It was the Lest of Times, it was the Wurst of Times.

Tonight, I realized that I'd been living in a pile. I started making smaller piles. This process was undeniably stupid, but I felt, once I had all the wee piles, that there was no stopping until I had resolved the situation. I started examining bits and pieces that had been squirreled at one point or another. I made tea out of the decade preceding this one. The tea was a little stale and also contained a few pre-millenial bits. I dredged up a bunch of flavors that tickled and were generally so dusty that I sneezed, violently. But somewhere between when the steeping took place and the point at which the tea reached the temperature of erstwhile bathwater, I encountered two leaves, actual printed hojas from the past. I swirled my cup around, gazed in, focused my attention, then turned it over on my saucer. Having waited a couple of minutes, I lifted my glass again and began to puzzle over what was left beneath. Unlike future tea, this tea-stalgia is detailed in the extreme, and despite its surreal form and content, yields a definite emotional response. Here's what we printed:





I like these lists. They're chock full of mildly disturbing crap, and you can see us pushing one anothers' buttons, alternating entries. There is something to be said for that level of creative comfort and rapport. Our patience with one another and our shared frustrations get to play out, not simply in silent gazes or utterances bandied lazily. For some reason we formalized, we collaborated zealously, playing on the contrast between the generic simplicity of the list and the vast, fluid scope of our aspirations. What came out was rough, of course, but a fantastic artifact nonetheless, and a great indicator of the depth and breadth of boredom and desire. That's pretty much all for the moment. Hope you guys are swell.

P.S. Hey Ty, while I can imagine that this isn't high on your list of personal priorities, please make sure your state legalizes it on the second. It would be so excellent.

Rock and Roll Weather:

Sometimes when I'm summering, I can't wrap my head around my own music library. I feel like a temperamental pregnant woman with visceral, irrational cravings which make weird and unpredictable the various aesthetic qualities of the songs I've collected. Songs that I poured over my brain innumerable times with no diminution of emotional response, suddenly feel lapsed, dull, and unmistakably obtuse. Additionally, I find myself stuck on new music. Sometimes it's really legitimate, and I can see how it fits in with all the old canon, where the sound comes from, where it's going. Often though, I don't care and I tolerate listening to things whose parameters clearly exceed my normal thresholds of listenability. Examples of this: soundtracks, music with lyrics I will never learn, noise, ____ metal, bluegrass, instrumental psych, Crawling With Tarts, and many others. This isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but I don't think it used to happen quite like this.

I hate this feeling of obsolescence when I encounter it, and I take care to prevent myself from experiencing this wrong-place, wrong-time, aural toothache sensation by only bringing out these pillars of the sacrosanct temple of rock and roll when I know they'll ring true to willing ears: in the car with eric/tyler/jon/gina/a few others. Social environs would seem to trump, but when I want to really get down with the division of my music to which I was first drawn as a collector and an investigator of tunes, I wait for the magic that arrives following labor day weekend.

A week ago, I took [sic] elesdee with David on a day sandwiched between early morning trips to MSP. At some point in the middle of the afternoon, standing the between the fire and the pond and holding a stick that flamed great red-blue-orange feathers and crackled loudly, I suddenly felt like I was hearing power chords, strumming loudly and building in the distance to the South. Was someone playing music somewhere? I tried to get my ears wrapped around the sound, but it was still very faint, and there were a lot of available sounds for my brain to play with and collage, which it did. The sound built to somewhere between "Back in the USSR" and a Led Zeppelin riff, energetic, regular, rolling, pounding. I burst out with "Sounds like Rock'n'Roll, man!" before I could think about whether I had actually figured out what I was listening to. David looked at me and listened. The sound was a jet engine, and he took my statement not so much as complete misrecognition, but more as a kind of cheesy joke. It didn't matter, I had already felt something shift back into place. Electric guitars made sense in my brain again, and they sounded sublime.

Now, the weather has changed. The sky has darkened, the clouds pack low, slate-colored down comforter. The wind below them moves with the kind of urgency that one sees in migrating geese this time of year, and is not so much warm or cold, dry or wet, but a pure electric mercuriality. I am drenched in a kind dim longing for an identity so long amputated as to feel phantom. I look out the window as I drive and I want to hop atop motor vehicles, to get thrown out of a shitty restaurant, to hoist someone into a tree or a second story window. I have been cast back to a time so dark and deep, that when I first left home I had almost forgotten what it meant. This is where Rock and Roll gets me today. Our saturating communality still comes back, fills the chords, and reconciles my human-centipede of minds when the memories of our times of institutional parkour re-appear and rush by in every direction. The sets are still up, more or less, and sometimes I think I see us, flitting ganglyly out of the lit portions of the street as my car passes in the middle of the night. I can go out and put on Thru the Eyes of Ruby, and it makes my spine tingle and my feet feel light.

I've got more thinking to do on these topics, but for now I just wanted to bring the post count for this year up to one. I've got a total friend crush on you guys; write something sometime. Tyler, you are officially excused on account of you having an actual dependent to feed, and I hope she's doing really well.

Love from the museum,
Petros