Brief Note: Nostalgic Journeys (Via MGMT's "Siberian Breaks")

“Being here’s always changing tunes”

— MGMT, "Siberian Breaks"

Everyone has their own unique stimuli. It’s interesting, if you look. I have this one particular song that really takes me back in a serious way: MGMT’s “Siberian Breaks.” When I was fourteen and this song came out, my big brother was really into psychedelic music. He introduced me to MGMT to begin with, and this song especially was a kind of a revelation for me. I remember the mythos surrounding my big brother’s room and the tapestries he hung and the sort of strangeness of it all. I love my big brother. The lallating guitar stums which open the song seem almost to prelude a kind of curtain’s being pulled. Maybe the curtain covers the band. Maybe it covers the scene. Maybe it’s the inner or third eye. I always enjoyed reading into MGMT’s lyrics, the myriad ways certain lines could be interpreted. This is only amplified with the various tunes involved (convolved, maybe more accurately) in this one song. Andrew VanWyngarden (the lead singer) said in an interview with Spin “It’s kind of like eight different songs strung together into one, and the general theme is about surfing in the Arctic Circle by Russia.” That in and of itself justifies my wanting to listen. There’s a sort of soul-dropping point, though. The synthesized falling, a great synaptic energy overwhelming the whole brain’s mind: around 4:47, after the jolly sub-interlude, a staccato of drums and tamborine and guitar and multiple keyboard tracks over which dark lyrics penetrate the most intuitive parts of you, this building up emerges. Subtly at first, and then it takes over, and breaks like the crest of a wave to Andrew’s lyrics: “The low tide is telling me when it’s over….” and awe shocks your eardrums’ heart… “to breathe in everything exposed…”

The truth is these sorts of tracks really get to me on a personal level, not only because of my love for the memories attached to them, but because of their timelessness, because of the substantial nerves they provide for my gut, because of the rapid swell I feel building and dissipating at once inside me. I will always love this song, this band. I wouldn’t trade anything for the memory of my brother and I sitting on his bed as he plays guitar, listening to his music, watching Aqua-Teen Hunger Force, eating taco salad, etc. etc.

As I get older, the lyrics take on new significance. They become riddled with new meaning: not only new ways of interpreting, but new means. I become paralyzed by the words and the melodies which enframe them. Maybe this is why this band has always appealed to me: I’ve always loved the irony and dark funniness of the prospect that: here I am, analyzing and contextualizing the possible meanings of meanings of lyrics within or against the tones they are affronted by, and (in reality) MGMT was probably under such a variance of hallucinogenic and overall mind-altering drugs that such analysis is done from an angle the two realities cannot rectify. Even still, I love the words. It is poetry at some of its finest, from my experience.

It’s the sound as my stimulus for the memory. What is yours?

The LogicoDaemon Pastoralis: a Pome

            In which, quiver young froth, we go about some arbitrary keepsake of habits: those in shiny shoes go about having those shoes shined by those with dirty shoes; the mouse playing “jip” with the lion; those with heartbeats playing “mythos” with the dead. To for as I wake and slumber see the world through rosy lenses, and to as I die all slowly take them off and see it as it is, I go and watch from heightened steps the cities far below this cloudscape dance and wrinkle off as lightforms as light forms.

            We of elder tongues beseech the gods of Capitalism in spitting bright saliva onto thirsty garden beds. We blink and behave and smolder as burnt coals smolder as the flowers burgeon and swoon and blossom thusly their own unique shades of gargantuan colorism. We bend and kneel and soil our pantlegs and pick the flowers whose brightnesses match our own sentiment, and take the flowers and wrap them in plastic bouquet-wrap and place them on the graves of our loved ones of the elder tongues, who did the same for theirs, and theirs the same for theirs for theirs. We snarl widely at the fossil-fuel emissions burping by, at the cloudbellies of gradient clouds all varying so slightly it is impossible to tell which from which’s stratus locale. We clip and trim and bury our eyebrows in muck so as to make those slight exuviae of facial expression all the more precise: that they must know what we mean when we express what we think we mean.

            So boyo in loose overalls, lend me your ear this one and sober time: lend me strength to tell you the things I cannot bear to say; lend me gooseflesh; lend me audible light. I beseech you. Give me hope again.

Note on The Novel and The State of The Novel

You feel so close it’s almost like you can’t breathe. So wrapped up in the thing that is this thing you’ve made, you’ve perished internally over, you’ve formed with your own hands and led to float high enough to watch it slip away. You scour the pages of your manuscript for a spark, some piece of the pie you might take with you to the work den. Alas, nothing is sane. The novel is, quite literally, everywhere: all over the place. You’ve come to realize its growth as the monstrous embodiment of a thing you fear more because you don’t know it than because it’s so intimidating—though it is: intimidating. You begin reading through pages and pages of a past more lucid self to begin to understand that it’s not only got a mind of its own, that it’s actually sharing its textual space’s mind with your own dear subconscious: That you’ve been working on the damn thing for the last six-seven years, and that it’s so deeply engrained in you, parts of it—the realest most salient parts—that you can no more begin wondering what plotline to charter or character to flesh than you can begin to wonder how to begin with where you began. To understand that this is all so convoluted it’s to a point where you really should just drop it. But you can’t drop it. You live in its pages, so much now that it’s almost more like you’re living through it than vice versa. You simply cannot simply just drop it. You couldn’t if you tried. Everything you write becomes a part of the novel, one way or another. Everything you think, a possible germ for the settings or stories or people you’ve come to know better than yourself. It is the worst kind of cage: the cage which you’ve unknowingly made to keep yourself locked in; it is the worst kind of hole: the hole you’ve dug that is itself your own grave: a blank headstone. You begin to wonder, maybe this is all something else. Maybe I wasn’t meant to go along this path. Maybe none of this is worth any of my time. But what else can you do? You are tied to it now, in some Kekuléan knot you couldn’t possibly untether yourself from. You are bound in a tacit contract that is your head’s skull’s brain’s mind’s own inability to simply let this shit go. So here we are: where were we again?

The Neo-Onyx Tenant of Digital Spaces

We of the great spellbound seating watched in horror as bombs erupted onscreen. Watched in horror as the false loved ones we’d come to know in narration were disintegrated amid black-and-white static. Shrill, noiseless white from which nothing materializes or ebbs. The key of Data-Type Commands sitting on the edge of the desk at which you are sitting. We as the proverbial hive-mind all tuned in to the bombing at hand, frozen as the audience freezes, frozen as the mouse in its cage freezes and redirects attention to the spout where a new nicotine drip has been refilled. This quiet derelict hotel room you inhabit as the outer night chimes wind-whistles being the home of a lonely mind. (p.) The sound of near-silence and AC unit’s cool breath and ventilation filling the room with the mad-happening tip-taps of key board control. You, typing in the code which creates the mesh of the walls of the room you type in. Soft wind in the bikerides of Florida nights whose sidewalks withold shadow for a darkness that is pitch-black, a darkness such as darkest fog that substantiates a wonder where the bike’s black tires begin and the pavement ends. The echo chamber of crickets in the humid air so much also a wonder as to where the distance is from you and the next bur of scraggly yellow-green, in which crickets play on the wicked chorus of faint moonlight. The sound a sound somehow comparable to the idea or image of an ant being swallowed by a dollop of heavy rain. The sounds about their own sounds like the chimney smoking wild flames agust. We go in and out of the long-ago sensations and type in bug correction with feeble fingers once willed for gripping handlebars. There in silvery lakes of disturbed waters one lily-skipping frog makes way for Summer: to get to the other side. This hotel you’ve checked into to code the walls the and keep safe the keepsakes of its existence. This hotel in which no neighbors are audible or water tap quiet as drippage seeps into the mind’s subconscious like a metronome slowed way down. Way down into the gut the seeming sickness of late day’s rose blooming up and out like a good omen that might—we settle way down in our chair, unkempt and keeping still except the hands where the hands type. (p.) There are the lights of overpassing quadrocopters and sentient nether people flying up past the windows. There is the image on the screen of bright blankness as the studio audience holds its breath forever. There would be hearths to warm their bones, cotton swabs of alcohol to sterilize their wounds. There would be great seas of wheat which move and break in tidal dance: the swallowing of all guilt or silence or final loneliness there ever could be. There would be the computer monitor as the blank screen as the repository for the imagination of the viewers as the viewer that is you, holding your breath. There would be a great oncoming rush of life and the sounds of crying for a new warmth. The new warmth as a median between the real and the un-, a point of rest where at first there was no option but to fall endlessly. To wake anew and bloom up and out with gloaming petals. The first great sign of a true cage: wander.

Green Notebook Excerpt i

This whole trialogue between the shoulder-dwelling spirits (angel & demon scenario, I’ll admit, yes—except that both shoulders feature only demons in this case) in which my own inner voice is much quieter than either demon’s, and neither one much includes me in the conversation’s focal pts. That they, the unique yet equally demonic demons, could and would parlay w/ one another about any given subject: for instance: The two well-educate professorial adults conversing beside me at their own table about the difficulties involved in teaching: this some subject’s own restraints interrelating to their daughters’ own upbringings and educations. Point (w/h/y) being that, no matter the fucking conversation, these demons’ opinions and projected-and-(yet-un-)-yet-trialogically-affected points being so formed and well-articulated and loud they overwhelm even my own (points), such that even now it begins to feel as if my thoughts are no longer my own; that they are the subconsciously conjured meanderings of two autonomous shoulder-sitting demons.

Note on this note:

I remember vaguely I was at the coffee shop whose name begins with a large golden O, sitting by myself at the public table in the rearmost part of the seating area, just before the restroom. I remember I was just sitting there trying to think of what I might write or edit when I began tuning in (as I easily do) to the conversation occurring between the two professors sitting across one another just to my left. I remember many details were lost and that I couldn’t possibly have gotten all of them down anyway what with my lack of longhand speed and the whole situation being rather strange in some way in and of itself. It was this neat idea of mine to start out with the typical movie-conversant Angel v. Demon scenario, wherein two spiritual energies often humanistic and all made-up (w/r/t the whole appearance factor) sit on either shoulder and debate with the human on whose shoulders they sit about whichever moral dilemma is at hand, except that (apart from maybe conceivably eavesdropping on these professors having their coffee, making conversation) there is really no moral to be had or parsed and that actually both the spirits turn out to be demons—no bipolarity. This idea, festering like a great sore, became nothing. I just wrote it down while I had the energy and wherewithal. That’s really all there is to this one.

Type it in Slowly - A Pome

Type its in slowly

Type it in slowly

I can only imagine 

the beam splintered frosting, 

along with the noose that

he hung from the rafters 

named The One And Only

Type it in slowly

Type it in slowly

the static is gray and the color is fading, along with the coolness of closet with shadow

door only open

Boolean sequence

door only open

type it in slowly:

door only open

door only open

the dreamer in fragments of mirror that's broken

the mirror is broke

you're so fuckin' ugly

get a new mask as the one that you're wearing

begins disappearing

type it in slowly

type it in slowly 

I saw it in slumber

Angels above me

Light that warmed skinglow

all this moving through static snow: French-vinyard lemons

It's meant to be sour

though sweeter than ever

type it in slowly