Not All Dogs Go To Heaven.

Eureka, Ca. - As a Lutheran minister of some thirty-three years, Owen Laythrom was well-versed in the art of fielding difficult questions of faith, and in mediating the various spiritual crises of his community. “I’ve heard just about everything”, says Laythrom, “from ‘why is there somethin’ rather than nothin’ in the universe’, to ‘does the appearance of an extra horn on my sheep mean he’s blessed by The Dark One’ to ‘is God a man or a woman?’” Laythrom additionally cites “counseling couples divided by infidelities” and successfully advising families “whose son or daughter might be addicted to them hip-hop singers or home-arcade contraptions” as among his more venerable accomplishments within the immediate community. He’d even once been asked to perform an exorcism, a request which he “thankfully declined; turns out it was just some kid stoned on LSD.”

But in the early months of the previous year, Laythrom asserts that he “began to discern something of an irregular metaphysical pattern” throughout the various inquiries ordinarily advanced by parishioners, perturbances he found himself alarmingly ill-equipped to answer with any confidence or coherency.

“People in our community are pretty attached to their pets, and so they began to ask, ‘will Mister Yippers make it into heaven?’ and so forth. I found myself at a complete loss. The scriptures have basically jack to say on the matter”. Laythrom added that these were “spiritually legitimate questions”, and that they began to inspire “religious rumblings within me, the likes of which I haven’t felt for some years”.

Moreover, the lifelong Lutheran began to wonder whether the soul of his own dog, Rusty, would be permitted entrance into the afterlife. “I just can’t imagine whiling away eternity without the company of my old buddy”, said Laythrom of his twelve-year old Golden Retriever. “But he ain’t always been the best dog, and from time to time has acted in a manner altogether unbefitting of the canine species, and one that’s about as close as a dog might get to sinnin’ in the eyes of Our Lord”. When asked to cite specific offenses, Laythrom highlighted “chewin’ up a good leatherbound Bible, and humpin’ on the legs of decent lady parishioners” as being among Rusty’s more spiritually-noteworthy transgressions.

“So I said to myself, there’s only one way to be sure”. Rusty was thus rendered officially heaven-bound on the morning of December sixteenth, a Sunday, in the presence of several dozen local witnesses, the first in a long series of animal baptisms to occur throughout the following months. “I just sleep better knowing poor ‘ol Rusty won’t spend the eons smoldering away in the unremitting agony of the abyss”.

Shortly thereafter, Laythrom, 62, claims he “saw my life’s work before me, clear as day”, and began to advertise his services in the classifieds of local newspapers. The first of his advertisements featured photographs of withered, defeated-looking canines, over which was imposed the phrase “Got Salvation? Baptize Your Best Friend Today.” Laythrom characterized the publics’ response as “immediate and overwhelming”, adding that “it was an idea whose time had apparently come. It probably seemed a ridiculous request to most, one they’d be pretty embarrassed to even suggest, ‘til they saw it bein’ offered. I just legitimized what everyone was thinking”. He claims that attendance of his services has swelled several-fold, an increase he believes is largely attributable to his commitment to animal salvation, and that he’ll soon require a larger venue in which to host the newfound initiates.

And Laythrom’s commitment to his professed calling is nothing short of blockbuster in scale. He proclaims that he “will not rest until every living organism on this earth has undergone a formal baptism”. When reminded that there exist at least several hundred trillion such individual organisms, and the practical considerations with respect to the time required to perform such an epic initiation, the Reverend replied “Picture John the Baptist, taller than Mount Shasta, plugged into a nuclear reactor and hopped-up on God’s Own Methamphetamine: that’s me.”

To his surprise, the Reverend was quickly inundated with requests to baptize not just dogs, but a host of other non-human companions. “A fella out in Cutten was raising crickets, for the specific purpose that they be fed to pet lizards and such. And that was apparently weighin’ on his mind some. Another family had just purchased a pony for their youngest daughter; as we couldn’t very well get ‘im into the tank, we had to do it down in the river.”

“I suppose it’s what they call the ‘domino effect’”, Laythrom pensively remarked. “You get to wondering about the fate of a dog’s soul, and it leads you to take into account that of a hamster, or maybe even a little sparrow. ‘Fore long, you move on down the line to cicadas and inchworms. By sundown, one starts reckoning the mortality of houseflies, house plants, dust mites, and all the rest, an’ I think, ‘hell Owen, what’ve you gotten yourself into’”? Following an uncomfortably long pause, the Reverend then added, “It’s just hard to know where exactly to draw the line.”

But many area animal rights advocates do not share Laythrom’s peculiar enthusiasm for animal salvation. In a recent press release, Barbara Nolan, a local spokesperson for the animal liberation group A.W.S.U.M. (Animals Without Supervision Undermining Mankind) stated: “it is a humiliating and unnatural thing to subject parakeets, horses, jackrabbits, dogs or any other animal to a Christian baptism. It is an affront to the autonomy and dignity of any living thing to impose upon it one’s own arcane, twisted spiritual delusion. Laythrom’s activities ought to inspire deep revulsion even among the most indifferent of individuals within our community, and local authorities and law enforcement officials should act immediately to end his campaign of terror against the voiceless individuals within our animal community.”

At last week’s city council meeting, Nolan further qualified her objections, characterizing Rev. Laythrom as “a confused and incorrigible Christian sociopath without scruples”, a “crooked wannabe messiah in the throes of early dementia”, and his services as “cruel and insane, shamelessly exploiting the gullibility of local believers while threatening the health and well-being of innocent, unconsenting animals”. Balancing her sternum upon the podium, she then held up before the assembled crowd her own canine, a beagle named Brownie, adorned in a miniature t-shirt which read “IF GOD WANTED ME UNDERWATER HE WOULD’VE GIVEN ME GILLS”.

And Laythrom’s circle of opposition extends well beyond the concerns of animal rights activists; indeed, among Laythrom’s more vocal critics have been members and representatives of various local Christian denominations, including a few of his own parishioners. Blaine Dickenson, Pastor of the local Seventh Day Adventists church remarked: “I heard about what ol’ Owen’s been doin’, the goats an’ all that, and cannot personally endorse such a thing. Me an’ Owen been friends and go back about thirty-five years, but giving the baptismal rites to a chicken is just about the most jackass thing I ever heard of.” Following a series of chuckles, he then added, “I guess it is pretty funny though.”

When confronted with questions concerning the ethical standing of his baptismal practice, Laythrom stood his ground: “Baptizing a cat is about as much fun as milking an upside-down cow”, said Laythrom, indicating the bluish, infected-looking scratches about his neck and forearms. “They tend to convulse violently, like they’re bein’ dipped in a fire, and they howl in a mournful sort of tone, like some diseased coyote. It’s like holy water on a demon; the more they twitch and moan, the more you can be certain that God’s medicine is takin’ effect. But no, they don’t seem to care for it a bit”.

Remarking specifically on the criticisms offered by Ms. Nolan, Laythrom noted that “Basically, our respective organizations are not at cross-purposes; we’re both interested in animal liberation. Their primary concern is to keep critters from dyin’ without necessity, and mine’s to ensure the necessity of their salvation after they’ve physically expired. And I don’t repudiate them for their neglect of the soul.”

But perhaps the most unlikely and remarkable of components attending Rev. Laythrom’s work is that his services are performed pro bono, without exception. “If one feels compelled to contribute, I tell ‘em, ‘wait ‘til we pass the plate around on Sunday’; last damn thing I need is to be called a charlatan or profiteer”, he said.

“I suppose that if I were of a bit more of an entrepreneurial disposition, I might well parlay this into the generation of some wealth. But I guess I might prefer to squeeze through the eye of a needle later, rather than sleep poorly now. If I were charging folks, I’d feel inclined to provide them an absolute guarantee that they’ll be reunited on high with their little companions, which I cannot, in any good faith, present. Instead, I offer up an insurance policy, of sorts: as far as God’s concerned, I reckon we did our best.”

Joe of the Golden Arches.

Sometime in 1998, a man entered a McDonald’s establishment in Santa Monica. It was a sunny Wednesday, thirty-nine-cent hamburger day, and he purchased roughly one hundred burgers, loaded them into a large sac and exited the business. He then claimed one of the medians that separate east and westbound traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard as his own personal pitcher’s mound, and calmly unwrapping each individual burger, began to hurl them at full speed upon the windshields of passing motorists. He did not gently toss the sandwiches; he paused thoughtfully between pitches, maybe enjoying the swell of anticipation among the thousands of imaginary attendees of his mental stadium, wound up dramatically and whipped those fuckers like his career depended on it. It took nearly an hour before anyone summoned the courage to call the authorities, much less confront their burger-wielding assailant; he was a huge man, and most people in Los Angeles are afraid of everything. When the police arrived, the man made a gallant effort to fend them off, but sadly had exhausted his supply of beef-ammo after only a few additional fastballs and sliders, at least two of which impacted directly the well-kept uniform of Deputy Duane Fischer. The man was subsequently tazed and fell in a twitching undignified heap of yellow wrappers and ketchup.

For me, it was an act of greatness and of bravery, completely without supplication or compromise. It is not a thing which may be visited in one’s spare time, hung, framed, or purchased; he made both the media and the median his medium. It represents everything that is just and valuable in terrorism. He made the jackass anchors at KCAL-9, along with their viewing audience, his unwitting collaborators, and McDonald’s his official sponsor. And that he did not bother to call it art, or anything else, rendered the act all the more authentically artful. He did not cavort with hipster grad students throughout the interstices of “up-and-coming neighborhoods”, or kiss ass through crowds of nepotistic gallery owners, shamefully begging for an opportunity to show; he wordlessly took on the fucking LAPD with forty dollars-worth of burgers, and never asked for a thing in return.

In the present age, the bar could not be much lower; most people will applaud just about anything, so long as they are told that it is officially laudable. No one better understood this than that shit-slithering king of all modern hucksters, L. Ron Hubbard; the mark perceives value only in things or services for which he must pay an excessive fee. Visitors of museums would like to believe that their fifteen dollars was not pissed away viewing scores of innocuous trees stenciled in garish pastels or other sorts of inert shit that so closely resembles a Target commercial, and so suspend their critical faculties and content themselves with exchanging a few forced pleasantries concerning the neat uniformity of the collection, or struggling to unearth in the empty works a poignancy which simply is not there. Next time, sucker-punch the docent, demand an immediate refund and spend your fifteen dollars printing vinyl bumper stickers which read “My Son Butt-Fucked Your Honor Student”, and apply them liberally to the bumpers of strangers’ cars under cover of night.

And our hero did not need a cause, but only an occasion. He did not insulate himself behind a curtain of like-minded individuals shaking identical signs. Anyone can do that, and despite the unoriginality and evident uselessness of protest, most would maintain that because his little gesture lacked any direction or theme, it was of less value than if it were clearly conjoined to messages of vegetarianism, or anti-consumerism or anti-militarism. I do not agree. That his actions were so unwaveringly absurd, so obviously disconnected from the specificities of faction, association or even self-concern, place them squarely within the non-category of timeless art. In that act, he was bare and abandoned, and no one was at or even on his side. It is easy to petition on behalf of Tibetans, whales, and polar bears, or conversely against wars, the IMF, an imaginary New World Order, and so on. But it requires guts and grit maybe something like genius to hurl steaming dead animals at police officers. To be sure, those cows did not die in vain.

I'm not sure why McDonald's eventually discontinued thirty-nine cent hamburger Wednesdays. But I'd like to believe it had something to do with him.

Meditation on Children and the Woods #1.

You drive down the interstate, a long vanishing highway columned in trees; it’s nice to think that there exist such undisturbed swaths of forest, areas that remain relatively untouched. But just beyond that calm facade of trees are the children; they are the area wildlife in this respect; it is rare that you see them, but you know they’re there. And the forest is where they go to do the things they cannot do in the company of adults, the things adults would prefer to believe are beyond the capacities of most children to perform. But children are capable of most anything.

Their resourcefulness is evident throughout the woods; it is children who are responsible for the engineering of that bridge, that overpass of dubious constitution. These trees conceal outposts, tentative little safe houses, coded points of rural intersection known only to privileged initiates. Teenagers much too old to be frequenting or building tree houses erected that lofty fortress, and risk life and limb just to get high and recline with true friends within the suspended safety of its reclaimed plywood walls. The trails themselves are an emergent result of furtive teenage pattering, the product of several generations of committed partying, permanent recordings of flight paths away from the tyranny of structure and parental observation.

In the Midwest, all children are afraid of the woods. At a very young age, one learns the fundamentals of forestry: the woods are where bodies are dumped and buried, are safe-havens for deranged homicidal recluses who wait patiently in their rotten gullies for the chance, late-afternoon passing of some naïve schoolboy along the trail. If profane rituals and arcane conjurings are to be performed anywhere, it will be in the woods. The little mind of the child has assimilated the lessons of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Evil Dead and Friday the 13^th long before it gets to knowing much else. That Thing which prompts one to abruptly flee the basement and ascend the staircase with such blank abandon, That Goddamned Thing so nourished by filth and dead leaves, It which so detests the light; the forest is its natural home, and while in the forest, there is no upstairs, no mommy and no nightlight.

Whether real or imagined, these felt conditions prime the forest with a kind of charged flammability, a readiness to accommodate the most unorthodox of childish impulses; beneath this canopy of euphoria, decisions are made in quite a different fashion. Because it is anticipated that nearly anything may unfold within its shadowy perimeters, activities which transpire in the forest tend to collect into rather unordinary forms. Children step into a world in which they genuinely believe that ordinary laws of physicality have been somehow suspended, and then conduct themselves accordingly; sightings of packs of children dressed in black robes of their own fashioning are not at all uncommon in the forests of the Midwest. Their parents and teachers are operationally deceased and they are guided about by a weird melody that is all their own; the agents who patrol and enforce the border between the dead and the living may not exercise their authority in this autonomous playroom. Their little paranoias, their homegrown mythologies built in cooperation from anecdote, pagan holiday and horror cinema, generate a little wooded alternative into which they may step and watch the ordinary dissolve into a kind of nothingness.

It could be that parents are able to quietly intuit the danger inherent in permitting free-range of the child’s imagination, which may in part account for the existence and popularity of the Chuck E. Cheese franchise. After all, they were once children themselves. Better to do the imagining for them. Better to create an environment of safe, animated critters with nice songs and innocuous messages, rather than license them to unleash monsters of their own reckless fashioning upon a neatly-ordered world of etiquette and ethics. Better to assuage those ever-ripe imaginative facilities with safe approximations of the supernatural before they have the opportunity to discover their latent gifts and powers. At all costs, insert something between your children and the forest, lest they dispose of you in it.

The first euphoric sparks of individual freedom are born here, in the woods, and the extent or range of the free will is measured in transgression. All the more evident and, moreover, all the more undeniably authentic is my freedom when it purposively violates standards that even I appreciate and hold dear. It notes an action that is fundamentally objectionable, antithetical to all reflex and instinct, and then delights in its macabre ability to deliberately perform that action in the face of such natural impediment. Once originally untethered from the authority of parents, schools and churches, the mind simply wonders what else might lie further down this corridor of freedom, and is thus apt to indefinitely posit all sorts of ways in which it might more fully realize a sort of transcendent autonomy.

It’s herein that we locate the attraction to and appreciation of the serial murderer, and how this character of tabloids and horror fiction is elevated to the status of hero in the mind of the forest-dwelling child. The serial killer is, like the child, wordlessly appreciative of his predicament in the world, a predicament which he shares with each of us. God has abandoned us, and any effort you expend toward enriching your existence will be indifferently erased upon death. But he parts ways with us in that the serial murderer fails to observe the conditions of any sort of social contract, and views such pedantry as a trifling impediment standing between himself and immediate gratification. But he is not bound by any doctrine, nor is he the servant of his own conscience. It’s true: he obtains pleasure from killing, but not necessarily from the process of killing itself as such; the euphoria consists exclusively in the complete and unrestricted fulfillment of individual freedom, and the means of acquiring such fulfillment are of little concern. The particular takes precedent over the general; my little gesture of independence will secure my own independence, and your independence is your own business. Fuck the implications it might have for the social contract. In this moment, in this gesture, I am wholly free, and precisely how that action might dovetail with convention is of absolutely no concern to one who endeavors to be completely free. He understands that his actions will not only completely destroy the humanity of another, but will concomitantly destroy himself, and yet he proceeds. Thus, the forests are populated and ruled not simply by little miniature Jason Voorhees, little Dahmer Juniors, but also by little Raskolnikovs and junior Meursaults.

The forests are a refuge for high school burnouts, where jean-jacketed and acne-faced children go to drink warm beer and fight. It is in the forests that they acquire their first taste of liberty, bask in the joy of their first and best inebriation. They begin to drink and smoke more than their little bodies will permit them, and become invested with notions of impenetrability and providence. They conduct themselves in a manner that is loud and violent, they show off and fight and vomit. Rarely do such events escape the detection of local police; being teenagers, they lack the facilities of tact and subterfuge required to conceal such activities from the bored, meddlesome ears of nearby residents. More importantly, it is a statistical improbability that such ostentation will escape the detection of a scythe-wielding madman, who, smelling of dead chrysanthemum and of leaves, will punish the improprieties of these wood-dwelling teens with dismemberment.

It’s under a canopy of deciduous trees that they clumsily part ways with virginity and existence; down by the crick a young couple gets to knowing each other. They sip warm foam from red plastic cups and over the bonfire take in the complex dance of shadows across the face of their beloved. They are dizzy and possessed of lust and euphoria, struggling to craft sentences and gestures of studied, refined care, treading lightly in fear of discouraging the interest of the other. They stumble with their words, they manufacture little accidents and justifications intended to reduce the physical space between them, they entwine glacially, over a period of hours, confess to each other in carefully weighed phrases, and cross thresholds as the emerging sun thrusts into relief their dishevelment, their shared disrepair. The light gurgle of the brook gets etched into the memory of the head just before it is severed by the dull blade of an axe.

Wasn't it a Good Year?

In keeping with the popular tradition of annual list-making, I thought I’d compile a little directory of my own. I’d not heard too many records last year; it’s not a point of pride so much as it is an admission of ignorance. So here’s a short inventory of my more memorable excursions of 2007, easily among the more memorable years of my life. Enjoy.

10) Peoria, IL: fortunately, there’s no place like home. The only allure this place retains for me is that it remains home to so many of my best friends, and so merits the occasional homecoming. In 2007, my ordinarily bittersweet biannual return degenerated to the purely bitter. With each subsequent visit, there are fewer persons and things present that I once loved, and a great deal more Applebee’s, Chili’s, and all the rest of that shit that sucks the character from a town.

I ain’t mad ‘atcha, Peoria. It’s just that I so intimately and irreparably associate you with misery and despair, with broken homes and bad dreams, with cold nights and poverty, slow change and false starts, withered trees and sad old crumbling tree houses, a bulldozed childhood and prick stepfathers and dead mothers. Nothing personal.

9) Las Vegas, NV: my sense of humor is such that I may endure a few days in nearly any place without ever entirely falling to pieces; worst case scenario: we get as piss drunk as possible and laugh it off. Granted this is harder to do in places like Amarillo or Dallas (most of my family now reside in Texas for some inexplicable reason) than it is in most others. Despite being a fairly protean creature, two and-a-half days in Vegas was about as much as I could stand. I am just not a Vegas kind of guy. I detest phoniness, and Las Vegas is nothing if it is not substitution, approximation; the basest sort of king-size abstraction. As such, the phoniest among us are probably the most invigorated in its company. I find the same to be true of present-day Manhattan; the family-oriented (whatever the fuck that is) corporate retail stores that now occupy the former residences of dildo shops and porn theaters in Times Square to my mind represent a transgression considerably more vulgar than the alleged profanities they’ve since displaced.

Las Vegas represents a great deal of what is wrong with our world; a parasitic little canker in the middle of the desert, a fake-ass little oasis of idiocy that robs suckers of their dough and Americans of their precious water supply. If any place in America can be said to actively endorse a policy of non-thinking while simultaneously promoting ruin, it’s this one. But it is romantic, in the obvious sense of the term: being in Vegas feels approximately like how one feels when watching popular films set in Vegas. You feel that immediate, ersatz kinship with the celebrities you’ve so often seen engaged in hosts of glamorous activities about the strip, and that connectivity and correspondence makes you feel like you’re somewhere, or maybe somebody. But you’re not, and nobody’s paying much attention. The reality is considerably less-romantic: septuagenarians who've never enjoyed the profit of a basic statistics course, chain-smoking and losing their social-security check at the slots, objectively poor-ass black dudes* up from L.A., embarrassing themselves by pretending to be rich for a day, parroting sad rap-video platitudes like “yay-uh, Vegas baby. This how we do it in Vegas”. But as I mentioned, even a place this repellent could not stop me from having a ball.

8) Puerto Nuevo, Mexico: beautiful coastline, a mere three hours from L.A., and one can gorge oneself on lobster tail for next to nothing. Then, if you’re feeling like a complete douchebag, you can drive up to Rosarito and dance to shitty MTV-style trance music in foam-filled nightclubs and be physically assaulted by barmen who carry around bottles of Cuervo in leather gun holsters. Suit yourself.

7) Solvang, CA: Solvang is a little village twenty minutes inland from Santa Barbara, whose architecture is intended to invoke the look and feel of Copenhagen, or perhaps a smaller Danish town. It tends to attract older, moneyed California families, maybe some Danish tourists, and sometimes myself. This was my third visit, despite swearing to never again return after my first. There is absolutely nothing to do here but wander about and drink good California wine, which rather suits me. The entire place shuts down at 8:00 P.M.; grossly premature by most standards. But after a full range of tastings at seven or eight decent wineries and a severely intoxicated girlfriend who will not cease cursing loudly en español in a crowded 4-star restaurant, calling it a day around eight begins to make some sense. Go for the buzz, stay for the Aebleskivers.

6) Big Bear, CA: my good friend Monica has a timeshare (see: glorified hotel) in Big Bear, so she, myself, Jasmin and Fernando spent a few days there; I believe we were the only Latinos in town. Oh wait: I am not Latino. I am Italian. And I happily abdicated the German portion of my lineage upon learning that I am part Jew. I mean, have you seen The Pianist? Have you properly assimilated the lessons of Black Book or Downfall? It is quite enough that I’m closely related to Giovanni Gentile, positivist philosopher who authored Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism, and was raised (to the extent that I could be said to have been “raised”) a Catholic. Retail stores make me paranoid because I’m certain that the staff necessarily suspects me of shoplifting, and I’d certainly flunk the simplest of polygraphs administered to me. Old Guilt is like a phobia; it translates broadly and is entirely unresponsive to reason.

Anyway, Big Bear is largely forgettable; its landscapes pale in comparison to hosts of other lake-riddled mountains throughout California. Though the company was sublime.

5) Valley of Fire State Park, NV: about an hour outside of Las Vegas, you’ll find a little side road that leads to a series of striking Mars-red sandstone formations jutting out of the desert floor. It’s an inclement area, largely without shade and water, but perfect if you’re seeking a bit of solitude. Though strange and dizzying, I wouldn’t qualify it as properly lunar; it pisses me off when travel writers so frequently refer to terrestrial landscapes as being lunar, as if they have some personal familiarity with the topography of the fucking moon. I suppose it pisses me off because they are paid so handsomely to write so poorly and I am paid absolutely nothing to write rather well. But it even fails as a metaphor; the most extraordinary and wildly varied scenes are to be found exclusively here on earth. If I were offered the opportunity to attend an expedition of any length to any known planet, or any of its satellites, I’d immediately reject the proposal; all known celestial bodies are a fucking bore when contrasted with the diversity of earth. The Gobi desert of Mongolia, the Atacama of Chile, the Uyuni salt flats of Bolivia; all are commonly referred to as lunar but are considerably more dynamic and startling than the moon. I know all this because I have actually been to the moon, and I can verify the very real presence of horses galloping and throwing up hard white clouds of regolith.

Anyway, the campsites are deeply recessed into the cliff sides and are remarkably soundproof. I spent some evenings building unfairly huge fires on the desert floor, thinking about the Indians who once dwelt here and the wealth of petroglyphs I’d photographed throughout the day. And drinking heavily.

4) Idylwild, CA: a charming little half-town two hours from L.A. There are a couple of pubs here, should you care to imbibe the hard-luck stories of local rural-folk. Spent the first night in a forest cabin, and the next two in a tent. I was a bit startled by the considerable presence of meth-rattled panhandlers here; who’d expect to repeatedly confront such a soiled constituency in the middle of the woods? And while we’re on the subject: why are all the worst drugs, the physically most-pernicious, also the most addictive? You never hear of any kids addicted to acid or Salvia divinorum (please do not bring up my activities in the summer of 1994). When DMT or an analogous tryptamine-based substance becomes a habit-forming convention within a given population, Philip K. Dick will be formally recognized as the prophet that he was.

3) Zion National Park, UT: most National Parks are such that a sign is not required to alert you that you’ve breached its perimeter; the stark contrast of Zion’s colorful plateaus emerging outside the already-gorgeous Virgin River Valley are evidence enough, as it’s clear you’ve landed in a rather special place. But thanks for the signage all the same. There was a little grocer in the park that sold cleverly-antagonistic microbrews like “Polygamy Porter: Why Have Just One?” and “Evolution Ale (add your own subtitle)”. I love that in a state as socially-stifling as Utah, there exist institutions within the National Park system willing to openly participate in a beer-based taunting of Mormonism. And what the fuck kind of name is “Mitt” anyway?

2) Five Dried Grams of Psilocybe cubensis in my living room, Los Angeles, CA: ask and ye shall, with a bit of patience, receive. For my birthday, I never ask for iPods or books or hookers or sweaters; I never ask for anything but drugs; any of the entheogenic variety. I did this for several years, and finally received the motherload. As I’d not taken any appreciable quantities of psilocybin in roughly two years, I thought that I might compensate this deficit by testing my boundaries, which meant consuming something in the way of five or six grams. I selected the terraced, staggered-dose method, piling them on over a period of two or three hours. It proved to be among the roughest of all psychedelic episodes within the index, considerably more difficult than my weird engagement with a little Yoda-esque Mazatec shaman in the cold mountains of northern Oaxaca.

I can report to you with some confidence that our ordinary experience of this world accounts for only a slight margin of what it really is; I have been witness to events that were not the product of some memorial amalgam, some abstract mosaic of previous experience. I could be wrong about its objectivity, but impressions of this rather gripping magnitude are a bit difficult to shrug off as simple neurological aberration. My favorite analogy is that of the television: imagine that you’ve been blessed with only the few shitty UHF channels; your model of television is necessarily restricted to these scant few impressions. To my mind, high-dose psychedelic experience interrogates a margin of objective reality not ordinarily available to our common-day apprehension; it represents a shocking introduction of Direct HDTV into a field of grainy, uni-dimensional, antennae-based wandering. Not to sound too Charles Dexter Ward**, but, I saw unmentionable things.

1) Vietnam: though I’ve already imparted much of this tale at length, I suppose the inclusion of a proper epilogue hadn’t occurred to me, and might be in order. What else can I say: the people were people, like any other place. Sometimes they were genuinely kind, and in other instances they were the same difficult pricks you’d confront anywhere. The food was incomparable. And there is always an inherent excitement in leaving your country of origin. I think it says a great deal about the malleable and forgiving constitution of the Vietnamese people that they so readily accept us as Americans, in lieu of the fact that we so profoundly fissured and decimated their culture.

But really, it was the being there that made it so special; that quality of participation and immersion that is not reducible to any of the surrounding constituents. In the moment of your joy or your discomfort, these sensations are not predicated on any single quality, or any difficult synthesis of them. In fact, my most treasured memories of Vietnam proceed from situations of the most classically-unfavorable variety: flood, instability, uncertainty, injury, shitty accommodations, and chance of death. Massage and museums and sailing are things you sign up for, but I most enjoyed the chance occurrences that could not have been anticipated. The best experiences are claimed not through money, but through a sometimes difficult commitment to gregariousness, or a sometimes undignified letting go.

Social Traveling is exciting not because it allows one to reinvent oneself in the company of others, but for precisely the inverse reason: you may proceed as yourself and on your own terms in a manner that it is often difficult to accomplish at home, in the near-constant presence of friends and associates who will scrutinize and weigh your behaviors. Strangers allow you the rare opportunity to reveal your authentic self before them; you will likely never again cross paths, and so you have nothing whatsoever to lose. In doing so, this authentic self is consequently disclosed to the superficial self, and you’re all the richer for it.

Eureka

01/06/08

* I love black people.

**either you get it or you don’t. Expect an H.P. Lovecraft-based flow chart to follow shortly.

Jesus Wept.

I thought that while I have finally shared with you my last LP, I might just as well share the fruit of another silly project (please understand: I’m about eight beers into this operation; mistakes and embarrassments will certainly follow).

In the summer of 2003, Jeremy Kerner and I decided that we would host a Public Access TV program, one that would feature J.K. and myself as amicable but crack-brained-paranoid eschatological Christian televangelists. It would be called Prayer-A-Dise, and its highlights would include performances by several prominent Christian acts (bands created and portrayed by he and I), as well as some ridiculous infomercials for products and services of a decidedly spiritual strain. We took the endeavor pretty seriously, and attended the Public Access workshop at the local cable provider in Hollywood.

While the premiere episode was never actually broadcast, it was completed, along with material for a second installation. My technological ineptitude is such that I have failed to understand how to render DVDs to any uploadable format; thus, the unfortunate absence of available video. In lieu of this, I thought I might share with you a bit of the audio from the program, as I feel it’s reasonably funny as a series of self-contained little songs and sketches. They are as follows:

Thud of Grace: at the time of this project’s conception, I was sleeping on Jeremy and Cory’s couch, and we all spent some quality time watching the Trinity Broadcasting Network. One afternoon, a particularly animated female evangelist was engaged in retelling the story of Magdalene’s unfair stoning; she referred to the thud of the stones upon the whore’s physical person as a “thud of grace”. And we of course could not just simply let this go. We got drunk and immediately formed a band, Luther Honeycutt and the Sunshine Boys, and in a single evening, we wrote and recorded the tune in its immaculate entirety. Our rendering has nothing whatever to do with Magdalene, morality or fistfuls of whirled pebbles; ours is rather a Revelations-based admonition of consequences concerning the impending apocalypse. The video was shot in Malibu Canyon, and on a basketball court in North Hollywood (I’ll post the video as soon as you explain the process to me).

Tofucious: the Info-Guru: later that year, in autumn, I’d acquired an apartment in Koreatown. As I am virtually unemployable, I set about writing songs and comedy sketches, thinking that I might be someday well-paid for my retarded ruminations. Among the characters I gave birth to around that time was the inimitable Tofucious; a bandanaed old soul who offers Mankind an effective exit from its inevitable ruin through a simple acceptance of a tofu-based sacrament. Like most spiritual compensations, it doesn’t make a grain of sense, but I suppose that’s its point. All shot at my old place on the corner of Kenmore and Beverly.

Footprints: this one was recorded for Episode II, and the well-conceived video was sadly never executed. This piece was to be delivered as a kind of perversion of the original Footprints tale; instead of the Good Lord thoughtlessly carrying the man throughout a period of serious moral transgressions, as he does so reflexively in the original piece, the Lord elects to instead simply drop the narrator, allowing him to fend for himself. Go Fuck Yourself, the lord says. We wrote the song together, with myself as the voice of the protagonist, and Jeremy as the voice of God (you’ll get it). This one was easily the most fun; note my drunken Gilmour-esque solo immediately following the middle-eight; it’s way off, but still a pretty rippin’ lead.

There are other pieces, some of which you’ll later enjoy by way of video; but others that are purely conceptual. There’s always The Scroll Ranger, a metal-detector whose wiring has been modified so as to detect only sacred parchment-based texts beneath the earth's crust.

Anyway, Happy New Year to all of you. Y’all’re the best.

Don't Say I Never Give You Anything.

Upon my return from Guatemala to Los Angeles in the summer of 2003, Jeff Gregory and I immediately began work on a follow-up to our 2000 LP The Skies Are Filled with Information. We plunged right into the endeavor without any pretext, architecture, or even an imagined trajectory. We’d both since accumulated a fairly dense back catalog of songs, and went about the task of selecting what we felt might be a decent collection of appropriately-paired tunes, making demos and preliminary recordings as we went along. We ultimately decided on a considerably shorter album, and settled on ten songs: seven songs of my own, and three of Jeff’s. As our earlier efforts (the LP and following EP) were of a decidedly electronic character, we naturally began by collecting our organically-penned compositions and translating them into a variety of possible synthetic backdrops; essentially, programming patterned chord and rhythm structures that corresponded to the original strumming and tinkering, just as we did with our first LP. It took at least a year before we recognized that the old methodologies were not at all accommodating of the songs themselves.

So we then elected to start from scratch and make a properly-organic record. We enlisted long-time pal and collaborator Cory Flanagan on drums, and he performed beautifully. The synthetic element was relegated to at least a marginal role on this record; little flourishes of synth here and there. And of course the strings are canned; I am without the resources or the discipline to contract chamber ensembles. Everything else is pure: the upright Steinway is played throughout by myself and by Jeff. He and I of course shared guitar and vocal duties, and friends Jeremy Kerner, Jeff Phelps, and Matt Shane lent contributions of guitar and toy piano here and there. Hushdrop John San Juan may or may not be in there somewhere as well.

To make a rather long story short, what you’re about to hear ought rightly to be thought of as the three-year labor of two distinct records: the finished product was preceded by a full-length, awkwardly-danceable electronic abortion.

It was a long, difficult process; at the time, Jeff and I were simultaneously lending our efforts to running a record label. I’d get out of class everyday at 12:35 and take the subway to Jeff’s studio in The Valley, and we’d work most days ‘til midnight or so. Often, Jeff and Lawren would kindly lend me their couch for the night, as recording was always attended by a great deal of Tecate and Jack Daniel’s. The evening would almost necessarily terminate in a cloud of marijuana smoke, frozen pizzas and ZZ Top, and while exhausting, it was always fun. If upon first listen the record presents itself as a relatively stripped-down, minimal sort of photograph, it’s only because we spent such a great deal of time and effort arguing and omitting superfluities.

I suppose there is some requisite element of hubris involved in this sort of post; but I feel that this record is worthy of at least a bit of consideration. And it's been a long time coming. After making several records with a host of bands, it’s the first that occasioned in me a little sigh; it’s the record I’d always wanted to make. I felt I’d finally struck a long-sought balance of complexity and simplicity, between harmony and dissonance, hard vs. soft, and all the rest of it. Lyrically, while imperfect, I do feel that it represents something of a graduation. Not much of it makes me cringe, which, as a lyricist, is about as much as one might pray for. And the production is exquisitely sharp. Jeff insists it’s the best record he’s ever made, and this is, y’know, the dude who made much of Corvette Summer.

So anyway, here is Holding Hands With Prince Vacuum, in it’s entirety, for your scrutiny, criticism, and hopefully, for your enjoyment.

The Prints of Whales

42

Hand of Evil

Olly Olly Oxygen Free

Different Plane

Running Backward Fast

M is for Memory

Observation Alters

Invisible Soldiers

No Such Thing

A New Career in a New Town.

My first week here in Eureka was spent living in a hotel, maundering about town in despair, waiting for property management companies to phone me with some good news. I drank as much of the local beer as I could manage, and enjoyed locally-produced television commercials, the sort of which feature the proprietor and his family stacking presents in Christmas-elf regalia, or the staff of some retail store dressed as farm animals, or whatever. It feels a lot like my hometown of Peoria; much of the blue-collar social character is the same. There is a pronounced element of white trash here; abject, homely women with poor dentition and too many offspring, those who think it permissible to wear an insulated flannel beneath an oversized Raiders jacket, the type who sees no transgression in walking publicly with a pungent, half-smoked Marlboro Light tucked behind her ear. The architecture is much the same, though here there are many more Victorian homes, and a charming little downtown area. Only it’s, you know, on the ocean and nestled within the redwood forest. And I’m a complete stranger here.

And then there are the hippies: few things unnerve me more than persons who cling steadfastly to a manner of living or a system of ideas but cannot offer any argument of their philosophies beyond inanely-rhymed, platitudinous slogans. They fail to comprehend that their little gestures toward establishing individuality, whether in the fields of ideas or in fashion, do little else but overtly reinforce their absurd uniformity; I’m no zoologist, but they appear to look, think and act alike. When they are not begging for money or cigarettes on the sidewalks, they sit self-righteously on corners with cardboard signs that censure commuters for driving cars and eating meat. In my estimation, these worthless stabs at protest obviously constitute a colossal squandering of precious caloric intake that easily eclipses the sins of omnivorousness committed by ordinary, well-meaning car owners. I do not own a car, but they can fuck themselves all the same.

There are actual seasons here, and tonight it is freezing. In keeping with Local Ordinance #615-23, I have grown my beard to meet minimum length requirements. But I will risk the threat of a fine by refusing to comply with unjust legislation that requires me to smoke marijuana, engage in impromptu hacky-sack circles with strangers, and get my hair professionally dreadlocked by part-time glassblowers.

I barely made it to the end of Palahniuk’s Choke; some trusted friend ought to explain the value of nuance and shade to this man. Celebrated as he is, I view Chuck as the Jerry Bruckheimer of contemporary fiction; he locates little catch-phrases, clever little lists and twists and other trite devices, and repeats these techniques ad nauseum throughout the length of the text. At the risk of sounding pedantic: extreme hyperbole and exaggeration cease to be effective when they alone constitute the core of a given work; he’s like that annoying kid in the lunchroom, religiously driven to grossing out the others. Anyway, it is stenciled from precisely the same template that produced Fight Club, and should bore the shit out of anyone who can distinguish good writing from “a high-octane thrill ride”. Sorry Charlie.

I saw a large herd of elk, about twenty-five of them, grazing not too far from my house. I stood about eight feet away from one of the three bulls, and it was something special. I’m roughly twenty minutes from the National Park, and will probably spend many of my weekends up there, among the trees. The trees here are the largest and oldest living things on earth, comparable only to the sequoias in King’s Canyon to the southeast. To sit against a thing that has been metabolizing consistently for three thousand years, if fully considered, is a pretty dizzying thing. Before the living Christ and the living Buddha, this here critter was enjoying its adolescence. It appears stolid and inert, but yet it is not; the quick scale of our immediate perception is incapable of appreciating the long dynamic flux of this beast. Our apprehension of trees is essentially autistic. I am reminded of several passages from Whitman’s incomparable “Song of Myself”:

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much?

Have you reckon'd the earth much?

&

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands,

How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

And I no more than anyone else. It is when I get out of the house, out among the trees that I remember the full effectiveness of nature, its indifferent ability to erase my trivial worries. You climb a hill in the morning and remember that you have a body, you lose your breath somewhere upstream and your pedestrian concerns are immediately supplanted by a sensation that does not translate easily into words. Awe is among its components, as is a kind of wordless, healthy anxiety. It’s that thing which good poetry works so tirelessly to approximate. But as Huxley noted, by way of Korzybski, even the finest of recipe books cannot compare to the worst of meals*.

I don’t know a single soul here, and find myself extremely lonely. That I can’t afford to come home (wherever that is) for Christmas only adds to this dullness. There are several good bookstores, and a nice little boardwalk that runs along Humboldt Bay; you can stroll in the wind and watch the little fishing vessels taxiing in and out of the marina. But these are rather poor substitutions for real human contact. Said another way, there’s nobody here to go drinking with. Whoever they are, they say that the act of drinking alone is a sure symptom of alcoholism. This little nugget of sagaciousness was probably the invention of some humorless, shit-brained Christian who likely has never enjoyed an original thought throughout the entirety of his dolorous little joke of a life. Some people are so foolishly concerned with health and wholeness and positivity, essentially with life-extension, that they neglect to perform the emotional leg-work required to understand why life is even worth living, to say nothing of extending it. These are difficult questions, and necessarily require the intercession of liquid courage; it loosens the tongue precisely because it first loosens the mind. As Kierkegaard so well understood, to be human is not a fact, but a task. And I feel somehow enriched, like something approaching truly human, when I expose myself to ruin.

The Extropian nerd-types will write excitedly about recent developmental horizons in life-extension technologies, but they must answer: why? What will you do with an additional two hundred years? Will you spend your bonus centuries sitting before a computer, salivating through an abstract fog of miniaturized devices and the poorly-feigned moans of amateur pornography?** Nonbeing may be less rich in content, but as a volitional selection it does at least not fall within the categorical parameters of pointlessness.

This particular place is for me a strange place to be; I am accustomed to warmth and friends, to a cacophony of strange dialects and clogged freeways. But then to be is a strange place to be. I wonder what I’m doing here, and then I temper that question with the larger: how and why is there a here for me to be in? What the fuck is the universe doing here? Or, if you prefer, what are the multiverses doing here? But this must all by now have the ring of familiarity. I sit out on my new porch, seized by insomnia and smoking cigarettes at three A.M. It is completely silent. I observe couples of stubborn, bumbling raccoons and the failed furtive attempts of my new neighbors to peep on me through little rents in their curtains, and I remember the old “Monsters are Due on Maple Street” episode of The Twilight Zone, a wonderful little meditation on collective paranoia. Their suspicions are probably right on the mark; I am searching and I am signaling. For what, I cannot yet guess.

Eureka

12/14/07

*paraphrased, as my books remain in boxes.

**on a related note, for a little foray into the dystopian horrors of life-extension, Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, while not his best, is certainly worth reading.