Good Reader. The schedule got blown. I can’t do anything about it now but offer you this-scattered thoughts and remembrances of a particularly spiky and brutal week. Gets the best of us all I suppose and I can’t thank you enough for being out there. I’m out of the shark shallows, the enemy has retreated and my phone is off.
Some names and places have been changed to protect the innocent. The guilty have no place to hide.
That’s the preface to a spoken word piece I’m working on called Worse than Whiskey, The Artist Who Sold Medical Supplies. The preface could easily work here except to say that I have had to cut wide swaths of the original post out. I know. I’ve had to edit and it is rueful. Let’s just say that it would be better for me if I cooked up something much bigger for them to chew on and that when I do take aim it’ll be for their throats and we can be together again, just like old times.
“The blog is a weekly read for me. Thanks for being real.”
It is my succinct and true pleasure good reader, to provide you with the Real. As discussed with social media mogul Charles Link a few days ago, we live in a post-authentic world. I was in the attic. And I was sweating. A culmination of slow screws and fuckarounds had resulted in this dripping hot night in the attic of a dead Confederate palace tweaking on bad hash and triple-nickels while yelling into the phone.
“Ask yourself, are you sure Ian woulda done it this way?”
Of course I was referencing that punk guru and bald hero of the times, Mr.Ian MacKaye. And of course we were railing against this hall of mirrors the terrible Century had become.
“I had no idea, ” I continued, spouting, “that being an Artist would be seldom more than coffee in the morning with social media, seltzer w/lime, maybe type a little, do something else, jerkoff and go to sleep with social media. It’s solitary and wretched, Chas, and the most amazing thing. The world is full of folks who have something to say and I am one of them. I’m so connected. I’m so alone.”
“We are all titans with our own torments I suppose.”
That’s from another Charlie, and I was thrilled when poet Charlie O’Hay wrote me this week, while also offering this jewel of wisdom:
“Drinking is pain. Sobriety is pain.”
I’m having a bad week. And I hit a snag in the publishing schedule. Let’s just say this outlet got clogged, and without any other release beside playing guitar and talking to friends, I was set to blow. Don’t get me wrong-friends, you’ve helped. But the pressure was on and I’ve no more access to the self-destruct button that drinking had become. I need to get a grip. Somehow make a tower of myself where the disappointments and cunts of life won’t sour me to the point of inactivity and shunted expression. The attic is a metaphor. I need an attic. A rehearsal space, some refuge.
But for now I take my refuge in you. Thank you for being out there. My whole deal is about you being out there, and divinity is in the space between. I have found no new coping mechanism, the world has taken the round, my anger got the best of me. But you are still reading me and I am still writing it down.
See you in the rooms motherfucker.
“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
―H.L. Mencken
Going for the Throat 