On this Veterans' Day...

... I offer up the salient lyrics of Dystopia's "Jarhead Fertilizer," not to offend, not to be purposely caustic and incendiary, but to try and prod you to reflect on this: From where do we get the fucked up notion that veterans have made some noble sacrifice in serving their country? Are they serving for us? Or for the rich fucks that send them to murder women and children and round up more blood money? If more people understood the TRUTH, the American military, and in turn the American Empire, would crumble to pieces in front of our fucking faces.

Happy Fucking Veterans' Day.

"Education stable career
Join the army
Become a murderer
Kill for god and country
Return to be a hero
To tell you the truth
I hope you don't come back

Courage
It takes a big man to push a button
Fight with your honor
Like shooting children
and cutting their parents throats
Go to the frontline
Watch your friends
Get cooked by napalm...
...and they're murderers just like you
Getting education by killing people too
Bodies blown apart
You feel a sharp pain in your stomach
Now you've lost both of your legs to a grenade
Blood and vomit spew from your mouth
No career education
And you're sent home in a doggy bag

Waste your life
While taking others lives away from them
Left so empty
Just a pile of shit to me...
...And your parents looking stupid
Their son reduced to a pile of shit and dog tags
But he did what he was programmed to do

Such a good soldier.

...I hope you're fucking proud of your son...
Fuck your son I hope he fucking dies..."

Depression and Piggy Flu

The initial consultation with the psychologist was today, and once I got over the nervousness, I think it went pretty well. She seems very good, and what's more, she seems to genuinely care.

It was bizarre for me to hear someone essentially say, "With everything you're telling me, your heart should ache." Probably true, but hard to acknowledge nonetheless. I've had a facade up for so long, it was about time it started to crumble.

Next week, Monday at 3.

Progress... perhaps.

And people are getting all freaked the fuck out about swine flu, or H1N1... of the 1200 kids in the Bethlehem elementary school, more than 600 were out sick last Friday with flu symptoms that hospitals can't and won't treat. "Go home and drink plenty of fluids," they say. Well yeah, no shit. Seriously, what are people expecting from doctors right now? I had to tell a fucking woman earlier this evening that I was sniffling because I had been crying, and not because I have swine flu.

Some good advice to anyone freaking out about piggy flu right now - Do two damn things: 1) Sit the fuck down, and 2) shut the fuck up. Kaythanks!

The Last Man

There is something about being the only person walking on the grass, across the common, every day at school, while others choose to walk on the pavement - on the disgusting, unnecessary and worthless pavement - that makes me feel like the Last Man, and that the rest of these fucking fools are industrial machines on their ways to get fitted with new bearings or whatever.

Yet here I sit with my laptop, handheld PDA, and mp3 player (no advertisement of brand names necessary). I've got my gear and I'd hate to part with it.

I've got tar on my feet... worms are crawling out of my skin.

I choose to feel the ground beneath my feet, to walk amongst the trees - not the tall buildings of this false academia, the so-called ivory towers - because with those strategically placed yet somehow still majestic trees I find camaraderie. With the majority of my classmates, I sometimes feel a sickening revulsion. I like them well enough, and converse and even sometimes spend time with them, but I can't help but hate them and all that they want. Because they're just like me. Fucking just like me.

Pursuing An Impossible

How do I possibly live with myself? How do I get up out of bed everyday, somehow content with what I have become?

I fall in line everyday. Actually, I fell in line long ago, and continue to go through the daily drill of lather-rinse-repeat, to somehow make myself a more acceptable person - an acceptable student, worker, husband, father - all the while disgusting myself with the things that I do, which often contradict the things that I believe - nay, that I KNOW - to be true.

I could take the usual short cut and blame society. Society is, of course, fucked up beyond belief. Literally beyond belief. People that are genuinely good, with good hearts, good intentions, and good actions, become corrupted by the society which the elders have allowed to come into existence - which the elders indeed created. There is no reality in this society, this unsustainable pile of unbridled consumerism, wreckage and despair, and there is no reality left in our lives.

I throw stones at that which I partake in. Oftentimes gladly.

Simpler people should have and would have thought this impossible, that we could somehow destroy everything good and sacred and replace it with materialist nonsense. But alas, we achieve the horrifyingly impossible everyday, going down new avenues of the grotesque and deplorable.

There are, of course, other options. I could just as easily choose to destroy society, but I refrain, because I don't think that would achieve the desire of returning to the sacred simplicity of former times. There must be some way to get to that, because it exists in our minds - and not as forced delusion. But at this point I am not aware of a path that would lead back to that.

That is sort of what my life is turning into - a quest, or a journey through the depths of pain, disappointment, loss, and despair, hopefully to arrive at another path that will bring us back to something else - not something that it simply more aesthetically and materially pleasing to the 6 senses, but something entirely fucking livable, in all four dimensions.

Perhaps I wear the disguise to conceal what I know to be my true purpose; perhaps I wear it to evade that purpose. Perhaps I'm entirely full of shit.

We achieve the impossible everyday. It is high time to start erasing imaginary lines, to pursue a different,purer impossible - a headless impossible. One that we conform to, not one that conforms to us. One in which we are not front and center, we are not on the periphery - we just are. It exists in the mind, and once it arrives it will be necessarily headless - out of the mind and into the hands of a world that accepts it and experiences it and the richness of spirit that it is composed of.

These are not easy things to understand, given the brutal context of our lives. But they are necessary and essential in every practical and reasonable sense; do what you must to understand. Don't take my word for it - because seriously, who the fuck am I? Mess with your head. Indulge in illicit chemicals if you must - I did not, but some require it. In short, do whatever it takes to expand the parameters of your consciousness to include the impossible and unimaginable, because therein lies the heart of darkness.

Let's go digging.

"Those who engage in Western left-hand path sex-magick, the rituals of Thelema and various other mental techniques designed to bring the operator into contact with a superconscious reality (what Terrence McKenna might call the entelechy of the Overmind) are openly setting themselves up to be exploited by that which resides on the other side."

-Blair MacKenzie Blake, "DMT and Magick," in Dark Lore, Vol II

I've often operated under the assumption that one of the prime motivators in life is the promise of great riches, material and otherwise, if only we are to obtain enough knowledge. Knowledge will make life bearable, yes? Knowledge will show us the way. Knowledge will allow us to live the good life.

Knowledge also possesses a great deal of intrinsic value, to me at least. It is valuable in and of itself, and we should appreciate it for what it is, not for what it does.

Well, I am growing tired of knowledge - particularly self-knowledge (indeed, one of the trickiest types of knowledge). I'm tired of these little epiphanies that the typical person is supposed to experience as we learn about ourselves. They're nonsense. I'm tired of trying to understand myself in terms of the things I already know of myself. "I'm this way," and "I'm like this," and "I do this when x happens." All incredibly boring, time consuming and pointless. I'm beginning to think that it would be a much more worthwhile experience to try and understand myself and the world that I inhabit in terms of the things that I don't know about myself. It's an seemingly arcane piece of wisdom that the unknown has vastly more to teach us than the known.

I rarely know what the hell I'm doing anyway. So fuck it. Let's go digging.

Depression Can Be A Real Motherfucker

Depression sucks. Big sweaty fucking balls. I should consider myself fortunate that it doesn't affect me the way it used to; whereas depression would once render me literally useless for weeks at a time, it now generally comes on and lasts only a few days at most, and the intensity of the DOWN is not typically as far DOWN as once before.

One of the things about depression that really pisses me off is the way that it comes on, hitting me like a tidal wave - all the bad, empty, devastating feelings coming over in an instant, but at the same time taking its sweet fucking time (all of about 15 seconds) so that I feel myself falling farther and farther from normalcy. I fucking hate it because the wave of depression falls over me so suddenly, for no apparent reason, and I can feel the cocktail of chemicals in my brain being shaken up with poison in it. The really unfair and unfortunate part is that when the depression lifts, there is no corresponding raising of the shades, if you will. Not for me, at least. I have to wonder how others experience this.

It makes me feel like curling myself into a ball and laying in a whole that I dug with my own weathered hands. I feel like no one gets it. I feel like punching people in the face for not getting it (though I don't have to be depressed for that to be the case). I feel like I could and should be alone for the rest of my life. And worst of all, none of the music that colors my life sounds good. I have nearly 7000 songs in my iTunes library, which, if played on a continuous loop from song 1 to song 7000, would take about 785 hours to listen to. And when I'm fucking down, none of it sounds good. It all sounds like bullshit.

I'm glad this latest bout with the motherfucker that depression is ended before Father's Day weekend, so I can enjoy the weekend with my wife and kidlets... though I'm still not feeling 100%.

Anyway, enough of this fucking crying.

We've been experiencing a lot of thunderstorms of late. I love them, for a number of varied reasons.

We've had thunderstorms for each of the past 3 days and nights, off and on. But there are little thunderstorms that come and go, their bark worse than their bite, and then there are thunderstorms that should be considered harbingers of the motherfucking apocalypse. The latter is what we endured last night.

To go with the torrential downpours, how about a side of hailstones the size of nickles (much like bullet holes the size of matzoh balls!)... Wind that blew the table over and practically put the umbrella through the siding of the house... Thunder that shook the very earth, and lightning that lit the entire sky like nuclear death, for 2-3 seconds at a time... it was unbelievably violent, and amazingly beautiful. Lucky for everyone, the world did not end. The sun rose again this morning. We didn't even lose the electricity.

I'm hoping for more of those today :-)

Suspended Animation

Hell, I feel ANIMATED today.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I've been drinking small but substantial quantities of wine since 2:30PM this afternoon. Need to keep it up :-)

I was supposed to climb on the roof and clear the gutters, but suburban domestic servitude can wait. Cheap wine is today's over-arching theme. Not so inebriated that I can't help take care of my kids, but just enough so that I feel pretty good about it and everything else.

Man, the Black Pyramid s/t CD is supposed to be "stoner rock," but neither weed nor weed culture is my style. Cheap wine, apparently, is my style. And that record still sounds great, from the Middle Eastern sounds on the first track to the blues-y riffs and solos throughout... I don't play it nearly enough. I wish it were out on vinyl, because I love vinyl. I'd rather not buy another CD ever.

Black Math Horseman up next...

perceive, to;

I either just formed a more honest and intimate relationship with the Earth and the immediate ground beneath me,

*OR*

that is the last time I mow the lawn in bare feet.

Miserer

One of my last.fm friends sent me a link today to an mp3 excerpt of "Miserere," one of the songs that will be appearing on Bloody Panda's new record, Summon (due out August 11th).

Here is that link:

http://www.profoundlorerecords.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=14&Itemid=33

Holy. Mother. Fucker.

I had to ask him if it was possible that the Panda's oppressive style of doom has become even darker and heavier, because that's just what I was hearing. I don't often get this excited for records, but whereas I was super-thrilled for this record before, I am now practically drooling. August 11th cannot come fast enough.


In other news, I'm considering going to Allston again on Monday night to see Bone Awl, Ashdautas, Volahn, and Witch Tomb at O'Brien's. If I can get Marilyn to pick up the kids, I think I may...

How many posts can I title "Clean Hands Go Foul?"

A lot of people who are supposedly very close to me really don't "get" me, and while I shouldn't, I do fault them for it. I'm not hard to read - in fact, I'm right here, laid out about as bare as one person can be, with my heart bleeding all over my sleeve. It pisses me off when these folks claim to know what's going on in my head and why I behave in the manner that I do.

This has nothing to do with the aforementioned long lost friends - I don't see them often, but they know me better than anyone on the planet, and they always have. They know when I'm headed in the right direction and they know when I'm full of shit - and, luckily for me, they have no problem pointing it out to me. Bailed me out (no, not out of jail!) more times than I can count.

But some people who claim to be my friend and claim to mean well are in reality full of stuff far worse than shit - twisting my words, actions, and feelings to their own twisted ends. You wanna twist my words? Fine. You wanna claim to know the intentions behind this or that action? Alright. You wanna twist my feelings to make yourself feel better about your fucked up little world? No beans motherfucker. No, I'm not gonna hurt you or even hold it against you, because who the hell has time for that? Not me. I'm simply going to forget you exist - and that's your fucking problem. And why is it your problem? Because I'm an awesome fucking person who has more REAL LOVE to give than most people dare dream of, and I'm am not afraid to give it. Not. Even. A Little.

I hate to sound like I hold my friends to abnormally high standards, or that truly being my friend is some sort of great privilege - like belonging to some elite club -because that's not it. I have friends all over the place - all over my immediate area, my home state, the country, all over the planet, and even in cyberspace - that I would literally bend over backwards for - simply because I CARE.

I don't claim to be perfect. I openly admit to having fucked over some people that didn't deserve what they got from me. I've fucked up, I've been wrong. Yeah, I've been bad. The difference is that I will say that I've done wrong, and I will tell you that I'm truly sorry, rather than twist around whatever you did or felt to make it look like I wasn't so bad. Because even though I've done wrong, I likely respect you enough to give you the truth.

If you're a friend of mine that reads this - be it an in-person friend, a person a million miles away, or one of my fine feathered internet friends - do me the favor of telling me if I've done something wrong. If I've made you uncomfortable, if I've screwed you over, or if I just plain neglected to do the right thing - do me the favor and call me out. You don't owe me that, but it would likely be in our mutual best interest

I never intended this blog to be for this sort of stuff, but if not here, then where? This shit comes out of me whenever I listen to Khanate's final album - the grand opus Clean Hands Go Foul. Somehow that record, and particularly Alan Dubin's agonizing vocals, bring me back to center on these things that keep me awake at night. And it fucking ROCKS, slow and mean. Those guys are sorely missed.

Today I'm...

...skipping out of work early to meet some long lost friends at the Albany Pump Station for lunch. I'm so psyched. While I'd like to go see Eddie Vedder at the Palace with them, there was no way in hell I was ever going to pay 75 freaking dollars to the guy who fought the good fight against Ticketmaster's fiendish practice of overcharging for concert tix, only to turn around and do it himself.

Hey Ed: you're now the Pot, buddy.

But lunch!!! Can I get a Woo-Hoo???!!!

I may not like this tomorrow, but tonight it makes perfect sense...

strike me down, should I go to hell for what I have done


i am alive
and what's more -
i am awake
she lives to give
and in turn i care only to take

ready to see, to feel
to burn through the night
i am the fire
and - out of nowhere
She is the light

my angels go silent
my demons, they creep;
yes, i may slumber
but though i lie, i cannot sleep

this soul takes hold
i embrace its caress
thine spirit cries out
with a need to express

we came looking for ash
but found only soot;
this love we consume, devour,
and trample underfoot

left in ruins
love we send to the grave
betraying a promise
we chose instead to enslave

convictions dissembled
morality left behind
a beauty to explore, to transcend -
and a memory to find

a whisper, a wonder
and a check left blank
to look back and question
why that crumbling ship sank

my will breaks
my spine cracks
with each passing lie...
without this one true love
we wither
we blister
and we die

TEN HOURS???

I can't remember the last time I slept for 10 hours... it may have been before the kids were born. I don't even think I slept for 10 hours when I was in the Adirondacks by myself last summer.

There were some things I wanted/needed to accomplish last night, but I guess it doesn't really matter. Because I feel great :-)

Ready to enjoy the weekend like a badass motherfucker, like this guy:

The Isis-Dark Crystal Connection

This is the best way for me to describe what Aaron Turner from Isis was like last night. Keep your eye on Fizzgig, the little ball of fur on the ground. Dead ringer for Mr. Turner and his new afro/bushy-beard combo.



Also funny - Pelican guitarist Laurent Schroeder-Lebec was sporting a Darkthrone t-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, in addition to the bandanna around his neck. Looked like he should have been working at a gas station in Appalachia somewhere. Pure awesomeness.


In related news, the sequel to the original Dark Crystal, called The Power of the Dark Crystal has been pushed back again to 2011, though a couple of sources say that fans shouldn't expect it until 2013.

Signal Fills the Void

I'm sure than anyone who may or may not be reading this knows how it feels when you're tired... so fucking tired that you cannot get any restful sleep. I've slept for 4, maybe 5 hours total over the last two nights, and whereas I could once push myself through that lack of sleep without problem, it's getting more and more difficult as I age. Not only is my body tired, but my soul is just drained, exhausted, and lifeless. I thought all of the exhaustion that accompanies a semester of grad school would dissipate a few days after the semester ended, but it has been a few weeks since I turned in my research paper (the research paper on missile defense that raised me from an B+/A- in US Foreign Policy to a grand A!) and that hasn't happened yet, and I am more exhausted than ever.

There won't be much sleep coming tonight, so I'm looking to tonight's activities to rejuvenate my restless spirit, much like the Wolves in the Throne Room/A Storm of Light/Krallice show did a couple of weeks ago. Seeing Isis and Pelican should do the trick, at least for a while. Perhaps this is too much to expect from one concert, but there's something about Isis's new album Wavering Radiant, their entire back catalog, and Pelican's collected body of work that has led me to believe that this one night of live music could ease the constant tension on my heart and soul. There's one catch, though - I may HAVE TO hear Isis play "Hall of the Dead" and "In Fiction," and Pelican will certainly be REQUIRED to play "Last Day of Winter." Don't let me down, boys.

The gentlemen in opening band Tombs would be pleased, perhaps, to hear that I expect nothing from them. Not that they're not a good band - they are - but they don't get to me the way Isis and Pelican do.

My little kidlets are doing their best to (unintentionally) keep me smiling, as they always do. I mean, how could this not make you smile:



Or this:




They are such good girls. It also helps that they love one another.


... I love them to death - I mean, more than anything in the world. But there's something to be said for some silence once in a while, too. Having two kids running around doesn't leave much time for quiet reflection - something that has been in short supply. I'm looking to my upcoming trip to Minnewaska - my favorite place in the world - to provide the quiet and solitude that I need.

It also doesn't hurt that somehow I've actually managed to form what seem to be meaningful friendships ((** GASP **)) over the internet. You know who you are (that's not supposed to sound so foreboding). Thanks for being cool.

The 99 Toyota Corolla leaves for Northampton in t-minus 4 hours or so, and since this is the quiet (and I mean COMATOSE) period of the year at work, I can fill those four hours with music as loud as my laptop speakers get.

Here's hoping the boys rock out with their cocks out!

Tasty Time!

Mmmm... best cure on Earth for getting only a couple hours of sleep...

Clean Hands Go Foul

Leave it to Alan Dubin's tortured but mesmerizing vocals to lift me from a shitty day. No matter how bad my day has been, it would stand to reason that with a voice like that, Dubin has had a hundred days that were a thousand times worse.

Further confirmation, I think, of Schopenhauerian philosophy.

Long Day

It's been a long day of incredulity at things that shouldn't surprise me in the least. I'm jaded enough that fucked up things shouldn't shock me, but sometimes I lose track of that, and my jaw hits the floor.

It's also been a long day of internal conflict. I'm torn in two different directions, neither of which is here and now. Damnit, I fucking hate that.

Now, I'm struggling to stand upright, as some malicious nauseating virus has turned my digestive system into a battleground.

I take solace, however, in the entertaining fact that I can go from listening to Xasthur and Lurker of Chalice directly to playing Counting Crows, and find myself feeling more depressed by the latter - perhaps because Counting Crows sounds like Main Street in Cold Spring when I was 20 years old.

One more reason to love Kylesa...

Went for a drive to grab some food for the fam today, and got pulled over by a cop in Troy, apparently for speeding (though I question that I was actually exceeding the speed limit). He checked my plates, came to the car, gave me a funny look, took my license and registration, and after what seemed like an hour came back to the car.

"You're gonna want to slow down here," he said, " but since I like your shirt, I'm gonna let you go with a warning."

Puzzled, I said, "Uh... okay."

He replied, "My son was going to see Kylesa play, with Mastodon, I think, and I have a habit of checking out the bands that my son goes to see, since he's only 17. I listened to their new record [Static Tensions, the cover of which was depicted on my shirt] and really loved it, so I went to the show with him and have all their CDs now. I'm a fan, I guess... and feeling generous cuz of your shirt there. So just slow down a bit, don't mention this to anyone, and have good one, okay?"

I wanted to give him the "rock" salute, but figured I should quit while I was ahead. I said thanks a lot, and went on my way.

Forget the fact that their albums rule, they play raucous live shows, and are all-around nice people who autographed my copy of Static Tensions - the reason to love them is that their t-shirts get you out of speeding tickets. Fuck yeah!

Beginnings...

The title of the blog, Land of Some Other Order, is taken from a track on Earth's Hex album. I love Earth, and have for years, since their beginnings on Seattle's influential Sub Pop label. For various reasons, the title seemed apt...

I'm not sure what I'll be writing about in this blog - probably about music, since I spend what probably amounts to way too much time listening to it. I'm a metal freak these days - a little bit of this, a little bit of that - as long as its metal, let me hear it. It provides a soundtrack of sorts, for what I do, what I think, what I feel.

I'm going to try to keep politics out of it, but I know already that I will not be successful.. I have too many thoughts, too many frustrations to keep quiet. I'm radically radical (like my terminology?) in my political and social beliefs, but I will probably just use this to express my own points of view, rather than to try to influence anyone else. I've identified, at various times, with Marxism, Anarcho-syndicalism, Green politics, deep ecology and various other ideologies. For the most part, I find ideology to be constraining rather than guiding, so I just am what I am. I mention the -isms because they have all influenced me in one way or another, though my biggest influences are my enemies.

I may discuss family issues, as well. I have two little girls - Isabela (will be 3 in August) and Calleigh (just turned one in April), as well as a wife who I generally adore. She also frustrates the hell out of me, because we are vastly different people. If we were the same, though, how could we learn from one another?

I'll likely get poetic at times, using language that no one will understand but myself. Call it poetry, if you will, but its really just me trying to hide various feelings in sneaky, indirect language.

I think that's all I have to say for now. The trick will be in seeing how much I actually use this.