the drugged snowdrift, a seed germinates in a decomposing log

A personality is starting to form, germinating in primordial reflexes like a seedling germinating in a decomposing log. Yesterday morning, after a particularly frustrated night of crying, you failed to grab my face and crumple it in your tiny hand like tinfoil, or whatever infant plan had shaped in your nascent frontal lobe. A freakout. Two minutes later you reached out and touched my face, then did it again. You have abandoned the fencer's reflex, a feat which even surprised you, two infant arms flexed like a miniature version of the incredible hulk on some miniature rampage. Your face changes with each development. Your eyes are not the puffy, almond-shaped orbs they were previously. Fifteen days ago, one of your moods would last a mere second or less, now, you can stay pissed off for five minutes or more if you really put your mind to it. You have two interests-breastfeeding, real and imaginary, and being swung around under the light of a dim edison bulb to the music of Tool or White Zombie. You have made it clear that the heavier part of the burden is to fall on your mother, and you scream in protest when any attempt to correct this inequity is imposed upon you. Still, I enjoy my late nights dancing to Tool, Kyuss, and whatever else Pandora.com finds for us though it leaves me feeling drugged all the rest of the day.

In other developments, the ice ages have returned to Chicago, sadly missing the imperial mammoth. I remember a science fiction story, read as an adolescent, where subterranean cities of future Americans waited out the ice ages in isolation from the rest of the world, tunneling beneath the earth and powering their operations with nuclear reactors. Frost inches up the second story window. Snowdrifts. A white apocalypse out there. The hairless cat snuggles with the turtle near the radiator.

Enjoying the perpetual terror of an infant faced with a horrible planet full of abominations

Its true. The infant is perpetually horrified at this big vast ocean of a place. It is the sort of world where a ceiling bulb can become god, the sublime strains of Bathory played for an infant twenty nine hours out of the womb, but sung to her the night before to keep the noise of a strange place constant with that cramped paradise that came before. How much of it do you still remember, Ruby? You do that thing with your mouth that you must have done in the womb, though less and less as the time goes on. How much do you dream of it nowadays, a week out of the place? Is it like visiting a strange country where a person dreams of home for the first few days, but then, home is the illusion of memory and here is whatever new place has imposed itself upon a person. You rule my life yet you are driven by impuse.....a clock, a creature not in touch yet with its own physiological needs. This charming selfish personality of yours will vanish like a coat of primer under a finish, but it will still be there for the rest of your life keeping you alive on your own.

more baby pictures

uby

This is probably the best pic we have of Ruby

We took this one in the hospital yesterday, getting ready to bring Ruby home. To me, she resembles her mom. Perhaps, she expresses a few of her father's alleles in the shape of her nose. Her knees remind me of her mom's..the shape is characteristic. A full head of hair, enough for a "hairstyle", pearly dark blue eyes. The appropriate fingers and toes. Alert from the moment of leaving the birth canal, probably before. She focused on my face 3 minutes after leaving the birth canal...and has spent the last couple of days running infant survival programs, forcing me to stare into her face (or she cries) so that we can memorize each other's features. Crying when she is put down, so that we do not leave her where predators can get her. She demands food constantly, and stimulation frequently, at night, everything we can provide, given that most of her homeostatic mechanisms are barely online, and her cortex has not wired itself to process much of what she sees.

WELCOME TO EARTH, RUBY

So, maybe it was one of the promises I made the other day, because you are here, Ruby. About the time I was goofing around with those posts, I get a call from your mom, "wondering when I am gonna be home from work"....this was directed wondering, I could sense it, so I cut things short and came home. As soon as I get there, Jan says "keep your shoes on, we're going out somewhere...anywhere..the bookstore. Ruby is coming." We figured that a little walking around would get things started. A few books, some caffeine for me, some fancy dinner, and 60 or 70 contractions later, our friend, Terri is over at the house and you are on your way...or so we thought. Things petered out Tuesday evening, after hours of intense prodromal labor.

We go to bed the next night, and I am imagining that you are still two weeks away. Nah. At 3.30 you wake Jan with the real deal. It is cold out, I drink coffee and call people...wake them up in the middle of the night. Soon, we are checked into the alternative birthing center, Terri is there with advice and back rubs, the midwife arrives, cheerful and stoked...woken up early. We check into the hospital at 4:30. By 9, we figure you must be close. Nope. The cervix is about where it was on Tuesday. It stays that way ALL DAY, till 3 or 4. By then, everybody is tired, and we are wondering what to do...the contractions will not stop, and you are not coming. The midwife and Terri try their goofy tricks, while I go home to feed the cats, so that my skepticism about goofy midwife tricks does not play a part in hampering them (homeopathic medicine actually stopped the contractions on Tues...I do not believe in any medicine that supposedly always does the right thing, that is impossible). I come back, and the contractions are INTENSE, like they are supposed to be. Their goofy tricks worked. I am impressed. There is some real drama here, because this was the point where they would have used pitosin, probably an epidural, all kinds of stuff. Jan was committed to a natural birth for you.

How committed? I remember cold washrag after cold washrag, every conceivable birth position, three trips to the bathtub.....more washrags, the birth ball, hands and knees, legs up in the air, on your side. We were holding our tongues about how bummed we were....at 9 only a little farther..but you had moved. They take a big risk and break your water...more your mom's idea than anyone else's...she researched everything about labor and delivery. At that point, you mom starts forcing you out, and gets REALLY TIRED. At some point around 10.30, I remember the midwife checking her, screaming "Oh MY GOD, We're gonna have this BABY!". You were finally committed to coming. Hours of pushing. Your head starts cresting at 11:30. Jan is exhausted..but she has totally taken over, really, nobody gives her any advice anymore, except when the midwife had her lay on her back to get your head over the pubic bone a little earlier. I was expecting you at midnight. I kept checking Terri's watch. Terri never flagged, was always encouraging, and always had water for your mom. Which is good. I held your mom's hand as they finally got you out of there. It was about six or eight minutes after midnight when you came out.

You looked "animatronic", "undead", "monstrous", the perfect grey baby, with an improbably short, Clive-Barkeresque grey umbilical cord.

I cut it. They let me hold you. You gurgle bubbles between cries, trying to get the knack of breathing air. Then, you get quiet and stare at me relentlessly, while the color comes to your face. That shot of me on this page was taken pretty close to then.

Turns out, your mom took a calculated risk in getting you out..she pushed like hell, and tore herself...because she knew she had only so much energy left. She is recovering from them now, on the couch, watching Freeway and feeding you. They made us stay in the hospital for a while. I slept on an uncomfortable couch and, at night when you want to PLAY, I sang Bathory songs to you and jiggled you to those Viking Metal bass lines. The cats at home were wondering where we are. In the middle of labor, Jan made me promise to buy her sushi the next day. I brought her sushi in the hospital, which is good, because the food was improbably bad...and delivered at unexpected times.

Now, you are home. Yesterday, they let you out. We were exhausted because you have adjusted our sleep cycles...and Jan STILL needs a good night's sleep she will not get for months. I try to help her on this, walking you around at night and dancing with you to Psyklon 9 and The Sword. Turns out, you DO like metal.

Welcome to this world, baby.

lizard men

I wasted my adolescence playing Dungeons and Dragons. Seriously. I played some Traveler, some Space Opera, some Gamma World, even some Paranoia, Toon, and Call of Cthulu, but mostly it was DnD, sucking my time, giving me a reason not to hang out near the 7-11 pay phone, smoking a cigarette, trying to look cool, joining a punk band, trying to get laid. Instead, I fought orcs, impaled paladins, befriended dragons, got disintegrated, built vast space empires. Looser. At the end of all of it, what I had to show for my time was a set of amazing writing skills and an even more perverse imagination, along with the knowledge that a mummy could not hope to beat a vampire in hand to hand combat, that hell is ruled by archdevils, followed by dukes of hell, that antipaladins can turn clerics, that wraiths get their power from the negative material plane, and that geodesic is good for mapping countryside, but nothing beats good old grid graph paper for mapping underground labyrinths.

Here are some highlights from the time I wasted.

1) I first got a copy of the original DnD rules on a family vacation to Minneapolis. It wasn't the boxed set, just the rule book. I filled in the rest. I remember calling my sister an Ogre, but getting the pronunciation wrong. Still, grandma's house was boring, and now I had an excuse to draw one dungeon after another. I still use their notation for doors, cliffs, windows, and trap doors.

2) The first time I fought a skeleton, it had something like six hit points. I had a mace. I was first level. I barely won. I don't think I got too much farther in the dungeon than that. It was in Walnut Creek, CA, and a friend's friend was Dungeon Mastering. He left with the module, whatever it was. I must have been in sixth grade at the time.

3) Keep on the fucking borderlands. Hell. I dunno how many times I burned this thing down and killed everybody in it. Sometimes I had the help of the hobgoblins in the caves of chaos, sometimes not. Sometimes, we killed everything in those caves too. This keep had a way of repeating itself in every fantasy world I constructed...it was they way fantasy empires project power, by replicating this same keep and dropping it all over the map.

4) Riding through a halfling village, on a warhorse, cutting the little fuckers down with a morningstar, or burning their houses down with spells like Flame Strike. I had a predilection for evil clerics, something I can directly attribute to Thulsa Doom's character from Conan the Barbarian. The ones that lived underground, we gassed with spells like Stinking Cloud. We led the women and children away as slaves, in chains, to build a ziggaraut to my mighty power.

5) As an evil, 29th level cleric, we fought the Indian Diety, Ushas, Goddess of Dawn, and defeated her on her own turf, thus destroying her. I still feel guilty about this. She was an awesome goddess. I now realize that we cheated (she should have used her divine command power to completely destroy us...I think we made ourselves deaf or some dumb shit). I don't know how I ended up using clerical spells against another god, but it made sense at the time, even in Elysium. Seems like evil magic should not work there. We had some sort of infernal army helping us. It was like 4:00 AM when we did this, and we were cracked out on Jolt and chocolate chip cookies. Funny, dawn came anyway, in the real world. In my goofy fantasy world, of course, eternal night....EEEVILLL. Everything everywhere must have perished. Dumb cleric, no followers. I was DM and playing with a friend simultaneously, this is something like playing chess against one's self...goofy. That explains it. Seriously, I never see a sunrise nowadays without apologizing to her, or thanking her for making us think we won. Tenth grade, probably.

7) I usually DM'd. I came up with so many fantasy worlds, I could never keep them straight. I remember one scenario where I was breeding armies of undead from caged ghouls and human hostages fed to the ghouls. I would then turn the undead. Another evil cleric. Animate dead was the basis of my power for a hell of a long time. Best third level spell ever, even better than fireball is for magic users, if used properly. One need never to fight opponents again, ZOMBIES do that for you now. Fuck having a thief around to check for traps, let ZOMBIES go first....and hundreds of zombies, led by some fuckwad on a warhorse, is a good time. Hell yeah.

8) I had this campaign with ultra powerful player characters. They were at about 24th level. I translated the book of Revalations into DnD format and ended the fucking world. It was awesome. Early on, they had to keep rolling on the random disease table (yes, there is one in the Dungeon Masters Guide, first edition) for the ailments they got from god, then trying to heal themselves. Somehow, the pagan gods they worshiped still had some modicum of power. There were armies of undead led by a badass antichrist....a big lion-headed beast that breathed sulfur. The PCs knocked those things down, no problem. More monsters though, and earthquakes....I think most of them got wasted before the end. A couple ended up in the lake of fire, tormented eternally. Good job.

9) My friend Rolf was a killer DM. Tomb of Horrors was the perfect module to fuck with me. I think we all died. I was a total pussy about it when my were-rat thief crawled into that fucking sphere of annihilation and disintegrated. I still think that cover is a shitty thing to do...you can clearly see them FIGHTING a lich. Instead, you get this crappy demilitch that is indestructible, and devours your souls forever...it was a total killer dungeon. At the time I was pissed, now KNOW why Gary Gygax wrote it, from the daughter of a woman that played with him all the time. HE DID write it to kill characters, he wrote it to kill her, specifically. This was the same woman who invented the rust monster, by the way. Figures, doesn't it? You DnD fans out there, your most memorable, miserable DnD experience resulted from a personal vendetta. Wouldn't have it any other way, now. Sometimes you are just fucked.


10) THANK YOU, ex wife, for the few times I got laid BECAUSE of DnD. Great times.

Dear Ruby

Dear Ruby,
It is your official due date, and I am waiting here for you. I can guarantee you that this planet has snow, the kind that requires a snow-suit, for making snow-angels. Soon, it will have rain, and sunflowers, and ice cream. It has fossils. It lacks Titanotheres, sorry, but it is well-stocked with arthropods. I promise to lay off on the loud death metal until I think you can handle it...you are more likely to hear Joanna Newsome and Tangerine dream early on. We have three freak cats for you to meet, and a little bassinet with a sheepskin. We have tiny socks for you.

see you soon.

this is horrible

this is, indeed, horrible. going back to a blog is like going back to an AA meeting after a month long drinking binge. arrrghhhh....feels better already. it was a failure caused by high expectations...i did not want to just blog ANYTHING....it had to be "good", whatever that is. meanwhile, we have watched the entire structure of finance collapse, a titan with clay feet falling over into the desert, crushing thousands of us under its bulk as it shatters, more to perish because the angered gods will cause economic drought and wilting. meanwhile, my daughter is locked and loaded, the miscreant kicking every time the mother eats a cheesburger. i will probably look back on this as a simple, happy time, but in fact i have a headache nearly always and find myself perpetually distracted, nonproductive in a very banal way. it is all about that collapsing colossus....i enjoy seeing it topple, but here i am, wanting to shore it up with a scaffolding of bamboo, because i am underneath it like everybody else. meanwhile, fish swim free out there in the north pacific, and color-changing squid. jupiter is unaffected. i have just realized that it is absolutely impossible to ever know the answer to the life after death riddle, because to die is to stop being capable of knowing anything, any person who dies is effectively insulated from the knowledge that the game is over. nor horrible, just a fact of existence.

The Tower

The thing rattles its cage it is a man it is a beast it is captive it is godlike. Black clouds gather, lightning, the vanguard of rain, crackles and illuminates through the cold cold window, its bars polished by centuries of clutching hands. In the city below, this tower can be seen from all points, a stone archolith, a black spire, stabbing the heavens, a spike held to the neck of pagan gods who crafted the earth out of venom so long ago. Gold coins fall into a wooden box. Far to heavy to carry, the treasure box sits along a row of such boxes in a deep vault, torch lit, location secret. One box for gold, one for silver, six for copper, nine for tin, bronze and the lesser metals. Even here, in the bowels of the black tower, gusts of wind from the north cause dust to rise in spiral eddies, torch flames bending and bending back again. More coins. A bony hand holds a particularly ancient one in its grip, admiring its age. It is from the time of heirophant Merovik, sixteen centuries ago, the face of the dead autocrat depicted in profile in its gold. In those times there was a second tower, and a third, one for each eye in the face of the true god. Coins drop. Cage rattles. The first downpour of rain starts suddenly.

They Are Called Arachnoids

The surface of Venus, dark under an impossibly thick cloudscape, nightmarishly hot, and dry as a bone under sulfur clouds and atmospheric pressure so intense the air ripples with every shudder of the air mass upon air mass nowhere for the heat to go. The crust seems solid but it is not, so hot it does not break into continental plates like our Earthly foothold instead the plumes make their way to the surface as vast and horrible bubbles, calderas of molten lava they rise to the surface melting the landscape and cracking it like pudding on a pot, bubble bursting and filling with lava, from space the affair recalls two dimensional spiders in some horrible web.
They tell me that meteors, falling to earth, one it was in Indonesia I think that killed a dog..five billion years in space before that dog existed and it nails the canine on the head with perfect accuracy it could happen to each and every one of us and we should live our lives knowing it. Those meteors have diamonds in them, tiny, and older than the solar system, made as the shockwave of an ancient supernova passed through its upper atmosphere millions of miles distant, debris of which precipitates the collapse of yet another starfield another sun another two dozen one, our own, adrift in the galaxy we shall never know which stars share a common origin with us.
Once again, I contemplate every lifeless globe out there unsung and beautiful never-to-be-observed and long for some dimension x, solids of which have already been described floating along the plane of imaginary numbers.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Lonely out in space, this vast starfield a shroud, woven of nebulae, wracked with cosmic rays, nurturing a million rocky orbs. A vast sea, dark as pitch except the occasional flash of lightning, warm clouds above, deck after deck of them, flecked with volcanic ash. Elsewhere, an icy orb, crystal lattice after crystal lattice left over from ancient volcanism, domes collapse and broken shards litter the landscape like a brawl between titans in some colossal glassware shop. Still farther and there are nothing but radiation clouds, lethal to some, nourishing to others, a neutron star at the center of them, degenerate matter so tightly compressed that time on the surface crawls and creeps a million ticks of the clock elsewhere to one subtle click of the second hand, were it even possible, on a surface that crushes matter into a single, vast and complicated, matrix of woven strings.
I long to be back home, clouds purring over an urbanized landscape, the sussurus of cricket calls at night, hot chocolate and donuts in the morning, meetings and late trains. Life and death, not annihilation and cataclysm.

Jupiter

We just watched mighty Jupiter, globe vast and dusky spinning fleet every ten hours a revolution, it crawled up the edge of a mighty scaffolding, like some Ptolemeic fluke the firmament was committed to measurement and mighty Jupiter raced like a pony. Or was it us that was moving, as you kept saying just as Jove spins earth spins likewise, but slower, and so much less to spin you could cram hundreds of our world in its cloud deck like bowling balls bouncing around the tilt a whirl at an amusement park all these rocky orbs in coplanar orbits not inevitable just luck because our star condensed the right way to produce a pleasant series of ellipse.

Jupiter, you could have eaten us, long ago, when the solar system was a few hundred million years old and accretional friction from all those tiny chunks of rock and planet you swallowed added up to braking and tighter orbits and thank god you ran out of things to eat on the way. It stopped you. And here we both are. Thank you Jupiter for all the deadly asteroids you have swallowed up over the years, bolides that could have smashed into the earth. I am sorry i never made it to the planetarium when you were eating Shoemacher Levy, it was a show, but I was going through an ugly breakup at the time. Still, getting out of the house would have done me good and there is nothing like astronomy to make a person wonder about things. Like bikinis. I am brutish and savage, a product of mammalian evolution and scratch me, yes, do it, you will feel the ape beneath the flesh, evolved from nucleic acid and opportunistic ontogeny, selfish dna and unselfish, slaughter and nurture, till neuron meet neuron and there we are, both on the balcony watching the sunset marveling at the tons of steel, iron forged in the heart of a red giant and carbon most likely cycled through a million cycads and jawless fish on the way to its status as a railing, protecting the both of us from some final oblivion. It is a shame that we only get to know so much.

is entropy finite?

Why should I be forced to sit around waiting for protons to decay? For entropy to destroy my living room? For my hair to get messed up again? For the great caterpillars of the earth to come out from their secret mines, devouring every thing in sight and leaving in their wake a silky web of entropy? Tell me this, space tyrant, demon consort, "thing" that sits at the end of time waiting for reality to munch itself into a vortex of black holes and subatomic particles: if times arrow is clinically reversed, does that mean order increases with every possible transaction, or at least, Gibbs free energy is reduced every time I refuse a stick of gum or throw a meter in the backwards parking meter. This is happening right now, I can tell. Another copy of me is rushing backward in time to that parking meter I leaned against, high on LSD, in the wake of a rainstorm, as a nice lady needed to use it. She was actually disgusted with the hippies on the street. There was a newspaper vendor playing Indian music and this happens just before, or just after, that parking meter, depending upon the entropy thing. Is there a finite amount of disorder? Is entropy finite? Does that mean that the universe will "finish" itself some day?

left him for dead

A crazy person attacked me today. Accused me of being a Satanic Motherfucker. Beat him senseless. Left him for dead. OK...maybe I escaped his, surprisingly strong, grasp and backed away from his insults. Called cops. Got the fucker arrested. Note to self, a random crazy person is MUCH stronger than I generally assume him/her to be.

Goodbye Mathemetician

Mathemetician uncle. I am sorry I did not go fishing with you, five years ago I was tired from a road trip and you were a lot to handle one on one. A genius. A giant. A speaker of fifteen languages. A topologist. An expert in set theory. I could not work my way through the abstracts of your papers, in fact, the titles were a mystery to me. You travelled the world. You grew up on a ranch and branded cattle. You smoked menthol cigarettes, and I like to think that somehow, in another cosmos parallel to this one, an undying aspect of you is still sitting at the Satire, in Denver, with a menthol cigarette in one hand and a self-satisfied grin on its face. Your face. Jack, I will miss you.

the dark espresso of aether

Late August again, frogs in the trees, katydids too, gryllus on the ground, click click click chirrrrrip chirrrrup chirp chirp some more, overlapping cries of wanton passion, they make the darkness deep and this moment meaningful. They all are. The moments. The insects. There is no way to save them, the crickets will soon be gone, their eggs under the soil the frogs overwintering somewhere soft and muddy. August slides into September, the smell of new textbooks and the sudden appearance of friends, from every corner of the Earth, with stories to tell of time misspent, drugs done, lovers conquered, pets fed. Life, like the foam on a cappuccino so insubstantial so translucent over wonderful power in the deep. These moments I can almost, abetted by the crickets, see through the foam, to the black, the endless espresso dark spine of the universe that unites us all in caffeine, like cave fish, like black monkeys, like deep sea fish...

Why We Fight

We fight because we have forgotten not to. We fight because we drink coffee. We fight because the bastards are stupid and we can see through their schemes. We fight because they can make us loose but we can make it so they cannot win. We fight because we like it. We fight because the anger keeps us alive. We fight because we can make it difficult for everyone. We fight because of love. We fight because of hatred. We fight over ideas. We fight over beliefs. We fight for some kind of vision. We fight because the struggle between us and them is eternal. We fight because Giordani Bruno burned at the stake and we fight because a million others have stood up to dictators. We fight because their Jesus is bullshit. We fight because our president is a fool. We fight because the world is wasting its resources. We fight because humanity needs us. We fight because humanity can endure, somehow, whether we win or not. We fight because winning means everything for the future. We fight because we can raise hell.

Every Person in the MIdwest Should Be Forced to Eat Burgers at Kumas Corner: A Culinary Review by Psyko Butcher

If you do not eat here on at least a semi-regular basis, you will be killed.

Bray Road and the Beast

Werewolf hunting started slow traffic and no music in the car. Two couples, arranged to be optimal for horror movie scenarios, as evidenced by House of a Thousand Corpses and Kalifornia, among many others, one of the woman was pregnant, adding to the horror possibilities. Soundtrack a disappointment, took the Literature Professor's car and with a car come certain rules, a shame, it had a 6 CD disk changer and Ozzy Osbourne would have hurt nobody. Beloit came easy, only two hours into the driving, shaggy-haired man who teaches school, but under the placid exterior, a beer-drinking badass armed to the hilt and the closest we could get to the Punisher. An old house full of young cats, beer on the side porch, a small city dying of its own obsolescence, a trip to a bar called the mouse, where harsh language is forbidden. I broke the rule, immediately, with the word "Pussy", unable to get it in my head that, when referring to a glass poured half full to avoid intoxication, this is still a bad word. People who believe in bad words puzzle me. Still, at the mouse, a person can be thrown out at the slightest utterance of profanity. What I find vexing, particular, interesting, and indicating a certain degree of hubris on the part of the establishment owners, is that nowhere is there a sign posted indicating "no profanity". Their chicken and dumplings were designed and formulated to nourish the working class it was here I consumed the largest dumpling I have ever seen, in truth, half went uneaten. The badass lives in a green household his bipolar wife home schools their children they fight and stab each other and make up and are genuinely suited for each other. I once saw the badass kill a man with a number two pencil.
Onward, to Whitewater, a bed and breakfast run by old people who do not understand bohemia or goatees but were charmed that there was a wool spinner on the team and somehow forgave me my metaldom. It was so quiet there that a pin dropping to the floor would have elicited numerous comments on timbre and such, and the insect noises on a cool night were virtually deafening. Victorian houses need LSD and windows that open, neither of which we had, but it was my first bed and breakfast since CA and my sisters wedding and it was so restfull I could barely keep from falling asleep as I walked in the door of the place. At night, we pulled ourselves out of dreamspace and horror novels and books about the Amish for a long drive around a swamp looking for a particular place a werewolf may or may not bee. The iconoclast who loves werewolves had a theory that the Bray road beast inhabits swamps, so a scary drive at night was in order. Then sleep. Then wakefullness, and mystery pancakes, and a lovely moment on the front porch, the first indication of autumn coming....then driving, to a flea market and looking at oddities that give places rusticity. Rusticity, for sale everywhere, including a charming sign that featured a curvy woman in a vintage bathing suit, it read "The may look beautiful, but SOMEONE SOMEWHERE is SICK of DEALING with HER SHIT."
Elkhorn. Not as put-together as Whitewater, brimming with a university, or as beat as Beloit, brimming with a university the locals find alienating, a place of farm implements. Nearby Duvalle, a place of Mexican food and cemeteries, our lost Iconoclast, seeking the wolf, never could find her way especially in the presence of a navigator, but we loved the way she would dead end us in cemeteries. Old graves everywhere, stillness. Surrounded by ghosts so palpable they left circus traces everywhere. Note...when searching out werewolves, do not miss an opportunity to be eaten by Zombies. Bray road, finally, after many detours and another visit to a swamp that was not there. nnnnnnnnoooooooooooo.

Death Metal Baby

This one sketches her mother out, but I love it. Ruby Dalia Genevieve Midnight Morel Molumby (the extra middle names are to predispose her to be goth, or artsy, or affected, or confused...why stop at one middle name?) looks very death metal here.

Anguish

Forty Thousand Years in Space

I reposted my crazy magnum opus, Forty Thousand Years in Space, on the molumbia page

Halictids

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These are two halictid bees from Oak Park, IL, taken by my former field assistant, Marcus Thomasson. The one on the top is Laisoglossum sp., a halictid bee which builds nests in underground tunnels, dug in sand. Most species are social, though some are solitary. Females work together to build a nest in spring, and one of them bullies the other into submission. Their offspring are born, destined to be workers, of sorts. Twenty or thirty bees is large for a Laisoglossum colony. The one on the bottom is Sphecodes sp. It is a parasite, laying its eggs in Laisoglossum cells (I do not know how host specific they are, presumably, Evylaeus, Halictus confusus, or anything similar will do). The females emerge in the spring, with the would-be queens of Laisoglossum, and seek unwary hosts.

Babies should not be permitted to defile the sanctity of my repast

Babies, their Locustlike Omnipresence, and Why they Should Not Be Permitted to Defile the Sanctity of My Repast

A Culinary Review of Maya Del Sol, by PsyCHO ButCHER

Oak Park. Earnest Hemingway called it the city of broad lawns and narrow minds, and despite their unflagging liberalism, this continues to be the case today. Liberals often fail to see how they can be narrow-minded, always assured that they are completely correct in their beliefs, and thus, having arrived at their narrow-minded opinions through the best of intentions, recontextualize their mental arthritis as a perverse virtue. Oak Park is the sort of place people are scowled at for not recycling plastic by housewives who commit far greater sins to the planet by their overconsumption of gasoline for their mini van. It is a safe, reasonable, and banal place to grow up-and thus, it produces a profusion of babies. Babies should not be allowed in restaurants unless their owners have given the other patrons of the restaurant to discipline the child for its misbehavior, with sharp knives, if necessary. My rhythm guitarist, a female, assures me that crying babies result from a failure of parents to apply a program of operant conditioning on their hellspawn. Children who eat cocoa puffs in front of the TV, with a plastic spoon and a sippi cup, are so overstimulated at meals, and so unused to sitting still, that in every restaurant they must run around with a fish stick in their hand or face the angst of a life spend in the waning days of a great civilization, with doom on every horizon. Our children know it is their fate to suffer for our collective sins. They hate us for it. Thus, they cry.
Maya Del Sol is the most promising restaurant to spring up in this culinary wasteland for a great span of time. Usually, Oak Parkers, mild in their dispositions, fail to recognize good food when they encounter it. Oak Parkers mistake snootiness for good food. Their suburban lives have given them so few experiences by which to judge anything, every piece of shoe leather served on the right table setting passes for fine cuisine. Maya Del Sol is a Latin Fusion restaurant, meaning that the chef has license to serve up food from anywhere on the globe that Che Guevera would have sought to convert to communism. This, generally speaking, is a good idea. The empanadas we ate, though wrapped curiously in spring roll wrappers, were presentable. Their salsa verde was truly incredible, curiously, served with an unpalatable alternate that tasted like Campbell's tomato soup out of the can. The Tilapia tacos I had were decadent, extraordinary, apocalyptic in their glory. Best since Mas, on Division street.
I recommend this place. Knock over a stroller on your way in.

the larva, in its first instar

So, here she is, the larva that we seem to have generated. For those of you not completely familiar with our own, strange species, humans have internal fertilization and prolonged incubation of what, were we a member of a more normal species, (class insecta, for instance) would be a first or second instar larva. I included an image of a Philianthis sp. larva, a bee-hunting wasp, for comparison.

We, somewhat lovingly, refer to her as "the parasite' because she drains resources from her mother via a big suckerlike appendage called a "placenta". Not a parasite in the ecological sense, of course, we anticipate an increase in Darwinian fitness. I already like her, in fact, she demands sushi and sleeps a lot, likes music and wakes up early in the morning.

Dear Ruby

Dear Ruby,

I am sorry we pissed you off with the ultrasound yesterday. It was obvious that it annoyed you because you kept slipping trying to slip away from it, to hide under a liver, a kidney, whatever. I wish the technician had captured the exact moment you gave us the finger. Through the amniotic fluid, it was clear as day....wrong finger, by the way, I will teach you to do it right someday, hopefully. You like Jan's new guitar a great deal, we can tell by the way that it wakes you up and causes you to flutter and move about. This was a very different kind of sound.
I am cursed with the knowledge of all the terrible things that can go wrong in human development, and the whole time, I was looking for telltale signs of something wrong, but my untrained eye saw nothing of the sort. Your heart is mammalian by now, your cranium is quite human, you have a spinal column, legs, lips, eyes, a visage. You sleep a lot.
I am starting to think of you by your human name, not Oblivia, forgetfullness, but Ruby, a girl destined to wear a pink tutu or to color on walls, to like dinosaurs or to want to be a princess, to own a goldfish or to decapitate barbies, or to want her barbies PERFECT, undecapitated. I feel I have met you before, we both know this, because of a dream I had years ago. This is druggie metaphysics, I know, but your gender seems to confirm that you are, in some sense, the same person I shared a three hour conversation with, in this lab room, caught between one reality and the next, between one time frame and another. The name is a perfect synthesis of your mom's and my thinking. A gemstone, yes, but countrified and ungenteel. Part of the natural world, yes, and adrift in honkeytonk energies. Ruby.

Sun

Somewhere, near the sun, in an orbit so tight it would be virtually impossible to see it because of the stunning glare of solar plumes, is the planet Vulcan, interior to Mercury, in the Vulcan zone. If it is not there, it should be.....the same way palm trees should be visible out my window and the smell of the ocean would be very welcome. Still, this is a wonderful turn of the Earth.

Light. As a feather. As a cinder. The brood cell is done, and I have stocked with a doll, a few clothes bearing skulls, a children's guide to Cthulu from an expert Demon.

Sparkles, like the sun off a tropical ocean, like LSD lights sending sunset remarks through closed blinds. Last year, about this time, the garden fragrant and fertile from Siva and Kali, decomposing everything, connecting me, human and mortal. A Sunflower Baphomet stared at us as we watched a candle burn and made wisecracks in a dark room, for hours.

This year, I urge to bury the city in sand just high enough to make people put out beach towels. I spy juvenile cardinals on the trees of our neighborhood and in our yard, clumsily foraging and making stupid decisions. Eumenid wasps have filled my drill holes with their own babies.

Sun. Old beast. Thank you.

NOthing In String THEORY PRECLUDES THE EXISTENCE OF THESE iTEMZ

Nothing in String Theory suggests that the following ITEMS do not exist:
Interdimensional subatomic wormholes: These entities spontaneously appear, and disappear, billions of times a second, carrying electrons from this part of the universe to distant parts of the universe. The net movement of electrons is zero, however, because we receive distant electrons as well. Since electrons are the same everywhere, the only real effect is to cause an intergalactic electric current of sorts.
Neural tube dilemmas: The neural tube of the human nervous system develops early in life, and involves the massive migration of cells inward from a layer of tissue on the top of the developing embryo. Anything that interferes with this process at the anterior end can cause a condition called anencephaly, literally, no brain. String theory says nothing about why this happens despite its claim to status as a theory of everything. Nothing in string theory predicts why neurons migrate the wrong way or developmental holes fail to close, however, it does happen, to unfortunate humans, causing much suffering. Damn string theory.
Vast Unknown. The vacuum. The void. The horror.
A great old one at the bottom of the ocean: It waits, in a city of noneuclidian geometry, dreaming, till a time when it will rise to the surface and anoint its followers with special powers. Since the mathematics of string theory are noneuclidian, they can be taken is weakly in support of, possibly even allied with, Cthulu.
Robot Sex. Though a simple understanding of biology, and evolution, can demonstrate that no nonliving entity can reproduce sexually in the sense that we understand it. Sex involves meiosis, and the transfer of genetic material from two individuals into a single genome. Robots have no genomes. Damn string theory.
Mxyztplik-This is the extradimensional enemy of Superman. He comes here, he causes trouble. For some reason known only to string theorists, if he is forced to say his name backwards, he must return to his own dimension.
Lawn Chairs. Damn string theory.

in the garden

hope reads the hourglass sees the sand thinks of ancient deserts midnight caravans the smell of mint tea under a sky full of celestial incandescence. it is here, lover, in the distant strangeness, that our eyes meet, under a blue veil of Tethyn brine, hexacorals bristling from reefs now long extinct, the habitat of Plesiosaurs, the breeding ground of sea turtles. hope sees a life folded within this life, a place where sunflowers grow and dew condenses on water glasses, a cosmos where perfume and envy mix with the rush of warm air currents creating and uncreating itself by seed, by mushroom and earthworm.
i see you in these places sometimes, starlight eyes and emerald crown, riding a pixie chariot pulled by atoms. you are with me then, a speck of ephemeral sunrise.

String theory predicts your extradimensional doom

Stole the gif from Terri Pilling, at NDSU......obsessively interested in string theory currently and enjoying the potential existence of Calabi-Yau structures embedded within this universe, at every conceivable point, as if they belong there. That is what those things are, undulating in that creepy manner.......there are an infinite number of them, at every conceivable point in space, because they are not really structures at all, just aspects of the dimensionality of the universe we are not able to observe directly......I am even more partial to the notion that this universe we currently observe is a "brane", a four dimensional slice of a larger, multidimensional reality which we cannot observe directly, but only through inference. In fact, both possibilities might actually be the case. Even better, and I am surprised at the timidity of string theorists, not timid in other respects, from proposing that there may be other time-like dimensions folded up into the small interstices of the spacetime we experience.

I think it promising that, before such a theory existed, adding stringy dimensions to normal, 3d physics produces interesting ways of explaining things we take for granted....like electromagnetic waves.... This was done by Kaluza in 1919 before anyone understood quantum mechanics....all Kaluza did was stick an extra dimension into reality, combined it with Einsteinean spacetime, and found that his model predicted Maxwell's electromagnetic waves. Oscar Klein was the person who first described what this extra dimension might look like. Imagine a dimension, perpendicular to the four dimensional timespace we inhabit, but small, so that any trip along this axis inevitably leads to the same place in a very short distance. All of us, or the subatomic particles within us, at least, move in this direction constantly. Trips in this direction cycle, though, they oscillate. Add more dimensions, you get the spaces described in the gif above.

I also like the idea that there are big, macroscopic dimensions, we are simply unable to sense. That is, of course, what people implicitly mean when they say "creature from another dimension". Such a creature would inhabit a universe parallel to our own, but removed along the axis of one of these invisible dimensions. Our entire physical universe, the spacetime we think about, can be though of as a plane, cutting through a larger solid. This creature's universe would be another such plane. If the planes intersect, you get a line. If two four dimensional timespaces intersect within a five dimensional solid, you get a three dimensional space at the intersection. This could be the entire universe, as the worlds pass through each other instantaneously, or a two dimensional field that exists for a duration. Through this field, terrible creatures could come and go, perhaps dragging human victims to their doom. But, could they exist here? Unless you tweak other elements of reality, physical laws should work the same there as they do here.

This could happen to you. Tonight. As you sleep. An interdimensional Hound of Tindalos could drag you, screaming, out of your bed, through a gate into a terrible world, never to be seen again. Nothing in string theory precludes such a thing, and, following the logical lead of all string theorists that they must be right because their ideas are cool, even in the absence of evidence, we must assume that this can and will happen. Tonight. Beware.

Space Gnomes

Gnomes are our enemies. Anyone who does not know this is dangerously deluded. Consider this: when was the last time a gnome did anything but steal your possessions and make you late for work? Space gnomes are particularly odious. One thing about space gnomes I will never understand is their objection to relativity.....both general relativity and special relativity piss them off, presumably because it interferes with their plans for interstellar dominion.

Here is a space gnome trick, repeatedly tried, to circumvent relativity. Gnome 1 departs from a stationary object, in deep space, with no other point of reference. Gnome 2 stays on the stationary object. Gnome 1 accelerates, reaches a speed of 95% the speed of light, stays at that speed for ten years, turns around, and returns after accelerating to 95% the speed of light in the other direction. Gnome 2 stays put. When gnome 1 returns to the stationary object, usually someone's yard, it talks shit about how the YARD was not stationary at all, and that to think of it as such violates the entire principal of relativity. There ARE no privileged frames of reference. AND YET, gnome 1 has aged many more years than gnome 1, enough time to drink a great deal of beer. Gnomes are assholes for even bringing this up. In fact, the garden is never stationary, it is moving with respect to the rest of the universe, whether the gnomes choose to observe stars, planets, silver surfers, or not. There is no such thing as a stationary object. So, why the fuck was it gnome 1 did all the aging? This REALLY happens to gnomes.
I finally get it, what gnomes do not understand when they gripe like that.
It is the acceleration, both ways, and the deceleration, all of it, that broke the symmetry between the gnomes. In fact there was no symmetry to begin with. Not in this case. The gnomes usually try a new trick after pulling this one.

The next trick is to go to very distant points, with respect to each other, using their long lifespans as an aid to space travel, then accelerate to a good fraction of the speed of light, and cruise past each other, not accelerating, so that their combined velocities are greater than the speed of light. They do this because relativity pisses them off and they are trying to fuck with it. This trick is never really satisfying though, because from the perspective of each gnome, the other is receding at less than the speed of light. The Lorentz contraction of space, in the direction of movement, and time dilation, make it so that, to each other, they are receding at just shy of the speed of light. They can add a third observer, gnome 3 to the mix, as a stationary point between them, and this third gnome sees them receding from each other at greater than the speed of light, but this is not a violation of relativity and all three gnomes know it.

I remember a time when two gnomes, in separate spacecraft, accelerated to 99% the speed of light, using an enormous amount of fuel. They cruised at the same rate, relative to each other, one of them trailing a bit, and turned on their headlights. Both were annoyed because the light was not blue-shifted at all, since both were not moving with respect to each other. They even tried using a mirror, the one in the front turning around and shining its headlights on the gnome in the back, who was holding a mirror. Nothing, because from their perspective, noting in particular was amiss, even though, from the perspective of the rest of the galaxy, as they cruised, clocks were running SLOWER both aboard the gnome ships, AND in every distant planet (not faster there unless they mess it up by turning around and accelerating home), also, everything aboard the ships was very short in the direction of motion, from the perspective of distant planets, and all the distant planets were squished really flat in the direction of their apparent recession away from the gnomes....but none of this was apparent to the gnomes on the ship, even though it was happening, and that pissed them off.

The truth is that relativity pisses off gnomes because they have a belief that there is one, single, center of the universe that is NOT part of cosmic expansion, that is totally still in the absolute sense, and that they can put a planet, and a nice green lawn there, and sit, unmoving, forever.

snowflakes

Slither slither smell the air..through the withered wood over treebranch and under henbane between stone after stone, like the world serpent swallowing its tail like an electron vibrating in an S orbital high above an atomic nucleus slither smell the air dance the survival rhythm sense the mouse sense the footfall fear the avian menace avoid open space at all costs avoid outer space with its vacuum energy and freezing temperatures cosmic rays and vastness stay snuggled up in the core of a lifeless asteroid under a pillow of plasma in the fractal geometry of methane snowflakes falling on a dark moon sun set another setting universe expanding always expanding and somehow the same size always a fragment of it experiencing itself somewhere typing done with coffee.

Quarks

Quarks. They come in flavors. The flavors are paired though, by color. UP pairs with DOWN-one color. CHARM pairs with STRANGE-another color. TOP Pairs with BOTTOM-a third color. Quarks have a spin of one half, which means if you rotate a quark half a turn, it is the same as it was before you started rotating. They are not physical objects though, and they do not actually rotate. These three colors actually stack by ontogeny. Top and Bottom are thousands of times heavier than Charm and Strange, and a thousand times more unstable. Likewise, Charm and Strange are heavier than Top and Bottom, and unstable. Each color of quark has a corresponding lepton, and a corresponding neutrino. There are electrons, muons, tauons. Muons, as you might guess, are heavy, tauons are alarmingly heavy...electrons are light. Every particle has an antiparticle. There are positrons, for instance. Everything arranges itself by color. A proton is composed of up and down quarks (two of one, one of the other), neutrons have the inverse (two down quarks, one up quark). This explains their charge, by the way, because an UP quark has a +2/3 charge, and a DOWN quark has a -2/3 charge. Three quarks together somehow invoke the existence of a massless gluon, like a photon, except they only exist within a proton, holding it together, forever, though it can switch to a neutron, by changing the status of one of the quarks. This process releases a neutrino. Neutrinos are massless too, by the way. They are not exactly within protons, but changes in quarks invoke their existence, to conserve angular momentum. You can make mesons out of two quarks, by the way, but mesons are not stable. I do not know what happens when mesons decay though, into gamma rays, neutrinos, and antineutrions, lone quarks are impossible for some fundamental reason, more like why you cannot have just the inside of a basketball without the outside, somewhere, rather than why you cannot have half a cat, which in fact, you can, but it decays into a dead cat quickly and bisected cat is not really half the whole. None of this stuff is either there, or not there, in the sense you might think, because there are an infinite number of virtual quarks, and virtual other particles, that do not exist at the moment, whose existence can be invoked by the right set of conditions...in coming into existence, energy is transferred into matter, the opposite of the destruction of matter that occurs when fission or fusion occur. You can make a hydrogen atom from two up quarks, and a down one, a gluon, and an electron. For good measure, throw in a neutron-a gluon and two downs plus an up. Now, if you really want to, you can replicate an age of matter that probably existed for a few hundred years after the big bang, or less, maby. Make mater out of strange and charm quarks, and surround it with muons. You could do it. You could even make matter out of top and bottom quarks. Surround it with tauons. This matter would be superheavy, superunstable. The quarks would decay into charm and strange, then the charm and strange would decay into up and down. It would be great while it lasted. In the end, matter, not antimatter. If there were no top and bottom, there would be no assymetry, and antimatter everywhere, colliding with matter, releasing gamma rays. In the end, no matter. But I am composed of both matter and energy as I type this. The math actually makes sense in five dimensions, spacetime and a fifth, strange and bounded and not infinite. Therefore, it is significant that top and bottom quarks once existed.
There are approximately 140 types of mesons. A meson has a quark and an antiquark. Two normal quarks will not stick together. You can make a meson, called a K meson, out of a strange quark and an anti-down quark. It is unstable, decaying into a pion. A D meson, by the way is composed of an anti-up and a charm. D mesons, apparently, can flip into an antimatter state, composed of up, and anticharm. Antimesons. Pions are the lightest mesons, the normalest ones, composed of up and antidown down quarks, or down and antiup (an antipion). No meson is really stable. They decay into neutrino plus antineutrino. Kaons are heavy and surprisingly stable, composed of strange and anti-up quarks. A very heavy one is the upsilon, a bottom quark and an antibottom.
This fifth dimensional space, which is bounded, has a top and a bottom, one spin is at the top, one spin is at the bottom, of this domain. Top and Bottom, Up and Down, Charm and Strange, opposing walls, opposite spins, of one half. In the middle, all hell breaks loose, matter is obscenely heavy and not real in the usual sense. You can flip through a dimension like this, but not really ever be there.
Spin, parity, and angular momentum, are conserved during all the flipping. They are the parameters within which the particles exist, and we only think we know the particles are there because we infer their existence from the rules.

The Morning of a Fierce Battle...My Thoughts

Listen to the drums in the distance. Skin stretched over bone of ancient beasts. Bronze shields reflecting the morning sunrise. The smoke of extinguished campfires. Our swords are sharp and our archers have the high ground. Elms sway in the distance. Earthworks have been built. Ready for battle. Their armies will come no closer to our homeland. Horses snort, their masters holding the reigns and speaking words into the beast ears of the nervous creatures.

In the distance, giants, their knees taller than the men they camp with. You can make out their crested helmets, their axes glint in the sun, the skulls of men strung around their necks like beads, a necklace, a warning. They are not immortal, though, giant, though they eat the flesh of men and drink beer by the keg instead of by the pint. An arrow between the eyes will kill one. On our side, we have witches, their black tresses falling to their shoulder, they pass one eye among them and take turns seeing, but with a word they can pronounce a giant dead, or a man, and the victim has no choice but to obey and die.

I fear one of them has put a charm on me because I cannot stop looking at her, her white shoulders, the curve of her hips, her strange and wonderful lips. Yet, where her eyes should be, there is nothing but smooth indentation. Sometimes, I dream of this creature and it is terrifying.

Horns blast. Dust clouds from a thousand hooves. The archers wait till the enemy cavalry is within range. The battle begins.

Doom

Doom. Under the weeping wood. In the gloom. In the darkness. In the cloudy twilight. The smell of sulfur-a finger pointing to another world, in the wisps and hollows, a volcanic spring. Strangeness. Nihil. Stillness. The nightbirds, their cries a forlorn compass, counting corners, marking time, circle like ghost ships. The nightmare visits, drops from the vine like an overripe plum. Abomination. Life reflected in its opposite-unlife. Nightshade. Atropine. Fire. Jimson Weed, its flowers open in the twilight of morning. Wolves cry in the distance. A stranger dies.

Apoidea

The day before yesterday, I identified a Halictus parallelus from WI. This is a social bee, though it lives in small colonies, not the metropolis hives of Apis, the honeybee. A lifelong beekeeper tells me that the reason Apis is getting so many diseases is that it never evolved to stay in the same place for year after year. Apis swarms at the drop of a feather in summer, and yesterday, Mr. Beekeeper was pulling a swarm off the cyclone fence. It escaped, a rare thing nowadays, feral bee colonies. My Halictus queen never got to found one. Sandy country out there in WI where I caught her, and hopefully her distant realatives are doing well. Six or eight workers, maybe more by now. It will all be over in August or Sept, the whole set of workers having spent their lives to produce a dozen or more queens and a similar number of males. Sand, not wax. Tunnels, not hives.
In my garden, Agapostemon viriscens, on my sunflower, and Megachile georgica. The first a beautiful green halictid bee, like halictus, but only quasisocial. They share nests as an incidental effect of their construction activities, and tolerate each other, but do not truly cooperate. I see big females and smaller ones though, a big one was foraging earlier this year, and I am beginning to conclude that this species leans toward eusociality. I read that eusociality, queens and workers, evolved over and over, and has been lost as many times, in that family, the halictids. Tattoo on my arm reads...I serve no queen. Entomology joke. Speaking of kinky, Megachile georgica practices bondage. The males have enlarged tibia to block the female's vision during mating. Another Megachile, Ashmeidella, very tiny, ID'd my first one only recently. Also, a strange parasite, probly torymid, from a trap nest I set out behind the greehouse. How the thing found a host, in Chicago, amid such uncertain surroundings, I cannot comprehend.

Summer Bee Update

Weird year for bees. Wet weather. Favors some and hinders others in a way I do not yet understand. Bees are complex in their population biology-always going extinct in one place and growing to abundance in another. There is a study of bees in Carlinville IL, the most famous bee study ever, in the late nineteenth century, by a man named Carson. There is a return study that concludes that, despite changes, most of the same bees are still there. In my yard, everything has speeded up to a ridiculous degree. Male Megachile georgica swarm and lek about ornamental sunflowers. Agapostemon viriscens, not early at all, but back from a long hiatus, forages there.

recent metalshows capsulereview

Lone Wolf and Cub: ......acceptable but fairly standard the wrong man was standing in the front at Reggie's it was a June Saturday and they sounded better from the outside-it is true that I am biased against them because of their name I never liked the comic and the films are something a friend keeps insisting i enjoy but i detest...they will evolve I am certain because the act was technically proficient yes. two screams and a skull.
Yakuza: was a total full on skullfuck of the first order, forcing bloodcurdling images of nuns impaled on pikes, strange frost-covered wastelands, the astral plane writhing with ghoulish faces and fire. The saxaphone fit nicely, despite my misgivings, the vocals were incredible, and the bassist should not leave the band, but he will. Same warm evening as above, more high, and wanting beer. Sixteen impaled nuns and a landscape strewn with bones, visionary.
Minsk: Synthesizers should front metal bands only if the person behind it is a hot chick or is in the process of taking a human life and neitherappliedhere....though the music is an incredible soundscape, strange visions and wastelands, eyes closed this was an incredible show, which is fortunate because eyes open some dork is playing a keyboard and does not look sufficiently metal to keep me excited. The drummer has facial tattoos and obviously wants to front the band, so he should, what is he waiting for. Tongues of endless fire and a box of spent ammunition.
Nachtmystium.: compainions and I were joking that these people were rockandroll trash of the first order, roadhardened, having swagger, very promising after a night of nerds making metal, and our expectations were exceeded. This is black metal regressing into Motorheadesque roots full of power and energy and drugs and sex and speed and the flavor of an enemy's blood in the mouth. A hundred dead enemies, drums, black banners, triumph.
Inocula.: First at the Pearl Room, opening for Gwar, then at the Double Door, this band is Nu Metal with all that comes to it the vocalist has feelings and the band dresses down to an irrational extreme going onstage they look like the suburbanites from Crystal Lake that they are. The stripper, and the skinny girl forced into the role, at the Double Door were a good idea, small crowd, no Gwar that time, but NOT deathmetal and not even metal, just aspiring rockstardom. About sixteen feet of beer strewn with empties, an empty bikkini top lying there amid them, but it turns out the owner dropped it changing into her shirt get evil or get out.
Mensria: Both before Gwar and at the Double Door, an act of incredible rage and power. It takes savage professionalism to play an incredible show to both crowds, the first triumph, the second equally brutal, despite opening for a lead act with no draw whatsoever. This band is the resurrection of DeathMetal at is finest, an reincarnation of what it must have been like to see Possessed before Beccera got shot by junkies, savage, energetic, violent, violent, violent. Two crates of unregistered handguns and ammunition, a pound of weed, two naked chicks, sirens in the distance, incredible.
GWAR: Was Gwar. Fans soaked in fake blood. Incredible sets. Pissed off the fans by scheduling a stupid band just before themselves. Over a hundred thousand years in the business, I hear, and they deliver. One dead fat kid, slumped over a table at McDonalds, other patrons laughing. Yes.

Odious Yellow

Exterior Shot. A shadowy world full of creeping vines, sagging and ancient trees, everything in shades of grey, even the sky, checkerboarded with bilous grey cumulus. Black spitlizards sun themselves on the ancient trunks, the white sun poking between stratocumulus for a moment before ducking into the shade. Giant earwigs everywhere. Spiders the size of basketballs, sitting motionless in the absence of a breeze. The calls of a dozen different species of cicadas, neuroptera, tree frog, and katydid, mixed with the onerous bellowings of the hairy-faced humanmonkey. Two moons, in orbit about each other, high in the sky, hidden by tree trunk and cloud.

Parathaxes and Jubilinda slither to the surface, emerging from an underground nest meters deep. Both of them sniff the sky, lazily and with delight, tasting the scents of the grey jungle after a rainstor. Jublinda raises her dorsal crest and wraps her tail about a tree trunk, pushing her pearly moist skin into the polka-dot pattern of postcourtship. Parathaxes slithers under her and vibrates softly.

Parathaxes. Croaking in gutteral Lymbonese, a dialect shared between them but rarely pronounced so far north of the equator.

Odious yellow sausage engine engaged deeply mimicking muttering feldspar magnetism boom boom dust to dirt dirt to entropy sky to star star to cinder cinder to ash to earth to germ to brain to mind to here and now croak croak croak......

Jubilinda. Croaking a deeper version of the same dialect, her croaks drawn out and pulsing through the darkening jungle.

Deeply Circumspect.

The two watch the sunset together, both sure the universe will produce a certain amount of radio waves, and no more, for the greater good.

the turtle stalks the smoking lounge

a pleasant morning, and the weather here, in Chicago, feels like the weather then, in Costa Rica. Almost the same quantity of rain, though the wildlife is somewhat sparser...sunflowers bloom, already, and one is a mutant. a sport, the nurserymen call them, a carpel systematically replaced with a petal, in every flower, it looks like a sunflower carnation....such a simple trick of nature, it is what produced the ornamental rose. an air conditioner runs, uselessly, creating a tiny pocket of cool air that was somehow significant the night before. in space, a green lantern has lost his life to the caprice of an ancient demon, his ship crashing into a radiation belt. in wisconsin, osmia albiventris and andrena carlinii flourish, apparently, in the sandy wastelands between Madison and timber. the future swims full of malignant cells, and countermeasures, and measures to counter the countermeasures. as a hunter gatherer, i would be dead right now, my head crushed with a rock by some well-meaning member of the tribe, though it is not clear i would harbor the arthritis that would necessitate such a fate, it too, like the viruses that spring from our genomes like mice leaving a plague temple, is a product of the density of potential hosts, and immune system countermeasures, and overdone countermeasures that continue to last a lifetime. everyone seems to be coming down with one, an autoimmune disorder. as a priest, in ancient Sumeria, i would be completely at home. my kind are like that, content to preach. the turtle stalks the smoking lounge now. it is time to rise and remember things.

Drywall

they make it out of gypsum now but back in the earlier part of the twentieth century at least two companies made the stuff out of paper pulp, anticipating Ikea.......it was the great depression at the time but a good idea because in upstate New York they had just cut down all the useful trees and had given up, resorting to making wall board out of compressed paper......people were drunk a great deal back then, like all the good characters in Nelson Algren's novels, such as Somebody in Boots, drunk, all the time.....only a small amount of the stuff, the most expensive, was "enhanced" with asbestos fibers, and I am hoping not do die of mesothelioma as a result of my house...but we all die of something and i have my suspicions that asbestos is not the killer we have made it out to be......not like mister cancer, he kills, in cigarette form........i could use a cigarette right now, though i do not smoke, i know if i were smoking i would feel calm and lucid and clear, not scattered in the wake of a weekend spent eating cannibinoid brownies and seeing concerts...... i do not get the impression that the Olsons used the most expensive fake wallboard, however, so i think i am save, and the stuff must have been pleasantly light....it is worth mentioning that the Olsons were Nordic heroes who occupied my house from its construction till 1979 when i was in grade school and bad things were happening everywhere, i remember seeing a Newsweek article on how our cities were dying and it seemed crazy, how could the cities be dying when it was well known that people were moving away from the country into urban areas...i knew that back then......now it is easy to see what the suburbs did to downtown, and all the junkies and boarded over shop windows that spread from the nuclei that had always lived in the centers of the metropolis....Chicago once had an impressive red light district spanning block after block....did i mention that there is something called a "queer ladder of social mobility?" and that the Irish were working their way out of criminality in my great grandfather's time, in St. Paul Minnesota, a city of rolling hills and narrow streets...... eight decades and a leaky roof, and the Beaverboard is eroded but I refuse to replace it in all but the most problem areas...drywall, the gypsum stuff, is heavy......hanging drywall is masculine....men are supposed to hand drywall, drink Coors, and fart......i cannot do it right unless metal is playing....I drank a Coors at a metal show on Sat........i do not know where they get the gypsum they mine for drywall, but it does indeed come out of the ground from somewhere.....like plastic...which comes out of the ground as petroleum......

The Cosmic All

by stages, it has been happening, usually after i have had about six cups of coffee and then kept drinking it. the cosmic "all". it crashes in from all sides. i cannot stop extrapolating till my mind bumps against the corners of what is known and what is unknown or what cannot be known by definition because it is not there to know. too much of a big picture thinker, yes, this usually happens when i am letting the microdetails of my life go to hell. certainly, it takes more and more caffeine to get me out of bed every morning. i hear there is a lethal dose. still. still, i see my cat vainly staring at the new insulation we have stapled to the wall, a change from the last time, the neurons in his feline mind unable to connect in such a way as to indicate why this change has occurred, but the feline is unable to let it go. i am like that, but with a bigger brain. so many five dimensional strands weaving themselves in and out of time. so many microscopic plastic spherules in the ocean. so many extinct paleozoic neuropterans. at some point it all connects....the cat, the spherules, the fifth dimension, the neuroptera, the cytochrome oxidase, the death metal. all this has something to do with the fact that, since we have moved to a room with a plain, almost zen, lavender ceiling, i have slept terribly, unable to amaze myself with the details of a decaying drop ceiling suspended beneath shredded vintage beaverboard. i dream awake now and make sensible decisions while i sleep.

The Room That Should Not Be

It has tiny fibers under my skin now, and my respiratory passages will never be the same. I fear mesothelioma and yet I do not. Generations of men and women before me have lived with Beaver Plank, many in upstate NY, many of the same drank heavily and played cards. Brother, my real one, sees so much with his minds eye that I get an occasional phone call from his workplace, requesting directions back. Genevieve, mother of many, gives me a baby quilt in beige, perplexed that she cannot assign a gender to the embryo. They are huge, the two magnificent formations that are the source of all my joy and happiness. Damn anyone or anything that tries to make me wait in line for them. Yes, I am thinking about the class Mammalia. Our strange clade, more beastly than birds, giants of the animal kingdom. It is summer and everything blooms outside. Pentstemon. Hollyhock. Carrots. Ants forage. I have not found the time to dig a burrow under my garage. Instead, I craft the Room that Should Not Be. The cat fears a passage to another dimension. A hole to hell. Sheol.

Planktonic Larvae

By this I write of freedom, of the gyre in the South Atlantic where all our noncollectibles are accumulating, in vast bulk, to the detriment of albatross and to the amusement of planktonic organisms now hidden among the considerable shelter of a false Sargasso. We do not float our leftover submersibles here, pity, nor is there an active volcano inland of California within which to tunnel, endlessly, through the very hard igneous rock, building gallery after gallery in the darkened vault of the earth, in short, chaeotgnaths but no dragons, arrow worms but precious few arrows. What I am getting at is absolutely nothing. My purpose is to illustrate a sort of confusion, a hunger for that feeling I had when I was merely twenty one years old and finally able to justify buying beer of my own, growing on the windowsill of my own apartment, this same city years younger in my mind, and I had the energy to confront it all, but none of the resources. I want drugs, I want them badly. I want the drug that makes my mind swell like a kitchen sponge left in a pool of gasoline, so that I can see even more of the cosmic all, from my back porch, and measure every trivial moment of time in terms of its true, unique importance. Another summer drifts by, Sargasso-like in its moment by moment sloshing, in its quiet chorus of birds and its often neglected arrangement of smells. Sex. I want sex and I want it badly. If I were a Viking, I would desire to kill things as well.

Lottery is off

I just watched the film Captivity and came to a conclusion. There is nothing more boring than watching a woman bullied for being famous. As much as I would love to build a Holmes-esque murder house, I would have trouble stocking it with victims....the judgmental aspect of the supervillians in those movies pisses me off and makes me hate the film maker.

A Pact in Blood

You have probably already guessed this about me, I sexualize human sacrifice. I also enjoy the look of a good step pyramid in action. When I hear some vapid actor, pop musician, or "celebrity" in Vanity Fair magazine, or People, or Entertainment Tonight, complaining about how being a celebrity means they cannot walk down the street and be a regular person, I know the truth about them. They are ungrateful. I feel that they should pay the ultimate price for what we, collectively, as a society, have given them. They should pay with their lives.

Of course they should. Every single one of them, Chevy Chase and William Shatner, Tom Cruize and Jewell, should be a potential victim of the ceremonial knife. I do not know as many of their names as a typical denizen of the Western World because I do not watch television, but they are out there, inexorably smiling from magazines, immersing me in the details of their lives.

Cruel? Nonsense. Should my plan go into action, we could arrange to mail each and every one of them each an index card. A simple question, and two boxes, "Yes", and "No". The question would be, of course, "Will you now agree, within a few days or so, to become one of the millions of civilian masses, bagging groceries or stocking chewing tobacco at 7-11, anonymous, and working at a job that is not an expression of the adolescent fantasy of doing something inherently enjoyable and creative, and being paid extravagantly for it? A job at Wall Mart and an apartment in a lousy part of town, with a crazy landlord, will be provided to get you stated." To check NO means to enter the lottery, and to keep your status as a celebrity, a product of consumer culture and its various benefits, the Lexus, the bling, the personal assistant, the job where you play lead guitar for a band and somehow get paid for it, rather than saving bussboy tips to have the tubes in your amp replaced". Maybe, the question needs some editing, but I think most of us know the overwhelming tide of YES response cards that would flood in to Tikal, as workers cleaned the vines off the pyramid. Maybe an odd one, like Werner Herzog might check yes, for the change of pace, Stephen King might, though it would sadden him to loose his readers. I don't know celebrities. I think it obvious though that most of the cards would read "No".

Then, the lottery.

Why the lottery? Because we, collectively, have given them a life of adolescent fantasy, where they can act in films and travel the world, have constant plastic surgery, wear designer clothes, or have the luxury of giving flip answers to reporters who ask about their song lyrics, and yet, many of them manage to complain about the inevitable, inexorable, consequence of what has happened to them. True, they are not all alike. Some of them ruminate on the consequences of fame rather than complain about its limitations. Some rock stars are very appreciative of their fans, spending hours signing autographs. For some of them, like Salamon Rushdie, fame has brought the need to go into hiding for fear of their lives. Still, there seem to be so many of them that want the legions of adoring fans, without the strange emails and stalkers standing outside the window at night, with binoculars, or to grace the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine, without a strange message, painted in blood, on the window of their Mercedes "You Will BARE ME many children!!!". The one brings the other, doesn't it?

Those that have pulled a Sallinger, and kept their lives private, have had their cake and eaten it too, they won. I, personally, could not be happier. I do not know celebrities. Still, I think they should pay.

The true purpose of this rant is, naturally, to invoke the image of a randomly chosen celebrity, chosen by a monthly lottery, dragged to the top of a Mayan step-pyramid. Would it not be grand? The obsidian knife? The feathers? The television cameras capturing the last moment of Courtney Love, Britney Spears, or Angelina Jolie (all women because this is a sexual fantasy and not serious political commentary, and I am straight), bare breasted, chest heaving, as the Central American gods, hungry from centuries of neglect, finally receive the sacrifice owed to them, to ensure the fertility of the land?

Dear reader, perhaps you are not Satanic or Metal enough to appreciate the value of the worldwide, celebrity death lottery, and maybe that failing will keep you from being incarcerated.

I admit, maybe this lottery of mine is impractical. There are degrees of immersion into the public consciousness, and it is fundamentally different to be known for something admirable than for something questionable or downright vile. Still, it seems fundamental that every step into the public eye brings consequences, some unanticipated.

the truth, some of it

I do not know why complicated brain structures tend to be laminated, yet they do. Our own cerebral cortex is laminate, six onion layers, our cerebellum has plenty, in Morymyrid fish, there are organs of extreme neurological complexity associated with the processing of neurological impulses, and for some reason, I think lamination is tantamount to the potential for thought. I was, and still am, consistently impressed by the cognitive power of parrots, toucans, crows. I hear woodpeckers are pretty smart too. I would never volunteer to be one of those to vanish, but I would love to live on an earth with a mere five hundred million people, its present cultures intact, just represented by fewer individuals, I wonder if, at this density, we would be able to remember all the things we have learned, and I think that, perhaps, we are destined to reach these numbers sooner than we might prefer. I miss the smell of the ocean and I miss seeing the things in it. It makes me feel powerless that I have not arranged to move closer to it. It makes me feel powerless that I cannot control time or read minds either, though some might say these are less reasonable expectations, I have tried both of them with the same vigor. I am lonely, but in a strangely good way. Nothing is wrong, everything is right, but the flowers are all gone and I realize that, like morymyrid fish, toucans, and alpine buttercups, someday I will die, this is natural, and though I have no desire to put a stop to it, I am frustrated by my lack of ability to visit my previous selves properly. I should be able to stay here, in this moment, sun set, streetlamp in an evening sky, summer finally warm and my mind filled with the soft nuances of seratonin. I told you I love you because I do love you, even though it is like the love of a rainforest vine for its beauty and its tenacity, or maybe you who are reading are the one I love like the feeling of a soft blanket and a fire, or maybe it is you, the one I love like bubbles in a glass of Pilsner and the promise of wonderful misdeeds, maybe I love you for the way you look at a Winnebego and see a pirate ship, or the way you actually have committed acts of piracy from a winnebego, each of us can be so many things to one another. I am mystified by our ways sometimes.

Dear Oblivia

I do not know your gender. At this point, neither do you, and that is fine with both of us, I am quite sure. I know nothing about your chromosomes either. Judging by the fact that you have made it this far, I am guessing they are a bit more standard than the set we handed to Lucifer, on the morning of 6/6/6, because Lucifer was a short-term visit to this world and you seem destined to stay a bit longer. Whatever they are, those chromosomes of yours, I am cool with them. You are a product of evolution, and your existence is an attempt by our species to explore the whole world of evolutionary options open to it. Without such experiments, a whole array of sudden macroevolutionary changes would be impossible, so such things must be. I hear there are polyploid salamanders, and I carry a polyploid strawberry in the pocket of my coat, food for our brother, the skink, its own species on a path to evolutionary destiny.
Whomever you are, you have a telencephalon. That strange bulge at the end of the spinal column, destined to grow into an organ of incredible complexity and delight, is at its onset. There has been a primitive streak, some time between our trip to the waterfalls of the Columbia River gorge and our numerous cups of Stumptown coffee, I imagine. I like to think the coffee helped you along. Perhaps, if things go well for you, you will discover coffee yourself. Coffee, Cafea arabica, our sister in the honeysuckle family, who produces such wonderful alkaloids, on its own evolutionary path to greatness.
Limb buds, you have them. And a tail. And gill pouches. Design-wise, you are fit for swimming, and ideally suited to develop into a lamprey, or was that two weeks ago? Already, those limb buds have pegged you as a tetrapod, and if things go well, perhaps you might use them to play piano, smoke pot, or at the very least, discover the delights of touching things. I do not know who you are or what you are destined to become, but in a sense, I already love you, and am grateful for the changes you have brought to my life. I was grateful for Lucifer, temporary and inconvenient visitor that he was, but this time, there is talk of modifying the dining room for other uses.
You are a sensible embryo. You induce the consumption of almond butter. You demand a great deal of sedentary time on the couch, watching season after season of Deadwood episodes, you prefer that your host eat fresh fruit, sleep copiously, and walk around with a certain, undefinable glow.
It is raining today, out here, and there are tulips. The process of educating people is winding down now, and like a weaver bird, I am building a nest for you.

a letter home

They laugh at me when I speak of raising a newborn human in a ten gallon tank and still I think it is a good idea what love and spice to a roomscape such a creature not quite skinklike in its ability to burrow, in fact no burrowing at all and completely unable to climb through trees, like a larval scarab requiring a pile of dung, eggs so carefully oviposited upon it, dutiful mothers, like earwigs guarding their clutch against intrusion. A baby's room should have machine guns, a teenager's room should have books, a soldier should have flowers, a maiden should have reptiles, a mommy should have drugs for her day, a daddy should have the solace of a strip club and a cigar. I regret missing the formation of the solar system, it is a hundred thousand years that have slipped my mind, as have the last six ice ages and here again cometh another one, delayed or halted by anthropogenic climate change, cities flooding, blue sharks on Market Street in San Francisco, crocodiles in lake Michigan, and mangroves everywhere. It should not surprise me that people stare in disbelief at my own disbelief, that this nervous system of ours could have evolved in an arboreal frugivore, a terrestrial scavenger, a homonoid, the odds were stacked against it. Unfortunate indeed that, like plankton, we drift aimlessly as individuals across the earthscape and have such limited propensity for forming structures out of our own bodies. I am lonely for you, one with whom i should exchange pollen, lonelier still for the trees we would grow. Soon, seed shall be set and our story will give rise to yet another, still, with my minds eye and deep memory i see it all, in colors as astonishing as oil paint, the sea scorpions, the sunset on cloudy uranus, the view from a distant star as our own sun spirals round the galactic center. One tulip, then another, then armageddon, then geology, then rat men, then tree lobsters, another armegeddon. I miss you. I miss your mind.

Fifteen Percent Less Evil

Yes, you heard it. Fifteen percent less evil today, and thinking about the big picture. Metaphysics, existence and the lack of it. Made a metaphysical glyph. Something dreamed into existence.

Sixteen-Year-Old Demos

I just recorded two songs, bass tracks and vocals, on Garage Band, and I am wonderfully surprised. They sound like the demos sixteen-year-olds make in their basements. The vocals are certainly weaker than the bass tracks, which are far from perfect. Still, they exist. I can show them to the other band members. It does not matter that they suck. They exist and I made them. The metal brother was right, it is important to save beginnings because a person can learn from them later.

An Ill-Begotten Beginning

The Honkey Tonk Barbacque, in Pilsen, Opened Too Early and has MAde some Insulting Decisions Regarding Service And To Dine There is To Become Furious at the Inadequacies of Others, Especially Considering the Wasted Potential of the Affair Because it is Charming and Good that the Propriotors of A Food Truck Expand into Permanent Quarters

A Culinary Review by Psycho Butcher

The particular operation, on Eighteenth street in the lovely Pilsen neighborhood, was suggested by a friend on the basis of its inherent promise. I say lovely, because it is ruled by picturesque criminal gangs and has buildings whose exteriors contain elements of the quaint and unexpected. Within its confines is a place that offers live country music on Friday and Saturday nights, and is in the process of opening its doors to guests. The food, though not terrible, is not great. The cornbread was too dry. I make better cornbread and my oven must double as a kiln for crafting swords. The idea of roasting meat over a flame appeals to me for reasons which should be obvious to my regular readers. The meat was adequate. The chicken fatty and cheap. The ribs equally so. The mac and cheese tolerable. The bread worthless. Ironically, the only truly exceptional meal was their vegetarian option.
This was all very disappointing because the room is truly charming. It has a high ceiling and is replete with rustic nicknacks. So unfortunate that they did not expend so much energy on plates an silverware. There were none of either. Dine-in guests are quite literally forced to eat their meals, carry-out style, on to-go paper and with to-go forks. This infuriated me so much I nearly stabbed the waitress, friendly and charming though she was. Even the pathetic to-go boats dispensed to us were inadequately small.
The place serves no coffee. My charming server looked at me as if it were normal that a place that serves dessert lack coffee, trying to sell me sweet potato pie at the same time she denied me the essential accompaniement. She is lucky to have left the table with her life.

Unless you are a buffoon and like country music, do not go here.