Beer and Bacon (Again)

It’s funny that women, seeing my old school rolling iron styles of conveyance always question me on the reliability of said old vehicle. Without too much irony, I try to point out that the old trucks typically go batshit and breakdown on me with logarithmically less frequency than the particular woman has or will.

A convoluted sentence, I know. The point is, my cheap Mexican Strat has more reliably improved my life for the last ten years than any person related tonnage added to my payload. Cheap date, considering it was about $250 new. She has run me about twelve dollars in luthier work over the years. I will try not to make obvious jokes about replacing the cable jack on her.

I will try.

The point of this ramble (Beer and bacon for breakfast? Absolutely), if indeed there were one, is that I had a pretty badass jam session last night. The house was a run down pile of shit and quite possible the most expensive object for miles around was the guy’s drums.

Until last night, I had not run my amp higher than about three since early 2005. It’s a monster, and the only other amp I have is 15 class A watts, which means once it starts to sound good, it knocks the fillings out of your teeth. Obviously not a polite thing to put neighbors and such through. I got to turn that Marshall combo up to about seven.

Now:

The nature of musical notes, as we hear them, is a monster of complication. If I were to take any particular object and vibrate it at 440 oscillations per minute, that would technically be the musical note “A.”

That is simple enough, but it would be impossible for any instrument (anyone cares about) to produce only that one note. In every fretted note of a guitar or every struck wire of a piano, a world of complexity emerges. That is because music is not the product of some cerebral calculation and coordinated physical laws. It is the marriage of the melodic and harmonic tones. These harmonics live in the piled high flood waters of every note. When a guitar hits one note, a total of sometimes seven tones escapes. That is not exactly true, those are the detectable tones. A controlled explosion along several harmonic frequencies leaves the instrument that your ears hear, but your brain cannot interpret. All your brain can do is hear the flood of so many levels and vectors and know that it is hearing the essence of the real.

It is telling that our brains recognize reality only in complexity, and associate all hard line truths and linear maths with the divine. We know better than we imagine. A person can draw a line around themselves and say that one side is right and the other wrong, but they cannot say the myriad reasons an A is there or why the impossibly complex explosion of an A a C and an E can change the nature of our perception. Or how the numerous chord inversions can alter everything that chord says to us. The brain, the ancient and primordial brain, the temple absconded by our self created souls, the throne of our mutated and selected reason, still resonates with a flashing photon extension in E7. Or the light apricot fuzz covering a woman’s body in the rectangle of morning sun my window lets in.

It is sad that we do not have the capacity to reason or even name so much of what we feel.

Time’s a’ Wasting

This is, without a doubt, the coolest thing I have seen on the internet.  I got there somehow through a link from Nurse Myra. Not sure how.

Anyway, it’s a little Flash toy that allows you to vector bodies into an attractive force and try to sustain orbits.  I have about thirty of the little guys running right now.  Most of the orbits are very eccentric, but I nailed one or two.  What you have to do is click on the screen drag the line that appears to create a vector.  The longer the line, the greater the velocity.  If you get the vector right, you’re rewarded with an orbit around the central attractive body.  I honestly didn’t read the page, but I’m guessing it has something to do with electrons.  I don’t give a shit, though.  Satellites and planets would be a better comparison.

Anyway, here it is.

http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/waves_particles/wavpart2.html

Craigslist Friday

(It is not Friday)

(And this is the lamest yet)

http://westslope.craigslist.org/muc/756717270.html

Rockstar

Since the geological work is over for the summer, I needed a job to get me to the school year.  I started answering Craigslist ads.  I have a whole lot of Blackfoot, Molly Hatchet, and Skynyrd to learn.

I don’t know whether to shoot myself or buy a belt buckle.  Story of my life.  How was things back here?

No Words

Egnar Plains

A word has followed me my whole life. It describes a state of being, it rests heavy in the world of terms and such, it lays down at the feet of existence as the most sublime and sinuous of adjectives. The word is not thrown around often by too many people. You had to have grown up with it resting heavy on the hearts of your folk and deep in the bowels of your existence. Lolling around in the populous East, I would assume you never hear it, at least not anymore. When I let it roll out, it’s always with a scratching in the throat and a murmur. To emphasize it would be to remove it’s power.  Lonesome.

When I hear the plainative vocals of Hank Williams, it comes across and devastates. In his quaver and nasally delivery of lyrics full of colloquialism and truth, you catch it. The man knows how to say the word. It hits in a register that defies your apathy. I can sing, sometimes well. But not without the scratching ache of the word in my voice.  When it’s a style of singing, it’s high lonesome.  When you’re on your own, and know it well, it’s just plain old lonesome.

One time I was riding with my dad while he ran gas out to the farms south of Cahone, Colorado, along the old 666.  somewhere on one of those straight and rust red roads, the old International Harvester bobtail tanker blew a head gasket.  We sat next to the hulk in the acres and acres of beans as far as I could imagine.  And I had trouble imagining past the San Juans, the Blues, the Sleeping Ute, the La Sals.  They stood sentry around the Egnar Plains, scratching the sky.  The Utes called the Blue Mountains the Abajos and believed that they held up the sky.  I would have believed them at that age.  I was young enough not to be in school, I know that.  My dad walked away to a house huddled in some cottonwoods and willows and called for a tow.

When he came back, he sat down on the running board of the truck, next to where I was squatting in the shade under the fender.  He had on a dirty white t-shirt stained a little red by the dirt tucked into a patched up pair of jeans with a pink shop rag hanging out of his back pocket, but he always seemed neat and tidy. He smelled like diesel. The wind kicked the Indian Paintbrush and the Sunflowers along the bar ditch around and we sat under the sky.  I asked him what will happen to us, all the way out here.

He just stared off into the beans and said we just have to wait around.

Just us?  The cedar and sage rimmed the bean field and disappeared over a low hill.  Clouds, the few we could see, drifted along with shadows pulled underneath them on the beans and the maroon dirt.

He just sat on the running board and stared off into the Blues where he married my mother.  They had to marry in Utah since Colorado would have required she be at least sixteen years old.

Just us, he said.  All on our lonesome.

Serious Sunday

When the nitrates burned a hole in the sky and the temples of man burned to the ground, I though of nothing but you.  Away on the seas of antiquity, I thought of you.  With the burning of your eyes and blue eyes crying in the rain.  Or in the terminal as I got loaded up in a C-9 or C-130 or C-whatever with a green bag on my back and some distraction in my mind.  Now I never think of you at all.

But when I spend the night in the thrall of playing an instrument tuned and tucked and polished to beauty unknown to your kind, I miss you a little.  You drunken fucking whore.  I mean that in the kindest way.

I know you would laugh all that off and drink more.  And more.  Or have you switched back to the blue crystal stupidity that claimed you in our origin?

Unfortunate, probably.  I still value you.

True As Love

She sat in the dark corner on a dead end street. She looked like maple and hafnium. Like sugar and murder. Like metallurgy and calligraphy. Like mystery and (slightly) a Stratocaster.

She spoke. Her voice was like sin and sanctity. Like infanticide and the aeolian scale. Like bourbon and water. Like the ultimate end of the universe and a fistful of dollars.

Black and silver, dark as the last carbon left on earth on its way into the last rift of the last continent floating on the last ocean in the last far reaches of a backwater galaxy. Silver shining like a thousand suns or like a great burning inside a man struggling to reason in the tumult of everyday.

I’d seen her before. In dreams, in literature, and in the empty hands I held to the light. To run my hands along her neck, to let my fingers find the resonance of her, to be baptized in the river of her song, I would gladly have given all that I had and almost all that I am.

But the beauty of a fine set of hips and the trusses of suspended strings love me back fully. They love me like the last fair deal gone down and the holocaust. Like guns and fruit of the vine. Like the touch of a former stranger and the hair left on a dented pillow. Like the noose and the silent, gutteral conversation of a lover.

I have an unhealthy relationship with women.

And more of an unhealthy relationship with guitars.

Update: Mostly this one.

Cold Water

Curiosity

Alight on the thermals over the sandstone cathedrals today, a golden eagle circled for about a half hour. Since I had nothing more pressing on my agenda, I watched him disappear into the clear sky. A light breeze was kicking dust up the face of the slope and into my nose and eyes and everywhere else defenseless. The sun screamed out white today. The humidity was a little high today, for the desert. Probably upwards of thirty percent. It was just enough to make sweating necessary and a left over talus boulder into a very nice cot. Eventually, a nap found me.

I dreamed about eagles and an angel. She smelled like smoke and coffee. She had on black mascara, which I thought was a little odd. She wouldn’t show me her tattoo. I’m guessing it would be barbed wire or cinnamon. I’m not sure what a cinnamon tattoo would look like. Later, I found a cobble sized piece of mossy agate. And some agate that is a striking blue. I wonder what manner of beauty the cretaceous must have sacrificed for this.

I wonder now what a cinnamon blossom would look like. Probably just delicate.

I have a small glass with mostly ice and a little caramel skim clinging and creeping farther into the container as the water dilutes it. The drips are slipping farther down as gravity wins the fight against cohesion and adhesion. Then I help the process along and pour the half melted ice and a little of the sweet smoke into me. The eagle is worth a thought.

On the eagle’s way up into the thermals, I wonder who it carried with it. I wonder what rabbit or marmot found itself towering above its former domain. That makes me think of other birds out in a different desert. Gray ones with a prey easier to kill and not nearly as beautiful. I wish I knew at least a few of those I owe an apology.

The barite concretions of the Mancos Shale formation boil out of the interbedded mudstones and calcite veins and they compress into hard nodes. Then, as the water falls onto the tender slopes of the easily soluble, the nodes are left sitting on the surface, exposed to all the world. Below the drab brown, you can find crystals clear as glass as large as six inches long. If you remove them, you must transfer them immediately into some sort of cooler or other means of protecting them from the above ground heat and sun. If you don’t protect them from the rapid temperature change, they will crack and maybe shatter like ice pulled from the freezer.

One time I dug for hours into the soft clay of some ancient loam from the time of enormity. I found radiating acicular habited barite and gypsum. I carved one into an Easer Island figure one afternoon when I was finding reasons to keep breathing. Someone had wandered off on me. She just sort of got lost and went away. I still think she was wrong, regardless of how things may have worked out. But even then, the irreversibility of all things was apparent. We could never fight the entropy that had moved into the void where some sort of affection and need had lived. We were done and even if we had not or have not moved on, time and space did without us.

Some answers can’t be found in rocks. Possibly.

Ice is a mineral. Not too many people know that. The problem is that, depending on the definition, the ice in this glass may or may not be. It is anthropogenic in origin. Some definitions do not allow for any sort of biogenesis.