I owe grass an apology
for not valuing the verdant green-
leafed sprawling covering it gives
to the ugly earth...Sorry, earth.
You're necessary but homely
Like a strong but stupid pony
That lifts bricks or does tricks
Only about a fifth of the time.
Sorry nature.

Arms and Legs

http://www.myspace.com/colindieden - That's where it can be found. If you like Connor Oberst, you're going to lose your mind a bit for this. I went to highschool with Colin towards the end, and the kid's come a long way.

Myself, I have a show coming up in a few weeks. The weeks leading up, including now, have been intense, as I go through some pretty important soul-searching as to why I write. Lately, I wonder most about what the purpose of playing music is at all. Nick Welch, dear friend, told me once that I shouldn't worry about it so much. He did so in words I could have easily said myself: "Dude...fuck it. Just play music."

Half of me agrees.

This afternoon I spent some time outside of Henry's, talking about music with another dear friend. His take was different. We talked about a Master Class he'd attended with a percussion instructor from Yale. After a particularly impressive, but not flawless, performance by a particularly hardworking student, he told the rest of the studio; "Either become like him, or quit. The world doesn't need another mediocre musician."

More of me agrees.

I think the truth comes somewhere in the middle. What made Bob Dylan great wasn't that he gave any kind of damn what his audience thought. What he did give a damn about was what he had to say.

When Johnny Cash set down "American Recordings" in the mid-90's, his comeback wasn't paid for by punching the same ticket stub that had made his career earlier. He took the advice of Rick Rubin - to try something new. He had to re-define his sound by being who he was at that moment in his life, and in his career. And we got singles like "Hurt", and even this, which is damn genius: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25EYTbrmgM8)

Hell, the Beatles. That's all I've got to say there.

Still, they were perfect at what they did. Nothing was an accident. They all relentlessly pursued exactly what they wanted to say, how they wanted to say it. Music without purpose - without a meaning - is just acting with instruments. It's how we got Miley Cyrus, and a cavalcade of other technical but soulless sonic waste. It's exactly what Jeff Goldblum's character means about his teleported steak in, "The Fly".

Ronnie: [Ronnie eats it] Oh... Oh, oh, tastes funny.
[Spits it in a napkin]
Seth Brundle: Funny? How?
Ronnie: It tastes um... synthetic.
Seth Brundle: [Seth smiles and takes the napkin] Mmm-hmm.
Ronnie: [smiles with intrigue] So, what have we proved?
Seth Brundle: The computer is giving us its interpretation... of a steak. It's, uh translating it for us; it's rethinking it, rather than *reproducing* it, and something is getting lost in the translation.
Ronnie: Me... I'm lost.
Seth Brundle: The flesh. It should make the computer, uh crazy. Like those old ladies pinching babies. But it doesn't; not yet because I haven't taught the computer to be made crazy by the...
[smiles at Ronnie]
Seth Brundle: flesh. The poetry of the steak.

You can't just interperet someone else's steak. Because what they came to the table with was genuine. Yours has to be genuine. It can't just be rearranged bits of the same drivel fed to you by every hand and mouth you meet or hear on the radio or in the street.

Without something genuine, something original, something worth hearing, there is no point to ever take the guitar out of the bedroom. But since I'm going to be playing to 80+ people in little Homer's, I guess I'm up against it now. So I guess I had better figure out what I want to say.

When you say it.

To be happy is
the very last
thing
I want for you,
and the first
for me.

When you hear me in the grass.

I've done a lot of walking,
But when you see me in the grass, I will not fuss anymore.
I will flow, with the green wheat undulating
To wind,
To currents,
And bend low in the breeze.

I'll come clean
I've been off running
I've been trying to leave
All I know about me
But coming home
I can see your breath on the window
And I know,
I know
This is where I should be

When you owned the ozone

Physics brought this one to mind...as well as my sickness-addled brain. This cold must have come with a built-in drip of Robitussin.

So Chloroflurocarbons. Bad news guys. They bind with oh-three and make oh-two, which is good for us because we breathe that stuff, but then on the other hand that means we're all going to die.

Especially Austrialia (or Sexcriminalboat, as some people say who are from Stone Mountain, Georgia).

Our fearless collegiate "leader", Professor Somebody-or-other-who-can't-teach-a-class (I really don't know her name), pointed out that when O3 doesn't bind with those cuh-razy sun rays that are a-comin' to kill us, that the next thing to resonate perfectly and absorb the energy is our DNA.

Which is bad, because that makes bad things happen to our "cells".

We need those.

So our skin can absorb Ozone, which is handy except that a lot of us were planning on using it for a while. You know, to live in and stuff.

Enter the Tanners. Fake-bakers. The orange-chick makers.

There is actually a segment of the population who really get a kick out of this DNA-resonating jazz. They like the way it tickles their chromosomes. So I have a very "GREEN" solution to make everyone happy (except some DNAs).

Let's just export the tanning business to the ozone layer. We can fly addled individuals up to the brink of space for the best UV rush they've ever experienced. Solar spas on the high plasma seas. It's the (ultraviolet) wave of the future!

Thousands upon thousands of super-saiyan blondes rotating the planet in geo-synchronous cellular obliteration. The clients get the best tans of their lives, and in doing so patch the holes in our dilapitated ozone layer, leaving the rest of us free to run around naked with no sunblock on.

Cocoa-butter for everyone!

Except you, middle-aged moustachio'd white man. None for you.


THE END.

When you've got the funk.

When you've got the funk, I'd say that you have it all. Some blessed soul at Westport coffeehouse just cranked up some sinfully smooth saxophones, and it's making my butt go sway*.

(*Yes, I shake my ass from time to time. What of it.)

Funk is hard to pin down. It's up-tempo in a way that makes you want to put down that old mouth-harp, quit crying over that old woman who done you wrong, and go find a new one to dance with. One clean-spit guitar riff, a horn jab or two, and I'm ready to become friends with somebody new.

Strange, isn't it, how for all the GET-ON-UP'AH! goodness that funk has given us, it's a word that we also use to talk about emotional sludge. Getting "in a funk" is apples to the whisky of "getting funky". Being depressed has nothing to do with bass saxophones.

-

Much has been going on in this life of mine. Upheaval, tradgedy, suffering, stagnation and ironically, change, have been the harmony to my Monday through Sunday melody–the one that you can't put down when you turn off the amp. Music stops, but we still float forward in notes, faltering and alone no matter the symphony that we can't strike from.

My melody is asking me whether resolution ever comes. If in this life we ever feel less tossed, less prone, less subject to the whimsy of spinning galaxies of galaxies. Or the tides. Asking which came first–the questions or the answers, and wondering whether they actually come in pairs, or if one outnumbers the other.

You can stare into the looking glass as long as you like. You can refuse to meet the morning. You can stay up fighting before you even leave, and make knots of pure simplicity. You can puzzle, you can wonder–you can dichotomize and analyze and subjugate and simplify, but the ultimate conclusion always comes down from God that we just don't ever know.

We are living in mystery, the kind that only happens to everybody.

When you are eaten.

I've been wondering lately what, exactly, is so terrifying about the thought of being eaten.

People try to tell me that to be eaten would be terrible. An awful way to die. I tell them that it would be purposeful–meat recycling, if you will. People usually just look horrified when I say that kind of thing.

Through watching more horror movies these past few months than I'd seen in the cumulative 21 years beforehand, I've seen a lot of people-eating. Often, people are eaten by big things, i.e. monsters, dinosaurs, machines. Other times, it is other humans that sink their teeth into the largest untapped food source in the world.

Strangers, neighbors, priests, boyscouts, lawyers, firefighters and actuaries...walking red meat. Humanburgers. People pie. Johnny Depp did it, why shouldn't we?

But none of that is the point really. I do wonder sometimes if in survival situations I could bring myself to eat other people...to slice thick, card-sized slabs of meat from cold, dead buttocks. It's been done before. The point is, I want to know why it's so terrifying.

In reality, I imagine you would be dead for the majority of the chewing–or at least in shock and riding a tiny tidal wave of positive chemistry into the gullet of whatever (or whomever) has you caught between their teeth.

But no matter the violence or atrocity, in movies or the news–no matter if the victim is dead or alive, we cringe an extra inch at the thought of cannibalism, or being eaten alive. In reality, it'd be a really short way to go. Way shorter than cancer, or any other terminal disease. You'd live your decades strong, and end them in mere seconds of suffering. It doesn't sound so bad, really.

I think that where this fear comes from is our deep seated, nagging feeling that we might not be so special as we think. If we can be eaten, then we are no different than the cows, pigs, or chickens that we chew on a daily basis. It all comes down to the fear that maybe, just maybe, we really are just meat. And when we are eaten, we are gone. No body to show we were alive-no ashes to revere on the mantle, nothing. We've become assimilated back into the great whirlpool of nature, in recycled atoms and decomposing carbon. And there's nothing we can do about it.

We hold the image of a complete body as sacrosanct. And to watch the undead pull taffy from our guts threatens more than just our ideas of violence–it flies in the face of every person who has ever cared for their safety, or life.

Because we live in these bodies. And until we die, they are the only way we have to interact with the world.

What a shame that they are so fragile. Because we are all food for someone.