Variance

You are on my mind.

When you stack up the bulk of humanity, you end up with a population. As the number grows, the bulk in the center of the bell curve swells and the outlying sweeping near zeroes push away into infinity as they always have. But that assumes that the population is infinite. The population is not. It is finite, though at the point you cross into scientific notation territory, you no longer have control over the numbers. The crazies become emergent.

On the tails of the curve, the old and reliable bell, you have curiouser and curiouser. So, does the infinitely growing population (at least for now) mean humanity will become infinitely weird? Probably.

This booze is terrible. I swear if it wasn’t 16% I wouldn’t have drank a quart of it. It’s like a shit and methanol sundae. That’s what I get for brewing in dead of summer. It’s almost impossible to keep it under 70 degrees.

The infinitely sustaining and always complicating in on itself population screams and howls at outliers. And on the rim, proud and true and forever animal, the coyotes wait. Nothing is infinite. And that’s exactly what they’re counting on.

I’ve been running stairs as part of my daily runs. I’m up to four miles of sustained running with about ten solid minutes of up and down stadium stairs. A woman, with the flowing locks of something ethereal, informed me that men running stairs is “hot.” She is accurate in that. I counter the hotness by running in the cool of the morning. My brother, lost and gone forever to the wilds of American Christian enormity and sanctity, I fear, runs with me. We talk. We understand each other. The other day I told him about one of the times I murdered. I told him about blood and infrared and burning corpses. And I told him about salving wounds with alcohol–the wounds in your brain from murder. I told him about whores and good women and some in between. I told him about the fun. And about the hate. And about being a bad, bad person. My life, as the experiences have piled on forming an eternally complicating population, has achieved a balanced curve, but on the outside the crazy reaches off into the horizon. Never to intersect non-existence along that X axis.

But goddamn, the crazy was fun. I have a feeling his piety would not have let me share had we not been sheened in sweat and aching in our calves from running bleachers.

I think about you, because you were the first to call me complicated. You were half wrong.

John Wayne Would Have Said It Better

Violence has been on my mind lately. Not because I’m angry, or even a little upset. The wash and swash of my shoreline lately has just been transgressed by it.

Early last week, I was on my own. My nights have not been my own all the time anymore. I don’t mind, but occasionally, I kick everyone out of my life. Some nights I need the magic dark and the sacred desert breeze to myself. Some nights, I need a sackcloth cup of coffee and a fire in the back yard. Some nights, I need to be all on my lonesome. Some nights I need to buy a cheap quart of Busch at Albertson’s with the change I dig out of the lint trap. Shit happens.

So, I walked over to the grocer. I had nothing on my mind, which was kind of nice. The night was beautiful, but hinting at rain. The peace on the air was palpable. The beer purchase went without a hitch. At home, I had some manner of left over bean contraption and a book I needed to read. The makings of a priceless night were coming together. Then I got out in the parking lot.

I want to call them kids, but they were more like early twenties. Maybe late teens. They were generally doing their best to be menacing. Threats bring out of me a rage I cannot explain fully or even pretend understand. It’s like the whole goddamn world has decided to set me on fire and I have the only gasoline and matches in town. I didn’t feel threatened.

They knew they were making the honorable and normal citizenry uncomfortable hanging out next to the door. By their body placement, they forced people to walk around them. The dumbass ringleader sat on the hand rails that led out the door with his knees directly in peoples path. It was the irritating behavor of young boys with no way to challenge themselves. They purposely talked loud and crude when women exited the doors.

I walked out the door and the loudest one stared at me. Really stared. I gave him an upward nod, like he just wanted to say hello. I ignored him as much as I could. I walked around his knee. Then he screamed behind me, “Bitch!”

I heard him get up.

It all seemed like such a waste. It must have been how non-believing Christians take communion. Some sort of elaborate sacrament to a God you don’t believe is there. Violence is a habit. An old habit.

I turned around, exasperated by the whole process. I had apparently hit him with my bag of beer. The world would cave in on us all for sure. He spouted on some stupid shit. I apologized. Not because I was sorry, just because I wanted to go home and read my book. This was a bad move. It made him more faux-angry. At this point the other shithead blinged up sycophants were getting restless. I gave them all a look, to make sure none of them were any sort of real threat. And they weren’t. No one was a real threat. the faux anger and moronic rhetoric was nearing a logical conclusion, so I turned slightly to leave, but for whatever reason, I didn’t turn my back to them. The guy lost it. Or at least pretended to. A torrent of terrible second language Spanish left him. Then English. I kept the eye contact. It takes a serious person to attack someone who will see you coming.

“I’m gonna fucking kill you!”

I’ve been threatened legitimately with death before. It’s sort of fun in a retrospect kind of way. Like bootcamp. Like deployments. Like war. Like hate. Like murder. But this was just a waste of my drinking time. I really wanted to read that book.

I asked him: Do I seem like someone to fuck with?

The line, low and sort of growly, should have had some real punch. When he was quiet for a second too long and I knew I could leave safely, I should have felt like a badass. I should have felt better than him. I should have walked off with my chest out and pride in the cockles of whatever heart I have left. Instead, it was just boring. And tiring.

In the darker corner of the parking lot, where one of my friends as a teenager was gutted with a stolen knife because he talked to a white girl, I felt like sitting in the grass.

So I did. And opened the beer. The clouds were covering the moon and teasing with rain. We both knew they were full of shit. My friend’s name was Eric. He didn’t survive. He died in the parking lot while they kicked in his face with their cowboy boots. While he died, I was learning how to fold T-shirts into an insanely complicated envelope and polishing my boots into chrome. I was working my body and my mind and the soul in which I still believed into a weapon–honor, courage, commitment.

A policeman drove by slow and I looked him in the eyes while I took a pull out of the beer. He slowed, and maybe some part of him thought to get out of the car an fuck with me. In the end, he stayed in the car and sped off somewhere.

Violence is so intolerably boring.

Past Lives

One aspect of public journal writing I sort of hate is that it functions as an emotional snapshot. Unlike other media, this sort of art captures, or at least pretends to very well, whatever ridiculous thing you feel or think right then. I used to have a site that has long since been relegated to archive.org that is excruciating and sometimes terrifying. The current of violence in what I wrote is a little unnerving to me.

But even on this blog, I have these vast swaths of almost unreadable whining. When I read the stuff from three months or so ago, I can’t help but roll my eyes and groan a little. Honestly, the girl was not that big a deal.

The old site did have its moments. My writing was very rough, then, as I hadn’t had any sort of English class at all since middle school. It’s still rough now, but not as bad. I was crude and angry. And as I mentioned, there was a real violence to the person that writing captured. Now when I write about violence, I write about the violence itself. Back then, it was just part of everything I thought and everything I felt. The bottle of Wild Turkey a night could not have helped.

But I had my moments.

21julO5 (cont.)

I’m sitting here, answering emails, about to go to the gym, a little wine left in the glass. Blues playing slightly too loud. There’s a still silence as Otis Taylor’s ethereal ballad to a love lost but never really left behind, Rain So Hard, ends on a powerfully acoustic vamp. Lightning crashes and silence descends over the track. It’s chilling.

I remember to breathe.

Freddie King’s voice cuts through my nirvana with pain untold. Have you ever loved a woman? God, yes. He weaves a story of falling for a woman. In the first verse he talks of obsession, finally revealing her hand isn’t his to take. The second verse tells of his shame and sin. The deft work of his guitar sets up the punchline to that verse. She belongs to his very best friend. Helen of Troy on the Mississippi. Bethseba of the Delta. The truth seeps in slowly, hurts a little, but you can sense hope in his voice. You want to hear what the next verse says. How does the story end?

It’s not to be. the band ramps up as a stinging lick from his guitar ruins your hope of conclusion. This is just the guitar solo. At least that’s what it seems. The notes tell of a different story. It’s not the down-trodden pain of a broken man. It’s powerful. The notes work up the scales, fast, but agonizingly gradual. Not quite chromatic, there are no notations for the slightly bent notes he’s destroying you with. Small stinging rises, a little more than a quarter bent note. In the no man’s land between major and minor, he plays with your passions. His solo swirls up into the upper reaches of your conciousness. You want him to play more than three or four notes at a time, please. End the suspense. He rewards you.

He hits the notes high. Bending them just enough to be perfectly out of tune, then races up, notes flashing like the glint of a mirror in the desert, leading you up the path.

That’s when he surprises you, dropping down to the guttural sonic bottom of the guitar. With a run off a scale handed down by Prometheus before man even noticed the cold, he tells you how nothing else matters. It’s the scale of a crying baby. The scale of a mare dying in birth to the foal. The scale of notes pulsing inside a climaxing woman. Your heart beats a little faster at the thought of hearing something so primal. The fire licks at your scalp, playing with you and consuming you at the same time It gives you shuddering chills.

Just like a woman’s fingers running up the back of your neck.

Update: I will not be updating for a little while.   I’m planning on being busy.

Salsa

In response to a very nice post about corn salsa, I had to make a little salsa myself. This is more or less the exact opposite of the Reverend’s version. While his is a study in healthy minimalism, mine is fairly heavy and probably not great for you. It’s on the heavy side because it is based around black beans.

Now, I hate to brag, but I am something of an expert on beans. I can tell you that beans are most definitely not created equal. While black beans can preserve well, they are not my favorite frijole. That honor falls upon the Anasazi. A close second is the old family standby of pintos. It is not mere concidence that I know so much about beans. It would be exagerating to say I had beans with every meal growing up, but we did have them once a day. It’s just what poor people in that corner of Colorado do.

For more information on beans, go here.

All that to say, I would have preferred a different bean.

Here is the recipe:

Ingredients

• Three slices of bacon
• Four roma tomatoes
• One half green bell pepper
• One whole chilaca pepper
• Some onion
• Three cloves of garlic
• Half pound of cooked black beans
• One lime
• Sage
• Oregano
• Salt

Process

Over a hot grill (preferably with a smoke pan full of wet wood chips) roast two tomatoes and all peppers. The skin of the peppers will grow waxy and bubble as they roast. I like a little bit of charring. While they roast, cook the bacon very crisp. Once the bacon is cooked, remove it and saute sliced garlic and onion in the grease. Remove the vegetables from the grill. Remove the skin from the peppers (easier if you wrap them in a cold, wet paper towel for a minute). Chop the all the vegetables, including the raw tomatoes coarsely. Dump them in the pan with the onion and garlic. Add beans and bacon. Use a pinch of sage and a pinch of oregano and salt to taste. Squeeze in the juice of the lime. Stir.

Serve hot or cold as a topping or dip. This amount will easily feed four people.  Picture forthcoming.

Monday

It had been a while.

• Since I woke up still drunk.
• Since I had the aching gut of too much alcohol and smoke.
• Since I drank straight from the bottle.
• Since I talked about the coyote people dream.
• Since I spent a day miserable and useless because I drank myself into the ground like a child.
• Since I had to pull myself up off the ground in the morning because I passed out outside.

It had been a longer while.

• Since my brother and I got a fit of the little girl giggles.
• Since I cared about people I was drinking with.
• Since I did a front flip on a trampoline.
• Since I laughed so hard that I snorted.
• Since I heard the story of my sister-in-law almost falling off a cliff, drunk and hoochie momma dancing.
• Since I appreciated my family as I should.
• Since I felt the way I did waking up next to you.

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