"I remember Halloween"

Sadly, the headline for this post, taken from the Misfits' song "Halloween," is the best way to describe my current relationship with one of my favorite holidays. It's been a while since Halloween has been truly fun, and now that I work nights, celebrating Halloween in even the most quotidian fashion is out of the question until I either get another job or Halloween once again falls on a weekend.

It's a bummer all around.

Lame. And awesome.

Lame: I bought a copy of Danzig's best album, Lucifuge, earlier tonight, because I haven't had one in ages. I was highly disappointed to find out that the liner notes didn't unfold into the shape of an inverted cross, like earlier versions did. What the fuck, man?

Awesome: I also picked up Against All Authority's Nothing New For Trash Like You, which is a collection of old songs off of 7"s and such. Bill, ye oldest buddye on thee earthe, is responsible for turning me onto these dudes years ago, and ever since I lost the AAA tape he made me in '97 or so, I've missed listening to songs like "Above the Law"- the stuff on their full-lengths never quite hit the spot as much as their lesser-known material. Now I am content.

I take my cues from New Jersey

My oldest friend on Earth, Bill, recently posted a list of suitably autumnal albums. I'd do the same, but I'm lazy, but reading his comments compelled me to note Houston's own change in the weather, which is thoroughly pleasant as of late. It's time for jackets, pipes full of University Flake tobacco, Oktoberfest beers and glasses of Powers whiskey, turning off the AC and sleeping with the windows open, and slightly mournful books.

"Wake me up and take me away"

I really want to be sitting in the living room of 19713 Westbridge Lane c. 1998-99, watching The X-Files and drinking coffee, right now.

Failing that, I'd like to be doing the same thing in some sort of astral/temporal projection sense, my 1998-99 in the recliner or on the couch as I sat nearby enjoying the exploits of Mulder and Scully and mulling over my past (and very present, under those circumstances) self's life.

Unheimlich is gonna be updated in a few minutes.

The etymological root of distraction is "internet"

So here I am, smoking a cigarette, working on Unheimlich and occasionally flipping to the archives of the DFW-centric wallace-l mailing list, when I find myself reading tangentially-related celebrity gossip. Okay. Fine. Say la vee. But then, on the selfsame mailing list, I see this, and immediately have to mention it publicly so that Andy will have a link:

BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN: THE POSSIBLE MOVIE"

And now it's back to writing.

Once I finish reading more recent wallace-l posts, that is.

Conquering das Schnitzelberg

Friday night I went to see Opeth, Pelican, and Fireball Ministry at the Meridian. I dig the venue, even though $3.50 for a Lone Star is kinda steep, and all the bands kicked ass. I'd heard about Pelican here and there, but never listened to them until now. I was highly impressed, and picked up their album The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw, which I'd recommend to anyone who's fond of metal/post-rock instrumentals. Opeth was better than the last time I saw 'em, mainly because they didn't play as much stuff off of Deliverance and Damnation. They even opened with my favorite song off their new record, namely "The Baying of the Hounds." Good times all around.

I spent Saturday visiting Matt and Holly at their new place in the Hoodlands. I went up there with Linda, since she hadn't met 'em yet, and everyone present thoroughly enjoyed themselves. We ate dinner at Alpenhaus, which was even better than I remembered it; the Oktoberfest celebration added to the experience, since Spaten Oktoberfest beer was $11 a pitcher, and there were a couple cool musicians providing the finest in accordion/guitar German music. The guitarist was a German-turned-American (he came over here in 1960 (!)), and part of their repertoire was Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again" in German. Sehr gut, y'all.

So, yeah, life's been all right. Same ol' shit for the most part, but that's no surprise. Been trying to write more in the way of short stories lately, as well as tapping away ever so slowly at Unheimlich. Reading tons of shit, too, and spending lots of, but not enough, time with Linda. All in, yours truly is doin' all right. It's casual.

Cacktacular!

It's quarter till five in the A.M., and I'm currently drinking all my roommate's beer (which I will replace tomorrow- I'm not one of those kinds of pricks), working on Unheimlich, reading the correspondence between Dave Sim and Alan Moore, listening to Gwar, and generally enjoying life.

Linda lent me a book called Stiff, which is about the things cadavers have done/had done to them over the course (or corse- heh, I love me some anachronistic wordplay, which in this case I did not get from the aforementioned book) of written history. I started it last night/tonight- "tonight" extends until I go to bed or dawn comes- and I will probably have it done by this time tomorrow. It's fuckin' awesome, and easily one of the funniest things I've read outside of Dave Wallace in a while. If any of you fuckers are boring CSI/pathologist-wannabe nerds, pick it up; if you're not, you should definitely pick it up. I'd rather people who didn't want to make so-called career decisions based on TV shows read the book and appreciate its approach to life and death. (If TV influenced me that much, I'd swallow my anarchist beliefs and become an FBI agent in the vein of Dale Cooper or Fox Mulder, but, alas for the Feds, I'd rather be a broke-ass motherfucker with a fairly intact sense of dignity.)

I could go on a rant about the popularity of forensics, or at least the televised-whore version thereof, but I won't, because writing a novel about an unhappy, little-late-but-hey-what-the-hell-pseudo-lesbian "escapist" is way more important.

HAIL SADDAM-A-GO-GO!

A brief fictional exchange w/real-life coda

"Time enthusiast."
"Yes, that's me."
"What does that mean, exactly?"
"Exactly what it sounds like."
"Um."
"I like time. It's my hobby."
"How can time be a hobby?"
"I enjoy it. I watch it pass. Observing time is like... bird-watching, I suppose."
"So you like seeing what happens as time passes."
"Yes, but I'm particularly fond of watching time itself."
"How can you watch time? You can only tell it's there based on its effects."
"I'm afraid that is why I am a time enthusiast and you are not."

My girlfriend and I were briefly discussing political standings the other night, and she described herself as, ideally, a "rational anarchist." Need I say what effect that statement had on me?

A lazy middle finger to modern society

Fuck you, work.

And fuck you, October 16th, AKA National Boss Day. This has to be the most revolting excuse for a holiday I've ever seen. Of all the people who deserve a day of recognition, bosses of all stripes do not qualify. Sickening.

Erdinger: my new favorite hefe-weizen

According to the fine, fine news organ that is the Houston Chronicle, H-Town should be getting its first taste of, ahem, cool weather sometime tonight. I'm skeptical as to how long it'll last- I'm willing to bet that strolling down the street at the end of the month will still make my balls sweat, but hey, I wouldn't mind being wrong in this case.

It appears that my brother will be going to New Zealand after all. I'm not sure when, exactly, but more power to him. It's nice to know one of the Smith boys is doing something with his life, 'cause I sure as hell don't seem to be. On the flip side, however, my lethargy when it comes to pushing my dreams of being a writer forward is growing old, and I'm takin' steps towards getting my shit together. Almost two years of virtual inactivity on the attempted-publication front is getting a bit old.

Oh, and whenever my brother leaves the country, I'll have a car again. I'm highly ambivalent about this, all things considered. I see myself driving to places that I've become accustomed to walking to, and that's just fuckin' grotesque.

When everything turns to shit...

"The Phantom Lord has never failed."

Yeah, despite my lengthy, energetic rant about David Lynch and such, today's been a real downer. I wish there was more I could do, but I can't cure fucked-up human and feline diseases, and neither can Metallica's "Phantom Lord" or any of their other songs. Fuck.

While it's no consolation to Sara or her cat Cleo, heavy metal helps me through the rough times. Always has. Let's hope it always will.

Fuck.

Foolishness vs. Foolishness©.

Wiley Wiggins is always a good source of material worthy of thought and research, and it was at his site that I just read about David Lynch and his connections to Transcendental Meditation. I'd heard of this connection before, but until Herr Wiggins mentioned that TM (oh, the irony in the abbreviation) was a cult of sorts, I'd always thought that David Lynch had simply discovered some kind of pseudo-hippie mind-clearing thing.

Hey, fine. As many of you know, David Lynch has been one of my favorite directors since I was seventeen, and that I admire not only his work but the man himself immensely. His movies and televison work, especially Twin Peaks, have shaped my approach to writing, and viewing the world, in more ways than I feel like relating right now. So what if he's a big fan of meditation or whatever? I'd meditate properly if I had the patience for it, but instead I'm content to watch condensation run down a beer can or follow the spirals of smoke coming from the end of my cigarette.

But, as mentioned, that was before I started reading about Transcendental Meditation. Much like Scientology, it reeks of bullshit, particularly for one reason: it claims that science backs it up.

This is unacceptable. Un-fucking-acceptable. Some of the half-dozen of you that read this blog may be aware that I have an ongoing, albeit far from violent, relationship with Christianity. If I was up to it at the moment, I'd get into that, but suffice to say that I spent a couple formative years being a real asshole of a Christian, and then gave it up in favor of other things. Mind you, I never gave up on it entirely; Christian theology is still on my mind constantly, and while I cannot call myself a Christian anymore, I still feel more affinity for that religion than any other one out there, save perhaps Taoism, and only if Taoism is stripped of its religiosity. (Now that I think about it, that may be the case with Christianity, but to a lesser degree; further thought on the matter is necessary.) Anyway, one thing I've concluded about my approach to religion as a pseudo-insider is that to try and provide it with some kind of rational or scientific basis in order to appease or prove something to nonbelievers is not only futile, but flat-out wrong. (I thank Søren Kierkegaard for this, as well as all the secular existentialists that have provided so much of my basis for a philosophy of life over the past half-dozen years.)

Why is it wrong? Christ, ask your average Baptist. Even they know that faith is exactly that: faith. It doesn't, and shouldn't, rely on any kind of framework outside of that basic tenet. Doing so undermines the linchpin of any religious impulse, although I will not deny that envisioning science as a glorious extension of religious faith- within bounds, mind you; I'm not advocating something idiotic like Creationism or, possibly even worse, Intelligent Design- is a bad thing. I simply do not want to see science used as a tool to prove the validity of religion. Or vice versa. I'm not going to play Stephen Jay Gould's Rocks of Ages card here, despite the clarity of his arguments in said book. Faith is faith, and therefore moves as the human heart and mind does; science is science, and relies on everything that faith does not. Refusing to believe in a god is one thing; refusing to believe empirical evidence provided by folks who willingly admit that there is room for error and will correct their views if new data arises, is another.

So, back to my main point. David Lynch's association with Transcendental Meditiation is bullshit, because TM claims that science backs it up. As I understand it, the scientific claims of TM are dubious, and presented to the public in a most selective fashion- i.e. a fashion that will sell TM to anyone who's willing to accept a set of figures and charts at face value. It really disappoints me to hear that Lynch is part of this whole thing.

But.

As I've written in previous entries, an artist's personal views do not necessarily stop me from enjoying their work, and patronizing their current and future endeavors. I will continue to watch any and all films that David Lynch releases, because I have more faith in him as an artist than I do lack of faith in him as an artist swindled by some bullshit swami. On the same note, I hope that anyone who reads my novel (and hopefully novels, in the near future) doesn't turn their back on me because I'm continually fascinated by the notion of the Christian Trinity. I will, however, say this much: I do not espouse any strain of Christian thought that would dare to suborn science in the name of religion. Religious scientists? Sure, as long as they realize that God does not want them to lie in nomine Patris, or, in another case, concoct poisonous lead-based elixirs because some post hoc Taoist gods told 'em it was a good idea.

Applicability aside, religion is about the search for (subjective? objective? I'd go with the former) truth, and to lay the truth aside for the sake of dogma is one hell of a motherfuckin' sin. May whatever god(s) you believe in smite you if you fail to acknowledge that the world around you is simply beyond question. To quote a Danzig t-shirt: "God don't like it."

Finalmente: my brand of foolishness is better than yours, because I'm not raping some other field of knowledge in order to justify my own field of knowledge.

(I hope you read this, Linda, since I have yet to cough up a suitable rant in your presence.)

nichts

If I ever had the chance to be someone other than who I am, and decided to actually take that chance, I would be one of the following:

No.

I would love to visit the past and do things that the Dave Smith of today would never have the opportunity to do, but I don't think I would ever really want to be anyone other than David Addison Smith, whatever that has ever, does, and will ever, entail. There never has been, and never will be, another me to cough and stroll his way across the days, weeks, years, plagued by doubt and happiness. This is right. It's just me and my dreams, the latter as nebulous as the former, and both as thin and ephemeral as the world which anchors them, though no less powerful for all that.

Time, marching in leaden boots, sometimes in straight lines, sometimes in lazy spirals; sometimes hand in hand with Self, sometimes utterly disassociated. I can feel it all unraveling and knitting back together, drawing in new strands and threads, dropping old ones only to pick them up again and add them to the skein at hand.

Nothing makes sense, and it never has to. Just play the hands across the loom, hear the click of the shuttle, and realize that you weave nothing, march nowhere. The universe started in that void that is the moment before you started walking, before you sat down to weave. Before God put on his boots and took a seat at the loom. Walk. Weave. Return to nothing. Nothing is you, me, everything: terrifying indeed. We all wanted to march somewhere, weave a tapestry of meaning, and some of us- the fools, the geniuses, the madmen- did, or are, or will. But the threads, rich and vibrant, and the road, dusty and choking and stretching on between rows of stately trees, are not really there. The trick is not caring. Weave on. Walk on. Ex nihilo, ad nihilo. Nothing is the shining substance(lessness) that was, is, will be. Ignore the tight, tiny gaps between threads, and pay no mind to the spaces between footfalls, even though they are where you are.

Nothing makes sense, and it never has to.

Righteous.

Time definitely moves differently when you spend it with a solid dame. For the first time in a long while, this weekend didn't seem too short.