Category Archives: Lucubrations

So I’ve mentioned the small place I’ve got over the liquor store at the corner of Bedlam & Squalor, in Fecal Creek…I usually refer to it as Hotel California.  There are actually 4 apartments up here, and the other inhabitants are just weird as hell.  One of the apartments is occupied by this awful charwoman that is just Part of the Deal around here.  She “cleans,” which, well…let me explain.  This woman has about the worst case of OCD I’ve ever had the displeasure to deal with.  She puts Mexican bric-a-brac on every available flat surface.  It’s ludicrous.  But then, when she “cleans,” especially in the kitchen, her prime directive, indeed her only directive, seems to be “out of sight, out of mind.”  Anything that has been left on any counter top, stove top, or basin area is immediately seized and shoved into the nearest drawer cabinet or “unvisible” space there is.  Unless, of course, she happens to get in any way distracted between the time she picks up a given object and the time she places it in an “unvisible” area, and then God only knows what will happen.  Oh, and ovens and dishwashers are considered valid storage areas.  Yeah.  So I have learned to pull all the shit out of the oven before preheating it.  I have opened the microwave to find foil wrapped mysteries or metallic silverware hiding in there.  Meals have been delayed hours because I could not find my cast iron skillet anywhere, and it was only when someone incidentally went into the laundry room and found that the skillet had inexplicably placed in there, on top of the dryer could dinner proceed.
We’ve had our problems, she and I.  For a while, I could hear her prowling around outside my door anytime I was on the phone, presumably trying to listen to my conversations for her own dark and perverse reasons.  To put a stop to this, I started giving fake and rather malignant tech advice to “friends” on the phone.  One time when I suspected she was listening, I told my friend of my new time-saving trick: placing your cell phone in the microwave for 65 seconds will fully charge the battery.  Twenty-four hours later she had a new phone and was awaiting delivery of a new microwave.
And but so anyway this morning I was awoken by ridiculous bangings in the bathroom next to my place, which bathroom this beazy has apparently elected to paint today.
Usually she hires shady and swarthy gentlemen of extremely dubious Visa status from the parking lot of Home Depot for such things. But not today, thank Christ.  For these smaller projects, she has a couple glasses of breakfast wine and channels Frida Khalo and paints it herself.  But super slowly and carefully, as if painting a portrait. It is horrible to watch, and inspires visions of strangulation in the wine-dark psyche of your humble narrator. But once she gets bored and starts getting really drunk, she hurries to get it done and sloshes paint everywhere, adding several hours of clean-up time to the entire nightmare.
All of that nonsense disrupted any sense of rhythm I’d hoped to achieve today.
How was your day?
N.P.: “Strange Machines” – The Gathering

“I’m on a bus, on a psychedelic trip
reading murder books, trying to stay hip.
I’m thinking of you, you’re out there, so
Say your prayers.”
~ Billy Idol

This is it, dear reader…crunch time.  There are 158 days left to complete this book and determine its publishing fate.  I am so woefully behind schedule that I can’t bear to think about it whilst sober.  This is typically my most productive time: the dead of winter, long and icy nights..  And things have been picking up.  It’s just bewildering and disorienting to not have a clear vision of the end product.
Okay…back to it.

N.P.: “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” – Giorgio Moroder, David Bowie

Jesus, it’s already Wednesday.  How did that happen?  It feels like I’ve had a lot of travel days lately, but I’m not sure why.  I haven’t gone anywhere.

Today is Boxing Day if you live anyplace where the queen is on the money.  Boxing Day is the day set aside for duct taping  up any unpleasant guests who darkened your door on Christmas (usually children), sealing them in boxes (usually cardboard) and sticking them in the attic with the rest of the awful Christmas decorations that have been cluttering up your existence for the last few weeks.  It is a rather dark European tradition that, much like the siesta, I think we colonists could benefit from adopting.

I was watching footage of what appeared to be a boy band performing in Indonesia when the tsunami hit on Saturday.  I know it’s not funny…it was quite horrible, actually…but I found myself chuckling as I watched it.  It;s just that I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on stage doing whatever – playing in a band, doing a reading, delivering a lecture, dancing in a bondage club – when I thought to myself (having no one else to think to), “Oh dear god this is a disaster…I would give anything for a huge fucking tsunami to come absolutely barreling through here and wash me and everybody in here out to the watery depths so this can just be over.”  Maybe one of the band members simply  has (had) more pull with the divine than I do.

N.P.: “Lazy Eye” – Silversun Pickups

I got to mess around with a Roland JD-XA a bit today.  I could raise some real sonic hell with one of those.  I need to start hanging around music stores again.
More writing on the phone today, again.  Not as much as yesterday, but not bad.
Some weird Christmas party with the villagers is wrapping up downstairs somewhere, and at least one straggler is aggressively shooting dice.  Repeatedly.  On what sounds like a glass table.  I’m pretty sure it’s one of the noises that Charles Manson heard right before he sent his family out to Do Their Thing.  I can take another 5 or so minutes of this shit, and then I’m gonna go down their and shove some dice where they will make much less noise.

N.P.: “Fire It Up” – Black Label Society

Pleasantly interesting day.  Was awoken by natural causes as opposed to the bellowing of idiots or the screams of their offspring, or the psychosis-inducing shriek of leaf blowers or wood chippers.  Which was nice.
Started writing before I got out of bed.  Didn’t really stop…still haven’t.  Finished a few shorter things for the book.  Feels like actual progress.  Which is also nice.
What’s nuts is everything I wrote today was on my phone.  I even used the dictation feature a bit.  I need to start using that more.  It’s interesting.
Anyway, back to it.

N.P.: “Want” – Recoil

Perhaps the Academy should not worry so much about catering pathetically to the fragile masses and finding the most innocuous, uninteresting host possible, and focus instead on finding someone who’s willing to watch their stupid award show.
Nobody watches these things anymore.  All of the award shows’ viewership numbers have been steadily trending down and to the right for the last 10 years, most precipitously in the last three.  Down double-digit percentages in some cases.  And they just keep making it lamer every year.  A sterile, humorless host introducing dull and underwhelming acts.  And this year I’m sure they’ll continue to get the ratings they deserve.
What they need to do is invite Guns n’ Roses, and get Axl and Slash shithouse drunk in the limo on the way over.  And then give them an award.  Doesn’t matter what award…just make something up.  Whatever.  Just get them up on stage whilst six sheets to say a bunch of fuck words and hurl slurs at the Hollywood elite.  God yes.  That used to happen all the time.  And I used to watch a lot more award shows.

N.P.: “Kill Your Darlings” – Mesh

The fog never lifted in The Creek today, and I think all of Anhedonia is socked in.  Which is fine with me: if it’s not going to rain, fog is a temporarily acceptable substitute.
Haven’t really left the house for a few days.  Just typing away, desperately, yet not feeling as if much progress is being made.  Frustrating to say the least.
It’s been tougher to deal with people lately.  The last couple of weeks have been particularly challenging.  Most conversations feel like I’m being tested and that I’m failing the test.  I should probably just turn the music up louder.

N.P.: “Miss You” – The Rolling Stones

What’s crackin’, dear reader.  I’m pretty tired.  Exhausted, really.  It might be all the bourbon and NyQuil.  Yeah…there’s been a lot of that going on.  I’ve felt better for days…the cold or Ebola or whatever it was was basically gone the next morning.  But I’ve kept up the NyQuil and bourbon regimen, just to be safe.  You really can’t be too careful with these things.  Don’t drink enough toxins to kill off all the germs in your system, you could be responsible for a pandemic that takes out half the species.  And we certainly wouldn’t want that.
Anyway, I’m feeling much better.

N.P.: “Rocket Science” – The Good Year Pimps

Das ist Krampusnacht. Krampus über alles.

Even when I still believed that Santa Claus was an actual dude with an actual mailing address inside the Arctic Circle, with an actual toy shop at the same address staffed mostly by elves, blah blah blah, I felt, deep down in that dark and vacant space where my soul should have been, that Things Weren’t Right.
Even as toddlers, children understand that there are scary monsters [see The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim and that study where children were given rewritten versions of fairy tales with the scary monsters taken out, and the kids got all pissed off and attacked their teachers’ kneecaps].  Rugrats know that evil lurks, and they resent the hell out of patronizing adults who tell them otherwise.  I certainly did.  Which is why the unipolar morality of the Santa story never really sat well with me: goodness is ostensibly rewarded, but evil goes completely unpunished.  All year long, the promise of every materialistic dream a child may have coming true on Christmas morning is dangled in front of the child’s beady eyes on the condition of “good” behavior during the rest of the year.
I always assumed there was some kind of sliding scale of goodness vs. toys spectrum: if your behavior was superlative and Christ-like all year long, then you get absolutely everything on your list, and perhaps even a few bonus toys.  If you were a minimally decent person for, say, 8 months out of the year, but a bit of a prick the rest of the time, then you might only get a third of the things on your list.  But what of little Adolf and Osama?  What about the little kid who is an absolute bastard every goddamn day of the year?  What of him?  According to the Santa story, nothing.  Not a damn thing. Hell, Santa will even still come by your house: he’ll just leave a piece of coal.  So what?  Who cares? This means that some little fucker can run around terrorizing the neighborhood, lowering property values and ruining everybody’s lives all year long, and the only thing he has to worry about is maybe not getting as many toys as the Goody Two-Shoes next door?  Alll little Adolf has to do is stroll over to Goody’s on the 26th, when the little angel is playing with all of his benevolently hard-earned toys, whack him over the head with a board, take whatever toys he wants, and swagger back home.
No.  That’s just ludicrous.  It is unjust. And it is existentially unsound. There can be no light without darkness.  And there can be no goodness without evil.  That knowledge is innate in human children.  But in the Disneyfied, politically correct culture that is modern day America, apparently parents are afraid of damaging their little snowflakes’ eggshell psyches, We ask our teachers not to use red pen when grading papers, because red is the color of blood and there is an implied threat there.  We’re not going to keep score in little league games because the idea of someone winning necessitates that some lost, and the concept of losing at anything, even a baseball game, is far more than a human being should have to endure.  And oh God, the results are tragic.  Entire generations who cannot conjugate the verbs “to lose” or “to fail.”
I say Enough.  Ya basta!  I say that people in general, but children especially, are far heartier and more resilient than they are ever given credit for.  And it is with that in mind that I suggest that we hit reset and start celebrating Christmas properly.  Let us look back toward Europe, to where the Santa Claus story originated, to get the full story: the story of the Santa’s dark counterpart, Krampus.
If Santa Claus is a right jolly old elf, then Krampus is a bad-ass Christmas demon.  If old Saint Nick is benevolent generosity and reward, Krampus is divine retribution and vengeance.  Krampus is a very satanic-looking demon (I suppose all demons worth their horns are rather satanic-looking): a satyr (in the Roman tradition (as opposed to the Greek)), with massive horns and a bifurcated tail, who is draped in noisy chains and cow bells, and wields a collection of pointy sticks with which (get this) he beats all hell out of children who have been assholes during the previous year.  If children have committed more than the typically venial offenses associated with childhood, Krampus will not simply beat them with his sticks and chains, but will either dismember them, or simply drag them to hell, never to be seen again.  Sometimes Krampus just eats the goddamn kids right there in front of God and everybody.  And don’t think you can go running to Santa to save you from Krampus…no.  Krampus and Santa are good buddies.  Existential friends who enjoy happy hour at der biergarten together.
Krampus does not just molest and abuse vagrant children.  No.  When not dispensing yuletide justice to miscreants, Krampus enjoys goosing attractive women and licking their faces, a la Rick James on a good, crackful night.  Oh yes…Krampus is a straight up poon hound.  Unlike that grandfatherly twat Santa Claus, ever the family man, the Christmas demon crushes mad ass on the reg.  There is no Mrs. Krampus.  No need.  Krampus has game and he wants to fist your mother.  After he eats your soul.
Speaking of eating, don’t bother trying to placate Krampus with cookies and milk.  He cannot be plied with baked goods, and Krampus is notoriously lactose-intolerant.  You would be better off leaving whiskey and steak, but those will not likely work either.  To avoid the wrath of Krampus this night, there is only one path: The path of righteousness, and the avoidance of douchebaggery throughout the rest of the year.
N.P.: “Back in Black” – AC/DC

Goddammit, dear reader, I’m sick.
This hardly ever happens.  My system is composed mostly of whiskey, vitriol, and vengeance, and is thus pretty robust and resistant to infection or infirmity.  But right now I just feel like hell.  It started with a sore throat Saturday night, which is no big deal.  But then that mutated into a cough on Sunday, and now…Ebola.  Or it might just be a particularly pernicious head cold.  Either way, there is only one treatment: American Absinthe (a.k.a. NyQuil).
Shit.  I hate this.  If things don’t improve by tomorrow, I shall activate Sick Mode, which includes lighting the candles, playing Faure’s Requiem on repeat at sphincter-loosening volume, and getting higher than the cost of living in California on NyQuil and bourbon until I either feel better or die.
Damn right.

N.P.: “Edie (Ciao Baby) – The Cult