Metal Matters

This post is an open invitation to anyone who wants to contribute to a future post, or number of posts on the subject of heavy metal. If this interests you, whoever you are, whether we know you or you live in Romania, the country with our second highest number of visitors (go figure), then hit us up. We'd love to hear from you, and you can be immortalized within these here ranks. How exciting!

METAL MATTERS

1. Before we go anywhere with this, I need you to profess your undying love for metal. So, let’s hear it. I want the person reading this to know without any question that you have a passion for the heavy stuff. I want the sort of person who might be totally uncomfortable, or maybe even pretty ignorant with metal to understand almost intuitively why someone else would feel so compelled to listen to this sort of music over any other. Don’t think of this as a sales pitch, think of it more as a testimonial to the sheer joy of heavy music.

2. When did you become a metal fan, and what were the circumstances surrounding this time in your musical life. Has it been a near-lifelong obsession? Were you a late bloomer? Was it a gradual process or were you hit over the head with it, suddenly?

3. Do you have a genre preference? How would you define that style of metal? What makes, let’s say, sludge so much better than power metal, shred better that goregrind, etc . . . 

4. Do you feel a sense of community with the metal world at large, or is this more of a personal sort of thing, almost something you keep hidden? 

5. How does metal fit into your musical makeup, and by extension, into your overall life? Does it overlap into other areas (work, your relationships, church service, workouts, etc . . .)? 

6. In what way, if any, does metal cause you problems (work, your relationships, church service, workouts, etc . . .)? In other words, if you’re, say married, does your spouse think you are a stunted child for being a metal fan? Does your boss give you shit for listening to “acid rain music,” and so on . . . Be honest.

7. What do you think about the role of gender as it relates to metal? Apply this concept to the presence of women in metal both in bands and as fans, and also the ways that masculinity, as well as femininity is expressed both by the bands and by the fans. In what ways has the historical “sausage-fest” of metal become more appealing to women (or has it?), and why? Do you see any sort of changes in metal in order to accommodate women (again, both as fans as well as band members)?

8. What about the politics of the metal world? Do you see metal as a rebellious form of music, or is it hyper-reactionary, coming across as almost ultra-conservative? Or, like most else, is it more of a grey area? If so, explain. How well do you feel metal is able to express genuine emotions at the risk of being camp or overly theatrical, or worse, at the risk of possibly presenting a veneer of empty-minded hatred and downright stupidity and intolerance? What takes place to counteract some of the mindless shock tactics and outright violence and ultimately shows metal to be a voice for whoever is expressing it, good or bad? Who represents the ugly side of metal? Who makes the fans of metal look like complicit (or, at least tacit) drones, utterly beyond sense and reason? And, beyond that, who uses metal as a true voice of transgression, leaving the listener with a broader sense of the world in which they live?

9. What is your hands-down favorite metal song? Band? Artist? Lyric? Why?

10. What’s next? Where does metal go from here? 

Mr. Whimpers

1

Let’s not denigrate ourselves here. These days it seems I can barely muster the strength to venture beyond BED -- KITCHEN -- COUCH, and back to BED.

Ever since M took her final meeting with Mr. Whimpers, my window of opportunity -- or what the rest of you might refer to as “will to live” -- has, uh, taken a bit of a hit in the ass. 

It’s okay though, we can handle it, we can adapt. There is a way out. But for right now we are doing best with BED -- KITCHEN -- COUCH -- BED.

Whimpers came to call on a dark and stormy night. I shit you not. It actually seemed darker than any other night, which seems ridiculous now since all nights are dark enough, relatively speaking. And yet somehow this night was darker. This night took your garden variety darkness and invited itself in to your parlor, literally. In fact, it was like you couldn’t get the shit off you. I feel uneasy at the thought of it now. And yeah, it was truly stormy. It came down in sheets. It tore Noah’s chapter out of the bible and wiped its ass with it. 

While I was outside closing the damn garage door, which always fucks up in an electrical storm, this creepy fuck shows up at my front door. M, as she always does to a fault, to a fucking fault, saunters right up and lets the guy in. I come back in, turn in to the sitting room, and am treated to the following. 

The power is out, so the light is out in the room, it’s clearly off, and still, when I look at this fucking guy standing in front of M, who is sitting in her plastic-covered chair, back to me, he is lit. I don’t know how, but he is lit, I can see his face. And I don’t like it. 

He is grinning from ear to fucking ear, and his skin is moving, almost rippling, but that can’t be right. Nobody’s skin ripples, right? It just isn’t something that happens. But I swear it was. And he’s got this idiotic hat, wide brim. And with his head oddly lit from some unknown source above him, and his head cocked down towards M, all I can see of him is his wide smile, and rippling on the cheeks. But that can’t be right. 

M, poor M, she is stock still, head tilted up at the fuck, and she is whimpering. It’s a delicate and fragile thing, and I don’t like it at all. It means a whole lot of bad stuff that I don’t want to think about, ever. 

As I step closer, very slowly, I round the edge of her chair and just catch for a moment that his feet are not touching the ground. Worse, the tips of his shoes, of his obsessively shiny shoes, are twitching very fast, like the movement of a fish when you stick the knife in and get ready to clean it. And that’s the feeling I get from this guy. he’s here to clean M, he’s here to devour her, he’s here to take all the light, leave only his own dark, sullied in the mud of the storm, mud that is not on his shiny shoes because they aren’t touching the ground. 

I don’t even know what to say at this point. 

I am virtually frozen at the impossibility of the whole thing. None of it makes any sense at all. The weather was bad. We felt uneasy. That was it. 

We pay our taxes, drop a couple small bills in the basket on Sundays. We do our part. I cut the grass, tip my waiter, use the self-serve lane. I buy American. 

So why us? Why M? What is there to say?

This guy, sharply and suddenly claps his hands together, and the sound is like a grenade. And I remember grenades. I did my service, I worked my way across France in ‘44, I marched into Berlin and the whole nine. I’m the real fucking deal. Yeah, so this guy claps his hands, and boom, I can’t see shit. All light is now gone. I feel something move not by me, but around me, like a fucking cold wind, and I am now on my knees. Not quite sure how I ended up down there. I just was. 

And fuck it all . . . I am whimpering too.

2

M stayed in that chair for a fucking week. I got her to eat after a couple days, but as far as the rest of what your body demands of you, well, figure it out. I had to throw the chair out after that week was up, let’s put it that way. 

She also had not a damn thing to say for that week save for one, and it was always at night when she was asleep -- she would wake me in my chair by muttering softly but repeatedly, “See you soon, see you soon, see you soon . . .”

And that was pretty much that. A week to the night later she simply got up out of her chair, went to the bathroom, showered, threw her clothes away, and went to bed.

I didn’t ask her about what happened that night, I was afraid to, to be honest. But one morning she just walked into the kitchen and plopped herself down in front of me. She was giving me that look. I told her the coffee was fine, not too bitter, and she just shook her head. 

“You were outside,” she said. “I heard this rapping on the door, not a knock but a sort of steady, even, insistent rapping. It was so slight that I found it hard to remember how long it had been going on. And you were outside, I didn’t know what to do, so I went to see what it was.

Just as I opened the door, the power went out. And still, for some reason, I can see its face.”

It. Why did she have to call him “it”? It doesn’t sound good at all. Why not “him,” because “it” is just no good. “It” confirms that something very bad happened that night and I don’t want that on my mind. I’ve put great effort into pretending I didn’t see the rippling, or the shoes, or the impossible light. I sure as fuck don’t need him to become “it.”

She continued. 

“It was grinning, and that was not good, but there was something else . . . there was this thing with his skin. I can’t explain it. It’s skin, it was -- rippling. I could see it clearly, it was shuddering, almost like fluid. It was so terrible, and I can’t even explain it. And there’s more. I noticed something moving near the ground. I looked down and I saw that this thing was literally hovering above the ground. I know, I know it sounds insane, believe me, I can’t even believe myself as I say it out loud, but I swear to you it’s true. And its shoes, they shined, they shined, I remember that, and what’s worse, they were twitching, almost blurred. I couldn’t handle it. I felt myself coming apart. I didn’t know what to do. 

And then I felt its breath on my face. 

I looked at it, I couldn’t stop myself, I felt a wave of terror down my upper back. I looked at this thing, this impossibly wide grin, and as I did this I felt it speak to me in silence.

“See you soon,” it said to me. “See you soon,” over and over, and yet it did not speak.

Somehow I found I was sitting in the chair, with no idea how I got there. It felt as though I was in a waking nightmare. It was all so impossible and still I knew it was actually happening. 

Its shoes twitching, this was the first thing I noticed. It was hulking in front of me, I looked up. Its head brushed the ceiling, and again was the terrible light. 

And it was then that I saw its eyes. I saw its eyes, damn you, I saw its eyes. And its eyes looked directly into me.”

I was stunned. I was frozen. I had no idea what to think. I noticed I had dug red grooves into my palms with my fingernails. Her story was almost unbearable. 

She went on.

“In its eyes I saw things that have taken the life from me. I saw things that force me to question it all, everything. Nothing I have ever known can be trusted. In its eyes was the sum of all madness, the end of all that is good, and the end of all that has meaning.

It was right. He was right. He will see me soon.”

That night I dreamt of a terrible flood. I was leading a group of faceless people across a pregnant river, a raging river, utterly black. There were stones that just barely broke through the madness and I stepped from one to the next to lead the way across. As I worked my way through the black I noticed huge shapes moving just below the surface. As I looked back to find those for which I was responsible, all I saw was the thing, its face alight, arms at its side, and all around it everything I had ever known was being absorbed into its body. And then it looked up . . . and I saw its eyes. I ran.

M was gone the following morning. I never saw her again. But before she was gone forever I received a call from her. 

“Is that you,” she said. “are you there?”

“Yes, yes,” I cried, but then realized she wasn’t talking to me.

I wasn’t even breathing. 

And then I heard it, a sound I will never be able to accept, and something that will undoubtedly lead me to the edges of sanity. She was whimpering. And then there was a clap. And she was gone. 

3

So, ever since, it’s been BED -- KITCHEN -- COUCH, and then BED. It’s been all I could muster. I simply have nothing left in me. But I will pull through. I have to. What’s it been now? Two years? Fuck. Two years. It’s time to move past this and make my remaining time my own. I refuse to let Whimpers take whatever I have left in this life. I owe at least that much to M.

That’s funny though. As I sit on my bed I notice under the closet door the toes of a shiny pair of shoes. And here’s the rub. They’re twitching. 

They Do Not Deserve You

It's so very late. I should be asleep, but I'm not. I'm wide awake. I'm exhausted, spent, wiped out, empty, done. yeah, all of that, but wide awake. I am letting the late great Ronnie James Dio along with Black Sabbath cradle me in its beauty; I'm listening Children of the Sea live, and it is a motherfucker. Supposedly Robert Plant and Bonzo went to a London club to catch the hot new thing (Black Sabbath) and all Plant could say was, "Wow, this is terrible." What a pretentious cocksucker.

I am butt-up against a page-turner and I don't like it. The boat is drifting down a current most foul and I didn't even buy a ticket. That's no fucking deal at all.

I can't drink enough tonight. There's not enough in the house. I'd go Sterno at this point. It's that bad.

There is a room a short space away and within they are wrapped in slumber, and they are at an emotional impasse. And a stone's throw from there I sit and I record my feelings in a pathetic attempt to tie this moment down for the future so that I (alone) can revisit this day and never let it go, and then I can get on with my life.

You absolutely have to get on with your life because by my calculations this is it, ladies. This is fucking it. Imagine spending the lion's share of it in fear. That is a tragedy and a slap in the face of plain good sense.

You ought to know that the stuff is in short supply.

You have stripped your words bare and shed them of artifice and cloaked them in a sheen of self-defense, of glory. But there is no glory in the disease that coats you like a cheap suit. You spew anger with callous disregard for tact or taste because that's just what you do, but did you know that anger is a shade of clarity with which I am intimately familiar? Did you know that your brand of anger pushes beyond the borders of humor and hurtles itself directly into the province of glee? Didn't, did you, you fuck? Did you forget that whenever you summon the forces of true rage you are walking into a neighborhood which does not fucking care about you in the slightest because you are nothing?

Didn't know that either, did you?

You claim to sweat pain and yet you are nothing but a catalyst for all of ours. It's singular, your contribution, but you know what? That's not a nice thing to say, and you are way beyond deserving of kindness. Let those who are bigger than me bestow that worthless gift upon you. I will remain content to consume you from within.

Consider it an act of mercy.

Your first, and your very, very last.

Play good music

There seems to have been a lot of free advice to Houston bands going around lately, and who but the Aging Scenester would be in a better position to pile yet more profundities upon the grave of this badly battered, yet seemingly undead horse?

The most recent heaping helping, provided by a roundtable of local music writers, was geared towards telling bands that they need to market themselves more effectively, particularly to the music press itself; so that they are not overlooked.  This led to some folks saying things like, "Why don't you people in the music press get off your lazy asses, do your own jobs and quit trying to tell me how to run my band".  It led some other folks to wonder if the only thing separating H-town from the rich, productive, and unique music scene that it so deeply deserves was nothing more than a shortage of shamelessly self-promoting douchebags. 

While the Aging Scenester certainly feels that he is personally above all forms of shameless self-promotion, he also recognizes that some amount of interaction with the press has advantages, even for bands not trying to "make it".  For one, a band should take advantage of opportunities to have their work reviewed by someone outside their immediate echo chamber.   Houston has, by most accounts, a pretty diverse local music press where your band should be able to find someone to cover them.  Yes, yes, you say, but no one reads them and they're irrelevant anyway!  That's substantially not true because I can tell you, as one who has certainly held his share of disdain for the music press over the years, it never once has stopped me from reading a review of my own work.  That's right, hipsters -- sniff at the HP all you like, but you know you'd chew your own arm off to get to La Tapatia or Brasil for your copy if you knew a thorough review of your album or show was gonna be in there.  And you desperately want someone who isn't your buddy or your girlfriend or your girlfriend's sister or some guy at work to evaluate your music.  You may not agree with what they have to say, but reviews give you an insight into what you are doing that you will not get anywhere else.  Our local music press is in a tight spot, because on the one hand they don't want to crush the life out of a music scene that they already view as being somewhat fragile, but they also can't just nakedly shill for bands or act as their free PR agents.  The Aging Scenester certainly feels that it would be nice if the Houston music press would do more reviews of local bands, and that they would get out to see more shows.  He does not expect cheerleading, but he does feel that bands that don't get constructive criticism from neutral third parties will either a) miss opportunities to improve themselves or b) keep playing and sucking for all to behold. 

But what, exactly, does it mean for a band to "improve themselves"?  I've given this a little thought, and I sure as fuck didn't come to the conclusion that it means "having more flyers printed than any other band" or "getting all your cousins and co workers and ex girlfriends to vote for you in the Houston Press Music Awards" or "overwhelming social networking sites with band spam".  No, my friends -- there is no escaping it.  The solution, however brutal it may sound, to the alleged crappiness of the Houston music scene, is very simple: to have fewer crappy bands and more good ones. 

That means that as a musician, if you want people to notice you, you want to build a fan base, you want people to buy your merch -- here it comes, such a novel concept -- play good music and play it well. 

"Well", you say, "what the fuck does that mean, you stupid old fart?  Play good music?  I mean whether music is good or not, that's just like, uh, your opinion, man!"

Point taken, so here's some specifics --

1) Learn to play your instruments
Now the Aging Scenester happens to be a guitar player.  And certainly not a fantastic guitar player, far from it.  But he has been playing since before many of you were conceived and he does know a thing or two, among them:
    a) The guitar is far from being a dead instrument but most alterna-bands play them like they are, which is partly because they are put off by all the indulgent wankiness and guitar hero bullshit from the late 60s on up, but also because they really don't know how to play the goddamn things and it's a convenient cop-out.
    b) If you strap on a guitar and get in front of people, they're going to expect something.  They are going to expect you to bring it.  Actually this is true of any instrument.  Show off.  Have some fun.  Throw in a little flash.  This is why people came to see you, instead of staying home and watching Top Chef reruns in their pajamas.

2) Get better singers
Here's something that may or may not have crossed your minds:  people generally relate to the vocal parts of songs more than anything else.  This is natural because music itself is really just a kind of bizzare linguistics.  This needs to be embraced -- but not by people who can't keep pitch.  Now you may have picked Joe Bloe to be your singer because he is charismatic, good looking, a great front-man, energetic and all that -- but in reality, Mr. Bloe got the job because no one else wanted to do it.  Yep, that's right.  And Mr. Bloe, for all of his positive traits, sadly cannot carry a tune in a basket and may have, as many egotists do, an exaggerated estimation of his own vocal ability.  This leads him to explore nooks and crannies of his golden pipes which should have stayed forever hidden within the walls of his shower or the doors of his car. 

Singing is -- straight up -- the HARDEST fucking job in rock & roll.  Do not take your choice of singer lightly.  Do not suffer through a vocalist who has diarrhea of the mouth, or pen -- we call these people poets, and they have their own deal which is poetry slams at coffee shops.  It's not that no one cares about what your lyrics have to say, except...well, generally they don't.   How they sound is what matters.  Especially in Houston clubs which are not exactly known for the stunning quality of their PA systems, your audience is not going to be likely to pick up on the nuances of your lyrical brilliance above the roar of guitars and drums. 
This one is not easy.  A really good singer is a rare commodity.  A passable singer can be made with a lot of effort, trial, error and humility.  If you cannot find a decent one, then keep trying: but keep your musical efforts to your practice space until you are ready.  Or be an instrumental band.  Above all, do not resort to the standard cop-outs of burying mumbling vocals under the mix (wow, that's soooooo edgy) or just screaming tunelessly (wow, that's soooooo edgy).  No.  Enough.

3) Write some good songs
What a novel concept -- if you write good songs, people will listen to them, maybe even more than once, and when they come to your shows, they will remember them from last time!!! Yaaaaay!   Now I recognize this is about as intangible as intangible gets.  But I have to believe that part of the reason that so many bands around here have such unmemorable music is because they listen to unmemorable music.  The Aging Scenester knows what he's talking about, because he's old enough to recall listening to the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, the Beatles and Joe Walsh on a fucking AM radio when he was a wee lad.  I know that all of you are way too cool to listen to old fart stuff like that.  And I sure as hell listened to my share of horrible, tuneless shit or straight up noise, when I was an aspiring young hipster back in the day.  But the big mistake I think so many people make is listening to music for genre instead of for songs.  Or maybe a better way of putting it is that people listen to the 'sound' of a band rather than the actual notes they are playing.  I still listen to a lot of genre music, but to this day I listen to Led Zeppelin and the Stones because they wrote some great fucking songs, and I never get tired of hearing them.  I understand the pitfalls that so many of you want to avoid -- you don't want to go retro, you want to be original, you want to be quirky, you view pop music as a wasteland, you hate the crass commercialism, you have contempt for conventional songwriting tropes, etc., etc., etc.  But there's a lot to be learned from listening to good, catchy mainstream music and yes, stuff that was written and recorded before you were even born.  Don't be afraid of writing a simple song with cool lyrics and decent vocal hooks.  Think about harmonizing more on vocals.  Don't over-write your songs; the best ones write themselves. 

This is not to say that your band should not do that 25 minute long Ode to Space you've been dreaming about, with lots of experimental jamming.  Or that you shouldn't write songs that are more complex or more lyrically personal, or that you shouldn't explore what happens when you jam a pineapple juice can under your guitar strings, or that you shouldn't have songs that are blunt expressions of rage or some other emotion -- this is, after all, an artistic pursuit.  Just show a little more appreciation for the art of songwriting itself, and be your own harshest critic when you listen to what you're playing.

4) Perform for your audience
I recall the oft-maligned John Lomax saying, a while back, something to the effect that a lot of bands in Houston just sort of stand around listlessly staring at their amps during performances.  The music might be cool, but the bands looked as bored as the audience inevitably was.  This was harsh, but good medicine from Mr. Lomax.  Now he sure as hell wasn't talking about Filthy McNasty, for example, or the Poor Dumb Bastards.  But he was talking about a lot of bands, my own included, and he was right.  Here's the deal: you're a performer.  Go out there and perform.  Engage the audience.  Make them glad they're there and that they paid their five bucks to get in.  And while this really makes me sound like a tool, I would add -- dress the part, if you feel so inclined.  Yeah, yeah I know, you're all genius musicians and you are so above the rock star thing, and you just want to be comfortable -- but first off, you are missing out on half the fun of being in a band if you don't act a little flamboyant, and second, basically you just look like roadies or slobs up there and it's depressing. 

Having a worthwhile stage presence and some live energy is a big part of making sure that whatever people did come to see you had a good time, and will want to come back again.  And it's more fun for you too.  The reality of it is that many musicians feel uncomfortable in front of people, they don't want to look at the audience, and they have a hard time with this.  So they adopt the disconnected navel gaze by default.  In the end, it doesn't say cool or artsy, it just comes across as laziness or indifference to your own music. 

5) Check your ego(s)
I say this with some qualification.  Because a healthy amount of self-esteem is really important for someone who wants to perform in front of people.  Presumably, if you didn't think you were any good, you wouldn't waste your time and the audience's time by playing.  However....

I think a lot of bands split up before they really have a chance to get good.  To know each other's idiosyncrasies, strengths, and weaknesses, and learn how to play as a group.  A lot of times, this is just life -- someone gets a job, moves, goes to college, or starts a family and just decides to throw in the towel.  But truthfully I suspect that a lot of bands break up because of personality conflicts, egos, one guy running the whole thing and the other guys (or girls) getting tired of it, etc. 

There is a lot to be said for getting along well with the other people in your band.  One way to do that is to respect everyone's opinion, to share credit, and to give everyone room to explore their own instrument and their own artistic contribution to the music.  Now you may be a person who thinks that your art is the absolute most important thing in your life, and that you cannot let other people get in the way of your vision.  The history of rock & roll is full of people like this, and if that's you, then there's not a lot I can say other than that you may be successful artistically, and even commercially, but that I wouldn't want to be in your shoes.  For my own part, a big reason I'm in a band to begin with is because of the camaraderie and the joy of creating something with a group of other people. 

So if you've got a huge ego and you decide that's what is going to power you to stardom, you better have the chops to back it up.  Otherwise, come on down to earth and jam with all us little people. 

==

I bring up each of the items above with two particular caveats:  first, these are all things that I personally had to learn as a musician over many years.  They are not all easy to do, and they take patience and persistence.  I did all these things wrong at one point or another, and probably am still doing some of them wrong, but I know how important they are from personal experience.  The second point to make, which is more positive, is that they are all things you, as a band, can control.  You cannot control clubs, asshole promoters, record labels, the music industry, the Internet, MTV, the radio stations, or the music press but you CAN do something about the quality of your own music.  Much of the advice I've seen bandied about recently seems to be focused on trying to bend a nebulous music "business" to your will by constantly hustling yourself.   I can't say that doing that will hurt, and I guess that if your goal is to be a working musician, you are probably going to have to do some of that stuff.  But for most of us, music is a secondary career or a vocation; we all have bills to pay and lives to lead.  We do what we're doing because we love to do it and our definition of success isn't necessarily financial.  You may never get to quit your day job but you can still have a fulfilling life as a musician if you play good music, and play it well. 

Hark the Heralds

I wear a talisman. I wear one single talisman because were I to wear an additional one for every instance in which I upheld a moment of daily life-magic into the light I wouldn’t be able to move under the weight of them all. 

Look, there really is magic all around you. This isn’t some sort of Doug Henning, fucking transcendental levitation bullshit, either. There’s just forces at work. Trust me, they’re there. Their thereness is very, very there. Give them light and let them show you the way of the righteous. You are at your best when you take your place behind them and stop all your pathetic wrangling to try and beat that which functions to precede you. I am no genius, but I fucking know that that is a god damn waste of time. 

Have I made mistakes? Holy fuck, I’m the belle of the ball. I have tripped beneath the weight of my own fallibility so many times I’m like a walking testimony to the virtues of hubris. I build monuments so that I might worship at the altar of my own stupidity. I am crippled at the mere thought of some of the most basic human interactions. And the next day? The next day I light a torch and guide myself into uncharted terrain, fearless, without hesitation and fuck you for asking. 

that’s who I am. 

But tonight, last night, these many nights before that -- I am something else. 

Heralds have shouted the arrival of my ignorance before his court, have dropped scrolls to the marbled floors detailing my every indiscretion. He is not amused. Nor should he be. 

You can do a lot with a brain. 

Mine is like a running joke. Mine is like a gag reel, an eternal next and next and next and fuck you I’m so tired of this and I am so not sure of what this means and I am never the man I was before and will be tomorrow so don’t even think of calling me him. 

That’s who I am.  

I just want to forge something that I can look at from a distance, no matter how slight, and say, “I did that.” 

I have done that. I have done that with both of my children. I step back -- they are there, being stubborn or dancing hip-hop or eating a fruit snack, and what I am lucky enough to notice is -- I did that. But I am not done. 

Where did I go off the rails? Where did I leave the plot? Where did I take a short leap off a long pier and get swallowed in the maw? 

You know what, it doesn’t matter. 

Tomorrow hasn’t happened yet. And that is why I wear this talisman. Because no matter what has come before -- and oh, what a fuck before has been -- no matter what was before, what is next doesn’t exist. 

There’s still hope. Cash it.

You Are Here

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My long time pen pal and I write back and forth about many subjects. What keeps it interesting is that we don’t see eye to eye on everything. Religion is one of those things. This started out as a letter to her regarding my thoughts about god and the universe, but quickly evolved into something else. Thanks for keeping me on my toes, Luli.

To those I don’t feel like explaining myself to, I call myself an Atheist, but I’m certainly not an asshole about it like some folks. I am simply not religious, which is actually different from being an Atheist, but a lot of the time that explanation is simply not good enough. I tend to agree with a lot with certain aspects of Eastern thought, mainly because it’s philosophical and not technically religious. People can believe whatever they want for whatever reason. The problem I have is when people try to change the way I think and give me stupid reasons for it. For my part, I know what I think and why I think it, and I don’t need people to agree with me, nor do I have any desire to change the minds of others. I don’t like religion, but I know that there is some good in it. My grandfather was a pastor who lived and breathed by the word of god, and he was the greatest man I’ve ever known, so by association, it can’t be all bad. He never forced religion on me, but he was always willing to talk if I wanted to listen, which I think is the right way to go about it – live and let live, and help if you can. I could site the Crusades and many other things pertaining to the negative, but that’s sort of off topic. There are things that make me not believe, such as Astronomy (which I will get to shortly), certain details of evolution, and biblical contradictions, but suffice it to say that I don’t care if a god (or gods for that matter) exists. The thought of worshipping anything is “sinful” to me. God could prove that he/she exists to me today, and I would not change my ways. Living beings are not meant to live in guilt and have to worry about whether their actions or thoughts (thoughts!) might be looked down upon by a jealous higher being. Religion was used to keep the lower classes in order, to establish a hierarchy, a caste system. In my eyes, it really has no place in the world today, save to give people some hope that there is more to life than, well, life. No one wants to think that we cease to exist once we die. This is part of the reason I am so against suicide.

Regarding the power of prayer and wishful thinking, God (the universe, whatever) would be under no obligation to give people what they want. There are roughly 7 billion people in the world (meaning 7 billion souls by Christian standards) and over 106 billion people who have ever existed (http://www.prb.org/articles/2002/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth.aspx), and god would have the magnitude of the universe to take care of, so why would an all powerful being even think about what ONE person thinks or wants? To point out how tiny we really are, think of Earth in relation to our solar system. Under the best of conditions in the fastest spacecraft currently available, it would take a ship somewhere between 150 and 260 days to reach Mars, and that’s one of our “neighboring” planets. Scientists hope to one day be able to launch a satellite as far out as Pluto (Dwarf planet, I know) and have it get there in less than ten years. And that’s just the edge of our solar system, whose planets revolve around our sun, a star. Okay. Our star is one of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with a mind boggling distance between them. There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all of the beaches on Earth. Whoa, right? And what does that speak of beings on other planets (I find it hard to believe that the universe is that big and we’re the only planet with life) and other species, even ones on Earth? Just because we run the show here doesn’t mean we’re necessarily the only ones with souls, granted a soul is to be believed in. Even if god or whoever heard prayers, in the scope of the universe, it doesn’t matter if people get what they want – the world still turns (or, the universe still expands, depending on the viewpoint).

As far as Earth is concerned, I think all people are equal. It goes back to the scope of things. Like a drop of water when looked at under a microscope is a world unto itself, we are the tiny parts (however intelligent) that make up the whole of our planet – we ARE the world. God/religion just doesn’t factor into that for me. Limitations on how you can or can’t think, how and who you can or can’t fuck, and overall how you have to live and die, and many other things just come off as silly to me. Some people point to how Christians are charitable and help people – yes, because by and large they will often feel guilty otherwise. I give when I can, but not to appease a higher power or to assuage any feelings of guilt, to push my agenda, or some other end, but because, however diverse we are, in the end, we are the same.

Religion really has no place in the modern world. Technology has become god, and man is doing all he can to live easier, but that easy living is making our existence a virus to the planet. Maybe foretelling of the Apocalypse was an ancient cynical prediction – and now we have the technology to completely destroy ourselves. How funny that humanity’s race to evolve might end with man destroying himself. Is that what god would want? If he is in control of everything, then that’s the ultimate end for us. Space travel is extremely dangerous, which means that god wouldn’t want us to leave the planet, but as numerous experts attest, leaving the planet is the ONLY way that humans will survive. I won’t even start on the cyclical Ice Ages or Eternal Recurrence. How funny that the only way to survive as a species is to be ungodly. Granted, I know that these are only MY views (and I skipped lots of philosophy and thoughts on interpersonal relationships to keep this from dragging on so long that people, including me, lose interest), but I didn’t come to think this way simply by faith, which I think is a total cop-out reason to claim anything. Don’t really know why you think or feel a certain way? Well then faith is your get-out-of-thinking-free card. The Ontological Argument also gets on my nerves. Do I believe in some higher power/force/element? Yes. I don’t think we have discovered all there is. I bet people thought they knew everything before they found out that the Earth is round, too. We are still evolving. Well, some of us anyway; others are content to waste their lives away on drugs, booze, and/or the small scale of their lives. So many people in the first world live in a dream and criticize reality. In the scope of time and space, we live for less than the blink of an eye, so we owe it to ourselves to do all we can to love, learn, live life to the fullest, be good to each other, and be happy. If daily life is a constant downer, then baby, you’re fuckin’ up. Grow, change, move, evolve, and truly live (and other verbs too)… or don’t; the universe doesn’t care either way.

But…..I….Do.

Dances and Falls

. . . , slouching, fading, fighting, being foolish and reading the holy texts as they are carved on moss-riddled rocks lapped by the angry sea. Crediting the walking dead with their invisible gifts and tidings, sure to take the world by storm. As we lie there, in sleep, as we crash beyond walls seemingly impenetrable and relegate the waking life to a terrible, terrible dream itself, know only perhaps a moment to pause in reflection and bask in the cooling shadow that renders us oblivious to the wages of sin. Nobody knows nothing, nobody knows no one, nobody knows.

In an instant, as the corpses line the boulevard, boney hands in salute to the grimmest parade, rotting stench of your daily reality stinging your nostrils as you crawl, bloodied, naked, in a silent agony before them, as you feverishly attempt to divine a new tenable narrative from the glut of empty, IN AN INSTANT -- you have lost. 

Arms blasting by, unstoppable, merciless, a whirlwind of enraged terror. Ain’t gonna fly when you ain’t got wings. Ooh, I get it, a motto, a catch phrase, a verbal mandala, so pretty, woven from the finest, all gone with the slightest breeze. 

And this is a motherfucking hurricane. Breathe it in, it is you. Take another dose of skin-peeling wind and piercing rains. Immerse yourself in the surge because it is an onslaught and you have nowhere to go.

It waned, was repelled, and there it was. There it was. There it were, be, was. 

It’s so very hard to bring beauty out from between the heaviest curtains of ugly. 

I am a weak man. You need not know me for who I am. So open, so shut down. So close to the very end, just like all of you, and all on my own, so very pathetic. 

I stand on my feet, yes, but perhaps only because I am shackled, I am harnessed, I am tethered. I am so far from home. I can’t lift a finger to salvage the flock from the coming flood. I can already see their bloated shapes in silhouette, floating in a muddied slur, rung, haloed with ants and maggots. there is no comfort in the end of their cries. In fact, it is deafening. And they cry for me. Corpulent, flesh sloughed off in an oily sheen, shades of purple, so very gone, so very here right now. All of it because of me, because I am incapable of building something that can last. I am an evolutionary time bomb. My time has always come. It’s not pretty, and yet it’s still very much there. 

Bring a camera, use a flash. 

I didn’t think it was supposed to be like this, but this is exactly the way it be. 

Pull up a chair and don’t forget your mask. Pull up a chair, always room up front, and watch as the little creature dances and falls and dances and falls again, and always . . .

The Wages of Spin

What to tell ... what to tell ...

This guy, knuckles dragging, balls engorged, this guy cuts a mean swathe. This guy, with his head so heavy he needs a crane to lift it. This guy, his word the butter that drips from the beds of heaven, the smoothest, most chestnut brown, most satisfying coffee picked from the highest points yet known. This guy, whose every motion is an exercise in kinetic perfection, guided from HIS own very hand. He is but a wonder to behold. This guy, his every thought so exquisitely calculated, so expertly delivered as though crafted by hand in a laboratory filled, miles long, with the most adept creative and logical minds this world has ever produced. Truly, truly a wonder ...

At least, in his own eyes.

I see this ...

This tiny man, his ears flapping away, so disproportionately large they threaten at all times to consume his head in an elephantine blanket. This man, his rose colored nose swollen at the tip like the genitalia of a great baboon. This man, with his oceanic, inflated ego, as transparent as tissue . . .

Let him taste true pain. He earned it.

I Scream . . .

Author: Annie Wilkes

I scream, you scream, we all scream: Get the fuck away from me and leave me alone!

Everyday I hope, there is something better, something more, something I’m missing right in front of my fucking face. Love, I have no idea what that means beyond my immediate family. I get attached too easily to people, I care (I guess as opposed to love) too much it seems. I am trusting and sometimes people think naïve. If I only ‘care’ it’s so much easier to push people away and hurt them before they hurt me. I trust implicitly upon first meeting, but am reassured all too soon and easily that I just don’t like most people. No big deal, I’m not the kind of person to have a lot of close friends, the ones I do have, like 3 or 4 that I talk to on a regular basis don’t even live where I do, with the exception of my sister.

I don’t often come across as optimistic or happy-go-lucky, I find that a bitter and/or sarcastic remark could easily define my day, but underneath it all, I am hoping, happy and most days content. It helps to know that on any given day I haven’t fucked up someones life intentionally or my own. I work my ass off for everything I’ve ever wanted but know full well I am spoiled and could get what I want by just asking.

This is going to derail now. I must have been someone incredibly fucked up in a past life, because I do believe in that shit. The following events took place within a 3 ½ month span of my life. I can’t make this shit up.

My sister’s significant other has a best friend who has professed his love for me, he doesn’t even know me. I’ve never hung out with him, probably haven’t said more than 20 words to him in my life and he continues to tell people he loves me. It really helps that he’s 10 years younger and drunk almost everyday of the past 5 or 6 years of his life and has no front teeth. This may be the most normal of suitors at this point.

Lets see….my next love possibility was like an uncle to me my whole life. 50+ yr old man, whose wife I adore invites me over late one night for a night cap, while we were at my parents house one evening for a friendly game of Texas hold’em. I had fixed him a plate of food cause he was too drunk to do it himself and it’s what you do for your elders, right?! Wrong. True story of “no good deed goes unpunished.” This man is also a drunk, goes on month long benders, pisses and shits himself and continues to invite me over. His wife left him a couple years ago for her sisters ex-husband.

Who’s next? Anyone? Anyone? Yes, the smelly older gentleman who just moved to town who offered to pay me to cook for him. Under certain circumstances this should be taken as a compliment to being a great cook. Given the events of the last couple weeks of my life I wanted to cry, not to mention this man was asking my brother about “available” girls in this town. I felt dirty, for no other reason than I just did. I still can’t look this guy in the face, he was very adamant on the phone, as if he kept offering to pay me would have made me change my mind the 4th time he asked. I may need to go puke now.

The only man I was sure I had ever loved disappeared on me shortly after I graduated high school, he is 3 yrs younger than me. So the last time I saw or talked to him was September of 1996. I only know this because two months ago he found me on a social networking site and reminded me of the last time he kissed my face and knew it would be a long time before we would see or talk to each other again. He then proceeded to tell me how much he still loved me, would do anything for me and would fly to see me immediately if I helped him figure out how much a ticket would cost, oh wait, “Get a quote for one for my son too. What am I going to tell my wife?” EXCUSE ME?! FUCK YOU. Stop calling, forget you know me, WHAT THE FUCK?! WOW.

The fucked up portion of this story follows two weeks after the last part of my love odyssey. In my last relationship, and I use the “r” word loosely, it lasted a year and was more of a relationship than I had ever known in my little over three decades of life. There were promises made, four letter words exchanged and bliss if in fact that’s what it was. After leaving town for more work there were a few phone calls one or two emails and then this person must have fallen of the face of the fucking earth. And then, one month short of a year since I last saw his face, I ran into him. I saw him in the airport, I was sitting talking to a friend and I looked up and he was standing there, looking at me from across the terminal. He then proceeded to turn and walk away, he had to get on the escalator and put a floor between us. I sat there somewhere between a second heart shredding and the joy of the memories. I had to go to the bathroom and hurl, fortunately for me as soon as I came out of the bathroom my flight was boarding.

So now I’m hanging out with a dude (who I thought was cool) until a week ago when he told me for some fucked up reason that he liked my older sister but he also has a crush on me. “Hold that thought, gotta fly away for a vacation, hang out with my ex and two kids, call me!” HO-LY FUCK!

I am now sure that whoever I was in a past life, my dismembered, beaten and broken body is lying in an unmarked grave somewhere and whoever I knew in that life does not search for answers to my mysterious disappearance.

I wish, I hope.

Guest Post

Author: Xenos

Let's just pretend, for the sake of argument, that there is a god. What sorts of characteristics should a god have to be worthy of worship? Modern Christianity seems to hold that their god is omnipotent, omniscient, both omnipresent and "supernatural," eternal (yet able to step into time when direct intervention is needed), and the epitome of goodness. On the other hand, the gods of most polytheistic cultures (except the Hindu god Brahman) were far from any of these absolutes, yet considerably more powerful than humans, including controlling the forces of nature. For this reason if no other, they were at least worthy of attempting to appease. But aside from the priests and/or priestesses of these gods, did anyone really worship them? Or is/was the average polytheist's relationship to the gods mostly another area of application for rational choice theory (maximizing self-interest)? I am specifically concerned with the traits of rationality and consistency, but we can certainly attempt to consider power, knowledge, and goodness in relation to worshipability.

As you might have gleaned already, I do not believe in god. My wife does. She believes that earth is probably the only planet in the universe with intelligent life. I do not. My whole train of thought revolves around these two differences in beliefs. Apparently Stephen Hawking is now warning the denizens of earth that extraterrestrial life, if or when we encounter it, is likely to be much more advanced than we, and to treat us as Columbus treated the Native Americans. My wife scoffs at him as if he were proposing the looniest idea she’s ever heard.

Of course, he’s a world-renowned theoretical physicist specializing in cosmology...and we’re not. So he may have a pretty good idea about how realistic such ideas are, probably better than my wife or I do, anyway. So I wonder how she can be so quick to dismiss what he’s saying. But then, I also realize that she has a dramatically different perspective.

If you believe in god, especially the Abrahamic one, then you probably take the Bible as a primary source of information about how, and why, the universe came to be. You may be willing to see the human interpretations that are actually written there to be only a figurative understanding of actual events, but you probably think that god created the whole thing in a sequence more or less congruent with one of the two versions given in Genesis. And you probably think the point of it all was to create mankind, to set us all up for this test of faith that is life, in which we each prove our worthiness to spend eternity in god’s presence, or something like that.

And the Bible doesn’t say anything about folks from other planets. So then, there must not be any. God didn’t create them, so they don’t exist, and anyone who says they do is obviously wrong. Never mind that that’s what they said to Copernicus, Galileo, or Columbus. But again, I’m in danger of appealing to empirical evidence instead of hard and fast rules laid out by god in his ghost-written diary. So, even though scientists who study space may have scientific reasons to believe that there may be intelligent life from other planets, that’s not an available avenue for arguing with a theist, at least not until some extra-terrestrial alien has made its presence known beyond all shadow of doubt (I think even most bible-thumpers now recognize that our planet is more-or-less an oblate spheroid rather than a suspended plane).

So, if we pretend that god exists, and that god is male enough to call “he,” and that he created the universe (or multiverse), and is eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent (yet supernatural) and unequivocally beneficent, then why did he create such an utterly huge universe just to put life on one tiny little planet? Surely, being omnipotent means he could have just created our solar system, or even just our galaxy, and still given us plenty of stars for our night sky. If he needed to make sure that we had certain minerals and chemical elements floating around, he could have put them all in our galaxy. He could have legislated the laws of physics differently, for god’s sake. As an omnipotent creator, absolutely nothing would be impossible, so that also means that nothing is/was completely necessary. It was all arbitrary, based on his desire to create it the way he created it. So why such a huge universe in which to hide our tiny little planet? Maybe to give us a nearly infinite frontier, so we’d always have more to strive for? But that leads us back to justifying sciences like astrophysics and cosmology.

So, it seems that god, if he exists, and if he has the qualities ascribed to him by the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic faiths, and if the Bible is really supposed to tell us all we need to know about such things, is irrational, and maybe a bit neurotic.

And since we’re discussing god and rationality, can I ask about the changes that god went through between the old and new testaments? I mean, what happened to that guy? For thousands of years, he was a tough-love, discipline-minded, vengeful tyrant who told us to stone people to death for breaking the social rules he gave us. Then suddenly, he was all about giving up worldly possessions, loving thy neighbor, and turning the other cheek. It was like he did a bunch of acid and became a hippie. Yet aside from the specific rules that Jesus changed (and the ones that we have simply decided are too silly), the rest of the old testament is still supposed to provide guidance. Huh? How are we supposed to know what god wants when he apparently has at least two dramatically different personas? Is this maturation, a phase, or a personality disorder?

So, if we pretend that god exists, and has the aforementioned characteristics commonly ascribed to him, and if the Bible is his idea of a manual for directing our lives and societies, then it would make more sense with this god, as with those of the polytheistic pantheons, to follow a rational choice model of appeasement rather than to worship a neurotic schizophrenic who may send you to paradise, or tell you to murder your child.

Together Under the Sun

With the sun, a banner, a barter of the highest order, in celestial trade for our relative comfort back on earth, all our hopes. We shattered silence with the voice of our emptiness, raised in a world without end, a walled city, founded on a fount of fear and threat. 

In 1961, Paul Schaefer, self-appointed Lutheran minister, former Hitler Youth and former Luftwaffe medic, stepped from his plane onto the Chilean tarmac. In photos he is seen smirking. Perhaps it is because he has escaped justice back home for his crimes against boys. And perhaps it is because his true legacy lies before him. 

He purchases a large parcel of fertile land with the money he has collected from his followers. In time he brings them to Chile and from there they start to build a walled city. Within the confines of his city Schaefer’s followers develop the empty land into a seeming Utopia lush with gardens, crops, a bakery, a hospital, living quarters, an airport, a massive arsenal of weapons both brought in and manufactured on-site and even a secret maze of underground tunnels that wind beneath the colony, giving Schaefer a way to flee if necessary. 

As he establishes his stranglehold on his people through fear, intimidation and abuse, he also eventually cultivates a relationship with the newly-minted Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet, a military man, seizes power from Salvador Allende through a U.S. backed coup. 

Pinochet has many enemies, both real and imagined, a side-effect of deposing a democratically elected leader through violence. Pinochet develops a systematic plan for torturing and executing those accused of being his enemies. Unfortunately for Pinochet, his torturers are not very skilled, and thus are often unable to get much in the way of confessions from their victims because the torturers are so heavy-handed most of their victims die long before anything of value can be beaten out of them. 

By the time Pinochet is in power it is 1974 and Shaefer has virtually mastered the art of control. In fact, there is supposedly good reason to suspect that Shaefer has learned much of his torture techniques from some of the most notorious fugitives in history - men like Josef Mengele. There is also reason to believe that Schaefer’s colony is virtually a waypoint for other Nazi fugitives being funneled into South America as a sort of evil underground railroad. Schaefer, seeing opportunity fall directly in his lap, offers Pinochet his expertise on the arts of torture and murder. It’s a match made in Hell. Schaefer gets the umbrella of official protection he needs, as well as an utterly ridiculous charity status for his colony.

Shaefer is not only a revolving door for the world’s worst, however. For him, Colonia Dignidad is more of an outward expression of the way in which he wishes the world to be. He is fully established in a position of ultimate power. He surrounds himself with young boys, charged with all sorts of menial tasks at his whim, and he sexually abuses them as he sees fit. This literally goes on for decades. He creates layered and immutable laws designed to keep families apart, to keep men from being sexually involved with women. This plan is so well executed that he is able to keep his congregation from producing any children for 15 years. On the occasion that someone eventually does happen to become pregnant he separates the parents not only from each other, but also from their newborn until the child reaches the age of 6. And on, and on, and on, etc . . .

As what I imagine is a way of endearing themselves to the surrounding locals, the Colonia hospital takes in the Chileans and provides them with world-class medical care. As the Colonia’s reputation grows outside of its walls, a growing number of Chileans actually long to have their children live in the compound in order to get an education at the Colonia grade school. Many of these Chileans are trained to become loyal followers of Schaefer’s cult of personality, and many of the young boys are also sexually abused. 

Eventually, in 1990, Pinochet voluntarily leaves power as a response to pressure from the Vatican as well growing international dissatisfaction with his legacy, and is replaced by a newly-elected president, Patricio Aylwin (an opponent of Schaefer’s). With their governmental protection revoked, and as members of the Colonia escape and get the word out on what really goes on in the compound, it is a matter of time before the authorities raid the Colonia and attempt to capture Schaefer. 

Somehow, Schaefer is able to escape with a staff of thugs and nurses and eventually makes his way to Argentina. He is able to remain there, undetected, until 2005 when he is finally captured and brought to trial. 

He died last week. He was 88. 

In the footage of his being brought to the courthouse in a wheelchair, he looks at peace, calm, he gently smiles. 

There is no way to measure the damage this one man has wrought on the world. 

The colony is still there today. There are attempts at contrition from this outpost of evil, many of those so willing to comply, to enforce his madness, free to live out their days in the Chilean sun, utterly outside of the justice they deserve.