Almonds & Sulfur

the breeze died empty

on this autumn weekend,

set free to vanquish

into sunday funnies,

her short breath tart

of almonds and sulfur.

the night keeps edging

my reckoning to the sidelines,

for a while past echoes

until at last no longer

yet forever sadly yearning

for the comfort and the stupors

of a tanqueray morning

drained dry.

The Final Peel (Dreamland Fog)

She peels my mind

like a grape out of season,

keeping the platitudes

from the reach of my mouth.

Compulsively itchy,

she's a mammoth wooly blanket,

stinking of casinos

and new money dung.

I remain ever clear

through the forest of my anger,

just a slick twist unstapled

yet hard wired to my fear.

Begging the fog,

"Please masquerade my confabulations!"

And coax me gently

from the raincoat jello shakes.

Blur me resolute

and absolutely fabulous

with delusions of Disney

painting shut my Looney Tunes.

I need the fog of dreamland

when my furniture finally passes;

my best friend, my chair,

of malignant bad posture.

I need the fog of dreamland

when the night keeps its promises

of smoldering loneliness

even television can't consume.

With my gills gone gray on grime,

the fog drifts me asunder

coating my mind's eye

to a soft focus rose.

Peptic, vaguely pompous,

my fog frees me from the vanquished,

as even the grotesque flee,

making sick at my sight.

I share with them their nausea,

I am stillborn of their nausea,

I am master of their nausea

embodying its essence,

while watching my entrails

twist in the wind.

Sway

So I sit here this evening with a migraine and a toothache and Sticky Fingers on the iPod. Not exactly an inspirational record but it seems to fit my mood to a tee tonight.

I've felt out of phase and off kilter all this week in ways I haven't since the bad old days, yet without having indulged in any of the 'better abuses through chemicals' that accounted for such a funk back then. My 'head full of snow' (thanks Moonlight Mile) is purely of my own making this time. By that, I mean it's physiological, which to me is more frightening than the pharmaholic hangovers of yore. That, by the way, is a great name for a rock and roll band: The Pharmaholic Hangovers of Yore. Ya heard it here first.

Now before you get all excited about some amazing scientific breakthrough you think I've discovered where I can tap into my psyche to get an organic high with no need to pay for drinks, score dope or whatever it is you might otherwise do, you should know I've only stumbled upon the capability to induce the hangover portion of those particular rides. It's like discovering a get-rich-quick scheme wherein you instantly become a multi-millionaire in the eyes of the IRS and have to pay taxes on this money, but you never actually get the money itself. I can't imagine anyone wanting such a gift.

How did I unlock my inner hangover?

It was really quite simple: I started nosing around where I don't belong in a Pandora's box of childhood memories I'd heretofore kept on ice in my subconscious, repressed into a stone cold coma. There they stayed lo these many years, nice and somewhat quiet (except perhaps for the ulcers that occasionally flare up, but that's only a guess and in any case, indirect). Until last year, when I decided I needed a proper hobby and said to myself, "Hey, how about trying my hand at some creative writing, some 'factional' short stories about Growing Up Birnam." Think one part That 70's Show, two parts Titus, two parts Twilight Zone, a jigger of Married with Children, a healthy splash of The Night of the Living Dead and a slice of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on the side.

I started with one of the few memories I had of those carefree, Leave It To Beaver days: Dad throwing his hat on the rack in the front hallway, loosening his tie and calling out, "Honey, Kids - I'm home!" Yes, indeed. Then I switched off Nick at Night and tried to get my focus back to the task at hand, my memories, my childhood. No Barbara Billingsley, no Hugh Beaumont (though I'm sure Otis Campbell from Mayberry was really there on occasion). Start at the beginning, Ben, concentrate. Think of each significant event and start riffing on the keyboard. Think, remember, write.

Think, remember, write.

I've spent about 15 months of doing this now and each memory pulls another one out of the ether along with it, up and out of my pounding head, like doing shots of Tequila then fast-forwarding past intoxication to the aftermath. I think this week's sort of the culmination of this journey. The first week of the year is always tough for a number of reasons. One is because it means the holidays are over and as much as I profess to dislike this time of the year now, I loved them as a child. My dad usually managed to hold it together during the weeks leading up to Christmas and I don't have any bad memories of that time of year but then came January and business as usual with drunken bickering parents. Sort of like a segue from It's a Wonderful Life to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? To add to this, the first week of the new year means I just got back from time spent with my sisters in AZ, which I enjoy but which inevitably means much reminiscing about that childhood. Too much whine can give you a hangover to rival too much wine, it seems.

The tone for most of this 'therapy' is too dark for posting to this blog (believe it or not, the shit I have thrown up here is the 'lighter' side of my memories). Beyond a black hole of depression, the rejects are frankly not all that entertaining at this point (certainly not all that funny). Or maybe they're the good ones and it's the shit I've been posting. Or, most likely, they're all shit but nevertheless my shit and I should throw caution to the wind and see what sticks. I need to figure out the angles before most of these screeds see the light of day, and that's if I decide it's even worth the price of admission to continue on this odyssey of self discovery redux.


Unfortunately, tonight I've got a psyche full of snow and the rabbit ears aren't working (damn digital broadcast switchover, nobody told me it applied to my head). Time to turn out the lights as I listen to the sound of strangers sending nothing to my mind ...

Moonless Fade

The night wind cuts hard as diamond

in through the corner of his eye,

bleeding salty tears warmer

than anything the evening offers.

-----

The streets spill into a squalid beauty

past hungry shadows hiding from themselves,

the lost who cast forlorn reflections

off sightless puddles in surrender.

-----

He stumbles bent by this rain swept congregation

in damp and damaged spastic kicks,

enslaved to the madness pouring out from within,

down past cavalcades of vanity and steel -

-----

with their ragged jacked current coursing through his aspirations,

with their ragged jacked current ungrounded through his short hairs,

with their ragged jacked current draining his best intentions,

with their ragged jacked current now blown only for him.

-----

Cold now.

Quiet.

Then it's gone into one last diamond point of light,

leaving only the moonless fade.

Darkness on the Edge of Life

My favorite album has remained constant since 1978 and likely will stay on top until I go down under (that doesn't mean a trip to Australia). Or perhaps not. One can only hope it'll change. Why hope for a change? Well, in a very real way this choice is a barometer of my growth as an individual. Or rather, in this case, a lack thereof.

I'm talking about my 'favorite album' and not 'favorite collections of songs,' so that counts out greatest hits and other compilations like The Jam's Snap!, Elvis Presley's Golden Records and Sun Sessions, Beach Boys' Endless Summer, Psychedelic Furs' All This and Nothing and Elvis Costello's Girls, Girls, Girls.

There are lots of #2s for me, many of which are #1 on a given day:

• Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, Nebraska, Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils and Dust
  
• The Clash's London Calling and Sandinista!
• Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom, Get Happy!!, Armed Forces, This Year's Model, Trust and My Aim is True, and Spike - Elvis wins the consistency prize - he has the most albums on my favorites list.
  
• Velvet Underground's Velvet Underground and Nico
• Ramones' Self-titled debut
• B-52's Self-titled debut
• Jim Carroll's Catholic Boy
• John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band
  
• Billy Joel's 52nd Street and Turnstiles
• The Beatles' Rubber Soul, Help!, With The Beatles and Revolver
• Beach Boy's Pet Sounds
  
• The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers, Let it Bleed and Exile on Main Street
• Elvis Presley's From Elvis in Memphis
  
• Bob Dylan's Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing it all Back Home, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan  and Blood on the Tracks
• Patti Smith's Horses
  
• Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks
• Gang of Four's Entertainment
  
• Kristin Hersh's Murder, Misery and then Goodnight
• X's Los Angeles
• U2's October and War
• Graham Parker's Squeezing out Sparks
• Nirvana's Nevermind and MTV Unplugged in New York
• Pearl Jam's Ten
  
• Green Day's American Idiot
• Steve Forbert's Alive on Arrival
• Throwing Muses' Red Heaven
• The Stooges' Raw Power
• Violent Femmes' Hallowed Ground
• Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate and Songs of Leonard Cohen
  

But my number #1 has always been Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town.

It might seem a strange choice for me.

"Geez," you could say, "you seem to be a pretty cynical guy with a decidedly dark sense of humor. There nothing funny going on here. It's deadly, even stridently, serious. And no cynicism to be found. You don't seem to have any religious faith, something that seems to permeate each of these songs. What gives? Dylan, Costello, Stones, Green Day, and most of the others, they make sense. But Springsteen? Darkness?"

True, there's not a shred of humor on this record. It might be one of the most bleak albums ever made, unceasingly so. Yet it is filled with optimism and faith. There is plenty of religious imagery. It's core to the people whose stories are being told. In the end, though, that's just imagery and metaphor. This faith - these songs - are all about a fundamental belief in yourself. Faith in you. Faith held even in the most horrifying situations, and through the most numbingly mundane.

And there is not an ounce of sentiment on this album. Nothing to escape the dark heart of humanity. The words are basic, overly redundant, devoid of the purple prose Bruce was known for up to that point and fell back to again afterward. Some of the songs are almost unlistenable taken by themselves - they build on Lennon's Plastic Ono Band Primal Scream foundation, ratcheting it up several notches with blood curdling contortions - yet they fit into this world perfectly. Conversely, many of the tunes are my favorites even outside the context of the whole: Racing in the Street, Badlands, Adam Raised a Cane, Candy. All would be in my personal top forty.

Darkness is not a 'concept' album. Yet it is. A series of small moments, events that occur in small towns and cities across America. Rich and poor and middle class, they're all affected by the dissolution of hope and dreams and faith in yourself and in others. The bonds and chains of family.

It was released in the hey day of the first punk explosion and shares a lot with the best of that lot (especially the Clash, though they focused on the political element of faith perhaps more than they did the personal).

I look at Darkness as the first of a quartet of albums Springsteen recorded in this same vein, the others being Nebraska, Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils & Dust. These albums share a similar core, a common conceit, but it is not a musical one; rather, it is thematic, and it is attitude. Sure, it might be fair to say Bruce covers this same turf on everything he's recorded. There's at least some truth to that. But the hard, unflinching, bleak, bare, milk-all-the-sentimentality-out-of-it attitude exists for me only on these Springsteen records, and not many others, of any artist. It lives for me on Darkness most of all. (Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate and the Velvet Underground and Nico live in this world for me as well. There were seeds of it on Born to Run in Thunder Road and Backstreets but I love that album for wholly different reasons.)

In the end, all of what I've written here is just a big load of pretentious bullshit.

None of this explains why I've been coming back to this record time and time again since 1978. Why I invariably play the thing from beginning to end each time. Why it's never just background music when I do. The whole thing can be explained by two verses on the record. They come from different characters and different songs at wildly different tempos and moods. One from the point of view of the protagonist's loved one (in this case, his girlfriend) and the other describing the protagonist himself (first person). They perhaps sum up two different, warring, sides of my being better than anything else I've found in art. The first pokes at my core, borne of my upbringing, and the second is aspirational, what I've been striving to get to ever since:

1. Racing in the Street: She sits on the porch of her daddy's house, but all her pretty dreams are torn. She stares off alone into the night with the eyes of one who hates for just being born.
2. Badlands: For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside, that it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive, I wanna find one face that ain't looking through me, I want to find one place, I want to spit in the face of these badlands.

The protagonist of each song on Darkness is always striving to live life, not satisfied merely to exist. Even in the face of devastation. Even when all of the others around him have given up.

I want to identify with those protagonists but I know I can't, not really. In the same way Jules wants to believe he's the Shepherd at the end of Pulp Fiction but knows he's still the 'Tyranny of Evil Men.' But I'm trying, Ringo, real hard, to be the Shepherd. Maybe if and when I finally make it, this record will fall by the wayside.

Until then, "Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland. Got a head-on collision smashing in my guts, man. I'm caught in a crossfire that I don't understand."