confluence of events

My cat Lily yowling constantly on a cool Tuesday evening... I'm about to go nuts when my other cat Thompson starts yowling too, from downstairs. Outside the wind is mellow and pushing a lovely Ocean calm into my second story bedroom. I'm trying to work on this new writing project, high on Vicadin, Fat Tire and now I've switched to my trusty Sierra Nevada. Intermittently I'm chewing chunks of Bret Easton Ellis's brilliant new novel Imperial Bedrooms into the mess within me and ringing his paranoic style for all the inspiration it's worth (no small amount). There is a gaping hole in my mouth where blood has clotted over but occasionally surprises me with a stringy, iron-tasting dribble down the back of my throat.

Downstairs A Place To Bury Strangers is jamming at max volume. Fuck my neighbors (nothing personal).

I tip my beer but not before thinking that something urgent is transpiring somewhere in the forest of neural pathways etched into the meat between my ears.

The sun is down, it's 8:05 PM and although the chemicals and cool air are causing my fingers to lag a bit my mind is racing. I've got to get this down, got to get this down...

Two A.M. Corridor is the story of a bartender and the people he surrounds himself in an attempt to make the easy buck, get the girl who is already been explained to him is off limits and somehow avoid the frenzy of supernatural chaos that may or may not be the power behind one of the world's biggest hotel chains. Good luck Ray, you're gonna need it.

dreeee-min

Dreams
Funny...

A couple weeks ago I inexplicably had this old 80's pop song in my head.

For weeks.

Dreamin' ("I'll be dreee-min, dree-min"). I knew the artist was someone that had been a beauty queen or actress. I remembered sitting in the Little Theatre at Palos South ~7th grade and hearing this on a radio in a hallway - the memory was in fact similar to a dream in its ethereal opaqueness. I couldn't remember who sang it, and at the times throughout the day when it would surface in my consciousness,, I would vehemently swear I was going to go home and use that handy little iTunes store to figure out who it was. I would always forget because, honestly, it's a nostalgic indulgence. I mean, admittedly, I did, when it entered my realm of awareness, like the song. Not in a "I Like this fucking song kind of way," but it had a kind of haunting melody, even for a throw away pop song. Anyway, enough of me coming to terms with saying in public that I like trite drivel and onward to the phenomenon.

More recently it popped into my head at work somehow and my friend Manny, pop-master, knew it. "Vanessa Williams is stuck in your head?" or something similar was his question. We laughed about it.

Now I wake up this morning (no no no, this afternoon! I don't get to say that all that often anymore) and I am, for like the 10th straight day or something, bowled over by my dreams. I mean, I have always hungered for dreams and other's dream-related stories, but I have not really had many dreams to remember in waking life IN YEARS. And yet, I'm sitting here today and I can tell you what I dreamt yesterday in clear, vivid detail. And now this afternoon I woke with another one. So I ask, has the song "Dreamin" and figuring out who sang it somehow unlocked my dreams for me? If so, I would like to state here and now so that Ms. Williams might read it if, her career now long since over, she is googling herself and comes across my meager blog. Ms. Williams, I would like a dream where Penguins are elected into office in the United States. I would also like one where I punch Anthony Keidis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the face. Thank You Ms. Williams.

Now, here is yesterdays dream to a "T".

10/02/07

I dreamt about leaving work to try and run down the street to the Albertsons (that Jewel to you Midwest folk) to buy Oreo cookies because in real day to day life they have become what I call work-crack (see below for definition) and I had failed to bring any. So instead of driving I hoof it and discover a little White Hen (that's a 7-11 type stand alone convenience store for you cali folk, a type that does not exist here as far as I've seen) and I duck in to buy oreos and wait in a line behind some bizarre, almost thuggish characters and when I finally get up to the front to pay the guy has short reddish-brown, greasy hair of medium length slicked back behind a backwards turned mesh-in-back ballcap and is smoking a cigarette. he rings me up and we somehow start talking about money or our mutual lack there of and then when I walk out onto the sidewalk and head back to work I find two, One hudnred dollar bills on the sidewalk, just sitting there, neatly placed. I look around and pick them up and start walking and then I hear the sound of an approaching skaeboarder behind me. I get this ominous impression like it is the skateboarders money that I have taken and I try to move faster because now there is this encroaching hostility over taking me, but as I move I move slow because my legs are stuck in this weird, cross-legged style sitting position, even though I'm standing, walking no less. Then the dream ends with me frantically looking over my shoulder at the encroaching, faceless skateboarder.

Hopefully this will mean I find $200 bucks in real life (Wink Wink Ms. Williams. Or, shit, maybe Ms. Williams controls dreams and, (mind racing to find a Ms. Williams counter-point) ahh, Paula Abdul governs reality? NOOOOOOO (throws his arms up in the arm) NOOOOO! NOOOOOO!

Glossary:

Work-crack: whatever food or substance you turn back to repeatedly during work days to comfort and propel you through. Some examples would be coffee, oreos, vodka, crack, whatever the individual in question prefers.

If anyone cares (and how could you after this long-winded nonsense. Geez, I should really take a tip from Dan Brown and make ever page a chapter, or is that every chapter a page?) I'll post today's dream later.
Currently listening:
20th Century Boy: The Ultimate Collection
By Marc Bolan
Release date: 20 August, 2002

atmos haunt

atmospheric hauntings and more talk of life without a toaster...
woke up today startled from a dream of an earthquake by what I thought was an earthquake. Just a thunderstorm. a 2 hr thunderstorm. I lOVED EVERY FUCKING MINUTE OF IT, except that we had put Tom (short for Thompson, as in HST), the outdoor cat we harbor at night, out just a little while b4 and I was terrified for him being trapped out in such a heavy storm. I couldn't get back to sleep so I sat up re-reading the INVISIBLES book 7. Smoked a little. Put on a pot of coffee (first of MANY) and had a wonderful experience. I literally trip when I read THE Invisibles. It changed my life back when the issues of this particular (the last) volume was monthly, and since then it has been one of the main sources of inspiration for EVERYTHING I do. I can't explain it, but it has this effect on my nervous system where its a time machine, a halucinogen, a road that mainlines you right into the supercontext. At one point I stopped reading, opened the back door that looks West toward the water and just stared at the cloud formations. Performed my Tarot pull for the day. 5 Cups: Disappointment, upside down. It was at this point that something strange happened. It was definitely fueled by the comic, because I still had so much effect from King Mob and Edith by the Ganges and Division X at the Wicker Man and blah blah blah but the image on the card expanded. It grew, and as we toggled our perception back and forth between the atmosphere of the planet in my vicinity and the image spilling from the small card out into the many levels of my brain I reached all kinds of new angles for reading and interpreting these things.*

At the same time I fell under the subtle impression that I was witnessing the exact same atmospheric conditions that I had the second morning in Dublin, '01 when I went with Grez and Tony. Like I was somehow standing in my doorway now in 1/07 and also on a street in Dublin looking at a storm that just may have passed from one when through what we think of as the limitations of time to another. Maybe I'm like pigpen from peanuts and instead of a dirt cloud following me through the air I breath this storm is following me through the ages of my life, weaving in and oout of tiem to rear its head and inspire me when I need it. Maybe its that same one from sooo long ago, sophmore year? when I laid awake at night with a teenage broken heart listening to it and Disintegration by The Cure for the first time. Maybe it will be there when I birth from this life into the next.

*Tarot is amazing because there really is a scientific reason WHY a divination system such as this works. based on the collective unconscious of humanity's archetypal pallete these things don't come true because you want to make them that way, their simply putting into language the future as it already unfolding via higher dimensional perceptions we do not understand how to use, interpret or acknowledge. this system puts those instincts into our language, a language based on symbols representing what we can all perceive with our Earth bound senses.

Anyway, I'm fucking rambling because I was off today and I've smoked quite a few times. Hence where 'disappointment' comes in, cuz the Magick of that first time at 9:30 in the morning was (I knew) never going to be re-created.
Currently reading:
The Invisible Kingdom (The Invisibles, Book 7)
By Grant Morrison
Release date: 01 December, 2002

Peachy

the long, winding journey of sleep - the darkening that embraces all in the end...
okay, I'm just writing this to get my brain flowing. I slept for a good number of hours for the first time in a long time last night - felt good. I must have been a real bastard in a previous existence to warrant my working retail during the holidays...

Finished the Sopranos this week - I don't know why there was such a backlash about the ending when it aired - I thought the finale was amazing. I'll probably write about it eventually, just to put down what my thoughts on it were - if for no other reason than to work it out for myself. Also, watched Martine Scorsese's The Departed last night, 2nd time I've seen it since seeing it in the theatre. The blurb on the front of the box is 'Scorsese's best film since Goodfellas' and frankly, I'd have to agree (although I haven't seen everything he's done since then. Gangs of New York comes to mind as one I definitely did not see, although me thinks I shall remedy that soon). Great use of music, as always, to compel and capture the different era's.

The nights have been colder lately, and it feels good, although now I have this stupid cough.

Ministry announced their final tour recently, with their 'final' show being in Chicago in May. If I could sell a couple scripts by then I'd fly home for that one in a heart beat, to see it end where it all began...

I miss industrial music. But alas, it would appear it finished its course some time ago, with all the current stuff I've heard (if there's something out there, someone let me know) being more concerned with perpetuating what the original bands sounded like. Everything good has evolved the form until it has become something else, which of course is the natural order of true evolution.

The big fish

I stepped out of the shower this afternoon and while doing some deep breathing exercises I usually try to step into my day with for the first time I think ever I felt something behind the mask of the ego scaffold I so adamantly stick to.

I felt a quiet. Not an introspective quiet but a vast ocean of calm underneath the clothes I dress myself in when I step out of my mind and onto the stage where I interact with all of these other marvelous souls. It felt raw and primal and... powerful.

I'm going back in, after it, and suddenly I understand what David Lynch called the 'big fish'.

The Smiths

I can't get them out of my head. I've never felt like this about a band before. Not that they're better or I like them more than other bands, but they're resonating with me in ways that are really kind of creepy. I'm not usually one to pay super attention to lyrics but Morrissey gets to me - he's able to capture in a few simple lines some of the most important, daunting ideas of what it is to live and love...

Fuck you november 12th 2009

Fuck You November 12th 2009. You batter me for 9 hours with corporate-bullshit stress that makes my soul leak through my eyes, then you take my friend from me. Fuck you - I'll drive a nail the size of a gallon of alcohol through your heart and leave you dead and behind me when I wake up tomorrow in a world with one less person I love in it.