Notes From The Ant Empire: The Sun, The Soul, The Song That Made The Stoic Man Cry

I recently went on a date with the wife for Thai food in Thai Town followed up with Okkervil River at the Henry Fonda. We spotted Will Sheff out on the patio before the show, underneath the holiday lights and projection of the opening band on the outdoor wall. He was taller and skinnier then I unexpected, but then again, everyone is decompressed on Youtube.

Look at these clowns run around a ping pong table like kids born in the 70’s. Youtube, the video immolation of America.

If you took the opposite of the Tibetan Book of the Dead you come up with the American Book of the Living. And that book is cooked like a dishonest bookie’s. We’re not living anymore but fleeing from one entertainment source to the next, the pleasure feast paid for by credit, and we know how that goes.

Still…

I was born in Southern California and I love it. You may hate Bush but you’re still a Yankee when you’re abroad. I’m a Californian first though. I go down to the pier at the end of Washington Blvd. and reflect on the city behind me, stare at the ocean and then go drink a beer on the 2nd floor sundeck of the restaurant that’s changed names so many times I’ve lost count. After the sun goes down people start lining up for tables at C&O across the street and the bike path is abandoned to shadowy individuals and waiters take orders while firing up the heating lamps. The sun is extinguished in the waters of the Pacific, somewhere between here and China. After three Stella Artois, fascism never tasted sweeter.

                                           

Although I don’t believe in much, I believe in the soul. I don’t believe it goes anywhere when our lives are done, but while we’re alive it exists. After that, it’s only eternal existence is in the memories of those we’ve touched, but once they’re gone as well, that’s it – which, in its own intimate and valuable way is divinely magical — but still, the whole thing is temporal and meaningless. Not to be too unabashedly crestfallen, but we’re flies on the window screen of life, trying to make sense of ourselves, pooping all over the place.

Not to be too melodramatic, or emo, but our souls exist in certain bends of the violin bow. The smell of outfield grass in spring. The care put into perfect clay oven tandoori chicken. The moisture left behind from a lover’s kiss.

The way I look at it, some of the most sacred and soulful artifacts are crossword puzzle eraser shavings. You can have your steeples and sermons I’ll take the Sunday Times in bed with a steaming, fog-lifting cup of coffee.

                                            

I don’t trust people who say they don’t listen to music. If you have a soul, you listen to music.

When I worked at Trader Joe’s back in 2003, one of the customers was a squirrelly, diminutive man with a bushy mustache, floppy ballcap, and the exuberant compulsion to sell people bumper stickers that said DRUM MACHINES HAVE NO SOUL.

I don’t fully agree with the sentiment but I admired his quixotic mission, this was not an economic enterprise. The guy was hardly rolling in the Mochi. I see the stickers affixed to bumpers once in awhile in traffic, so his message is reaching some people, either that or it’s a sign of hipster’s affinity for irony.

Still… he needs to listen to DJ Shadow. Some drum machines do have souls, I tell ya.

Every culture on Earth cherishes music except those small, deranged subgroups of humans with a tendency to blow things up. Just something to think about.

I catered weddings back in my younger years. With more hair on my head, epaulets on my shoulders, because we were on yachts, and a tray of hors dourves in my hand I came upon an older, gently-stooped, stoic man leaning on a cane. A calypso band was playing a Bob Marley tune, complete with steel drums and female backup singers. I think it was a wedding. He smiled and waved off my offer of bruschetta when I spied a tear on his leathery cheek. I asked him if he were alright, if he needed anything and he blushed and confessed that he was more than alright, he was moved. He found the music to be enchanting. Divine. Those were his words, not an edited embellishment on my part, in fact, the only thing that makes this story even slightly interesting is that it’s absolutely true, and I can’t figure out if I have had a boring life, or if I have a boring version of what’s interesting.

It’s just how my soul is built I guess.

The song was No Woman No Cry. The wedding band’s version was absolutely awful, but the man leaning on the cane felt otherwise, his soul was touched and who was I to ruin his moment.

                                          

Star or satellite, which is that I see tonight?

Notes From The Ant Empire: Ice On Mars

So NASA has concluded that the white substance they’ve found on Mars must have been ice.

Because it evaporated.

Okay… I’ll buy that.

What this also means is that there may be a frozen Martian in those ice chunks.

Let’s send Pauly Shore up there to dig it up. Then we can film Encino Man Two, Life on Mars. 

We now officially found the presence of water – one planet over, in our own solar system — the ultimate harbinger of life. I think it’s safe to conclude that this means there are thousands and thousands of planets out there with the potential for water.

And you know what that means?

Yep, the possible existence of Annete Funicello movies on other planets.

                                                            

I could go with a little Beach Blanket Bingo myself today.

There’s something I find terribly tiring and cliche about complaining about the weather, it’s so predictable in its country bumpkin way; but damn, it’s hot as a witch’s yeast infection!

It was 109 in Sherman Oaks yesterday! Almost as scorching today. 

My buddy was arguing that it was only 105 yesterday. Even though it said otherwise on yahoo – as if he could somehow detect the difference of four degrees and was more of an expert than the meteorologists on the news with their Doppler gadgets and combed-over expertise!

It’s funny when stupid people think they’re smart.

                                                            

There’s a guy who makes art with nothing else than a stick. Draws lines in the sand. At beaches and dry lake beds. Mind-blowing forms and shapes, giant in size.

His name is Jim Denevan.

He does it all by his eyeball. It lasts as long as the Earth lets it.

The resulting sand drawing is made entirely freehand w/ no measuring aids whatsoever. From the ground, these drawn environments are experienced as places. Places to explore and be, and to see relation and distance. For a time these tangible specific places exist in the indeterminate environment of ocean shore. From high above the marks are seen as isolated phenomena, much like clouds, rivers or buildings. Soon after Jim’s motions and marks are completed water moves over and through, leaving nothing.

It’s pretty amazing. I recommend you check out more.

Life is fluid and we better get with it…

                                                          

I pound on the keyboard and squeeze the mouse like a trout to get my ideas to take shape on the screen, to illuminate the pixels like a hyper-modern love affair. Like a Welsh Pop-punk band.  I want to wear shorts from Target while I denounce Capitalism like a one man dunce cap – broadcasted souls screaming through the air, choked up with myspace pages and cell phone calls – while I sit on my IKEA couch and hold a beer from Belgium, praising Individualism.

I want to breath in white noise and exhale slogans and jingles all mashed together like a trash compactor for old advertising campaigns. Where’s the beef? Man, have it your way! 

It’s all mixed together like a chemical cocktail of commercialism. My shirt is from the Gap.

Beer drinking bears. 

Tigers hawking cereal.

I want to be a modern disposable poem, made of plastic. I want to contradict myself.

A million dollar Banksy in the flesh. Art of Funny Starving.

                                                           

I went to the Silver Lake Lounge the other night and had a crappy time.

Somehow it was appropriate – as if it’s not really cool to enjoy yourself anymore. They overcharged at the door and at the bar and the AC was pitiful and the bartenders surly.

It wasn’t the bands’ fault everyone was miserable. They were good. Somber. Long bangs. Bashful guitarists. Female keyboardists.

All of sudden every band has a cute chick on keys.

Still…

It was hot, like I said before, blistering hot.

The musicians kept making jokes about the heat. Jokes that weren’t helping.

It wasn’t a night for fun.

                                                           

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with lately.

Always trying to take a Polaroid of the present. And there is no such thing. There’s always a delay, a ghost. Cultural Feedback. You feel it most when you least suspect.  That feeling. I’ve been here before. Or, someone like me has been here before. Some other me, before me.

You get the feeling of one fluid, human emotion, transcending time, reading Richard Brautigan.

The whiskey had made us mud-puddly at the edges of our bodies and the edges of our minds.

“This is delightful,” Vida said.

Books that are over thirty years old, about the same things you’re feeling right now, remind you that there has always been one big pang and one big heartache in the world. And you realize that 5 dollar gas and George Bush doesn’t make us any more oppressed or put-upon or complicit and broken than Richard Nixon or Truman.

You realize the man on the moon does not grace his romantic charms on you and your lover alone, but upon a thousand, million, lovers, sitting in the night blossom jasmine scented porches of forever.

And you realize the ocean has always called the lost.

And it brings you a certain joy – knowing you’re not alone in your aloneness.

                                                           

My mind is a very crowded place.

Packer Dulce once wrote:

A cult is started when a scientist dies… 

The crowd pushes forward, up to my eyes, for a better view.

                                                             

Art of Starving: Emotional Graffiti

– The heart weighs three pounds, or is that the brain?

                                                            

thesunsingssongsofsizzling
thesunsingssongsofsizzling
thesunsingssongsofsizzling

Notes From the Ant Empire: I Am Their Giant Lord

I was walking to the store today to buy a pair of scissors. Don’t ask why I needed the scissors, you don’t want to know, but I was walking because I’m on a quest to see how many days I can go without driving in L.A, while I’m between jobs. My little one-man revolution.

I just started today.

On my little mini-walkabout, I passed this peculiar sign.

I felt like removing the dangling placard at the bottom and wearing it around my neck, walking to the store with that proudly bouncing on my chest.

Then I thought against it. Maybe it’s a little too on-the-nose, as they say here in Hollywood.

That would seem a little needy.

                                                             

Am I the only one that thinks John McCain’s daughter is kinda hot? I try not to because she’s the spawn of the enemy, but, you know, um… she just is.

I can’t help it.  

And, in a way, it’s kind of a turn-on, the fact that she is McCain’s daughter. The forbidden fruit tastes sweetest, I guess.

Here she is drinking a Bud.

The Primary is coming to an anti-climatic end. Today. Thank God.

I’m just glad it’s over. I’m looking forward to seeing Obama take on McCain, the debate that will unfold, and more of Meghan McCain. I heard Republican women are freaky. 

                                                           

In other news, I finished a short story tonight.

It’s called The 8-Ball. It’s about a pool player named Bumbles Barry.

I look at the collection of files, those familiar Word icons we all know and love, that represent my life’s work to this point, seperated into appropriately named folders, and I know that I’m creating something here, that I’m building – but sometimes it feels more like I’m digging.

Or tunneling.

This is an ant in my ant farm. Rhoda.

My little Ant Empire.

I am their Giant Lord.

In the instructions it reminds you, in case you’re naming them, that they’re all females. There should be a warning attached that if you’re naming all your ants you need to get out more often.

I’ve only named one of them, thank you.

What’s my point?

Oh yeah, writing is kind of like digging a tunnel into your mind. Excavating out the raw material, snooping around like Geraldo in Capone’s vault, seeing what’s down there. Life is just one big mass of dirt and it’s up to artists to carve little tunnels for us to travel through it.

 

And who’s to say that removing matter isn’t creating empty space, building nothing out of something?

                                                             

I’m going camping this weekend.

Campfire. Tents. Hiking poles. North Face.  The whole deal. I’m trying to find a spot far from light pollution. It’s getting harder and harder to accomplish that. I’m thinking Eastern Sierras.  

The stars are slowly disappearing from the sky.

I can’t help but be saddened by this and wonder how many splendid mythologies we’re losing along with them. Think of the wonderment you felt looking at the sky and seeing it filled with a million worlds you knew were so many light years away that they could have already exploded long before you were ever born, and feeling the Earth rotate for the first time by watching it happen overhead in the Milky Way. All that wonderment you felt as a kid, and still do, what will happen to it when the stars are gone and the sky is nothing but a black sheet over the Earth? Or worse, a smoggy blanket of refracted urban light. The smear of billboards and streetlamps upon the heavens.

What will happen to the luck from a falling star when no one can see it?

                                                              

I wrote a collection of poems called Stunted Wonderment back in 01′.

Here’s an excerpt from one of them.

It’s like the donut is nothing without the hole.
The donut is the hole.
To think, I live for this.
My large intestine can wrap around the world
But I just want to put my arms around you.
While the sun sets in lethal doses
I dream of wild horses… taking me… away.
Every twitch, every neurotransmitter switch
Every kick, every crackjunky fix
is a crackling campfire for the Gods.
They all ran off with the wild horses so baby…
Don’t mean to be graphic
But you’re the hole for my donut.
You’re the whole donut.
You’re the glint of something good
in my bad boy eye.

There’s more. Most of it’s this bad.

I put pictures of mountains and lakes and dilapidated barns next to the poems. I ran off exactly one copy at Kinkos and proudly proclaimed myself the author of a collection of poems called Stunted Wonderment, obviously still do.

Come to think of it, it’s not all that different than what I do here…

I hope I’ve gotten a little better with the prose, though.

To think, I actually once wrote…

Life is a sweaty set of balls the Gods play pocket pool with.

Notes From The Ant Empire: The Legend of Zelda and Wolf Parade

My wife is downstairs playing the Wii right now.

A peaceful, synthesized soundtrack trinkles up the stairs and overwhelms the loft with a sugary, hypnotic melody. I am trying to concentrate on my political blog but can’t help feeling lulled into a somatic sleep by the music, a wakeful dream.

She is playing The Legend of Zelda, a little blond dude running around collecting coins by busting open pumpkins.

I think it’s a front for a Leftist cult, imbedded with secret codes.

After hours of playing, you reach a secret level that exposes an organized conspiracy of shocking proportions. You discover the Illuminati’s underground chamber, with the plans for world domination hidden behind a wall.

Link, and therefore, you, go through a sinister portal to nefarious ideas.

Mind Control from Nintendo.

That’s why I don’t trust video games.

There’s too many flashing lights, it fucks with your head, like the banned Gnarls Barley video.

There’s just too many ways for programmers to invade your mind. Too many senses to be stoked.

Plus, too many buttons to push.

________________________

I walked to the store tonight.

The moon hung upside down and looked like a melon rind, a smiling face without eyes. A star blinked, or a satellite. Fast food bags lay flat and run-over on the asphalt, bugs hovered over grimy black puddles. The city felt like a video game to me. A place of constant danger or amusement. A maze of role playing.

It seemed unnreal.

I’m an old fashion Atheist looking for a religious experience in a modern world.

A world where neon restaurant menus stay lit up all night after they’re closed.

Where it’s acceptable to dance in public with headphones on, but not to share the music with everybody else.

Where everybody pisses their pants when the stock market tumbles, whether they own shares in AT&T, Apple, or ACME Anvil Company, or jackshit.

A world where people look at me like I’m crazy when I say that fire hydrants are cartoon dogs that smile at me.

The truth is, if there is such a thing anymore, we’re masquerading mannequins. In a hyper-trendy culture, where anti-trendy is ‘in’, we pantomime ourselves all day, then come home and don’t know what to do with ourselves, sit on the couch with our arms folded on our chest.

There’s a general, suffocating fear of the future, still, we drunkenly continue down our path of energy-sucking consumption, like cows being led through the slaughter house, traipsing through the deadly conveyor belts with Dolce Gabanna blinders, while disco balls throw light around promiscuously.

We know something terrible is coming, but we all have different ideas of just what that is. Environmental Destruction. Terrorism. Economic Collapse. Health Epidemics. Who knows?

The modern world is a shifting kaleidoscope of entertainment and stimuli, fear and media manipulation. Anything of note and weight is discarded by the side of the Super Information Highway, nothing heavy than a feather can fit through those tubes.

Truths change daily. With each hasty news cycle.

Religion is a television show.

T.V is religion.

There are galleries that sell $100,000 works of art by a grafitti artist that tells the Rich they’re rats and Capitalism sucks.

To coincide with the second day of auctions, Banksy updated his website with a new image of an auction house scene showing people bidding on a picture that said, “I Can’t Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit.”

The machine wins when it devours its dissenters by putting them to work.

When college kids film themselves rocking out to Lincoln Park with Che Guerera posters behind them and posting it on Youtube.

Perhaps Earth really was settled by the rejects of Golgafrincham.

> The Modern World by Wolf Parade

______________________

Sometimes I get a case of the ‘don’t want to leave the house’, but nothing like this woman.

The boyfriend called police on Feb. 27 to report that “there was something wrong with his girlfriend,” Whipple said, adding he never explained why it took him two years to call.

He said the boyfriend had brought the woman food and water during the two years and told investigators he asked her daily to come out of the bathroom.

“And her reply would be, ‘Maybe tomorrow,’” Whipple said. “According to him, she did not want to leave the bathroom.”

The house had another bathroom he could use.

It reads like a Raymond Carver story or maybe Bukowski, but this woman is real. This happened. She didn’t want to leave the toilet, she didn’t want to get up. She was that dysfunctional, that depressed.

You could say she was really down in the crapper.

[Rimshot]

_________________

“If life is a game of ping pong, I’d rather be the ball than the paddle.” — Buddha’s remarks upon seeing the sport of table tennis for the first time in 1937.

Notes From The Ant Empire #6: Plane Crashes, Heath Ledger, and Who Let the Dogs Out?

Heath Ledger dies of apparent overdose on pills and the world asks, “why wasn’t it Britney?” Some people are saying it was suicide. His father otherwise.

In the Australian city of Perth, where Ledger was born and raised, his father called the actor’s death “tragic, untimely and accidental.”

All we know is that a talented actor is dead.

These days, everything you read and hear about is apocalyptic doom. The decline of the dollar. Global Warming. Islamic Terrorism. We should remind ourselves that we’re more likely to meet our end the old fashion way: Heart attacks. Cancers. Shot by an arrow.

We’re all caught up in a fatalistic fixation of some future calamity. Certain of certain chaos…

Lately, imagined death is on everybody’s mind, maybe a real death will remind us we all got some living to do in the meantime.

******************************

In true Ant Empire bizarreness, Mitt Romney asks a group of black kids “who let the dogs out?”

On Martin Luther King Day! Proving my point. Mitt Romney is half robot/ half 1950’s sitcom dad/ half slimy protozoa.

Yeah, I know that’s a mathematical impossibility, but it’s Romney. The man’s amazing!

At first, I thought, Romney’s a Mormon, he doesn’t seem to be in touch with pop culture, maybe he truly wants to know “who let the dogs out?” Maybe it was just an innocent, sincere question.

But then he added the woof woof at the end.

******************************

Two planes collided over Corona the other day, raining debris down on a used car dealership. In related news, there is a deal on a new Altima if you’re in the market.

Am I the only one that is surprised that this kind of thing doesn’t happen all the time? Fuck going to the moon, I’m shocked every time the 747 I’m riding in is able to lift all the ground and defy the laws of physics, at least how I know them.

More enlightenment coming my way; the reporter interviewed other pilots and they said the freak accident could have been because it was a clear day.

John Elwell, who has been a pilot for 42 years, said sometimes clear days can be more challenging that those that are overcast.

“The sunlight is the biggest problem because it is in your face and it impairs your vision,” Elwell said.

Put that down on the list as one more thing that could kill you: a clear day.

******************************

When we were down in New Zealand and Australia my wife collected sea glass she found washed up on the beaches. I was recently in the Mojave and noticed the abundance of brown, clear, and green desert glass.

Pieces of Michelob, Corona, and Heineken.

Tales of our civilization will be written on bottles of beer.

*****************************

If aliens do come here to Earth, it’s obvious they don’t want to be seen or bothered. It’s obvious they want nothing to do with us.

I can’t blame them.

Notes From The Ant Empire: Terror in Friedmanstan

Life looks aflame from afar, but close up it’s just fireflies in a jar.

Is it possible to filter the amount of information we receive constantly? Drive down the road and you come across dozens of billboards, each with customized messages to get your attention, the radio relaying mood and news, your phone keeping you instantaneously connected with your lover halfway around the world; the sights and sounds of the modern world would have a dizzying effect on someone transported here from just a century ago.

Can we stay afloat in the sea of radio waves, television signals, flashing LEDs, Matt Drudge, I-Phones, Bob Dylan hawking shoes singing the times are a’changing? How is it possible to interact in a world of which so much we don’t understand?

Where everything is blurred.

And by not understand I’m not talking about the eternal stuff. Not the big guy up there or what a black hole is. I mean, the basic stuff, the stuff that makes us go.

Look at my hand there, it’s holding a steering wheel. That’s about where my knowledge of the mechanics of an automobile ends, and yet, I’m confidently sailing it down the highway at 75 miles per hour, and snapping a picture, of which I haven’t a clue what makes the image stick to the film.

Our monkey brains can’t possibly understand it all…

There’s too much knowledge, technology, and information out there. The problem is it’s becoming increasingly easy to not learn anything. All our gadgets and doo-hickeys think for us. All the newspapers have cut off their limbs and bodies and nothing remains except the big, black headlines.

The president tells us not to question him; he knows what we don’t and it’s terrifying and tyrannical and we’re better off worrying about something else and letting him protect us.

The effect is we’re a numbed populace distracted by our beeping, glowing, singing oppressors, our pockets buzzing with them, our homes proudly displaying them.

The juxtaposition of thought is a schizophrenic experience. You’re watching a moving, a tragic documentary on the horrors of the Holocaust, cut to a bald genie all in white mopping a woman’s floor while the domestic housewife looks on adoringly, saying ‘Mr. Clean, what would I do without you?’

On the side of your Satrbuck’s cup is a Zen koan.

Standing at the urinal reading the stock ticker in live time.

Star or satellite, what is that I see tonight? If I wish on one and it’s the other, do I still get to find my lover?

******************************

Once again the Japanese have triumphed on the world stage in the other international sport they excel at besides hot dog eating contests: Air Guitar.

OULU, Finland – A Japanese man out-”played” challengers to win the Air Guitar World Championship for the second consecutive year at a contest in northern Finland.

[...]

“It’s great. We’ve seen all the nations, united nations, ‘rocking on the free world’ and that’s good, that’s great,” de Tonquedec said.

One of the favorites for the title was American Andrew “William Ocean” Litz, whose act ends in a spectacular backflip onto an empty beer can. He finished 11th.

What? A backflip onto an empty beer can smashing it only got our Yank 11th?

We. Were. Robbed.

******************************

Hey everybody, the latest in health trends, right around the corner: picking your nose and eating it!

Dr. Friedrich Bischinger, an Innsbruck-based lung specialist believes that people who pick their noses with their fingers are healthy, happier and probably better in tune with their bodies.

He says society should adopt a new approach to nose-picking and encourage children to take it up.

“With the finger you can get to places you just can’t reach with a handkerchief, keeping your nose far cleaner. And eating the dry remains of what you pull out is a great way of strengthening the body’s immune system,” Ananova quotes Dr. Bischinger, as saying.

Somehow I’m guessing Dr. Bishcinger either has a tremendous sense of humor or is a nut. To extoll eating boogers as a cure-all is taking it too far.

Personally, I can see how a good pick is therapeutic. Remove the tickling gooey feeling from right in front of your brain. Every animal does it so why can’t we? But I won’t eat it. I don’t go there.

I’m a boogerflicker.

******************************

A short film by Naomi Klein of ‘No Logo’ fame and Children of Men director, Alfonso Cuaron will make that hamster on the wheel up in your head run a little faster.

The same thinkers that say there’s no free lunch, espouse the “utopia” of a Free Market. You can’t get a free lunch but there can be such a thing as a whole gatdamn Free Market? Malarky straight up.

“For me every day is an anniversary of Sept. 11.” – Rudy Giuliani.

******************************

Miles from town, deep into the mountains, over a series of hills, a dense thicket of trees protects a small secret clearing. The hiker found it by accident, followed a humming sound that he heard, knelt to the earth, sniffing it, staring at it closely.

He put his ear to the ground and listened.

His heart beating with the news.

Ba dum. Ba dum. Ba dum. Ba dum…

Notes From the Ant Empire: Babyface

The dog days of summer are upon us.

I typed this while the sun burned through the grime-stained window of my hovel and melted the keys. The plastic letters stuck to my fingers, so later that day I walked around with words attached to my fingers and palms; words that didn’t make any sense so when I showed people my hands, they meekly shrugged at me.

Furdkolp basmblebod.

“Sorry, pal, can’t help you.”

If there’s one early memory we all share, whether we’re aware of it or not, is of trying to communicate something of great importance and only being able to wail. All the words we knew sounded like the ones stuck to my hand. They made sense to no one but ourselves.

Gobbledegook. Jabberwocky.

There’s something tragic about that — the trials of infants — the miscommunication that results in an adult staring down at you in the crib making their face into funny shapes while you’re pleading for some milk, for someone to free you from sitting in your poop; while you’re hollering about the existential rapture you’ve experienced, being shoved from the womb into this world of immediate want and need, “god dammit, I feel like I’m going to hurl, someone burp me!”, some bozo is holding their ears forward and puffing up their cheeks, grunting like a gorilla.

Like you even know what a gorilla is.

“That’s why I’m a poet, babyface.”

I’m still struggling to get people to understand me.

I still have the same complaints as infants.

Their eternal wail.

I don’t like it here. It’s too bright. Why am I’m alone? It’s too cold. I miss the good old days where everything was soft and cared for and warm. Where the sound of a heartbeat is the only sound I heard but the only one I needed, the most beautiful lullyby.

It was the sound of life and love as one.

*****************************

Talk about an unfortunate incarnation, to be one of Michael Vick’s pit bulls. Bad News Kennel, appropriately named, is an example of humanity at its worst. What a pitiful and unnecessary plot turn his biography just underwent.

But fuck Michael Vick! Those poor clueless dogs…

What did the pit bulls know about their executioner? Not the blazing speed, or the rifle of his arm? His mansion, his American dream, was their prison and hell. They didn’t know the glory of the man outside their cages, readying the ropes.

But they were just dogs though, right?

I have no sympathy for the quarterback’s downfall, in fact, I’m pleased. The one good thing from the recent orgy of celebrity scandals and disgrace is that the stranglehold of idol worship that held this nation dumbfounded is starting to weaken.

O.J. Michael Jackson. Bill Clinton. Robert Blake. Paris Hilton. Britney. Chris Benoit. Barry Bonds.

Michael Vick.

It’s a chorus of fallen heroes, an analogy for modern times. The lesson: money and fame does not equate merit, nor assure happiness.

A recent poll attests to this lesson reaching the kids of America.

The survey of the nation’s young people found only 1% name money as the thing that gives them the most joy. Twenty percent name spending time with family, and 15% cited friends.

Yet financial issues are among several problems atop the pile of things they say make them most unhappy. And while a majority are happy with the amount of money they and their families have, money ranks as their fourth-highest source of stress, and 55% say there are many things they can’t afford.

We’re coming around to the idea that C.R.E.A.M doesn’t rule everything around us. There’s a quiet awareness that all of this excess can’t endure forever. There’s something deeper, more meaningful.

Regardless, we’re still under the influence of its demands; bills, needless things, keeping up appearances, etc, bloody etcetera. That’s the true tragedy: to knowingly waste your life working a job you hate for shit you don’t really need.

To not even consider the other option is a foolish sacrifice the overwhelming majority of us make — the material trappings of this golden age rain down like low-interest confetti, shopping malls are nothing but giant roach motels — even I partake in the feast, I buy books like Bradley Nowell bought bags of heroin.

The thing is, it’s not like there isn’t another option.

I’m going to be a writer one day. I’m going to get those words out bright and clear. I’m going to live the life I want. If not, I’ll get them out dark and muddled. Until then, I have artofstarving.

If you want to surf all day and serve beers at night, do it. If you want to be an artist, buy some paint. You want unicorns, start gluing horns to horses. Don’t feel obligated to follow in mom and pop’s footsteps. You have your own shoes to wear.

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Damn, nature is a tricky bird.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Pounded and strained by heavy traffic and weakened by missing bolts and cracking steel, the failed interstate bridge over the Mississippi River also faced a less obvious enemy: pigeons.

Inspectors began documenting the buildup of pigeon dung on the span near downtown Minneapolis two decades ago. Experts say the corrosive guano deposited all over the Interstate 35W span’s framework helped the steel beams rust faster.

Shit piles up on the bridge, kids
you think you can walk under it?

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There is a 84 year-old man still rolling his Model A ’round town. The first car he ever owned. A romantic sentiment is behind the longevity.

Mr. Curtiss said he was 15 in 1938 when he bought the car, which sold for $400 when new, from a Derby man for $10. It was during the Depression.

[...]

Mr. Curtiss also has a strong emotional attachment to the car. He met his wife, Dorothy, shortly after he bought it, when he was 17 and she was 14; they had been married 56 years when she died in 1998. The initials they carved on the steering wheel as teenagers can still be seen. “She was the first and only girl I ever kissed in the car,” he said. “It’s priceless because of that, as far as I’m concerned.”

If this guy can make his car last seventy years we should be able to do a better job taking care of ours. I drive a 1988 Volvo, and before this little article thought that was a feat of endurance. The old boat runs pretty good. The bar was previously removed from the steering wheel so at the top it’s hollow and soft and I can twist and squeeze it like a stress bag when stuck in traffic. My name is also etched into its body, in the hood, although romance is not behind that sentiment but whiskey.

It’s time we look at the big picture.

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Sometimes a flash of light in the shadows of the room is only that; a flash of light in the shadows of the room.

Notes From The Ant Empire #6: Bandannas, Tragedies, and The Summer of Hate

Bandannas should only be worn by cowboys, chollos, and golden retrievers, and possibly pirates.

That is a beautiful sentence. One worth a closer look.

It’s strong, declarative. It’s a proclamation: Bandannas should only be worn by… then there’s rolling alliteration: cowboys, chollos… then there’s a little comedy: and golden retrievers… then it amends itself with the addition of pirates, a great addition to any sentence.

Try it.

They walked down the beach holding hands, lovers framed by the setting sun, and possibly pirates.

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My family comes from Minnesota. Most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins still live back in the land of 10,000 lakes. As many of you know there was a disaster earlier in the week in Minneapolis, a major bridge spanning the Mississippi river collapsed and 6 people died.

As I write this it’s the first time I entertained the idea that I had relatives on that bridge, relatives that perished in the murky waters below. I’m assuming none did, or I would have heard by now. Does it make me heartless to not jump to worry right away though?

I read many articles about people worrying about their loved ones, making desperate calls to the city, stuff like that. It never even crossed my mind.

I always find that overreaction a bit dramatic. Six people in a city of half a million is rather statistically small. People get shot, get into car accidents, fall from buildings in those numbers all the time. Why aren’t people always in a state of panic?

I guess, when you think about, we probably should be.

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If 1967 was the summer of love. 2007 is the summer of hate.

Politics. Donkeys hate the elephants and the other way around. Everybody hates music right now. Christians, Muslims, Jews fussing with each other, (and that’s one fuckuva euphemism for ya’) Barry Bonds is going to break Hank Aaron’s record and the fans are pissed. Television is nothing but crime stories and reality shows that glorify lying, treachery, and conflict. We are a spiteful generation.

The children of the 60’s fled to the suburbs too and then the exurbs, all buying inflated look-alike homes on prairies and in the deserts and in isolated enclaves where they watch Fox News and tsk-tsk from a distance.

I live in the porn capital of the world, the San Fernando Valley, Southern Cali, Mulholland’s stolen orchards. Across the country, though, you take a long drive and that’s all you’ll see, interstates dotted with K-Marts and lonely teens lingering in Dairy Queens.

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Don’t you know

Nannoo is flowing,
put on your headphones,
Atomic clouds are blowing,
put on your Ugg boots

Notes From the Ant Empire: Graveyard Edition

Where have you been? Everyone has been asking.

Well, not really, but I’d like to think that I’ve been missed. I have been working on a new gig, and this week I’ve had the thrill of working the 9pm to 7am shift, the dreaded graveyard shift. It’s turning me into a zombie I tell ya.

I do all right untill it hits about 4 in the morning and then my eyelids start to sag like a 60 year-old’s breasts and my thought patterns start to flatline. I’m still awake, but the brain is not moving at the speed it should.

It’s 4am right now, and I’m trying to hang in there.

There’s no work to be done at the moment, which is worse than being busy because then all that tiredness has a chance to manifest itself, to well up in my being and scold my body for still being awake. If I was busy like the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland right now I’d have no problems, adrenaline would do the job, but instead my drowsiness is becoming unbearable. I figured I’d sit down and pound out a post to wake myself up.

WAKE UP DAMMIT!

Lack of sleep is the same as being drunk, but without any of the fun. You can’t think right, your body stumbles around when you walk, and all you want to do is go home and flop into your bed.

Anyway, the world doesn’t stop for one bleary-eyed writer to bitch and moan about it, so I will digress for the time being.

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In a scene straight out the Wild West guards at an iraqi bank pulled off a heist that netted them almost a quater million dollars.

The robbery, of $282 million from the Dar Es Salaam bank, a private financial institution, raised more questions than it answered, and officials were tight-lipped about the crime. The local police said two guards engineered the robbery, but an official at the Interior Ministry said three guards were involved.

Both confirmed that the stolen money was in American dollars, not Iraqi dinars. It was unclear why the bank had that much money on hand in dollars, or how the robbers managed to move such a large amount without being detected.

Several officials speculated that the robbers had connections to the militias, because it would be difficult for them to move without being searched through many checkpoints in Baghdad

That’s a caper that deserve a rousing ovation, so Iraqi crooks, I salute you. Job well done.

Not to mention that the money was in American dollars. It must be nice to have millions and millions of dollars floating around the country, hanging around in a bank for the taking. Thieves and criminals brought it over there; and the guards that were supposed to protect it stole it.

It’s like bizzarroville over there in the Middle East.

The fact that it’s suspected that they have ties to the militas just makes you wonder what’s going to happen to that money. It’s probably not going to new playground equipment is my guess.

That place is fucked and we did the fucking.

Can we just leave already. Sheesh.

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In lighter news, actually not news at all, but just a bunch of silly pictures, check out these ordinary stars from the Celebrity Obssessed Giant TMZ.

I’m really not sure if the one of Angelina Jolie is her or not. And are these real people, or just some clever photoshopping. I feel like a fool for not being able to tell.

Anyway, moving on.

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The sun is coming up, its rays touch down on grass made of plastic blend. I hear snoring coming through headphones. I’m watching time code, waiting for it to hit the 7-hour mark. Life is a composite of words and pixels, editted thoughts, two-dimensional human beings in a tiny screen.

This is my life on the graveyard shift on a television show that never, ever ends… on a planet that spins, pirouettes, and wobbles.

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And for no other reason than it’s five in the morning and my brain is going batty, I leave you with this entertainingly disturbing video of a man having his way with a storage room of pinatas. Male pinatas, female pinatas, and even an innocent dalmation.

Enjoy and good night, er, morning.

Notes From The Ant Empire #5

This week the Ant Empire truly lost an icon and a literary genius, Kurt Vonnegut is now enjoying his final reward, his much-deserved rest. I honor the man by refusing to say “he’s up in heaven now.” See, through Vonnegut I learned about the concept of Humanism, a fancy term for a simple thing — the idea of being good without all the saints and hell-fires.

According to Humanism, it is up to humans to find the truth, as opposed to seeking it through revelation, mysticism, tradition, or anything else that is incompatible with the application of logic to the evidence. In demanding that humans avoid blindly accepting unsupported beliefs, it supports scientific skepticism and the scientific method, rejecting authoritarianism and extreme skepticism, and rendering faith an unacceptable basis for action. Likewise, humanism asserts that knowledge of right and wrong is based on one’s best understanding of one’s individual and joint interests, rather than stemming from a transcendental truth or an arbitrarily local source.

But through time, and my own journey-thought, I learned to not give it a name, just let it be. Plus I could never describe it better than Kurt so why try.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

When I was just a wee lad of 23 I saw him give a lecture at Brentwood High School. He talked of the crush he had on the young Indian clerk at his postal center, how he made a point to only buy one envelope at a time so he would have an excuse to come back again soon, and how his wife found it to be adorable, this from the 70-something author.

Vonnegut could be profound, witty, and tender, often all at the same time.

How can someone write so deeply so entertainingly?

His prose was germaphobe-clean. Quick and concise. When it’s all over and you close the book for good you’re amazed at the result, and don’t know how he did it; like a good magician he makes it look easy.

At least we know that he was prepared for this next stage of his being, his non-being.

“I have experienced what happens when I die, and so have you. We call it sleep.”

Vonnegut was one of those cranky old men that inspired me to pick up the pen in the first place, blame him.

From Galapagos, a little lullaby about the end of the world:

Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people’s actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next— and on and on.

Good night, Kurt, sleep well — you were a good sport.

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It’s a shame Vonnegut didn’t live to see the Marine’s new hybrid helicopter/jet in action.

It’s called the Osprey, a cute, cuddly euphemism for this godless killing machine. I’m sure he would have been impressed with man’s new efficiency at killing other men.

It will be “truly a historic day for your Marine Corps,” said the commander of the Marine Corps, General James Conway, referring to the deployment of the aircraft in Iraq.

“The quantum leap in technology that this aircraft will bring to the fight has been a road marked by some setbacks, lots of sacrifices, and the success of these Marines standing before you today.”

The Marines are planning to acquire some 360 of the aircraft, which cost more than 70 million dollars each, but which they believe can fly higher, faster and farther than their aging CH-46 helicopters which date from the Vietnam War.

My math’s a little rusty, but that’s 25 billion dollars, no?

Then again, what’s money? It’s just a concept; I’ve never seen a gold bar in my life.

Doesn’t it just make you proud to be an American?

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What is so attractive about city lights? Is it that they’re bright, and twinkly, and colorful? Or is it that we know they mask an ugly daily-struggle? they hide a brutal face behind a jewelled veil?

Lots of horrible, destructive things are beautiful.

Large waves.
Lightning.
Lindsay Lohan.

Is it the lights? or the concept behind them? The people sleeping, fucking, working, and dreaming in those lights.

So it’s my conclusion that city lights are really only pretty because they are made up of a million miserable souls.

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And since we’re talking about concepts:

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It has always been a life-long passion of mine to sing along to songs in languages I don’t speak. Japanese maybe.

Farsi?

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Ever wonder why moths look drunk at night, why they dart and zig-zag around any sort of light like tiny lunatics?

It’s because artificial light screws with their field of vision something nasty.

The reason we see them swinging around is because their guidance systems are based on a good system that didn’t take into account the invention of modern artificial lighting. These creatures have evolved over millions of years, and suddenly, in the space of less than a hundred, the environment changes radically, and now they’re ill-equipped to deal with these changes.

The eyes of moths and mantises are geared to steering by the moon or stars, with both objects set at optical infinity. Their basic rule of thumb requires them to fly at a specific angle to an optical stimulus.

Our eyes work differently so we can see depth, theirs are geared towards the stars so when a street lamp appears their whole navigation system is thrown into terrible disproportions. As they try to correct it, they slowly descend more into the light, and often their zapped-death.

It’s a modern tragedy on a very small scale.

Cue the tiny electric violins.

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I’m a sucker for a sale.

And I mean sucker. If there is a shirt on sale for $15, down from $35, in a trendy store – and it’s just okay, not my favorite, not even really my style, but I kinda dig it – I’ll probably buy it.

Put that exact same shirt at Ross or in a thrift store for $10 and I”ll probably walk away.

It’s about perception, the illusion that I’m getting a good deal.

That I’m pulling something over on them…

Like I said: Sucker.

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DON’T STARE AT THE SUN!!!

OKAY, NOW YOU CAN LOOK.

Is it me, or when you stare at the sun in the first picture it actually starts to burn your pupils a little bit?

Is the sun strong enough to hurt you in a photograph, a memory, a concept?

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They got to the part with the cattle and the creeping things
said I’m pretty sure we heard this one before
And don’t it all end up in some revelation
with 4 guys and horses and violent red visions
famine and death and pestilence and war
pretty sure I heard this one before
– The Hold Steady

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Los Angeles is a quiet city, until you get on the roads.

Then it’s like a thousand rock and rap concerts on wheels.

When somebody pulls up next to me with the bass pumping and the windows rattling and I feel it through the walls of my car and it’s drowning out my own music, and I begin to feel a pissed-off rage build inside my fiber; I try to remember when I was young and carefree, with spit and vigor of my own, and had just bought Biggie’s first album Ready to Die from The Warehouse and a buddy of mine – which I called homie then – and I drove for five hours, bumping through through the endless  streets of Los Angeles as loud as the standard radio in my stick-shift Honda Civic could go.

That was one of the best nights of my life.

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Some people collect priceless artifacts
I got ARTOFSTARVING