The Sound Drug

Music is the highest drug you can take.  Sure you've heard all sorts of people who insist that they "get their best high off of LIFE" say foolish-sounding things like this, but c'mon and hear me out.  Can it get you higher than heroin?  I don't know, with a hundred percent surety, because I've never taken heroin.  But what heroin does is give you a chemical shortcut to happiness.  It activates you, it activates you super hard, but in one direction, no?
Sit at the symphony and hear dozens or even over a hundred people belting out their full capacity, channeling their concentrated souls through their instruments.  That isn't one direction, that's a thousand bloody directions all coming at you at once.  You aren't taking one chemical and shooting it into your arm or the space twixt your toes, you're plugging your head and your crotch and your heart into the souls of a whole stage full of people, and not just them but the artisans before them who crafted those instruments too.

Music is a totally insane thing.  There's not a reason it should "work."  The sounds that any man makes are dreamt of in the space of pure originality in that person's mind ergo necessarily completely foreign to the experiences of the listener, yet the listener doesn't find them offensive, or revolting, or even unusual (unless of course that's a compliment): they find them pleasant, reaffirming, resonant, relatable, and even comforting.  The fact that we all group around certain songs can't be irrelevant to the fundamentals of human nature, and by extension the universe (I understand if you see that as a dramatic leap, which today it surely is.  But of course every thing is a variation on the same "things," and the same could be said for vibrations, so it isn't a tremendous stretch to say music is the most extreme & advanced articulation of the fundamental universe we yet have).  The facts that certain songs sound excellent in every genre, or that metalheads can be swayed by electronic freaks, and that classical die-hards can be thrilled by hip-hop compositions, are not trivial.

In that way, music is a critical interaction twixt people much the way that writing-&-reading is...except far more fundamental.  Where writing requires a person to take the interwoven complexity of his thoughts and emotions and force them to condescend to the level of language only to be re-interpreted up an identical but reversed pathway through the reader, music bypasses all these steps completely: a musician & a listener are a pure, evolved, human sense communicating with another human sense.  It's one [or many] people -- temporary collections of energy, vibrations -- creating vibrations to be received by other people, other vibrating collections of energy.  It is surely among the purest forms of one mind talking to and actually understanding another outside of literally Being John Malkovich, that is to say experiencing not just a person's physical sensations but the entire worldview that informs their 'soul,' if I may take and use such an overly-dramatic and over-employed word (for I feel here, now, it is necessary).

So to get back to the point, music may just be the highest drug we can take (on our own, at least.  To steal much popular culture before me, "the most fun you can have with your clothes on.").  With music we aren't just accelerating our mind's chemicals with one [admittedly complex] chemical that we smoke or snort or shoot or swallow.  We are intoxicating ourselves with the minds of others, with the exorbitantly complex interactions that are going on inside our fellow man (there is a universe inside each of us).  We are getting high off of their brain chemicals, by extension their entire beings, for a body could not exist without a brain and vice-versa.  Name a fan of narcotics who does not identify among their most enjoyable activities when high "listening to music."  From weed, liquor, and LSD up to cocaine, barbiturate pills, and heroin, and everything in between, music remains universally enjoyable and even essential to the experience of any given drug, commonplaces like marihuana and liquor included (to say the very least.  I could include sex and Netflix on my list of narcotics if I were so inclined). The point is these are all things people do -- absolutely all of them, from the most wholesome to the most depraved -- to make their situation better, by whatever their present notion and definition of "better" is.  And all of these people include music in their plan for betterness.  All of them.

In no way are we more connected with one another - even if at a distance - than though music.  And that comfort that comes from connectedness is the thing for which we're all looking; it's the comfort that sells every Coke in the country, and every square of LSD too.  There's some Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom in all of us.





The full movie Being John Malkovich appears to be available free on YouTube, at the time of this posting, leastways.

Forever'll Never Come

That feeling when opening a new handle, like "This shall last forever!"
But forever is never as long as your doctor and your wallet would have you hope. But the inner groove of every album keeps telling you, "forever'll NEVER come baby!"

A Very Late Night

Often I write several things in one night and then wake up to find out what they were.  This is one of those times.

My consciousness and self-awareness will have a battle of wits
while I sit back and chuckle away on the sofa.

Lightest I've Felt in Years

The truth is you're treating them like enemies, to be bested, because that's all they've ever been to you - competition or non-threats - when what you really want is to be friends.  You want it so dearly.

And realizing that was the lightest you'd felt in years.

Five Hundred Horses

How do you do it?

What, you think I've a secret or something?  Truth is...[leans in, fake whispers, narrows eyes] I'm fucking nuts, I just route the energy in one direction.  Imagine a thirteen-year-old boy behind the wheel of a Corvette.  Foot to the floor and doughnuts for days, right?

Mmm hmmmm...

The car's brilliant, the secret's to put a focused, calm driver there.  Five hundred horses all pulling the carriage in the same direction?  Beautiful.

Liquor

It's curious

it loves you
like a cat

it spits at your trifles
yet uplifts your victories

makes you fight better
encourages you to write better
bolsters you from the sidelines, no matter how hard you've been beaten
even though it gives its fair share of the punches.

always loves you when you're in need
always offers a helping hand when you're struggling

but never hesitates to stand holdin a hammer 'round your coffin.

She shoves you into the abyss as readily as she offers a hand out,
she'll always help you get where it is you want to go.
She doesn't offer you any advice, though she's centuries of knowledge.
No, she doesn't hold a map and doesn't give you her opinion.  Wherever it is you're trying to get, she puts her hand on your knee and pushes the pedal further to the floor.

she tells you not what door you're opening.
She only passes you the key, and puts her hand gently on yours as you turn it.

Anthony's Two Muses by Ron Lewis

Give 'Em A Chance

You know I never met anyone as crazy as myself.  But, I think the truth is everyone's as crazy as I am, I just wasn't giving 'em the chance to show it.

Originally written June 29, 2014

Today's Instruction: Don't Care

Turning a negative into a positive, turning weaknesses into strengths.  It is perhaps the most important skill anyone can have.  The terms "weakness" and "strength," when used describing character traits, are really just based upon the results derived by the person with the trait.  Anything can be transformed into a strength.

Getting to the title of today's article, not caring can be the ultimate weakness and the ultimate strength.  Think about it - the dream is sipping rum drinks on a beach, that you own, in the company of honourable men and beautiful women, not caring about a thing: strictly just being, and taking pleasure from "being" in the best sense of the word as you know how.  It can be easy to get there using the same technique: don't care.

Some may say that if you don't care, you won't get anywhere.  I'm saying that you channel that not-caring into the mindset of having no risk associated with your actions.  Note I didn't say no risk associated with your decisions.  I'll get back to this later.  IF you don't care about he consequences of failure, then you'll go ahead and just DO things without hesitation.  As long as you're making smart choices about WHAT you do you'll probably be succeeding at most of what you attempt.  In this way you'll always be climbing life's ladder, but fearless about how high up you are.  You'll just see that there's another rung, and keep on climbing.  What you could do is limitless.

Returning to risk: Every action has associated risk.  It would be pointless to try and live a life without risk for that's unachievable.  What we all do every day is make decisions about what to engage in and what not to based on the risk involved with failing at the task versus the reward achieved from succeeding at the task.  We don't articulately, explicitly do this with every single decision we make; rather it's a decision made so fast it feels automatic and goes by unnoticed at all.

After the decision's made - whatever the scale - we are done considering risks and we just go forth with the task.  So even with a risky task, the hard part is not accomplishing the task itself but deciding whether or not the task is worth accomplishing.  In this way your decisions do bear risk.  But once you've decided to do something, you cannot waste time being burdened by the risk associated with failure.  If you just don't care, you'll simply plunder ahead doing.

You Know She Knows It

Don't declare that it's magnificent.  She knows it is, in part because she is.  You know it is - in part because you are - but that's not enough.  You need to recognize that you know it and she knows it too, but most importantly of all that you know she knows it, and therefore don't have to declare it.  The thrill isn't in what's explicit, it's in what's implicit.

Time Machine or: The Restaurant at The End of The Universe

We don't want a time machine because we want to go back and re-live things again.

We want the ability to freeze time in place, without freezing ourselves too.

We want to never age, we want to stretch those perfect moments out forever.  We want that sun to hang right above the waves, and never set.  We don't want that drink to get shorter no matter how many times we touch the glass to our lips.  We don't want the needle to ever hit the inner groove.  We just want to keep the magic alive, to hang on to that fleeting feeling for just one second longer.

Image from Overdrive by Signalnoise

Haikus in English are Patent Foolishness

Y'all don't know each other.
You smile.  She smiles back.  Life's gold.
'Murican haiku.

Originally written October 21, 2013

The Lindbergian Fantasy

Every time you drive a car, crank up your stereo, use a blender, or even romantically dim a rheostat (part of your mind is loving how much *power* you have, wielding electrons at whim).  As your television warms up, those few seconds are like the opening scenes of the space odyssey: we're in awe of how plain fucking awesome we are.  In our own little ways, every day, we live out the Lindbergian fantasy: man & machine, coming together greater than the sum of the parts.

Beware the Filmmakers

Beware of musicians, sure.  Beware of all artists.  But beware the most of filmmakers.  For we are the dirtiest bastards of all that your father warned you about.  We are the most dangerous because we come with the most class, with the most pomp and circumstance.  But we are the filthiest.  There is nothing we won't do when allowed to, and we will be allowed to do anything.  Just remember, it's only pretend.

The Rear-Ending That Wasn't

I rear-ended a girl for the first time today, though not in the normally good sense of that phrase.

            I sat waiting at a red light on Santa Monica Boulevard, headed East towards Rosewood.  The light turns green, people start moving forward, everything's going normally.  I notice a Star Tours bus coming the opposite direction, fully-loaded.  I decide to remove my hat and wave it out the sunroof at them.  When I look back down in front of me, there's a car, almost stopped, not twenty feet ahead.  I stab the brakes, they lock up and I skid, but it's too late: I can tell I'm going to hit her five feet before it happens.

            It was only a gentle crunch.  We both pull over.  The worst part isn't that my flawless record's got a wart, the worst part isn't that the front of my car's a little bit fucked, the worst part isn't that it's going to be a long time until I can afford to repair the car, or even that my insurance rate will rise.  The worst part is that there's no way I can deny – to myself, that is; I'll obviously never admit it to insurance or anyone else – that this was entirely the product of me being a complete dumbass.  By choosing to give some idiots on a bus a show they'd forget anyhow, I delayed myself and the driver of the other car by some twenty minutes and caused myself what I'm sure will be a great expense.

            That having been said, there are more upsides than downsides.  I was in my S-Klasse and she was in a new Audi.  It was pure German-on-German, so hardly anything happened to either vehicle.  My grille, which is mostly plastic, got bent but my bumper's fine.  Her bumper somehow looks miraculously untouched, save for some light scratching.  I had expected it to be totally crumpled.

            This girl who was driving was cute in a cold, Scandinavian way.  Icy eyes, pure blonde hair, and a pretty rack.  I could tell by the rest of her – thin, far too thin for my taste – that the airbags weren't factory standard.  We both call our insurers.  After a while on the 'phone, during which I'd been looking the other direction, I turn back towards her car and notice some other, to be honest quite more attractive girl had suddenly appeared.  Evidently, she had a passenger that I'd not noticed at all before.  The driver – Nicole – had what you might call the ultimate blonde hair, but the passenger had what can only be described as golden hair.  She was even lovelier.

            Perhaps it's simply because it wasn't her car, but the passenger had a warm, completely natural smile.  She also had tits that readily outclassed Nicole's.  That's not to say hers were bigger – though they were slightly – but by god was she perfectly suited to them and vis-versa.  They looked natural, too, no sense of stiffness.  It's an open secret that I love big bolt-ons, but there's an unrivaled hypnotic majesty to the fluidity of god-given boobs in motion.  If I went to Central Casting looking for a believably though uncommonly attractive Beverly Hills girlfriend, they'd have given me this girl.

            If all goes well, and I expect it to, I'll have my Cadillac back in a week or two.  Perfect timing.  God bless that Mercedes, but it has got more issues than I can afford to deal with right now.  As a Benz brother once said to me at the golf course – he'd owned a diesel too – "Wonderful car; everything’ll break but the engine."  I've been learning that is the truth.  Door handles, window motors, locking system and other vacuum leaks, it all goes to hell and shipping parts across the pond ain't cheap.  But those five cylinders will crank until long after the last man breathes his final breath.  This thing was respectable with rough edges before, but after this crash it's looking trashy.

"I WANT MY CADDY!"

                      -Woody Harrelson

            I must have lied earlier when I said that the worst part was how this collision was my fault.  The worst part is that I'm not fucking both of those girls right now.  Particularly the passenger.
            It'd be great to have accidentally, moronically hit Nicole's car and then hit it off with her friend and us have this fun night while she's still stewing about minor cosmetic damage to the bumper of her A4.  But that fantasy has an ever-so-mildly cruel, vindictive touch.

            No, something better might go like so: Nicole is discombobulated by the unexpected alteration of her otherwise uneventful afternoon, but she handles herself well – she asked me after several minutes on the wire with her insurer, “Want to call your insurance company too?" at which point I realized that's what I should've been doing all along; this was my first time at this particular rodeo (something I made sure to tell my AAA agent, verbatim) – while her friend is surprised but laughing *with* the universe and *at* Nicole & I.  Meanwhile I appear to the passenger as a suave-yet-perverse stranger, rather than the milquetoast inconvenience I'm sure I ended up being in reality.  I would hit it off with the passenger, the effect of which is doubled to Nicole since she's surely thinking I’m [il]legally retarded for banging her car.  The fact that she drives a current-model-year sportscar & I hit her with a junky yet somehow miraculously operational black luxury car with black seats and black windows while wearing dickshit shades and a sheriff's hat says to her that while I've clearly yet to find my place on some sliding scale – maybe that of money vs. taste, though more likely that of 'trying to be cool' vs. 'actually being cool' – I evidently somehow know what the hell I'm doing enough to afford to be driving through Beverly Hills in the middle of the afternoon in a Mercedes, even if the driver door handle's broken and the brake pads are worn to the metal and I actuate the starter with a screwdriver.

            This peculiar aspect of reality unmistakably turned her on.  When I was younger I would've been too stupid to realize that this particular aspect of my reality was eggs-actly WHAT turned her on.  I'd then suggest that we pull off Santa Monica, since the trip from the 405 to West Hollywood that'd normally take fifteen minutes damn near doubled thanks to our halving the number of open lanes.

            She was driving a new Audi through Hollywood during work hours.  She and her friend had tits granted by Santa Claus and if not God himself.  It was all predictable, but as network television and Samuel Goldwyn can both tell us, predictability is nothing to be afraid of, if anything it is something to which should be clung.  Nicole quickly realized she didn’t' want to go home to thousands of square feet and constant bickering.  A half-Olympic pool with custom underwater speakers and imported bottles of brandy wouldn't erase the banality of sleeping next to a man who barely expressed passion for signing thirty-five million dollar contracts, let alone coming home to a gorgeous naked blonde woman backstroking in his half-Olympic pool.

            Many hours, bottles, and positions later, Nicole and her passenger sat splayed on my wall-to-wall rugs.  Well, my common-law aunt's wall-to-wall rugs.  My name wasn't on this place's title, I just lived here.  They were juicy and so was I.  At least girl-juice was clear; grease wasn't: you should've seen this place before I rented a professional-grade rug-cleaner.  Gross.  The girls smelled good.  Five years of sloppily transported Filipino food didn't.  God Bless You Rug Doctor.

            It wasn't the best.  It sure wasn't the worst.  Maybe there's some personal bias, but those Scandinavians know what they are doing.  Must be in our genes.   Nicole and her passenger and I were nothing special, we were just another set of people in the thrashing confluence of humanity, which while incomprehensible at large can be at least marginally understood by focusing the glass on Los Angeles.

The Difficult Women

We love the easy woman, because she is easy, but...

we are drawn to the TASK of unlocking the sexuality of the difficult woman, precisely because we know a WOMAN is there under her robes in any situation.  The reward is unlocking the sexual nature of the woman presented to us in the distinctly nonsexual situation.
Would you rather have twenty dollars earned after a hard day's work, or a twenty dollars given to you for free?  The answer is obvious, yet the male mind is drawn to that twenty from work.  surely this is not rational.

the male mind is not innately rational simply because it is opposite to the female mind and the female mind is irrational.  we are, like the women, wholly and dramatically irrational, just differently.  Coke and Pepsi are both cola.  But Coke ain't Pepsi.

Exit Pull

Going to exit the weed store
pushed on the pull door.

Rock n Roll

We've all had that moment.  You can't tell when you look into our eyes, but we have, trust me.

We've "needed a moment alone," or "had to do something," or "taken a quick break at the bathroom."  It's a low moment, when it happens, but it's a soul-restorer and power-giver the instant it's over.  We feel like we're on the verge of heaving, and more times than not we actually do fill that ratty porcelain throne with things we'd previously ingested.

And for a split second, our entire history dissolves, our image - of which we are well-aware - is nowhere to be found in our consciousness, and our concerns number zero.  We exist, almost as another person entirely, in that moment, purely alone and purely at peace.  We're wholly absent from care about the opinion of a single other sentient creature, and we exist purely in that tiny haven.  We are glad to be alive, not from fear of having been dead, but simply from utmost relief and being so comparatively comfortable, tender from shifting twixt these existential sensations so rapidly.

We flush the toilet, wash our hands, take another swig of whiskey to gauge our level, slug a few pegs worth of water to trim the sails, and place our hand on the doorknob.  The transformation happens, from the temporary vessel of random humanity back into whoever we are.  Then we're ready.  We twist the knob and step through the portal, greeted by compatriots, embarrassingly transparent wannabes, advisors, and select genuine comrades, all refreshing our momentarily forgotten personality, all unaware of the horrors transpired behind an unassuming door.

We're champions once more, immortal for having purged signals of our weakness, gods shedding their mortality.

Impractical Lovers

My hand wants to grip that wood
or leather
or in dirty cases even plastic.

To take her out
first being gentle
letting her warm up

giving her the time she needs
to get comfortable.
For her to be rightly lubed
cooled
warm
but cool
for this dude.

And once she gets going
she likes to run
even gallop
Three hundred some wild horses
chugging and loving
under my thumb.

She's strong as a dragon
but sensitive to part of an inch
and she'll bite
right when I won't take it
knowing I'll be back
'cause such beauty I can't not forgive.

I love our wrestling matches
but I don't ever want to fight.
Anyone could be a sadist for such majesty
and I pity he who couldn't,
he who prefers comfort
over alertness
and values simplicity in seduction
over reward of success.

The street runs both ways.
I turn her on
slowly
wondering how much she can take.
She returns the favour
Accelerating my pulse
as fast as I accelerate hers.
Our breaths getting denser
as the strokes mean more.
She screams with pleasure
and I can only amplify mine
by pushing her further.

Some ignore
some sneer
some double take
and some give compliments
to which I cannot instantly respond.

But some know
and acknowledge
and give a smile and sign
and I return the same
to them & theirs.

Ends justify the means
but I pity him
whose doesn't see enough romance in the ends
to justify impractical means.

Younger Than You

When I was young

maybe eight

or ten

I had a conversation

with my mother

at the club.

“Two times in your life

are strange”

she said,

“the first time the president

is younger

than you are,”

whereupon she paused

affecting drama

finishing:

“and when first the same

could be said

‘bout your doctor.”

I believed.

It sounded strange

and far off.

Something

about which I would know

nothing

for a very long time.

Those days are yet to come

while one she failed to mention

has already come to pass.

I speak of the day

when you first know

you’re growing older

The day the pornstars

are younger

than you.