Rock and Roll and RPGs

I feel like I’ve neglected this blog a bit. A few things started to take up more of my time, energy and attention and I wound up letting months and months slip by without an update. But I guess that’s ok; the main thing from my point of view is that I didn’t stop trying to channel creative energy. The vast majority of my efforts have been in the realm of music, so that’s what this post is about, mostly. That and a really harebrained idea I have for a game.

I can’t recall exactly when this happened, but sometime early in 2024 I switched from playing guitar to playing bass. I played a borrowed four string bass for a few months and then picked up a five string for myself. I like having that extra low range. I have really been enjoying it – it’s very different from guitar in terms of the approach and I’ve learned a lot as a result, and it has helped me hear new things in music, even in very familiar pieces. It helps that our drummer also has extensive experience with bass and has coached me some on how to change stylistically. You can really feel a difference in the music when the bass and drums, the kick especially, are locked in together. I am pretty sure that this is what makes a band sound “tight.”

The bass has a much larger scale than a guitar does, and as a result, it is physically more demanding to play. My fingers hurt for a while as I got used to the thicker strings. Also, when I finally picked up the guitar again after a couple of months, it felt almost childishly small to me. All of a sudden I was able to make four or five fret stretches pretty easily. And I’ve noticed during our less active periods that I have to stay in practice or I loose my chops much, much faster than I did for guitar – more endurance in the musculature is required, and if I don’t play for a few weeks, I wind up feeling like my arm or fingers are almost, like, paralyzed with exhaustion after playing something with a lot of fast downpicking.

About three months ago, we decided to record a few songs, essentially an EP. Our drummer has done music professionally since he was in his early twenties, and he has a pretty nice home studio so we did the actual recording there to save money that we are now using for post-production. We wrapped up the recording part itself a couple of weeks ago and it’s been sent to someone who really knows what they are doing for mixing and mastering and general post-production.

One of the things that I feel like I really grasped during this particular recording experience is the role of preproduction and how incredibly important it actually is. Typically I have always thought of preproduction as just rehearsing the songs into the ground and making sure that everyone knows where they need to be at all times, knows the pieces backwards and forwards. And that has actually been sufficient in the past, when all we were looking to do was capture what we do live. But it’s also the time to ensure that everyone is on the same page, and in a band like the one we are in now where we are doing some somewhat more complex arrangements than we could easily reproduce live, this really matters. The thing about working in the studio is that if there are differences of creative vision, they come right to the fore and can no longer be ignored during the recording process. That can be a real test of a band’s communication and interpersonal skills, since you often have multiple creatives with strong personalities and opinions who are involved in the disagreement. We did have some differences in our creative visions for some of the material this time around. Mostly with us it involved the keyboardist / singer wanting to add a LOT of instruments that are not normally part of our performance. He has a much different sense of dynamics than the other three of us, and we were sort of constantly having to restrain and reel him in. We worked through it, but there were some moments when I could tell it was stressful for various members of the band. It’s never fun to be told “Hey that idea you had? Yeah, we don’t like it,” you know? And for myself personally, I don't enjoy delivering this kind of news either, and would expect most people do not. In the future, I am going to do my best to make sure that this kind of thing gets hashed out during preproduction. I’m also going to make sure that during the recording process, if there are differences of opinion anyway, that the band has a “lead” we have agreed can make the final decision on something if we cannot otherwise reach consensus. A “ref” if you will. The drummer has also acted as a producer for a lot of other bands during his career, and he filled the same role for us. If he’s going to do that again, I’m going to make sure he has buy in from the entire band so that he can make the final decision on a dispute and once he does, we cease discussion and move on.

I don’t want to make it sound too dramatic, it really was not bad compared to some of the disputes I’ve been in with fellow band members. I will say though, that it takes a special kind of person to be a singer; they almost have to have a little ego. I used to have kind of a hate-on for singers and spent about 10 years playing in bands that were instrumental only as a result. It stemmed from several experiences I had at live shows I played where the band minus the singer humped in all the gear – our drummer at the time had a massive heavy metal kit with two bass drums and like 6 rack toms and probably as many cymbals and just a ton of hardware to rig it all up. This was also in the days where you had to have a decently powerful amp to play a live show, so those also weighed like eighty pounds – most house sound systems were much more primitive than they are now. So the band gets all this gear in, and set up, and we’re waiting for the singer. And he’s not there….and he’s not there…and it’s fifteen minutes to go live and he’s not there….and it’s ten minutes to go live and he’s not there….and it’s five minutes to go live and he shows up doped to the gills carrying a microphone. This happened more than once. Thankfully the guy we are working with these days is not like that at all.

Anyway, I think the recording should be ready within the next couple of months. It’s just a little thing, hardly even an EP, two songs at about five minutes, two that are around a minute and a half, and one that is about twenty seconds. The singer wanted to do thirty songs, and given that we ran into some of this stuff, I am really, really glad we didn’t try to do that! We got mixes on the first few short pieces back earlier this week, and I am hugely impressed with the guy doing that work. He’s really managed to get the best out of the recordings. Of course, I am of the (admittedly biased) opinion that he had really solid material to begin with, but still – given that these were just little throwaway things, I am really pleased with how they sound and am eager to hear what he does with the longer, more complex, more serious stuff. There is probably not much call for it, but I will post links when the stuff is ready. One tune in particular might be of interest to people familiar with this blog; the lyrics were written by the singer after he read a short story of mine posted here, and then we co-wrote the music. My original inspiration for the story was a sort of amalgam of real world stuff that has kind of haunted me for years and ideas from the Starling and Shrike world that Dave (aka Her Christmas Knight, who runs the Grand Commodore blog) created. It’s been really interesting to watch how one idea can spin out and serve as inspiration for multiple projects, even cross-genre. The same kind of thing happened a long while ago working with this particular singer where I wrote a short story and he wound up writing lyrics based on the story. That tune musically quoted Lovely Rita Meter Maid and Sympathy for the Devil (at the same time, no less!) and then went into a dirgelike metal thing. The overall effect was a little Helter Skelter, like the acid trips of the Summer of Love gone very, very bad indeed and devolved into the Tate-LaBianca murders. I’m really quite fond of it.

Aside from the main band, I’ve started fooling around with some ideas for a two-piece side project with the guitarist. Heavy, super bleak industrial stuff reminiscent of Streetcleaner-era Godflesh. It gives me an excuse to tune the 5th string on the bass even lower and allow all the nasty feedback I generate when I use distortion to bleed through ungated. That side project is in its infancy right now and it may discontinue before much happens with it, but we will see. At the very least it’s forcing me to learn a lot more about drum machines and MIDI programming than I have ever bothered with in the past.

SO: There are some really interesting parallels between playing RPGs and being in a band. The most obvious one is that you’re all trying to imagine and create something together, and it’s very easy to think of a band as a bunch of PCs. There are also both roles and rules. The role parallel is pretty easy to envision I think – drummer: maybe the fighter, bass player: cleric, guitar player: rogue, singer: magic user. Of course these could be interpreted differently, and there is overlap, and multi-classing, and you might wind up with like an electronic digeridoo sub-class, but I think most people would agree that these parallels make sense. Like a party of PCs, a band must often cooperate if they are to achieve the best result; when that result is achieved, whether it is in an RPG or a band, there is a sense not just of getting to a flow state, but of arriving at a group flow state, which is just an amazing feeling, exponentially better for every additional person who gets there together. There’s also the potential for PvP, particularly if the singer shows up late and so fucked-up they can’t function. I’ll admit I’m holding on to a bit of resentment there.

There are also rules. Even in the most avant-garde bands, and those most dedicated to improvisation, there is usually some structure. One project I was a part of (which was actually a very very long running thing) there was one rule, which was: if you know how to play it, you’re not allowed to touch it. A lot of people would call what that project did noise rather than music, but I have a very loose definition of music – “sounds arranged for the purpose of listening to.” And by that definition what we were doing was certainly music, as well as just a lot of fun. There were some absolutely beautiful, happy accidents during improv sessions with that group where things came together even though no one knew how to play whatever instrument they were holding, if it even was an instrument – sessions with that band used to begin with someone emptying a box full of toys that made weird noises into a central area in the middle of the room. This pile consisted of everything from a kid’s laser gun that made zap sounds to an old 8 track machine to an out of tune harpsicord, to a child’s xylophone. Once we used the spring from a garage door to make absolutely heinous crashing sounds. Probably we are lucky it didn’t snap and take someone’s head off as it unwound.

But in what most folks think of as music, there are more and more rules - typically you need to play in the same key for example, and stay in time, and you usually don’t want the bass to be louder than the vocals. And there are quite obvious skill checks when it comes to playing the music, but not so obvious ones as well: I’ve watched more than one person fail a wisdom check by putting a beer on top of their amplifier which then vibrated until it tipped over and spilled the contents into their gear. To continue the D&D metaphor, one could think of different bands as different parties. And I guess the city or area in which a band plays is the campaign world, whether that’s the local suburban VFW, clubs in the city, or, at the superstardom level, the world.

Because of all these parallels between being in a band and playing RPG’s I have had this recurring idea to write an RPG where the characters are musicians and their enemy is possibly the crowd itself. I was initially thinking the enemy would be other bands, but I like the idea of the crowd being the foe. Somewhat related, buried in the root for the word “monster” is “monstrare” – which among other things, means “to show.” I kind of like that.

Each kind of musician (drummer, guitar player, etc) would have an RPG analog level and techniques they could learn as they leveled up, almost like spells or feats. The venue (the “dungeon” analog) can make a massive difference, like maybe one place is a total shithole that pays in pitchers. I played a venue (which shall remain nameless) like this once, and wound up ordering a pitcher of gin, which seemed like a very good idea at the time, but in hindsight (speaking of failed wisdom checks) was unwise. I did not have a great performance that particular night (though I managed not to fall off the stage either, which was actually kind of difficult given that it was split by a lane leading to the bathroom down the middle). But another venue might give you 10% of the door or something, which could be used like treasure.  And gear would be like, well, gear – swords and armor and stuff. I guess the lawyers might come after me if I use brand names like Fender and Gibson but maybe a Gibson 335 gives you a +2 skill check when playing rockabilly or using the chicken picking technique, where something like a BC Rich Warlock or Mockingbird gives you that kind of bonus if you’re playing death metal, or shredding – something along those lines, anyway! I’ll do my best to work out something that makes sense.

If this thing stops living entirely in my head and I start to actually put down anything solid, I’ll throw it up here. And if anyone knows of anything out there already that is like this, I’d love to hear about it – I’m aware of something out there called Deathbulge that looks kind of amusing and similar enough that I may abandon this entire idea completely, but I don’t know very much about it - if anyone has played it, I would love to hear what it was like!

In September of 2015, Motorhead kicked my ass.  I really wish I'd seen them earlier.

Death of a Cat and Dragons as Hoarders

I spent most of the day yesterday helping my mom clean the basement out.  My mom is something of a hoarder.  Not an extreme case by any means, we aren't talking about foot-wide pathways through stacked items or anything, but the basement has accumulated a lot of stuff over the years, as basements do, and she's had a hard time getting rid of a lot of it because much of it is meaningful to her in some way - my grandmother's four poster beds, or my great grandmother's nightstand.  And of course, old things from when my sister and I were little kids.  Stuff like that.

The hoarding thing never made sense to me until about two years ago when one of our cats died very, very suddenly.  She was a sweet little orange cat we got from a shelter and named Biscotti.  She had come to the shelter weighing only three pounds even though she was about two years old, they thought, and they had to put weight on her before they could spay her.  For a cat, she was clumsy, but she made up for it with determination.  We got two from the shelter and they were a study in contrasts - Cappuccino, a big, mostly white patch tabby, is so graceful you would almost swear that he levitated rather than jumped.  When Biscotti made the same jump, she wouldn't quite get there, she'd get her forepaws on the thing she had jumped to and then scrabble up with her rear legs.  Very un-catlike in some ways.

One of her eyes watered and she would constantly get crusties there, which I would wipe off with a wet ball of cotton on a daily basis. Cappuccino, on the other hand, never got crusties.  He is big, even for a male, and muscular, and fast, and powerful.  I wonder if he might not have a bit of Maine Coon in him, he's such a big beautiful bastard.  She was little, even for a female, with stubby legs that reminded me a little of munchkin cats, and she got fat quickly.  When we got her she was five or six pounds, and she got up to 11 before we put her on a diet.  She would eat ANYTHING.  She was a stray from what we were told, not feral, much too easy to handle for that, but a stray of some kind, and I think, based on her weight when the shelter got her, she must have been starving.

In spite of all this, she was kind of in charge, between the two cats.  When she wanted a piece of territory, she did this thing where she would come right up to whoever was in it and sit down right next to them with absolutely no regard for personal space.  She managed to conquer most of the household that way, except for a few places she begrudgingly shared with Cappuccino.  I say begrudgingly, but really, it wasn't - they cuddled together, and she would hold him down and groom him, like he was a big, stupid kitten.

She groomed me, too.  She would come to my bed when I was lying down and get up near my head and lick my hair and head.  Or sometimes when she was at the top of the cat tree, if I walked up to her and leaned my head against the platform she was on, she'd groom me.  Her breath was a little fishy, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.  It sent little shivers racing down my spine, like getting a massage sometimes does.  She was affectionate to me, like I was a big, stupid kitten too.  And she luxuriated in being pet and scratched as only cats can.  One of the things I feel like she taught me is that love IS touch, in some sense.  When she died it hit me like a truck, way harder than when any of my grandparents died, almost as hard as loosing some of my friends had, and I wondered why that was.  I think the sense of touch is connected to love the way the sense of smell is connected to memory - there's probably some amazing brain chemistry there somewhere.  I don't know that much about the brain, but it seems to me that it was in large part because we touched each other so often and so unselfconsciously that it hurt so much to lose her.

Anyway, she was about five when she died, we think.  She used to wake me up in the morning at the crack of dawn to be fed, as is the way of cats.  And on this particular morning, which was Independence Day, 2021, she woke me up, and I fed them both, and then went to go write, because early morning is often when I write these days, and they were fine.  About a half an hour later I heard one of those low moans cats sometimes make when they are really upset come from the other room, and I thought there must be some animal or something outside, because the two cats we had never fought, but it sounded serious, so I went to go check it out.

She was lying on the floor with her arms out like she was trying to scratch, and Cappuccino was sniffing at her.  Her hind legs were kind of bunched up like she was going to jump or something, but her belly and forelegs were flat on the floor and it looked like all her muscles were tensed.  An odd position, one I had never seen a cat in before.  I knew something was wrong, but not what.  She made this sound like she was trying to vomit the biggest vomit ever, maybe, this heart-wrenching, guttural, mucus-filled exhalation - I had a girlfriend describe something similar issuing from me one time when I apparently OD'ed and stopped breathing for a few minutes.  I guess I made a similar sound when I started breathing again.  She said she had never been more grateful for such a disgusting sound.  But maybe in Biscotti's case it was the death rattle?  I'm not sure, but that was that.  Her body totally relaxed after she made that noise, and she died.  I don't think thirty seconds had passed from the time I first heard the moan.

I rushed her to the emergency vet, but I knew when I was putting her in the carrier that she was gone.  She was so limp in my hands, her body just kind of folded and slid into the carrier.  I remember being very thankful it was Independence Day at 5 AM because there was literally no one on the road and I tore ass over to the vet, going like 80 in a 35 zone most of the time.  But it was too late, and I knew it was too late.  I just couldn't let go without trying though.

Speaking of letting go, this is where the story comes back to hoarding.  After she died, I remembered I had brushed her the day before, and I went to the garbage and it was only like paper and stuff, and her fur.  And I took a ball of her fur out, and put it in a little plastic bag.  It was like I just couldn't let this thing go, even though it was trash.  It was her somehow - the two had become connected in my mind and if I had not been able to retrieve the fur before the bag went down the chute or got carried off by the trash guys, I would have been very upset, and felt like I threw her out somehow.  She had become her fur in my mind, with all the emotional weight of the living being.

And that was the moment I understood hoarding.

So.  My mom isn't that bad of a hoarder, but she's had forty years of living in the same place and the death of both her parents, her great aunt, both of my dad's parents, etc, and stuff just builds up.  There's no actual filth thank god, but there's lots of stuff in the basement.

My dad has tried to help her with this stuff, but he doesn't understand and is not sympathetic to the fact that she has formed emotional attachments to it, so when he tries to help her with it, it deteriorates into arguments in the best tradition of people who have been married for fifty years.  Somehow though, when I suggest she let something go, maybe it's the way I do it, she can let it go. Maybe it's because I let her go through it.  Maybe it's because when she sees something that makes her sentimental, I say ok, mom, take a picture of it if you want to remember it, and then let's let it go.  We made really good headway today, I took out like three big bags of trash, two bags to drop off to goodwill, and I took the last little bit of crap I had over there, left when I went to school in the nineties.  Even my dad was happy with the sheer volume of stuff that went out.  But of course, there really were some treasures mixed in with the junk.  One thing was a picture of my Great Uncle Bud from WW1.  It lists him as US of A Company B 339th Machine Gun Battalion (I think - if anyone else can make out the writing and thinks it's something else, let me know).  I think these things were filled out by the family, but I'm not sure.

My Great Uncle Bud was a quiet man from rural Iowa.  And also apparently a motherfucking machine gunner in World War One.  I remember seeing his uniform many years ago over at my Great Aunt's, and being struck by how small it was.  People were smaller then.  The diet has changed and I think the additional protein makes people bigger.  In Japan, you can see this generationally as more meat has been added to the diet - my wife's brothers are both like over six feet tall.  Her dad is about my size, maybe a little smaller.  I never met her grandpa, but I'm told he was about the same size as her grandma, who, granted, was old and hunched as hell, but stood perhaps a little over four feet tall.

A motherfucking machine gunner.  Jesus.

The experience made me think about the word "hoard" and the nature of a hoard, and I wondered if anyone has done dragons as hoarders in the sense that they are emotionally attached to the items in their hoard.  The reason they know you stole a single gold piece is because that was a gold piece their grandfather dragon was given by his mate, Arenisamalirestasiya the Cobalt, as a weregild for killing one of their hatchlings.  And that other gold piece came from the treasury of the Lord Potentate of Rilenas, the Grey Capital, when the dragon took vengeance upon him for denial of the monthly tribute of cattle.  He melted and burned the entire treasury excepting that one piece.  And on and on and on, all the items have a story or provenance and in some way they ARE that experience or that being for the hoarder, and loosing the item is like loosing that experience or that being.

Delicacies of the Court of Empress Sonota

Being A Visual Record Of The Things The Heroes Were Served Having Slain The Necromancer Tratorios And Delivered The Empire From The Clutches Of The Undead

Almond Biscotti

Checkerboard Green Tea Shortbread

Flourless Chocolate Cupcakes

White Chocolate Rose Cupcakes (The Yellow Rose Being a Favorite of Princess Ophelia)

Salted Chocolate Drizzle Biscuits

Almond Chocolate Glaze Cake

Gâteau Breton (Apricot Filled Pastry Cake)

Tarte Tatin - (Carmel Apple Cake)

Bergamot Black Tea Chiffon Cake

Pear Frangipane

Tarte au Citron

Flourless Chocolate Torta

Strawberry Shortcake with Whipped Cream Frosting

Chocolate Mousse Cake

Olive Oil Cake

Shortbread of Millionaires

Basque Burnt Cheesecake

Apple Rosette Frangipane Tarte

The Den of Lions

I. Mene: I have numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end.


You,

Who perpetuated black science upon the human heart, the omphalos luminous

Who strides in the zephyrs that caress tresses and the gale that lashes ash trees

Who aroused me and aroused in me the desire for the numinous

Who hears prayers and petitions of others but only when delivered from their knees

Who resides in electromagnetic storms and ley lines over the kingdom of death  

Who swallows every single inhaled and every exhaled breath

Who is avalanche master, total devourer, dead reckoner, great annihilator

Who murdered three year olds with shotguns in Chicago

Who is the lord of all, killer on the dim path, lightfucker, vivid dictator

Who is the hole in everything and the reason nothing is whole



I cut the head from the granite figure of the Christ

To the chime of steel striking stone. Each blow brought sparks and light.

Then I climbed to the roof of the monastery

And pissed upon your virgin Mary.



I, Rebel angel

Maw of the wolf

Leafless tree

Black branch

Claw of hell



I who dwelt amongst dangerous angels

Who yearned for years and desired annihilation at your hands

Who begged you to strike me. I made plans

And goaded you with headless son and piss soaked bride

Who incanted atrocities that smelled of purple Columbine

Who lusted for your touch, even should it destroy

Who heard others address you familiarly

and knew the bitter hemlock taste of envy



What must I do, lord? I hear your voice sometimes and it says,

“Kill her while she sleeps. Take her breath in your hands and kill her.

Squeeze the last wisps of air from her with your fists. This is my touch.

The icy grey waters are my touch, submerge thyself.

The children are dead at Uvalde, this is my touch.

The bombs of the Liberator your grandfather flew during the first daylight raid on Berlin fell on babies, this is my touch.

The hole at the center of everything, the hole at your center, this is my touch."



I cut

Down

your son

Down

and looked

Down

his granite eyes stared back from the ground

in the parking lot in front of St. Cletus

I murdered again the Risen Jesus.

If this were but a human head I might feel

His soul flee to the great wheel

And see his eyes go cold like bloom on grapes,

Becoming monstrous, vapid shapes.

We mocked the ones who took your vows.

You were silent then. You are silent now.



We who became willing slaves to the annihilation of I

Sought your caress in the ecstasy of oblivion

The syringe is a cross and it is a nail

and it is cock and balls and it is Spear of Longinus

We who hoped in driving spike through arm and spear through side

We might be as loved as he who died



Lo, You touched my mother instead of me and gave her stigmata

Lo, I walked amongst rebel angels gathering army and armada

Lo, The dark rivulets of blood welled from the inside of her arms rather than her hands

Lo, I am a witness to sympathetic wounds inflicted by the lamb

Lo, A miracle made from blood and love's spiteful power

Lo, The lions did not devour me though I wished to be devoured.



Not even when I pissed on your bride, your virgin whore, did you answer

The evrso many prayers or strike me down so I shall strike you down so you strike me down

I want your lions to tear me apart. I want the flame to burn me.

Do you not understand this? Have you forgotten me?

 

I am Daniel,

which is you are my judge,  

You made me for prescience, to be the knower of dreams

Exile, veteran of the rebellion

Who knows the taste of dead friends and lovers:

Steven who we watched while he had a heart attack

and lingered in hospice braindead while his wife held hope

so tenderly, like tiny dandelions gifted to her by her daughters

Plum who is irrevocably lost and whose light I no longer

see or feel when I reach out in the Great Dark

Chris who I loved and fought with and who fled and 

Who I saw again only once he had been made ash

And Chris who lay for days in overdose, withered thin,

Shrinking as his muscle rotted beneath his skin.

In his casket he looked so old and so small.

Thus was I made to know the writing on the wall.





II. Tekel: You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.


And I am lost in the woods, all is a Dionysian blur

And the frenzied maenads come upon me

And they are named: One is Alexandra and One is Galen

And they desire me and their desire saves me from monstrous murder

And they will tear me apart as they would a lost fawn and I will let them

And they poured sticky liquor on their breasts and bade me suck, 

And they said take, this is my Body, take, this is my Blood

And the hips jerk and the Body shudders in pleasure of its own accord, the Body automatic

And no input is needed from the brain at a certain stage once the I is annihilated

And Galen’s irish irises the blue grey of storm clouds reflected in the frigid river

And Alexandra’s greek eyes green like the moss of old ponds and money

And cascade of red curls, and smooth black tresses, and musk of unshaven females and their desire

And marine reek of semen and sugar of liquor

And pale and unmarked flesh, and tanned and supple flesh, and twilit morning

And they exclaim you are so rough but not too rough

And my hands against the core of them, smooth pudenda snowcaps of fat low on the Body

And they writhe in my grip and I writhe in theirs and we will leave a mark

And expressions of total excitement and affirmations chanted and eyes widened in pleasure

And they are like cats in how they luxuriate in my touch and arch their backs

And the greek girl wraps her arms about me and pushes my Body into her Body from behind

And touch and tongue and her arms about my stomach

And nipples graze my back and fingers caressing my throat

And hands on her thighs and ass she holds my wrists as she strokes my face 

And as she grabs my hair and as she kisses me and my love

And they tangle and make love to each other and to me

And the fuck goes on and on forever, world without end, until the annihilation of I

And we speak to each other in the secret language with no words

And there are only moans and the open notes of pure pleasure

And there is no way to say jealousy or hatred or property

And sursum corda, quod amantes amentes

And afterwards the greek girl strokes my arms, scarred and bitten by steel kisses

And my perfect circular scars as if I have spilled drops of hot fat or acid on them

And I show these to the corner boys and they are my pass to the underworld

And the irish girl asks me if I miss it and miss her

And I recall the annihilation of I that was delivered mainline to me through my blood

And I recall my love, my Plum, and her desire for annihilation

And how we have been in each other’s veins and annihilated I

And how we fucked each other while we lay together bleeding and lost

And she has been in my veins and I in hers

And that is a level of intimacy not soon forgotten or put aside

And yet I still exist in the scant moments between sex and dope and wrath

And in her betrayal she cannot meet my gaze and I see her death wish and how she wants to be touched

And it is god’s touch she provokes not mine and we are alike as we provoke the touch of god

And a weapon comes to me through bloodsoaked backstreets

And she will know the hand of the lord is upon her and I am but his proxy and praxis

And I will behead her and hold her head aloft by the hair and make her face me

And watch her eyes cloud over and go frigid

And watch as her light leaves and her fingers go rigid

And I want to be consumed entire and yes I do miss her, I am a coward,

And it matters not whether by poetry or love or wrath or heroin or god I am devoured





III. Upharsin: Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persian


I encounter Mrs. South at the outer doors

In the insectoid orange of sodium lights

She has lost her keys this night



And she begins to weep and I throw my arms around her

when her grandfather died she wailed in the shower

and I entered the water clothed and held her as she cowered



She only weeps when something is beyond repair

She rocks in agony as we enter the lion’s lair

And she says she has been to the doctor and there



will never be children, no hope for her ovaries, the bulging stomach

pregnant only with tumors that stud her uterus

and we are the abomination of desolation



I see in the ash of prescience the grey days that stray away from us

And the years become the intolerable product of aimlessness

And cats who are but pale replacements



No,

        No weeping and screaming thing at 2AM

No,

        No human heart upon which to perpetuate black science

No,

        No life everlasting           No      vessel of hope to be lost

No,

        No being to love into being

        No being to love into loving

No no never never 

No no never never no no no no

No,

        No sin of fatherhood to put aside

Now,

        There is nowhere left for god to hide.



Maneless lion I,

Withered vine.

Burnt and leafless tree,

Seeker for the sign,

Black branch stripped of bark,

Repeater of the fall,

The kingdom of the lamb is dark.

I write upon heaven’s wall

In the invisible ink of our childless marriage -

(a level of intimacy not soon forgotten or put aside)

In tears torn from my wife’s broken visage:

Ego te absolve - τετέλεσται.

This post is not about gaming…

…so please feel free to skip it if that’s what you are here for. No harm, no foul!  Also, there is a homophobic slur used in this piece; it is an artifact of the time period, in my opinion, and I want to be clear that I do not endorse homophobia or hatred.

OK, with that out of the way:

For the last week or so I’ve been in a really bad headspace. I had a birthday in early December. To date myself, I am closing in rapidly on 50. When you get to this age, a couple of years seems like a couple of months, so even though I’m not quite there yet, I feel like I may as well be. I have actually forgotten my exact age a few times so it makes things easier as well to just remember 50. I have been feeling ancient and irrelevant.

The day I turned twenty five, I woke up incredibly hungover to the phone ringing. An old girlfriend was calling to tell me that my best friend had committed suicide. It had actually happened a few days earlier and she had not been able to get through; at that time, fast internet was expensive, and I had a single land line which shared duties both as a home phone and as an internet connection. I had left the modem on for the last week, not expecting any calls, probably downloading some files that at the time were considered huge. I had only turned off the connection because I thought my mom and dad might worry if they couldn’t get in touch with me on my birthday.

That day was a total clusterfuck from beginning to end, but that was the worst of it right there. And I want to / need to talk about it. About him. About them.

I think we were fourteen maybe when we first met. We played music together. He sang and played bass. I played guitar. Music is the True Language of the Ineffable, and through it we came to understand things about each other that could never be said, could never even be articulated. He didn’t start off this way but as he aged he began to possess an indefinable quality that people call “it.” The thing a young Marlon Brando had. The thing young Elvis and Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop and Kurt Cobain and Mick Jagger all had, like a natural 18 CHA. He wasn’t a great speechmaker or anything like that. But by the time he was seventeen he had come into his own entirely and on stage he was in his full glory, a young god. In one of the Discworld books, Nanny Ogg’s cat Greebo is transformed into a human. When I read that bit it immediately made me think of my friend. The way the eyes and the smile are described is just dead on.

Here's a passage from the discworld wiki:

Despite the scars and the bad eye, the human Greebo's other eye glitters like the sins of angels, and his lazy smile is the downfall of saints. Female saints, anyway. He appears as a dastardly buccaneer ready to unbuckle any amount of swash; a six-foot, well-muscled, grinning bully who radiates a greasy aura of raw sexual energy that can be felt several rooms away. Despite everything they see, women are still attracted to him.

I’m a straight male and even I picked up on that “greasy aura of raw sexual energy."  Women threw themselves at this guy.

Jesus, I just looked up pictures of Greebo as a human and the general artistic consensus even LOOKS like him a little:

He even had a vest like that.

Had things gone differently, I think it’s quite possible he would have become a household name like the others mentioned above.

At one point we traveled to Indiana to play a show, and we were in some small town, and they didn’t like us, and he made some ill-considered remarks that implied the best things going there were incestuous sexual relationships. The mood got ugly. When we were breaking down and packing up, he went outside to smoke or something, I’m not sure what, and suddenly I realized he was gone and I got a Bad Feeling and grabbed our drummer and went to go find him.

He was in the back of the parking lot surrounded by like ten good old boys – I say ten, but the actual number was probably somewhere between eight and twelve. They were about to kick the ever-living fuck out of him. As I came up on this Situation, this is what I heard him say to this group of men:

“You guys are a bunch of cumswilling fatherfucking faggots and the only reason you came tonight is because your little sisters wouldn’t let you touch them.”

In hindsight, there is a lot wrong with this statement, but this was the 1990’s and challenging another young man’s sexuality if you were not friendly with him was the one of the main du jour ways to show him your displeasure.

It was also a really good way to get into a fight.  It probably still is, but I haven't used those terms or gotten into a fight in such a long time I'm not really sure.

His utter lack of fear is one of the things I will never, ever forget as long as I am of sound mind. He was not a fighter, in spite of oozing danger. The drummer and I were the band badasses. I had been working in construction labor for a couple of years. I had done a decent amount of training in boxing and martial arts and had been on the wrestling team, though I didn’t like my teammates and quit after the first year. And when I wasn’t doing those things I was hauling musical gear around. I was in shape. But I also had enough rough and tumble experience to know that ten vs. one or even two or three only has one result in the real world. I am certain that without any intervention, these guys would have at the very least put him in the fucking hospital. And that’s assuming that none of those guys were packing and willing to bring a gun into the mix. Even without that I think it is quite possible that they might have killed him. I had visions of him being chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged through the streets.

But I did intervene, and I managed to talk these guys down, apologizing profusely while our drummer pulled him away and I explained he didn’t mean any of it, it was all just part of the stage show (absolute bullshit, he meant every word, but it worked). However, the fact that he was ready to fight, that he wouldn’t back down, that he had said this thing and was not only sticking by it, he was doubling down on it in spite of the circumstances: I respected that so much. I’m not justifying his behavior or what he said, please understand – it was a dumb fucking thing to say, and it was ungracious and ugly to come into this little town and insult them, never mind that they didn’t care for our music. And by today’s standards it’s hateful as well, which I do not endorse in any way. But having said it, he was NOT backing down, and that was beautiful to me. He had no fear whatsoever. Instead, I backed down for him, like some kind of fucked-up Subotai to his Conan.

I think what I am trying to say here is that I loved him. Yes, in a platonic way, as a friend, but in hindsight there was a romantic component to it as well that is incredibly rare in relationships between straight men. Not a sexual component, no, but a romantic one. We instinctively understood how the other was feeling.  We were absolutely united by the pursuit of genius and the desire to experience the sublime through excess. We shared everything from books and music to girls. And we also shared an addiction to opiates.

About a week, maybe two after I got that phone call, I gathered everything I had ever written to that point, every scrap of paper, every disk, every journal, I even got copies back from people who I had given them too, and I took it all out into the backyard and burned it. I was in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa at the time. I dropped out the next semester and never finished. I didn’t write anything creatively again until 2021 – a space of a little more than twenty years.

Before I left for school, lives had begun to become undone by addiction. For whatever reason, at the time, I could see what was coming down the pipe at us and that it was Not Fucking Good. Maybe I made a WIS save they failed, I don’t know. But I began to try to fight my way through to some kind of sobriety, or at least non dependence. When I did that, the girlfriend I mentioned above started dating my friend instead of me. For reference, this was the first girl I ever actually fell head-over-heels in real-deal Capital-L Love with. She was ferociously intelligent, and wild, and physically beautiful, a punk rock princess with dazzling, vibrant purple hair. And her eyes, oh my god. She had the slightest touch of heterochromia, and they were this deep, glazed blue-green with tiny golden brown sunbursts around her pupils. And in spite of being drop-dead gorgeous, she was NICE to me. This was very, very unusual for me, to have such a pretty girl be nice to me and that I felt at ease around. I had managed to punch way, way above my weight class, something that has happened to me consistently with women; I don’t know why that should be but some things you just shut up and be grateful for.

Anyway, when I decided to bow out, just like that situation with the ten good old boys, instead of backing down, my friend, seeing the same thing I was I have no doubt, doubled down. He accelerated into addiction, and he took my former girlfriend with him. And unlike some of the other girls we'd both seen, I cared about this one, so as much as I loved my friend, I also hated him for that, hated them both a little I think. But it also made sense in its own weird fucking way. They were both gorgeous, and fey, and kind of otherworldly to me. That didn't stop it from hurting me, though.

I'm off-track here. The point is that I managed to step away. They did not, and eventually wound up on the run from police for strongarm robbery and when they were arrested I was actually glad because I knew it meant they would have to kick, and maybe things would go back to How They Used to Be. I was pretty naïve.

My friend did three years in prison, and it changed him, but not in the way you might expect. He didn’t come out of it a hardass or a gangbanger, or anything like that. He came out with a timidity that had never ever been in him before. The first week or so he was out, we were crossing a semi-busy street, going to a record store I think. There was plenty of time to cross, but he saw a car coming and gasped and grabbed my hand, and pulled me back up on the sidewalk. It took probably 30 seconds for the car to reach us, and we would have been able to cross in seven. He looked kind of sheepish afterwards, but it actually really touched me that he had pulled me back like that. He had become totally acclimated to the pace of prison, which is incredibly slow. I have never been to prison, but I have spent a few nights in county lockups, and there is an awful timelessness about it, especially if you are in withdrawal. He never really got used to the speed with which things moved outside of prison ever again, I don’t think.

While he was doing time, I finally cleaned up some (not really truly all the way, but enough to not have to devote myself mind body heart spirit wallet and everything else to the fucking needle) and went back to school.

At some point after he had been out for a while, he started drinking very, very heavily. I think maybe he was trying to recapture that old swagger that he had lost and when he was drunk he felt invincible. This was never anything he told me. He wound up with a DUI. After the first one, the cops in his neighborhood started looking for him and pulled him over every time they saw his car, and he, like an idiot, refused to stop driving, and so the charges for both DUIs and Driving Without a License just piled up and it got so he was looking at additional prison time. And when I saw him or talked to him I did my best not to be furious with him because I could see the despair in his eyes.  It was 1999, and still JUST possible to kind of start fresh if you moved far enough away geographically. I moved to Iowa City for school. He ran off to San Diego without saying goodbye to anyone to escape doing more prison time, and I never spoke to him or saw him again.

A few months later I got that call on my birthday. His parents were very religious and insisted it had been just a mistake, that he screwed up and took too much, but I knew that it had been On Purpose, and I knew why: it was because he could never go back, never recapture the intensity. I wish so, so much I could have pulled him back from that street the way he did for me.

I feel responsible for his death. That’s probably dumb. But you see, I was the one who introduced him to the thing that wound up killing him. I knew a guy in the city who was selling Mexican tar. My friend was a type one diabetic with easy access to needles and no phobia of them, which meant we started off right away by mainlining the drug, rather than something slightly tamer (if such a thing can be said to exist with regards to heroin). Rationally, I know that it would have wound up the same way, no matter what I did. He was actively seeking this thing out, consumed with dreams of being like Mick Jagger or Uncle Al Jourgensen or something, just like me except I was maybe thinking more like I’d be Billy Boroughs. Idiotic in hindsight, but we were only seventeen, an age when most young men are idiotic. And there were so, so many vectors it could have come from, if it had not been me, it would have been someone else. But I can’t seem to internalize that it’s not my fault, and instead what I have is a hollow, painful place that opens in my chest like a black hole in the pre-dawn darkness when I am by myself, before my wife wakes up.

I want to talk a little about my wife as well. She grew up in Japan and never had to deal with any of this stupid shit before she came here. She is a Good Person untainted by this kind of corruption. I am incredibly lucky to have her, and have once again punched way, way above my weight class. I feel quite certain that without knowing and staying close to her, I would be dead or in prison myself. When we started dating, I never told her about this shit because I knew that as a rational, reasonable human being, she would look the situation over and decide she wanted no part of it. There was one night she came back to the US from Japan and crashed out in my bed all jet lagged and I and a bunch of my friends stayed up all night shooting dope, smoking crack, and even doing the occasional speedball, and she never knew.

I finally had to come clean with her one day when we walked in to my place coming back from dinner or something and found the friend I am talking about and my roommate at the time (a guy I have stayed close to, basically the only other "survivor" as it were) literally on the floor with the needles still in their fucking arms. She thought they were both dead and they looked like they might be. Having been through OD situations a few times, I checked and could see they were breathing, but for her sake I woke them up – dragging them one by one to the bathroom, running the tub cold, and splashing it all over them – they were too heavy for me to actually get them into the tub without hurting them. They were pissed at me for having done this. I did not care. Even though, or perhaps because she is a good person, my wife has something in her like steel.  Or maybe because she has something in her like steel she is a good person.  Either way, I can count the number of times I have seen her cry since 1998 on one hand: when her grandpa died, when her grandma died, when our pet fish died, when our cat Biscotti died, and when we walked in on those two assholes passed out. Because they are so infrequent, when the tears do come, they are amazingly effective. Should it be within my power, there is nothing I would not do to halt them.

I try to keep her front and center in my thoughts, but sometimes I forget how lucky I am. I think entitlement is probably the natural state of human beings unless we very consciously remind ourselves of just how much more fucked-up things could be. Or at least that’s how it seems to be for me. The thing I need to remember, to keep ever first and foremost in my mind, is that by any measurement, my life is really, really good. In spite of a rocky start to the marriage (neither of us were really ready to live together or be married, but her visa expired and we were even less ready to never see each other again), we were both willing to put in the work and it evened out.  I have been moderately successful financially, and our needs are simple and we do not lack. My parents are both still alive, and I have a remarkably good relationship with them these days. I have a generally very good relationship with my wife. I do not have children or many close friends left, and this last is I think the biggest thing that brings me down sometimes. I miss very much the easy authenticity I had with my friends, especially those two, and the lack of any need to explain things to each other, especially difficult-to-explain things. They knew and understood. I think I probably have a touch of seasonal depression anyway, but it’s particularly bad at this time of year because I cannot help but think back to that phone call and it sets up a spiral that can be difficult to get out of.

The other day I was in the Loop for work. Right by the river. It was one of those bleak, cold Chicago days where everything is the same grey color, the buildings, the asphalt, the oppressive sky that feels like its clouds are no more than ten feet over your head. The wind was bitter enough to bring tears to my eyes and then freeze them to my cheeks. I went up to the railing at the river and I looked down into it.

And I had this sudden and eidetic memory of a summer night he drove us over to K town to cop and afterwards we were sitting in the car parked and my girlfriend straddled me, facing me in the passenger seat and all of us were turned on in every way possible, she was careful and gentle, she was almost never so gentle and she found a vein on me when I couldn’t and I remember just before she pushed the plunger down she bumped her forehead against mine, on purpose, and a lock of her hair, beautiful, deep, and violet, brushed against my cheek and tickled it, and her smile was full of promise and she smelled so good, like clean rain, and she looked me full in the eyes and she kissed me deeply and the faint flush at her throat, and my friend was laughing at us, with us, in the seat next to me, a joyful, clear, contagious laugh like bells, and the plumes of blood, and the overwhelming, unbearable pleasure of all of it. The intensity of it. And I know that I can never, ever go back, those times are done and that intensity is gone forever, and that if I were to try to get it back it would kill me and before that it would destroy me and those I love, and in spite of that I miss it in a way that I feel I cannot begin to make other people understand no matter how hard I try.

The river was grey-green like a dead thing, sluggish and turgid, swollen with flat chunks of ice. It looked so cold and dark and suddenly I had this almost unstoppable urge to just… jump in. How long would it take? Looking down at the frigid, grey water, I don’t think it would take that long. I don’t think it would even hurt that much. Not the way going on hurts, anyway.

And then I thought about my wife, and I did my best to snap out of it. She needs me. She depends on me. But.

They haunt me. I think this is maybe what ghosts actually are. In my mind and soul, they are unquiet spirits that come back over and over again in the dark mornings to stir that hollow place and make my face and throat feel hot and tight and like my heart is a bird trapped in my ribcage and the blood is pulsing behind my eyes, a mild headache. Sometimes they don’t or won’t wait until I am alone and I come close to breaking down in public. I’ll catch a little whiff of vinegar, or I’ll just picture the plume of blood comingling with the junk in the barrel of the needle and the ghosts visit and I start to salivate and my fingers shake and I want to weep. Sometimes it’s so close to the surface that someone will notice something and ask me:

Are you ok?

This is not typically a question people ask me and sometimes it catches me off guard and I’ll find I’m rubbing my teeth together hard enough that other people can actually hear it and my shoulders have bunched up to my ears and my forehead is creased and I will very consciously release all the tension in my shoulders and jaw and head and smile a little and reply with a lie made glib and simple and above all believable through long practice:

Yes, of course. I am fine.