"Everyone's Entitled To One Good Scare"

In high school, when I lived in Southern California, our house was fairly close to a funeral home. The funeral home was also close to a 7-11. Coincidence? I think not. The funeral home was always something that your eyes just sort of drifted over as you went past it; you knew it was there, but you didn't need to register the fact.

Our apartment here in Seattle is also fairly close a funeral home. I was walking past it once when some employees were leaving. I overheard one of them mention that he had quit smoking. The quitter's coworker said, "Congratulations. Then again, that's not necessarily good for our line of business." I had this strange double reaction to that statement. I thought it was really funny, but I was also a little offended by it, which disturbed me more than the statement. Forever in denial of death...

But, let’s go back to the funeral home in California. I remember riding my bike around the building with my brother once. We were looking in the windows as we rode by, and in one of them towards the back, there was a dress hanging. We thought it was someone standing in the window and it gave us both a start. We continued to circle the place and continued looking at the window with the dress hanging in it. I don't know, it's one of those kid things where you dare yourself not to be scared, but sort of revel in the being scared at the same time; it's walking past a haunted house, walking through a graveyard at night. On about the fourth loop around the funeral home, on looking through the same window, there was an actual person now standing in the window. My brother and I both shrieked and rode off home.

On a Halloween night, so many years ago, a friend and I were walking past this funeral home on the way to my house. As it was Halloween, our eyes naturally drifted to the place. And then, just as we were right before it, the front doors flew open and a guy came charging down the stairs. My friend and I gave a yelp and ran off down Alicia Parkway as quickly as possible.

I think that one of the guys working there got a kick out of scaring the shit out of kids, and I appreciate that.

It was one of those good scares, surprising and ultimately non-threatening. Not like when a guy with a burlap sack on his head ties you up and leaves you in his earthen floored basement where there’s this makeshift shrine to Satan.


Rocktober song of the day: For the last, the final, the Halloween edition, I present to you Doug Martsch dressed up in full Neil Young drag. I present to you the mighty 20 minutes of Cortez The Killer (Live) by Built To Spill.

Not At All What I Intended To Write

My mind is sort of working on overdrive today - a lot of concepts swirling around all willy nilly; a lot of monkey mind chatter.

I thought about math as language, trying to give concrete value to abstract ideas. Music does that as well. Language does it, all these silly words trying to nail down specifics from the ether. And how any concept invented by us will be fraught with the same fallibilities no matter how much our brains want us to believe in the perfection.

Our brains seek out the order in the chaos. Everywhere you look in nature, you can find this calm and pristine order, but I think we're missing half the picture by not allowing ourselves to see the mad chaos in it all as well. As of this morning, I think this may be the great lesson I've pulled out of dabbling in hallucinogens, getting a peek at that chaos.

I thought about a line from Rest Your Head by The Wrens: I hate the change, but I love the effect it's bringing on.

Then I thought about William Burroughs and how I had been strongly attracted, not to William Burroughs' writing, but to the idea of William Burroughs' writing. There was that rebellious affection for an outlaw soul, a fighting of normalcy by proxy. I would like to go back and re-read Naked Lunch, re-read The Ticket That Exploded and try to see them simply as books and not as underground culture talking points. I however do not think that these are picks to be reading to Bif's stomach...

I feel like some sort of windstorm picked up inside my head and started knocking loose thoughts that were clinging desperately, some of them moving too fast still to grab onto. I need a quiet place away from this frustration factory of work to still my mind a little. Or I need a bottle and a partner in crime with a desire for some mutual, intellectual masturbation.


Rocktober song of the day: Queen Bitch by David Bowie.

It's Like Thunder, Lightening...

When things start to get to be a little much at work, when customers frustrate me, when actions of those around me frustrate me, I can always look to the man above.

There's some sort of air duct juncture right over my cubical, and on this is a sticker. The sticker is one of those universal pictogram type things for those who cannot read the English or French warnings that go along with the picture. This is good for visiting dignitaries from Java who come by my cubicle all the time.

The picture shows the black silhouette of a man touching a wire, and there's a bolt of white lightening, bigger than his head, coursing through his body. I cannot say why, but this makes me smile something fierce. That, and the exclamation: VOLTAGE HASARDEUX!


Which also reminds me of a story Erik said that he heard on NPR - it's apparently verifiable, but I cannot remember the host whose website you can find this on. A woman was at work, brushing her teeth in the restroom. She bent down to take in water from the tap in order to rinse her mouth out. At that exact moment, lightening struck the building went through the plumbing and into her. The woman had on shoes that kept the lightening from leaving that route, so it found the only other way out it could. Ready? The woman shot lightening out of her ass!

No shit, this is a super power that I want; to shoot lightening out of my ass. Voltage Hasardeux indeed.

The woman lived, paramedics helped her and explained to her what had happened, but I have to imagine the next few bathroom breaks had to be a bit of a chore.


Rocktober song of the day: It's another 2fer ladies and gentleman! White Girl by X, followed by 20th Century Boy by T. Rex.

Not All Who Meander Are Lost

Come here, follow me for a second. Here, grab my hand…

Bif and I were walking out of the apartment the other night and both happened to be looking up the street at the same time. Two fall brown leaves had chosen that moment let loose the tree and float to the street within the cone of the streetlight. As she was raising her hand to point it out to me, I began laughing at the giddy rush that comes with miraculously catching those little moments in life. She asked what I was laughing at and I told her it was the same thing she was going to show me.

Synchronicity, which was the answer a Jeopardy player gave to a question regarding an album by the Police. The correct answer was actually Ghost in the Machine. What the hell happened to Sting? The guy turned into the worst kind of cheeseball, adult contemporary schmaltz-fest. The man came up with some of the effing kickingest bass lines of the 80's, the guy played with the Police.

On the walk in this morning, there was police activity a couple blocks north of the building. From a distance, it looked like serious business - lots of flashing lights and cruisers in the middle of the street. My mind ran rampant with theories; sniper, high tech heist of the Krispy Kreme, beginning of the zombie apocalypse. It appeared that some time before there had been a spill on the road of some sort - fuel, I'm guessing. The cops were leaving and a sole hazmat guy was spreading a brown, powdery substance on the road. I'm not sure the substance did what it was intended to because as I walked by the cold fall wind picked the stuff up and blew it around in swirling sand eddies. It looked like outtakes from Lawrence of Arabia.

Desert islands? Are there such things? Every time I see islands, there seems to be at least some trees and not just stretches of dunes. I think they may be the thing of childhood myths; like vampires, moon men and fair and equal treatment under the law. I guess I can see how someone from the grasslands of Middle America could see the large amounts of beach as desert.

I've been trying to avoid watching Lost, trying to avoid TV in general. I sat down for a second while Bif watched last night and got suckered in, yet again. God damn you Lost! At least I could rationalize it by playing guitar while I watched, like I was multitasking.

I'm trying to teach myself to play slide guitar. I'm trying to find the inner motivation to be at home and write, to work on the larger ideas that are floating around in my head. I'm trying to ignore the burning rage I feel when I'm bombarded with constant stories of celebrities adopting children. Apparently buying children is to A-list celebrities what obvious plastic surgery is to the lesser ones. It's fucking awesome...


Rocktober song of the day: Going back to Zeptember for a moment, and ignoring the ubiquitous Cadillac commercials it is featured in, today's pick is the still powerful Rock & Roll by Led Zeppelin.

Ain't It Strange That I Can Dream

If I had the power to travel back in time (and I'm working on it good people, I'm fairly sure the key is microwaves) and talk to my 13 year old self, my 13 year old self would be shocked and dismayed to hear me say what I want to tell him. He would shake his head furiously, throw out his hands as if warding off some profane beast and say, "it's not true" over and over - probably throwing in a "dude" from time to time.

I have officially seen too many vaginas on video. And the last few had babies coming out of them.

Yeah, I knew going into it that I was gonna see 'the video' in our birthing class, and I've seen similar footage before, but it was fairly amazing that 35 years of media and societal manipulation was wiped out so quickly; things went from sexy to scientific in about 35 seconds.

Relax, I'm exaggerating. It's still sexy, it was just a tad unnerving to see a part of the body that is typically deemed as not proper for the masses to be so proudly on display - and as noted, with babies coming out of them.

It had already been decided that when the time comes, I was going to stay above the DMZ when the baby is introduced into the world, so I wasn't worried about that aspect. And even if I was down there with goggles and a catcher's mitt, I probably wouldn't be worried about it. What I'm concerned about now though, after the class, is watching the woman I love go through what could be a lot of hours of serious pain and me not being able to do anything about it.

We were practicing labor positions in the class, things to do that might make Bif more comfortable and things I can do to assist. I was making inappropriate jokes, as I will do, and making her laugh. She informed me that when labor actually strikes, she is not going to be in the mood for my stupidity, so now I have to be concerned about that as well.

But what I got most out of the class, other than a very uncomfortable feeling watching the teacher shove a doll over and over again through the pelvis bone of some poor sap who donated their body to science, was the flood of emotion that comes when that baby enters the world. As I mentioned yesterday, I was tearing up watching these people go through this sort of elation I don't completely understand yet. When the time comes for me, I'm gonna be a fucking wreck.


Rocktober song of the day: Fat Bottom Girls by Queen.

"Heaven Never Dreamt Of Anything As Sweet As That..."

And so it ends, feeling monumental somehow, feeling like so many factors lined up just right to make it happen. We closed “Soul Of A Whore” on Saturday night, partied it out, said a long goodbye.

Author-man Denis Johnson came up to see us closing night, which made a lot of people really nervous, myself included. But when it came right down to it, it was realizing that it would be the last time I would be walking that stage as Will Blaine and speaking Will Blaine's lines with his faux Southern gentleman swagger that blocked out the fact that Mr. Johnson was watching.

There was a particular scene, my particular favorite, that was just me and the super talented Terri that I just plain hated to see come to an end. It's a disturbing scene, one where I had to fully acknowledge my creepy side. Every night, on finishing the scene, the two of us would walk off stage, stand right behind the wall for a second and hug it out - just a sort of reassurance to each other that we were cool. Saturday night we hugged, went back to the green room and both started crying a little bit knowing we weren't going to get to do the scene again.

I don't know, it's weird and I probably can't explain it very well, but we all put a lot of work into this show and invested a lot of emotional intensity to make it work, so now that it's over there's an emptiness that sort of hurts. The next morning, sitting in a birthing class (which I'll bring up tomorrow) and watching videos of women going through labor and delivery, I was still so emotionally raw that I couldn't stop crying at the simplest expressions of emotion.

The closing party started out as a relatively sedate affair. I was sitting down on a table, talking to Erik's fiancée Irene about having seen the show 3 times during the run when Denis Johnson approached. I had met him once before and he struck me as very quiet, particularly shy. He still seemed this way, but also had this sort of happiness floating around him, which I assume probably occurs when you see something that you yourself have slaved and sweat over come to life. He thanked me for the job I did, mentioned a couple of parts he was fond of and told me about how the script had changed over various incarnations. He has this sort of plain, Midwestern handsomeness and a dry smile that just puts you at ease, and I remembered wondering why I had ever felt nervous about performing in front of this man.

The night wore on, more beers, more hugs, a fake striptease by yours truly that turned into a real one when Jodi ripped every goddamn button off my shirt (well, all but one, but Robert made sure to finish the job). I made my usual prolonged goodbyes and wandered into the cold around 3. I felt a big crying jag trying to bust itself out of me while I walked the dark roads home, pulling my button less shirt closer around me. I pushed it down trying not to think about the fact that it was done, but about feeling like I'd done some pretty good work and had gotten the chance to work with some truly amazing people. I thought about the extra time I'll have now, and of getting to see people I haven't hung out with in awhile.

But no joke, I'm gonna miss it.


Rocktober song of the day: Don't Bring Me Down by E.L.O.

Where It's At

My mind that is...

I cannot shake the internet headline I read the other day: Scary Spice Pregnant With Eddie Murphy's Baby? So many aspects of that assault my delicate sensibilities, it's like I’m trying to look at a four dimensional object spinning on one of those heat lamp hot dog things.

I cannot stop thinking about how I really want to throw away my happy-go-lucky customer service script and throw in a well placed “are you fucking kidding me?” to a large majority of the people I have to deal with for a living.

I cannot get Grandaddy’s Campershell Dreams out of my head.

I cannot shake the sort of melancholy feeling that is riding the knowledge that we end the show tonight. I’m gonna miss these people, I’m gonna miss this world.

I also have a hankering for a scotch and soda, and a Rueben.


Rocktober song of the day: Closer by Nine Inch Nails.