| On The Crest |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|09:20 pm] |
The sounds of summer celebration fill me with contempt for humanity. Not contempt for the specific children in the pool or the particular adults setting off small fireworks or chattering about "the red sawx" while sipping watery beer. The sounds fill me with loathing because they are so naive(?)and out of touch. Overhearing conversations, I have the desire to pinch myself, to try and wake myself up from this weekend oriented nightmare. You have to understand the way in which I think...
I view myself as living amongst the ever quickening ascent of lines on these graphs.
I have lost all will to attempt long, in depth conversations with those who take all of this for granted, aren't the least bit aware of the presently occurring train wreck and maintain a cocksure attitude that all will continue as was, as is, based on absolutely no data or secure facts(that part just really drives me nuts). Without considering the future, they expect me to consider their advice?! Coincidentally I find myself attracted to more nutty music lately because it mocks/parodies the madhouse. I don't understand the upsurge of excitement over fireworks. Maybe it's a tiny bit thrilling to be in the presence of stuff exploding in the night sky but that thrill has never stuck around..lasts a few minutes at best. The only good thing about the fireworks on Saturday night was watching Clover run around outside, ears perked, genuinely concerned, "Are we being invaded!?" Unfortunately the city walls weren't breached and the celebration of faux freedom, as expressed by lighting little rockets on fire, continued throughout the night unabated. Modern human beings love celebrating stuff, doesn't matter what it is, they don't have to know. As soon as my head hit the pillow I found myself within a vast dream, it cost $45.00 to use the bathroom in this dream.
Sarah grilled again on Friday but Zach and Jackie came along this time. Storm clouds passed by the porch, Sarah grilled a frozen pizza, made s'mores and barely took any photos, but who needs a photographic testament to a good time? Not I. Zach and myself came up with a new concept, a new scheme to tack onto our already lengthy "future plans" list....art history bongs. We didn't quite figure out all the details but dreamed up some knockouts pretty easily..the cubist bong, the dada bong, a Greek vase bong. It's safe to say a group of stoners somewhere on this planet have already been there and done that. We hardly ever smoke weed(ok..well, speaking for three out of four of us), that's kinda how we got to talking about it. By barely ever indulging myself, the act retains a thrill. Last time I did was 11:00 AM on Christmas Eve, all by my lonesome and listening to "Awaken the Guardian." TBN shoulda been great, all sorts of patriotic masturbatory material, but those lazy fuckers just ran some late 80's/early 90's Fourth of July program with a bunch of old generals/p.o.w's telling war stories while sitting on puke yellow couches. Which reminds me..the P.O.W./M.I.A. flag used to frighten me when I was a kid. I had absolutely no clue what the acronyms meant and for awhile I didn't even know that POW and MIA were acronyms. I thought the silhouette resembled a bald woman and the barb wire/watchtower in the background convincingly linked the whole picture to the Corrie ten Boom book my parents forced me to read and the accompanying movie, which scared the shit out of me when I was 7 or 8. So I linked the flag with sick/bald women(one of them possibly named Mia?) Much of what Zach and I talked about after turning off the television dealt with our childhood and teenage years, our imaginations working with ads in metal magazines, creating ideas of what such and such a band or album would sound like based on promo shots and small ads for album covers. All of the mystery and the expectations! So great to dig that stuff out from the pits of my brain and relate it to someone likeminded. We got really wrapped up in this topic after talking extensively about the few albums that we felt guilty about having. Owning music that betrayed our parent's trust or at least an awareness that our parents would frown upon our purchases. But the real meat of the conversation focused on those imaginary worlds, now past, in which so many albums and bands sounded, like the promo shoots or logos looked(because that's all we had to go on). As I drove home at 12:40 something AM on Friday night, I recalled a promo shot of the Norwegian black metal band, Gehenna, and my expectations of their sound based around a rather small, and bad quality, photo and the 4 or 5 sentences describing this one track that they had submitted to some women in metal compilation. I've never been able to find that photo and it's also likely that I've run across it but failed to recognize it because the picture housed within my memory is much cooler than the actual picture. There was a wooden wall background, something hanging on the wall behind them(a candle holder, a mounted animal head?) and a lot of shadows obscuring portions of their corpsepainted faces. Every single time I looked at this picture and read the short write up, a thrill arose inside of me, imagining in detail the smell of pine, and candle wax within the dark lodge, the wind howling outside, a blizzard engulfing the sparsely populated mountains...a mercilessly cold night.
*For the record, there are plenty of obscure, odd, deformed and beautiful old black metal demos, EP's, and albums out there that would've lived up to my childhood expectations. All is not lost. Here is a good list of Norwegian demos, some that I've still yet to hear. All kinds of purely dark and strange stuff.
*And Here is my Aotlaw interview
Watching the Pharmacratic Inquisition, which deals heavily with the Amanita muscaria mushroom, I felt the re-occuring urge to try my mind at some entheogens, especially the Amanita muscaria mushroom as it can work to prepare one for death. Not that I'm at all ready for a psychedelic experience, or at least I don't think I am...but I'll be ready for a psychedelic experience before I'm every ready for death, right? I want to exist purely within my imaginary worlds most of the time and I'm well aware that doing that would be akin to living in the Matrix, i.e. I wouldn't be interacting with any "real" people or eating any "real" food and etc. But the imaginary world would fulfill me, as I'd be an extension of it. I don't wish to preside over it like a god. This triggers something related to virtual reality, the image of a virtual reality junkie...frothing at the mouth, either malnourished or grotesquely fat, sitting in some sorta space-age recliner with a massive helmet on(legions of wires connecting it to a larger device on the ceiling or beneath the chair).
I cleaned up a lot of bloody feces on Sunday because my dad and his girlfriend went to New York. Tiffany stayed for the night, a freebie, two freebies and Tuesday day as they'll be in Providence together all day. Even when I got paid for six days, I got less than half of what I'd get if I worked at the kennel and I had to do a hell of a lot more. I don't blame the dog, nor do I blame my dad's girlfriend because who knows just what my dad tells her about me and my thoughts on the situation. They're at that stage in their relationship where they are just beginning to become familiar with each other but still long to see one another every second of every day. I know my placement on the thought map. I've been around couples at this stage and it's not as if they don't ever think about anyone else when together but they are so caught up in one another, they assume you'll just be lurking in the background(like always), totally fine and just doing whatever..waiting for their phone calls even. Depressing dog caretaking is depressing and goes hand in hand with all other depressing things. Now, where did I put that virtual reality helmet?
I Pose a Question!
I've written here and there about my feelings towards listening to music with a 'shuffle' feature on. One thing I've never done is ask those who listen in shuffle format on a daily basis what they get out of their randomized listening experiences. I'm genuinely curious and I ask not because I want to start an argument or make you look bad. The power of a lone song can't be denied, teams of songwriters, producers and lyricists design lone standouts, not to compliment other parts of the album or tell a story, but to generate hype and profit, nothing to do with albums. With most people listening to music in mp3 format, shuffling in a playlist full of current lone standouts(from all different artists)seems to make sense. But I don't know anyone who strictly listens to singles oriented music. Popular diets seem to be a mix of many different musical styles, various artists from various eras. As far as classic rock and pop go, I don't believe those songs were ever made to be shuffled(a majority of musical artists crafted songs with the long playing record in mind). Shuffling anything non-singles oriented from any time period kind of turns my stomach. I used to listen to music on shuffle all the time, every single time I listened to music. It's no wonder I couldn't sit still through one track when listening to music with friends..my attention span was very short and I felt like there was something better on my playlist to shuffle to. Please keep in mind that I had a lot of issues with anxiety at this time as well, could've had something to do with my fickle music listening. But actually, I wonder if I was ever even listening at all. Maybe my ears would pick out a catchy synth line or a fleeting vocal harmony but because the moods, the beats, the instrumentation were ever changing, it was near impossible to fully grasp anything and actually listen to it. Anxious shuffler I had not always been, I used to have my CD/tape deck combo, a box of CD's and cassettes. Of course I listened to every album in full, I made mixtapes if I wanted a whole bunch of my favs on tape for the walkman...solid logic at the time. Then, arriving a bit late at my household, came wondrous, titillating technology and childlike greed and runaway anxiety enabled the shuffler within. I recovered once I noticed myself getting heavily into progressive rock and heavy metal(a reawakening!) It's not very satisfying to listen to a single prog rock opus here, a speed metal blitzkrieg there..and all mixed up in an overflowing library of totally clashing genres. I'm pretty adamant about the idea that both progressive rock and heavy metal are album oriented..and that's how they should be listened to if you're listening to pay attention. Could it be that a lot of "music listeners" aren't interested in paying attention but rather in having some kind of background stimulation, some sort of danceable beat ever present? That's fine, just fine, let me point you in the direction of Now That's What I call Music!:375. Those of you who want to genuinely listen to music, want to pay attention and get something out of the experience, why do you shuffle? Let me go further, do you think that shuffling songs written to fully function as one concise piece of music disrespects the artist? And let me repeat myself, I don't intend to start an argument or save you from your shuffling ways, I only desire your personal opinions on the matter. Something tells me that shuffling has a lot to do with our lightning fast lifestyles, the speed at which trends appear and die, the quickening of time. It's no wonder that I detest shuffling as it resembles a kind of meaningless babble like so many other things in our Great Modern Civilization. Not the best analogy on the internet, but think about it like exercising. If you were to do one push up, then a single crunch, just one jumping jack and a few other exercises in the same fashion, what would you have gained after completing your one minute "workout?"
*friends of yours? |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
autokrater's journal
