Prunella Vulgaris's compendium, or: A companion for the ingenious of either sex. The newest experiments in japanning, to imitate the Indian way, plain and in speckles, rockwork, figures, &c. The art of persuming and beautifying. Divers receipts in physick and surgery, with many other useful things. To make enamel of divers colours for gold, silver, or other metals. To which are added, many curiosities, and rare secrets, known to few, but very profitable and pleasant.
I've made no secret of my grunge love, brought on no doubt by my dad listening to lots of rock radio, and liking the Seattle sound. At any rate, here's a bunch of random Nirvana covers for the weekend.
Black Math Horseman's deconstructed one won't embed so listen here.
Also, songs Nirvana covered that got me into other bands.
The kids made me laugh tonight, the youngest one hamming it up and inventing games with me, it was good to be around that kind of love, and I realize that not everyone ends up with families that they enjoy being around, especially after a long day of a throbbing jaw.
I stop at a friend's to talk things out about upcoming summer things, resolving the small stresses that I can, knowing that it's that time when I find everything fraught with implication and what seems to mean a lot means nothing at all, and what seems to mean nothing really means something. Something about this time of the year brings out the intense and irrational loneliness that's absurd when surrounded by so much love, and maybe part of the ache comes from denying the truth of these feelings for so long.
A couple of routine cavities turned into a root canal, and I rode my bike home with the entire side of my face feeling slack from the novocaine, with my smile crooked and my lips unable to suck through a straw. The surgeon likes listening to Brian Eno and Explosions in the Sky so I'm laying there and now my weird brain associates oral surgery with post-rock.
But it's the first warm day of the year, and I overdose on feelings of summer. Stubby pigtails and cut-offs and an old Clash t-shirt and a kite bungee-corded to the back of my bicycle, as the sand swirls off the beach and I'm thankful for the sunglasses that keep it out of my eyes as it saturates my hair. The kite spins and dives and rises again, I am the only one even trying to fly one on the beach that's still half-frozen. Everyone's outside, we're all euphoric, people are smiling and saying hello to each other, couples are selfieing and kissing on the rocks and smoking weed.
I cut through the park up through the old almost-hood, and get invited to some vegan potluck outreach where I'm sure the food is good but I'd feel like I was taking advantage and it's too beautiful out to be in a basement watching a movie about factory farming, so me and Neighbor wander back down, where the dropping sun makes us really cold, and we hang out at the apartment listening to surf records and I think about how amazing it is that we can be poor and have such beauty surrounding us.
It's D. Boon's birthday today so I played a good hour's worth of Minutemen this morning, something I haven't delved into since the college years and occasionally during the regular radio slot and I forget just how amazing this band was and how little they sounded like anyone else.
My first exposure to them was on a really quite good K-Tel of all things compilation of 80's indie rock that was the first inkling to my suburban warmed-over grunge self that there was this whole other world of music just waiting to be discovered, and it was my first introduction to Black Flag and the Melvins and the Chills and Squirrel Bait and Husker Du and other bands that had their heyday while I was somewhere between in utero and starting kindergarten.
Maybe we're both stepping back a bit, it seems, and that's good, that it's probably mutual, there always seems to be this unspoken something every time. One might mock celebrity uncouplings, but californistan-new-age-therapy-absurdity aside, I understand it. Not everything has to end in tears and incinerations, be it significant others or roommates or whatever. Not everything has to be bridges burned, it's just that we cross over those spans much less.
a friend's birthday, all of these faces and friendships sustained over the last decade, borne out of peonage and punkery and roommating and conversations both sublime and absurd, and I had a conversation that gave me a moment of clarity and when I thank her she says, "I listened to you but you know what you needed me to say" and she's right. you both deal with your problems differently, and there's no way you can reconcile that...
and I don't know how to let go, how to let down easily, how to let it die back without it hurting either of us, though I think we've both been doing that, but then I'm always been proved wrong, and despite the lack of demarcations and the plethora of ambiguities, I know it will hurt, whether now or later, and that I will have to reckon with returning to the solitude, of wondering if there will be anyone else who will make me feel so blissful even for an imperfect moment in this town where everyone leaves.
somehow I get my homework done and ace these assignments and find time to clean the apartment in between the hanging outs that have happened all this week. I don't know how either. I could use some sleep maybe though.
What do you want to do? I donno, what do you want to do? Wanna hang out? You don't have to. Should we play some music? Maybe? I don't know. What about dinner? Do you want to chill with someone or not or with someone else? Oh screw it, let's do something.
We are tired and indecisive, it's been a long day for both of us and neither of us wants to really admit it, and it's late by the time decisions are made, after I've gone and glazed a few ceramics and ridden my bike and made myself a bowl of leftovers. But he has dishes to give back to me and I have things for him and so we meet up. The roommate's ladyfriend is over cooking dinner and we feel weird being there so despite the insistent cold, we decide to head down to the valley to wander in the darkness along the river.
Our sense of forest isn't much of one, because you can still hear all the cars roaring over the bridge and humming on the roads on either side, there are the lights from the dog park and the animal shelter and the houses on the overlook. The clouds interlace with the stars, and despite the light pollution, I can pick out the big dipper and Orion and Sirius. We wander by the closed-up boathouse down to where the ice piled up when everything melted.
Neither of us want to go home, he switches out the Grant Hart in my CD player for Kyuss, we do terrible Valley Girl impersonations. I am an unconvincing ditz despite dealing with the Clevelandian equivalent on a daily basis, and we end up at a diner full of other lost-looking souls, slouching in a booth, talking about Cleveland and band stuff and life stuff.
One of my old roommates comes over last night with a third of a bottle of wine and some mango juice, and I cook her dinner. She's just quit her job and was offered another one by people who should know better than to ask her to take a paycut beyond the little she was already making. She's in the process of figuring out how to sell her possessions in the next few months and leave the country to save the world somewhere, some place like Kenya or Nepal. I know this is a long time coming, that her soul is more gypsyish than mine even though I look a little weirder.
The apartment is cold and there is snow on the ground which saddens me. I have a bunch of bananas going soft so I make banana bread to warm up the kitchen. We're listening to the songs we fell in love with in our dorm rooms a decade ago. I learn a lot about her immigrant families that I didn't know, and that our town has been a good fit for the Lhotshampa diaspora that was kicked out Bhutan for not being the right religion or ethnicity for the "Kingdom of Happiness." Evidently other families are coming here because the experience has been positive, which is something I didn't know and something that makes me feel good about this town even though there's giant potholes everywhere and a lot of political shenanigans and heroin addiction.
The next night, me and Neighbor go out to eat deep-fried bar food and watch some blues at a bar at the half-gentrified neighborhood next door, where the crowd is refreshingly unhipster. The band covers Gram Parsons, Social Distortion and Curtis Mayfield, we chill out and people-watch and soak in the atmosphere. I am tired but it's nice not to have to stress.
One of my college radio homegirls is sick so I wander over her way with a stash of tea and we sit in her dining room talking about various and sundry, and then homie and I talk on my walk home, he says he liked what I played on my show, we talk about other things too but we're both tired and maybe say things that don't mean much.
