Rock Hammer I

*Note: This might confuse the shit out of some long time readers, especially those from the old blog.  Get over it.

“Is that blood on your shoes?”

“Probably. Hard to tell.”

1. Rock Hammer does not offer information.

He sets a boulder sized fragment of a rock on my table, spilling some soup.  Without asking, he shuttles the coat and gloves on the bench opposite me out of the way to make room for his cask-like body and a near demolished framed backpack. He is wearing shorts and sandals.  It is snowing outside and below freezing.

I drink some coffee and stare at him as he slides off his jacket and pushes food in front of him to the side, spilling soup in the sandwich plate.  I wince knowing how much the owner of that food hates soggy bread.

“So, Rock Hammer,” I ask him, “Why are you covered in leaves and twigs?”

2. Rock Hammer always goes by both names.

“I had to climb over the tree in the back to get over the fence.  The doorman doesn’t let me in, any more.”

“That makes sense.”

“Of course it makes fucking sense.”

3. Rock Hammer always makes fucking sense.

The waitress comes by and puts down my beer and the glove owner’s Manhattan.  She puts it too close to Rock Hammer and it is no longer my beer.  I politely order another from her and shoo her off before she does something crazy and asks him if he wants to order.  The beer is quickly destroyed. The Manhattan follows.

“FUCK!”

4. Rock Hammer bangs his fist on tables and yells.

Rock Hammer bangs his fist on the table. Patrons turn arming up their best looks of privileged antipathy.  They quickly look back at their own food and their own parties. Rock Hammer generally is unkempt, but he looks more frightening than unhygienic today.  Every movement sends a hail of fine brown dust flying from his clothes and wildly imaginative hair.  His beard has grown legendary. It has a twig protruding from next to his mouth.

At least he isn’t howling. Or naked.

“So, what brings you in…?”

“Shut the fuck up.  This is important.  I need you to do me a solid. Take this,” he gestures at the rock, “and hide it.”

“Rock Hammer, that’s a rock. Couldn’t you just have thrown it anywhere?”

“Anywhere?” he shouts.

I feel the cold hand of fear grasping me. “It’s just a rock, right?”

“Just a fucking rock?”

And the air between us incinerates under his twitching gaze.

5. Rock Hammer never brings you ‘just a rock.’

Silent and deadly, in his hand materializes his rusted rock hammer.  It looks to be the 20 oz. He is going to kill me.

That’s when she walks in. The rock hammer falls to the table The glass surface spiderwebs.  Some men undress women with their eyes. Rock Hammer drags them into a cave and beastfucks them with his eyes.   Especially when he hates one.

“You,” he squeezes through a locked jaw.

She pushes me aside and sits next to me. she folds a napkin and smiles. She nods and greets him.

“Rock.”

“Rock Hammer.”

“Rock is easier to say.”

“So is ‘Harpy,’ but I still have the respect to call you Evil Harpy Whore Spawn of Satan.”

“That’s catchy…” I say to the general ignoring ears of all involved.

A deafening explosion rocks the outside parking lot, sending shards from the broken windows raining in on the customers closest to the blast. Instictual ducking isn’t enough. I take a shard to the forehead and feel the first pooling of blood in my eyebrows as I raise my head above my sheltering table. Neither has moved.  She has one of the heavy leather menus held at high-ready next to her face with the blocked shrapnel sticking in it. Rock Hammer didn’t bother.  He has a six inch chunk of glass embedded in his arm and cuts on his face.

6. Rock Hammer feels no pain.

Compositionally Speaking

There is this thing I do.

I start with twenty-five perfect form pushups, the kind where your chest brushes the ground and you have to keep your head up to keep from smacking your face on the concrete.  That is reasonable, I think.  I give myself a short break. Very short.

Then I do twenty.  Again, this is no big deal. I’ve only done forty-five of the things.  It starts to wake up some muscles I forget about sometimes.  Those little guys in your shoulder, for instance.  They suck.

A short rest.  Not enough for all the pain to go away.

Then I do fifteen. Then ten. Then five. Then four. Then three, two, and one.  Then I come back.

One thru five and then ten more, if I got it. That makes one hundred pushups in less than ten minutes.  It’s insane.

What makes it crazy is the situps I do in the interstices.  Those short rests are actually just however long it takes to knock out the same number of situps.  So, within ten minutes, I’ve done one hundred of both.  That’s when I decide to give myself a sixty second muscle failure drill.  Sixty seconds to do as many pushups as I can, going to my knees if I’m not able to hold out any longer.  Then I do the same with situps. Then repeat.

This whole process takes around 15 minutes. It’s fifteen minutes of hell. I give myself a breather after that.

And then, if I’m feeling Okay About Things, I continue on with whatever I’m doing. If not, I do the same with some other muscle group, doing pullups for example.  I have yet to go more than two cycles in one sitting, but I have went through five cycles in a single day this week. Either way, I always end up Okay About Things.

It’s like some form of low grade magic.  Not the kind you’d see in a temple, but definitely the kind sold out of the back of a wagon.  All that, and I don’t have to change clothes, I don’t have to go anywhere, and it’s free.  It hurts, that is no lie.  But there’s some dark and primal part of your body that awakens upon muscle failure.

That shaky and blood-full time where you can feel your muscles swollen against the previous confines of your skin are akin to some sort of physiological revolution.  Your deeper and less esoteric self has driven the academics and skinny necked politicians against the great wall of punk-ass bitchednes and gunned them down and dragged them through the streets like the Christians of Byzantium.

I’m not sure if being stronger makes you dumber, but it is most definitely a fair trade some days.

Four cycles of these pryamidically constructed agonies is one hour out of the day.  That’s the same time elapse as a therapy session.

And therapy sessions definitely make you dumber.

Deathmetal and Sympathy

Over the last two months I have had very little caffeine.  It was next to impossible to find and decidedly detrimental to my physical abilities.

I have since made up for lost time.

I’m sitting here convulsing.  My fingers have the clammy pall of death and my eyes are forgetting to blink, turning my corneas to blood and dust.  I have Billy Cobham and Jack DeJohnette dueling it out in my head.  The smallest bit of trivia sends me skidding off into the dark night of the Wikipedia, lost for months and years.

It’s like the wrong kind of high.  The one that makes you scrub a layer of skin off in the shower.  It’s the high that turns a spinning body oblong, then eccentric, then off-balance enough to blow apart. Have you ever seen that? It’s amazing.  I saw a piece of aluminium warp and bow and frag like a grenade one time.  The lathe was doing 20,000 RPM, the metal was taking high polish.  then there was a rumble, then a chatter, then a goddamn asteroid belt of silver fibers everywhere.

Every new map I make takes untold minutes to load, so I have to maniacally check Facebook and email and phone and over and over.  I know no one has said anything.  I know nothing has happened in anyone else world, but they have the normal one.  The one where it doesn’t take forfuckingever to pass one solitary minute.

I must hydrate.

Or join a jazzmetal band.  It could go either way.

Back, Maybe

Maybe the last few months turned me into an accomplishment junkie. Something must have happened.

I’m home, now.

I’m resisting with every fiber of my being walking out of my job.  I’m trying everything to keep myself from withdrawing from school.  I’m resisting telling everyone to leave me alone and let me leave.  Let me go. Let me explode off into the night and be gone.  I’m good at gone. I’m no good at here.

I’m trying to remember how to do my job.  I can’t finish my homework to save my life. My car is broken and the insurmountable task of fixing it just depresses me. I can’t figure out if people are still my friends.  I don’t know how to fix anything.

Maybe coming home just screwed up everybody else.  They don’t know what to do with me.

I’m trying not to take off on all of them. Let them figure it out.

I dread every meeting with every person. People I love. People I missed deeply.

I want to ask them: What do I do?

I miss having the world broken into one week breaks with must-achieve goals. Tell me I have to run two miles in fourteen minutes and I will do exactly that.  Tell me I have to hit so many pop ups with a shitty, taped together rifle, and I’ll do it. Give me a squad and tell me to assault a position, and I got it.

But set me here, in middle of everyone’s life continuing, and I don’t know what to do. It makes me want to run off.

Again.

Still alive

And returning before long.

It’s been an interesting few weeks.

Reissue

Because I’ve been busy, here’s one from way back:

 

There’s something about you.  Like a ‘68 GTO. Maybe more like a Le Mans.

It’s a shape.  You are not an understated body, that is no lie.  You got that balled up lithe look of a mountain lion in a tree.  When you move, you ripple and your skin moans mercury over your muscle and lank.

But sometimes you remind me of a litre sized Ducati.  Yeah, piped up and jetted out.

It’s a rumble you do.  Not all the time, just every so often.  Your voice falls to some demon contralto like a right angle twin with desmo valves and a open inducted throat.  I can feel it in the floor and in my skin and it’s asking and begging to have the throttle wide open and the motor mounts straining.

Maybe you’re like my Jag.

Something different and sort of perfect and never the same.  You respond.  There’s no settling into it.  The way you can strip off the gray and blue and cotton sensible civilization covering you up and slide into silky sheer red instinctual animal skin.

And then claim it isn’t for me.

You hate the blues.

But if rock and roll is really just spit and sweat and Black Snake Moan, then you’ve got it down.

Yeah, Five to One, baby, one in five.

No one here get’s out alive.