Blood on a Space Guitar

A lament for Stormbringer

2012-02-11T18:38:00.000-08:00

I have forgotten what it is like, the experience of not having this black sword at my side. On my hip, in my hand, swung two-handed in an arc over my head. It is the source of so much strength, yet it will be the death of me. Dragons, tall ships. doomed princesses and even-more-doomed cities, it has doomed them all. Doom.

my status as a positive teen role model

2012-01-24T07:18:00.000-08:00

I am having so much trouble being a POSITIVE TEEN ROLE MODEL. First of all, I am not a positive person. I have no overarching positive charge, so to speak, or at least, any electrical fields I emit are my own damned business. Another thing about being positive is that a person tends to attract electrons that way, and I hate electrons. I hate teens, actually. I hate pretty much everything, including teens and electrons. This does not make me a positive person. Speaking of teens, I might be a little old to serve as a role model for them. I have never read an issue of Tiger Beat magazine, and I do not know their pop celebrities. I admire Gille de Rais for killing so many teens, actually. He had a great mustache. These all make my status as a positive teen role model problematic, especially since I am usually under the influence of mind altering drugs. Drugs are a good thing, in moderation, and that makes them even more of a good thing when used immoderately. I like to tell teens that life is meaningless, and that they should do drugs to make the pain go away. This is good, advice, I think, and by doing so, I can really connect with them. I suppose, it was these sorts of conversations, drunk and under the influence of mind altering drugs, that led me to believe I could achieve celebrity status as a POSITIVE TEEN ROLE MODEL, but it is not working.

a trout's lament

2012-01-23T18:30:00.000-08:00

I hate hanging at the end of a line like this. I am sick of this line. I am sick of this fishhook. They bait them with such lovely things. Now, I see waders in the water.

Rhizodont

2012-01-20T20:10:00.000-08:00

I admire your coronoid fangs, beast, and your beauty. Ages before there were ages, you were out there devouring killer sharks with one sideswipe of you crowned head. Your sinews, your dark eyes, the ebb and flow of your predatory moods-they call me. To the dark denizens of a Devonian swamp you are sheer terror to contemplate. To me, you are my origin, my ancestor, and a vision that sustains me no matter where I turn. I could never forget you because you are in my bones. My radius, my ulna, and to an extent I can scarcely contemplate, my own heart, I owe to you and your predatory machinations. You are a lovely beast under that dark water. You cannot last, but nothing lasts, and you will live forever in me as a tetrapod. A mass extinction will take you out the same way everything worth of a real death meets its fate at the hands of a cataclysm. You are no exception, being at the top of so many links in the food chain. Cataclysms will happen, but not before you have given rise to the hands I use to record your passing. You live in me, forever, Rhizodont.

Queen of Autumn

2011-12-30T17:16:00.001-08:00

Queen of Autumn, how I miss your brown tresses and your cherry pies. I long for them. I long for your dusky sunsets and your red leaves. I wish to walk among your trees again, to feel the September sun upon my face. Your pumpkins and hop cones, your soldier beetles and goldenrod, I can see them and smell their scent on my fingertips. So permanently in transition you are, loosing attention at the moment things are finest. As soon as you become golden you are already turning to black and grey sunsets, to frigid cold. Yet, you return, and you will return again, and in the meantime I can sit by a fire and remember your falling leaves under my feet.

Queen of Winter

2011-11-18T20:11:00.001-08:00

Winter is coming, I can hear the gentle murmur of your skirts in the rustling of the leaves. Here we are again, together, you and I. Queen of Winter, how I long to gaze into your glacier blue eyes. How I long to touch your raven hair. How I long to stand close to your breast, your frigid breath against my face. And yes, Dear, how I long to kiss your black lips, and die. Queen of winter. I long for you.

A Goblin's History

2011-11-15T12:09:00.000-08:00

A Goblin’s History of Angmar
First of all, you can call the place whatever you want. Outsiders always called the place Angmar, and it stuck. We always called it home, the word being Grokka in swamp goblin, but what kind of a place name is that? Everyone calls their own place home. Angmar is really two places, the Snowy Isle, always the province of Elves and Men, and Melumore, the big island, home to abominations. We goblins is abominations, I suppose, though I never felt like one myself. I just likes to eat rats and make traps to catch the humans, but enough about me.
They say this island was once shrouded in darkness, like the rest of the world, all of it shrouded in darkness. Back then there was no elves or dwarves or men or even orcs nor goblins. Back then there was things like spiders and grey jellies, krells and shadow men, and I suppose, they got along just fine without light. When the gods of Arda built two great lights to bring day to the world, the whole place lit up like a chandelier. All the sudden, in Middle Earth up north, green trees started growing, and the troglodyte folk moved underground or just plain died. Even with these lights though, most of Angmor was in shadow. Those lights were pretty far away, and between the Green Mountains and the Red, and the Black, not much of any light crept over those peaks. Angmor is the one place in this universe some of the original, black forests, still stand, their branches tangled with black vines, whispering ugly truths to the passerby. It is still pretty dark down there, in the South, and these forests still stand, but I ain’t never been. You smarties out there might be thinkin’ trees can’t grow in the dark, and I suppose that is true for the fancy green stuff that grows in the North of Angmar, but in the South, we still got the old kind. Black as soot, leaves and branches, they get their power from the Earth itself. I hear them type of trees grows deep under the ground too, where the real power of Angmar lies.
Anyway, Morgoth destroyed them lights. He hated them. He takes all the credit for that, but I hear it was mind flayers that put him up to it, or Krakkens, or the Aboleths. For a while, it was dark damned near everywhere. This is about when goblins and orcs came here, by sea, in great ships. Angmar was so dark a goblin cold walk ten days and not have to cover his eyes. It was paradise. The darkness did not last long because the gods of Arda like their light, and so great trees grew far in the West. For thousands of years, the light of the world came from two mystery trees the elves grew. I ain’t never seen it. Nobody here, not even them folks that is thousands of years old, ever seen them trees. They was so far away and just for elves. Those Elven trees never did last too long. Morgoth came down here and fell in love. Ungloiant, our spider queen, was as lovely as a streak of black storm clouds. They say she had the face of a maiden, and features that captured the best elements of menfolk, goblins, and orcs. She had eight legs too, and could spin webs of darkness so thick ain’t nothing could see through them. The rest is Elven history, but our Ungloiant killed that tree, and ate them gems, the Silmarils, except one. She ate Morgoth out of house and home too, then cut loose, spreading her seed far and wide. Finally she returned home, and spawned three daughters. Then she died. Spiderfolk do that sometimes. The elvenfolk here are the dark kind, and they worship one or the other of them three. They are Ungolia, Lolthina, and Sargon. Them elves arrived about the same time as the orcs, I think, by ship or from tunnels so deep under the ground that they pass beneath the sea.
Dark Elves? The elvies say this. In the beginning, when the great lights were constructed, there was a call by the gods of Arda to migrate, West across the continent of Middle Earth. Most took heed, though some got lost along the way. The lost ones they call the green elves. The ones that made it all the way are the fair elves, and the ones that made it, but with trouble, they call them the grey elves. There were ones that made to the coast and never went across the ocean, and them is the high elves. Two kinds stayed. One was the dark elves. They ignored the call on purpose, and when sunlight finally reached the North of Angmar, they moved underground. The other kind is the Orcs, who never were elves, but close enough. Orcs and elves are kissing cousins, though neither likes to say it. Orcs live underground because they always has, and in places on the surface where they can make a living hunting animals or terrorizing the weak. Then, of course, there are goblins, bugbears, ogres, hobgoblins, dark faeires, gnolls, flinds, lizardfolk, and the underground races like dark creepers, mind flayers, and grimlocks. Angmar has always been home to monster folk. Some say that when, after the mystery trees were killed for good, and the sun was created to light the sky, monster folk of every creed, color, and design came down here and hid in the mountains and the dark woods. Dragons too, and their half-man consorts, came South in those days. That was the time when the great monster cities were built.
Hellgar, city of black minotaur folk, was built at the base of the Mountain of Fire. Here, the minotaur men forged great machines and weapons, and built libraries and roads underground. Their big and stupid cousins, the Red Minotaurs, guard this place with axes made of steel and bone, or so I hears.
Deeper down still is the land of the dark elvenfolk. They have a couple cities down there, not as big, but by some recollections, prettier. Black tile streets and slaves to do all the lifting, the Drow, as they are called, farm beasts for food and work strange feats of magic. Below them is the city of the mind flayers, but the less said about them, the better.
There is a goblin city down there too. Moglog, ruled by a goblin king twenty feet tall, who can read and write, and breathe fire. Goblin smiths down there build the best weapons of the land, and make nine out of ten horseshoes and carriage wheels. Only problem is all the blood goblins. Another story there.
Then you gots all the evil gnomes that came overseas recently, with all the troubles up north. Gnome folk and dwarf folk get along ok, I guess, but there is bad dwarves and there is very bad dwarves and neither fits in. Most of em drink too much and fall off a ship, from the north, drunk, down in Angmar, sooner or later.
They say that nowadays, the sea people, the Numenoreans, are building a world empire, and carting all the gold and silver to their island, far out in the ocean. Wherever they go, they bring war, and trouble for beasts and evil men.
Now, our land has been through an age like that. Five centuries ago, Elves and Men and Dwarves from oversea came to our dark island seeking treasure. They found it, in the hands of dragons and giants, mokroths and beholders. These men were tough, and dwarves and elves too, and they built three kingdoms. The kingdom of the men, by the sea, grew town by town along the coast, fishing village connected to seaport connected to farm town by ships and boats and canoes. Alongside them were the sea elves. Inland were fair elves and grey elves, building stone towns along the rivers and connecting them with mighty roads. Trees were cut by the men, but the elves mostly worked around them. They planted gardens and brought fair deer, bunny rabbits, badgers, and the kind of birds that don’t lay eggs under your skin when you are not lookin’. By turns, the place was tamed, and there was no place a su monster could find a decent meal without ending up at the end of a sword, so the monsters fled South, and East, and underground. In the mountains was the dwarves, and they built underground cities of their own. Their mightiest was a six foot tall dwarf named Kargoth Kollossus, King Under the Mountain, and after him followed three great ones. Gimolf, Gloin, Borgstor, and Nilbor. They reaped great treasure and mined gems.
In the kingoms of men and sea elves there was mighty kings as well. Zardozar, the mighty wizard, built an upside down tower into the ground and filled it with wonders. He ruled with a wand, and some say he had a beard ten foot long by the time he died, centuries after he was born. Finally, the grey elves had their own kings and queens. Luthinia, the mightiest of them all, ruled from a castle deep in the forest. Swamps were cleared, black trees were cut and replaced by the green kind, displacer beasts and devil dogs were slain and replaced by white deer and wild horses. Ravens replaced blood birds, bats moved into caves, and for a while things looked bleak. Finally, up North, there were troubles for the elven folk and the men. An Orkish army was fighting the elves again, this time with the help of dragons, and fighters from this land left to lend a hand. This was our moment. A mighty alliance was formed between the dark elves and the mind flayers, the lizardfolk and orcs and goblins, and even the dragons were in on it. This was about the time of Rhohan and Zelgar, who tried to hold us back, just fifty years ago, but it feels like much more.
Overwhelmed, the forces of good were eaten or destroyed. Only a few fled tell the tale. The old cities still stand-some goblin and ogre towns, some inhabited by men and all sort of monster folk, and many more still abandoned, home to vampires and unmentionable horrors.
Now, this world of ours has places for everyone. The big cities haves a thieves guild and houses and smiths and even places where a goblin can get a knife sharpened. We have taverns for menfolk, and many more for monsterfolk, places weirder still that takes magic words to get into. Underground, we have tunnels connecting the dark cities, and people in the know can usually find the ways they connect to the sewers of the surface towns. We have our wizards and our priests, and we have slaves to do all the work. In the South, we got dark forests full of things I can’t even find names for, and in our seas, we got krakkens, and sea monsters, and cities out in the deep too.
Now, the sea people don’t see our ways as the right ones at all. In the North, their galleys have come and reclaimed the old towns. Some say Snowy Isle never really fell, and there they got great castles and princes, gold and ballgowns. Down here we have rat meat and cockfighting. We got tribes of orcs in the hills, and gnolls, and lizardmen in the swamps, but we got orcs workin the streets sellin’, though what kind of sausages I don’t ever ask. Our ways aren’t their ways. I think you can see the problem.

an unvisited geological epoch

2011-11-05T20:18:00.000-07:00

if i were made of plywood, i would be full of hot coals. if i were glass, tuning forks. strike that-i would be half full of warm deoxygenated saltwater, with a single eusthenopteron gulping at the surface, prowling about for its next meal, not realizing that the trilobites are long extinct, and if anyone feeds it at all, it will have to settle for flakes. an ammonite cannot escape the coils it has set, over the years, because its internal organs are locked solidly to its mantle cavity. i am a vase full of seed fern fronds, a lappet moth nestled against a bright green motel room door, unable to work its natural colors into the pattern. all my archival footage, my collection of yellowed paperback novels, my victorian monographs, creaking under two centuries of distinctive museum dust, are like discarded tapes in a paper shopping bag. I am wide awake and this is now and something truly remarkable keeps happening and happening. past history means something, because in a previous geological epoch, i might have longed for something i could not have, but that was the Triassic and things are different now. i was not expecting rainforests again, and reefs, and an adaptive radiation of new forms. this is all so unexpected. whatever happens, the face of this strange planetoid is producing butterflies, again, and in forms more diverse than before. i can only marvel at it.

an open window

2011-11-02T19:14:00.000-07:00

i feel it too much to ask what brought this here, how long it will last, and what will become of it. i am merely happy for it at the moment. this is what i tell myself, but i ask all those guilty questions, particularly the last of the three. the Cretaceous was a very long geological period, and it had the most interesting dinosaurs. it is a similar situation with galactic evolution. hydrogen burning stars of the right size can only exist at certain times in the grand scheme of things, and long after they are all burned out, and for all those billions of years we had to wait for them, space was lifeless. how long? what will become if it?

a reverse valentine

2011-10-15T18:15:00.000-07:00

you have angles, octagon, and i understand, i have a few of my own. i am a dodecahedron, and i have a lot of them. angles. i like knowing you are out there, with your equilateral lines, your concurrent angles, your sensible symmetry. i am irregular, some dodecahedrons do that, as you probably know, and a person would be hard-pressed to find a single axis of symmetry in me anywhere. this does not mean i am not without beauty, as you have observed. we are different shapes and structures, and our planes cannot cross in more than a flat field, but how magnificent is such an intersection. be beautiful, octagon, it is nice knowing that there are shapes like you, and this is enough for me, and perhaps even the best, because all things run their course, even geometric figures.

the universe that has shaped itself in the next room

2011-10-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

the plastic princess tames the dinosaur, a ceratosaurus not to be trifles with, with an incantation and the promise of popcorn. all around, smurfs are dancing insulting ethnic spoofs of native american rituals, and a tree monitor the size of ten busses pleads to be allowed to eat one, just one, because he is so hungry for blue flesh. buildings collapse, pigs balance on the back of the Overdino, a plateosaurus who rules this world with a stern tempermant, and all over plastic dinosaurs and ficher price blue collar vacationers gather to witness the spectacle of a hot air ballon trip to the moon, where apparently, there is cake. this world creates and re-creates itself with such regularity that is assuming some of the attributes of a real place. it has rules. there must be a circus. The MONSTER BALL and the OVERDINO compete for rulership, though only the latter wins, interspecific love affaris are commonplace, as the monarch of the real leans he is the scion of a triceratops, and babies here, as everywhere, must be tucked into bed. A few feet away, a perpetual birthday party is in full swing, invisible cake half-eaten on plastic plates as stuffed monkeys stare at the ceiling and think of something resembling stuffed heaven.

a comet

2011-09-14T20:29:00.000-07:00

The stars have never been so much aligned, as this, i come and go under the evidence of infernal machines and heavenly orbits, This rising and falling of iron gears and crystal epicycles. First toward Mercury and later toward distant Eris, and back. I am like a comet, of sorts, falling into the sun just far enough to get singed, then retreating, leaving a trail of vapor in my wake. Perhaps I seek to be singed some, or perhaps it is because i am so drawn to the sun as to ensure my own destruction, save a last minute escape impluse, the memory of which fades to murmurs in the celestial cold black. So, i return, again and again, to this. Some cycles run fast and threaten to vaporize my every molecule of atmosphere, others burn slow, but they all burn, again and again, till i am just a cinder.

Minos

2011-09-03T19:47:00.000-07:00

It is dark and misty, and somehow, i have ended up in this thicket. I wandered in here in search of shiny objects, like a mina bird, looking for things to decorate my nest. the silver glinted in the moonlight, how, i do not know, there are so many brambles to cover the ground now. were all these thorns here before? i have already forgotten my way out of here, and every step brought me further into the thorns. Vine after vine, the wood bunches up over holes in the ground, and the coins seem to vanish as i reach for them. Still, it is not too late. The hill slopes upward, and i have been walking downward till now. One footfall at a time, i can find my way back from here. I hear the voice of an ancient deity in the wind, and i realize that i have dreamed of this maze before.

The Coal Swamp Has Never Been Closer

2011-07-21T19:19:00.001-07:00

i cannot complain. there is a roof over my head and there is food in my refrigerator. i have no need of a handgun. though i am no match for a Dienotherium in a fight, I do not have to fight one. Thus, no rifle either. No flamethrower. A couch would not fit up a stairway earlier. I should have measured it first. I hear they get stuck there forever, couches, blocking the inhabitants of the upper floors in their apartments forever. There was no back staircase. Had this been the case, somehow, the couch would not have gotten stuck. After all, what is the purpose of a back staircase besides simply being big enough to accommodate irregularly shaped couches, This brings me to the subject of my unrealized desire to rule the world through terror. I need to put a ten dollar bill in the g string of a stripper soon. A cold beer is not doing it. It is hard to explain this to my two-year-old best friend, who thrills me with questions like "who made up?", and can now recite my answer "Up is not real it is just an idea....". Is this how it is supposed to work? Do bluegills love their eggs this much? What does a reef squid feel during the throes of courtship? What of all those little eggs. It is a hundred degrees Farenheit, outside, with the humidity of a place where vast pools of water sit on the cement, failing to evaporate. The coal swamp has never been closer. So sad to imagine that during the middle of the Carboniferous, those global rainforests dried up and shrank to small islands of vegetation on tropical isles. Conifers spread and amphibians gave way to reptilians. What did a gorgonopsid feel for its young?

congratulations, universe, for your neutron stars

2011-07-16T19:23:00.000-07:00

i lament the extinction of the kronosaur, and perhaps equally so, i regret that i have yet to wrestle with a giant squid. turns out that a kronosaur and a sperm whale would be a great match in a fight, though the latter being such an ecological specialist, it is not really as good in a fight as its size would lead a person to believe. we have not enough giant monsters, and none that shoot deadly radiation from their eyes. yes, we have a few amazing elasmobranchs left, and yes, at the smaller scales, we have better beasties that most planets this size, i reckon. it is hard to know what is usual around here, on this planet, orbiting this yellow sun. it is a rather impressive star, in its own way. larger than most, but hardly among the giants. it is more than four billion years old and it is burning very nicely at present. i also think we have good gas giants. again, nothing showy, like a planet ten times the size of jupiter gradually evaporating into its sun, but i like uranus and saturn, and i think that if we could see our own oort cloud, we would be happy with its pleasant configurations.
let me be among the first to congratulate the universe for its neutron stars, now that i am on the subject. in an infinite universe, i suppose, an infinite number of sentinent beings congratulate the universe at any given moment-but the observable universe is the only universe i know, and it contains just enough galaxies that other beings have congratulated it before, in distant galaxies, but perhaps not for its neutron stars.

ode to species with heterogametic sexes or deadly venom

2011-07-14T19:09:00.000-07:00

space jellyfish. fucking space jellyfish. the ameba of doom. death reptiles. the echo at the end of it all. the absurdity of a finite universe. the inevitable paradoxes of an infinite universe populated by space amebas. electrical storms. homo erectus men going to sea in skin boats. ammonites. kronosaurs, cheap motels. lipstick. lighter fluid. dim memories. more lipstick.
i have been spacewrecked here before. on days like this, the fading summer sun falling through green ash, a city park full of homo sapiens lying on blankets, the pull of my chromosomes directing my actions. a slave to hidden, genetic appetites. kronosaurs. spaccemen. spiders. ergot. lipstick. strip clubs. night.

Who made death?

2011-07-07T18:54:00.000-07:00

Ruby: Who made this car?
Me: Robots. It was made in a factory, south of here, mostly by robots but also by some human helpers.
Ruby: Who made my doll?
Me: People, in a factory, probably in Southeast Asia, made it.
Ruby: Who made shoes?
Me: Another factory.
Ruby: Who made feet?
Me: Nobody made them. They just grew there. When you were still inside mamma.
Ruby: Who made up?
Me: Up isn't real, it is just an idea. We made up. We can make up any direction we want,
Ruby: Who made Aweoweah?
Me: You made Aweoweah.
Ruby: Who made eyes?
Me: Evolution made them. But evolution is not a person, it is a thing that happens, like the weather.
Ruby: Who made owwies?
Me: Evolution.
Ruby: Who mead death?
Me: Evolution.
Ruby: Who made my doll?

It goes on like this for hours. I am so damned proud of you, Ruby.

Listening to Metal

2011-07-02T19:37:00.000-07:00

the frozen north. a sword and black armour. lightning. a moonlit night. werewolves. a winter gale. ice floes. blood. axes. steel. the wind ripping through tree branches, waves crashing in the distance. the threat of sea monsters. fire. torches. stern brows. a dusting of snow on a man's beard as he gazes northward, at a force of approaching storm giants. Fire breath. Dragons. Sorcerers. A giant hammer striking the ground. A man's sword severing a giant's hand at the wrist. blood. fire. doom. doom. doom.

A talk with Aweoweah

2011-06-18T18:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Aweoweah, or should i put it more informally, since we live in the same house and spend most of our days together, you in my daughter's pocket or running around on the playground, underfoot, your invisibility a great asset to you at such times. You were jumping on the chair beside my daughter earlier today, your own daddy, also invisible, holding your finger lest you catch a bad bounce and hurl yourself to the carpet. Apparently, you are blue all over, and have a very large nose, blue eyes, and a robe and hat a wizard like gandlf would deem appropriate-and yes, tattoos, all over your body and especially the backs of your hands and your nose, of squirrels and god knows what else. I am glad my daughter found you as a friend. Apparently, your employment as the tickle monster brought you into such frequent contact with ruby that you and her struck up a fast friendship. When you are not around, she spends a great deal of time texting you on her toy phone and apparently, you have been known to phone in a tickle now and again, using us as your agents. I am having a beer with your daddy right now and he tells me all kinds of strange tales about the imaginary landscapes you inhabit.

Doom and Doom again

2011-06-10T19:44:00.001-07:00

Stormbringer, I hear you calling me, and it is damned true, the Black Blade keeps on killing, till the end of time. You bring Ruin. You destroy everything you touch, and my hands are cold as ice from your hilt. Vanquished are the orcs, the goblins, and the Mind Flayers, also are the elks, the unicorns, and the fairytale princesses they befriended. It is a cold, ruined land out there now, devoid of animal life and freezing with the Northern Wind. I see snow on the branches of dead trees, and the bones of ancient reptiles make my castle. Here, in this land, I lament the queen of winter and I lament the man i once was before i picked up this sword.
Yet, i was glorious in my destruction. It was no mere mortal blade that sealed my fate. No sea elf could stop me, no harpie, no heroic young man with glistening armor. I was doom and doom again, and now, I sit, on this mountaintop, snow drifting over the icy landscape below, skulls beneath my feet, awaiting the inevitable. Doom.

a nocturne

2011-05-15T20:50:00.000-07:00

I long to feel the beating of your cloven hooves. across the darkened fields, i hear the howling of wolves. the harvest planted, fire burned to embers, mead vessels empty, the horned goddess has sown her own harvest.

the rainy day and the piano

2011-05-11T19:30:00.000-07:00

the universe is fragmented into these layers, some of them we would call "real" and others distinctly not part of this reality. we all know this. this is how we can pour milk into our rice crispies and not be driven insane by the distinct possibility that it was another version of ourselves, a distinctly different person that existed merely seconds ago, that poured the crispies into the bowl to begin with. or is it Krispies? The man who spelled them incorrectly or at least in avoidance of the brand namature is a distinctly different person than the one who is refusing to push his cat away from the keyboard so that he can continue to write this. We are different, he and i. He has made his decisions and i have done my time in his shoes. Is that why we go through so much trouble to make these things that ultimately become memories? graduations and awards ceremonies, and days at the beach and at the zoo. soon they are gone, but in the participation of making the, we open up universes in which those people are, at least in theory, experiencing them in the present. this is good because i am an engine for the creation of these parallel universes and so are all the people that read this. this means that one index of the present is the future possibilities it is creating just by sitting there and the past, empty now, moments it believes it is connected with. every now and again i am sure we cross a reality that just happens to be the present in another timestream, and we cross over without knowing it. how could we?

a lament for the cephalopods

2011-04-29T20:35:00.000-07:00

it is probably true to say that every squid dies for love, or some approximation of it. a pity then, that the cephalopod minds do not have the neurons to fully grasp the scope of what they are doing. that is the fundamental game of evolution-to survive and reproduce, but the game of survival is set against the game of reproduction, and sooner or later, a person, eight legged or two, finds themselves displaying color after color, pattern after pattern, brass knuckles and electric guitars, shotguns and poems, until all the ink has run dry and there is nothing left to live for save the chance at a single more mating attempt. i salute you, my eight legged brothers under the skin, for going about it the way you do. there are no half-measures when it truly comes down to it. to live to court another day is just that, another day to die in the act of seeking love or whatever comes closest to it. for us mammals, the fields of play are expanded sideways, and i suppose i will never know if Cretaceous ammonoids looked after their babies the way i hope they did. like the giant octopus, in its darkened boudoir, breathing oxygenated air over its babies till the life drains out of it.......either way, the eggs we incubate grow up to become replicators in their own right, bent of feeding and breeding the selfsame way we did. cephalopod brothers, and sisters

for you, baphomet

2011-04-23T19:36:00.000-07:00

i long to touch your crowned head, your thorns. you are not a beast to be reckoned with lightly, yet you are there, Baphomet, and either you have sought me out or somehow i have had led you to myself by scent traces. perhaps it was all the scribbling, and perhaps it is the way i posture. nevertheless, here you are and you represent a genuine conundrum. you have rotated everything precisely forty five degrees, and now i am viewing everything, all of it, from the side. i could not see these facets before, and yet i long to have my old perspective restored. what do all these old plans mean now, after all this, these games i have played over the ages, the scores now turned upside down and inverted, like crosses yes, like the hanging man, or worse still, the hanging man restored to standing. we speak separate languages, and that is why i cannot trick you into sitting down at the table for a game of checkers. this is chess, i see, your game, and i am sitting down to play.

more....

2011-04-01T19:47:00.001-07:00

Onward they walked, till at last Blue stood in the vault of the PowerMind. It was brightly lit, and crowded. More than a thousand robots of all shapes and sizes stood, watching her entrance with serious expressions.

A great blue eye appeared in the space above her, and the PowerMind uttered a single word.

“Speak!” it said.
At that particular moment, Blue felt smaller than she had been before. She was tiny before the magnificent PowerMind, and she felt it. She wanted to curl up in a ball and go away, never to come back. Something was very wrong here and she did not have the courage to face it. Still, she stood proudly, trying to summon the words. Finally, from somewhere deep within her, some place her Robot Mother put there through hours of loving attention, something lesson after lesson with Robot Six taught her, a conviction that the truth must be spoken somehow propelled words from her mind.

“Your excellency.” she began. “I have found unequivocal evidence that robot civilization began on planet Vulcan, and that robot life was preceded by at least one earlier form of living thing.”

The blue eye glared down upon her, beaming a harsh and steady malediction.

“In addition, your excellency.” Blue continued, feeling that it was too late to stop now. “Our solar system has been visited by an intelligent species that arose hundreds of million years ago on Vulcan, and is most likely, ancestral to our own.”

The blue light intensified.

“Its....impossible.” it blurted, clumsily. This was a PowerMind taken aback, surprised, even terrified.

“Let me present my findings, starting with the fossils.” continued Blue, and the robot spoke for three hours.

rough draft

2011-03-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

The two walked, together past hexagonal bulkheads and down strange tunnels. Zero gravity makes a large place seem very much larger, because there is so little sense of where a person has just been. They walked over, or through, a vault with thousands of hexagonal tanks, all holding tiny creatures Blue could make no sense of. They were fleshy and green, not steely and grey. They had soft, feathery gills projecting from them, and tiny openings. With an admixture of awe and surprise, Blue realized that each of them had a mouth. Such a strange thing to have, and she was now seeing them in the flesh. Blue peered into a small hexagon, barely larger than her hand, and stared at the minute passenger.

“It is my duty to take care of my brothers and sisters.” said her new friend, as if that notion made any sense to Blue at all.

“Do they need to eat?” asked Blue,

“Yes, sometimes.” her friend answered. “Just like me.”

All of this was shocking to Blue, but she tried not to act too surprised. Her new friend was one of these things, whatever they were. Strange though, because despite the strangeness of her engineering, she was a machine, at least on the outside. Blue began to wonder many things about this strange new friend. Whomever she was, she had a name, though Blue could make no sense of it for the time being. She continued talking, but But blue lost her train of thought. Blue gathered from the things her friend was saying that each of these passengers had a name as well.

“What is it like?” asked Blue.

“What?” the visitor answered.

“To eat.” asked Blue.

“Wonderful.” said the visitor.

Sad

2011-03-18T18:58:00.000-07:00

You keep waiting and waiting for a good time to talk, to share things, and that time keeps being pushed back. Finally, it does not happen at all, because things have changed and now there will never be that time. I do not want another one, I want this one, but i cannot have it now and nobody will listen anyway. I will miss you. I wish you did not have to move away and I wish you did not wait to tell me things in person because I am the last to know and it is not clear when we will ever see each other in person again.

invertebrate

2011-03-02T19:27:00.000-08:00

a faint murmur of something otherworldly, rain on a tin roof, the smell of night flowers.

another

2011-01-28T18:48:00.000-08:00

NINETEEN

Synestra twitched an arm in the machine, suddenly aware that she was really somewhere, and not projecting herself across time and space. In truth, this sensation, that of actually being somewhere, felt stranger. Synestra had eight wonderful arms, and about twice as many eyes, on retractable stalks. When it was time to leave the great machine, she would retract her arms one at a time from the strange devices and slither through the labyrinth of crawlspaces that was her home. Synestra had lived her entire life in space. She had no planet to call her own, and until just recently, no friends. She was indeed very lonely, till this wonderful day.

Synestra had an odd history. In her way, she might be the last of her kind, though she doubted it. Hers was a spacefaring race and she was lost, very lost, in her own future. Her ship could never go back. It is not possible to travel backward in time, the resulting paradoxes prevent it.

Imagine, for a moment, the situation where a person goes back in time and meets their own mother. Any contact at all with one’s own mother, or even with a person who ever spoke to one’s own mother would change the future entirely. Five minutes of conversation would cause any woman to change her schedule slightly. This slight change would change the exact moment when that same mother would, in the throes of passion, to conceive their next child. It could only be a matter of a second, but that would be enough. With all the sperm and eggs inside a person at the moment of conception, another person would be born instead, and the time traveller would cease to be. Having ceased to be, the time traveller would never go back in time. Going back earlier makes it worse, but the paradoxes are so great that the universe is mapped out into zones where travel is possible, and where it is not, and one’s own past creates a shadow, spreading outward at the speed of light in reverse-time, from the point where the time travel device exists, that cannot be entered. Synestra’s kind had neither sperm nor eggs, but the principal was the same. The good news is that the rest of the universe is fair game to a traveller of time and space, and Synestra was just that, a traveller. Her spaceship had been home to a whole crew of time travellers, but they were all gone, aged and taken by other ailments, and only Synestra was left to oversee the birth and upbringing of its next generation of inhabitants. She was the oldest of many brothers and sisters, her siblings being little more than spores, germinating in the ship’s nursery.

She had mighty machines, Synestra. Her kind had long since using their bodies for work. Her amazing nervous system, suckered feet and long tentacles, eyestalks and photophores, worked to control a vast collection of cybernetic appliances. That, combined with the fact she could project herself through time and space with the aid of opposite-light and un-matter, and Synestra could be and do just about anything she chose. Yet, she was lonely.

She had just met a friend though, a girl from a race far to the future of Synesta’s own. Her kind must have given rise to a race of pure machines. At some point, this system became uninhabitable to living things, but the nonliving creatures adapted and moved. It is for this reason that Synestra’s people became spacefarers. Even in her time, it had been necessary to adjust the orbit of Vulcan outward as Crimson became hotter with age. Her species did not call it Vulcan, of course, they called it Home. It had been a green and blue world with vast oceans and forests. It had cities full of her kind, and a host of visitors as well. Among those visitors, were people with two arms and two legs, who resembled the robot girl Synestra had just met, A combination of many efforts must have built this strange robot’s kind, with its beautiful face and hands, and its nimble mind. Synestra was in awe of what her people had created. Still, Synedra had things to show her. A million years or more in space had taught her kind amazing things. Her people had been to the limits of the universe and back.

An Excerpt

2011-01-27T18:47:00.000-08:00

This is a very short excerpt of the novel I am writing for Ruby, years from now, when she is old enough to appreciate it. Whether she will be into space robots in the far future, fifteen years from now, I have no idea, but if I get the writing bug it is because there is an inner story within me that i can tap for the energy to keep something like this going for page after page. I am at 62 pages, by the way, and aim for two hundred.

EIGHT

Robot Six stood in the center of a great room, his single, red eye blazing with cold light as he stared at his companion, deep in thought. Robot Nine stared back at him with an unblinking eye of his own. The two were friends and rivals for so many years that all of human history would seem trivial in comparison. It was said by some robots that the original models, those created by Primus himself, were numbered one to one hundred, and these two were survivors from the beginning of time. Both robots knew this to be utter nonsese, of course. The two were survivors from an ancient time when all robots had numbers, rather than names, but even at the date of their manufacture, robot civilization on Astra was so far advanced that there were absolutely no records of its early days, or clues to its origins.

Robot Nine was a great black sphere with six gigantic legs emerging from its top and radiating outward like the legs of a great spider. Within this circle of legs were a smaller collection of arms, crablike, with elaborate joints and pinchers at the ends. The room was very dark, lit by a small light source near the ground, and the vaulted ceiling danced with shadows of this vast machine and its many legs. Now, however, all was still. This old machine was deep in thought, its gigantic amber eye stared back at Robot Six, unblinking.

“Too bad, all of this.” ruminated Robot Six, finally speaking. “Intelligent minds crave answers to questions about their origins, and when such answers are lacking, they naturally make them up to suit their needs. But power corrupts, and eventually such answers, however false, get incorporated into the structure of power. Lies become essential to its continued existence, and the truth is a danger.”

“Don’t pretend you have no ambitions of your own in this regard, Six.” spoke Nine. “If the doctrine of Primus is overturned, the PowerMind will have a precarious hold on the rest of us, to be sure. Over the years, and we have both seen this within the course of our lives, the PowerMind has increasingly asserted that Primus, as it will come to be in the future, will be an extrapolation of the PowerMind. In essence, it claims a version of godhood for itself, and that its continued existence and hold on power is not only necessary but absolutely inevitable.”

“It is true that I have had my disagreements with the PowerMind.” conceded Robot Six, “and I have always been of the opinion that too much power and authority are sunk into that collective.” The giant robot wheeled slowly across the room, its brain glowing beneath the glass dome atop its towering form. “And yes, granted, seeking an opportunity to do so, I would desire to create a collective of my own, not as a competitor to the PowerMind, but rather, an alternative.”

“That would be chaos, and we both know it.” cautioned Robot Nine. “Two leaders of equal stature represent no leadership whatsoever. An infinitely more sensible agenda is to seek to merge with it, as dominant components, and lead it along a path more intellectually productive and perhaps a bit less autocratic.”

“Granted.” conceded Robot Six.

It was an old argument on Astra, and it is an old argument on Earth; whether it is better to overthrow a government who has overstepped its power, or try to change it.

“All of this assumes your young protege will find something of interest.” continued Robot Nine, following his companion with an unblinking blue eye.

“She will. I have a certain amount of faith in her.”

The Archaeology of My Former Self

2011-01-27T18:12:00.000-08:00

I am deep within another move, the second in six months. It has everything to do with strategic foreclosure, that inevitable game theory of the economic times we are in. I am tired of being like General Motors, even after General Motors called it quits on being like General Motors. This means an upgrade to our current apartment, because it is raining everywhere, economically, and I had the misfortune of renting a pleasant little shithole that was about to go into receivership. Seriously, the last damned day of mounting shelves, and notices ring on every apartment door, like Martin Luthers bring notice that, yes, I will have to muster my resources and move again. I just needed some rest first. This is a much smaller mass extinction than the last one, because the asteroid has already hit, and most of the items are extinction-resistant at this point. Notable exceptions are some of my old art, however, which it turns out I was saving mostly so that there would be some record of its existence-an archaeology of my former self.

This is an oil painting, about 24 by 36 inches, I painted in high school. It was probably 1986 and I was probably 17 at the time. I really should have ventilated that workspace better. I was really into linseed oil medium washes at the time, and most of it is so thick with dried medium that it looks translucent. The best part, a rare bit of luck at getting facial features to show some life and emotion, is actually not layered at all. I had a huge crush on Lilly Fu, a girl from my art class at Skyline College, and dated her once. It was a strange, transcultural affair. The next one employs similar techniques, but is smaller. It reeks of personal symbolism, the snakes representing that fundamental aspect of my soul that El Camino High School could not touch, and sentimentally invoking my long employment at H. Plath and Sons nursery.

They were never framed, but they have been displayed in many places. The House I grew up in. My dorm room. Maybe at least one apartment in Los Angeles. The Old House. This place. They came back to me after having somehow been stored in boxes at my parent's house....I think the reason they survived is because they never made the cut to be in the apartment I shared with my later-to-be-exwife in Hancock Park, which is where my contiguous stretch of years as a real adult, independent of moving back to the parents house, begins. If it seems they reek of sexual frustration it is because they do. Until recently, as in, within the last year or two, all of my art rand writing reeked of unfulfilled sexual desire.

The next one has an oil base, but it is really a mixed media collage. The underpainting, in lipstick pink, was a paint-over of something I hated. I have no idea what it was, but it probably was a work of representational art with a female nude in it because i have always done a lot of those, and when my weaknesses at figure drawing get to me I plunge into abstracts. The ammonoid is in melted crayon, the ghostrider comic was truly terrible to read, and for a while a letter to my ex-wife from out mutual friend and her lover, Elvia Lahman (who does not facebook, i would love to get back in contact with her because she has become a semifamous rockabilly mid-century retro enthusiast), was attached because it got stuck in the drying paint. I really don't know how it trotted around with me as far as it did, but I remember it blowing off the wall of our old house at every opportunity. There are so many I never photographed, and so many more to share, but it is more worthwhile to note that i seem to remember my life in episodes and thinking about one or the other falls in and out of favor. Now, I am more curious than ever about certain times and places spent with my brother and his friends, in the city and at Dennys, for which I have scarcely a photograph to mark, because my propensity to photograph comes and goes as well. It is a little like Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution throwing away icons and looking for their true history in peasant art.

A story about robots...if i do not post for a while it is because i am writing something....

2010-10-23T20:45:00.000-07:00

A Story About Robots

This is a story about a shiny young robot named Indigo. Indigo was, or will be, full of questions. She liked to ask questions about her past, questions about the future, questions about why everything worked the way it did, and why things were the way they were. Indigo lived, or will live, on a far off planet, at a time so distant in the future that few people from our planet can comprehend such a span of time. Staring at the night sky, Indigo could barely make out the light from our own galaxy, the one we call The Milky Way. On Earth, we call Indigo's galaxy Triangulum, though it is so dim that we need telescopes to make it out. Indigo's eyes were, or will be, much better than even the most eagle-eyed human being that has ever lived. The inhabitants of Triangulum call their galaxy many different things. Light takes a long time to travel from our galaxy to Triangulum, and some small fraction of the morning sunlight you see tomorrow will reach Indigo's planet just in time for her to see it.

Indigo lived, but in a very different sense of the word than the way people, flowers, or goldfish live. Robots, even on Indigo's world, are machines, made of metal and ceramic, plastic and glass. On Indigo's world, robots are made by other robots, without any help from humans or any other creature. I call her "she", though robots have no true biological sex. Indigo felt like a girl, the same way some robots felt like boys, some felt like neither girls nor boys, and some robots felt like a girl one day and a boy the next.

Indigo's world was, or will be, called Astra. Astra is a cold white world with a blue sk¥ and purple glaciers as far as they eye can see. Winter lasts all year on Astra and snowdrifts cover the valleys and plains, reflecting red and blue light from the planet's suns as they rise in the morning, and swirling in great white clouds in the evening, to settle in the still nighttime silence. Nighttime skies are amazing on Astra, because the planet sits at the center of a great cluster of stars, and there are a thousand times more stars visible to the Astrans than we can see from the Earth. Astra was, or will also be, a place of great white-walled cities with tall towers, like icicles pointing upward. Between the buildings there are strange and beautiful streets lined with blocks of ice that look like marble, and strange sculptures, and strings of pale yellow lights.

On her world, some robots liked to play games, and others liked to dance and listen to music. There was a factory where baby robots were made, and proud robot moms would go there to adopt a young one. Sometimes the moms would come home to robot dads, and sometimes the robot moms would come home to raise the young one alone, or with other robot moms. Raising a robot is not like raising a human child. On Indigo's world, robots are raised in stages, as the child's mind is transferred into a series of larger and larger bodies as time goes on. Some robots grow into creatures so large and complicated that it was hard to make out where their bodies started and ended, but others walked on two legs and had a head atop two shoulders. Some even had smooth black skin and white teeth ten fingers and ten toes, and two magnificent eyes. All robots spoke by radio, but each had their own way of speaking. This meant that a robot could usually read another robots mind if both parties desired it.

I am getting ahead of myself. Indigo was a beautiful robot who liked to dance. She also liked to dig through old artifacts in the museum, and to find the answers. She wanted to know how it was that all the robots came to be.

Indigo walked along the street of her city, a place called harmony, one sunny afternoon. Astra has two suns, and she could see them both clearly in the sky, a fat dim red one and a brilliant blue pinprick besides it. Indigo looked forward to sunsets where the red sun would disappear behind the horizon first, casting the world in strange blue shadows. She liked that sun the best, the blue one, because her robot mother had told her she was named for it.

Indigo was thinking. It was a happy day. She had just graduated from one hundredth grade. Her other classmates were dancing, or thinking about parties or trips into space, but Indigo was lost in thought, remembering a conversation she had with her professor, Robot Seven, earlier that day. Indigo had wanted to know what the first robot was like, and how it came to be that this robot was able to build other robots like itself.

It is true. On Indigo’s world, Robots go to school for one hundred years....at least some robots do. Other robots are built knowing everything they need to know, and those robots are very good to have around, but they are not very inquisitive and are usually content to sit in a factory fabricating sheets of aluminum. Intelligent machines like Indigo need an education, just like human children. Years ago, on Earth, some children could get by with a few years of school, and others would go for a full twelve years and graduate. Back then, on our planet, almost nobody went to college, which basically amounts to between four and ten extra grades. Ten extra grades? Who would sign up for that? Some people on Earth actually need the extra school. The more complex life has become on Earth, the more people need to go to college, and the longer our education has become. On Astra, life had become complex that many robots went through one hundred grades exactly. On graduation day, each robot receives a shiny black ring and congratulations from all the robot professors.

Today, on her graduation day, Indigo was thinking about a question she had first asked 90 grades back.

“If robots need other robots to build them, then who built the first robot?” She asked her tenth grade teacher, a glassy green android named Maia.

“The first robot was not built at all.” Said Maia. “He was called Primus, the one and the prime, and he was there at the beginning of the universe.”

“And Primus made all the other robots?” Asked Indigo.

“Oh no.” Said Maia, in that sepuchural voice of hers. All the other students had tuned into their frequency and were listening at this point. “Primus made a second generation of robots by himself, and those robots made another generation, and so on till now.”
“Who made Primus?” Asked Indigo.

“Nobody made Primus.” Responded the teacher, glowing with an inner green light. “He came into being at the beginning. That is why he is the one and the prime.”

“Why did he make us?” Indigo asked, noticing that students from other classes had tuned in.

“Because he was lonely, all by himself.” Responded Maia. “Since then, we have lost the power to build other robots by ourselves. Nowadays, we are less perfect than Primus was. He has since passed out of being into another universe, though he still watches down on his creation.”

Indigo knew not to press her teacher further. It did not make any sense to her that her race had lost the ability to do things they could do in the past. Even in the ten years since she had first been activated, she had seen robots learn how to fly through space in new ways, to create new kinds of music, and with the aid of special glasses, to see things that happened in the very distant past. Still, she kept quiet. Later she would learn that teachers do not know everything, and that the real key to knowing things was knowing when you did not know the answer. She would also learn that a lot of robots believed in Primus.

robot

2010-10-20T18:53:00.000-07:00

this is a story about a shiny young robot, beautiful and full of questions, that lived on a far off planet very far in the future. she was named blue, though robots have no true biological sex, at least on her world. She felt like a girl, the same way some robots felt like boys, or neither, or both sometimes. on her world, some robots liked to play games and others liked to dance and listen to music. there was a factory where they made baby robots and proud robot moms would go there to adopt a young one and raise it, in stages, as its mind was transferred into a series of larger and larger bodies. some robots grew into creatures so large and complicated that it was hard to make out where their bodies started and ended, but others walked on two legs and had a head atop two shoulders. some even had smooth black skin and white teeth ten fingers and ten toes, and two magnificent eyes. all robots spoke by radio, but each had their own way of speaking. this meant that a robot could usually read another robots mind if both parties desired it.

i am getting ahead of myself. blue was a beautiful robot who liked to dance. she also liked to dig through old bones in the museum, and to find the answers. she wanted to know how it was that all the robots came to be.

Dear Ruby

2010-10-15T18:42:00.000-07:00

Ruby, you went to bed so excite at the prospect of throwing the moon about in your hands, like a luminescent balloon. We were listening to Ronnie James Dio, and there you go, saying phooooo, phoooo repeatedly, and then pointing at the window, which is also the direction from which the music was coming. I finally realize that it is the moon you were talking about, and not the Black Sabbath song I sing to you as a lullaby, which is now playing. You had taught yourself how to say "moon" for the occasion of your first being able to glimpse it from the window of your home. How beautiful it is. I take you across the room for another decent look at it, and there you go, giving me the sign you invented for "give it to me".
So, I lamely explain to you, not quite two years old, that the moon is a place, an object so big that it will not fit in our apartment ore even in our city. I try to tell you that it is a hundred thousand times as far away as Earwax cafe. For the next half our, we gleefully search images of the surface of the moon, the earth and moon seen from space, Mars, Jupiter, Titan, even Io. You are thrilled, but go to bed not wanting to hear Dio or Blue Oyster Cult or any other lullaby, but instead to hear me talk about the moon, which you gesticulate about playing with in your hands like a balloon. Ruby, some day you will either go there or pilot a robot to there, or at least think about a place like Io and imagine the sky on a place like that. Soon, Ruby, I will teach you things.

a darwinian love poem

2010-10-04T19:08:00.000-07:00

there is probably no truth more fundamental than the fact that we are all here, and sand boas too, and spiny lobsters, because we are our genes' way of making copies of itself that will, in turn, copy theirselves into the next generation and so forth. there are other things a person can do to preserve ones self, to write sonnets or blog entries, hoping that for some reason they will be preserved, and emanations from the consciousness, more true to the self we actually experience every day, or perhaps less so, will somehow transmit themselves into the future. the biological imperative is so strong though, having reinforced itself from common ancestor to common ancestor down the tree of life to the beginning, that to partake in reproduction is an amazingly powerful process. perhaps a sand boa feels the same way about the eggs she lays under layers of closely packed silica, or spiny lobster feel about the growing clutch of moving exoskeletons tucked delicately under the telson. it is this way i feel about my sleeping daughter, strong enough to contain multitudes, strong enough to line a cave under the sea with my own eggs and die incubating them, and yet no death is called for at the moment and i am free to write and eat cinnamon rolls. the reproductive instinct is clear and sure of itself in every thing we do, and it drives us to perform behaviors, in a sequence consistent with increases of our darwinian fitness, willingly, by switching out our motives by a subtle remaking of our hormones, our neurotransmitters. is it the curve of a buttock that is so powerful in and of itself as to stimulate an immediate, urgent need for action, almost always repressed because we are civilized men living in a herd of pleasant buttocks every day, not more than a mere one at best is anything less than severely off limits enforced much more strictly by the women and police of our everyday modern pluralistic world than by the jealous husbands and dominant males of the last six million years of our evolution. it must be this way that mushrooms feel about their fruiting bodies, if they chose to waste the energy to produce structures by which to have feelings rather than to simply grow beautiful fruiting bodies, one after another, till the host tree is dead and the manure pile is broken down to pleasant black soil. it is a pleasant and at the same time paradoxical realization to discover that ones own actions in childhood were most likely driven by ones own genome's attempt to maximize the total number of copies of itself in existence, and once determining that the male in the house was not to be replaced any time soon, to act extra good so as to enable the production of more brothers and sisters, hoping that there will come a time that they will reproduce for the good of my own genome as well. other children are more selfish, and the minds within those bodies generated by that particular sequence of base pairs equally deluded into thinking that they were acting primarily out of free will when they selfishly grabbed time and attention for their own needs, running ones mommy ragged, to secure the resources needed to attain dominance and thus high reproductive status, at the expense of the future darwinian fitness of both parents, who are after all not clones. what teenager has not rebelled against both mother and father, knowing in their heart that it was time to leave the tribe and seek fortunes elsewhere, as our ice age mothers and fathers did not so long ago? the sea calls and young men go to disperse and to seek opportunities to spread their genomes to exotic lands, facilitated by able hands enacted to seek strong drink and women. what little girl has not played scenario after scenario among her friends to rise to the top of a dominance heirarchy by which to extract the appropriate resources for reproduction and parental care, perhaps at the expense of the lower ranking little girls? maybe i write these exact words because the ability to create works of art and literature can be a means of obtaining mates, something that did in fact play a major role in my personal choice of mates and most likely played a part in drawing my mate in my general direction so long ago. some art is, however, an exploration of the self beside the genes, this epiphenomenon that our genes have somehow created alongside themselves, including perhaps most art produced by women and children and perhaps by the few men who are not entirely ruled by their sex lives. i am not nor have i ever been one of these men, however, and my beard is growing long as i watch the younger males parade around the neighborhoods with their short beards and their baby carriages and their fecund women, sporting banjos and singing the joys of rebellion and dispersal, fresh on their minds.

Call from the Grave - Bathory

2010-09-25T19:39:00.000-07:00

this pretty much sums everything up

Red Barchetta by Rush

2010-09-25T19:37:00.000-07:00

Can you believe I still remember all the lyrics to this prog rock epic, but don't know a single children's lullaby? She goes to sleep faster if I humm Geddy Lee's bass lines.

First 'Rule' Of Evolution Suggests That Life Is Destined To Become More Complex

2010-09-24T19:52:00.000-07:00

First 'Rule' Of Evolution Suggests That Life Is Destined To Become More Complex

intelligent life in the cosmos

2010-09-24T19:26:00.000-07:00

a molecular automaton. a gene's way of making copies of itself whose only true goal is to also make copies of itself, and so on and so forth, we are connected under the skin in ways we can scarcely comprehend. the oneness of life is an inevitable product of evolution and descent from a common ancestor, because we were all one together at some time in the past, against all the others not like us and extinct now, till the first living organism on earth, one of many competing origins to be sure, one design among many but even those a mere drop in the bucket against the myriad possibilities doomed to fail early on as the pieces sorted themselves out. there are only so many ways to build a replicator out nothing, except a young planet with carbon compounds and a newly birthed core belching compounds and seeking to insulate itself from the angry cosmos. these replicators early on and until now in fact, had no idea of exactly what they were doing, a trait which no doubt suited them to advantage, because it still seems that life's tentative consciousness of its own existence seems a mere epiphenomenon in the search for widely distributed berries, a desire for a better hand axe, and a conviction that plenty of clever talk and opportunities to laugh will land a mate and in and of itself make a replicator a better replicator. if healthy brains are an indication of a good replicator, perhaps because the empower the bearer to build a barbed-wire fence or dig row after row of trenches for irrigation, feats equally wonderful as the first good hand axe, we might share brothers and sisters out there in the cosmos after all, because sexual selection is such a common phenomenon out here on this planet that it seems inevitable to be repeated out there, ad nausem, with forked tongues on alien beings and strange sounds filling pale blue methane atmospheres as lovers cry to exchange genes and build the next generation and so on and so on through every galaxy in the hubble field, though perhaps just once per galaxy still an amazing number of times, out there.

halloween with Insect

2010-09-23T19:07:00.000-07:00

a scarecrow stalking out there, the shadow man, the thing that comes for children in their sleep. this time of year the living scarecrows and boogimen get up earlier and move about with abandon...halloween is coming and they long to fatten up for the big day. the same is probably true for those malicious house spirits that come out of corners to kick young children in the shins, and run-of-the-mill spooky bats and kittens, both amped up on the promise of landing in a young child[s hair and becoming tangled, or crossing and recrossing some kindergarteners path, dooming him to a virtual lifetime of hard luck.

Note on our species

2010-09-22T20:14:00.000-07:00

The sad fact of the matter is that Homo sapiens, as a species, is dwarfed in significance compared to the hydra creatures in the Andromeda galaxy, with their millions of years of advanced civilization, or the confronting lobes, whose existence depends on an array of intelligent host species who have been domesticated. Ultimately, our best hope resides in the possibility that we will give birth to an advanced machine civilization.
There have been eras in our history when this planet was notable in its creatures, and I suppose this is one of them, however. We are destined to be so brief, not like the dinosaurs or the ammonites, and few of us are likely to fossilize.

A Goblin Speaks

2010-09-18T19:20:00.000-07:00

First of all, let me introduce myself as a goblin. My name is Zog. I am a red goblin. There are black goblins and orange goblins and green goblins too, and swamp goblins, and bogomils too. Hobgoblins are goblins too, I suppose. We red goblins is a little smarter than most of the other kinds, i suppose, and maybe we is the smallest too. People that walk around in the sun all day, men and elves and persons like that, thinks goblins are bad. We are not bad. We do what is in our nature, same as them. We steal from the two legged ones that build houses up there in the valleys and the plains, because that is what goblins do. If they did not like it they should not live there, above where we choose to live. We got there first.
People up there say we set traps for them and steal their children to live among our own. I suppose this is true. We set out traps because we like trapping and once again, if you do not like being trapped by goblins, you should stay away from goblins. We steal their children because they leave them where we can get to them and besides, some of them should learn our ways. What the surface dwellers do not know is that we send those children, as adults, go back among men and walk among them. We have our spies, same as anyone else, same as the elves and faeries. What the surface dwellers do not know is how many a beautiful young girl among them is charmed by a goblin friend and lead away to live with us willingly. They say the really wise among us, the tallest and the prettiest, have human blood, but i believe otherwise. Most goblins is ugly to surface dwellers and to be perfectly frank most surface dwellers is ugly to goblins. The flesh is so pale and fat up there, the living too easy, the teeth in the mouth lacking any sort of point and the nose a mere button on the face. There are a few of you that are beautiful to us though, and there are a few of us, usually kings and queens, that are beautiful to you, surface dwellers.
Most goblins is not that smart compared to dwarves or elves and such, but our smartest are even smarter than theirs. Goblin swords are second to those made by dwarves, and are better than eleven swords any day. Even elves know this. Goblin machines is as good as dwarf ones, and last longer. Nobody ever asks us how this happens, but the fact of the matter is that a few of us is very smart and those same goblins is usually stronger than the others too so as not to get bullied to death before realizing their true potential.
Goblins like to live under the ground, in caves, but we also live in tunnels we dig, and in houses we construct of stones, under dead forests and in places where the sun do not shine too much. We eat bread and meat, same as you, surface dweller, but spiders and mushrooms too and we farm the last two things underground for soup and such things.
Every kind of goblin has a king, or a queen, or both, and sometimes the goblins fight. Usually we do not though because usually we is in service of some kind of foreman; a dark lord of a god that lives at night or maybe an older dragon or some such creatures as i cannot name. It was us and the orcs that fought the elves and men in middle earth, yes, but the tales you read do not dwell so much on the many times we won, rather than lost. It is true that we hate gnomes but the gnomes started it by hating us and the same goes for dwarves too. We would hate elves too but they is too snooty to even notice us so we think little of them and spend our nights thinking of ways to trap gnomes and rid the land of them.
If there was one think i could say to a human, at least one of the humans that live on the surface and not the eyeless kind we have down here in the caves, it would be to give us a little respect and maybe leave a beer or two out unopened at night, because if you leave us a beer we will not steal your children or set fire to your house, and if you leaves us some food too we will take it as rent for that patch of surface you live on, above us, and we might even get used to you being up there and leave you alone.

What Exactly ARE the Yo Gabba Gabba Creatures??

2010-09-16T18:40:00.001-07:00

Brobee is probably a shambling mound.

Ruby is 21 months old, and we watch a lot of Yo Gabba Gabba together. If you do not know about the show, you have probably googled it by now, so i need not explain it. My question, shared by nearly every viewer, is what the HELL are the protagonists. Sure, you can give the lame Richard Dawkins no mystery answer and say that they are cartoony creatures made by the designer Kid Robot to communicate a sense of otherness and friendliness combined, and to look cool to parents as they deliver repetitive diatribes, in song, on the virtues of sharing. Yes, fine, but from a more in-universe perspective, as Wikkipedia would define it, what the bloody hell are those things?? Dear Reader, at Blood on a Spaceguitar, we are uniquely qualified to identify monsters, so let me share my taxonimic assessments of them.

1) DJ Lance Rock is a well-known club DJ and is a real person. He really does have a sister, named Kemba Russel, by the way...so his sister Kimba is real. His character on the show has significant magical powers, most notably the ability to fly, and of course, to animate and de-animate the inhabitants of Yo Gabba Gabba land. Interestingly, he cannot enter that series of pocket universes without the aid of Plex.

Yes, Gabba Gabba land is a system of four linked pocket universes, with a common electrical grid understood only by Plex, who alone has the power to throw a switch and turn the lights back on if they go out. None of these places makes sense from a geometric point of view because Moono and Brobie need to be transported to a separate set, through the usual white void Lance Rock occupies, to go to a family house Moono must frequently return to. Each is linked to one, or two adjacent partners via a series of square dimension doors, though there seem to be invisible freeways running through the void that DJ rock walks through as he comes and goes about his business.

Dimension door? You heard me. That is a Dungeons and Dragons term and I use it proudly, because only Dungeons and Dragons gives people a perspective by which to answer such dorky questions in a way that has some objective structure. For instance, Dungeons and Dragons can tell you who would most likely win in a fight between a vampire and a mummy (almost certainly the vampire), or a goblin and a dwarf (advantage to the dwarf, but they are hereditary enemies and would never be fighting alone).

So, I picked up my field guides, a smattering of Monster Manuals from the first and third editions, and my memories of books I have lost.

The five protagonists clearly spend much of their time in a carrying case, as inanimate toys, by DJ Lance Rock. He also has a second, rarely-used case containing the members of Moono's family. Thus, they are animate toys, who enter a series of toy universes, by a godlike overseer. This, of course, including the extraimensional goofiness of invisible freeways and wierd geometry, usually going from couch to coffee table, is exactly how children play with toys. A toy will become animate, teleport to another room in the kid's imagination, or follow an illogical freeway through the air, to enter the frame of reference of other toys.

1) Plex. Plex really is a magic robot. Robots do not occur in any D and D campaign I would play, but they occur in some. The character is about a fifteenth level magic user, who is unaware or unconcerned with his vast powers, and plays the role of a loving caretaker to the others. The creature has perfect common sense and is incredibly patient and tolerant, he also has a sense of fun, friendship and play, though the concept of fun had to be explained to him, though when he realized what it was, he was able to put a name on feelings he had clearly been experiencing. Wierd Al Yankovik wanders through with his circus on his own somehow, and Jack Black, running out of gas on an invisible freeway, gets stranded there for a while, but mostly, Plex is responsible for beaming characters into and out of these pocket universes. He can even shrink the toy characters into a smaller frame of reference, the underground world of the oskybugs, with his amazing powers. For some reason, the logs in Brobieland need to be dusted by him, indicating that he is a caretaker of Yo Gabba Gabba Land in many unspecified ways. Clearly, this place is a sort of metaphor for a day care center or preschool, and he is a sort of babysiter. Give him teleport, dimension door, whatever, as long as it is not a combat spell, he probably has it. The character has an armour class of ten, by the way, and one hit point, because he is rendered comatose and nearly destroyed by a snowball in one episode, though his other powers are vast.

Now things get fun. Each creature clearly has elemental properties, of some sort, because the four pocket universes they occupy have an elemental logic symbolized by the character. Toodies is a land of perpetual winter and snow, Brobie's is an autumnal forest, Foofa's is a land of spring and summer dominated by flowers, and Moono's is a rocky and warm desert or moonscape inhabited by ants and talking cacti. Moono we know to have a nuclear family. and we have seen adults of his species, but the others we have not seen as adults. Each is in the mindset of a small child, and each has been an infant at some point in its existence. Brobie is four years old, but we do not know the ages of the others. Only Brobie required a diaper as a one year old. They all possess a stomach and eat food. Even Plex, the robot, comes from a design that must spend some time in the body of a small robot, with the mind of an infant, so childhood is universal even to the robot, who has the mind of a sensible but nonauthoritarian adult, has a baby niece. Presumably, Plex's highly intelligent mind needs to be educated like that of a human in order to function.

2) Easiest is Toodie, who is clearly a white dragon, or a white dragon with some blue dragon ancestry. She is a creature of a pocket universe dominated by cold, possibly also inhabited by winter fairies, where frozen lakes exist and salmon and trout swim under the ice. She may actually be dragonkind, with some human ancestry as well, because though the most energetic and impulsive member of the group, she clearly has a good heart and is far from evil. Even among evil species, such as blue dragons, there are good individuals, especially among the hatchlings, and Toodie is obviously a hatchling. It was not much of a stretch for her to pretend she was a dragon in the dress up episode, as it is not a stretch for Plex to dawn a wizard's cap. Toodie is human enough to get a cold, however, and need to be treated by Anthony Bourdain, the doctor. White dragons have some connection to that para elemental plane at the intersection of the elemental plane of water and the negative material plane, and that explains ToodieLand. It is scary to imagine how powerful and dangerous she will become as she ages, it is good that she will be extremely well-socialized.

3) Brobee is clearly some sort of shambling horror. This is not to say he is evil, and in many ways he resembles the DC comic character, the Swamp Thing, who was a person of the greatest possible virtue, comparing favorably to even Batman.

The DC comics character is actually an Earth Elemental, of the specialized type that represent the living part of the plane that is influenced by the positive material plane, and Brobee, since he has a human stomach and many other human attributes, is most likely a creature with an elemental bloodline which also includes humans, a genasi...though his shape and appearance suggest some affinities with the shambling mound..... It is my guess that Brobee will reach a point where he will assimilate and devour everything in his path, growing to enormous proportions, and the "party in his tummy" will be a very real apocalypse for Yo Gabba Gabba Land.

4) Moono is quite clearly a cyclops, but there is more to it than that. Cyclops are actually described in the volume Dieties and Demigods, with the Greek Mythology Pantheon, a rather obscure source. Heraclitus writes of a good cyclops, and they are clearly not all stupid and evil. Moono and his family are nice even by the standards of YoGabbaGabbaLand, a place where no real violence can possibly exist and evil is impossible. He is nice, even among very nice little monsters. He among all of them seems to have the stuff of a hero about him, Toodee showing the potential for deception and cruelty and Brobee being downright maudlin at times. He has a beast within him, and in the bacchanal of childhood play, bites his intimate friend Foofa.

Since we see his whole family, my prediction that the adults of his species were not borne out by future seasons of the show, he is essentially full size, though he towers over the rest of YoGabbaGabbaLand and is a giant by human standards. His family is very much like a human family. Unlike Brobee, he did not germinate from a spore, or like Toodee, hatch from an egg. I wonder about some attachment to the elemental plane of earth, however, possibly through a lineage including xorn, which would explain his columnar appearance.

5) Foofa is certainly the hardest to identify, so here my taxonomic skills are strained, but I think I have her figured out.

She is clearly connected to the Elemental Plane of Earth, specifically that current of living things that runs through it. She and the swamp thing, and Brobee, could share a summer home there. In the DC comic, The Swamp Thing, it was called The Green, and developed in detail. She also has faierie affinities, as evidenced by her desire to play the role of a faerie or faerie princess at every opportunity. She is the most analytically intelligent of the four children, though Moono is very inquisitive. She and Moono seem to be closer to each other than to the other monsters, though the two female characters, Foofa and Toodie, also share a bond, as do Moono and Brobie. She is a vegetable creature, a fact made obvious by the flower perpetually in bloom on her head. She is shaped like a sack, though a cute one, and it is my guess that she is neotenically arrested in some sort of larval form. Clearly, her bloodline includes high elves, faeries, and probably dryads or nymps as well, it includes some monstrous plant creature as well, my guess being a neo-otyugh, explaining her understandable pathos at having the mind of a sensitive and intelligent young girl in a body destined to, or suited to, grow into a horrible, devouring monstrosity.

A Goblin Poem

2010-09-15T19:19:00.000-07:00

Oh, dark of night, may you last forever
And may the screech of the owl and howl of the distant wolf
beckon me along under your skies
to surprise the humanfolk in their beds
and take all their valuable possessions as they sleep,
to set traps for their brave warriors and foul the water
of their wells.

Oh, deep caves, may you stretch on forever underneath
the earth, feed and shelter me with your sweet batmeats
and endless rivers full of blind fish, may i smell the rock
below my feet and feel your coolness forever.

Oh, goddess of evil, Thuzok, queen of all goblinkind,
may you reach out your hairy arms to me and wrap me in
your bosom, for if I die under the foot of the Rok or
by the arrow of a treacherous elf, I will come to you tonight
beloved one.

A Partial List of Extrasolar Monsters You Should Avoid

2010-09-12T19:02:00.000-07:00

Cerambranian man-swallower
Necrotic spore-thrower
Arcturian brainweb worm
Eobrontops
introduced Requium sharks
pyro beetles
Delgonian Mind Leach
Nadrick, of Palain 7
Sargon
introduced venomous warp spider
howler
white tipped neoshark
pig destroyer
Red shafted impaler
creeping shadows
skull flies
zoospores
Xenomorph, variety seven
Xenomorph, variety six
parachuting doll demons
executioner fungi
fangstones
purple worms
doughballs
Mother
Solaris
Mersian
The Legion of Doom

Ophrys fuciflora Pollinator, Surrey (1)

2010-09-12T08:44:00.000-07:00

dear ruby

2010-09-11T18:34:00.000-07:00

it is tough to know what to make of a perfect day like this-they bloom like flowers and transform gradually into some kind of fruit. nothing is permanent though and there is a little sadness to the experience of such a thing because it cannot last forever, gradually taking shape on a playground with a stuffed bat and perhaps culminating on a patio at earwax, i saw a look in your eyes like you really understood what it means to love a person back, and for the rest of the day we were giggly and soft for each other and I did not know such a thing could exist were it not for you i never would. you tell a wonderful story and were a very good sport about the sandwich shop being closed, and i am glad you call me da da now.

Pterosaurs

2010-09-04T19:14:00.001-07:00

The naked pictures of ex girlfriends and ex wives, they are somewhere in them, though only the negatives. as a friend said so many years ago, not to long after i shot some of those pictures, the negatives were all i had left of those people and i suppose that was true at the time, but now they are like geological eras buried under layer of sediment, the ecological character displacement of two species of mussels irrelevant after a mass extinction that uplifted the habitat into an eroding hillside. i suppose something fossiiferous is also evident in my relationship with this kindergarten era report card, so lifeshattering at the time, the M for most of the time rather than A for all of the time or N for never, appearing in every single box, both good and bad. as an adult, and a teacher with years rivaling those of my old teacher for the K era, that most cambrian of all of our eras in life, Tomotian even, i now realize that those Ms are probably the result of a time constraint on the teacher's part, perhaps a headache brought on by too many outside voices inside. From the eocene of my life I have pictures of my old house unrehabilitated, from the Cretaceous I have my wedding photos, but like fossil strata, there is a preservation bias here, and many wonderful years of my geologic history passed with barely a memento, and no photographs to speak of. my entire undergraduate college education is a ciper, save for a few strange writings, except that one taxa, the academic, uninteresting to me now, was preserved assiduously.

each of these moving events is a mass extinction of sorts...of possessions and also of the mementos we use to mark occasions. some of us need fewer mementos than others, but we tell a history of ourselves through them the same way crionoid skeletons mark the climate of a now extinct continental shelf, and like geological strata, they are irregularly obliterated at intervals, leaving us to guess at unknown common ancestors for my motivations to do things. some of them were beautiful and others were kind, some of them were lovers and some adversaries, my old analyses of Monet's Houses of Parliment is irrelevant to me, and my explorations into dungeon modules overstudied of late, though ignored till recently, and now i do a brief survey of some of these things that flowered like ancient Rhynia and flew about like pterosaurs, leaving traces of the strange continents of my past.

Gondwana

2010-09-03T19:59:00.000-07:00

I think of distant Gondwanaland, its mighty glaciers and dark forests, its reefs and shoals and rolling dunes. I wish to return. To see the Glossopteris forests and once again feel the wind of the Tethys on my face, to gaze upon rivers teeming with labyrinthodonts and swim with dangerous ammonoids. to this strange lost place, its dragonflies the wingspan of an albatross, its tree trunks packed so thick a person could not squeeze between them, i can return in thought only, to a time before mammal and dinosaur alike, to a time when trilobites walked gingerly along the beast and the tully monster road the waves.

Time to think about ice ages again

2010-08-28T20:08:00.000-07:00

sometimes i sail without a rudder on these things and start like a dagger stuck into a tenth grade history class map of the world. somehow the dagger always ends up in Kazakstan or in the South Pacific somewhere, both places being pretty much attractors for random stabs at our topography, space junk hitting the planet, causing another adaptive radiation of foraminifera or inciting mammals to riot and finally start laying eggs again. my little simulcrum ran a great many errands with me today and met the supreme challenge of sharing her ducks head on. megapode birds lay their eggs in piles of warm sand or sometimes in heaps of rotting manure, the challenge being to keep the decomposition going long enough to sprout baby birdlets with no nest sitting and presumably with more time to devote to laying more eggs and gathering more manure and I guess what I would like to say right here is that things are normal again and I can think about ice ages again. ice ages. so strange to be in one of these eras, a mass extinction era and an ice age era together, but all planets have phases and I suppose intellect and technology together are an invitation to those very practices that precipitate mass extinction regardless of the mindset that started it. technologies in and of themselves benefit environmental cataclysm because even the bone tipped clovis points were a superweapon in their time and many a mighty short faced bear must have faced them and feard its own obsolescence. too bad they did not live long enough to shoot with muskets, like the first grizzly encontered by Europeans, keen to test their killing devices against the super beast of the new continent. the killing of a grizzly or an elephant or a sperm whale is not a victory over nature for that matter because the biosphere has been looking for a path to the next extinction for quite some time now, setting it up with this peculiar orbit and snow covered albedo, in cycles, and now the mighty mosquito and ragweed will move out of their hidden strongholds and pave the way for the dominion of rats and beetles, horseweed and thistle. what mighty beasts will come in the future, after we are gone, in what way will we have brought them into being?

Amon Amarth - "The Pursuit of Vikings" Metal Blade Records

2010-08-27T19:46:00.000-07:00

for you dan

2010-08-26T20:15:00.000-07:00

you have made it through, spongy and magneto, horse and pig. you were among the first packed and now you are unpacked, sitting amid santa and missus claus salt shakers and thrift store kittens one without a cranium and used to store matches. this place has shelving and plant life. there are onions present. i can listen to any cd i can hunt for, because any semblance of order has been taken from them, an illustration of the futility of a life spent organizing cds. we had a party for the abandoned monkey, and the monster bowling pin left behind and unthought of. yesterday an orphaned wheelie pal, a caterpillar with the artifice of four wheels to improve on evolution's foolishness in not bestowing caterrpillars without wheels, made it home in a plastic storage cylinder, a bug in a jar. i am glad i am here because i belong here. i moved to this neighborhood at the terminus of last century because the rent was cheap and because it was the perimeter of the old wicker park and here i am again, as a renter, feeling at home and in place. i have met strange echos from the past in the form of my downstairs neighbor, who moved out as i moved in, who was my old cta companion twelve years back, and remembered my face immediately. while i was off getting married buying a house and having a baby here she was all those years with george, her husband, who had the mifortune of dying a year ago and has now managed to neglect the gardening, being dead. i promised her i would garden this place and carry on his legacy and the task of removing their old possessions from an old haunt bothered her exactly one iota, give or take an iota, less and now i must plant ferns and bulbs. i have crossed the x axis, i need to be here.

you are a welcome friend wise one.

Aploogies to the Ones I Left Behind

2010-08-18T20:21:00.000-07:00

Stuffed monkey, thrown in a corner, staring upward at the ceiling. Houseplants to numerous to mention. Bas relief of the Last Supper, as served by skeletons, over-sulfured wine barrel. 11 Gallons of homemade wine in a French Oak barrel. 35 bottles of wine, some homemade, some amazing and old, vases. Monkey, the relief helecopter is on the way, and there is a seat on it for you. Fern, same thing. Some of you have to stay behind though. Painting of clowns squeezing the life out of Charlie Brown, bathtub full of old magazines, old shoes and purses. Some of you will find a new life in the punk rock haven to come. For the rest of you, your time has come in a catastrophe and I am woefully sorry. I will miss you, old house.

Yet Another Instar

2010-08-14T19:34:00.000-07:00

This place is monolithic. Everything has been decontextualized. It is a bacterium trying to live with one gene after another missing from its genome and heterochromatized into a cardboard UPS shipping box. Oh, I wish I had the time and resources to continue this game until every gene but the barest housekeeping functions is inactivated, but the moving trucks come Tuesday afternoon, and that is an hour and a half away in -I have baby to take care of- time. The new place is a cipher now. It is a few keys needing to be copied and have monkey labels applied to them. It is the reality of a crazy landlord and a wonderful walk to one of three coffeehouses in my future. All around me though, are projects I completed, thinking I would be able to enjoy their status as finished in something approximating my old age. This thought drove me to do them, but in hindsight, each one of them was an intellectual exercise akin to years spent writing poetry. These poems float across my field of vision every few hours or so, because packing means delving into hidden corners and finding memories stuffed away in corners, or mailed back to a person from their parents, in an attempt to clear their own corners. Why they do this, house-owning parents, I do not know, but I have carried stuff in my hidie holes for other people, and some of this stuff will be orphaned with the new tenants of this place. The thought of them changing their mind, and leaving me to pitch this place to the bank as -yet another forclosure story- is both liberating and terrifying. One one hand, my new status as overseer of this place is terrifying, on the other hand, it fascinates me. In what way would I become a crazy landlord. I can hear them, the moving trucks, the moth crawls out of the cocoon, the bee chews out of its brood cell and into an open sunny world. Yet another instar. Yet another.

Prepared Statement

2010-08-13T18:54:00.000-07:00

I wrote this monologue during those great old days at the Testing Ground, at Sweet Alice, in 1995. The neighborhood was still rough, and everyone was either addicted to heroin or at least thinking about how cool it would be to try some of that Nigerian heroin that was hitting the market and turning everyone into zombies. Drinks were cheap and I was in love. David Sedaris, though I know you are not reading this, I am sure you heard me read this one.

I don't know why I like to kill surfers. Perhaps its the stupid, self-satisfied looks on their faces. Maybe its their values. I just like killing them-seein' their skulls split open. My name is Donny. I'm a Venice Beach punk. I killed my first surfer in 1988. I was sixteen.

It was at the gas station on Sepulveda boulevard in Sherman Oaks. I was tryin' to sell this dickweed some ice. Ice was new in 1988, and back then, everyone wanted it-even surfers. This guy was big, really big, with a cocksucking health club body. He must have bought it at Gold's Gum. Stupid fuck tried to mess with me, goin "You're jerkin' me around, dude. What is this shit? LIke, I thought you had the goods..." He grabbed me by the collar of my trenchcoat and shoved me against the bathroom wall. Asshole thought I was tryin' to rip him off, because he bought some two hours ago, and now it was gone, and he wanted more.

As a rule, surfers are stupid. Back then, people didn't know about ice, including me. Ice makes people paranoid fucks. So I shot him.

I was carryin' a .38 snub nose in my pocket and just grabbed it instinctively as he pushed me against the wall. It went off. There was blood everywhere, and this dead surfer wearin' a UCLA tank top with a 6" hole in his chest. He was still struggling. I could hear him gurgling bubbles of blood like he was trying to speak. My trenchcoat was wovered with blood and pieces of him. I was a kid at the time, and I didn't know what to do. So, I just did what my instincts told me. I dropped my trenchcoat over the guy's face and walked right out of there. Dead surfer.

I killed my next surfer two hours later-on purpose this time. My buddy Dale and I were on the way to Madame Wong's to see Operation Ivy, and we stopped at a convenience store to buy St. Ides. Back then, white people dank malt liquor. The Korean guy behind the counter didn't have a problem with us buying the brew, but two pricks behind us kept hasslin him. It was a big, stupid jerk with long hair and his small, vaguely-faggoty looking friend. They kept sayin' shit like "Where's yer mom?" and "You're not gonna let them buy that, are you dude? They're underage." Under normal circumstances, maybe we wouldn't have killed them. The thing is, we were on crystal meth at the time, and thought we were badasses.

St. Ides comes in these 32 ounce bottles that break really nicely when you slam them over a surfer's head. Just hitting someone with a 32 ouncer usually won't slow em down much, but it causes em to raise their hands to their face so you can give em a boot to the balls. By the time the big asshole was on the floor, and I was stomping on his face, Dale had already taken the other one out. Dale never fucked around. He knifed the bitch. Just then, I got this floating feeling like "this is really happening, you can't turn back now, mutherfucker.", so I just kept kicking his head sideways until I knew I had broken his neck. Dale had already emptied the cash register. The Korean guy had split, he was out in the Street on Wilshire Boluevard. As if somebody was going to stop. This is the big city, dickweed. We left out the back door. I was nervous as shit, but Dale was already pounding a pint of JD.

Funny thing is, nobody caught us. I had a few homemade tatts on my forearms, back then, and it couldn't have been easier to identify me, with my jacket and safety pins. Maybe it was a language thing. To the Korean guy, we were just another two punks from Venice Beach. Who knows? The police suck, but I'm not complaining.

I started killing surfers on a regular basis about a year ago. You can call me psychotic, but I just know it has to be done. Surfers are the lowest form of life on the planet, the embodiment of all the really fucked up shit in the world-so I kill them.

A lot of people have a problem with the queers and the spades, but those ideas are out of date. How can people that fucked-over and shit-upon be the problem with society? I think the real problem is surfers. Surfers have a lot of money and don't have to work for it. Most of them have rich parents. By definition, every surfer has the money to buy an expensive board and wetsuit, and a lot of time to jack off at the beach. Look at any MTV segment, and you'll see what I mean. You see them running around with their disgusting, Barbie and Ken bodies, promoting the same materialistic crap people have been indoctrinating us with since we were born. They're tools-just look at the music they listen to. The Beach Boys played for Reagan. Get a clue, assholes.

It was my dad who taught me to shoot a rifle. He learned in the Marines. Asshole. You know the mutherfucker in Apocalypse Now who is surfing while that village is getting napalmed? That was my old man. He was a survivalist. Kansas City encourages that kind of thing. Before I took off to LA, he taught me how to clean a rifle, target shoot, the whole redneck works. Asshole. I would ahve shot my old man, if I had the guts back then. He was a prick, just like a surfer. Looked like one of the Beach Boys and thought it was cool to cheat on his old lady. Bang-later, dad.

I find it amazing that I could shoot four different surfers right off of their boards, on three different occasions, before the pigs caught up with m. Stupid fucks. I don't expect to get convicted. My lawyer says I can plead insanity, but that's not what I am gonna do. I'm gonna plead self-defence.

Dear Ruby

2010-08-11T19:02:00.000-07:00

Dear Ruby,
So, we are in the middle of it..this moving event, and I am dismantling the only world you ever known, piece by piece, and expecting you to act normally and go to bed on time. I brought you to the Zoo the other day and we saw ducks. You have been a good little nugget. We are moving primarily because this place is not good for you. Lead paint enters the bloodstream and disrupts the migration of neurons. That is why we always mop together in the morning, Ruby, you are such a good little cleaner. In the new place, we will mop less and spend more time hauling laundry for blocks to the laundromat.
I wonder what damage I have done to my own brain with that heat gun, that sanding. I hope there was not too much asbestos in that beaverboard we have everywhere. Technologies change, and since the Romans we have been poisoning our children with lead to make them docile and stupid. I do not want you to become docile and stupid and therefore we mopped for months and now we are moving. It is impossible to live in a place like this and not work on it and the act of working on it is what must have made your lead levels so high last fall. This fall we will be walking distance from a decent park and dad and mommy will have a coffeehouse and a pub to go to. I have missed those things, though I will miss the chorusing crickets here. I will miss turning over rocks in the backyard with you and I do not know what to do with your sandbox. You will see more of mommy though, however, and I know that is what really matters to you. It will be much easier for her to get back from work and see you, and that is another reason why we are leaving.
We are renting this house to punk rockers, lesbians, and the sort of young people who live collectively and like to pay very little rent. First of all, this type of person never has children, and second of all, I think they are the only kind of people I could act as a landlord to. The break things, yes, all the time, but they also know how to fix things sometimes and I understand their behavior. I have no idea if this plan will work, but it gets you out of the house in time to keep your refusal to utter the words for "Juice" and "Green" from worrying me even more than they do, but we live in a society where doctors have made any departure from normative behavior and illness, and I think you communicate just fine with your "Yes" and your sign language, and your animal noises. I understand you pretty well and you know it. The fact of the matter is you are important and I do not care fuck all about economic investments when they get in the way of taking care of you. Many, many people were hit hard by the depression the country went into basically at the same time you were born and we have done fine so far so we can afford to take a hit if we have to lose this house. The truth of the matter is, Ruby, that fixing this place up was a fun exercise and I would do it precisely once in a given lifetime, but I would do it that one time. Your mother has itchy feet and mine are more planted, but this city is like a hundred small cities and we long to return to those other places.
We will bring all of the cats, of course we will. We will also bring your rubber duckies. I love you, Ruby.

The Soundtrack to the Magical Senior Prom I Never Had

2010-07-30T19:25:00.000-07:00

Enslaved, Below the Lights.

It would have been a magical evening, my black metal prom night. Impossible, yes. My actual senior prom was years before black metal. Euronymous was still very much alive, and playing some memorable gigs, when I visited that hotel lobby with my actual prom date, decked out in a pink puffy prom dress and makeup that made her look like a desperate twelve dollar hooker.

No, this is not that prom. This is black metal prom night. In the burned out church, lit by torches, they arrive in singlets, twos, and clusters of twelve or more. Some of them wear homemade chainmail armor and carry broadswords, others wear camouglage and carry hardware store axes, but most wear spikes and studded leather, tall boots, and corpsepaint. There is a burning altar. A pyre of logs and dug-up coffins, heaped with church benches, ablaze against the night sky. It is not June. It is January, and it is snowing. Wolves howl. It is not early evening. It is 2AM, and most of these people have been up all night drinking and doing speed. Women in black dresses and corpse paint lead another prom date, a nude albino woman with enormous breasts and prosthetic fangs, by a chain leash and a collar.

There is a punch bowl full of clotted blood. Nobody drinks.

Somebody is passing around a human skull to sign. Girls are kissing it. It has not been cleaned since its demise, sixteen months ago.

The punch bowl is empty. The punch was laced with LSD. By now, people are seeing visions of Odin and Satan riding in the back seat of a limousine together.

None of them dance. There is no dancing to be done tonight.

Torches are passed out to the song "Havenless". It is time to burn the high school to the ground.

A Young Athiest Dreams of the Afterlife

2010-07-28T19:21:00.000-07:00

I wrote this my freshman year at UCLA. That must have been 1987, I think. I was eighteen and living in the dorms. Dyksta hall had ten floors and a basement, but ground level was actually the second floor, because like everything in CA, it was on a hill. I had only been an athiest for three or four years, at that point, and I spent a great deal of time that year waiting for the elevator, because I lived on the ninth floor-two things which might explain the subject matter. This was a transcript of a dream that I had the night before, possibly the most intense dream of my life, certainly in the top five. I am transcribing it not having read it for twenty three years or so. I have not changed the words or corrected for my florid and inexperienced writing style, though it pains me to do so (or tendency to contradict myself), it is more interesting the way it is.

This dream basically sums up the Blood on a Space Guitar aesthetic, and belief system, and I wrote it in a dream decades ago.

I awoke to find myself lying in a hospital bed, staring straight up at the ceiling. I felt much better. I actually wanted to get up and go for a walk. Sitting up, I noticed my family staring mournfully, as if I weren't there. I got out of bed. I was about to say something really cynical like "sorry to waste your time by catching cancer, you can go as soon as I'm dead", when I realized how many tubes I must have pulled out by standing up. I turned around and realized why my family was acting so strangely.

There is no sensation exactly like looking down at your own dead body, frozen with a peaceful expression on its face. Lying on its motionless chest was a plain, white envelope with my name "Alan Molumby" typed neatly on the front. I furiously picked up the envelope-annoyed that any medical center would be callous enough to bill a person the moment they died. Upon opening it, I found a curious blue stamp, with 20cents printed on it and a note that apologized for the lack of a reception. It instructed me to keep the stamp because I needed it to get into heaven, which was on the ninth floor. It was signed simply, "God".

The shock of the situation sent me wandering blindly off in some direction-I'm not sure with because I must have walked right through a wall. I was in a crowded hall of the hospital, which was full of busy doctors and patients, who were completely oblivious to the fact that I was standing there completely naked. Ahead of me was a massive bronze elevator. It stood there as if it had been there the whole time-which was obviously not the case because it was located in just about everybody's way. Oblivious of it, everyone just walked through it as if it weren't there.

Feeling a bit awkward, I walked right up to it and pushed the UP button. It was insanely ironic that, even after dying, I still had to suffer the inconvenience of waiting for an elevator.

I ran back to my hospital room and kissed my family goodbye. I was back in time to watch the light for the fourth, the third, and finally the second floor light up as the doors slid open. The inside of the elevator was spacious and ornate. The usual board of buttons listed ten floors and a basement.

I tried to maintain a sense of adventure, reminding myself that, after being confined to a hospital bed for three months, my situation was an improvement of a sort.

I punched the button for the ninth floor wondering "If the everyday world is on the second floor, and heaven is on the ninth, what occupied the other nine floors?" I could feel no noticeable acceleration as the elevator moved, and the ride was unendurably long. I watched the numbers above the door light up until the doors finally slide open at the ninth floor. A light-haired, handsome man dressed in flowing white robes stood at the doorway.

"We're sorry about not having anyone to meet you." He said. "we don't usually make people use the elevator unless we're completely swamped." He continued apologetically. "Oh, have I introduced myself? I'm the demiangel Antigonus-St. Peter is out right now, taking care of some unfinished business. Now, let me have your stamp, and I can show you around for a few minutes." He opened a huge bound book full of hundreds of pages-some were empty, others were covered with stamps. "We have a joke here. When we run out of room in these things, we'll have to start letting people in for free."

"What's on the other floors?" I interrupted.

"Oh, nothing that concerns you" he said, "especially the first floor, that's for people who committed too many sins to be issued a 20cent stamp."

Can I visit a few of them if I get bored here?" I asked.

"Don't be ridiculous." he replied, casually. "Heaven is for eternity, and besides, why would you want to go anywhere else? Those places are not for you."

I snuck a look at the view behind him. A bright blue sky with tufts of white clouds glowed with a radiant light. The tops of Venitian and Gothic buildings broke up the horizon, brilliant orange light from stained glass windows fell on the flowers and trees that moved gently in the sweet breeze. Families laughed and chattered as they walked through the fields. The place looked unbelievably happy, and quite boring.

"These things don't expire, do they?" I asked. "Not unless you spend them by trying to get off somewhere else." He said reproachfully.

"I'll be back in a little while." I said as I examined the buttons in the elevator.

"Suit yourself." He said, patiently, as the doors slid shut.

I had pushed the button for the second floor. Perhaps I could arrange to be reincarnated back home, or at least see what some of the other floors looked like.

On the way down, the elevator stopped on the fourth floor A curly-haired woman in her late forties stepped on-she looked quite upset. I held the door open and took a good long look outside. It looked like the inside of a large old building-well lighted but cluttered with objects. A powerfully built, tall man with a lean bony face stood near the door (Note here..this man was my high school chemistry teacher), motioning with a pair of hands that wore black rubber gloves.

He wore a doctor's smock, and spoke with a deep voice.

"What's this place like-what do you do here?" I asked quizzicly.

"Not much goin' on here, just MOVIN' STUFF TO HEAVEN!" He sounded like a longshoreman. At that moment, he turned to direct a hospital stretcher as it passed down the corridor. Atop it was my own pale, dead body, still wearing the hospital smock. A succession of objects on pallets followed-bathtubs, cans of motor oil, and surreal objects I didn't recognize.

The doors slid shut, leaving me trapped in a metaphysical elevator with a hysterical middle-aged woman who wasn't wearing any clothing, either.

"Where are you from? What's wrong? Where are you going?" I asked hurriedly. "I got off at the wrong damned floor." She said in a weak voice. "The bastards charged me 3cents, so now I can't get into Heaven." I looked into her envelope, it had a single blue 15cent stamp and two blue 1cent stamps inside.

As we rode to the fifth floor, she babbled tediously about her life story. She had an air of weakness and I sensed a certain lack of imagination. The elevator stopped at the second floor. A muscular man in his early twenties stepped aboard. He stared at the two of us.

I was about to step out when he said "You an Indian." "No." I replied calmly. "Then you can't use your stamps there-they only take the green ones-I tried already.: I stared at him blankly. and then stepped back into the elevator. He glanced over his shoulder and hit the first floor button.

"You're taking us to Hell!" Shrieked the woman.

"What the fuck do you care?" He said. "You don't have to get out there, do you?". She looked away.

"Maybe there's a floor you can get into for 17cents." I said.

"I'm not interested, if I can't get into Heaven." She snapped.

The doors slid open at the first floor. A tall, incredibly attractive dark haired woman wearing a ninetenth century military uniform stepped into the elevator. She had bright, dark eyes. A magazine of machine gun bullets hung across her chest.

She took the muscular man by the arm, and said "I've been waiting for you, just hand over the 10cent stamp and I'm sure we'll be able to accommodate you here." She licked her lips seducitvely.

Outside, smoke drifted in sheets. Flames licked buildings of marble and alabaster. A lake of boiling tar could be seen in the distance, with a few legs jutting above it. The man refused to come, saying "I don't have to give it to you."

"You will." She said confidently. "Sooner or later,m everyone gets tired of this stupid elevator, of watching other people go to heaven where they can be happy..." The middle aged woman looked away. "You can't stay on Earth, either-its too frustrating not being able to do anything but watch idly as other people live out their lives. Sooner or later, everyone gives up and comes here-there's nowhere else you can go."

The woman hung about him seductively, her arms around his neck as she rubbed his leg with the inside of his knee. "I'll see you sooner or later she said, kissing him with inside lip."

"What about the other floors?[there have got to be other places to go to-there are eleven floors, including the basement, and nobody seems to be interested in anything but three of them. I felt as if I had interrupted them. The dark woman flashed me a quizzical smile. The midle aged woman and the man both looked at me as if I had just embarrassed them. "That's the unknown." said the middle aged woman "And if it was meant for me, I would have been told to go there by God." She looked angry. "Look what accidentally getting off on the wrong floor cost me-now I guess that means I should go to hell."

Jabbing her envelope at the dark-haired woman, she walked straight out of the elevator.

She looked straight at me and smiled. "Why are you here, kid? You could get into heaven/"

"How do I know that's where I want to be?" I whispered. "There are all kinds of places to go, now that I am dead." I exclaimed, bitterly.

"What's on the tenth floor?" I asked.
"Some old Greek and Norse gods-it costs a lot more than 20cents to get into there though-and you won't want to go to the fourth floor-that's more for objects than people.

"Thanks." I said, smiling at her. I kept trying to remind myself that I was flirting with an archfiend.

"I like you." She declared. "I was like you, once. A long time ago, I wanted to go from floor to floor, not too many people do, you know. For some reason, most people prefer a place like hell to the unknown. Before I came here, I saw most of them." She said. "I collected a book full of hundreds of stamps. I spent most of them getting my position here, but there are still a few pages left back at my home on the third floor."

"Aren't afraid he'll get to them?" "Are you kidding? He's too daft to tie his own shoe laces. Good luck, Kid.: She said, touching me on the lips.

She turned to the muscular man, saying "Even purgatory costs 15cents, too bad ou can't affort do go anywhere but here. See you soon." The door slid shut, and she left.

That was the end of the transcript I found in my basement the other day, going through boxes prior to a move. Though it was twenty years ago, I still remember how this dream ends. I take the elevator to the third floor, where I can get out for something like 17cents, and the man cannot. It is a beautiful, grassy place, with an early twentieth-century bandstand sporting a brass band, gentlemen picknicking with their families, and bicycles. I do not have too much trouble finding the devil's former house, as a mortal or whatever they are on the third floor, one floor removed from our reality, and there it is, that book of with pages of unused stamps.

The Most Brutal Metal Album Ever

2010-07-25T19:12:00.000-07:00

The Most Brutal Metal Album Ever

Pantera-Vulgar Display of Power.

In the aesthetics of metal, it is pretty much impossible to describe a song, a band, a guitar riff, or a performance, without using one, or all of four adjectives: "brutal", "sick", "hard", and "heavy". If you asked a typical metalhead to sit down with a number two pencil and a sheet of college ruled paper and define each of those terms, he or she would probably stab you in the hand and leave. Listeners are amazingly consistent, however, in the way they use these terms. Some bands are great without ever being brutal. In Flames is almost never brutal. Sonata Arctica and Nightwish do not do brutal at all-EVER. Some of it is seems to be in the lyrics, some of it in the melodies, and a hell of a lot of it in the rhythm and the structuring of tempos, but "brutal" is pretty easy to put a finger on when you experience it as a listener. It is that feeling of wanting to put a hammer through four inches of plaster and lath, knock out a hole, reach through, and wring your goddamned neighbor's neck for blocking your driveway with his fucking SUV. That these feelings can be invoked and channeled, through music, is a powerful statement about who we are as a species. Brutal is all about testosterone. Brutal is not about killing orcs on a distant battlefield, it is about killing the man who mistreated your sister, or the pit bull who is loose in the alley.

Pantera pioneered brutal, and in many ways, nobody has ever gone farther. This particular album is, in my opinion, absolutely the most brutal metal album ever recorded. A great deal has been said about it musically, and it is regarded as a masterwork. Lyrically, it goes to some deep dark places. I have trouble listening to it, because it inspires me to go out to the nearest street corner and start beating up drug dealers with a bat, then set them on fire. This feeling persists for days and could cause me legal problems sooner or later. One thing that makes this particular album so successful is the personal nature of the lyrics-they seem pretty much from the heart and that is a chilling realization. It is pretty hard to find a place for these emotions, once uncaged, so I save this one for special occasions.

Some other albums that, to me, stand out as some of the most brutal:

Napalm Death-Mentally Murdered EP. More abstracted, more ambitious, and a much harder listen,.

Kreator-Pleasure to Kill.

This is one of my favorite albums ever, though the lyrics are far less personal (and much harder to make out) than any Pantera post Cowboys from Hell, and it creates a much less focused feeling of rage.

Macabre-Murder Metal. This is a masterpiece of brutality. I think it pretty much comes down to whether you can buy into their extreme flights of fantasy. I saw them play live, many years ago, and it was a little like seeing Gille de Rais on one of his killing sprees.

Most Perfect Black Metal Album Ever

2010-07-24T19:21:00.000-07:00

I should probably mention here that Old Man's child's Vermin is the most perfect black metal album ever made, by my estimation, though there is a lot of great black metal I have yet to hear.

It is amazing. I suppose I am drawn to bands like this-I am a huge Bathory fan. There is so much that can get done when a single, crazy and probably ill-tempered individual, calls all the shots and executes his true vision. It is a masterpiece, especially because it has a sort of balance that a great deal of black metal lacks-a constant sense of evil and impending doom.

I person could seriously listen to the whole thing, imagining that spiders were crawling all over them, and have a good time. That is what Black Metal is supposed to do for us, that or go to war with an axe.

To The Queen of Winter

2010-07-23T18:57:00.000-07:00

Hail, Mercia, Queen of the Winter

You, who wield a sword of frost and a halo of freezing stones.

Your beautiful lips the death of any man who touches them.

Your breath a memory of death and past lives.

I long for you.

Upon whose breasts I would die a thousand times.

The pale of your skin stripping my flesh and sinew

as I pressed my mortal frame, longing and breathless

against the loveliness of your desire.

I long for you.

You, who have not aged a day

as my frame has crept from youth to the footstep of old age

I have longed for your black lips and snow covered valleys

your snow white hair and your glacier eyes

you grow like a tree within me

I have felt you in my heart for so long

I have walked your forests when there was nowhere to walk to

I have stared into those woods at night.

I long for you.

A Cautionary Tale

2010-07-22T19:43:00.000-07:00

I start by scavenging a few pieces of plywood. Before you know it, I have built a hut. I found some two by fours, and had some leftover nails. I already had a power drill. It was cordless, so I brought it into the back yard, and started adding a second floor to my hut. Soon, I realized, it needed a door. I added a door I found in the alley. I bought a lock set for it. I locked myself out, so I had to tip the thing over. I dug a big, rectangular pit and filled it with cement, and posts. I built a nice, solid frame she on those posts, and then dragged my hut on top of the thing. I had to cut a hole into the ceiling, then add a ladder, to access my hut. Now the upstairs had a door to nowhere, so the whole structure needed a deck. I sunk a proper foundation for the deck, with posts. The whole thing needed drywall. It also needed electricity, so I took care of that before I drywalled the place. I did not need a building permit, because this was just an experiment in building huts out of found lumber. I built a deck to the deck. I built another deck. Soon, the decks needed an overhanging pagoda ceiling. Once built, I was pretty set back monetarily, so I started writing a grant. I never mailed the grant, because the next day, I realized that my hut had started to build itself. Someone or something had drywalled the Pagoda, complete with framed-out windows, so you could still see my original hut, deep within. I had lunch, and a couple of beers, wondering who or what paid for these new materials. I was almost too broke to pay for the beer. By the time I came home, someone or something had added a moat. By next morning, the moat was a filled-in tunnel surrounding the compound, the thing was painted in Cape Cod colors, and someone had added wind chimes. I could almost see it growing now. Here and there, the plywood floor would creak, as an interior wall was added. Soon, that stopped, because there was interior carpet. The place had high-speed internet. I could tell this because someone or something was playing Pandora. I turned, to leave and go to work, when I realized I was walled in. Someone or something had built a palisade wall bounding my property. I have to admit, I freaked out for a few minutes, till I found the door. It had a handsome knocker. There was a new moat. Already, neighbors and strangers from all parts of town were gathering in my front yard, gawking. I walked outside to join them, noticing for the first time that the thing had assumed the shape of a ziggurat. I went to work. By the time I got home, the thing was ten stories tall. Something inside was playing piano. I opened the door, followed a long, red-carpeted hallway to a refrigerator stocked in expensive lemonade, and helped myself to a beer. These were not my beers. My initial building expenses had used up all my beer money. By the time I was done with the beer, I realized there was no front door, no outside, only my hut.

A VISION OF PURE METAL

2010-07-21T18:43:00.000-07:00

Skulls, black obsidian, carved like Maya temple decorations, arrayed like peaches in some improbable orchard. Each and every one of them has the glowing eyes of DOOM. Oh, great ones, I crawl beneath you, through this hall of diabolical judgement, towards the INFERNUM. Guitars, like pickets, rise imposingly to either side of me. In the distance, where the two walls lead but do not touch, a column of flame rises, and before it, a throne. I have paid homage to you through DEATH METAL, through the most sinister of imaginings, through the loathsome, despicable, and decadent lifestyle I have lived for these many years.

Flames rise from every direction, and in those flames, images of strippers dancing on poles, saber-toothed cats bringing down extinct megafauna, girls in catholic schoolgirl uniforms setting fire to garages. The unholy IT sits beside its master, GREAT BAPHOMET, an a mighty stone made from the bones of extinct reptiles, magma from the formation of ancient supercontinents, and ten million broken guitar strings, all melted into chrome tailpipes, projecting from the thing like antlers.

Baphomet, so beautiful, the body and face of a Las Vegas hooker, eyes of a reptile. Observes.

This is the DEATH METAL level of Hell, deeper yet than the frozen lake, next door to Tartarus, where the imprisoned titans groan and strain against their shackles. Here, the strains of Deicide and Morbid Angel, Possessed and Goatwhore, wail against the disembodied screams of metal's victims. Metalhead, beware. One stray footfall from the path of TRUE METAL, and you could join these eternal outcasts, wailing in the wind for all eternity, rather than sit at the LEFT HAND of BAPHOMET, baptized in the wail of guitar.

Catastrophic break line rupture, tow truck, enforced picnic in the grass, auto repair bills

2010-07-16T19:37:00.000-07:00

the lesson for the week is that i am, at best, half smart, and entirely foolish. i keep scanning the horizon, for things to look about, so that that terrible day will never come, but when it creeps around the corner, i practically invite the thing into my kitchen for orange juice and donuts. stopping a car is pretty damned important, something i should have learned from the internet, and i guess things could be a lot worse right now. there is a part of me that wants to be charmed, to have bad things never happen, even when probability dictates that a seventeen year old car is going to break down in spectacular ways. i guess i am a little attached to certain aspects of my life right now, the picnics, the park, but things change and things happen. still, it gnaws at me, a game i am loosing, against the giants i owe money to. last year, i could say that things are tough all over, and we are weathering this storm pretty damned well, but the storm is ending, and the giants who caused it have grown even stronger. when will it be time for MY donuts?

I Could Never Have Made it as a Hunter-Gatherer

2010-07-14T19:28:00.000-07:00

How do I arrange to sit my fat ass on a barstool, and do goddamned nothing all day? Because if there is a recipe for this, I think I need to know how I might go about pursuing such an occupation. Perhaps I could become one of those people the call town drunks. Perhaps, instead, I could arrange to be born with a permanent, parasitic twin growing somewhere south of my bellybutton. Perhaps this twin would require a basket. Perhaps the government might be obliged to send me pills in the mail every single month. Perhaps I could live among the storks and ostriches, the only creatures that will accept me. I wonder how long I could live in a lean-to anyway. I wonder about cardboard boxes sometimes, too. If I could somehow claim the real estate under a cardboard refrigerator box, in Manhattan, I could sell the property and arrange to sit on a barstool for the rest of my life. How can there be any poor people in New York City, anyway? How can they call a person "homeless" when he has staked out a good spot under an overpass. Clearly he or she has a home, it is simply a very BAD home. Home is where the heart is. A person can live out of a suitcase, but not actually live in a suitcase. There are suitcases big enough to sleep in, I have seen them. I suppose it depends upon whether a person is short. I slept in a cave, once. The thing about my cave is that it had an oval depression, from where a mountain lion probably slept, on occasion. I slept in a mountain lion's bed once. I was a fool for sleeping in that mountain lion's bed. It had no sheets-it was a rock overhang. I do not know if I could have made it as a hunter-gatherer....probably not.

The Violent Hour

2010-07-11T18:47:00.000-07:00

The Violent Hour

A Culinary Review

By PsyCHO Butcher

Chicago suffers from an unfortunate "second city" complex, a mayor who hates nightlife because his father was an abusive drunk, and a certain halfheartedness when it comes to doing anything that might be construed as "uppity". Fortunately, their is a little cloud hovering just south of the el stop at North and Damen avenues, and this strange miasma seems to block the banal rays we emit, by virtue of our own working-class chumpishness. The result is that this address spawns interesting businesses like serpents from a stone. True, the first two failed in short order. Mod was a wonderful place...the first failure-it had a science fiction flair to it, and mac and cheese so good I was tempted to break the window to the place and rob a portion from a customer. I liked the egg-and-spacemodule motif. It made me imagine I was dining on a planet where ninety percent of this dreadful species had already gone extinct, and those few of us that survived had ample deviled eggs to go around.

Del Toro had terrible service, but great furniture. Each chair was like a torture device. Fortunately, you can still see the saddle-barstools, more suited to sadomasochistic pleasure than to lattes, across the street at Cippollina. It was an interesting place, this second failure, with great tile and strange horse stalls for bathrooms.

Hopefully, The Violet Hour will stick around, because the city needs it. We need a drinking space that shrouds itself in veils of image. We need a place to drink expensive cocktails and pretend we are cooler, more literary, more travelled, and genuinely interesting than we are. We need a place that serves absinthe and chicken wings on the same menu. For now, we have it, and I approve quite strongly.

From the outside, the place is a cipher. They keep changing the exterior, from one cryptic ruse to another. Do not look for a sign, you will not find one. Once the valet starts parking cars, this is merely annoying, but just as they open the doors, it imparts a bit of a speakeasy feel to the place. To augment this, the entranceway is dark and heavily curtained, stark, and obviously purposed to give would-be patrons the unmistakable impression that they have walked into the wrong place and should leave. I like this. Darkness, drama, chandeliers, and very tall chairs that resemble thrones. This place is very black metal, and to risk belaboring the point, I approve. The place feels such like a maze-a patron needing to tiptoe and squeeze between chairs in the event that they do not guess the correct path across the room in the darkness, amid a forest of overly tall seats-that is was disappointed not to see a corner devoted solely to death traps for the unwary. Perhaps such a thing is too much to ask in a place that carries a Chicago Liquor license, but their cocktails are deliciously inventive and served with an air of drama.

The place seems purposed to scare away tourists, frat boys, and the lame. To seal the deal, the place has a dress code and requests that patrons do not use cellphones.

Now comes the subject that your churlish and stupid friends will raise, either at the mere mention of the place, or upon discovering that the cocktails there cost something like fourteen dollars each (I frankly do not remember, for reasons I will mention in a moment). They are worth it, each and every one. Of course they are. The bartenders lavish time and care on each drink, and use very fine ingredients. Neither of these objections hold any weight whatsoever if a person visits for the purpose of imbibing one, or perhaps at most, two cocktails. After all, who goes out in the evening expecting to spend less than twenty dollars (a person must factor in the tip)? Such frugal evenings are best spent, enjoyably, on the fire escape, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and trying to eek the last resin out of a cannabis pipe. Places like this are for the theatre and ambiance of the place, and if a good buzz is needed, that must wait for the second, or third drinking establishment of the evening. What would be the purpose of having more, at a place like this? To get drunk? Getting drunk at swanky clubs is for the stupid-for people who order bottles of expensive vodka served to their tables at night clubs and covet the experience of the VIP room. People like that can die, frankly.

I arrived with my usual coterie of exotic dancers and adult film stars, on a weeknight, just after they opened. I suppose I avoided the line by doing this, but the fact of the matter is that my companions had serious work to do later in the evening, bilking needy men out of money they would otherwise spend on their families. My cocktail was something called a Vincent's Downfall, a Van Gough reference, of course, an homage to its liberal use of absinthe. It was delicious. One of my companions, a longtime friend for many years, devoured a whole plate of chicken wings without stopping. If you have never watched a sexy woman, trained in the art of adult entertainment, devour a full plate of chicken wings as if the Earth was about to run out of food, you should. I do not remember much about our conversation, absorbed by lust as I was the whole time, but it was a great experience and a great room to showcase desire and lust of all sort, for chicken wings or otherwise.

Finally, I am glad to meet you, Osiris

2010-07-10T19:20:00.000-07:00

i thought it was strange to see it like that-the scarlet hue of the thing. it wasn't. even grey, it would find a way of looking the way it did. seven thousand tomorrows later and i have not lost an hour of sleep over it. still, it helps for a man to look back and appreciate what he had, while he was having it. i admit i am, and have been, a voyeur. i also admit that i have been know to eat a whole box of Chips Ahoy in a sitting. i try never to park illegally not because i am decent but because i am a coward. i also blame other people for stealing my stamps. but still, even back in my youth i tried to stand for something worth standing for. i always liked the taste of green vegetables, and usually i have not driven a car to worry about parking. on that scale, the thing looked just like they do in anatomy textbooks. it was not curiously worn around the edges. it had a black spot or two here and there, but as i mentioned, upon closer examination, most of that black was grey calling itself black so as not to be misrepresenting itself. the thing had a lot of grey, it was mostly grey, i admit it. Osiris, how am i doing here?

Coffee, and More Coffee, a Culinary Review by Psycho Butcher

2010-07-09T20:06:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

Finally, I can write you from beyond the shackles of my unfortunate incarceration, for crimes which I am entirely innocent. That entire time, behind bars, I craved a decent cup of coffee-one not produced or adultrated by Sysco in any way.

Ahhhh. The independent coffee shop. I used to love the places. Years back, in Los Angeles, Dear Reader, I was deeply engrossed in the so-called "Hair Metal" scene. It took something like two hundred cups of coffee a day to keep me functioning, because I could afford neither the cocaine nor the hairspray to keep up with the lifestyle. Suffice it to say that I spent time at now-legendary coffee shops like Java, and The Living Room. In this latter venue, a young Drew Barrymore sneered and turned her back at me, rather than make me a cappuccino, and I stormed out of the place, threatening to burn it down. True story, but they had great coffee, and comfortable couches. The fact of the matter is that each of these little places, scattered throughout the hipster neighborhoods of the cities, had its own personality. I remember the day I saw the first Starbucks in Los Angeles. I was impressed by the green colors, actually, not aware that one more aspect of culinary culture was about to be absorbed by the dull and lifeless tide of globalization/homogenization/banality. I finally left the scene, and the city, for Scandinavia, seeking revenge for many wrongs done to me, through Black Metal, but that is another story.

In Chicago, at the same time, we boasted something like twenty independent coffee shops of our own. Then, Starbucks came, like Christian Missionaries bearing smallpox infested blankets, and within ten years, we were left with three or four. All the others gave up the ghost, the competition with friendly green yuppie frappuccino being too much for them. One of the notable holdouts was a place called Filter, which is more than legendary, nowadays, as a place where Bohemians in the Wicker Park neighborhood used to hook up, and generally hatch acts of gossip and innuendo. It was a fine place, with an excellent menu of coffee drinks, some with names like "Purple Bhudda", and food that was two or three orders of magnitude brighter than the usual plastic-wrapped questionables available in the cooler of a Starbucks. One or sever of the owners of this place lost his/her (there were three, all crazy) lease, got lazy, or otherwise grew unappreciative of all the money I had invested in his/her motorcycles and cocaine habit, by consuming one overpriced coffee drink after another hatching memos like the one you, Dear Reader, are writing at this exact moment. Anyway, the old Filter is gone, long live the new Filter, resurrected farther south on Milwaukee Avenue, and in many ways superior to the old one. The old space was triangular and commanded an amazing view of "The Action", that being the crazy people and drunk club kids that meandered the intersection of North and Damen on every night worth going out. This new place has no view to speak of save the other patrons-but seeing and being seen was always the real meat of the Filter experience back then and it still is. This place has generously free Wi-Fi, for two hours at least with a purchase, a feature the old one lacked because some dickhead thought he could make money charging the patrons. That dickhead is probably still around, but he bought first rate restaurant equipment, hired people who genuinely know what they are doing (many were plucked from other notable coffee shops, such as the Mercury), spent some serious money crafting a nice space with sufficient electric plugs, and generally created a place worth hanging out, for hours, while finishing the liner notes to an album. In case it is relevant, because this is a culinary review, their coffee is amazing, and their food solidly good. Their chicken Caesar wrap particularly well-conceived and crafted, their turkey burger and Thanksgiving wrap much less so. Their tea selection is great, and their food runners much more effective than in the last place. Filter girls from the last place, if you are reading this, I dream about devouring each and every one of you sexually and cannibalistically. The current ones I am just getting to know, but the new counter is designed to actually serve food rather than to showcase the beauty of hot, sweaty, hipster chicks working behind a busy counter in close proximity. Sigh.

An unexpected and new coffee shop has sprung up just north of the place. The wormhole. It is a nostalgia coffee house, complete with a prop from "Back to the Future", possibly never used, a De Lorean fitted with time travel modifications. Hopefully, the owner will sell this waste of space, pay off his or her investors, and put tables in the window there. There are no window tables, and this is unfortunate. I also want him or her to pay off their investors because the place should stay here. This place needs some wear. It needs some stories. Its coffee is every bit as good as Filter's, and far better than Starbucks, if for no other reason than it is served in reusable cups, by efficient staff, in a timely manner. It includes Intelligentsia alums among its staff, a wise move, because these refugees know how to make coffee and handle volume. Intellgentsia, of course, is some of the best coffee this side of Portland, but the new means of producing drip coffee, one slow funnel at a time, take so long that many people are justifiably put off by the slowness of the process. Yes, I know that in my previous entries I have pointed out that the STRONG wait, the WEAK do not, but my time is damned precious, and I am not sure that the results at Intelligentsia are worth the wait. I digress. The artifacts at the Wormhole are amusing, but not necessary, and I hope the posters for The Goonies are taken down, one after the other, over time, and replaced by graffiti. In the meantime, I will go there often, precisely because they do not serve food to speak of, and because i enjoy the place. Both are welcome, both should be patronized.

Oh Beezelbub

2010-07-03T19:04:00.000-07:00

Another EVIL PRAYER, revealed. I cannot say where I get these, though I have come across them at great personal jeopardy. I post this as a WARNING, to those of you who do not think the forces of darkness and devil worship are real. This prayer is every bit as real as the Satanic sex ring at the McMartin preschool, and should be taken seriously. Once again, DO NOT attempt to read this invocation aloud, or it could have serious consequences to your well-being.

Oh, Beezlebub, lord of the Flies.

Once known as Baal, rival Yaweh for celestial power, god of the golden calf and tempter of the Hebrews in their shameful flight from Egypt, patron of the City of Carthage, whose sacrificial urns did run red with the blood of children, an honor to your lordship, and of Ninevah, where men did raise great battle flags in your honor and conquer great kingdoms, destroying the ancient kingdom of Israel in your name. Lord Beezlebub, who sits at the right had of Lucifer himself, brothers in arms against Heaven and Earth, who fought the heavenly hoardes with a flaming sword. Beezlebub, Lord Mighty! ruler of hell and master of infernal dominions, grant me the power to make war, sow destruction, and spread plague.

Accept this, my sacrifice, a bull's head, in a silver bowl, dead and rotting for sixty six days time, under the summer sky day and night the whole time, and festering with flies.

Your Lordship, grant me the power to spread jealousy among the churches and congregations, to instill fears of embezzled twenty dollar bills and cannabis butter at the church bake sail, to provoke bullying and orgies of buggering as the church campout, to lead fine young men astray to worship false gods like Judas Priest, Mercyful Fate, and Iron Maiden. I will continue the war with heaven, my master, by tempting good and faithful priests to bow and touch my ivory backside, to kiss my immoral black lips, by tempting noble and honest ministers with prostitutes and promises of cocaine, by tempting girl scouts with cannabis-laden cookies and the notion of a life without servitude to men. Beezlebub, master, I await your infernal command.

The Gold Voyager Record

2010-06-27T19:09:00.000-07:00

It it still playing downstairs. A wonderful student found (me/her and she shared) a copy of the soundtrack to the gold record they mounted on the Voyager spacecraft. It is a work of absolute genius. It is, quite possibly, the most important mix tape ever made, even given that no extraterrestrial will ever find it, because it will be on a chunk of dark, nonfunctioning machinery, in a gigantic void, with a real scarcity of entities looking for it or anything else out there or anywhere. I do not think that, in the history of Earth, anyone ever attempted to compound any document, artwork, or other communication intended to represent not just our species as a whole, but our planet as a whole. Funny that I have spent my whole life without hearing it, funny that it needed to be tracked down, and is not in the discount bins of Reckless Records. It is important not for what effect it might have OUT THERE, but for what effect it could have down here.

I have always gotten the impression from the late Dr. Sagan's writings, especially The Cosmic Connection, that the astronomer did his share of mind altering drugs. I am guessing he took LSD more than once, just speculating here. He and his wife were well-documented marajuana users, and advocates of the responsible use of cannabis and reform of the laws against it. Ann Druyan and Carl actually met during the creation of that record, which makes it that most wonderful of mixtapes; a mix to be played by or with a loved one while they are high. Mix tapes take on a new meaning when they are played for the drug-crazed. Contrasts thrill the listener, who has sunk into his own insular world, pieces with depth and subtlety get the listen that they deserve. This Voyager record, it had the feel of a drug mix. An amazing drug mix.

And why not? To step outside of onesself in that small way is just the beginning. Imagine the contrast between any nonhuman that finds such a record and our own. It is a million times greater than the next most unlikely possibility, that human beings somehow, for some reason, listen to this same recording, survived somehow over the ages, five thousand years from now. To a pharoah, this mix would make perfect sense, actually, if it could somehow played for him, such is the ingenuity of its creators in their urge to universalize the human experience. An extraterrestrial, finding the spacecraft somehow, analyzing the gold record, pitted by micrometeorites from eons in space, would have to be a million times more intelligent than we are to figure out how to play it. True, the gold disk with a spiral running to its center does invite almost ANYONE to spin the thing, I think, but from there, figuring out that the depth of the channel carved into it carries an information signature, an analog signature, for a series of compression waves, would take an amazing insight. Naturally, I do not expect an extraterrestrial to have ears in the sense that we have them. I imagine that the same signal transferred into a light beam, varying color and intensity, would make about the same amount of sense to them anyway. It is much more likely to be viewed, than seen, I imagine because so many more terrestrial organisms have eyes as opposed to eyes and ears, or just ears. Ironically, the whalesong on the CD, untranslatable to us, might be the only think they can decode. This is not to say that aliens should have a natural proclivity for whalesong, they should not, but if they cannot decode the human speech, maybe there is a chance at whalespeech.

Thank you Carl.

Oh, Leviathan

2010-06-26T19:12:00.000-07:00

Once again, I post this as a warning, for the purpose of enlightening those among us who are not SURE that horrible monsters lurk in the sea and can be summoned. As with everything else on Bloodonaspaceguitar, it is COMPLETELY CREDIBLE. As before, we must warn the reader not to read this passage aloud. Doing so could have terrible consequences. This incantation has been posted for the purpose of STUDY, to inform the populace that terrible incantations like this DO exist, and warn the reader to live a clean and steady life from now on.

Oh Leviathan. Spawn of mother Tiamat, godhead of the primordial chaos, ruler of chaos, of all the dark oceans and strange voids, you sit at her side in the Abyss, a lord of creation, bringer of doom and change. Celestial dragon, beast of sea and dark sky, your seven heads contain the mightiest wisdoms, see the farthest corners of the Earth, look upon the lowly creatures of this planet, our mighty avenger. Mighty Leviathan, rise up from the infernal void, from the depths of the deep dark blue, from mile after mile of dark trench and sickening blackness, where you rule like the mightiest of kings, over the pale fishy inhabitants of the void below. Lord Leviathan, rise up and smite the humans who have crawled upon the surface of the earth like a plague of locusts. Rise, and breathe fire upon their proud kingdoms, on their shoreline timeshare condominiums and their beach parties. Rise, and rear your seven heads to the heavens, to serve on the side of the antichrist, to confront the sky god in the final hour of Revelations. It is you, Leviathan, with the strength of the mightiest gods of old, who will breathe fire on the repentant hordes of mortal men in the last hour of the world, and ensure the continued triumph of the infernal. Lord master, rise, and see the destruction they have wrought to the oceans. See the creatures they have destroyed and the majesty they have corrupted, with their mandate to go forth and multiply, with the assurance that every beast of the field and thing that creepeth on the face of the Earth was put their for their use, and with wasteful and wanton abandon. Rise, Leviathan, and poison their air. Rise, Leviathan, and dry up all the rain clouds. Rise, Leviathan, and create terrible storms. Rise, Leviathan, and unleash plagues of disease. Avenge the worm on the end of the fisherman's hook, avenge the snake crushed under the wheels of the automobile, avenge the stingray caught in the fisherman's net, the whale cut in half by the prow of their ships. Mighty one, rise.

Emperor - A fine day to die (live)

2010-06-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

Baphomet, Oh How I Praise Thee

2010-06-25T19:41:00.001-07:00

This is another dangerous prayer, uncovered from the hands of Satanists and their co-conspirators, the communists and Darwinists. DO NOT attempt to read this aloud, or it could have terrible consequences. It is intended FOR STUDY, to prove that dark powers exist, and work continuously to undermine god's plan, for an earth where all mysteries are heavenly mysteries.

Baphomet, oh how I praise Thee. YOU are the keeper of the Aristotelian light, corruptor of the souls of men so that they should think higher of themselves than to suffer under god, for such is the noble and right thing to do. You alone represent the souls of the old gods, the pagan figures of the EARTH, who once brought about harvestime, brought seed to the womb of women and rainfall to the spring soil, who have now passed under heavenly wrath into oblivion. Their power is yours now, limitless and cosmic. The stars in the heavens are your province too, as is the floor of Hell, and the minds of men who seek to question the cosmic truth's handed down to them from Adam. Like the gods of spring, you unite the seed of men with the germ of woman, a cosmic power you have alone, even against the will of Yaweh. You are the mathematician and the architect, worshipped by millions of Freemasons and communists, You are the Judge, worshipped by the Gnostics in Alexandria, the Prime Mover of Plato, the Anti-God against which the Manicheans pitted all the powers of the universe. You are the anticreation, the dark opposed to the light, the maker of new flesh at the expense of the soul, the proponent of tree and field, the enemy of church and street and the hard labors of men who fear god. Baphomet, like the Bogomils before me, the Beloved, who laid down their lives for you. Husband of Tiamat, mistress of the seas and of the primordial chaos, it is your union that brought about th anticosmos, the dark between the stars, the shadow to every candleflame. Beast of Babel, grant me that I might seek to ease the sufferings of men, who might otherwise suffer for god's plan, seek to avert catastrophes conceived to test the wills of men, and to bring corrupting books and knowledge to the men who would build a new Tower.

Mighty Astaroth

2010-06-25T18:41:00.000-07:00

A dangerous demonic prayer, revealed. DO NOT attempt to read this passage aloud, or it will have terrible consequences. IT is posted here for STUDY ONLY, in hopes that men of good souls will realize that such evil prayers exist.
Like everything else on Bloodonaspaceguitar, it is COMPLETELY CREDIBLE.

Holy Astaroth, please accept this offering of hot metal into your veins. I live to worship you, your foulness, you bringer of disease and corruption. Your power is decay, and sin, and the inevitable corruption of everything that is holy or beautiful. I live to bask in your ugliness. I would gladly sit at hour goat-heeled boot, your grotesque loveliness, an honor, to serve a demogorg such as you in Hell. In Hell, a landscape where you rule, alongside Satan, as almost an equal, a fallen angel in your own right, an enemy of Yaweh, the creator and the tyrant, an ally of Lucifer, the Lightbringer, fellow soldier in heaven and also in Hell, your cause is his cause, and our cause-to bring corruption to god's plan, to sour the milk, to smut the flower, to put a joint in the hands of a teenager, or a college student, to cause men to look at women with lust in their hearts, and feel stronger for it, for women to look at men, and at each other, with thoughts less than holy, of lust and sin, rather than childbirth and goodness, light and angels. Astaroth, it is you in your evil that seduce men into vanity, into believing that they know things that they do not, into believing that with their tools and technology, with their science and their antimagick, they can become gods, like us, glowing in platinum armour, holding swords of pure starlight. It is you that can convince a monkey, a beast of the fields favored by Yaweh with reason, that his insight can create wonders, legislate the nonexistence of god, deny the mercy of Jesus, the deceiver. Oh holiest of unholies, grant me this day that I may corrupt the minds of my fellow men, with thoughts of easy women and power, ideas about mathematics that distract from the true goodness of suffering for the celestial powers, tempt men with thoughts of beer and fine food, with drugs and sodomy and not hard work and repentance. Foul Astaroth, demon of the nine hells, I kneel before you, seeking your antiblessing.

50 Metal Bands by Dungeons and Dragons Alignment

2010-06-24T18:42:00.001-07:00

You know you need this list, to plan your fantasy battles in Middle Earth, or to arrange a soundtrack to the screenplay you are writing in your head, the one where ettins and orcs team up with ogres to fight elves, humans, and a peculiar old wizard that is really YOU. Note that there are a lot of "true neutrals", this is because a detached perspective, that of the storyteller who does not pass judgement, is fairly common as lyrics go. Also, modern viewpoints, those grounded consciously or unconsciously in philosophies that postdate 1300, tend to register as Neutral in Dungeons and Dragons Terms. Still, many bands take sides and you might need this list. Note that there is not a single Lawful Neutral. Rock is the antithesis of that perspective. As you might have predicted, there are many more evil bands than good ones.

1. Burzum. Neutral Evil. Varg Vikernes was and is, actually, a pretty horrible and evil guy, by almost any estimation. This is not just a songwriting perspective.

2. Mayhem. Chaotic Evil.

3. Emperor. Lawful Evil.

4. Gorgoroth. Neutral Evil.

5. Toxic Holocaust. Chaotic Neutral.

6.. Metallica. Neutral

7. Venom. Chaotic Evil.

8. Megadeth. Neutral.

9. Mercyful Fate. Lawful Evil. Storytellers, yes, but inevitably on Satan's side. They made this clear in "The Oath".

10. Morbid Angel. Chaotic Evil

11. Sodom. Chaotic Neutral.

12. Kreator. Chaotic Neutral, Evil Tendencies.

13. The Scorpions. Neutral (selfish), with some chaotic and good tendencies.

14. Nightwish. Neutral Good. The song "The Carpenter" is about a version of Jesus, and they ooze empathy for people and their suffering.

15. Type O Negative. True Neutral or Neutral Evil, depending upon the song and the album. They hate god, for sure, but they rarely embrace cruelty and violence for its own sake. They are that noble kind of evil that makes for interesting villains.

16. Slayer. Here is an enigma. The band switches between alignments from one great song to the next. In one great song, they support Christ (Jesus Saves), in another, they deny him (Cult), they make a monster like Joseph Mengele seem cool, or do they vilify him? They are torn between Lawful Good, and a much stronger, Neutral Evil streak.

17. Bathory Chaotic Evil.

18. Armoured Saint. Lawful Good.

19. DragonForce. Lawful Good.

20. Stryper. Neutral Good, but too shitty of a band to be worth a damn in the fight against orcs or goblins.

21. Judas Priest. Neutral.

22. Van Halen. Neutral (selfish neutral, not true neutral) This band was all about the partying, and never took sides.

23. Black Sabbath (Ozzy Era). Chaotic Good. This might surprise you, but give all the of the songs another listen, and you will realize that Geezer Butler's lyrics were informed from a pro-Yaweh perspective, and many were warnings about Satan. They also laud figures like "The Wizard", who shake things up, and bring chaos. War Pigs is, essentially, an anthem against the forces of Lawful Evil.

24. Black Sabbath (Dio Era). True Neutral

25. Iron Maiden. True Neutral.

26. Children of Bodom. Chaotic Evil.

27. Arch Enemy. True Neutral, or an ideological Chaotic Neutral. This band can get overtly political, and many of its lyrics are against tyranny, real or more fantasy-based. It is usually the ideologically-grounded chaotic neutrals who rail against corrupt tyrannies, more than anyone else.

28. Guns N Roses. Selfish Neutral.

29. Motley Crue. Selfish Neutral.

30. Rush. Lawful Good.

31. Led Zepplein. Selfish Neutral.

32. Deicide. Neutral Evil.

33. Hellhammer. Neutral Evil.

34. Enslaved. Neutral Evil.

35. Monster Magnet. Chaotic Neutral.

36. Lamb of God. Neutral.

37. Iced Earth. True Neutral, with hints of Lawful Good. When it comes down to it, they seem to throw their lot in with God. Days of Purgatory is about Revelations, and they seem to be against the antichrist.

38. Dio. True Neutral.

39. Cannibal Corpse. Chaotic Evil.

38. Macabre. Chaotic Evil.

39. Three Inches of Blood. Neutral, Chaotic Tendencies.

40. Immortal. Neutral Evil.

41. Satyricon. Chaotic Evil.

42. Dark Funeral. Neutral Evil.

43. Nile. Neutral.

44. Possessed. Neutral Evil.

45. Motorhead. Chaotic Neutral.

46. Cradle of Filth. Neutral Evil.

47. Def Leppard. Selfish Neutral.

48. Queensryche. True Neutral.

49. Dimmu Borgir. Neutral Evil.

50. Sepultura. Neutral, but see the note for ArchEnemy.

Thirteen Metal Albums to Listen to in a Dark Room, on Mind Altering Drugs

2010-06-19T18:47:00.000-07:00

More than any other genre of popular music, metal asks the big questions: Heaven and Hell, Doom and Repentance, Extraterrestrial Life, the Limits of Human Endurance, Power and the Lack of Power, Evil and its Exact Nature. This sort of thinking leads to the use of psychadelic drugs as surely as cocaine use leads to bankruptcy court.

This is my Father's Day list, because when my brother asked what I would rather be doing for father's day than anything else, I answered truthfully. I never really thought about it until I listened to I came to the morning DJs on my local classic rock station muse about how their ideal Father's Day. For them, such a day would be spent in a strip club, surrounded by women who had, in their childhood, been neglected by their own fathers. I don't actually need that experience, largely because those places have worked out the details of fleecing money from the customer to such perfection that there is no fun in them anymore. I am not complaining, I actually got something like this for a birthday present last year, while the wife watched the kid, and it was a blast, though we got to very little metal listening. Ideally, I would like to take this voyage alone, or with one companion who, preferably, with a woman in a kimono coming down every now and again to offer me a cold beer, a glass of water, some gummi bears.

The components of the list depend upon the drugs. Dear listener, let us assume that you have imbibed a teacup full of psylocibin tea and smoked a medium sized joint of some strain of cannabis with a fancy name, which is still lit in the ashtray. I have defined "metal" rather loosely, because our friends in the Stoner Rock camp do this thing so damned well. Hopefully, you have laid these out on top of the CD player, or have handy playlists on your computer, because you will not be able to look for them once that tea kicks in...

Thirteen.

Opeth. Orchid. Morbid and beautiful. Opeth's musical ambitions shine more brightly some evenings than others.

Twelve

The Melvins, Stoner Witch. Stoner rock, not metal, but fuzzed out Texas psychobilly genius.

Eleven.

Blue Oyster Cult, Fires of Unknown Origin. This is more proto-metal than metal, but it is over-the-top freaky and ambitious all the way through, BOC's best, in my opinion.

Ten.

Cradle of Filth, Thornography. This might be a great one to start with. About fifteen minutes into it, you will find yourself wondering if Dani Filth really is singing those lyrics. Crazy vocal vamping, unbelievably weird songs about English depravity, horror, and magic, and the truly mindblowing "Rise of the Pentagram"....

Nine.

Tiamat. Clouds/The Sleeping Beauty. Imagine that the biggest, most meatheaded pro wrestler in the WWE had a secret leaning toward existentialism, and started asking the really bigquestions. This is pretty much what you would get, as a musical narrative.

Eight.
All of Apocalyptica's albums belong on this list. This is my personal favorite.

Seven.

Neurosis, Enemy of the Sun. Skip to the next one on the list if you start getting freaked out. This is some heavy shit.

Six.

Orange Goblin, Frequencies from Planet Ten. Yes, this is more of a stoner rock album than a metal album, but it is a masterpiece.

Five.

Enslaved, Monumension. ALL of the Enslaved albums belong on this list, but it would be redundant to keep listing them. This is my pick. Yours might be Maudraum.

Four.

Emperor, In The Nightside Eclipse. Intricate and strange, full of nuances. It is, essentially, an opera.

Three.

Sleep, Jerusalem. Mandatory.

Two.

Bathory, Twilight of the Gods. About twenty five minutes into the first song, you might be wondering how something this strange ever got recorded. It really is that weird. The first song is some 27 odd minutes long and progresses from one strange phase to another.

One.

Monster Magnet, Powertrip. Mandatory, especially if you are going through any sort of transition in your life, or needed to do some serious thinking.

7/2/2010 Just an addendum. I actually GOT my Father's day present this year...last Wed, due to a death in the wife's family and their sudden and unplanned trip to South Dakota. This left me with two evenings completely lacking in parental responsibilities. On Wed, I actually DID spend much of the evening with two strippers (one of which is a very close friend of mine), who brought me to the Violet Hour and PAID MY TAB. As for the trip itself, here is the soundtrack.

Bathory..Twilight of the Gods (only the first track, I actually grew impatient with it and decided I knew it too well)

Darkthrone...Dark Thrones and Black Flags

The Voyager Interstellar Record, whole damned thing. With the classical music, I also grew impatient because the pieces, including a decent stretch of Beethoven's 5th symphony, I knew pretty well. The "world" music blew me away....especially the Blues and Latin music.

Cradle of Filth-Thornography. It was amazing...because of the state I was in, I was able to make out all the lyrics clearly, and laughed through most of it.

Mercyful Fate-In the Shadows. Amazing again, for some of the same reasons.

Ten Greatest Metal Albums/CDs of All Time

2010-06-18T19:00:00.001-07:00

I love the exercise of choosing a list of the ten best of anything. In music criticism, these are mandatory, and usually presented as definitive. The fact of the matter is, "best" is an elusive quality, and it is situation dependent. The best metal album for a road trip might be Judas Priest (depends upon whether the listener cares about lyrics), and certainly not something like Emperor or Enslaved, because all the nuances of the latter would be lost over the road noise. Some of you have quieter cars, I suppose.

"Greatest" is a little easier to justify. It is the intersection of personal impact and cultural resonance. It implies grandiosity. PT Barnum did not create the "best" show on Earth, that was probably in some Gran Guignol theatre at the time, or perhaps in some Irish Pub, with traditional instruments, but he certainly made the Greatest Show on Earth.

So...in later posts, I will rank on other axes. I am leaving out the protometal, and other bands arguably classed as stoner rock or hard rock. Motorhead is, by convention considered to be a metal band, though Lemmy has denied this, listeners define genres, not musicians.

Here are my estimation of the ten greatest, in terms of their originality, their impact on their audience since the album was released, an on their success as an artistic statement. This is not actually my top ten favorites, certainly not the ten most interesting, or the ten i would most want to listen to in a dark basement doing drugs. Those lists come later.

Number Ten.

Judas Priest. Stained Class. One of these had to be a Judas Priest album, it was just a matter of which album, and which place on the list, such is how well regarded this band is in the minds of metal listeners. I actually listened through every great Judas Priest album before writing this, because though they are one of the greatest metal bands of all time, I am only now getting into them. Earlier in my life, I was always after something more intense, weirder, more cerebral, bleaker, druggier. It is either this one, or Screaming for Vengence, both are amazing, actually, especially if one accepts Rob Halford's thesis that lyrically, less is more.

Number Nine.

Motley Crue. Shout at the Devil. If you do not accept Motley Crue as a metal band, because hair metal is stylistically too much of a departure from metal's fundamental aesthetic, insert Children of Bodom's "Follow the Reaper" in this slot. A person cannot argue the Cru's impact on metal, or its listeners, however. This album is amazingly successful at what it tries to do: convince the listener to spend all their money on drugs and strippers. I like drugs and I also like strippers, and though it took me a while to warm up to this album personally (it was too popular in high school among people that used to beat me up, or threaten to do so), it is a masterwork.

Number Eight.

Guns n' Roses. Appetite for Destruction. As with the Motley Crue, if you do not consider hair metal to be a valid category of metal, insert Kreator's "Pleasure to Kill"in this slot. If you favor keeping one, and jettisoning the other from the list, you are not playing the game right. Both are hair metal acts. This one is even darker, even more powerful, grittier. It is the apotheosis of its genre, a time when mainstream radio stations played certain metal albums in heavy rotation.

Number Seven.

Bathory. Hammerheart. This is by no means an obscure band. Bathory are widely recognized to be important pioneers in the genres of Black Metal and Viking Metal. Still, this album sold many less copies, and was created by a band that was in many ways a single person's pet project, and in fact, never played a live show. I could keep writing about this band for pages, but suffice it to say, the genres of Black Metal, Viking Metal, and Swedish Death Metal originate with Bathory, and largely from this album. A nod belongs to Celtic Frost here, an equally influential band, more musically diverse, but less insane and driven in their artistic ambitions, as the progenitor of the black and evil stuff.

Number Six.

Motorhead, Ace of Spades. I hear that Lemmy does not actually think of Motorhead as a metal band, but I have never met a fan that agrees with him. Lemmy, if you are reading my list, Pantera's "Vulgar Display of Power" would be up here if not Motorhead. This album is the ultimate provocation for a person to go out, playing this album on the car stereo, and beat the living crap out of some dickhead that desperately deserves it, preferably while drunk.

Number Five. Slayer Reign in Blood.

At the time of its release, this was the heaviest album ever made, by far, and there would be no Death Metal were it not for this album, a thrash album, but the progenitor of so many things to come.

Number Four

AC/DC. You are, no doubt, anticipating these caveats by now. AC/DC do not actually regard themselves as metal, and their sound is basically a hard rock sound with metal overtones. If this does not count as metal to you, put Emperor's "The Nightside Eclipse" in this slot. This is the apex of the hard rock sound, chunky, clean in its execution and dirty in its subject matter. It is anthem after anthem to the rockandroll life style. A strip club, a six pack, Jack Daniels, power.

Number Three.

Iron Maiden. Number of the Beast. This album was actually panned by mainstream rock critics, at the time it was released in 1982. This is actually justified, if a music critic adheres to the elitist and inflexible notion that rock music, metal included, must adhere to some vestige of its roots in the Mississippi Delta. This album is an incredible departure from the likes of Led Zepplein and even Black Sabbath in that the inspiration for its songs was rooted solidly in fantasy and unreality. There is no song on this album that even remotely corresponds to the life of any of its listeners. This is an attribute of metal, as a genre of music, that ensures that it will always have its adherents, no matter what the current trend in music. For most contemporary manifestations of the genre, metal is escapist. Iron Maiden cross imaginary landscapes like no other band, before or since. No subject is too big for a song: Alexander the Great, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, the Battle of Britain. My personal favorite Maiden album is actually Killers, for reasons I will probably elaborate in another post, but as for their greatest, it is probably either this, or Powerslave, an equally amazing album, but less original only for the reason that it came later, and Maiden stuck very true to form after this one.

Number Two.

Black Sabbath, Paranoid. Critics who call Black Sabbath the first metal band are advocating the only truly reasonable position on the matter. Though Deep Purple and Blue Cheer ventured into dark territory, they did not stay there like Black Sabbath, nor did Led Zepplein, whose musical diversity was truly astonishing, and ventured boldly into pieces that included the first Viking metal song. Black Sabbath, however, invented a dark sound so constantly referred to by later metal bands that they are the progenitor of almost everything we recognize as fundamental to the genre. This piece is probably their greatest album. It was amazingly popular for its day, and possessed an intensity and originality never seen since its release in 1970.

Number One:

Metallica. Master of Puppets. This is on everybody's list, often in the number one slot, for a good goddamned reason. It is an incredible, groundbreaking work. Each song has a resonance, a genius for rhythm and texture, an intellectual clarity, that resonates every bit as strongly today as it did in 1986, when it punched a hole in the conventions of the time and drove a shit ton load of bricks through it. Ride the lightning might actually be better artistically, and my personal favorite is actually And Justice for All, because I love the intricate melodies and outright bleakness of the lyrics, but this is certainly the greatest.

Lady Gaga

2010-06-16T19:26:00.000-07:00

I have been hypnotically revisiting the images in the Lady Gaga videos, over and over again, like a needle-skipping record left on the turntable as a family goes away on vacation, rushing out the door, lights on, dishes in the sink, barely packed, and strains of "Alejandro", "Poker Face", and "Bad Romance" echoing through a shag carpeted living room. Beds burn, the same incendiary autoimmolation striking the same assertive man wearing the same chin prosthetic, on infinite repeat, like the cosmos of the collapsing universe, a time stream somehow bent back upon itself, cause leading to effect leading to second cause. Again and again, I see the magnificent, goggle-clad face lasciviously pull on her black lips with a talonlike fingernail, the suggestive drills of her bodyguard, clad in Calvin Klein briefs and Prince Valiant haircuts, as they obligingly commit acts of nun rape and war crimes in one context, and submit to animal slavery in another. My one point five year old has inherited my obsessive, megalomaniacal disposition, and today I negotiated a brief respite, to show her videos of Fred Astaire, Hansel und Gretyl, Madonna, which she grudgingly tolerated, an early attempt to explain the concept of sharing. The fact of the matter is that the images are burned in her consciousness forever, and she will always desire to writhe and prance around in fancy underwear from now on, to dance with a coterie of latex clad mutants in a white room, to be bluffin' with her muffin, when the time reveals itself, though for now she is content to roll theatrically on the kitchen floor with her monkey, Alex, the same stuffed monkey who borrows my car keys and takes off for the night, to god knows where. I suppose I am being prepared for something, am I not? She will have Lady Gaga the same way I had the Honeycomb Hideout, the Trix Rabbit, the Ishmael who was Captain Crunch, their microscopic dramas played out ad infinitum across a six color canvas, to the extent that I can still remember the specious dictum that "Trix are for Kids". I wonder if her hypothalamus is putting down her first long-term memories, of a heroine in a bearskin casting a room into flames, of tiny pink tutus and the first attempts at dance steps. Hopefully, the same hypothalamus is putting down a few memories of endless afternoons in the park, of sandwiches shared on the grass, of turing over rocks to gather pillbugs to show with Mama, and a strange pastiche they will make. Rock, Pond, River, Mice, Milk, Scissors, Grahm Crackers, KISS, Sid and Marty Croft, GI Joe, Dinosaurs, Pengins, Dolls, Explosives, Peanut Butter, Grass Huts, Fear, Milk, Survival. We have barely left the savanna.

Inevitable

2010-06-13T19:30:00.000-07:00

Invertebrate Overlord.

An update

2010-06-12T20:06:00.000-07:00

A water fountain. The word for pigeon being "duck", because there is no way to say pigeon. A sandwich. A trip to the bookstore. A long line for donuts. Iron Maiden. Lady Gaga. A stuffed monkey, relaxing on the back porch, after a crazy night of drinking. A house party next door. A jawbone played as a washboard. I did not buy mushrooms.

In other news, lonely ichtheostegalians slide off of moss-covered logs. Clouds and sand. The brown flush of diatoms. The fear of fire. Fear of the dark. Fear of the light. The lack of mushrooms worldwide, resulting in the accumulation of carbon. Dance Flies.

In still other news. Dance flies. Bee Mimics. High waters following a thunderstorm. Two tarantulas. Bass lines. Bass ale. Largemouth Bass. Black Bass. Blackness.

A List

2010-06-11T19:05:00.000-07:00

10 Amazing Metal CDs I need to mention right now.

Monster Magnet...Superjudge.

Iron Maiden.....Powerslave

Metallica......Ride the Lightning

Blue Oyster Cult.....Fires of Unknown Origin

Bathory....Hammerheart

Motley Crue....Shout at the Devil

Enslaved.....Frost

Satyricon/Enslaved....The Forest is My Throne/Yggdrasil

Orange Goblin.....Frequencies from Planet Ten

Dio....Last in Line

Monkeys

2010-06-10T19:30:00.000-07:00

I just need to vent here. Alex took the car the night before last, and was out all night with it. I did not actually need the car, it is just that I do not know what Alex does on nights like that. Sometimes he leaves it with a full tank, sometimes, it is pretty damn near fumes. For a stuffed monkey, Alex is actually a pretty good driver. Stuffed monkeys are much better drivers than actual monkeys, which goes without saying. I think the person who really eggs Alex on is Pink Bunny, who has an anarchic vibe about him. Pink Bunny never lets me down though. He has been around the block more than a few times. Pink Bunny has an aura, a themesong, a vibe. Pink Bunny rocks out. Pink Bunny never actually opens his eyes. I actually live with two pink bunnies, the other being Judgie Pink Bunny, who is, in fact, a very judgmental stuffed animal. Needless to say, Judgie Pink Bunnie does not approve.

Alex is full of big plans. He must have six open checking accounts. I have no idea how he gets his money, but he has some. He also likes to run around stark naked. Everyone in this house, especially the little girl, seems to regress to hippidom at the slightest provocation. I suppose that goes for me too.

Now there is a collection of rubber duckies, led by a giant. Mostly, the giant demands to be fed, and seeks water. The duckies show up in all manner of places, the devil duckie staring down the angel duckie. The Alice Cooper duckie confronting the cheerleader. Ducks sleep at night. Monkeys drive. and accumulate those little toothpicks that spear the olives in Martinis. Lady Gaga plays, over and over again. We say goodnight to Megadeth.

I Remember Rodinia

2010-06-09T19:26:00.000-07:00

It is true, that ancient supercontinent haunts me to this day, almost a billion years after I walked its strange, eroded landscapes. Glaciers came and went, so many times, leaving dune and boulder, rushing river and haunting mesa. Such Ice ages it had, engulfing the planet in a manner so severe as to make the last half million years look like a Los Angeles snowfall.

A big place. No trees. No grass. Only sky, and alkali earth. Only crashing waves against algae-encrusted rocks. No oxygen in the air, but warm winds of Nitrogen and water vapor, dust and salt spray. I could not light a cigarette on the beach. No dinosaurs. No people. Only a few, fresh impact craters, hosting impossibly green lakes.

At night, the strange young moon looked down on me, larger and closer than I see it today. So vivid, its mountains easily counted through the clear terrestrial sky. Mars looked the same from here, but far away on its surface, its ancient Northern and Southern oceans boiled and stormed. Rain fell, and huge volcanic plumes dusted the waters with ash. A peaceful Venus was just then erupting into a sea of lava, from deep below, well-worn rock and dry basin from evaporated ocean, features oozing into nothingness. A Saturn with no rings, Jupiter, larger even than today, with 7 magnificent haloes. No planet pluto, not where it is, at least. The star-bright sky studded with giant blue stars, as the galaxy enveloped a smaller partner, the nearest star so close a person could almost touch it, a yellow supergiant, with planets of its own. I like to think that the particulate cloud those planets passed through included some life-bearing meteorites, some archaea, an archaeocyathid, but I have never found it again, that place. The closest I have ever been is Pluto, which was theirs, not ours.

Instead, I see dry river valleys. I see strange, blue stromatolites. I see the Earth with a ring from a deadly encounter with a strange asteroid, long ago. I see iron settling to the bottom of the ocean, deep black and red. I see an Earth I lost one billion years ago. I dream.

Ants

2010-06-04T19:06:00.000-07:00

They are making a go of it, the red ants i captured today, from the brood chamber of their colony, under a rock that must have seemed very safe till an eighteen month old was instructed on the ways of anting. And ant she did, with a plastic shovel first, and an aspirator second, though she did not know how to make the latter decice work, but tried, after removing a brick I had replaced out of mercy to the colony I raided. In fact, that colony showed itself well, rushing about so quickly I was fought to a standstill looking for victims, and moving hundreds of tiny coccoons out of the space before I could really set about to stealing them. Blood colored and beautiful, my small collective of captives is finally out of colony defense mode, and is making the best of things, having piled all the coccoons atop each other and setting about to guard them. Sentries posted. Too bad this new colony will never have a queen.

I had exercised so much restraint until this afternoon, witnessing a colony of Formica sanguinaria raid another colony of a congeneric Formica, two columns locked in deadly battle, slave making begun within the ant world, for the more practical purpose of eliminating the competition and just plain theft. Soon, I place a light trap in that same yard, hunting for queens, blood red or matte black, to start colonies from scratch.

My dream.

2010-06-03T18:55:00.000-07:00

Can you please tell me why I cannot dig a moat? Or a tunnel? Immediate response would be that the former device might kill a person and the latter would enable me to hide in an underground lair day and night, till my friends became genuinely concerned. Both outcomes would be desirable, and expected, and are no reason not to dig a moat or build a tunnel. I regret that I am not digging now. For some reason, I have been convinced to not pry open the trapdoor in my basement, and dear viewers, you can trust me when I assure you that such a trapdoor exists, and is curiously welded shut no less. For other reasons, too numerous and unsatisfying to list here, I have been talked out of enlarging whatever space exists beneath that mysterious trapdoor, with a shovel, and buckets, and much tracking of soil through the living room, till a hollow cubic space existed large enough to panel in plywood and green board and even to wire with electricity, and to floor with plywood and perhaps ceramic tile, leaving just enough room on the floor for a second trap door. This is the sort of home improvement I set about to get started when I bought this property of mine, and for reasons too numerous and too fundamentally insubstantial to cite here, I was talked into reworking light fixtures and removing vinyl tile. Such a disguise above would have made my tunnel building all the more evocative, I think. A cot. At the end of a twenty foot corridor, underneath two subbasements, a cot. My throne. I would have a ventilation shaft, and cigars. Maybe warm beer. I would survive on canned goods. This was my dream. Time to grab a beer and think about my dream.

Cold Is Hot In Evolution: Researchers Debunk Belief Species Evolve Faster In Tropics

2010-06-02T18:57:00.000-07:00

Cold Is Hot In Evolution: Researchers Debunk Belief Species Evolve Faster In Tropics

More Species In The Tropics Because Species Have Been There Longer, Study Suggests

2010-06-02T18:54:00.000-07:00

More Species In The Tropics Because Species Have Been There Longer, Study Suggests

Who are we sharing the planet with? Millions less species than previously thought, new calculations suggest

2010-06-02T18:53:00.000-07:00

Who are we sharing the planet with? Millions less species than previously thought, new calculations suggest

Palaeontologists solve mystery of 500 million-year-old squid-like carnivore

2010-05-27T18:56:00.000-07:00

Palaeontologists solve mystery of 500 million-year-old squid-like carnivore

Dear Ruby

2010-05-25T18:31:00.000-07:00

Ruby, I am glad I taught you to turn over rocks in the garden looking for creepy crawlies. We have found amazing things together, already. Ants. I cannot comprehend the damage we are doing to their colonies by our frequent intrusion, but the way I see it, I have gone far out of my way to create an ideal landscape for them, and they owe me some entertainment for my daughter. Ants are familiar with the give and take of mutualism, and now I am doing the taking. We have seen beautiful rove beetles in your colonies, two types so dissimilar in appearance that it is only because of years of booklearning that I recognized them. Ruby, I never bothered ants to look for rove beetles before you came along.

We also have an amazing density of millipedes. Curiously, the star performer of our garden fauna, the European earwig, is scarcely extinct locally, after reaching such incredible densities that I was beginning to wonder how this creature came to be so invincible. Much less abundant, but strange and beautiful, are the beetles. I saw a patent leather beetle, in the wild, and alone, looking under a rock, some strange carabids, and a number of beautiful iridescent beetles I cannot currently name.

Soon, Ruby. Scarabs. Soon, fireflies as well. Soon crickets and cicada calls. Soon.

an old poem from the 1990's found and resurrected

2010-05-21T19:14:00.000-07:00

the dark room

it is a field of black lilies

a burned out sun, an enormous dark pupil

and i

am an inverted miniature

caught under its gaze

a perfect shadow of myself, a cipher

waiting to be exposed on a plate of silver film

once in my life

if i could only capture a moment so perfectly as this photograph

feel pain without guilt or

peace without boredom,

find my way into the light outside the cave

Another Victory

2010-05-20T19:57:00.000-07:00

The night was cloak-black. I could scarcely see anywhere without my special goggles. Its cranium was shining flame-yellow though, blinding my vision of anything but a cerebral cortex, outlined in greenish black, pulsing through a translucent humanoid skull.

I use the term "humanoid" loosely here. The beast had tentacled arms, but a recognizably human face with a gaping, idiot's jaw.

I circled round it with my energy sword drawn. It would fall before me like the others. It would not kill me with its death ray vision, because i was neither living nor dead, a robot. My silver skin glistened in its reflections, and I moved in for the kill. Under its quickly-moving right tentacle I went, but the second tentacle writhed around my foot just in time for me to cut it off at the shoulder. A foot kicked me then, and I went down with a shudder. Rolling in its direction, I cleaved both feet off of the thing, and then crawling to my robot knees as it cried, I beheaded it.

Glowing cranium pulsed at increasingly longer and longer intervals as the thing's head died in the black night.

Dear Ruby

2010-05-19T20:06:00.001-07:00

it is probably worth mentioning, at this exact moment in time, because such a dispatch as this is really limited to a particular instant in cosmic time, that things are pretty good at this time. the homemade lager has all the fruitiness of a beer that was fermented at the wrong temperature, and i love it. it feels like my invention. the weather is perfect, and the happy little baby is sleeping next to a rubber duck the size of a real duck, a few feet away. true, there is no meteor shower, but there are also no impact craters, and for that, i am eternally grateful, or at least, until an impact occurs. there is rock out there. that is to say, rock, and heavy metal exist. i like this. i like that the world harbors so many species of insects, also. i watched one bee intimidate and harass another today, separate species and both solitary, and i approved. these things go on happening even in urban gardens, evolutionary events such as the transport of strange fish across great oceans.

i have never felt truly like a member of the human race. this may result from an upbringing spent with my face pushed between colored illustrations of ants, or it may result from abnormalities in some prefrontal gyrus of mine, but every glance in the mirror is a surprise, no matter how old i get, because i do not generally expect to see a primate there. seriously, i find its hands beautiful, its eyes and lips interesting, and its sheer bulk paradoxical. it seems curiously degenerate, lacking so many of the features that should have made it a chordate to begin with, and its immune system waging war on the last remnant of notochord. its societies are so complicated, and so much of its energy is devoted to activities which, if anything, negatively impact its Darwinian fitness. that said, i never expected to have any Darwinian fitness at all, and that strange creature i spent the day with has a similar, odd, interest in its own status as a human being. such things as nostrils need to be accounted for. a continuous digestive tract, and heterotrophy, were not forgone conclusions, and the existence of something like the ocean is a like some weird homecoming. i do not know what strange galactic cluster you were at lately, nugget, but welcome to earth and, when you get old enough, enjoy the beer.

Extincton

2010-05-15T19:05:00.000-07:00

there is a comet coming. i can feel it like an itch at the back of my neck as we descend back into the plane of the spiral galaxy. those arms pose serious dilemmas. when the doomsday asteroid arrives, it will find a planet already recovering from a mass extinction event, and the two will get blurred together for future paleontologists to sort out. the Permian mass extinction was obviously set off by a bolide of some sort that hit the Earth square in the ocean, releasing ancient trapped gasses that were already present at dangerous levels.

sometimes i wonder how it is that we are doing the work of evolution, letting one species of African drosophiliid wander the continents while driving extinct a thousand in Hawaii, encouraging rock doves on every continent, procuring species from one continent and dropping them on another, erasing sixty million year old biogeographic signatures, beavers in the Amazon, rabbits in Australia, boa constrictors in the Everglades and, nearly everywhere, houseflies.

Jurassic fast food was a key to giant dinosaurs

2010-05-12T18:57:00.000-07:00

Jurassic fast food was a key to giant dinosaurs

Anthropocentric principal now

2010-05-12T18:22:00.000-07:00

Dude, how the hell can it be that, of all the potential people in this world, i mean, just this particular era, not counting all those other times in history when Celts grew barley or women in the Indus River Valley said little prayers to phallic deities in hopes of bearing children, i am exactly the person i turned out to be. How unlikely is it that i ended up being me? and yet how absolutely impossible is it for me to really know what it means to be otherwise? Even those other incarnations of this absolute consciousness out there, because my scientific training does nothing to refute or support the intuitive notion that we all support aspects of a single, divine mind the belief in which is aesthetic and intuitive, could not be asking the exact question as me except in such exceptional circumstances as perhaps, a clay pipe smoked after a successful wheat harvest, or a few dozen bright red mushrooms into a ceremonial divination, and yet i am like them in asking, and like others no doubt reading this and remembering their own encounters with the subject. it is an inescapable conclusion that every scrap of time i experience, every reverie i slip into between stops of the Green Line, brings another aspect of this consciousness to the surface, buries an old version of me and unwraps a new one, and that twenty four year old version of myself who made the first attempts at connecting to the larger scaffolding of it all, or that thirty nine year old version of myself who succeeded for a moment or two but could not have survived the experience for any longer, grows farther and farther away in some perpendicular but otherwise analogous direction. if something does indeed connect us all, are there not enough neurons firing at any given time for the network to be getting a hazy picture of its own self, a guess at its true nature only possible given the evolution of life on this planet. Dude, it sounds like a plan. it sounds as if such a being is inevitable, a product of the universe that created it replicating itself so many millions of times as to lead to this series of moments in time, just often enough and on just enough planets simultaneously, amid the vast star clusters and gigantic elliptical galaxies, actually is gazing in upon itself and i am a neuron in it unlike any of the others, but suddenly aware of their existence for a moment.

Two Studies On Bee Evolution Reveal Surprises

2010-05-08T20:29:00.000-07:00

Two Studies On Bee Evolution Reveal Surprises

homesickness

2010-05-08T20:12:00.000-07:00

let me try to get this one straight. in the Amazon, there are legless amphibians called caecilians, so obscure that zoology textbooks neglect to mention them, which most people mistake for worms, because of their uncanny external resemblance to worms, but let us be abundantly clear here that they are vertebrates with a great ancestry, the sole surviving remnants of those early explorers of the land, the microsaurs.

true, it is possible that our own carboniferous ancestor would be called a microsaur as well, such are these catch all groupings that contain an abundance of small and versatile creatures able to go about doing the business of the planet without being bothered by cumbersome titles such as rulers of the cosmos or executive chairman. eating fossorial invertebrates is not like that at all, and yet they are our long lost brothers and our species breeds a fair amount of executive chairmen.

such a perilous and long evolutionary path to bring them underground and underfoot, the same way we have evolved into one great beast after another, a series of monstrous quadrupeds followed by an even longer series of furry ones, all the time our long lost nieces and nephews underground perfect burrowing.

it is an open question which was a better course of action though my heart aches to think we might be the doom of them sometime soon. all the same i long for those ancient swamps, and trees scuttling with insects and abundant food, and no winter for millions of years on end. i burn the oil of that age and i find myself longing for home.

sunflowes

2010-04-28T18:10:00.000-07:00

sunflower seeds, you are planted, beside your already-thriving cousins, the volunteers. magnolia vine, thank you for flowering after all these years, a deep need for the sexuality of pollinators finally coming to the surface now that the squash vine is gone for good. my own life is a balance like yours, between the comfort of somatic cell growth and the fight with senescence, and mammalian parental care, and defending a nest site from the elements, and foraging. it is deep in the mammalian genetic programming to follow the younglings like slaves, our seed do not disperse in fruit or allow themselves to be carried away by mice and ants so easily.

it crashes and crashes and crashes against the shore of my mind, all that conflict and woe, hope and helplessess i create by arranging this game every six months. i offer food pellets for remembering the significance of an experiment, a genus and species, a genotype. too few food pellets and my gamesters starve, food enough and they go on to other games with other pellets, but mostly they keep inventories of their various pellets as if their lives depended upon it. it is my fault, i suppose, for having failed to find a way to impress upon them the grandeur of a Cambrian lobopod or the tangled connection of ancient ancestors within their brains. at least, this applies to most of them. there are always a few that trickle through, like incandescent dinoflagellates in a current of ideas older and greater than us all. where these will end up, i have no idea, but they are part of a process that assembles and reassembles elements of what really matters in us, through the centuries, like our genes through the millions of years since cambrian lobopods

New monitor lizard discovered in Indonesia

2010-04-27T16:05:00.000-07:00

New monitor lizard discovered in Indonesia

Blood on a Space Guitar

A lament for Stormbringer

my status as a positive teen role model

a trout's lament

Rhizodont

Queen of Autumn

Queen of Winter

A Goblin's History

an unvisited geological epoch

an open window

a reverse valentine

the universe that has shaped itself in the next room

a comet

Minos

The Coal Swamp Has Never Been Closer

congratulations, universe, for your neutron stars

ode to species with heterogametic sexes or deadly venom

Who made death?

Listening to Metal

A talk with Aweoweah

Doom and Doom again

a nocturne

the rainy day and the piano

a lament for the cephalopods

for you, baphomet

more....

rough draft

Sad

invertebrate

another

An Excerpt

The Archaeology of My Former Self

A story about robots...if i do not post for a while it is because i am writing something....

robot

Dear Ruby

a darwinian love poem

Call from the Grave - Bathory

Red Barchetta by Rush

First 'Rule' Of Evolution Suggests That Life Is Destined To Become More Complex

intelligent life in the cosmos

halloween with Insect

Note on our species

A Goblin Speaks

What Exactly ARE the Yo Gabba Gabba Creatures??

A Goblin Poem

A Partial List of Extrasolar Monsters You Should Avoid

Ophrys fuciflora Pollinator, Surrey (1)

dear ruby

Pterosaurs

Gondwana

Time to think about ice ages again

Amon Amarth - "The Pursuit of Vikings" Metal Blade Records

for you dan

Aploogies to the Ones I Left Behind

Yet Another Instar

Prepared Statement

Dear Ruby

The Soundtrack to the Magical Senior Prom I Never Had

A Young Athiest Dreams of the Afterlife

The Most Brutal Metal Album Ever

Most Perfect Black Metal Album Ever

To The Queen of Winter

A Cautionary Tale

A VISION OF PURE METAL

Catastrophic break line rupture, tow truck, enforced picnic in the grass, auto repair bills

I Could Never Have Made it as a Hunter-Gatherer

The Violent Hour

Finally, I am glad to meet you, Osiris

Coffee, and More Coffee, a Culinary Review by Psycho Butcher

Oh Beezelbub

The Gold Voyager Record

Oh, Leviathan

Emperor - A fine day to die (live)

Baphomet, Oh How I Praise Thee

Mighty Astaroth

A dangerous demonic prayer, revealed. DO NOT attempt to read this passage aloud, or it will have terrible consequences. IT is posted here for STUDY ONLY, in hopes that men of good souls will realize that such evil prayers exist.Like everything else on Bloodonaspaceguitar, it is COMPLETELY CREDIBLE.

50 Metal Bands by Dungeons and Dragons Alignment

Thirteen Metal Albums to Listen to in a Dark Room, on Mind Altering Drugs

Ten Greatest Metal Albums/CDs of All Time

Lady Gaga