Listening to this radio interview with Al Cisneros and Chris Hakius from Om (and formerly of Sleep) makes me think that I'm hearing Dave Kennedy, kind of. It's the very level voice.

A perfectly good weekend of solitude was ruined by blowing out a tire on my brother's Jeep yesterday. When the spare was put on, it promptly kicked the bucket too, forcing me to leave the Jeep at Midas until tomorrow, since nobody's working today. Except me, that is; God forbid someone get their Greensheet a day late.

I hung out with my pops all day Friday. Matt, Sara, and Van Cleve stopped by at various points, and it was a damned fine day. Not socializing Saturday and Sunday was also ideal, though I failed to get much reading done, sucked in by Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel as I was. I think that once I'm done watching the fourth and first seasons of each show, respectively, I'm going to have to take a break in order to get anything done. That said, when the time comes for another burst of actively passive consumption, I know where to go.

As a parting gift, here is Li Po's poem "Waking Up Drunk On A Spring Day," taken from Five T'ang Poets, translated by David Young, Oberlin College Press, 1990.


Life is a huge dream
why work so hard?

all day long I drink
laying outside the front door

awakening
looking up through the trees
in the garden

and one bird singing in the flowers

bird, what season is this?
"Spring! I'm a mango bird
and the spring wind makes me sing."

now I grow sad
very sad

so I have some more wine
and I sing
out loud
until the bright moon
rises

what was I upset about?
I can't remember

For no real reason, I dug out my WWI-era helmet an hour or so ago and have been wearing it since. I reckon I should get used to the discomfort, seeing as how I'll be wearing it often when either a revolution breaks out, the country is put under martial law, or zombies walk the streets. Of course, while the helmet is advantageous item to have on hand, I'd almost be willing to trade it for several thousand rounds of ammunition for my Kalashnikov. Zombie teeth and misguided bullets may bounce off of the old tin hat, but being able to drop flesh-eaters and counterrevolutionaries at a distance is invaluable.

Lines from Tu Fu:

Failure after failure continues to the present,
And he will have to contend with ending in the dust.
Regretting that he did not imitate the best hermits,
who could not be made to leave their hermitages.

...

Like the dragon not settled in one place,
Or the brown crane that soared through the skies,
The able and wise have from ancient times
Not let their freedom be curtailed by circumstance.
I, however, am only a short-sighted and unwise man.

...

I should find out if Ezra Pound ever translated Tu Fu.

Apologies for the Johannes de Silentio routine as of late, but I haven't wanted to spend much time in front of the infernal machine these days. When I have been at the computer, I've kept it short. I did manage to finish putting together all the shit I needed to send Critical Hits off to some publishers, however, so I do have proof that the past week hasn't been all Jade Empire and 7.62x39 mm.

Unheimlich seems to have stalled, at least digitally. I'm still writing out a fair amount of notes on paper, but they haven't coalesced into anything really tangible, and I'm starting to think that my energy might be better spent elsewhere, at least for a little while. I'll have to wait and see.

My apologies for the brevity, but I want to find something else to do right now. Not having to worry about writing query letters and such has taken a load off my mind.

All nocturnal activity will cease until I am finished playing Jade Empire.

Man, I'm fucked. If it isn't one distraction, it's another.

My brother and I were talking earlier about how both of us have a handful of distractions that have recently come our way, mainly in the form of DVDs (Star Trek: TNG and Buffy) and video games (Vice City, Jade Empire). Both of us are aware that such distractions will lead us into lengthy periods of inactivity and couch-warming, the thought of which is neither entirely unpleasant nor really that compelling.

Of course, it really is compelling. Aside from taking care of Critical Hits-related stuff by the end of the month, what do I have to do that stops me from simply sitting back and enjoying some relatively passive entertainment? Sure, there's Unheimlich, but I seem to have hit a wall there, and sitting down to stare at the monitor night after night isn't achieving much. So the hell with it; I'll get back to doing "productive" things when I feel like it.

Besides, I'm really tired of being in my room, and the presence of the internet in here just makes it worse.

You won't care because it's about metal, but VENOM ON VINYL=SICK.

No plans for the weekend. I don't think I want to see anyone, with perhaps one or two exceptions. I don't think I want to do anything, really, although sleeping does sound good.

Life can be highly tiresome.

I had a good time in Austin, with the exception of the CD player getting stolen from my brother's Jeep and the three-hour drive home through pouring rain. Peter Beste's black metal photo exhibit was solid, and I splurged and bought the book of said photos. I'd be willing to bet that it's the only book in existence with packaging that unfolds into an inverted cross, and it will become the third book that I have that would make an excellent coffee-table book, along wih Van Burnham's Supercade and David Lynch's Images.

While in Austin, I stayed with Nick, who's working on Richard Linklater's film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. He showed us around the studio and so forth, and it was pretty sweet. Being both a Linklater and PKD fan, I can tell you that the movie will not disappoint.

Tonight Tracey wanted to see British Sea Power, and not being particularly interested in sitting around doing nothing, I went with her and my brother to Mary Jane's. I was very impressed by the band, their sartorial choices aside. At shows like that one, i.e. those I wouldn't normally go to on my own because the music isn't my usual cup of coffee, I find myself thinking a lot, which is a good thing. British Sea Power had some really good songs, and the sound quality was about as good as one could hope for, so I spent a good part of the evening thinking about writing and the play of emotions I get from different types of music. I would've written down those thoughts, but I lacked a suitable surface upon which to balance my notebook, and I wanted to just enjoy the thoughts as a result of being at those particular space-time coordinates. Thankfully, I recall enough of those thoughts to work them into my writing sooner or later.

As usual, it's time to write and then watch some Buffy. Adios.

As is usually the case on Thursdays, I got off work fairly early. I've spent the last couple hours reading Infinite Jest, which I'm almost done with. I started nodding off, so I figured I'd go to bed, but of course I didn't, opting to fuck around online and listen to Burzum. The combination of the two has been productive, albeit in a not-actually-productive, fucked-up way.

Burzum is a seminal Norwegian black metal band made up of one man, Varg Vikernes. I won't bother going into details about Varg, as any internet search for his name and/or Burzum will reveal plenty of gory details and I don't feel like rehashing the ideological issues that inevitably come up whenever Burzum is discussed. That said, listening to Burzum made me pay a visit to burzum.com, which in the past was a repository of various Varg/Burzum-related material. Now it's just a forum for white nationalists und so weiter, a fact which was not unknown to me, but since I'd never visited the site since it made the transition.

If you're not immediately repelled by the thought of reading stuff written by heathen national socialists (not to say that I enjoy such things, but then again, there's not a lot I'm not willing to look into, my curiosity being what it is), I'd recommend checking ol' burzum.com out. It's definitely worth a laugh if you want to read about doomed notions like the "Assyrian National Socialist Party."

A quick thought, though, regarding art (specifically music in this case) and ideology. I listen to music composed by, in no particular order, convicted murderers (Dissection), homophobes (shitloads of metal bands), homosexuals (Rob Halford), communists (numerous punk rock outfits, depending on the perjorative-ness of the term 'communist'), pseudo-gnostics (High on Fire), Satanists (more metal bands), arsonists (several black metal bands), Christians (Johnny Cash), misanthropes (too many to name), poseurs (Avril Lavigne), militant vegans (Conflict), ecoterrorists (Velvet Cacoon), NRA spokesmen (the Nuge), occultists (see former metal band comments), drug addicts (Thin Lizzy), alcoholics (Shane Macgowan), conservatives (Zakk Wylde), anarchists (Crass), multiculturalists (Dead Can Dance), nationalists/culturalists (Death In June), pagans (Cruachan), etc. etc.

Fuck. I had a legitimate ending to this post, but Blogger ate it even before I'd tried to publish it. Suffice to say that ideology matters insofar as it gives me something to think about, but it doesn't matter enough to override the music attached to it.

I'm going to bed. Good night, kameraden.

Here's the short story I wrote on the plane to and from Mexico City. I don't know if I'll leave it as it is, or do something else with it, but hey, dig it either way.

----

Q. What percentage of airline passengers talk to one another in flight? Of this percentage, what further percentage can be said to enjoy their conversation? And, as a final subset of passenger statistics, how many (expressed as a percentage) passengers go on to form lasting social relationships (amorous or otherwise) once the passengers have exited the plane and disappeared into the alternately airy and gloomy depths of the world’s airports?

A: Dear sirt, thank you for your inquiry. Unfortunately, the FAA does not compile statistics pertaining to passenger behavior, save for incidents of violence or other irregular activity. We are sorry that we cannot assist you further in this matter.

I cc’d this letter to the TSA, the flight attendants’ union, some sociologists, and anyone else I thought might be able to answer my questions. If I could’ve afforded it, I would have flown around on airplanes and done the research myself, but as it stood, stamps were a lot cheaper than plane tickets, as my uncle put it. He was the one who bought the stamps, since he was the one who knew anything at all about money. I sure didn’t but I blamed that on being sixteen and having been home-schooled until tenth grade by my now-dead parents, who, hated people so much that they withdrew from society to the greatest extent possible. Fine by me, except that they were quietly ashamed of being misanthropes and therefore cloaked all their loathing of homo sapiens (and his predecessors) in religious terms. I need not describe the damage that that kind of upbringing has done to my social development; if you’re rading this and can’t figure it out, then you are, as my parents both used to say, “one horrendously bad excuse for a living creature,” although they applied that particular epithet mainly to the people on the farm south of ours, and never to those people’s faces.
After my parents died (read; killed themselves with almost identical revolvers only minutes apart and at different ends of our 14.71-acre farm-cum-retreat), I went to live with my mother’s brother, who despite having a thing for chaw and nearby cups and glasses, wasn’t so bad. He taught me the basics of dealing with people, and even though I still haven’t grasped those basics very well, I’m enthralled by the possibilities that arise from talking to someone and not immediately assuming they’re a waste of God’s carbon. My uncle says, in between squirts of chaw into empty Pearl cans or iced tea glasses or (even once) my cousin’s friend’s unfinished bowl of cereal, that folks are generally all right, and that it’s a shame that Melinda, that hateful bitch, had to have a kid and ruin it for him, i.e. me. My uncle wasn’t cursing my existence, of course, but rather that I had been born to a crazy, hateful bitch like my uncle’s sister.
It was because of my uncle’s general but not particularly warm regard for other people that I became interested in human interaction on airplanes, and because of his unwillingness to spend money on airline tickets that I couldn’t do any firsthand research. Six months passed, and I gave up on the confined-space experiment in favor of watching baseball, or more accurately watched the people that attended baseball games. While all those fans were technically in a confined space, the atmosphere of a ballpark was less claustrophobic, and easier to study, than an airplane’s. Unfortunately, I still couldn’t gather any firsthand data; my uncle said that going to a ball game cost as much as a month’s worth of cable TV, and that watching the Astros play was a waste of time anyway because they’d blow it sooner or later.
I asked my aunt why my uncle was so reluctant to spend money, and she snorted and said “Don’t listen to him about the Astros— this is their year.” She then offered to give me a ride to the ballpark and buy me a ticket one day while my uncle was at work. I felt a little bad that I wasn’t planning on watching the game, since my aunt was clearly excited by the prospect of watching the Astros, but at least I was going to get to study people up close. It was as if I would have nine innings in which to make up for the misanthropic home education that my aunt calls a shame, a crying goddamned shame.

***

I didn’t make it to the ballpark. The truck broke down between Porter and Kingwood. The trip to the mechanic’s that followed wasn’t anywhere as useful as the trip to the ballpark would have been, although I did learn from a man about my uncle’s age that mechanics are like cops and mothers-in-law and can’t be trusted. This man reminded me of my father, except that my father had fixed his own car and was dead.

***

Q. How many fights occur at Minute Maid Park per annum? How often do similarly socially unacceptable or unusual events take place (e.g. coitus [public or semi-public], threatening behavior, nudity [partial or complete], throwing of objects on the field, etc.)?

A. [No response received]

***

Q. Since 2002, how many letters of inquiry into human behavior in specific close-quarter group environments have you written? Of these letters, how many were answered, and of this number, how many responses would you rate as “satisfactory” in terms of data provided?

Everyone has to show up early at work today for a meeting, wherein the fate of our department will presumably be discussed. Nobody's looking forward to it, myself included, but I've resigned myself to any bad news. Fuck it; it's just a job.

Dr. Long Ghost decided to worm his way under the fridge this morning, thereby terrifying me and forcing me to stuff phone books into the (amazingly tight, even for a ferret) crevice between the floor and the bottom of the fridge and giving me one more thing to worry about. Thanks, Oliver.

Van Cleve, ever the thoughtful gentleman, lent me the third and fourth seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so once again I am engrossed in that particular world and will have to work it into my schedule so that I don't spend all my time before and after work watching it. I still have stuff to do re: Critical Hits, and Unheimlich needs attending to as well, so I can't afford to let Sarah Michelle Gellar and company consume too much of my free time.

That's about it for now. Y'all take it easy.