The Shaming of the True

Last night, driving home, a hole opened up in the sky. I thought it would swallow me. I thought, at the very least, I would crash my car while staring into its luminous nothing.

(Once, we were lost in London's white canyons, walking in circles, the waving flags circumventing the void. (

One day, we will sit and sit and sit and sit. We will walk to the refrigerator and will stare into it. We will take out the plate, remove the plastic wrap, and eat the remaining slices of apples (alone).

I am overcome. I am having a hard time breathing.

     )                                                                                             )

The Bottomless Pit at the Edge of this Trail: Best Recordings

It is hard to blog about music while listening to music, but here goes.

Most Meaningful Music

Probably more important than the "best of" list that follows, these songs and albums meant something to me in this year of our L0rd, 2012.

1. Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea I had some drinks when I first conceived this list, which is why this is first.

2. Burzum, "Dunkelhet" The Wisconsin landscape-view that is the bus ride from Oxford to London and back again urged me toward black metal--this song in particular, at full volume. Runner up: Darkthrone's A Blaze in the Northern Sky.

3. Bon Iver, Bon Iver, Bon Iver Winter in California means rain. And this.


4. WHY?, Elephant Eyelash I am drawn to this album when I am far from home. Once, while sleeping on floors in New Zealand, I listened to the first two songs from this album on repeat until I fell asleep night after night. This year, I used it to drown out the Farringdon street noise. I also quoted it's opening track on Instagram, which is a sentence that would not have made sense a year ago.

5. Cap'n Jazz, Burritos, Inspiration Point, Fork Balloon Sports, Cards In The Spokes, Automatic Biographies, Kites, Kung Fu, Trophies, Banana Peels We've Slipped On and Egg Shells We've Tippy Toed Over Drive home sing-along.

6. Morrissey, "Everyday is Like Sunday" See #1

7. Rites Of Spring,  End on End In college, I stole this CD from my roommate. This past year, I found it on vinyl in a famous London record store. But even before that, I could not stop listening or stop looking up footage on the internet.
  
8. UNK, "Walk It Out" For some reason, this is constantly stuck in my head.
 

Best of 2012

In no order, these are new audio things that stood out to me in 2012.


1.Godspeed You! Black Emperor, 'Allelujah, Don't Bend! Ascend
2. Mount Eerie, Clear Moon/Ocean Roar
3. Swans, The Seer
4. Anatomy of Habit, II (When I typed this, I wrote "Anatomy of Hamlet")
5. El-P, Cancer For Cure
6. Kendrick Lamar, Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City
7. Die Antwoord, Ten$ion
8. Tig Notaro, Live/Professor Blastoff

This blog in audio form

The author of this blog is also the "genius" behind the "band" Friday Nite!. Check out their new "album" and download it for zero dollars right here:




41 "songs". Quantity over quality.

Free Associations Based on Historically Accurate Names of People and Places in "Braveheart"

William Wallace Alabama shakes hands across American flags of our fathers day of the dead

The Battle of Stirling silver medal heads and shoulders above the rest in peace

Edward Longshanks for the memories like the corners of my mind the gap band on the run

Princess Isabelle is a bell tower of power plant

The Battle of Fal-Captain-kirk land of the free home of the brave heart holy shit full circle

Ya Filthy Animal

I saw MacCaulay Culkin once, at the height of his fame, walking from a make-your-own-music-video boutique in an upscale Chicago mall. I was there to play mini-golf, eat frogs' legs and blue ice cream, see the fountain spray over the river. The celebrity run-in was jarring, momentous. I had seen his work with my father just weeks before. It moved me. I was about his age, maybe a slightly older 14, he in his leather jacket obscenely decorated with baseball diamonds, a middle school entourage in tow. He was short, even for his age. I, too.

And now my nostrils breathe fire in the burnt brown shadows of a nameless television show, the red reflections of clothing sales living in the sheen of the coffee tables. I am having trouble seeing clearly these days. Today, when I pet my dog, I swore the moment was a dream. I still do. And then, when M died in the Bond movie, my own mortality was plainly evident. It does not matter that I will not die poignantly, my enemy saying that yes this yes this was was the was it was the way it was supposed to end. My ending is an ending, unpoignant. The absence of a negative. The absence of a positive. A narrative with no arcs

And Culkin slaps his cheeks, his mouth an "O" 

Cops, Robbers

They say that everyone has a novel in them. Here is mine:

A rider rides a bicycle several times a week. The distance of these rides at first seems lengthy, but eventually we realize that in the grand scheme of things, no no even in the scheme of bicycles and their riders, they are not. These rides are not linear. The rider always ends up where he started. This continues.

Besides slight changes in wind speed and direction and weather, every chapter is exactly the same.

The steel grey, the reflective wrapped teal, the honey, and a creeking

If the temperature and time are just right: 58 degrees, slight breeze, no humidity, the waning sunset,  the bike disappears and you are flying.

(Actually, the universe is shaped exactly like a human, and we are living in the fingertips.)