Blah. I need a replacement so I can change jobs at the station and get my new, cool job.

Anybody out there live in the casper area and want to work at a TV station?

Lyric of the day:

“Schooly never taught ’bout hamburger or steakl; Eliajah Mohammed or the Welfare state; But I know! How do I know? I know because of KRS-One.”

Well, I can’t go into to much detail, but it looks like something may finally be swinging my way, money wise.

Which means it’s time to be afraid. Because it’s going to do a lot for my sense of self not to be broke all the time, and I’m a scary mother with a fully functioning ego (Yes, folks, you’ve been dealing with a muted version of me).

Also, I had a good day playing poker. Cause I rock like a fraggle, baby.

Lyric for the day:

I taken the cat in
Get him a place to stay
And I found out
He goin’ ’round town
Tellin’ ev’rybody that he
He got my wife

Then I gets mad
I goes to the cat
Like a good guy should
I said, ‘Look man
‘I’m gonna warn, you just one time’
Next time I warn you’
‘I’m gonna use my gun’

–John Lee Hooker, “I’m Bad Like Jesse James”

She always smoked, and she tasted like perfume and ashes.

In the light through the blinds she was a sleeping tiger with the lines of a woman, and I didn’t know where I stood even as I lay there.

I knew the following afternoon, our morning, I’d fill my pockets with my packets of poison and my waistband with oiled iron, brass and lead.

I also knew no splinter of doubt in the concept that nothing I said or did would buy her heart, in any sense as true as my gun or my need, but there has to be a way to keep score or the game ends.

I’m not a thing born in pauses; hesitation is not my crucible. If you came against me, you would surely die.

Yet I look at this sleeping cat next to me and I know I’m unmanned and beaten.

I’ll go out on her quest when next I wake, shred the world in the name of her needs.

Maybe I’ll keep a little bit for myself. I’m no saint, unless there’s a saint of gun-oil or poison powder, or maybe a saint of midnight stillness, a patron for those who huddle in sodium arc lights at bus-stops and coffee holes until the dawn slays the demons and they can slink toward their burrows.

One night I take my prey from these people, their patronizning saint, and the next I’m the voice in the dark calling out, “Let him go. Leave him be.”

White fence-picket limbs spiderwebbed with faint ink pause in their paths toward there prey; stubbled heads turn my way and bob like the beak-turrets of carrion birds.

They melt away, usually.
Most things with eyes know that this potion is poison, that I’m nothing that bluffs, nothing good to eat.
I’m nothing at all, except a way to test your agnosticism in a dark alley. 

Some, though, are made of sterner stuff; they don’t melt so quick. They come on forward in a blood rush, glittering at the corners and dipping paws into pockets, but soon enough they chase the other home, folding in new ways and damp in new places.

The bundle they’d surrounded is balled up like a sea-thing, but on investigation, it’s a kitten version of the cat, a little bit of a thing that burns quite bright.

The kitten has no owner now, so it follows me, and it doesn’t speak.

It sees me do my thing that day, trade the things for the other things.
It follows me through my day, sees the people I see. It – she – moves in my wake like a gull.

This should alarm but doesn’t, because the kitten’s no danger at all. It’s coming home with me, and it doesn’t need to be afraid.

I get home before the sun comes up to blind us all, and I show the cat the kitten. 

Inside, even though I’m never tense, I’m tense. The cat scares me because my rules can’t alwasy be put on her, so it’s a tense moment.

No worries. The cat likes the kitten.

The kitten will be a tiger someday. She’ll take care of the spider boys by herself, and she won’t need the bad old man to walk with her.

Seeing the cats together calms me and speeds my heart, thaws my veins.

I don’t know if I can afford these girls.

I don’t know if I can live without them.

I do know no one will take them. I do know that they’ll sleep in peace under my roof. That’s all I can do for now.

That’s all I can do, now, for then.

*****

Lyric for the Day

“Honor was not just a word
To knights of old who pledged their faith
In love over gold, love over gold.
Now they laughed at his fantasy world
And maximized all the potentials to earn 
The middle class was too blind to see
The true nobility of Don Quixote.”

Breakin’ the law, Breakin’ the law. . . .

I got pulled over the other day. By a cop, of all things.

You know what this idiot wants? To give me a fix-it ticket for a broken headlight.

You know what this idot asks me?

Liscense and registration

Insurance

Do I live at the address on my liscense?

Do I live around here?

Have I lived here long?

Do I have a job?

Where? (I said “yes”)

Where was I going

Where was I coming from

What was my phone number (something NO cop has ever asked me)

And then he gives me this big lecture about how driving with one headlight is dangerous. So I give up. Fuck it. How much can the ticket be?

“Yeah, shit, I can see how that could be a real killer. What if someone thinks I’m on a motorcycle and tries to miss me real narrowly?”

He blinked at me for about thirty seconds, gave me back my papers and told me to get my light fixed.

lyric for the day:
“Checking it up,
Baby,one more time for you
Checking it up,
Until the pot hits the sky
Even the best best years
Leave a lot to be desired
When they pass you by”

-Baby, I’m a big star now, Counting Crows

7 Lessons I’ve learned from no-limit poker:

1. 4th place is the worst: In a ten-player poker tournment, three places play. If you come in fourth, you didn’t just waste money – you also wasted time. The person who came in 10th has just as much money as you, and he’s two hours ahead of you in the next game.

2. You can only win what you risk: If you don’t throw it in the middle, you can’t make anything with it.

3. Pick Your Moment: You have to wait for opportunity.

4. Own Your Moment: When it’s your moment, move. Go big or go home. Or someone else will take your moment.

5. No one is ever really bluffing: Sure, sometimes someone holds out with bad cards, but no one really bluffs in the sense that the lay person imagines. Even a cold bluff is a legitimate attempt to win.

6. Winning is just step one: Sometimes you will also need a plan to get out of the room with what you’ve won.

7. Make a play or fold the hand. You see something you want? See someone you like? Shove the chips in the middle or forget about it.

Lyric for the day:

He deals the cards as a meditation
And those he plays never suspect
He doesn’t play for the money he wins
He don’t play for respect

He deals the cards to find the answer
The sacred geometry of chance
The hidden law of a probable outcome
The numbers lead a dance

I know that the spades are the swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art
But that’s not the shape of my heart

The Police/Sting, Shape of My Heart

All alone in the night again.
On my own in the station with whatever happens in the night.
Anything could happen, but nothing probably will.

I’ve been thinking about girls lately.
Specifically, the lack of one. I need someone to pleasure me slavishly.

It’s kind of hard to meet girls when you work at random and sleep during most of the times when girls do things. . . Perhaps I shall buy one from russia.

I’m looking forward to Saved!, and the Chronicles of Riddick. I actually really enjoyed Pitch Black, so I’m hoping for good things.

Saved just looks too funny to skip.

Edit: Almost forgot the Lyric of the Day

“is she weird
is she weird, is she white
is she promised to the night
and her head has no room
and her head has no room”

–Is She Weird, the Pixies.

idea I’m having for a short film or maybe a comic or animation. No dialouge, total running time a little under four minutes:

Open on a bed, man next to woman asleep in morning lighting. Cell rings. Man reaches out, answers, and we hear, “Hey, man it’s benny, from the globe. Listen, . . . was out on story, and, well . . . she’s dead. She said to call you if anything like this . . .” sound drops off and color fades to B&W. Man talks, pause, talk, closes phone, wakes up girl, talks to her, she is visibly angry.

Cut to man in bathroom. Camera is over the sink where the mirror would be (wipes steam off glass?) Cut from event to event as girl walks by open door with packed things, suitcase, etc, still looking pissed:Shaving head, shaving face, dressing, adding money, straight razor, phone, keys, shades to pockets. ( from vanity? Visible?)

New scene, crime scene, cop tries to bar man at the door. They have a brief exchange, and then the man points at the cop and opens his mouth, and things white out.

Same man, same cop, plain clothes, somewhere else. Different video style (same as over mirror, perhaps? Security Cameras?) The cop has 5er and looks real raggedy-ass and tired. He hands the man a picture of a girl. Says something that looks like a question, the man reaches out and takes him by the shoulder; says something. Scene in a room: man from behind, holding a pistol. Room full of dead people, smoke, blood… drugs on the table, girl from pic with runny mascara, balled up in one end of a couch. Man holds out a hand for her and she takes it, hugs him. Jump to shot of girl in cap and gown with cop and woman in nice clothes.

Cut back to present, cop gets out of the way.

Interior, crime scene, dead girl w/needle.

Man kneels, puts on gloves; touches syringe: Flash on fishnet-knees on the ground, butt on boots on asphault, hands on a zipper over a brunette head, cut from the unbuttoning, CU as a bag changes hands, a spoon melts powder, plunger goes down

cut to man examining dead girl.
He checks her body for marks: arms, armpits, backs of knees, thighs, webs of toes, stomach. Searches the place, again doing the pov thing with the technicians on hand: Distant shots of him really tearing the place up. He finds no marks, no nothing. He stomps out.

Cut to montage of man in various locales, talking to people, handing over money, showing them a pic, jumping from person to person, place to place, spending a lot of time and money and learning nothing from dusk till dawn

Cut to man smoking at desk? gets, idea, snubs out smoke. Goes to a to house, breaks in, looks through her stuff, looks through computer, prints an article…

Close up of article. Article connects local business man to skinhead movement.

Man walks into poolhall? Club? Party? full of skinheads/nn Walks up to the biggest two, who are in the kitchen? ( I think I like party) and shoots one without preamble, begin s to interogate the other. After a minute, skin goes for gun, man throws him down on table and pistol whips him five or six times.

The skin talks. The man knocks him out and leaves.

The man walks into an office. The workers in the office move to stop him, but they melt away before him.

He kicks in the door of an inner office.
Shot over his shoulder of a large, 50 something man at a desk.

Our man levels his gun at the man behind the desk.
Flashback of the desk man and some skinheads forcible hot-shoting the dead girl.

Back to the office.
One shot sounds, and the scene fades to white.

You hear the man’s voice

“She wasn’t a junky anymore.”

Sirens in the background, panicked voices from office workers behind him.

Lyric for the day

In starlit nights I saw you
So cruelly you kissed me
Your lips a magic world
Your sky all hung with jewels
The killing moon
Will come too soon

–the killing time, echo and the bunnymen

Long post. Fuck you and your ADD, read it all, or be condemed.

The Show:

Oh, god, the show was bad ass. It was just bad ass, there aren’t really other words…

Unfortuneatly, any worthwhile show starts with a 4-hour road trip to Denver.

LOOOOONG trip, tho. But I got some writing done, which is good, and we listened to a promo of the new Tiger Army record, and it was good. 

We got to town and started early in a bar called Barracuda’s . . . our “hotel,” a friend who lives downtown, was there, and she got us started with beer and pool galore. We checked out Wax Trax, which is a handy effing place for the hard to find junkies amoung us . . .basically, a larger analouge of Casper’s own Sonic Rainbow (Odd . . . we have the better website) …we then wandered in an out of a couple diffent places down town. I need a camera so I can take pictures of stuff…really. I wish I was a cam-whore with a wishlist and everyone could give me a dollar a piece towards it for a good bra-shot, but it’s not gonna happen…Time killed, we headed toward the venue, and began getting faced inside.

First band, the Horrorpops: The Horrorpops are a new-ish Pyschobilly band with a female lead singer…

For the uninitiated, Pyschobilly is basically really fast rockabilly with lyrics about sex and death…it could not, in other words, be cooler. So check it or rot and die.

They dished out a good set…this was a new band, basically, and is also sort of a “It’s my girlfriend’s band, give a shot” kind of outfit via the larger PB band the Necromantix (who were supposed to play but had a member in the hospital . . . saaaaad), one of whom is involved with their lead singer. The Horrorpops only have one big album to their name…so I didn’t have much by way of expectations…and they were really freaking good. I’m an AV geek, and I know something about sound, and I have to say, I thought a lot of what I liked about this band they wouldn’t be able to do live, and they did…They get a thumbs up. They also found out it was a girl in the front row’s birthday, and pulled her out of the audience during the show and had her dance with the band for most of the set…Big kudos for audience participation. One thing I saw that blew me away was a couple swing-dancing at high velocity in the mosh-pit, happly smacking and being smacked even as they gazed into each other’s eyes whilst tapping out a very, very high velocity waltz … Pictures of them(band, not couple)

This is a shot of the lead singer with her bass that neatly illustrates the look of Pyschobilly. There’s more pictures of them here . ..I couldn’t find a pic of them as a group that wasn’t either very tiny or a full size hi-res h-scroll smasher. Also, if you follow ink, there’s been a couple articles about their tattoos and their tattooist in what I guess you would call the industry literature.

Next was the Disasters, a biggish punk band whose major claim to fame is that their frontman was in Agnostic Front . . .they played, supprise supprise, several Ag Front covers and were basically an Ag Front cover band for the night, which would piss me of, but I liked Ag Front and I’m pretty lukewarm about the Disasters.

Then came the Huns (AKA DIES HUNNS – Same band. German for “the huns”). Duane Peters and the Hunns have been around since the dawn of time despite being a kind of filler, medium famous punk band . . . .and now I know why. They put on a live show that, frankly, breaks backs and eats babies. One thing I didn’t know about the Hunns was that thier female guitarist, Corey Parks (Whom you might remember from such bands as Nashville Pussy . . . and, well, Nashville Pussy) . . . well, she’s a giantess. Now, being tall, and enjoying acts that can break body and soul, I like tall women, and this girl is six four or so . . .much larger then the rest of her band . . . and she has large, jutting …eyes (body part subsitution to prevent outright castration by the same subsect of my audience who objected to my supposed “Jokes” about the “size” of my “wang”) . . .while her eyes are large but still proportionate on the relative scale of her frame, on an absoulte scale of eyes, well, any other woman with eyes this size would like some kind of freak. I’m really glad I didn’t run into her after the show, because I was sublimly drunk and no doubt would have said something stupid like, “Hi. I’m a 300 pound man-groupie. I feel we, as large people, could have very, very large sex of a mind- and spine-breaking nature, and as you are in a band and I am not, I will do whatever you say until you let me stop.”

Anyway, varigated exagerated anatomy aside, these guys really rocked. They didn’t stop for their entire set for any longer then it took to take a sip of water and spit it onto the crowd, and they played lound and hard, were frantic and evil as far as stage presence goes, and just really fucking cleaned up the house. Pictures of them:

Note the eyes.

Another shot where the “eyes” are prominent.

Here’s the whole band, for scale: . . . keep in mind the two men standing are normal five foot something dudes and not midgets.

After that the band I was actually there to see, Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards, played. Lars had done some weird shit to his hair and beard so he looked like Lemmy, which was good for a laugh.

Now, OK, other then wanting to hump any amazon bass player a band might have like a llama on viagra, or a compulsive need to loop, say, cartoon heroes, by aqua, when wrongfully placed in charge of the stereo on a roadtrip, I don’t have a real tendancy to get into specific bands real deep, read their bios, kiss there asses, worship them, that kind of thing. For me, groupiedom . . . it’s like . . . music is something i consume right? I don’t go up to a chef and scream and ask for his autograph and be like, “SHIT man . . .that was a great pie! YOU FUCKING ROCK THE BAKE-OUT MAN! I FUCKING LOVE YOUR WORK!:

I’m not into getting wrapped up in the people that make the things I like…but, frankly, I like this little rancid spin-off so much, I made an exception for them and just let myself be a fan instead of mister too-cool-to-rock.

And they were great. They played a LONG set that was most of their old album (actually, I think it was all of it . . . it was a good eight or ten songs off of it at least…) interspersed with new stuff of their soon to come out album, Viking, which is very, very promising.

It’s hard for words to express how I feel about this band .. . they speak about some things in a way that suits me quite a bit…like being an older punk, for example, and having to figure out what to do now that you are in your twenties… or having to figure out where your next meal is coming from . . . not in a “We’re so punk, we live in the gutter” kind of ennui way, but in a “There are no jobs and I have kids” kind of way . . . Some of the newer punk bands, that’s what’s missing from them . . . a connection with the fact that their movement was born of blue collar vacuum and destroying something because you had nothing, and being loud in the hopes someone would actually maybe hear you . . .

Their music makes me feel like I’m not such a shit, there’s still plenty of time to live and see and do what I want to do, and the world’s not ending and I’m not alone…and their album has helped me through some evil-ass days.

What I’m trying to say, is that hearing them live was actually one of the more meaningful live music events that’s ever happened to me…and I highly recommend it.

Lyric for the day:
In ’82 I was the young one in the bunch
Initation started and ended with a punch
As I got older I got scars to prove my worth
More times than others I fell face first in the dirt
Woa-oh-oh can’t you see, you’ll never take the gang out of me.
Runt in a pack of wolves
I was nosed up to the front
I preyed on the weekend soldiers who couldn’t take the hunt
Like Julius Caesar waited for the knife stuck in his back
I stood so proud and tall and I won’t go out like that.
Wo ho ho can’t you see — you’ll never take the gang out of me.
Well all the kings before I cut down with my axe
I stoop atop this world alone without a scratch
With another victory I basked right under the sun
My war was over but a new one has begun
Woa oh-oh, can’t you see — you’ll never take the gang out of me

–Skunx, Lars and the Bastards

Things I don’t get:

When you do something you KNOW is standup comedy:
Once something crosses the line into standup-comedy fodder, DON’T do it.

This means:

Don’t drive real slow

Don’t bob around on your headphones like a dipshit

Don’t talk in a theatre, etc

Yet no matter how many times Chris Rock or Jerry Seinfeld makes fun of something, people will NOT quit doing it. What the fuck does it take not to talk through a movie? I mean WHAT THE FUCK.

It’s not that they do it that kills me, it’s that EVERYBODY KNOWS IT’S IRRITATING AND FORBIDDEN, everybody HATES it when someone else does it, and it’s not at all difficult to not do….it’s not like I’m asking that no one breath loundly in a theatre, or have eyes in a theatre, or not make out or anything . . .  but at least one motherfucker in a theatre does it, every time. The last time, it was an older couple. The women kept explaining things to the man. . . not the occasional line he couldn’t hear, EXPLAINING things to him, like extra history and science designed to enhance the experience. What is this old bat, a DVD extra?

I was opening my mouth to get us kicked out of the theatre, but fortunatly my friend had the same idea at the same time, and said something brilliant: “Excuse me, but the movie’s started . . . shouldn’t you be setting a good example for young people?”

Stunned silence for two hours…now THAT’S comedy.

Lyric for the day, dedicated to the tough guy at the convinence store:
(Him, to friend as random female leaves store:”Yeah, I’m gonna make HER suck my dick later.”

Me, in line behind him:”Better hope she doesn’t notice what a bitch you are before she gets your fly open.”)

—————————————————————————– 

Once long, long time ago, I was naive to all I know
People tried to push on to me their weak mentality
I woke up and I know I am real and not for show
Unlike you, who knows inside you’re soft
because you’re just another bullshit fake, paper gangster

-Blood for blood, (Still just a)Paper Gangster.
—————————————————————————–