I walked out to check the road, and I satisfied myself that we wouldn’t be driving anywhere. We’d be playing it safe and warm, cocooning, staying off the highway because it was slipperier than goose grease. I turned back toward the house, took a few steps, and suddenly my feet were in the air and I was falling flat on my back on the frozen ground. I landed on the rhomboids and the lats, with a graceful occipital bounce at the finish. I saw stars and I thought my back was broken.

I began to bellow and roar, expressing the pain and calling for help. The dogs were there immediately, waiting for clear instructions. “Frnarg, groff, owww,” I told them and I lay there in the dark looking at the lights in the house. I rolled over onto my knees and got up before they could lick me to death. Moving was maybe not wise if my back was broken, but then if my back was broken how could I move? I shuffled forward like some kind of wounded gorilla. Beth opened the front door and I was pathetically grateful that she had heard me. She gathered up the dogs, and I staggered inside, shed my coat, stepped out of my boots and lay down on the living room couch.

The couch was wrong, it provided no support. Supercharged with adrenalin, I got up again, lumbered upstairs, disrobed, and lay down on the bed. And there I stayed all day yesterday. Moving was painful, and standing up to shuffle to the bathroom was agony.

Today I simply ache. I’m avoiding the kind of arm movements that tortured me yesterday. In fact, while I’m ambulatory today, able to make a pot of coffee and sit here for a few minutes, I think it’s really time for me to get horizontal once more, maybe watch some teevee…

[tags]ouch[/tags]

For No Reason

He wants to write words down
On pieces of paper
Recording them now
And recalling them later.
It remains a mystery
The pages of history
Outlasted the passing
Of things that were dear to me.

Those wonderful children
With bright shining faces
They waltzed in the halls
And they marched in their places
The darlings of dancing,
And spinning, and reeling.
Look into their eyes
To see what they're feeling.

It's almost too much for him
Bearing the cross he's carrying.
It's almost too much for him
Wearing the face he's wearing.
Why don't you change your style ?
Why don't you change your style ?
Why don't you change your style ?

He wants to find men
Who can love for no reason,
Who open their hearts
To life of all seasons
But they've all gone, it seems
Off in their limousines—
I want to live where men
Can believe their dreams.

It's almost too much for him
Bearing this cross i'm carrying.
It's almost too much for him
Wearing this face i'm wearing.
Why don't you change your style ?
Think i'll change my style.
Why don't you change your style ?
Think i'll change my style.
Why don't you change your style ?
Change
Why don't you change your style ?
Change...

Copyright Joe McDonald, 1969

Zoë Keating

[tags]Zoë Keating, music, cello, live sampling[/tags]

…and Wilson Pickett…

…and Marvin Gaye, Aretha, Smokey, Gladys… hard for me to separate 1965, 1966, 1nd 1967, but…

- mme levy

Google fast?  Google fast!

arbogast pain in the arse, parking me h’arse bucko… on a skateboard

North Hollywood to Santa Cruz without silent bob

First published in America on June 9, 2001 by Bloomsbury. The novel follows 12-year-old Cherry, a boy who aspires to be the most famous lot lizard (a prostitute at a truck stop). Growing jealous of the beauty of his mother, he passes himself off as a female and enters the service of a pimp
who runs a truck stop brothel in West Virginia filled entirely with
young boys dressed as women. The story itself has many of the elements
of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (below), but has a
lighter, more humorous feel in its account of Cherry’s quest (such as
renaming himself Sarah after his mother) to become the greatest
"lizard" in the brothel. Much as in LeRoy’s earlier writing, the
protagonist falls upon bad times and faces exploitation and abuse at
the hands of another pimp. Surprisingly less dark than the short story
collection, the novel has a distinct mythical, Dickensian feel and relates a story of love of a child’s mother as expressed through his imitation of her.

You can still get the morning after pill in Formerly Nazi Occupied France.

but no yellow Hummers with PETA stickers and girls in the back seat with starry-night blue nails

Favorite member of the Grateful Dead?  Duhhh… Jerry of course, but just as you can’t fault George or Ringo, (or even Paul, I guess) it’s hard to find something bad to say about Bill or Mickey, Phil, Pigpen or Keith, or even Brent.  Or Donna "A chick singing with Grateful Dead?" Godchaux…   

But I just never felt any kind of affinity for Bob Weir.  I love his scratch throated "Me and My Uncle,"  and "Brown Eyed Women."   It has something to do with the performance.  The Dead wouldn’t have been the Dead without him, but I would trade every Bob Weir song ever recorded for a chance to hear Jerry Garcia live one time on the pedal steel behind Crosby, Stills and Nash as they croon "Teach Your Children…"

And if I was trading out every Bob Weir song ever recorded, I’d be dumping almost fifty Barlow lyrics, which doesn’t seem fair.  But Jerry’s dead, and Barlow isn’t and I don’t give a good goddamn about Bobby Weir.  But I can commend to you Barlow’s recent post, wherein he offers this as partial excuse for his nine month absence from the blogosphere:

It was certainly not that I beheld no phenomena worthy of comment. No,
indeed. Rather, I’ve had adventures that Baron von Munchausen would
have kept to himself. I beheld beauties so monstrous and horrors so
sublime that they exploded my attempted descriptions like Katrina
scattered seagulls. Moreover, they came upon me too quickly. (Or
perhaps I came upon them too quickly. I accumulated about 150,000
frequent flier miles in 2024, at one point circling the globe, with
significant stops in places like Kyoto, Geneva, and Charleston, in only
8 days.)

I began numerous BarlowSpams and blog entries only to have them
slam, half-written, into the next improbability, where, beached with
awe upon the present, I no longer felt like reporting yesterday’s
apocalypse.

The background music is wonderful.  They should do liner notes… not sure where Lou Reed stands on creative commons though.  Was that Lou Reed?  Anyway, I liked the one about "I could see the ship pulling in…"  Who did that, I wonder. 

The conversation is so personal that I felt like an eaves-dropper.  Thanks French man, thanks Madame, thanks soldier Kelli. Come home safe.