Habits

Of course I relapsed, because that's what you do when you're stopping something you've done every day for eight years. You do it again. So, another patch on this morning, carrying on like nothing happened. I'm not Quitting. This is a Hiatus, and I can start smoking again any time I want to. I just don't want to yet, despite what my Lizard Brain might be screaming at me.

Creating is a weird thing. For the longest time I couldn't imagine creating collaboratively; the words that were falling out of my head were my words from my head. Even playing music wasn't a collaborative creation, per se. My first band played jazz covers, and Mylo Ranger had all the songs written by Myles. I found parts to play, notes to sing. My part, my notes. His song.

Echo Charlie is nothing like that. Very rarely does it pass that one of us has a completed piece that we take and run with. The act of sculpting and shaping, molding odd sounds and stray chords into something playable, something that sounds good, is now exclusively a communal thing. The idea is brought fourth but three pairs of hands shape it, adding here or tearing away there. In some cases, the idea is created, tested, and then re-done entirely. It's bizarre and it's fantastic. It's immensely helpful --I can write in prose until my fingers fall off (see the rest of the blog for evidence) but writing in lyric has always thrown me for a loop. It's a block of my own doing that I become so obsessed with the fact that I have to make something metered that rhymes that writing about something becomes daunting. With a little bit of the responsibility shared among the three of us, the pressure lessens and the ideas start trickling through.

I'm still not very good at songwriting, or at least writing a lot of songs regularly. Come to think of it, I've never written regularly at all. I almost let this entry slip, but the nagging junkie-howls in the back of my mind telling me that I should be sucking down a Pall Mall like the world is ending acts as a nice little alarm clock.

Buying a double shot of pitch-black Cuban coffee and smacking a keyboard until ideas fall out might be my favorite addiction treatment yet. On a side note, nicotine patches are irritating as all hell. They  itch, and they itch persistently. Evil little things.

I miss being near woods. I miss my small town where I could go explore an abandoned building or walk train tracks until I didn't recognize anything. Even in Pensacola I could wander around my little park. Delray feels wrong. Too false, too constructed. I'd like to be able to take a walk to somewhere that didn't lead me to another office park. My thoughts keep drifting back to cold woods, quiet and still buzzing with life. I'm thinking of Roswell, of Asheville, of the kind of South that keeps calling me back.

I think we're obsessed with the idea of change, my generation. The idea that things need to change but they can't, or that if we change this or that we'll wind up happy. We're all troubleshooting our own lives - at least, some of us are. I know too many people who bemoan the state of things and then never modify a moment of their days. It breaks my heart how many of the people I went to middle school with are still in that rickety little crater of a town, still saying to this day that they'll get out soon, that they'll come to Florida or move out west, go see the world.

So many of them never left the state. I hope they all see an ocean.

I'm not brooding, here. On the contrary, I'm thrilled with just about everything. The caffeine is working wonders and the clicking of my (completely sub-par) keyboard is keeping my thoughts off R.J. Reynold's demon-whispers. Hockey game right after work, then locking down for some good reading. Mylo Ranger has a show on Saturday, and it's a little upsetting that I can't bring myself to be excited about it anymore. I get so much more thrilled hacking away at new things, new sounds.

Kicking old habits is simple; just replace them with new ones.

New Echoes

Old ghosts haunting dusty rooms.

The last time I threw any words at this page Obama hadn't yet been re-elected. I still thought that I was a journalist, and I fueled this by telling everyone that I was a freelance journalist, which is a nice little bit of bullshit for "I have a blog I shit my thoughts out on." Of course, the election came and went, I discovered that there were other writers than Hunter S. Thompson, and four interesting years of life came and went. Moments of joy and misery happened, new and strange and exciting things cut through the mundane, I switched careers more than a handful of times, and I wound up a better man than I was when I still wrote about politics.

Here we are again, four years later. I'm writing this because I've gone on a Smoking Hiatus, and I need something to do with my hands at my mostly uneventful office job. I'm writing this because writing is a habit I'm picking up again like eating healthier and going to the gym and practicing my instruments and not just fucking around. I'm writing this because once upon a time, I turned out to be pretty good at that, and I intend to do a fair bit of writing in the big uncertain future.

I'm writing this here because I know that not a fucking soul is going to read it, and that means I get to say whatever the hell I want.

Of course, that's not entirely true. It's the Internet, and god knows if someone's going to stumble across my stockpile of stray thoughts. I know that. Performing is in my blood, and at the end of the day I still want an audience. Let me entertain you with my worldly views and creative ways of swearing.

So the Nicotine Hiatus. The thing about working an uneventful desk job is that you ultimately wind up getting paid to fuck around; now, the organization and nature of that fucking-around time is the challenge. For the most part I've spent that non-time watching British sitcoms on YouTube and wishing I could either be playing music or have the ability to write a fucking song for a change. Being on a company's dime and plowing through Father Ted sounds pretty good, and it is at first, but the human capacity for boredom knows absolutely no bounds. You all know me, and you know that I need at least some level of panic in my life to function.

I'm not going to claim that I have great ideas lying in wait, ready to spring on you like meth'd-up jungle cats. I don't have a damn thing rattling around in my head right now, and that's okay. Reading Warren Ellis's newsletter and website (morning.computer and yes you'll thank me later) got me caught up in words again. I finished the Welcome to Night Vale book last night and I couldn't for the life of me remember the last time I'd felt that satisfied by consuming content. TV shows don't do it for me, and Lord knows that staring at Reddit is just another fuck-around sinkhole.

So here I am, and theoretically so are you. Words are going to happen, and none of them may mean anything. Maybe some of them turn out to be pretty good; I can only hope.

Let's talk about the now, though. I've joined up/co-founded a new band with the explicit intention of making that band my career for as long as possible. That means no more mostly uneventful desk job. It will also mean no permanent address, no guarantee of stability. It means that I'm going to wake up in strange places with my bandmates and go to other strange places. When we're not playing for people, we'll be practicing, writing, re-tooling, or figuring out how to play for new people or more people. It's a long time coming; I've been with Mylo Ranger for the better part of four years and it's high time that I do something I seem to love this much full-time. It's a lunatic idea, and it might turn out to be the best thing I've ever done.

You're going to hear about it, whoever you might be.

So much has happened over four years. I've forgotten most of it. Those lost thoughts and memories come for me at night, right when I'm fooled into thinking that I might get some rest. Ambushed by rogue memories, long dead remembrances coming back for another embrace or another swing at me.

On the to-do list: go be somewhere pretty outside. Take the walk home slow, and pay attention. And stop fucking thinking about smoking, you're putting rose-colored glasses over your tarred up lungs, you junkie shit.

Postmortem: Iowa Debate

I want to preface this by saying that I've been drinking heavily, and that no editing will occur at any stage of writing this. What you're reading is what fell out of my head; pure Gonzo journalism.

Hopefully all of you tuned in to the Iowa debate tonight, a fantastic demonstration of useless political backspeaking and nonsense slung out at a camera for baying crowds of sun-tanned farmers who have already made up their minds who they're voting for. The whooping, hollering, and occasional cry for blood that came from the audience tonight seemed premeditated, with Ron Paul and Michelle Bachmann bringing their own herds of creatures to cheer them on after every spoken word. The questions presented were plainly biased, as is so often the case in these kinds of debates. Kudos go to Newt Gingrich for calling the moderator out on his bullshit. Those same kudos get retracted, but we'll get into that in a minute.

First and foremost: who came out of this one smiling? The obvious answer is Mitt Romney, who, as usual, charmed and dodged his way through all questions while defending his Mormonism and going just fringe enough to appeal to some of the more far-right voters while still remaining comfortable to the majority of central-right Republicans. The usual spiel was offered from all sides with the primary focus being the economy, and the song was the same: cut taxes, create jobs. Ho hum, and so much for that. Surpisingly, Tim Pawlenty came out of left field and showed enough fang to impress me. Most of the night was taken up with him sparring Tea Party darling Michelle Bachmann, a pretty but utterly useless sack of carbon who rehashed the same memorized lines time and time again. Pawlenty's last appearance on the debate stage left something to be desired; he was boring, sweaty, panicking, and clearly not ready to play with the big boys. He fell into his humdrum step a few times, but his handler, noted Republican campaign guru Nick Ayers, has clearly been feeding him the right kind of steroids. He almost nonchalantly dueled with Bachmann, putting the outspoken Representative on the defensive and thus robbing her of her strength, which is stringing together words in a loud and emotional manner until everyone goes away.

Ron Paul put on an interesting show, shaming Rick Santorum, a candidate best known for gay-bashing and openly worshipping Cthulhu. Ron looked tired and scared tonight; he knows that he can't win this election, but he wants to give it his best and get a good message out. He certainly succeeded, bringing to the debate the only genuine outburst of emotion, begging the audience to listen to him, to just think...it was almost heartbreaking to see the GOP rebel of 2008 looking like a very old, very tired man just trying to educate the shitheads around him. He held his own, but knows very well that this isn't his game anymore.

The usual suspects took up the same amount of space and said the same things and acted like the same useless strains of chlamydia that they are. Hermann Cain has no earthly idea what is going on around him, and could not justify himself to the world if his life depended on it. Newt Gingrich succeeded in sucking off the ghost of Ronald Reagan more times than a necrophiliac voodoo priest and proving to us all that he is outdated and useless, a dinosaur in the digital age. He couldn't speak without bringing up Reagan, Clinton, hell, even JFK. John Huntsman, former governor of Utah and newcomer to the GOP race, spent most of his time justifying himself, failing to justify himself, and ultimately making an ass of himself. He's mediocre at best and just another thing to hate at usual.

Noticeably absent on the stage tonight were Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico who, while faring well in the last debate holds views radically different from that of the mainstream GOP; Jonathon "The Impaler" Sharkey, a self-proclaimed vampire out of Florida who somehow managed to fill out paperwork for GOP nomination and whose most noteworthy policy is getting the Mafia to 'take care of' drug dealers; Jimmy "The Rent is too Damn High" McMillan, the poet out of New York who became an internet phenomenon with his fluid speaking and straighforward, no-bullshi rhetoric, and, of course, Rick Perry. For those who haven't been keeping up, Rick Perry, governor of Texas, declared August 9th to be a "day of prayer and fasting" in complete violation of the US Consitution. Governor Perry has announced that he is seeking the presidency and will be running on the GOP ticket.

To wrap this up: Pawlenty came away strong, Romney came away Romney, and everyone else just walked away. Rick Perry is the only unknown in this race; otherwise it will go down to Romney, who Obama will defeat in a narrow margin come 2012. As for me, until someone impresses me, I'm voting for Jimmy McMillan, because he may very well be Jules from Pulp Fiction grown up and gone into politics.

Flashback/Introspection

All of a sudden I find myself in the midst of heavy negotiations. Deep talk spoken in hushed whispers about the prices of eighths and o’s, who can and can’t score the good shit, medicinal grade, fresh out of Cali. This is the risk you run, associating with these kind of people. One minute you’re having pleasant conversation with friends and acquaintances, and the next you find yourself trapped in a scene out of The Godfather, wondering who might be concealing semi-automatic firearms on their person.

Everything seems fine and then turns fast, and the next thing you know you’re babbling, pretending not to speak English, answering only in the broken Spanish you remember from high school. You start looking for covertly installed security cameras monitoring your patio, your kitchen--hell, in today’s world a man’s own bedroom is probably riddled with more bugs than the defunct Soviet embassy. Your eyes divert rapidly, checking every car you don’t recognize, looking for strips of red and blue lights tucked away behind the top of the windshield, or the tell-tale spotlight. The yellow license plate is a dead giveaway, but by the time you’ve registered the color, you’re doomed. The police are not a force to be trusted, when you have friends like this. YOU, a law-abiding citizen, a tax-payer, a voter, have no rights when you willingly spend your time with these drug-addled vicious lunatics, these vultures that pick away at your bones bit by bit, forcing the occasional tab of acid down your throat along the way. It’s the spectrophysiological equivalent of marinade, a good dose of LSD; turns your brain into a soft gray mush the consistency of cold tomato soup. Your very soul becomes warped and twisted, bending in and out of dimensions whose existence would utterly destroy everything we assume about our universe and how it works. I have been told that the right kind of drugs add a layer of depth and richness to your consciousness, and I am certain that it was in the context of flavor.

It’s a hard life, being perpetually in Fear of a long-gone enemy. You can’t walk by a back alley without carefully scanning for the glint of a sniper scope. Every step is gentle, searching with the sole of the boot for concealed punji sticks. You take night courses in Vietnamese language and culture on a bogus credit card number, so you can discern the average citizen going about their business from a Victor Charlie assassin carefully trailing you, waiting for the right time to slit your throat with an empty soda can. You give the first sip of your whiskey to your dog, to check for the presence of arsenic or psychoactive drugs.

Then again, there’s something about getting drunk with your dog that adds an element of bonding to pet ownership that most don’t understand. As you sit there, staring at the news, trying to cram as much information past the thick moat of sweet stupidity you’ve poured recklessly down your own gullet, speaking out loud about the injustices of the world and the sheer fucking madness of it all, you can look down at your Doberman, licking its own ass in a blissful alcoholic stupor, and know that he understands you. He sees it too, in the same way that you do, and it doesn’t make any more sense to him than it does to your own advanced and evolved mass of thinking goo you keep in your headbones. Dogs don’t do acid, though. It doesn’t work for them. They exist best on their own plane, and have no need for artificially crafted chemicals to pull off the kind of sideways thinking that a good headful of acid can bring on. Dogs walk comfortably through that crystalline plane, and behave as such. I am convinced that all LSD comes from the glands of fully grown Great Danes, and that is why I no longer buy it. The dogs earned it, goddammit, they developed their own fucking brains in such a way that they Ride their way through life, and we were soul-crushingly dumb enough to live like goats, seeing only what was put in front of our thick, stupid eyes. We have to deal with that. So be it. Leave the dogs alone.

I have no issues with drugs, on the whole. Drug people have put me in a world of shit more times than I can count, but I’ve enjoyed it every single time and wouldn’t trade it for the world. Still, there’s an element of panicky paranoia that comes with being a Drug Person. No one is your friend except other Drug People, not even the drugs. The drugs are the worst, more evil than the most depraved backwater sheriff you can find. You know where you stand with crooked cops; their mindset is not difficult to understand, and if you can think quickly and properly, you can think like them, give the right answers, or at least avoid giving the wrong ones. The drugs have no mentality. They’re virii, blindly charging forth through the temple that is your body to play loud music and add unnecessary expansions where they want. They’re squatters, and they’ll turn on you whenever they damn well please. You think you’re picking apart the meaning of life hidden in a blade of grass, and then the next you hear intense whispering in a language you hope is Korean. You’re now scanning the bushes, back to the wall. Your soldier’s brain is trying to kick in, crafting fast tactical strategies,. coming up with off-the-cuff contingency plans. You try to remember how to say “I’m a journalist, don’t shoot!” and wind up making half-vocalized choking noises. You want to communicate, but you can’t. You try to sound more like a crow, to blend in while you make your escape. And just as you’re ready to make your move, you realize that you aren’t armed, you’re not wearing camouflage, you’re not even in the bushes.

You’re sitting at your own fucking coffee table with your friends, smoking cigarettes, pineal glands reduced to smoldering blobs of goo on the potent trip that you can only get by starving yourself of sleep, feeding yourself dangerous amounts of caffeine, and then spending an afternoon with your best friends, all fucked-up madmen just like you. It’s no life for a decent human being.

I love every single minute of it.

It’s only Wednesday, it’s off-season, and no one has anything to do. If there’s a good life, this might just be it.

Out of the Game

Good morning, sinners. I hope you've all enjoyed your breaks, been relaxing, keeping informed.

Lord knows I haven't.

I'll be entirely honest with you, this is the first time I've even been back to this dirty little corner of the Internet since the last time I wrote something on here. I've been getting caught up in the mundane, involving myself in the day-to-day to the extent that I completely lost sight of the Big Picture, and I have much catching up to do. I'm out of practice; rusty. I can feel it in my joints, in my mind. In my nostrils, for some weird reason, but that might just be the remnants of last night's thing. Trust nothing powdered and Thai in nature, for it is evil and must not be allowed to go unset-on-fire.

See? I'm already providing you with these valuable life lessons. Admit it, you missed me.

I do need to get Back In. I need to remember how to do all this. I can't let myself get so far out of practice that when something massive comes up, something of crucial importance, I'm just left staring dumbly at a computer screen, wondering what to do now. Good journalism, good writing, ought to be off-the-cuff. Polishing can come later, but if you're not shitting at least good hunks of carbon that can later become diamonds, you'll never stand a chance. There's an old saying about ribbons on fecal matter I'll let you look up, but it's the same principle.

In essence I'm making that tired old blogger's promise that I'm actually going to write more often, except I'm not. For all you know, I'm fleeing to Zimbabwe tomorrow, and this'll be the last you ever hear of me. I am the Wind, creeping through the sleeping town. My every word is made of gold. What are you talking about, you bastards? I'm not drunk. I WAS drunk, I am no longer drunk.

Keep your ears open, my little sperm-flunkies. I've missed you, and I might just start talking at you.

-Tambour

How did I miss this?

I have a Twitter. I don't really post anything there; any ejaculations of my ethereal brilliance are usually aimed right down YOUR quivering gullets. I keep a Twitterfeed around because everyone else has one, and it's trendy to toss out your every thought to the world like some kind of stream-of-consciousness Tourette's. But politicians all keep Twitters, and THEY are the reason I've always got my feed running. They keep me connected and entertained and (very rarely) informed. And I was just caught off guard right now, because I was just told by Tim Pawlenty that the first GOP Presidential Debate is tonight.

I know I said it's a won race, and I'm sticking to that. But I'll be offering a postmortem later tonight, because I have to keep you fed with brainthinks, my babies.

And also, it should be funny as HELL.

I read the news today, oh boy...

So if you've been living under a rock, a team of 12 Navy SEALs found and killed Osama Bin Laden. Barack Obama followed it up with a speech that can only be described as a political masterwork. On the one hand, my red-white-and-blue hard-on is raging massive like God right now. Yes, celebrating the death of a human is bad (or so the hippies tell me.) I felt a twinge of pride that justice had been served. If that makes me a bad person, so be it. I think the fact that I litter my front yard with land-mines makes me a far worse person, but whatever.

The bad news is that I don't have much left to talk about. The election's over, Obama's won it. Donald Trump would have to shit a little of star-spangled kittens that meow "God Bless America" in perfect harmony in order to put a dent in the margins. Talk amongst yourselves, my darling little acid dreams. Think back on these past ten years. For at least a little while, I'll be lurking in the shadows, watching carefully for something new to pounce on.

Tambour