June 17, 2008
You know its easy to get bogged down by ideas. I certainly go to great lengths to relieve myself of burdensome thinking. Sometimes, ironically, this takes more thinking. Other times, more obviously, it takes less.
Just last week I was walking when a sign I saw caught my attention. I paused and the person walking behind me, on her phone, bumped into me knocking my computer to the ground. Seeing 60 percent of my recorded creative output fall to the ground, I let out “no. No!” while hurrying to pick up the fallout.
Luckily, she only fractured her back deflected into passing traffic.
For some reason, some people dislike to be loved. For some reason, some people just want to love. Lets hope that these two don’t get together.
May 27, 2008
Things which happened and things to come; if we forget the former the latter will suffer the same joys and pitfalls as growth stalls.
I often cross the line, jumping the gun, as the fat lady sings in my mind. I often figure that now’s a good time. Penchants I have: thinking I’m thinking philosophically, shunning nostalgia as I feel nostalgia leads to time wasted, fearing wasted time, repressing desires or… fearing to indulge myself enthusiastically. Mostly, though, I’d like something new every day. I don’t watch the TV because it’s always a rerun. (A side note: In college, I hung out, for a couple of years, with some people who sought meaning… I should say, who sought experiences in a way they thought was meaningful. To me, this destroyed the purity of experience and the meaningfulness of experience; it really cannot be duplicated or sought as such, can it? The image I would suggest to most convey this frustration with my friends is that of this band of gawkers watching the TV day in and day out ignoring the synapses firing lively in their brains and the chemicals surging hotly in their hearts, quoting their favorite characters, reiterating their jokes, un-engaged with themselves or their friends. At the time, I thought everyone should partake of their own personal creative process. I was beginning to see that people, at their best, use their bodies as canvas, their voice a magnificent musical brush to fill the air with their purity of heart and soul… a kind of magical vocal song. But I was younger and more wild-eyed then.)
Back to the music: the music is a response to an experience or a person. And music is like a brace or an extra back for a burdened soul. What else could I say to the drugged out sex-maniac but … this is your brain… your brain on drugs? Songs sometimes take the brute brunt out of the blunt equation. The frustrated laborer and lover in me only wants to say that when I realized I’d been driving on empty for miles… I picked up the pace in the race and I smiled. And having said it, is the burden relieved? A little… I question the ways I spend my time as I often as I spend my time doing things I later question.
Now, a long time ago, I wrote of a woman friend of mine who, having suffered a psychotic episode, was sent to live with her parents in her trans-Atlantic home. We continue to talk of life to this day via the phone and since she was sent home that first time in November of 2003, we’ve continued our mediated rapport, not once having seen each other since our Fall semester Sophomore year. During those first few conversations that cold winter she would speak of the internet and its social implications worriedly. This is what resulted from those conversations:
Do not shut down, log off:
Download
May 7, 2008
Theres something really wonderful about waking up really early and beating the heavy traffic. Say you’ve got to drive an hour to get your work place. Say its only two stretches of Hiway and a couple exits away. If you leave at 6:50, its smooth sailing. If you leave at 6:57, consider yourself stuck. Turn on that morning banter, maybe some Stern, or a little NPR, and stare down the back side of the car ahead of you. Like clockwork, and more dependable than the weather, traffic patterns are an endless source of rage and joy. Joy: when you’re winning. Rage: when you’re not. And this reminds me of what people call ‘driving culture’. New Jersey has its own. It revolves around the idea that you are racing to get to your destination and that the person in front of you is winning and that, in order to be the winner, you have to be ahead of the person in front of you. This leads to the following hilarious (and aggravating) situations: I am cruising behind a jeep. The jeep is going an uncomfortable 67 miles an hour. This begins to really enrage you. You can only think of your destination and the open road ahead of the jeep. You accelerate to pass. You pass and, once in front of the jeep, slow to about 68 miles per hour. The jeep is now convinced he’s not going fast enough and, slowly growing more enraged, envisions his destination and the open road ahead of you… you get the idea.
I’d drive to work and thing of all the mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers heading to work and I wrote this:
April 25, 2008
This is the song I alluded to in the previous post… the one which I re-did upon arriving at my parent’s house.I
April 22, 2008
There was a time when I lived in a small room on the outskirts of a small city not far from Canada on the American side of that border. It was summer and the temperature was mostly perfect though occasionally very hot. There was no air-conditioning where I lived, but there were fans, windows, and a cool basement. It was in the basement that I practiced and wrote one particular song that I was very excited about. It was an outgrowth of the classical guitar that I had (and still have). The neck is big, the strings far apart, so the instrument lends itself to being played pluckily.
Anyhoo, to supplement some pay, I took a job at an Ice Cream factory. The pay for the ‘graveyard’ shift was the best so I began work at midnight and finished at around 8am. I’d wake up at around 9pm when my housemates were having dinner. I’d eat with them, hop in the ole’ Ford and head south on the Hiway into the darkness. A couple exits down is where I’d exit. I was smoking hand rolled cigarettes at the time and would usually have one on this ride and listen to whatever I happened to be listening to at the time. They were lonely drives knowing the immediate world was going to sleep and here I was going to work… But I wasn’t alone at work. The man who hired me and showed me the ropes the first day was a tall, large, and good humored family man. I wondered how he did it supervising the midnight shift. I got a locker, large boots, overalls, goggles, and ear plugs.
There was a rather large team of factory workers working this shift. I’d be working in the ‘assembly’ room as opposed to the packaging or preparation rooms where the ice cream was crated and put on trucks and where the base ice cream was prepared. In my room, one of the largest rooms in the factory, there were two automated assembly lines churning out 50 pints a minute each. Thats about a pint a second. Thats an amazing technical feat if you stop to imagine this process for a second. The ice cream, already mixed and of the proper consistency, would be shot through downward pointing hose nozzles into the pint-size containers, one at a time, which would have descended a shoot and would have been placed by a small mechanical nudging device underneath the intermittent streams of ice cream. Immediately after being filled, a hooked device holding a lid (the lids would be constantly descending from a large lid container) would sweep in placing the lid perfectly on top of the container. A device would apply downward pressure while at the same time wrapping the pint in protective plastic. In the end, another mechanized arm would sweep the pint out of the way toward the conveyor belt making room for the next empty-and-waiting container.
This was my first intimate experience, close up and personal, with the industrial revolution… you could smell the ice cream and feel the machinery and could barely hear yourself talk as a result of the incredible racket in the room… I watched in amazement for probably 20 or 30 minutes as all these pints would be seamlessly, effortlessly filled, covered, wrapped and moved along. filled, covered, wrapped, moved along. Then, one of the lids escaped prematurely and lodged in an unfilled container right before the jet of ice cream escaped the nozzle. A split second later, the jet of ice cream escaped the nozzle and, though some of it made its way into the pint, most of it spilled out… and most unfortunately it knocked over the pint… this caused problems. The nudging device failed to nudge properly the next pint container immediately capsized, lids went flying, plastic wrap was being misplaced… and ice cream started to go everywhere. First it just got all over the conveyor belt. Then it started to pour on the floor, every second another pint. people started running frantically and yelling stuff like “Hose!”, “Grab the hose!”… someone came rushing with the hose and sprayed away the ice cream which had began to accumulate. The floor immediately around this area was quickly pooling with a mixture of Cherry Garcia and water… the drains, strategically placed all over this room, were clogging with chunks of delicious cherry. Finally, all obstructions and ice cream were removed from the problem areas, the ice cream feeder was stopped momentarily and, once resumed, pints began to fill as normal. I was delighted by this melee. This, it turns out, was a common occurrence. Indeed, several of the men standing by this pint-filling station had but two jobs. To occasionally grab a few pints and conduct some Quality Assurance tests (ex. cookie distribution measurements, number of peanut butter cups per pint, even mix of fudge and peanut butter swirls… no joke). And to man the emergency pause button on the conveyor belt machine or to manually avert disastrous ice-cream loss by removing toppled pints or quickly spraying a jet of water to remove any slick ice cream spills.
It turns out my job, the first day, was to open boxes of cookies and pour them into the combiner. The ice cream would be made and then pumped to the combiner. There was a large rotating opening, not unlike one of those wood chippers… but slower, into which I would pour, every 7 and a half minutes, a box of cookies. This was murder. I also had to open every box and dismantle it properly, placing it on a cart filled with other cardboard goods that would be brought to recycling. Jesse was the guy who showed me the combiner station ropes. He was a young man, late 20s, and I thought very spry for this time of night.. but i guess he was used to it… and his pupils suggested that he may also have been ingesting something other than the occasional cream filled cookie.
The bosses quickly noted that my skills were being wasted on opening boxes. I could in fact tackle more complex tasks like gathering the trash and recyclables and disposing of them appropriately. I was also on hose duty which was quite a responsibility. The first two tenants of this factory was cleanliness and environmental friendliness. I had to be there when the ice cream spilled or if someone spilled a barrel of caramel… which thankfully never happened. So I got to see the rest of the factory. In order to get to the truck bays where there’d be trucks parked filling with cardboard recyclables, I had to walk past the shipping area, the refrigerator and holding tanks. This was all so magical, cold, and not as loud as the other room…
Tuesdays and Thursdays were special days at the factory because production would stop for the whole 8 hour shift and every piece of machinery would be dismantled and manually cleaned. I was lucky enough to be partnered with Big John, a barrel of a man who waddled more than walked and had to talk between breaths… “Hey bub” <exhale><inhale> “how you likin’”<exhale><inhale> “the job so far…” and so on… He called all the guys “bub”. Big John loved to talk as though he were commanding respect… later, in the coffee room during a coffee break, I discovered that people didn’t think very highly of him on account of the fact that he thought very highly of his own opinions…
Anyway, Big John and I were in charge of cleaning the conveyor belts. We had to detach them from the platform and had to remove the chain-like driving belts, which we also had to clean. We created a soapy solution and using high pressured water, blasted them clean in an empty truck bay. There were also walls we had to clean and some machinery to dismantle and soak. I did a lot of the lifting for John, though he was capable, I think he appreciated not having to do as much. He’d stand by and say things like “There ya go, bub”<exhale><inhale>”that’s it”<exhale><inhale>
After waking up Friday morning with terrible nausea, I decided that changing my body clock wasn’t a great idea. So I quit.
Then it was back to sleeping late, writing and rewriting and submitting my resume, waiting, and playing music. I ended up recording Long Sunday after several takes on a 4track recorder.
When I got to my parent’s house in Jersey after failing to find a job I re-recorded what I had practiced so often in that basement, over that hazy, sleepy, dreamy, anticipatory summer and renamed it to In the words
April 16, 2008
Now that Im thinking about it, while I was in the cool and clean and dry downstairs room of my parents house, at night, with solitude, music, instruments, photographs, pornography, books, and the occasional phone call as my only friends, I would begin to ‘freak out’.
The room is lined with windows which faced the silent trees, yard, and bushes of the backyard. Sometimes, for a second, I’d imagine a person standing there, still, stoney, looking in, with terror on his face. Then sometimes I’d hear people saying things quietly, or see silhouettes. My teachers always said I had an active imagination….
As I began to drive my car around and venture into the world, I’d meet up with friends and hear them say things which they actually weren’t saying… things which would make me self-conscious and worried. But I’d play it cool knowing it was all in my head.
I wrote this one particularly crazy night when there were invisible visitors around. The voices are supposed to be soft: “What’s that knockin’ over there? This sense of mystery seems to be fillin’ me up? I hope that it’ll pass like a breeze through the air… it’s just a little drink that I’ve been pourin’ in my cup… I know it’s just a drink that I’ve been pourin’ in my cup”
I arrived from upstate at the end of the summer and the doldrums of those days was drowned by the smell of sweet grass and fallen leaves and blue skies and crisp air. It was a great season as I recall to watch the trees die and the world fill with possibility. In hindsight, I was a young dreamer more preoccupied with fancy and fantasy then practicality. I guess this is expected of the liberal arts major with a penchant for creativity, cynicism, and a strong appreciation of solitude.
I found myself in a lower room of my parent’s house where at least I had silence and solitude. My social life abruptly shifted to lots of family time and as a result of this I wrote The Dangerous which is one of the first things I recorded during this living situation. Here is the song:
Eugene posted 'Out of every story' on June 17, 2008
