and then The Oasis was Enlightenment

To focus on to far a future is ultimately self defeating

I remember an ex-nun once giving me advice
she told me that I should spend more time considering
the next ten minutes versus the next ten days
it was sort of a, live-in-the-now/call-to-Jesus... if you will
my fragile adolescent mind
imagining something so bold
etched across it's vernacular
to see the sum of time as a mere span of seconds
if five minutes were a thousand years

It reminds me of someone shouting,
"don't look down."

You know how it goes
what's the first thing you do when someone tells you,
"Don't look down"
That's right... you look down.
Unless you're one of those folk
who has either

• A. everything figured out
• B. pisses perfection into a cereal bowl each morning
• C. isn't actually afraid of heights

and regardless which of those three you are
you still convalesce in the process...
but for those of us, however, who lay outside of such revered 'distinctions'
To carry our truths across the belly of a desert floor
with each mirage, a burden
a fixation,
that disrupts the causality of existence
we'd burst if not for these trappings
our enclosures don't speak kindly of the weather
but even those things pass... such is life
at a pace... just slow enough to not notice
creeping along with the speed of a 17-year cicada

67% Triacetate / 43% Nylon

I played Silvie's Lounge tonight, good crowd... quiet and attentive. The kind of crowd that meets you head on. It helped that a third of them were musicians.

To be honest, I had gone the good majority of my entire life without wearing triacetate and nylon together and I pick the most humid night of the year when I'm going to be standing under stage lights to (suddenly and surprisingly) break from that tradition. So epic fail in the wardrobe department on my part, but this is what happens when I'm allowed to dress myself. I did also discover that I can't finish up a twenty mile bike ride just two hours before a gig starts. The very idea to me is now reminiscent of a Ponce de Leon expedition.

So (as I was saying) my skin is just radiating heat... oozing. I contend that very few of you can understand or appreciate the way triacetate and nylon feel against sunburned skin... under stage lights. What could I have possibly done? That shirt had sat in my closet gathering dust for four years before making it's way onto the stage tonight. It wasn't to be resisted, after all it was the first time I can recall fitting into the shirt (as intended)... and if not for the heat, a fedora. Damn, this humidity.

One day off and then I'm back at The Abbey Pub. Good sound system (very loud).

I always find it a little surreal, the idea of playing to a room. It's a very strange and wondrous sort of give and take that one has with their audience... even if it's just two people (which it has been on occasion) and sometimes those shows are your best ones. Those are the no pressure gigs. The kind where you can say a few things that you otherwise wouldn't. Interestingly my crowds seem to be about 99% non-republican now... not surprisingly.


...and about the shirt, the shirt looked good.

It's A 21st Century Plague

Guns are really the plague of the 21st century to me. Fear is it's symptom. Paranoia is it's fever. It's like people see this in the news and they react one of two ways... one, if you're like me, you find it disgusting and you feel this whole culture we have in America is sick on the sauce of it's own violence... and the guns do nothing but make it easier for someone to facilitate that culture and you want all guns to be outlawed and banned, or two people freak and think the only answer is for everybody to be armed so that we can ooze and perpetuate fear. It's like a cancer... you can't just simply cut it out because it's spread everywhere...

Lost-and-found In Thought

Anxiety
you cold flame
I can feel your hands stifling me
the hard clasp struggling to maintain it's hold
to cast upon me the woes of worry
the pains of thoughts I can't hope to even control
I feel the bonds of madness
"I refuse you"
"I shall defeat you"
I deny your hands upon this throat
though you have found me
and as you dwell in my weakness
lingered upon the lesser states
your captions emblazoned upon my sweat
you, who wake me up 2 hours at a time
out of a dead sleep
dizzy and tingled
you don't deserve to rob me of my sanity
the pull and twinge of heart strings
I refuse your offer
the municipality of your palpitations
No...
Stop!
With your heavy-headedness
with your words spewing from my lips
your thought-control
I feel the cloak of your horror-tipped fingers
squeaking down the chalkboard of my last nerve
I refuse to accept thy invitation
to become trapped by fear's voice
to de-evolve myself in your plight
and succumb to this fight or flight
because I will soar
I will rise
and are rising...
I will overcome
I will succeed
I will empower my thoughts
I will infuse them with a positivity so bold
so harsh
so angelic by design
so as to completely overshadow
the tallest building in the Chicago skyline
I can beat this...

The Dis-Chord of Dreamland #1

...soap
quotations
self respect
new shoes
steampunk
celery stocks
opium
butterscotch
peppermint
fig leaf
Robatussion
pot leaf
silicon
decaffeinated
dopamine
dream...

Meanwhile at the debriding agent's office...

""Last chance - romance
forty years well spent
thinking about wherever else I thought we'd be
like burdens to a plan
with a stone in my hand
I'm going to skip it 'cross the water, baby""

""I wake up to see your smiling face
in a sun so bright
that it makes me see
that there's nothing left to say
when I see you glow that way
it must be something in the water, maybe""

""Hideaway streamers
on a lakeside hearse
Ding Dong Douglass
knocked him out in the first
it's a really silly tune,
a quirky little melody
'bout something in the water, baby""

""ripped all the weights
with the clothespin fingers
imagine your face, when you see
that no matter the look
it's something we took
every time we're in the water lately""

""who cares - no chance
judge ya at a first glance
and they'll tell you who else that they think you'd be
like burdens to a plan
with a stone in my hand
I'm going to skip it 'cross the water, baby""

...like an activist on a bus

That wander...
it's glide through a meadow
three inches from the ground,
like demons in heat
those road-weary leather-men
smelling of scorched Earth
and a thinly-vailed lust
which implies a repression of the singular
in a cadence of co-dependency
we've rested those zippers on ruby red slippers
while sipping the proverbial scotch
coffee break
off having some minute of your time
...and he'd say,

"fuck those boys"
"I fuckin' own Illinois"
"I remember when this shit was all forest and farmland..."
"...back when surviving meant a good tilled Earth"

and he starts carrying on
about how the lands been taken away

"by Freddy Mac and Fanny May"
"...and you best speak their names with God's reverence"
"like Pharaohs, you best-believe it"
"what chance do we have..."
"...now that corporations are people"

and he's stammering on
this perfect little ode to derision
Mr. Crazed Ratcheted Eyebrow... a skeptic
coming back from a talk he said
was with a God who "ain't" there:

"lovely conversation with oneself"
"a nice sort of meetin' where we discussed why it's necessary for science..."
"...to not become some superstitious religion"
"afterall, human beings always have to build their pyramids...
"we best make sure it be for the right reasons"