Something Heavy Coming Down

So this is how it goes:

This blog is bullshit, I have known that for a while. I started a new page I like more than I will ever like this place. I hate to say that, but it is true. So I'm leaving. And while I'm at it, I give up on blogging. No more of this what I had for lunch today business. No more of this handy sounding board to throw my voice out into the cosmos.

I will miss this page, that is no lie. I have met some good people who I first met when they left a nice comment or two. There were a few who stopped by when I had nothing to say and left when I did and a few who stuck by while I wasted everyone's time and had their faith vindicated.

This blog was where I went to be more of me than I could be elsewhere, but also where I could scream a little at my past and at the problems and burdens I had been given. Those issues are mostly gone or otherwise dealt with. Thanks for listening. That isn't the reason I'm hanging it up, though.

Do you see that post under this one about my brother? I will never do better than that, I think. Proof that beauty is not unknown in the world of rednecks who get there cars stuck in the mud and knock up women. So I am moving on. I have felt for a while that I had greatly outclassed this medium, and I mean that a lot less egotistical than it sounds. So for now, I'll leave this here as a record.

The String of Mediocrity Is At an End

For now, and for a while.

For Momentary Academic

Because she asked me to:


And into the black heart of the Mesa we rode at dusk and believed only in ourselves and only in our home and only in our women. We should not have.
When we shot through the clouds of lingering all day rain washing the rocks clean of first dust, and then clays, and then finally the silica broken free of its bonds to be transported away to the sea. Never the night to us or through us could travel a hundred mile highway of youth and golden copper youthful sun, burnished skin and ridiculous energetic smiles. We owned the land and we owned the sea that had once been and would be again.

And when we leapt out into the desert at midnight and into the mire
with
engine railing and wheel spinning.

When we tested our selves
and our machines and our endless supply of nerve
did we find in ourselves
the possibility of legend and the depth of our soul
into the night and
without restraint.

When we finally proved to you and to me that we
were braver than a machine
could be strong, but our will, the will to live
through the cold clear
adamantine night with thousand pointing glinting
stars, was strong and stable
and we were strong to walk and not faint, and
when the mud had not overtaken our
boots, yours soft brown boots for working
on the earth and mine black and waxed
for working into the earth, did we not
grow weary?

In the last sprinting freedom of our last glory night, we
lost the van into
the mud but found a story to tell.

And when we screamed down low over the Sangre de Cristos, the redded banks of earth, the blood of the Christ, heading south into the land of red and burgundy ground and brown golden people to retrieve your foil, your Alejandra, we were alone in a world adrift with the follies of young men such as we. Sensible things may have occurred to us about the night and day of highway running and the shotgun father waiting for you with words and lead, but we knew better than to say. When we poached of the land its bounty in years gone by we knew better than to question the legend as it formed and the story as it was breathing in our chests. When we would live on and on past the days of passionate youthful blissful rage, past the days of boundless energy to attempt the inane and impossible, we knew.

And when we knew.
We knew not to question or change the universe as we
unfolded it into a thousand morning stars.

We knew to leave the
story to be told and to let it happen.
Every
last and terrible thing
we did, and terrible women that
happened, we
knew. we knew to let the
creation continue and not to stay
our hand on
the lathe
of every man
creatures cosmos, the right to
determine how the
story
unfolds.

And thank you, Brother.

Vox Proletariat

Lately I have been reverting more and more to asshole behavior, which, if you are one of the two or three readers who who have known me this long, I used to journal about more often and even gained some fame*.

Those were good times for writing, but the site has since been disestablished, mostly because I see no reason to pay ten bucks a month to bitch. You can still find it cached in some different places, but I wouldn't recommend wasting that kind of time. The site basically revolved around Wild Turkey, mountain biking, and stupidity. In fact, because of the environment my vitriol was crystallizing in, I had all kinds of stupidity to talk about.

I am still a little amazed at how hard it was to maintain that sort of angry continually after i moved back to Colorado. With 285 sunny days a year and no traffic (or a reason to actually drive) I just could not maintain the aggression necessary for that kind of funny.

There are a few aspects of the site I miss:

• No comments. Now, I love comments, and have the requisite ego boost when I see that number crawl up into the teens. Unfortunately, my style of writing and journaling doesn not lend itself to large numbers of comments. I could try and change that, but honestly, I don't care quite that much. It would have to do with being funny and improving my grammar. Also, commenting on everyone esle's (and I mean everyone's) stupid pandering bullshit with pictures of cats and diatribes about "that guy on the bus who was SOOOOO mean."




• No fancy colors. Black, white, red and yellow, bitch. Since I programmed the whole thing from scratch (OK, copying and pasting and scratch), I had to keep it simple. There were three colors, not counting the background. And that background was black. You could be anywhere on the site in two clicks. I designed it as the anti-blogger. It was mean and simple. Dangerous looking, but sleek. It was not a place people shared stories of kittens. And I singed off with "Bitches."



• Drinking. Really, the drinking. Back in those days, I was known to put down a bottle of Turkey in a night. If I tried that now, I would wake up in the hospital, if at all.



• The name. Come on. That is the coolest goddamn pseudonym a non-WWF Superstar has ever used.



• The fanbase. There is something reassuring about women liking you for no other reason than your ability to convey emotion. Every fifth entry or so, I would talk about Freddie King, Andres, or Otis Taylor and how they applied to the homeland I pined for. I would invariably get an email consiting mostly of OMGs and smiley/frownie faces. One exception to this was Anne Arkham. She said something like, "Bitch, Otis Taylor is from Chicaaago."



• The supporting cast. Mostly old military friends. None of them got away from it quite as clean as I did.



• I miss talking like that. You would have to have read it to fully appreciate the awesome power of my potty mouth (Casey would never say that OMGs!!11!) and how funny I used to be.

So, why bring this up? Well, mostly I just thought about it more than usual. And Buddy guy just fired up The Devil In Her off the incredibly nasty and blacksnake moaning artblues project that is Sweet Tea, and by god fucking shit, I need to get laid.

*"Fame" here is relative. I will not live forever.

Seven Things To Do (Incomplete)

This is part of a meme I was tagged with about two years ago. I don't do memes, but this one section of it intrigued me. It took me two years to come up with five goals worthy of a list.

Traverse the Book Cliffs from Douglas Pass to Rifle Gap with nothing but a backpack and a rifle.

It's about two hundred miles, so it should take a couple weeks. I know I can do it, my capabilities are not in question. The only real question is how I would do it. Would I take down a deer the first day and pit smoke it so I have meat the whole trip? Would I take a few rabbits along the way? I know there's plenty of wild potatoes and onions along the back ridge of those mountains. The country is rough, and for the most part, wild. The wild doesn't scare me and never has. I am comfortable around the primal. My only fear is that I may never come home. Not that I would die or anything that dramatic. I am afraid I would see a little too much the basic fallacy of civilization. Freedom may be too hard to leave. That's a lot of obligation I'd leave laying on the side of the road.

Maybe I'll look at it as the final probation of civilization, the determining trial of society where I decide just how important it is to me.

Join a Band

I have been in a few bands, working and otherwise. I miss the camaraderie of the musical process. I don't want to be a rock star, and I don't want to be big some day. I want to commune with like-minded artists. I want to have guitar cables strung all over a floor and my old pedals strung up to an amp. I want to hear the same bullshit compliments everyone always pays the house band.

When I was younger, I would play out in the honky tonks and dive bars. It felt good to have the gear packed in the back of my Scout and later, to ride in a van and listen to warm up music, and fight over whether we wanted to be inspired by Korn or Buddy Guy (guess which side of that argument I was on). When the band was working, nothing was better. The feeling of four part communion in the creation of music is comparable to sex, but better than almost anything else. I hate to see more and more stages taken over by DJ's with their enormous boards and MacBooks instead of old burnouts and young delusional kids. There is something sacred about the playing of music. Not sure how it relates, but I really hate midi jazz. When I was in Asia the first time, I waited all day for a well advertised Live Band(!) to show up. When they did, it was a guy with a keyboard, a guy with a fake drum set and three sequined singers. Then they fired up the “jazz.” Somewhere in the world, all four members of the Lifetime hung themselves.

I need old dusty JBLs and analog. If it isn't chaotic in nature and prone to AC hum, it does not belong a stage. I got two nickels and a paradigm, it ain't spelled right, but it rhyme.

Build A Still

Obvious.

Build That 400

I got a Ford 400M sitting up at my dad's house under a tarp. I want to rebuild it and drop in the roomy engine compartment of Il Beasto. I would go into detail, but I would lose people. Well, I would lose the “men” that read this shit, and turn the women on. I got to be careful with that anymore. Suffice it say, high rise cams and four barrels.

Take That Trip And Write That Book

There are all these field guides to for different nerdy subjects: botany, rock hounding, butterfly collecting, etc. Invariably, these books are written by some nerdy couple who have a picture of their pickup camper out on some mountain pass in the book's color plates. Then they have some sappy bullshit dedication to each other in the forward. Anybody who's hung out with a significant other outside long enough can tell you that there is nothing like spectacular scenery, science, and fresh mountain air for catalyzing scare the bears off hair pulling back injuring aerobic country people bone bumping.

Basically, they travel around screwing out in the forest and pass it off as a field guide and then make money off it. At least 25% of their entries for a locale are along the lines of “We didn't quite have time to make it out there to look for the zeolites, but we heard they're there.”

So what are they doing if not looking for the subject of their book? Fucking. That's what they're doing. Then they run this scam where they write about whatever they happened to find in their free time outside of all the wilderness fornicating and charge you 12.95 for the paperback at Borders.

Well, I got a half ton 4x4, a bunch of camping equipment, an English 112 class under my belt, and a free summer. You put it together.

My plan though is to give more than lip service to the science of geology. But when I get into the petrology, I want to put in the important information those other people leave out. Such as:

“Basement rock is Black Canyon semi-melt metamorphic and ultramafic
granites, along with a few pegmatitic dikes. Rounded large boulder and cobble
size talus are generally found at the toe of free face cliffs. Rounded cliffs
are good speculation areas for tourmaline, micas of the biotite and white mica
families, and quartz varieties. Some topaz can be found in dikes, distinguished
from quartz by tetragonal crystals and hardness of 8. Lay down a blanket on the
rock if you plan on being naked, as friction will embed mica fibers in your ass
and knees and the palms and wrists of your hiking partner.”

The Trout Would Have A Different Take

In the night, with stars searing silver in the black sky, I crouched next to the small bed of orange coal and thick smoke I had been trying to nurse into a heating fire. The cold wind blowing up over the rim of the Mesa, the largest in the world, and over the lake had quelled the flames piled high into the quarter moon night earlier. Then it had blown the ash into the cool tuft of ghost pine and cottonwood it was now. The air was cold, alpine regions in November are not the warmest. Above ten thousand feet, the ice comes early and visits often.

The coals gave birth to a wispy yellow flame eating at a feathered strip of spruce bark I had prepared for this purpose. The light ate at the dark around the ash pile and shut off the stars in its flare. The flame crept slow up the bark's feathery inner reaches and then found the pine needles, heavy with oil and dessicated brown, flaring brighter, it found the pile of hatchet chips I had made earlier in the night. When the fire was still a living thing fighting back the night and me and my brother had sat on logs with our boots in front of the fire and meat frying in the iron skillet. I knew the heat would go away and we would need the chips. While I worked a pine log into a necrotized mess, Sean fried our food.

The fire eventually returned to us with my prodding. The light crept out over the ground in waves from the pit as the fire grew strong. The first of the pine branches caught and I sat back on my haunches. The heat came to me, driving out the cold that had awakened me. The undulating ring of the fire reached out to encapsulate all the rocks of the pit and then me and then our two bedrolls laid out on the ground, one full. The air glistened and condensed into a heavy cloud under my nose as i lived and breathed. Not too far away, people slept in their heated rooms, cocooned in their bedding. Me and Sean were planted thousands of feet up, near Leon Peak, ice crust on our bodies and beds.

He was across the flames from me curled in a ball snoring like he always has. The house we were both raised in did not quite have a thousand square feet to itself. Sean and I and one brother who ran from Colorado for good slept in one small bedroom with a bunk bed on one wall and a half a bunk bed on the other. The fire my dad would build on all the winter nights in our cast iron stove kept us warm against the tide of high Colorado cold.

While the fire built itself into the potential it had, I cajoled it along with food and air. Off in the trees, something big moved.

Sometimes I wonder if in the processes of the night, the foreign night that happens in the throes of discomfort to most, but the night that me and Sean can find solace in, some greater God comes to be. Not the creator of hominids who shit on their floor and cringe in anger at the unkempt dirtiness of nature around them and want to mold it into another floor to cover in their waste, but a greater God. One who has no idea that here in this galactic backwater, there are apes covered in skins they did not earn with flashing steel tools carving from the life of the wood fuel for meager comfort. The ground, heaving and beautiful covering the true iron nickel heart of this earth wrinkles and splashes onto itself with ferocity, but with a scale of time we can not even ponder with any skill. The universe stretches into what we can only behold as forever and we find in it's tidal backwater of time, our few years our few years, our vapor that flickers and fades, a reason for all of this.

I heard the hiss and gurgle of boiling liquid and saw the fire had gotten close to the enamelware coffee pot. I helped myself to a dirty cup of it and sat staring at the fire and across it my brother having a vocal dream.

Here in the city, the stars are not visible for the orange glow of our lights and the smoke of our heat. We are wrapped in our bedroll hiding from the cold current of nightsky that sparks on the flint of time and light and we hide in our beds and snore.

The greater god may come and go in the dark, but that night, I felt only the cold and the heat of brotherhood ownership and the stomach full of fish we had pulled out from under the ice of the stream. Greater truths may have been lost as I sat there in the dark happy and missing someone beautiful.

Rock Hammer

One time, back in another life, I had to attend leadership training. My particular methodology of motivating made people hurty in their feely bad spot, apparently. So, as it turns out, I did learn some valuable lessons. The be nice rule? That comes from there.

The reason I bring this up is that I see people instigate or exacerbate conflicts all the time with ineffective communication. When someone bumps into you and you see fit to tell them in profane manner how you are so incredibly inconvenienced, it is more or less worthless. You have lost your foothold the minute you raise their hostility.

A few months ago, I had to deal with citters. Urban hominids.

A gang or posse or whatever the current term would be of inner city youths was standing where I needed to be. They fucked with every single other white person (the youths represented several races) there on that sidewalk. They left me alone. When I approached the curb, they let me pass. While I would like to think it was because of my bearded grumpy face and Tonka truck build, the more likely answer is that carrying two rock hammers strung up on your backpack earns you some respect. Which makes me wonder how respect is earned. I ever get fucked with, and generally, if I need to ask that someone stop annoying me, they do it. Maybe people find politeness intimidating. Or maybe it's my god given talent for not smiling.

Or maybe it's the rock hammers. Maybe I should change my name to Rock Hammer?

Thoughts?