a foil for his last few albums. ‘You are the Quarry’ revolved around LA where he hung out on verandas and in foyers and played at the Hollywood Bowl for like ten days straight and was tan and was surrounded by Latinos, who love Morrissey (there should be a book written on how that happened, I think it’s very cool, but for the life of me I cannot connect the dots as to why Latinos love Morrissey).

‘Ringleader of the Tormenters’ was basically about Rome. Everyone went nuts cuz Moz basically copped to bangin’ (with a dude) which there was some question if he was into that since like the Smiths days, where he would just say random shit in interviews and watch everyone freak the fuck out. In Rome he also hung out with Ennio Morricone who makes scores for really dramatic Italian movies and the album sounded like being in Rome and being really dramatic.

Fast forward to YoR. He’s now hanging in Paris. Yes, PARIS. LA then Rome then Paris, fuck you he’s doing just fine. The album starts off with a REALLY good rockin’ song. The whole album is good and rockin’, there’s a couple slower songs, but they aren’t quite his best ballads. The relationship he sang about in ringleaders has apparently ended (and he’s fine with that cuz FUCK YOU HE HANGS OUT IN PARIS!). The lyrics are still great, the band sounds great. Good album.

Oh and guess what? You know Johnny Marr? Well Morrissey does still hate his fuckin’ guts. Or someone else who crossed him 19 years ago, which would be 1988 or so, which means it’s Marr. “Sorry’s not good enough” is the gist of the song. And you kind of feel bad for old Johnny because Morrissey is kickin’ back in gay Paris while Mr. Marr tags along with a bunch of meth heads who live in Creswell or something.

I listened to this album twice.

Then I listened to Andrew WK’s album ‘The Wolf’, which I know, Andrew WK isn’t really even ironically cool anymore, but the guy kills it. He’s a great producer, he writes really good songs and gives spoken word tours about how reaching your maximum potential as an individual is the best way to party.

As far as production of rock and roll albums go, the Sun Studio recordings of Elvis and Perkins and Cash and Orbison are like the Plymouth Rock, the beginning the foundation etc. ‘Exile on Main’ St. is the White House, the one everyone sees and knows and sees on TV and kids learn about in grade school. Andrew WK’s are like the Washington Monument. They’re fucking huge, right in the middle of everything, nobody quite knows what to make of it, but you’d be a sucker not to go to the top. His million tracks of guitars, ten vocal tracks and plinking piano ripped straight out of ‘Funhouse’ are basically the best rock and roll songs of the past ten years.

The best thing about AWK though is the sense of joy that permeates his records. He believes in his stuff, and that it’s his way of maximizing his potential and having the greatest party. The WK brings it like a fuckin brick to the head with the kind of sincerity that has you riding along on your bike having one of those rare moments of clarity where a guy’s song kind of transcends entertainment or distraction and becomes fuel. Fuel to get to the NEXT FUCKING PARTY!!!!!!!Oooooooooowww!

*Long story short: Even though it was under warranty, it cost $45 bucks to send it back to the repair facility. I called a man in India to verify that the Mac store by Lloyd wasn’t taking me for a ride. The guy at the mac store was kind of a db and kept saying he had programs that would let him “talk” to my ipod to find out what was wrong. I had to show him how shit inside was rattling around when I shook it, I thought he might have checked for that when it wasn’t working and wouldn’t respond to his stupid computer program. Then I told him my headphones were blown and he said that it was probably the jack in the ipod, which is total bullhsit, and that it would be fixed when I got it back. So they sent me a brand new ipod, same as the last one and my headphones are still fucked.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/the-last-2-albums-i-listened-to/feed 3 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/big-river http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/big-river#comments Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:57:32 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=132 Big River

Just because it’s not January any more doesn’t mean I can’t record cover songs.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/big-river/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/choo-zzzs http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/choo-zzzs#comments Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:41:25 +0000 Deafkitties http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=130

I am so relieved its raining. I woke up the other morning and strained to hear rain drops hitting the driveway out my window, only to find it was dry and gray outside.

 

I had a dream that lining my room where the walls meet the ceiling there ran a tiny train track with a tiny steam engine chugging laps. Delicate puffs of smoke and faint choo sounds helped lull me to sleep. Ben and I both agree we need to make this dream a reality.

 

I have officially checked out of my job. I don’t know exactly when that happened but the transition from somewhat giving a fuck to couldn’t care less has taken place. Around this same time a new sensation of progressive happiness has enveloped me. I am way into the latter.

 

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/choo-zzzs/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/uphilldownhill http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/uphilldownhill#comments Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:00:46 +0000 JIMBO http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=128 I have to catch two different buses to work. My transfer is downtown at a stop surrounded by very tall buildings. If I’m on time, it’s still dark out. Sometimes I’m late, and the sun starts to rise and light the tops of them.

One morning I was admiring this effect and noticed a strange light on the top of a mid-sized building. Green lights, perhaps six wide and eight tall, arranged in a diagonal array atop a pole, facing southeast. It can’t be for helicopters because the building is adjacent to taller buildings, so what is it? I can’t help but look at it now; every morning I check to see if it’s lit.

Yesterday the lights were red. I can’t really explain the way this made me feel, but superstition worked its way into my thoughts.

I work at a therapeutic nursery for children – aged birth to four. Normally I just drive the bus, but yesterday I filled in for the teacher’s assistant in the two-year-old classroom. The kids are wild and hilarious. A little boy poured all of his cup of milk into his bowl of cereal, ate most of the cereal and then asked for more milk. After pouring the milk back into the cup for him, he fished the last of the Kix out of the cup, poured the milk into the bowl and asked for more milk. A little girl – who had, upon arriving in the classroom, immediately went around the room and threw everything on the floor – went ahead and threw his bowl of milk on the floor, too, ending his experiment in gravity and the nature of liquids.

Spills can be cleaned and attention can be re-directed. Some things are more difficult.

This girl’s need to make chaos of the room was unappreciated by another girl, “D,” who needed stability. The first girl, “C,” got out the little xylophone and brought it over to me, sat down, and proceeded to make a racket. D immediately came after her, eyes alight with fire, growling fiercely from the back of her throat. She put her hands around C’s throat, and when separated, continued to thrash and kick at her, never averting that vicious stare, limbs shaking with rage. Two or three more times this happened – grabbing at other kids’ throats or collars, eyes wide, that unreal growl, and the shaking, as if there were more rage in her little body than it could handle.

It’s easy to over-simplify the reason behind such behavior with platitudes gleaned from made-for-TV specials, but there are so many factors at play. It may have been her family that gave her these ideas, but it may not have. I dropped her off at home and dad seemed a friendly guy, with the house relatively clean and warm smells of something being fried wafting out from inside – and a huge television on. Stress plays a large part in a lot of these families’ problems. Everything from physical health to the ability to deal with children’s needs is impaired by stress, and living in any form of poverty is stressful.

That said, the son of one of my family’s close friends – who is now in law school in New York – was a biter when he was three. A fierce biter.

Today, the light was green again, but before the bus came, it started to blink. Every. Three. Seconds.

I don’t know what it means.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/uphilldownhill/feed 2 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/now-playing http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/now-playing#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:32:42 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=120 Here’s what’s been shaking my eardrums lately:

Himalayan Bear – A Very Old Song

A Very Old Song

Listening to Ryan Beattis’ vocal acrobatics makes me think of what it would have been like to watch the great impressionists paint. Here’s this guy with a wild glint in his eye and his arms are moving all over the canvas covering it with oil in seemingly random patterns. His movements, while evidently virtuosic, seem separate from any larger purpose. Separate, that is, until the painting is complete and you pull back and see suddenly: a pond, raindrops, sunflowers, charming French countrysides, a bowl of fruit, all the variety of life in swirls of color and shadow.

Super Mama Djombo – Gardessi

Gardessi

These badass cats are from Guinea-Bissau and sing songs about their independence movement and the hero thereof, one Amílcar Cabral. If revolutionaries are like hipster bands, Cabral would be like the Wolf Parade to Ché Guevara’s Arcade Fire. He has all the cred of your Ché (idealogical Marxist, guerrilla fighter, heart of gold, assassinated by colonialist oppressor) but not all the distasteful fame. He was clearly influenced by his better-known predecessor, but a good argument could be made that a formula that was begun by Guevara was perfected by Cabral.

The Dodos – Red and Purple

Red And Purple

Actually, Amilcar Cabral is more like the Dodos to Che Guevara’s Animal Collective. A much apter metaphor.

Himalayan Bear MySpace
Super Mama Djombo on CD Baby
The Dodos on MySpace

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/now-playing/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/it-doesnt-matter http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/it-doesnt-matter#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:19:29 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=118 You Thought You Were Quiet

Yesterday but with words and a complaining keyboard.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/it-doesnt-matter/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/departure http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/departure#comments Mon, 02 Feb 2009 06:38:59 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=115 1

So January has closed and February is creaking open on her cold and squeaky hinges. Open A tuning and the turbulent emotions stirred up by Bill Murray’s complex and virtuosic performance in Groundhog Day.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/departure/feed 1 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/pop-song http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/pop-song#comments Sun, 01 Feb 2009 01:32:04 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=113 Pop Song

I thought about choosing some sort of significant song or important song or meaningful song for this, the last I’ll be recording in January, but decided to just do a plain old pop song called “Pop Song”.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/pop-song/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/five-years http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/five-years#comments Sat, 31 Jan 2009 05:25:02 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=106 Five Years

Singing this, I imagined it was about global warming. It’s really about aliens, right? But you know, maybe that’s a metaphor.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/five-years/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/jamie http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/jamie#comments Sat, 31 Jan 2009 05:23:22 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=109 Jamie

By request.

The fact that this — a cheesily and hastily crooned Casio reggae version of a relatively obscure Weezer b-side — actually almost works is much less a testament to my prowess as an interpreter of song and much more resounding proof that Rivers Cuomo (RIP) was one of the greatest songwriters of this (or any) era.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/jamie/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/how-we-came-to-be http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/how-we-came-to-be#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:44:58 +0000 Deafkitties http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=99 When I was fifteen I got a job cataloguing a couple’s library. They lived way out in the woods, past Cottage Grove Lake, up a winding gravel road. Giant antennas arched up and over their home that lay nestled in a nook at the top of a mountain. From their back porch you could see for miles, over the lake and beyond.

The woman used to be an x-ray technician and now she was a scholar. I didn’t really understand what it was she did but she was very smart. So was the man. He was a professor of some sort and spent his free time in the basement talking on Ham radio.

I remember the first time I walked up to their door. She answered, her long gray-blonde hair falling around her in waves. An intense aroma of licorice and spices hit me in the face. The house smelled delectable. Her face was kind, wrinkled with experience and laugh lines. She led me through the house and down the staircase to the basement, not before offering me a cup of tea.

As we reached the bottom of the stairs my heart beat a bit faster. In front of me was something beautiful. Eight giant bookshelves, stacked to the ceiling with books of all size. There were books lining the walls in heaping piles and magazines at my feet. To my left was a small bathroom decorated in lavender shades with even more literature strewn about. I was there to carefully and precisely inventory each book on 3×5 index cards which I would then file into a plastic cabinet.

“Hullo?” A severely gruff voice jarred me. A man appeared to my right, from a den I hadn’t noticed. He was tall with a shiny bald head and a lovely white beard. I immediately wished he were my grandfather. We met briefly and he shuffled back to his hidden room.

And so it went. Upon arrival I was always greeted with a cup of tea, usually green or fennel. Midmorning the woman would patter down the stairs with some kind of treat consisting of a fruit plate or cheese and crackers. I would sit at a small fold up table and slowly log each book. I took my time with this process, holding each work for a moment and inspecting the contents. The older ones smelled delicious, musty and long since opened. The woman had just as many books as the man. Hers were mostly topics regarding women’s sexuality and well being, radiology and modern science. His covered a broader range of subjects and languages. I loved skimming the guides to women’s sexual endeavors. I snuck off once or twice to masturbate after reading erotic excerpts. Whenever I came across novels that were set in a far off place I had to thumb through the pages, spending extra care on the words at the start of each chapter. This is where my hunger stifled. I never dared to borrow a book from their comfortable sanctuary; the idea was hardly thought of and went unmentioned for everyone involved.

The man would sit in the secret room, tuning in and out on his Ham radio for hours on end. He spoke in multiple languages to people mostly at sea. There seemed to be one Irish man he enjoyed visiting with in particular. I think they had taught together in years past. They discussed how the waters were for his friend, the weather and philosophy. It sounded as if most of his conversation was lighthearted but on occasion he took to Morse code and a more serious air.

At lunch time the woman would call us upstairs for an elaborate meal. Pork chops with rosemary mashed potatoes and steamed spinach. Or lamb stew with walnut salad. Once I think she even made a pot roast. This was an excruciatingly pleasant environment to find one’s self in. I enjoyed the time I spent there, daydreaming in my own small world over passage and text.

One foggy Tuesday when the dew hung low on the tree branches I was coming up the start of the gravel road and took notice of my surroundings. To the left sat a run down single wide trailer with garbage blown about the grass clearing. I thought I recalled it being inhabited the week before. As I passed by a small kitten darted from under the trailer and paused to stare, obviously more than distraught. I continued on my way to carry out the day’s routine but couldn’t get the kitten out of my mind. Did someone abandon her there? Was she feral? Perhaps she belonged to the neighbors.

Hours later on my way home I slowly rolled past the same trailer hoping to catch a glimpse of the tiny animal. This time the kitten was sitting out in the grass and as I approached she ran towards the car. I had to stop. Before I’d opened the door all the way she was at my feet meowing profusely. The poor girl was skin and bones once I saw her up close. I scooped her into my arms and she purred loudly, all the while crying. I scrounged around in my car for anything edible and produced a ketchup packet. She eagerly lapped it up and it all became very clear. I wasn’t about to leave her there to starve or be eaten by coyotes. I thought for a moment while she burrowed into my jacket. Monday. Mondays are days you most likely need cheered up, and she seemed just the creature to handle such a task. She was mine and I was hers and that is how we came to be.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/how-we-came-to-be/feed 3 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/dante-in-the-213 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/dante-in-the-213#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2009 03:19:26 +0000 JIMBO http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=93 For a week or so I was driving around my pop’s car with only the cassette single of “Regulate” by Warren G in the deck. Each side had the album cut exactly once – a perfect, repeating cycle. As I listened to it over and over again, the song grew out of the rote tale of west-coast gangster life I’d assumed it to be and into something more. Check it out:

The story begins with our protagonists, Warren G and Nate Dogg, cruising the eastside separately. Warren, though the principal of the song (it is on his album), runs into trouble, while Nate Dogg causes a car full of girls to crash on account of how fly he is. Nate Dogg, the king of the gangster-croon, the Sinatra to Snoop Dogg’s Dean Martin, is the tougher, more resourceful man in the narrative. He swoops in, saves the day (fends off the perpetrating dice-rollers) and then delivers Warren to the immobilized girls, relegating Warren to the role of Sammy Davis, Jr. in this contemporary gat-pack.

But this is where the song gets interesting: the third act of this narrative isn’t narrative at all, it’s the duo bragging about the abstract splendor of their well-being and how nice their music is.

It’s only natural the story should end with such ephemera. Trace the steps: The shepherd, Nate Dogg, leads Warren G, our pilgrim, out of hell (getting jacked at a crap game) and into purgatory (he still needs to find some girls). The third verse’s cyclical non-sequiturs “the rhythm is the bass and the bass is the treble” are the heaven the pair are after – a high, blissful experience that we can only assume is what one finds at that fabled eastside motel.

I can still feel that intense draw from the first time I heard Warren G’s opening line: “It was a clear, black night, a clear white moon.” He sets the scene in the style of epic poetry, as if nothing less were to follow. I think these fellas knew what they were up to.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/dante-in-the-213/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/dancing-in-the-moonlight http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/dancing-in-the-moonlight#comments Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:05:31 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=91 Dancing in the Moonlight

Science has shown that it is impossible, given the physical constraints of our universe (barring outlier chaotic effects predicted by some of the more exotic string theories), for one to dance while remaining uptight.

Big ups to DEAFKITTIES for the assist on vox.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/dancing-in-the-moonlight/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/how-modern-technology-made-my-life-much-better-and-then-much-worse http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/how-modern-technology-made-my-life-much-better-and-then-much-worse#comments Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:09:31 +0000 jza http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=86 So, I was riding my bike the other night and dropped my ipod. It worked fine when I picked it up. Then after using it for a few minutes it froze up. I did the restart thing and……FROWNY FACE. AAAAAAAAHHH NO NO Why? WHY ME GOD??

It is still under warranty, but I haven’t been able to make it to the Mac store yet. And don’t tell anyone I dropped it. I’m just gonna tell the Mac store that it stopped working.

Now that I have had the opportunity to compare life with/without ipod, I can duly attest that life is much less rich and much less vivid sans pod. I often find myself cold, lonely and distracted by worldly concerns.

Tonight will be the true test of the Mac store’s vaunted customer service. I’m coming in guns blazing.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/how-modern-technology-made-my-life-much-better-and-then-much-worse/feed 1 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/the-science-of-myth http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/the-science-of-myth#comments Wed, 28 Jan 2009 02:13:05 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=84 The Science of Myth

The story goes that this song is Ben Weasel’s final paper for a comparative religion class set to music. I don’t know if I buy that, but it is the “We Didn’t Start the Fire” of the pop-punk generation.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/the-science-of-myth/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/asleep-at-the-pen http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/asleep-at-the-pen#comments Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:29:12 +0000 Deafkitties http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/uncategorized/2009/asleep-at-the-pen

wow. my heart played the drums. it was saturday night. nothing was impossible is how i felt. so there i sat on my homie’s couch, holding drugs closer. they do not confuse me for what they come as. i know what will arrive. a spinning room and friendship squared and fear skirting your chest. that is all alright with me.

i wrote that paragraph last night after i went to bed. i swear i was sleeping. the first sentence just kept making loops in my mind until i fumbled around in the dark for something to write with. when i read it this morning i was somewhat entertained.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/asleep-at-the-pen/feed 1 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/guestlist http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/guestlist#comments Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:29:00 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=75 Guestlist

It’s flashback week here at coversong/day. The next two days highlight the extremes of Screeching Weasel, courtesy of me at 16. Today, the banal and feel-good, Ramones-esque Screeching Weasel at their very very best.

To my mind, the greatest lyric of pop music history remains (regardless of context):

Whoah oh oh oh oh

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/guestlist/feed 1 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/an-attempt-to-tip-the-scales http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/an-attempt-to-tip-the-scales#comments Mon, 26 Jan 2009 05:15:06 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=72 An Attempt to Tip the Scales

Yeah, what.

Ok, seriously, I’m not ashamed. I was 18 and I had just graduated from high school and I was scared and lonely in the big wide world and I listened to this song and this album quite a bit.

Now I’m 27 and I’m just as scared and lonely only the world is smaller. And I still listen to this album sometimes. Fuck you.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/an-attempt-to-tip-the-scales/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/dancing-in-the-dark http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/dancing-in-the-dark#comments Sat, 24 Jan 2009 21:55:29 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=70 Dancing in the Dark

You can’t start a fire worrying about your little world falling apart.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/dancing-in-the-dark/feed 1 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/in-the-wee-small-hours-of-the-morning http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/in-the-wee-small-hours-of-the-morning#comments Sat, 24 Jan 2009 05:24:51 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=67 In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning

Torch song. Frank does it better.

You may have noticed that I’m tagging these songs with the artist who performed them rather than the songwriter. I really couldn’t tell you why.”

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/in-the-wee-small-hours-of-the-morning/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/im-in-love-with-a-girl http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/im-in-love-with-a-girl#comments Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:35:47 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=65 I’m In Love With A Girl

This song is a mixtape killer. Seriously.

Thanks to Casey Moral for the falsetto assist.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/im-in-love-with-a-girl/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/pauls-song http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/pauls-song#comments Thu, 22 Jan 2009 01:59:50 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=60 Paul’s Song

Blazers vs Cavs is on soon and I have to make food first. This is an indignity to a beautiful and amazing song.

But if you’ve lived in Portland and this song doesn’t remind you of how much you love it, you’re soulless or a liar.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/pauls-song/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/here-comes-the-sun-again http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/here-comes-the-sun-again#comments Wed, 21 Jan 2009 04:38:20 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=57 Here Comes the Sun Again

A true story: one afternoon in June, 2008, the temperature climbs into the 90s and a group of friends set off for the Sandy river. Clouds drift overhead, and it briefly rains. But about 3 o’clock, as they head upstream to float back down, the sun breaks through the clouds and they cheer as they jump into the cold current:

Snow banks drift down the hillside for you
slides inside the Sandy river before the day is through
and before evening falls I may find myself there too
singing, “Here comes the sun again!”

M. Ward has set the bar high when it comes to writing about the town I love: there is no song that better captures summer in Portland than this one. There may never be.

Tomorrow, winter.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/here-comes-the-sun-again/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/gone-for-good http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/gone-for-good#comments Mon, 19 Jan 2009 18:33:08 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=53 Gone For Good

Listen, I have important things to do today. There are brunches to make and horses to bet on.

My ex-roommate Randall — an amazing, beautiful and (while I knew him) tragic man — made me learn this song and play it with him when his fiancé left him. He would drink Sparks (god rest their soul) and scream along “JUST LEAVE THE RING ON THE RAIL FOR THE WHEELS TO NULLIFY”.

Now he’s in an incredible band called the Great Northwest.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/gone-for-good/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/grassblade http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/grassblade#comments Sun, 18 Jan 2009 18:25:52 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=51 Grassblade

An embarrassingly sincere song, sung embarrassingly sincerely.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/grassblade/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/wave-of-mutilation http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/wave-of-mutilation#comments Sat, 17 Jan 2009 09:40:09 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=49 Wave of Mutilation

So, I mean, I did it.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/wave-of-mutilation/feed 2 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/olympia-wa http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/olympia-wa#comments Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:38:59 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=47 Olympia, WA

Notwithstanding recent offenses to humanity, Tim Armstrong is probably the most underrated songwriter of the last 50 years.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/olympia-wa/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/wolves http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/wolves#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:07:32 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=43 Wolves

II.

Always remember that there are people who will take advantage of you if you let them.

It’s not their fault; it’s their nature. They are born wild, strong, hungry.

It’s your fault if you feed them.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/wolves/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/lay-it-down-slow http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/lay-it-down-slow#comments Wed, 14 Jan 2009 23:06:05 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=40 Lay It Down Slow

I.

So I don’t like the term “resolution” because I don’t think much of anything can be resolved on an annual basis. There is very little worth changing that can be changed in a year.

That said, around the first of this year I found myself with two projects. You are reading and listening to one of them. The other project — the one that probably more closely nears the thing that people talk about when they use that word I don’t like — is much more personal.

See, I’ve begun to realize the way I use people: I use people to feel useful. I insist that they lay it on me, so that I can be needed — the thing upon which things are laid.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/lay-it-down-slow/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/a-change-is-gonna-come http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/a-change-is-gonna-come#comments Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:37:29 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=33 A Change Is Gonna Come

Barack Obama is your new Sam Cooke.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/a-change-is-gonna-come/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/you-or-your-memory http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/you-or-your-memory#comments Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:36:46 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=31 You Or Your Memory

How to fake it? Come home drunk and half-ass a version of the best song ever written about wine coolers and chewable medicine. You are shitting on what made you great. This took literally 9 minutes. Don’t bother.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/you-or-your-memory/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/personality-crisis http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/personality-crisis#comments Sun, 11 Jan 2009 21:34:32 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=28 Personality Crisis

“Your mirror’s getting jammed up with all your friends.”

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/personality-crisis/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/these-days http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/these-days#comments Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:32:24 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=25 These Days

This is a song about my feelings.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/these-days/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/that-was-your-mother http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/that-was-your-mother#comments Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:31:39 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=23 That Was Your Mother

With one verse, Paul Simon cements his status in my mind as one of if not the greatest songwriter of all time:

“Along came a young girl, as pretty as a prayer book, as sweet as an apple on Christmas day. I said good gracious, could this be my luck? If that’s my prayer book, lord let us pray.”

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/that-was-your-mother/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/her-dress-so-green-in-the-moonlight http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/her-dress-so-green-in-the-moonlight#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:27:56 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=21 Her Dress So Green in the Moonlight

The greatest ever love song about a one night stand. Three takes at once.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/her-dress-so-green-in-the-moonlight/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/the-chauffeur http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/the-chauffeur#comments Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:27:04 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=19 The Chauffeur

I was telling my buddy Jim how doing these covers is like taking the song apart from the outside and then trying to put it back together around yourself — it’s harder than you might think at first and it really makes you appreciate the craftsmanship of the thing. Especially true of The Chauffeur (which, incidentally has one of the greatest music videos ever [warning: contains boobies])

This wasn’t easy. I’m epically hung-over today. But I think it works!

Tech notes: I’m finding that the WAV files I’m mixing down end up with much hotter (louder) vocals than the Audacity files I start with. Can’t figure it out. Will try to work around it. Am increasingly attempting to view technical limitations as touchpoints for creative adventure.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/the-chauffeur/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/to-beat-the-devil http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/to-beat-the-devil#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:26:25 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=17 To Beat the Devil

There’s really not a lot to say about this song that it doesn’t say about itself:

It was winter time in Nashville, down on music city row.
And I was lookin’ for a place to get myself out of the cold.
To warm the frozen feelin’ that was eatin’ at my soul.
Keep the chilly wind off my guitar.

My thirsty wanted whisky; my hungry needed beans,
But it’d been of month of paydays since I’d heard that eagle scream.
So with a stomach full of empty and a pocket full of dreams,
I left my pride and stepped inside a bar.

Actually, I guess you’d could call it a Tavern:
Cigarette smoke to the ceiling and sawdust on the floor;
Friendly shadows.

I saw that there was just one old man sittin’ at the bar.
And in the mirror I could see him checkin’ me and my guitar.
An’ he turned and said: “Come up here boy, and show us what you are.”
I said: “I’m dry.” He bought me a beer.

He nodded at my guitar and said: “It’s a tough life, ain’t it?”
I just looked at him. He said: “You ain’t makin’ any money, are you?”
I said: “You’ve been readin’ my mail.”
He just smiled and said: “Let me see that guitar.
“I’ve got something you oughta hear.”
Then he laid it on me:

“If you waste your time a-talkin’ to the people who don’t listen,
“To the things that you are sayin’, who do you think’s gonna hear.
“And if you should die explainin’ how the things that they complain about,
“Are things they could be changin’, who do you think’s gonna care?”

There were other lonely singers in a world turned deaf and blind,
Who were crucified for what they tried to show.
And their voices have been scattered by the swirling winds of time.
‘Cos the truth remains that no-one wants to know.

Well, the old man was a stranger, but I’d heard his song before,
Back when failure had me locked out on the wrong side of the door.
When no-one stood behind me but my shadow on the floor,
And lonesome was more than a state of mind.

You see, the devil haunts a hungry man,
If you don’t wanna join him, you got to beat him.
I ain’t sayin’ I beat the devil, but I drank his beer for nothing.
Then I stole his song.

And you still can hear me singin’ to the people who don’t listen,
To the things that I am sayin’, prayin’ someone’s gonna hear.
And I guess I’ll die explaining how the things that they complain about,
Are things they could be changin’, hopin’ someone’s gonna care.

I was born a lonely singer, and I’m bound to die the same,
But I’ve got to feed the hunger in my soul.
And if I never have a nickle, I won’t ever die ashamed.
‘Cos I don’t believe that no-one wants to know.

I tried to practice but it didn’t feel right so I just kind of winged it. On his recording, Kris opens by saying the following:

A couple of years back, I come across a great and wasted friend of mine in the hallway of a recording studio; and while he was reciting some poetry to me that he’d written, I saw that he was about a step away from dyin’ and I couldn’t help but wonder why. And the lines of this song occurred to me. I’m happy to say he’s no longer wasted and he’s got him a good woman. And I’d like to dedicate this to John and June, who helped show me how to beat the devil.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/to-beat-the-devil/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/sunday-morning-coming-down http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/sunday-morning-coming-down#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:21:11 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=11 Sunday Morning Coming Down

There’s very little to say about this Kris Kristofferson song that Johnny Cash hasn’t already said better. His shadow (Johnny’s) looms large over the song.

I recorded it in one take, without really practicing or knowing the song, so you can hear me fuck up. What is more interesting is that despite the fact that I start the song making a conscious effort to sing in MY voice, you can hear Johnny come through in the wavering huge vowels in the chorus. He owns this song now.

Tomorrow, part two of a Kristofferson double-header.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/sunday-morning-coming-down/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/woody http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/woody#comments Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:20:38 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=9 Woody

Today: more Casio, less song.

At first listen, I made the default assumption (as I find myself doing with so many songs) that this song is about a girl. But a girl named Woody? Surely not. What, then? A friend? A roommate? A child?

No, none of these. It seems sweet little Canadian singer/songwriter Hayden named his cat after Woody Guthrie. An act which endears him to me almost as much as his ability to write a solid narrative pop song that clocks in under a minute, giving me a nice little rest.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/woody/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/big-dipper http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/big-dipper#comments Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:19:32 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=7 Big Dipper

No, not Built to Spill. This is the “Big Dipper” by Cracker, a band for which I owe my adoration of completely to my friend Aaron (recently of Thailand, now of Berkely). Of those people I know who said, in 2003, “if Bush wins again, I’m leaving the country,” Aaron is the only one who kept his word. For this, for forcing me to listen to Cracker despite my strong dislike for their only radio hits, and for many other good reasons, Aaron is one of my favorite people.

Interesting facts about this recording:

* It took a really long time. Like 6 hours.
* I was not consciously trying to make it sound like Casiotone. That just happened. But also, I just happened to use a Casio keyboard for just about everything you hear. So that might explain it.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/big-dipper/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/here-in-california http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/here-in-california#comments Fri, 02 Jan 2009 21:17:40 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=5 Here in California

I grew up with the songs of Kate Wolf. Along with Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and the Beatles, her quiet folky little songs were one of the few things our whole family could abide listening to on our frequent road trips. This is perhaps her most iconic song, and contains most of the lyrical themes that are her trademarks: epic narrative verses, big choruses, a bittersweet and bipolar relationship with love, and the state of California.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/here-in-california/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/oh-me-oh-my-im-a-fool-for-you-baby http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/oh-me-oh-my-im-a-fool-for-you-baby#comments Thu, 01 Jan 2009 21:14:37 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=3 Oh Me Oh My (I’m a Fool for You Baby)

In high school, my friend Brady introduced me to the Buster Poindexter verson of this song. Only recently have I heard Aretha do it. In looking for the Aretha version, I found the original version by Lulu. Rediscovering the song made me appreciate how well-crafted a song it is.

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