The Natural Order

Walking home from the annual get-blitzed-and-forget-my-breath mixer at the Victims of Female Waterboarding lodge, my father and I heard some dirt talking to a tree. 

It said, “I can discharge you from this cortex, or collect your organs like raindrops with colors to spare.”

I thought that sounded beautiful. 

“That sounded beautiful,” I said, tugging on my father’s Cuckold Klein unlimited edition denim jacket. 

He gave me this look: Your teeth and eyes and maladjusted thyroid are from the left-handed side of the family, meaning, Liquid should be illegal, she slid too fast, or simply, These summers are moot.

So this is what my father did: he went back to Walmart for the fifth time that week, bought a power saw (Only $149.99 – Don’t miss a single Rollback or special offer!), cut the tree down and pissed on the stump.

Then he made me do it.

“That sounded beautiful,” my father whispered while lighting my jacket on fire.

A Place Where Anything Else is Happening

“The nature of death,” my mother said, “is that it lacks a knowledge of good and evil.” She’d thrown my brother’s cat off the bed before I’d woken up. Maybe she planned on me for bludgeoning, too.

“Well?” she asked. I could tell something was different. It had been weeks since she’d mentioned the skin clogging her neck, since she’d tried to burn some misery off her cottage cheese and Smirnoff thighs with her Congolese acupuncturist’s rigid, waspy fingers.

“‘No’ means Jesus. Jesus means type-2 diabetes,” I recited obediently until she let me roll over. 

That was the last time my mother shared her thoughts with me, or anyone else. In the morning she’d run off for good with a pre-bust dot-commer named Alphonse who turned out to be an undercover eurotophobe and a third cousin of the Unabomber. And it would be months before my father immerged from his self-immolated womb of Who’s The Boss? episodes and pity Twinkies from coworkers.

That afternoon, my brother found the cat buried under a very Ellis-esque NO EXIT sign across the street and I don’t want to tell you what it looked like.

We Always Managed to Have the Same Teachers

Carl didn’t see the piñata-bashing club as I cracked him with it on the back of his dome piece, knocking him out for a solid two minutes. And I didn’t see the two massive parental hands that grabbed me from behind and spanked my learing, chubby rump until I apologized to Carl, our non-offensively biracial god and the president. “Crappy birthday to you” is an understatement. Honey-bearded Jesus and George Bush 41 just kept staring at me from behind their picture frames on the plastic, Pine-Sol-colored mantel, and I wouldn’t be getting my new Super Nintendo until the following year, when the only thing anyone really wanted to play with were Stretch Saddam dolls and Branch Davidian Big Wheels. But I would be seeing a lot more of Carl. Until the next time he touched me where it smelled funny.

Fascist-Dogma-Nectar Overflow

Know that it’s not cool to jump off a Subway restaurant. It just isn’t. My brother was neither holy nor insane, so I can’t tell you why he did it.

“I am an IED and this Walmart life is a short fucking fizzle,” was all he kept shouting down to the security guards and latex-gloved sandwich artists waiting to catch him.

Fearing that the slip-of-tongue might cause some friction with a minor fast food butt buddy (and more importantly, a possible decline in sales in the Global Regression aisle), Walmart decided to sue the entire town for malicious suburban redundancy.

We thought we had a pretty decent case until they brought in the Disney lawyers, who immediately started handing out 10-percent-off passes to Space Mountain to the judge, the non-Hispanic members of the jury, and every third octogenarian who promised to buy a Five Dollar Foot-long. That’s when we knew they’d take everything.

Now my brother can’t go to the U2 concert next week because he doesn’t have eyes anymore. None of us do. Just old, raw sockets. It really isn’t cool.

PTSD Is So 2005

Oprah agreed on a fair way to decide initiation, which involves two closed fists and pretending your grandmother’s in the room. The compromise proved to be a big ratings boost in most major markets (except, of course, in Kandahar) and was rated as favorable by almost every viable demographic besides panty-sniffing Japanese stock brokers vacationing in Haiti and bomb-sniffing dogs out on recon.

Honestly, I think it made most people feel a little better about the future: vapid suit-herders could still meditate under clouds of dharma-jizz in obese central-air pumping boxes, highways would still shimmer in the hot afternoons and block complete glimpses of fields, bizarre tension vibes and unprovoked assaults would still be the two most sought-after traits of every washed-up child actor.

My brother came home in August with half a femur and a pull-one-over-on-you Midwestern drawl he got from watching too many John Hughes movies in the hospital. Maybe that’s why nobody argued when he stopped taking his Ambiens and started stashing them away for what we assumed would be one heck of an Alive Day party the following year.

“The least coolest person on TV is more interesting than anyone I know,” he told me while I sponged him down for the last time, his Budweisers raised above the tub like night goggles.

GAME OF THRONES SEASON 2 EPISODE 8 RECAP

I LOVE TODDLERS & TIARAS

No, you can't buy a T. That's a different game.

Thursday by Chad Redden

plain wrap press

release: May 2012

58 pages

If you’ve gotten down with plain wrap press, you’ve probably read Janey Smith’s Animals, and if you’ve gotten down with Animals’ aesthetic, you probably like what plain wrap does. And if you still need convincing (which, let’s be honest, is kind of silly), these very same people have been kind enough to give us another small, simple nugget of sad radness, Chad Redden’s Thursday. Less prosey but no less ballsy than its press’s predecessor, the book is a careful, quiet meditation on memory deterioration, companionship, and time-as-revolving-door-being-pushed-by-a-metal-armed-figure-in-black, not to mention Scrabble and the possibility of a shyster of a husband or non-husband named Omar (“Do you have an S and an N? / If you do, / you can spell Sonar. / S-O-N-A-R”). There’s Margaret, for whom every day is a Thursday, which might not sound like such a bad proposition, except when she starts un-thinking a whole mess of other things until her visitor has to prove, once again, “I’m not Johnny Cash / even though I wear black.” Redden (of NAP fame) orchestrates an unassuming fill-in-the-blanks wordscape of Alzheimer’s-brittle verse that builds and rebuilds at a board game’s pace, all the more eerie and powerful because of what those gathering blanks signify. Certain sections where there’s just “THURSDAY” followed by an empty page are more devastating than most of the poetry I’ve read this year. But alongside the potentially frightening realization of what’s going on, there exists a constant and patient tenderness hovering within the text and in the spaces between it. Because empathy’s great, right, both on the level of, I want to keep you and what’s left of your fragmented consciousness as alive as possible, or sometimes it’s just cool when someone’s nice enough to care about the little things: “I can’t remember what / you said the crows meant.” They probably meant you should pick up Thursday. Well, not really. But you should.

so slow to find the good stuff but I found this

Kill For Love by Chromatics

Label: Italians Do It Better

Release: March 26, 2012



I’m going to preface this by admitting that I know next to nothing about Chromatic’s previous oeuvre except for a couple songs, like the excellent “Hands In The Dark,” so I’m no expert on the Portland band’s progression to get to where they’ve gotten on their latest album, Kill For Love. What I do know is that this album is fucking awesome, which is a word that gets overused to death but the first gut feeling that comes to mind when I think of this collection of sounds really is awe (and indigestion from the Spicy McChicken I just ate). If “ominously joyous” is an oxymoron then fuck you because that’s the current running through Kill For Love like said McChicken through me. Relentless beats that, refreshingly, aren’t in-your-face electronica, lush and spooktacular keyboard arrangements, gritty guitar sparks, pop-adelically obscured vocals of both the feminine and masculine persuasion. Stuff for going out and looking at people, before bed quiet time, during bed loud time, hangover cures in a dark cave. Anti-anthems like the title track and “Back from the Grave” sound like clever Cure/Human League/New Order/Crystal Castles/David Byrne-on-Percocet mash-up records. Which means: wow. Fuzzy instrumentals like “Broken Mirrors” and “There’s a Light Out on the Horizon” are testaments to better and darker adventures than you’ve ever had with people you wish you could meet. The album’s best song, “These Streets Will Never Look the Same,” (perfect for driving to a keg party in a sparsely populated forest region) represents one of the few acceptable uses of Auto-Tune in recorded history. And I know I mention David Bowie in every post but there are more than a few hints of The White Duke lurking like a coked-out specter on the fringe of the tracks, especially the sanguineous “A Matter of Time,” which doesn’t really sound like David Bowie at all. I guess all I’m trying to say is do yourself a favor and check Chromatics out. And if you see me nodding at you on the Subway, it’s not because I’m acknowledging your presence as a distinct, hardworking and respectable member of society, it’s because I’m jamming out to “Lady” and trying desperately to free myself from the confines of the banal, joyless world you call home. Also, there’s a pretty sweet Neil Young cover.