sweet nothing

“nuthin'” is exactly what i’ve gotten done this morning and there’s hardly anything “sweet” about it. the only time that nothing adds up to something is when you’re doing it on purpose, like say to clear your mind of clutter-accumulation or to avoid going to work. when you’re actually trying to be PRODUCTIVE in one way or another and STILL end up with bupkis then you’re just screwed, you can’t get that time back nohow and it’s hard to rationalize spending large chunks of one’s time on an endeavor that comes up empty-handed often enough to raise the question of PRIORITIES. like i got up a little before 6 and came in here to work on a couple of pieces of art and when you’re doing stuff like that it means that you’re NOT doing a lot of OTHER stuff, shit like trying to make money or writing to your senator or tackling income inequality or simply helping those in need, you’re not doing any of those good things and so when your otherwise-focused attention nets you a big hollow goose-egg to show for it you can call that a wasted opportunity, chum, and too many of those and you wake up one morning to discover that you’ve become a bitter old sourpuss with a drinking problem or a drug addiction or both. and that’s no way to live.
jeff called me from japan and he liked the 4-track stuff that i sent him and he still wants to put it out which is something of a relief, in the process of listening to my songs over and over again while doing the mixing i became pretty hyper-critical of the whole shebang and was having a hard time getting past the gnawing sensation that i’ve been hauling all of these tapes around for the last 10 years for no good reason as the music contained therein is pretty obviously sub-standard stuff. i had this scenario mapped out in my head where after all of this time spent ruminating about my lost “album” and then talking to jeff about putting it out and then finding all of the stuff on the unmarked tapes and then buying an only half-way functional 4-track machine and then going into the studio to mix them with evan and then not liking those mixes and then going BACK into the studio to remix everything with evan and then titling and sequencing the songs, after doing all of that i envisioned jeff receiving the finished product and not liking it one bit. that’s what is known in the scholarly work as “fortunetelling” and i’m terrible at it. or maybe i’m actually a little too GOOD at it.
but none of that happened. jeff liked it and he’s putting it out and we’re gonna tie it into promoting my art in some fashion and so this long saga which began close to 20 years ago when i got a little tascam portastudio for christmas and carried on forward through the dark years and even the darker ones has now pretty much resolved itself. i’m gonna have to somehow come up with small collages on demand as part of the “ad blitz” but that might be kinda fun, i won’t have the luxury of puttering around in the foggy soup of my psyche and will just have to throw the noodles against the wall and hope some of them stick. if they don’t then i’ll have to serve potatoes.
last night me and wookie and our friend marti went and saw a documentary about the underground music scene that was happening in san diego in the early ’90’s, i was briefly a part of that scene because the band i joined was one of the big 3 down there for a while. or maybe the big four. ironically i ended up in that band because they were the only ones doing stuff that i thought was interesting and at some point there was an opening in personnel if i was willing to knock someone else off of the “gravy train” and that was one of the very few times in my life that i WAS willing to leapfrog over another human and it paid off for everyone except the frog. anyways the documentary was called “it’s gonna blow” and they got the title from one of the band’s songs which was written and recorded before i joined but is quite possibly the best one that they/we ever did and so here it is:

i played this one for one of my neighbors once, a semi-interesting thug that lived in huge beat-to-shit farmhouse across the street and had a hobby of getting into drunken bar fights and selling pot, because he was curious about what my band sounded like. about halfway through it he looked at me and said “so…it’s just like a bunch of noise, is that it?”. and he was sort of right. thugs are like that.
today is saturday and me and wookie have a free day, i’m pretty sure we plan on doing some relaxing/eating/reading/necking before we have to go to a birthday party at a sushi restaurant later on tonight. no sports on for me but i’m in the middle of another pelecanos book(my 7th this month?) and i’ll probably try to troll some yard sales in an effort to come up with some new frames i can use for collages. the weather looks to be fine and i’ve got a headache but in the process of writing this i was able to exorcise the sense of stagnation that had settled upon me after hitting that old familiar wall earlier this morning. i hate that fucking thing.

if it’s broke, fix it, if i ain’t then don’t

for the 2nd time in a week a white cop got away with the murder of an unarmed black man. the grand jury in the eric garner case declined to indict daniel pantaleo just like the grand jury in the michael brown case declined to indict darren wilson. apparently in both cases the prosecutors basically manipulated the evidence presented to the jury to get the desired verdicts which resulted in both cops getting off with no accountability and no consequences. if the saying “a grand jury could indict a ham sandwich” is at all true then you basically have to look at the system in place and in cases such as these 2 things are obvious: black lives matter less than white lives in the american justice system, and cops are above the law. both facts are extremely ugly indictments of the american version of “law and order” and underline the total corruption of the phrase “to protect and serve”. the last time i felt protected or served by any policeman was never, and i’m white. what we’re left with are completely militarized police forces across the country who view the general population(particularly the african american population) as the enemy and have the backing of the laws and the courts to deal with that population in whatever brutal and repressive manner they choose, they will never have to answer for it. it’s a shitty system and should be dismantled and replaced and the sooner the better.
my frustrations are not limited to matters of (in)justice but have also crept into the work i am attempting to do, i have 4 new pieces that initially came together quickly but have at this point screeched to a stall/halt that’s been dragging on for about a week. this sort of momentum-thwart sorta pales next to all of the terrible shit confronting us in other areas of existence but it at the same time perpetuates any and all feelings of helplessness one might experience while staring into the belly-via-mouth of the beast. this sort of frenetic stagnation scrambles perspective and brains alike and disables the focus-function so necessary for tackling the larger picture in any meaningful way. meaning getting stuck in your art can get you stuck in your life and being stuck is no way to be unless you’re a pig, and while that wasn’t intended as a cop pun it IS time for our mid-post song so i’ll just continue w/the day’s leitmotif:

i re-read yesterday’s post and it was confusing because i mixed up 2 jeffs and one of them’s not even a jeff, he’s a geoff. for anyone who wondered what the fuck was going on, jeff is my friend in japan who has the tape-only label while geoff is the one who went to med school and is now doing his residency in yakima, washington. geoff is the one i saw yesterday, i know in the blog it seemed as if there was one jeff who was in 2 places at once but that’s impossible and it didn’t happen. geoff came over limping from a groin pull he incurred while slipping on some ice like a buffoon. he was grumpy at first but after 2 cups of coffee he chippered up somewhat and bought me lunch at the east side deli on hawthorne. i’m plugging that place because they have something called “field roast” which i’ve never heard of and is a meat-substitute for us non-cow/pig/chicken/turkey gobblers and it’s the only non-meat meat that i’ve had that doesn’t taste like sawdust or worse. after lunch we walked around the neighborhood and he told me a long story about a speed-freak lady(“she had about 40 hard years on her” he says) that showed up at his door one night and led him on a little adventure involving pissing herself, grabbing his dick, and demanding to be dropped off at a “biker house”.
wookie went out last night to a vintage sale that stayed open until 9(or so she says) but didn’t buy anything because all the stuff there was too uptown for her tastes or her wallet. speaking of her wallet she left it at home when she went to work yesterday morning so i had to run it over to her and i got to see her workplace and got to meet a couple of the alzheimer’s patients/residents that wander around the ward, they seemed confused but sweet. then after the vintage sale debacle she decided to go by the lloyd center mall to return something and when she came back out her car was gone. she thought it was a goner for sure and it was a goner but it hadn’t gone that far, her and the security folks found it in another parking lot on another level with the lights on and i think she said it was running, too? i can’t remember that part but the good news is that the honda fit is back in the family and my truck is still running even though the frigid temps these days seem to create a little barrier to my battery sparking the engine and turning it over, but i ain’t gonna replace nothing because i like to live dangerously but i’m actually just cheap. or broke. but if i ain’t broke, don’t fix me.