"monument construction"

"monument construction"

wearing a flannel shirt on a summer night.
cells shrieking for nicotine, brain for diversion.
paying for the whole week with gas money.
here, hide behind this brown glass wall...
on second thought, don't.
how will friday even happen?

"any more water on those wedges
and the whole block's a writeoff."

Thus I have heard:

Tonight MC Chris, MC Lars, and YTCracker played here in H-Town. I really wanted to go, but I didn't, partially because I had nobody to go with (not because nobody was interested, but because there were conflicts of the scheduling variety), partially because I didn't want to spend a ton of money- I wouldn't be content just to pay the cover, I woulda wanted to buy shirts and shit- and partially because I wanted to spend the evening relaxin' on the couch.

It's been a good evening. I spent much of it poking around a UNIX shell (bash, yo) and learning stuff, which has been one of my summer goals. Still, I wonder what I missed at the show. I bet YTCracker played some shit I would've gone nuts for, and I kind of wish I'd been there.

I wasn't. It's a shame, and a fact. If I wasn't listening to Nerd Life right now I doubt I'd feel as wistful as I do, but such is the case.

But wait, the music's changed: Ramones, It's Alive, track one, "Rockaway Beach." I bought this album fifteen years ago in Venezuela, and lost it on the bus within a week of purchase. My mood's changed. The transitory nature of everything has become all the more apparent.

All right!

Today is June 16th.

Today is June 16th.

It's been a productive summer so far. Thinking of each day as a potential landmark helps. Sometimes I forget to do so, but for the most part, despite any small-scale lapses and failures, it's been a useful approach to making the most of this most climatologically awful of seasons.

As always, apologies for the brevity, but I've got writing to do.

Tomorrow is June 17th.

eternity's yield

Eternity, no!
Who'd want that, even if
we get to spend it luxuriating
in the most refined of pleasures?
If nothing ages, nothing
deepens. I have no interest
in day after day after day
(to the nth power times
the nth power)
of childish appreciation of
phenomena, if all we're granted
is the ability to converse
about,
exclusively,
how cool
something is.
Better oblivion,
better Sheol,
better a haphazard scheme of return to
the mortal world for some vaguely just cause,
than an infinite stretch of acceptance
of nothing but the universe's finest
half-assery, for half-assery
is eternity's yield.
Better death, birth, flaking away,
the worst of senescence,
than the static lie.
How cool.

the great connected solitude.

Here, in the great connected solitude, me and you and him and her but really me who isn't me at all or you at all or him at all or her at all, but just a bundle, singular and multitudinous, of contingency, a confluence of incalculable decisions, actions and the inactions that are still actions.

Keystrokes, blinks, wars, misunderstandings, snapped fingers, spilled drinks, cuds chewed, nebulae photographed, kisses planted, skin shed, all lead to this moment, make it what it is. What is it, when the lamp goes out, the new song starts, the beer is sipped, the memory is triggered, the next word is postponed and inadvertently switches the tracks the train of thought was hurtling down a second ago? What is it?

Got me. But here in the great connected solitude, it's hard to feel lonely for long when that voice coming through the headphones reminds you of the strobe-lit dance party always going on outside your front door, and you start to realize the formless foundation of it all; and it's just as hard not to feel terribly alone when you start to realize the formless foundation of it all and that voice coming through the headphones reminds you of the strobe-lit dance party always going on outside your front door.

My God, I love this moment so much I might cry.

You're studying what?

I could be studying for tomorrow's Chinese final, but I'm not, because I've reached a saturation point. I've got a couple hours tomorrow morning that I plan on using to study (read: "cram"), and I've put in a fair amount of time over the past week, so I should do pretty well.

Sometimes I have no idea why I'm studying Chinese. Or why I do anything I do, for that matter. Surprisingly, this doesn't bother me as much as you might think.

"Fuck it, here's that fiction."

Some new microfiction comin' soon, y'all. Guaranteed, seeing as how it's in my notebook waiting for transcription. I just gotta conquer this semester, and then I'll have a couple-three months of relatively free time to jaw about whatever comes to mind. Exciting topics may include Chinese radicals (the linguistic kind, not the political), ruminations on skate park life, brutal Houston summers, whatever. No promises.

Fuck it, here's that fiction. Penned 二零一零年四月二十五日。 No editing.

Another batshit heat day out here, they all observe while mopping sweat from brows & crevices. Eight, ten hours on the blacktop in uniform for all, with a changing of the guard so to speak every two hours, time for hot coffee served in metal cups, no sitting allowed and cigarettes must be smoked w/in four minutes or else. Then it's back to formation until- if not when, at least on a small scale, a day scale- one of the figures in the bleachers comes down with the manual and invokes some rule or another, rule more arcane than the last, no way for most of those soaking their starched collars to ever figure out the whole thing. But there is no whole thing; the game is made up on the fly, rules from the manual quoted & put into play for the sake of a game using the manual as a prop. Nobody sees over the cinderblock wall east of the field, doesn't know what else is part of the larger scheme, knows anything but fields & barracks and hot coffee that blisters the mouth daily.

Gravitational Constant: G = 6.67 x 10-8 cm-3 gm-1 sec-2 (AKA More Shit Taken For Granted Until It's Too Late)

INT- 4843 BRIDGEMONT LANE, SPRING, TEXAS, 77388. NIGHT.

The year is 1993, and a young DAVE SMITH sits five feet from the television, watching Headbangers Ball. His parents and brother are all sound asleep, as they usually are at this late hour. DAVE is entranced by the current video, which appears to be a song by a band of imposing, vampiric Eastern Europeans surrounded by hot women and freakish extras. The frontman of the band plays an upright bass like a guitar, rolling his eyes back in his head and flashing literal fangs. DAVE tapes this video and watches it numerous times, sharing it with his brother SCOTT on the old TV the family bought years earlier in Italy. Time changes DAVE's understanding of what he's seeing, but it doesn't change the meaning. He has discovered Type O Negative.

INT- SOMEONE'S FAMILY'S APARTMENT, CARACAS, VENEZUELA. NIGHT.

1996. DAVE SMITH sits in a tile-floored room with several friends, listening to Type O Negative's cover of "Paranoid," but only DIPTO CHAUDHURI is into it to the same degree. It seems like everyone these two dudes hold dear is leaving, and they revel in Type O's amazingly bleak take on Black Sabbath's classic, playing the song over and over.

INT- PETE'S CAR, HUNTSVILLE, TEXAS. DAY.

1999. DAVE SMITH and PETE SWULIUS sit in the latter's car, smoking cigarettes and absorbing the first minutes of Type O Negative's newest album, World Coming Down. "It's Type O," they say approvingly.


These are my three strongest memories involving Type O Negative. There are more, of course, but these are the ones that come to mind when I consider the news that Peter Steele, TON's frontman, died yesterday of heart failure. I remember when Yi-Lei Wu came back from a trip to the States with a copy of October Rust. I remember smoking a bidi with the Swulii outside Numbers after seeing Type O in '99. I remember buying Life Is Killing Me years after it was released, during a period when I realized I hadn't listened to TON in a while. I remember Fran Torres playing keyboards for my brother's band, Last Eve, and looking particularly like Josh Silver, hair- and playing-wise.

I remember a lot of things that have involved Type O Negative over the past seventeen years, but of course it takes Peter Steele's death to make me remember just how much I loved, and still love, this band. Maybe that's what death is for, aside from being something to fear and make hilariously tasteless jokes about. I don't know. Every time I think I'm getting a handle on things, shit like this happens and I realize the scope of my assumptions about life as I know. Christ.

Hail Type O Negative. Requiescat in pace Peter Steele. Those chicks in the "My Girlfriend's Girlfriend" and "Black No. 1" videos were hot. Thanks for everything.

Sinister.

Among the recent things I've done is a short-lived attempt at doing things with my right hand. Being fortunate to have been born in a time not insistent on having my natural tendency toward things sinister rather than dexter beaten or cajoled out of me, I took an opportunity last night to try to brush my teeth with my right hand. My teeth ended up clean, sure, but it was not an easy task. My brain knew what to do, and my hand valiantly followed orders, but in a manner most awkward and tedious. A task that would've normally taken two minutes took more like six. Afterward, I tried writing English words and Chinese characters right-handed, which was an even clumsier undertaking. Ambidexterity might be achieved some day (or month, or year), but I think I'll postpone attempts until something tragic happens to my left hand... in which case I won't be so much ambidextrous as unidextrous, albeit with my new dominant hand.

It's Tuesday night, but it feels like Thursday, because this week's academic hurdle came, and was overcome, earlier in the week than usual. I've taken to staying up until well past midnight on Thursdays, writing and generally soaking up the witching-hour atmosphere, but tonight I can't afford to do so. Duties call, so I'm going to torch one more gasper and call it a night. I won't even read any of Anathem before turning out the light.

In lieu of delving further into my well-over-a-decade-old obsession with late nights enjoyed in quiet domestic environs- a situation in the midst of which I again find myself- I instead urge you to listen to the Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation's Succubus. Accompanied, perhaps, by tobacco and alcohol, and silent rumination on subjects best left undiscussed.

Good night.

Itinerary.

48 hours from now I'll be in San Diego, California, enjoying the first leg of a trip up and down the Golden State (or, as Erik Davis would put it, the Visionary State) with my girlfriend.

Twelve and a half hours from now I have a Chinese midterm.

Right now I'm not studying. Right now I'm enjoying some DCPD Bangerz, sipping tequila with Peychaud's bitters, Controy, and water, and daydreaming about skateparks and other assorted things.

I'll try to write from Cali-forn-eye-ay. Failing that, I'll drop whatever verbiage I concoct out west here when I get back to H-Town. (I'll also try not to use ridiculous nomenclature, though that's a dodgy proposition.)

Zaijian, pengyou.

"this is my curb"

"this is my curb"



"Skate curbs, smoke cigarettes."
...say hi to groms, moms, dads,
ice cream man.

That ain't wax,
that's aluminum. Months and months of Trackers and Indies
laid down on these curbs, mere yards from 35,000 square feet
of high-grade Grindline concrete.
It's easier out here, if you don't count pedestrians
and the occasional Parks and Recreation vehicle
rumbling through.
Stoge sessions sometimes, bitching about work
or just the rough concrete,
but mostly just Sk8-His and a set of 160somethings:
remember to lean back
and soon you'll be showing axle and
blowing the fuck out of some orange Khiros.

"Drink coffee, skate curbs."
snapshot: coffee grind
(backside 50/50, joe in hand).

Book it: only way to go. Remember to lean back
or you'll never enter the kingdom,
'cause bails don't count.
"how's it going, man?"
It's going, man.
It's
going. Let me see if I can nail this
feeble,
dig this fenceposted sunset and crank up the Rockboxed
metal before I have to go back in
and do what I'm gettin' paid to do.

Be back in an hour
for ten minutes of Tom Knox action. This
is my curb.

interstitial pome, number whatever

That was, in its way,
accidental:
the Tao of the house
seeing fit
that the rubber bat
stays aloft.

2.10.10

Apexin', dude

I remember it like it's tomorrow. Chris puts down his pen, looks up from the notebook full of BBS numbers and game maps he keeps next to his computer, and blinks. He takes a long swig of Coke, glances at the pack of cigarettes his dad left behind when he called it quits for the night, and almost reaches for one but doesn't, knowing he's already got an addictive personality (and besides, his dad will notice any missing smokes; he counts them carefully since he's trying to quit). Takes another swig of Coke.

"It's messed up," he says, "but this is what people are going to put on a pedestal. It doesn't matter how fast their machines get, what their baud rates are, or even if they've got computers that fit in their pockets. They'll get nostalgic about playing computer games in basements with wood paneling. Shitty graphics will be awesome. Nobodies will be heroes."

Before he sits back in his chair he plucks a Marlboro from the pack on the desk and lights it. "This is it," he grins behind the cigarette. "Apexin', dude."

"this is not the heart sutra speaking"

There will be no return to form.
There was never any form
to begin with. This is not the Heart
Sutra speaking; this emptiness is the
one we know, the one we fear, the
shape and texture we think we
associate with the darkest of nights.
Emptiness cultivated by trying
to hold it at bay. We'll return,
there's no doubt of that; it's just
a question of what we bring
back, or what we leave behind.
When we've returned, thinking
the sun has banished whatever
we just did, it won't be to form.

I've been much more silent than I intended. It's been a busy month; I feel like the 3.5" disk that runs my brain's OS has been swapped with a different one containing an operating system that handles school and work programs and very little else. Ugh.

A little somethin' for 2010.

LADIES & GENTLEMEN, the brain tonight isn't moving in the unexpected directions you may have expected given the circumstances, but rest assured there are still sirens screaming down West Alabama, holes in the elbow of someone else's sweater, too many minutes spent surfing (oh, OUTDATED!) increasingly few websites, bursts of laughter and temperatures that make putting beer, NA variety, in the fridge an unnecessary move, movement all done in cars at this hour and degree Fahrenheit, 'cept for the hipsters earlier bookin' it westward (swig) on their bikes; all the accoutrements and claptrap but as of yet none of the loneliness that the bottle and House of Pies sing to (why drink? why eat? Food's in the fridge, hombre) or sang to, so much seems past tense, definitely past and still sometimes tense, shoulder muscle tense, tense you don't find in Chinese, quite a blessing for the student of 中文 if you don't mind the cold fingers & copybook rote practice of 汉字, not me, that shit is great- hope the cat isn't too lonely, bet she's fine, we've got an understanding, 'cause sometimes, solitaire nights and that shoulder all tight again, you just have to be home, where the office is a mess and Elvira's watching you do zazen, all outta page and there goes the 78, later, folks, but no more than one or two-

Zero hour minus 13.

I've got my Chinese 1501 final tomorrow. Once I'm done, I hope to use my winter break (from school, not work, naturally) productively, in a writerly sense. We shall see.

Let's just hope I don't forget a semester's worth of Chinese in three weeks and ruin my current academic respectability come springtime.

"Barrows"

Barrows

We opened the tombs of
our ancestors, kings and heroes all,
only to find them empty,
quiet homes of dust and memory.
Our sacred myths founded on vacant architecture
and lies our great-grandfathers told
to keep the nighttime silence at bay.

No splendid treasure-hoards,
no bones to brighten the microscope's
eye, no spells to
ward off the other side's ravenous denizens,
only the tombs, hillside after hillside,
hewn stone mouths speaking
for nobody, nothing but the earth.

Thoughts on output.

I've been more prolific, in some ways, this past year than I have in a long while. One of my biggest problems with defining prolificity is the issue of length: have I written anything longer than a few hundred words, much less a proper short story or, even better, a novel? Not really. I've merely been amassing vignettes, poems, and fragments of ideas that if properly fleshed out could be seed material for longer works. I've also written a few episodes of the new iteration of Unheimlich, which if I haven't mentioned was revived by Andy Link in the form of a next-generation Xbox Live game. It's still in the daydreaming and scripting phase, but if it never gets past that, it's a better fate than its ancestor, Unheimlich the novel, faced.

So, despite being used to writing long-form works ("used to" being an increasingly inappropriate phrase, given my overall literary silence for some time), I'm faced with a plethora of short pieces that in the old days wouldn't amount to shit, but these days do. The sheer amount of small things I've cranked out lately- I've filled all but a few pages of a pocket notebook in seven months, whereas in the past it would've taken considerably longer to do so, and there are probably plenty of scribbles and vague textfiles floating around my house and hard drive- serves as the main metric by which I consider myself "prolific." There's something else to take into account, though, and that's whether producing a great deal of work counts for anything if said work isn't being pushed into publication.

I'm torn. Part of me, the much younger, militantly authorial, part, says "if you're not publishing, or trying to publish, then you're a dilettante," whereas another part of me- which the younger part understood, even back then, though it was hard to come to terms with- says "You're writing. That's all you've ever wanted. Stop beating yourself up about whether anyone reads it, much less pays you for it, and just write."

I tend to think the latter approach, which has always been the real reason for writing but is hard to stomach when you really want to make a career of writing, has the upper hand in my current inner debate about whether I'm writing a lot. I'm definitely enjoying writing for the hell of it, even if it I'm still frustrated that I can't seem to cough up anything longer than a page or two. I suppose that kind of dilemma's an intrinsic part of writing- not that it makes it any easier when you're up late at night wondering where all your ideas have gone and whether or not people will ever read something of yours that isn't maudlin, self-indulgent moaning.

Whatever. Fuck it. I'm happy with how much I'm writing, and I can see certain changes (for the better, I think) in how I write. I'm even posting more regularly to this web log, which I've missed dearly. Who cares if I'm not submitting work left and right or writing another novel?

Good enough. Good. Enough.

Happy Bodhi Day.

-DAS 12.8.09