I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

The second night in a short while, of staying in another's house with another's pets, a neighborhood to the south of where I live, this holiday weekend is drawing to a close. I saw family and hung out with friends, talked about books and made faces with the nephew and laughed and for all that is wrong with the world, his smile is so beautiful and his baby dinosaur laughter so amazing that I can forget sometimes.

There were so many beautiful interactions, and I got so little sleep, with all the midnight dinner, the drinking of coffee and fitful tossing on the couch as the cats ran around, the 4am conversations verging on the beautiful incoherent, knowing that there are no obligations to wake up to for a change. Because there are new friendships being forged, that I hope will lead to future adventures, of more late nights and explorations.

I wonder if it's weird that I get such visceral pleasure out of these interactions, of hanging out and having it feel so simple, of meals shared and cups of coffee drank, of conversations of compassion rather than overcompensation, of not having to try too hard and just exist in these crystallized moments that now at least are so free from complication.

de-comaed

Filled in on a homie's metal show, despite aspersions cast upon yours trvely's hesher credentials, I got a lot of phone calls wanting to know more about said jams, some of which have graced the airwaves prior due to their general rockitude and since no one else plays this stuff and I love giving my fellow lady-doomsters airtime. Played requested Testament and St. Vitus, doomed it up for the most part. It's archived til Wednesday here. 

Spent Thanksgiving morning with some friends I haven't seen since matrimony, drinking coffee and walking beneath trees still yellow in this late November. A good amount of cousins and relatives came in, and feasting was done, everything else too delicious to bother with turkey. 

Black Friday consumerism involved acquiring a new (but used and very cheap) turntable at the Best Record Store Ever and then hanging out at the station for open house dispensing college radio swag and hanging out with good folk and indulgence in reminisces of the Parmastani kind, lunch with my aunt, and then downtown to meet up with the Queen of the Bondo for Nostalgia Today (whatever that means) holiday festivities courtesy of the City of Clevelandia. 

It was more crowded down there than I ever remember it being, and while one could say that downtown for at least one weekend night feels "alive" again, it felt more Potterville than It's a Wonderful Life to me. Everything felt so made-in-China and consumer rat race. The LED lights had no warmth, the music was free of any meaning besides Santa and presents and sugar-plum fairies and not even The Nutcracker,  just that business of synthesizers and panpipes. It reminded me of why every year I spiritual detox and go to midnight mass if only to sit somewhere dark and quiet so that I can ponder the spiritual significance lost in the maelstrom. 

Still, it was not without entertainment if only for the trashy absurdity that is 21st century America in a dying city. 

 Some of my older friends don't believe that Bronies exist. This, and the accompanying fitted baseball caps and plush blankets also sold at the record store (who the hell shops here anymore?) seem to prove otherwise. I also realized how out of touch I am with pop culture, videogame, and boyband references, such arcana is not so much in my interest I guess, and I'm around less teenagers and little kids than I once was. Also, the phrase "Cray Cray" to describe craaaazy needs to die right now. Other dregs from the pop culture morass below:

Seriously, the photo from the store above is simply called GLITTER and is full of general dollar bling tackiness.Came home, did some tea and reading, went to the art museum for my birthday, looked at cool ancient stuff, went out for dinner with the folks and returned here for the daily grind. There was some exhibit of Peruvian coastal ancient art that included these super heavy-looking plugs for one's lobes. 

Somehow all that well-restedness turns into the usual need for caffeine and lighthearted crankiness that we've grown so used to. 

30 minutes to freedom

A headache, a cup of green tea, coming down from the stress of midterms and the aforementioned mutual destruction of dumbassery. Thankful that life has a way of just kind of going on. Perfection is unattainable, learning from mistakes and growing as a person's hard but more realistic. It's the end of the week, I'll get my doom on the airwaves tomorrow night, distance provides a better perspective.

Before the fiasco at the desk, I spent yesterday roadtripping with my dad down to the ancestral homelands of Appalachia. The fall colors were beautiful and therefore uncapturable on a mediocre digital camera aimed out the passenger window, but we talked and listened to Creedence, Elder (which he'd never heard and liked) and whatever was on XM radio which got boring really fast just like the terrestrial airwaves.

  We took our time down the back roads, and this time I noticed a lot of signs about the "War on Coal" which gets way more press down here than any other wars on entities. Also, fracking down here is huge, with trade publications touting college scholarships and economic revival,  billboards advertising good deals for your mineral rights. Some combination of lottery and gold rush and the company town at least from outside observing. These things are the only things really going on here besides the prisons, and while the scenery is beautiful, I know the soil isn't great and the water isn't either because my dad's cousin won't let me touch the tap.

My great-uncles all worked in the coal mines, they and their sisters had eighth-grade educations. They were smart as hell but didn't have the chance to show it, saving the wit for storytelling, morbid humor, and self-deprecating Catholic and Polish jokes and messing around with their city slicker relatives from Clevelandia. They're always happy to see us, and my head hurts drinking all this diet soda, but I learn something new each time, some tale of those departed, something else about the land around here.

Every year another one or two pass away, and there's fewer people to visit. We stop by the old farmhouse where my grandma was raised and it's locked up now, the garden empty, the canna bulbs probably still in the root cellar. Some other people are looking at it, they say their house burned down due to some bad wiring. It and the hundred acres behind it, the barn with the grand piano falling apart, for rent now.

It's beautiful out here, but I think I'd get lonely and miss my art museums. I see the occasional spraypainted black van doubtless owned by some metal kids, the occasional band t-shirt on the street. The music store down there carries more banjos than up here. It hits me how different the issues are out here. How if the bridge is out, it's unlikely to get replaced, these roads are so narrow and full of pebbles I understand the need for four wheel drive and pickup trucks. Abandoned baseball fields and stripped houses, railroad paths to nowhere, meandering roads between the hollers. At least in Clevelandia, a few people stick around, I wonder who will be in these towns in another 30 years.

We eat dinner at a diner near the casino. It's raining as we drive home, and I'm too tired to really think straight so we listen to riffs and nod along. My best memories involving my dad have to do with these kinds of things, traveling with no hurry, lots of music and being able to laugh at the same things.

beside the water

Attempts to get the heck out of Clevelandia for a couple days scuttled by epic rainstorms, I woke up late and ran out the door into the rain for more of the daily grind and the Elixir of St. Drogo that makes such things bearable. Not much to do when it's pouring. I had no creative impulses to indulge and this song was on the tape deck which always makes me smile.

Dinner with the parents last night, my homie of the east side along for the ride, knowing more of what the frenchish terms were on the menu than us, much laughter ensued over various and sundry, the little guy was moody, but good times were had by all, I think.

We all parted ways and the two of us headed down to the park where we sat on the glider facing the dark water of the lake and watched spiders spin webs above our heads on the frame. He wants to move someday, he always has, and I don't blame him, either down south or northwest where there's relatives and places to go hiking in the woods and less people who do crazy things.

Fireworks are being shot off downtown so we watch them for awhile, with the reverberations coming lately to the shore below, and then we walk back through the trees, hang out on the playground and swing, it's been forever since I've swung on the playground, but it's a perfect cool and clear night, the kind I live for in the summer and I'm glad I get to spend it out here.

happy when it rains

The rain came strong and fast, long overdue and much needed. It's been dry for so long and even though I got drenched and my hair is snarly, it feels so good after being covered in grit on the diamond as the fake invasion of downtown happened and I tried to keep my dystopian opinions in check.Hard to when this is going on (image courtesy of the local paper).

Maybe I'm turning into Tipper Gore and hell I played with squirt guns as a kid, and we chased each other around the yard with sticks, because playing war was devoid of actual blood and implications and was just a way to get the blood moving and the adrenaline rushing, which is scary to think about. Because usually when I see kids handling such weaponry, it's somewhere else.

THAT'S COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. 
 Sure, but why are you encouraging your kids to think this is fun and virtuous?

So after that, me and Queen of the Bondo went to the art fair at the end of the street where there wasn't too much going on, though we did find swankness at the vintage shop of 70's kitsch amazingness and found much to chortle about. I've always been a sucker for old thrift-store t-shirts with silkscreened graphics washed so many times they're amazingly comfortable, but since it's become more trendy in recent years, such things are way harder to come by. Got my dad a Ghoulardi mug for the tea he occasionally drinks so go me as far as Father's Day goes.

Went over to the parents' house for delicious foodage and wine-fueled conversation where strangely enough the factions split over Woody Allen films rather than politics, go figure. Also, I learned that my grandpa is amused by the antics of Pooty-Poot as much as yours truly. So that's where it comes from.

statisticals

   So, Mr. M'Choakumchild began in his best manner. He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty's most Honourable Privy Council's Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty points of the compass. Ah, rather overdone, M'Choakumchild. If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more! 

Technocracy ever encroaching's roots can be seen in the Industrial Revolution, in Hard Times of previous eras. Learning for learning's sake, to have a greater pool of beauty to draw from and a deeper understanding inducing wonder. Not everything is empirical, whether one believes in higher powers or greater forces or not, there are some things like the way that song makes your heart yearn that just cannot be explained by anyone.

And so in academia, I see people who've bought into these systems, paid with their lives and their souls and their cash, only to come up empty and unfulfilled, yet trying so hard to justify their points of view, but the spillover of ideology, of broken systems both capitalistic and socialistic, of relationships burned out by a lack of love compensated for by the pursuit of knowledge as a means and lucre as an end.

  No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what you are! No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject, each little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the Great Bear like a Professor Owen, and driven Charles's Wain like a locomotive engine-driver. No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb: it had never heard of those celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped with several stomachs. 
 
Someone told me that he doesn't want to talk to his children, that he sent them to the best colleges so that they could have intelligent conversation, not to "gossip" about the minutiae of their daily lives, or to talk about their dealings with other people. While it's true that small minds discuss people (and this is born out by the particularly small-minded among us), most of our daily interactions and greatest joys and stresses come from our human interactions. We are not receptacles of potentially economically useful data, we are living breathing souls that interact with other souls more or less. I might talk about politics and music with my dad or books with my mom but I also talk about the daily crap of dealing with siblings and colleagues and friends, because that's just as much the stuff of life as facts facts facts.

What's said is that it seems when one reaches a certain age, barring some life-altering experience bordering on the spiritual or otherwise revelatory, there is no way this outlook will change regardless of the damage it has doubtless already caused.

in memory

I know that with the continuation of time, and the inevitability of mortality, that more and more people who have been in my life will have shuffled off the mortal coil, and so I grieve, but sometimes distance blunts the rough edges just a little bit.

My great-uncle passed on this weekend thanks to cancer that made him almost blind near the end of his life. He'd slowed down a lot from what he was when I was a kid, before his wife passed away, when he had a house on the other side of Catawba Island that had a real beach, not just rocks like our side and would take all of us kids out in his rowboat with a motor, prompting comments from our parents about how we looked like a bunch of Cuban refugees packed into the back. He always had jellybeans in a dish in the living room and at least five different kinds of Faygo in the fridge and would build us driftwood bonfires on the beach doused in paint thinner that we'd roast marshmallows over as we watched the sunset.

One summer, the winds were such that there was all this rich loam Nile delta kind of soil deposited and he planted a cornfield on the beach like the fields of his native Indiana, and the incongruity of the setting sun and the nuclear power plant and the beach and the husks standing up in the water made me smile. He was one of the most warm and welcoming people I've ever met, and I can't remember ever having a bad time at his house, which he left to his son and moved into assisted living, but he would always come by and visit when we were up there.

And then this morning, I learned of someone else, and if I was superstitious beyond the 'organized religion' thing I'd be wondering who the third would be, but Robert was a recoccurring figure in my Kent State days. It was a long time before I made the connection of "F.U. Bob" as he was derided by people on campus who saw him on days when his Tourette's or whatever it was acted up, and the quiet man who sat at a table at my church with a collection of multicolored sharpie markers and a sketchbook with the big beard who sat and drank coffee and occasionally delved into deep philosophical questions with my pastor at the time. At the old church building, before I started going there, he had his own couch, where he'd sketch the congregants and musicians and paint with watercolors until the couch was covered in as many shades as a technicolor dreamcoat.

He described himself as a "skeptic" but enjoyed our company nonetheless week after week, sharing coffee and conversation, and would show me the sketches he did of me playing bass next to Scott or drinking tea at a nearby table. When people on campus would make fun of him, I'd talk about who he was as a person and that he wasn't just some crazy guy, that he was a really wonderful person that just didn't fit with the expectations of others. It seemed like anyone who actually took the time to talk to him instead of mocking him from afar learned that quickly, and unlike most outsider artists, to some degree his work was recognized in his lifetime, if the continual help of the community down there and the outpouring of emotions I've seen is any indication. I really can't imagine that little town without him.