In Defense Of My President

So, it's less than a year into the Obama presidency, and where do we stand?

The ultra right-wing, the Republican base, the twenty percent (or so) of Americans who believe Sarah Palin is a viable politician (and decent human being) are cowering in their bunkers, hands on their rifles, waiting nervously for the Socialist Elite to come storming into town, steal all their stuff and perform pot-fueled abortions on illegal immigrant lesbians using taxpayer money. It is, they are certain, Armageddon.

The ultra left-wing, meanwhile, the twenty percent (or so) of Americans who secretly long to be in the feared Socialist Elite, but only so they can inflict their fuel-efficient cars and organic vegetables onto an unsuspecting public, are becoming more and more outraged by the fact that it's nearly 2010 and the president STILL hasn't hung Dick Cheney for his war crimes. They are becoming disappointed in the man they assumed would steer the right-leaning country into a glorious era of peace, shared prosperity and unparalleled human rights.

In between: everybody else. Mostly, I think, they're feeling a little better about the economy and a little freaked out that the national debt is threatening to suffocate the financial lives of their future grandchildren, great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren.

I think they are hopeful that some big, necessary changes are around the corner to increase their quality of life and their quantity of life, and I think they are scared that those changes will have repercussions that nobody is prepared for. America voted for change. And we're getting it. And change scares the living daylights out of us.

Most people know I stand firmly on the left... especially on social issues, less so on fiscal ones, but generally I align with the Democrats even if I wish they were less wishy-washy. I share in some of the frustration that other liberals feel... worried that we are squandering this time we have in power... worried that we are not changing at as rapid of a clip as we should. I cringe, sometimes, at the compromises being made and the diluting of the message that the president rode to victory.

But when I stand back for a moment and try to look objectively at what's going on, I feel somewhat bolstered and reassured. I find myself standing in staunch defense of the president and his actions. Not because I agree with the outcome, but because I agree with the reasoning.

One of the things that made me livid during the eight years of GWB that the nation endured was his assumption that his presidential win, no matter how slight, was some sort of mandate from the masses. It was not. It was a psuedo-victory at best... an acknowledgment that just a smidge over (or under, as was the case in 2000) half of us thought he was the best man for the job. Bush acted as if he were representing all of us, as if he were given the reigns of leadership with our full approval and thumbs up. And he became a dictator. He did not lead with the will of the people in mind. He led with nothing but his own ideas (and Cheney's) to guide him. And he further split the poles of us apart while cementing his place as a terrible leader and a poor representative of democracy. He steamrolled his way through the presidency, and I hated him for it.

Now times have changed, the pendulum has swung enough to give my side the narrow (although impressively larger!) margin of victory and a liberal population held under the thumb of oppressive conservatism for nearly a decade snarled back to life and demanded a massive shift in direction to counteract the spiraling decline of the Bush era. In essence, now that we have the power, we want to do exactly what Bush did, except we want to do it for the right reasons. (Well, what we consider to be the right reasons (they totally are, though).)

But, despite the Democrats' victory, public opinion is not consistently on their side. Despite the fact that most Americans really would be helped by extending a public option for health care they still stand, somewhat unsurely, against it. While homosexual rights are the logical extension of the equality promised in our Declaration of Independence, a big contingent of Americans are still opposed to gay marriage. There is definitely righteous indignation in the voices of the left and I believe in what my ideology stands for... but this is a democracy, and for better or worse, that means public opinion is still supposed to hold sway over our elected, representative leaders. I hated Bush for dismissing the public in his decisions... I admire Obama for taking them into account, even when their views clash with his.

What will be gained by pushing forth an agenda that Americans are not ready for? The results of dictation, here, are never good. When an idea is foisted upon the public before the public is ready for it, it fails... and usually spectacularly. There is usually a violent and unproductive swing back to square one and progressiveness loses out in favor of tradition. When leaders bully their way through the American public, their agendas end up going one step forward and two steps back. Conservatives are feeling that right now. They are seeing the momentum of the last two years of Clinton and the first two years of Bush Jr. dwindled to stagnation punctuated by the loudest and silliest of their membership. All of the work they did making inroads into the public consciousness were lost as Bush elevated his concerns above that of the nation he was leading. He wasn't afraid to make an unpopular decision, but he should have been at least cognizant of WHY those decisions were unpopular.

The fact is, progress is being made, and although it's probably slower than we Dems would like to see, it's, in its way, remarkable. We're talking, on a national scale, about public health care. Everyone in the country is engaged in the debate... some of us are terrified, some of us are thrilled, some of us just think that, by God, we've got to try SOMETHING new. But this is the most viable conversation we've had about health care in my lifetime! And, yes, it's divisive. There's no way it won't be. But we're not dragging most of the country kicking and screaming into some new system... we're dipping our feet in slowly, mostly, trying to warm up, hoping not to have our toes eaten by sharks. If it seems like a small victory, think about where we were on the topic a year ago today. This is a massive undertaking. People won't accept a wholesale change without freaking out. They just won't. Right or wrong, that's the way it is.

So the president is moving slowly. He is making the attempt to sell his ideas to the public! What a novel concept that is. And yes, it drives me batty to see loony tunes folks shrieking at their congresspeople, but most of the town hall meeting attendees are not frightening psychopaths. Most of them just want to know what the hell is going on and how it might impact them. And while seeing the thousand page bill and hearing twice that many interpretations of it might not be altogether reassuring, I think there's a definite feeling of at least feeling connected to the process of legislating that we haven't had in an awfully long time. Listening to people unfortunately means compromise... And it means a watering down of the original potent message. But it also means bridges are built and a nation starts to be reconstituted after years of dissolution.

It's going to be slow and painful... moreso knowing we could just freaking do it because we've got the votes and even Al Franken for God's sake.

But that's a long term recipe for liberal disaster.

So I stand in defense of my president. I may not agree with his every move, but I think his motives are sound and his intelligence is immense. He's a strong enough leader to stand up for as many people as possible, even if that means, sometimes, disappointing his base in the short term. But I, for one, would rather put my trust in a man who doesn't cater to the far reaches of his side, but tries to tug the country, one battle at a time, in the right direction.

That's a foundation for long term success, not just for my party but for our country.

Change

As the darkness of night closed in on Marshall, he sat on his bed, his head in his hands, and a sort of monolithic sorrow crushing his chest. He was certain, now, of his own stupidity, his absolute lack of grace. He had ruined everything and he was sure it was never going to be good again.

The sun set, and dark rolled in, and soon, Marshall was illuminated only by an orange glow of parking lot lights streaming in through the half-open slats of his blinds. A desk fan oscillated and hummed. Dogs barked outside. Every now and then, he could hear a couple pass by on the sidewalk or a car drive past. He felt sick. Isolated. Alone. He replayed the day’s events in his head, over and over, and with each successive viewing, the error seemed more obvious. It seemed more egregious. A cool breeze blew in through the window and jostled the blinds. There was a mild din of plastic on drywall as the treatment slapped around. He didn’t know what to do now. He felt paralyzed. Abandoned.

Nothing good, he decided, came from expressing emotion. Nothing good came from telling someone how you really feel. All it does, he decided, is shatter finely built illusions. All it does is force reality to come charging through like rhino. When people ask you how you’re doing, they don’t really care. Nobody wants to hear about your fears or your worries or your hopes or your dreams. That’s what therapists are for. People want the artifice of intimacy without really knowing a thing about one another. That’s what she had wanted. And he wrecked that. He wrecked it and he didn’t know how, of even if, it could be rebuilt.

At some level, of course, Marshall knew she knew. She had to know. She wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t blind. She saw him fawn over her, gush over her, leap to her defense, beg for time. She saw all of that. She knew he was in love. But she was lucky enough to not really know. She could believe anything she wanted. She had nothing but circumstantial evidence… just an idea of it, no proof. Before he felt the need to upend his guts and tell her, breathlessly, just how in love he was, she could claim blissful and beautiful ignorance. Her reality was constructed in such a way that she and Marshall could be friends and nothing more, because Marshall never made the demand of anything else. She was fine pretending at closeness, and assumed that he was too. But inside, he was dying. Inside, he was clamoring to expel the truth.

As he sat on his bed in the dark, he wondered why he did it. He couldn’t adequately explain it. His stomach had been in knots around her. His brain hemispheres fused together in awe and lovestruck idiocy whenever the two of them were together. He cherished those moments, like rare stamps in some collection of time. Those moments stood out to him, and he wanted more. She was clear in her boundaries, but it didn’t stop his ridiculous heart or his ridiculous head from wanting, so badly, to cross into her borders. He kept it in check. He convinced himself, for a while, having her affection in any way was enough. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t close. It only whet his appetite. Every minute with her called out for duplication, for exponential growth. Every blush of something more only made the gulf between his hope and his reality that much more pronounced. He began to loathe the situation, the limits, the constraints and he hated himself for being cowed into action by his own asinine feelings.

He laid down then, on top of his blankets, in his clothes and tried to sleep, but he failed miserably in the attempt...

As night fell, Meredith was laying on her bed, struggling with a headache and pressing down on her eyes with her forearm draped across her face. She was sad and she was tired and she was angry that she wasn’t going to get to sleep tonight. She wished, somehow, she could go back and erase the last few hours, or that, at the very least, she could get a do-over. With her eyes shut so tightly, all she could see was the look of heartbreak on his face as he whispered “I love you,” and she responded with, “No you don’t.”

He did love her. She knew it. She didn’t want to know it and she certainly didn’t want to admit it, but it was doubtless. There was a polished sheen to the way he treated her… there was, in his words and his actions, a sort of barely contained admiration that both flattered and frustrated her. She knew. She could even pinpoint when his affection changed, when it grew it something unwieldy and larger than life. She saw the difference. He struggled with it, she could tell. And she wanted, badly, to somehow put him at ease. But she didn’t know what to say. The idea of it scared her to death. The idea that things could sour, that the status quo, a good status quo, might change made her sick to her stomach. So she ignored it and prayed that he would latch his attention on to somebody else. The idea of that made her queasy too. She liked things exactly how they were, but nothing stays the same for very long. Today she felt like she was watching a distant tornado, admiring it from her roof before realizing with dawning horror that it was headed straight for her. Now things had changed, and badly, and he was hurt and she was hurt and she didn’t know how to soothe any of it.

It wasn’t exactly that she wasn’t interested. She was. As much as she gagged at the idea of a soul mate, he was awfully close to that ideal, and she felt better with him than she did without. For Meredith, that was about as high of praise as any potential mate could get. But she squirmed, sometimes, at the idea of it as well. She would imagine the awkwardness of a first real date, a first real kiss… she would cringe at the thought of actual intimacy with someone she genuinely cared about because it just left so much room for things to go awry. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing him, so she kept up as many walls as possible and expunged any romantic notion of him from her head. Every now and then, her heart would twinge as she felt the flush of his kindness, of his compassion, of thoughtfulness she didn’t believe she’d ever be the recipient of. And she would crumble, a little, and try desperately not to let on.

Now, as the moon rose and she downed a cocktail of too many aspirin and too much Diet Coke, she was struck by just how off the rails it had all gone. She wished, then, that she could cry, because it seemed like other people in similar situations always felt better after a good cry. But she couldn’t do it. She didn’t even know what muscle to flex. She felt sad enough, certainly, but it just sat on her shoulders, heavy and damp, and she slumped back onto her bed and covered up her eyes again and pictured him, standing there, trembling with emotion and rejected wholesale by the girl he adored. If it had been anyone else she would have chastised their weakness, she would have mocked how much they cared. But she could feel it from it, waves of heat like the warmth of a campfire, and it was sincere and it was directed at her. She wanted, at that moment, to wrap her arms tightly around him and press her lips against his and tell him, madly, that she loved him too. She imagined it, and it seemed strained. It wasn’t her, and it wasn’t the response she could ever muster no matter how deeply she felt for him. It was too much, too theatrical… too showy. She did love him. If she was honest, she had to admit it, but she’d never love him in the same way he loved her. He’d never believe it because she’d never be able to show him. She convinced herself that, bad as this was, it was better in the long run.

But the long run seemed awfully far off on the horizon, and the here and now sucked. She hated knowing how badly he felt and she hated, even more, how badly she felt, herself. She tried, again, to picture the two of them, together, actually together, holding hands or sharing popcorn or driving late at night to faraway, star spackled beaches, content in a lovely silence and happy just to be with one another. And all of it fit. She didn’t retch, she didn’t recoil. The kissing, the sex, the gangly retro-teenage awkwardness of a burgeoning relationship was surmountable. It would, she was certain, be enjoyable at some point, even if it took some getting used to. So why did she balk at it? Why was her reaction so harsh and so cold and so damning? She knew why.

To let him in, to open that door and start something new would mean a drastic change. And Meredith saw all of the potential pitfalls... whatever he had to offer, she couldn't see the benefits being worth the trouble. She was angry at herself for admitting that, but she was, at her core, a brutally honest girl. She struggled with the loss and desperately searched reason to find a decent way out... but she couldn't think of anything to do or anything to say to assuage the situation.

She let out a soft painful moan and tried to sleep. She couldn't do it. Her brain wouldn't shut the hell up.

At around three in the morning, both Marshall and Meredith were bleary-eyed and wild with insomnia. Both of them thought fondly of the other, and then coldly, and then angrily and back to fondly again. Both of them felt bound by arbitrary rules, bound by some unwritten etiquette, bound by limitations and expectations they had set for themselves, and they were suffering because of it. Both of them felt hollow, out of sorts with the circumstances and lost in some sickening, confusing sea. Both of them wanted nothing more than to call the other, to hear the voice on the other end of the line and say, without hesitation or fear or anxiety that they loved one another. Both of them wanted that vocal embrace, that reassurance that despite a wretched day, things between them would be just fine.

Both of them stared at their telephones, paralyzed by the moment, and unable to act. They were certain things had changed forever.

Facade

What she had done, mostly, is try to hide behind a mountain of pretension, piling on layer after layer of subtle meaning and cryptic red herrings, hoping to dissuade anyone who bothers to look, hoping to misdirect the more tenacious amongst them. Like a roaring industrial anthem, she hides a melodic core under thunderous distraction and angry dissonance. She’s afraid that what’s beneath the noise isn’t good enough, isn’t interesting enough, isn’t real enough, and so she tried, desperately, to bury herself in a cacophony of meandering free verse and thoughtful, mysterious little scribblings. She worries that there is a hollowness to it all; she knows that there is such fragility to it that a simple gust of wind will send the entire house of cards crashing down. Even her name speaks to a certain inherent falsehood. Her parents named her, of all things, Lyric. And Lyric is tired of pretending to be more than she is.

Lyric pictures herself, when she pictures herself, as short, slim enough, with ratty black hair and too pale skin and grave gray eyes that seem a little too big for her face. Her lips seem strange, and she will become almost entranced by the way their slow pink fades almost imperceptibly into the white of her flesh. She will stare at them in the mirror, trying to determine where her face ends and her lips begin. Her teeth, she thinks, are too crooked, although they’re less crooked than most peoples’. And while her nose is perfectly acceptable, she is happy she can hide her ears, because one, she accurately perceives, is quite a bit larger than the other. She likes the way she dresses, even if other girls don’t, and she wishes she was more adept with mascara and eyeliner because she likes the way make-up looks on her when it’s applied correctly. All in all, she would say, she is a relatively plain girl, but on the right side of pretty. She is fairly objective in this regard, and feels head and shoulders above other girls her age who seem obsessed with weight and hair and tanning, and she’s never really felt bad about how she looks, which is nice. She’s never felt thrilled about it either, but she assumes indifference beats an eating disorder any day.

Lyric knows she is smarter than most people. This is not braggadocio, but instead, a very accurate hypothesis based on years of field research and reams of empirical evidence. It is also, she notes with sadness, not exactly a ringing endorsement of her intellect, as most people are pretty stupid. She sometimes wishes she wasn’t so smart. She wouldn’t give up what she knows or how she thinks or anything like that. She’d just rather that everybody else was elevated. It would make things easier on her, and maybe keep her from feeling obliged to let Tara Gimble always copy off of her math tests. But things are the way they are and Lyric is bright and most people aren’t and there’s nothing she can do about it one way or another. It’s still annoying, though.

Her hobbies are myriad and too many and the extreme variety in her pastimes precludes excellence in any of them. She doesn’t like this about herself. She doesn’t like flitting from one passion to the next.

She loves music, older music especially, and she has a closet full of grunge t-shirts that her Aunt Sara gave her. She likes that nobody she knows has a Smashing Pumpkins tour shirt, or a Screaming Trees tee or a homemade Nirvana hoodie. Sometimes people think it’s cool that she’s a decade behind, other kids can’t understand it. Adults love it, Lyric noticed, when a teenager likes something that they, the adults, liked when they were teenagers. Her Uncle Steve loves to talk about Soundgarden with Lyric. His wife, Gretchen, was a fan of Hole and L7 and the whole riot grrrl thing. She has an older cousin, Doug, who saw the Meat Puppets play when both of the Kirkwood brothers were alive and well. Lyric makes them feel less old and less lame by sharing their passion with them. She feels this is a valuable service to men and women on the verge of losing their youth forever. Her tastes run similar with books and movies. She feels slightly out of time, and that’s ok with her.

In addition, Lyric is a writer. She is an artist. She wants, desperately, to make something of value and wants her time to be spent just making things, producing things, because she is very afraid of not leaving a mark when she’s gone. She isn’t particularly good at any of the things she does, although she’s not laughably bad at them either. She puts forth a good effort, usually lagging at the end as she becomes bored and longing for something new to do. She has half-written snippets of songs in her head, a shoebox full of photographs she took of old factories and churches, a sketchbook with the skeleton of a teen drama graphic novel, a list of titles for the books she might someday write, and a notepad scrawled over with the seeds of a thousand unrealized projects. In this way, she has constructed a wall of creativity to hide behind. She has, in essence, built a faux persona, an exoskeleton that she crawl into to make herself appear, perhaps, deeper than she is. She can stand behind this pile of potential product and say, with regality, “look what I will make (someday)!” And in doing so she affords herself the role of poet, of painter, of stalwart chronicler of human existence and she allows herself to rest on it, to believe in it, and hope upon hope that she can follow through on something, anything, to substantiate her claims. In reality, she feels she has very little to say, very little to offer and she struggles with what’s behind the superficial charm of witty chapter headings and intricate magazine logos. So the superficiality descends into esoteric puffery, and the false starts and copious notes become increasingly stranger and harder to decipher. This has the added benefit of reducing scrutiny. It’s hard, she discovered, for anyone to objectively judge something they don’t understand. Better still, confusing things had an unintentionally hilarious side effect of forcing people into finding meaning. She found that teachers hated admitting they didn’t understand her papers or her journal entries. As much as they preached the value of substance over style, they were loathe to admit they didn’t actually know the difference. So Lyric’s persona of eclecticism and inscrutability continued to grow, unabated, and before long she began to feel suffocated by the gripping hands of a monster of her own design.

What she wants is for someone to see through her bullshit. She wants to be called to task for the overblown, overstuffed, shambling importance now ascribed to anything she does. But nobody seems to do it.

Lyric writes a column in her school newspaper. She feels like she has nothing of value to say, so she gussies up self-help aphorisms and sub-Ann Landers advice with artistic flourishes and strange linguistic trickery. She adds snippets of foreign phrasings and spellings cribbed from old “Krazy Kat” comic strips. She bends meaning to the point that it snaps and then reassembles it in a completely novel and useless configuration. Then she adds a quick pen sketch that is apropos of nothing to really sell the package. And people love it. It drives her crazy.

Lyric has talented friends who started an online e-zine. Her friend Mitchell writes short stories with plots and believable characters and genuine insights into being a young adult. Her friend Coriander takes beautiful photographs to illustrate Mitchell’s fiction. Her friend Leticia has well thought and intricately reasoned political views. She expresses them with grace and force. Her friend Carmon draws a hilarious comic strip called “Pack-N-Play” about a pregnant teen and her overbearing single mother. And Lyric provides nonsense, day after day. She never knows what to say, so she rattles off stream of conscious beat poetry and simplistic, rambling narratives or bumbling reconstitutions of her dreams into something like a letter, something like a play. It’s all miles beyond comprehension, not because of brilliance or genius, but because if it were reduced to something understandable, it would be absolutely laughable. But when obscured behind barbed wire non sequiters and middling art pretending the lack of inspiration is intentional, nobody seems to notice. Lyric is able, every day, to cram another load of nothing down the throats of her online fans. There are plenty of them. They don’t seem to care that she is, in essence, a sham artist.

Lyric won a scholarship when her art teacher, Mister Monroe, submitted a terrible painting of sparrow that Lyric had made and then hidden behind thick walls of goopy paint and spattered ink that added a dimension of (in the teacher’s words) “sorrow to the malformed shape of a poorly loved songbird.” Lyric felt guilty, especially knowing that her fellow student, Rickie Garamond, had spent weeks on his beautifully crafted rendering of Westminster Abbey only to lose his scholarship to a girl who was so ashamed of her terrible work that she blurred it as much as possible to avoid anyone seeing just how mediocre she really was. Even Rickie believed in her, though. He seemed thrilled to have lost to her. He even mentioned that he wished he could make art on a deeper level than just copying lines in a technically perfect manner. When she received the notification, she wanted to throw up.

She doesn’t watch much television, because she feels it distracts her, although she’s not even sure, now, what she’s being distracted from. She used to like jigsaw puzzles because completing them felt like an accomplishment… now, it’s hard to feel any level of satisfaction from completing someone else’s work. She used to love going to Denny’s at midnight with her friends. Now, her friends and their genuine and increasingly sophisticated discussions of art and literature and cinema only cement her feelings of cultural inadequacy. She hates speaking to them. She’s certain they will see through her façade and realize that she is a fraud, that her whole oeuvre is nothing but a pile of half-realized ideas and warmed over bits stolen from people that are way better at everything than she is. But as yet, they seem to believe in her sketchy, foggy talents and the value of the fluff that she pumps out.

Lyric sits, sometimes, in the dark, racking her brain trying to think of something sincere to say. She tries, desperately, to think of her passions, of music, of movies, of books and replicate that feeling in some way. But everything she does belies a sort of Xerox mentality. She feels incapable of real creativity. And when she does, in those dark moments, think of something genuine, she immolates herself in self-consciousness and burns the idea to the ground with her. If she does it, if she displays herself in a way that isn’t warped by frosted glass or spun through a kaleidoscope, she is certain there will be no doubt as just how mediocre she really is. And that scares the hell out of her. So she keeps up her charade, wondering if anybody will ever point out that she’s an empress and she’s not really wearing any clothes at all.

Lyric wants out, but she’s not sure how. She picks up the phone and calls her cousin Doug and hopes maybe they can go see a show. And she hates the fact that Doug thinks she’s just so cool.

Ghost Town

Sirat, somehow, found herself lazily wandering through the dusty alleys of an old west ghost town. She didn’t remember what had brought her there, nor, she realized with a sort of panicky horror, anything prior to that. She felt blank, a simulation of someone else named Sirat, a pale imitation with just broad strokes to fill in the huge white expanse of identity. And she didn’t like that. Around her, a crop of empty husk, hastily constructed buildings stood sad and rotting as a dim-bulb yellow sun hung low in the sky, hovering over the horizon and flooding the blasted desert landscape with a chalky glow. She felt ill at ease, isolated and strange. Nothing seemed quite right, and while she was tempted to blame her hole-riddled memory, there was a nauseating impermanence to her surroundings and herself. She saw vultures overhead that seemed to blink in and out existence. Things seemed fuzzy on the periphery of the desert, as if the world just came to a stop. She looked at her hands and didn’t feel like they fit with the rest of her personage. They looked different, somehow. It was only a moment, however, before they seemed to change and conform to her specifications. She felt, maybe, like she and the world were being pieced together at the same time.

With little else to do, she began to silently explore her environs. There was a smell to the place, a kind of stench of antiquity, and it stung her nose and made her eyes water. Each whiff carried with it a collection of memories that raced through Sirat’s head in a way that made them feel important and frustratingly intangible. It didn’t take long to acclimate to it, to put it aside and ignore it, but every now and then, a whisper of it would find its way to her brain and restart the memory show. It was disconcerting, but at least it was interesting. At least she felt something other than abandonment and disorientation. The town was small and trite, more like a movie set version of the American west than anything real. There were typical buildings: a jailhouse, a brothel, a post office and a saloon. Hitching posts and water troughs lined the dirt main street. Sirat could picture men in ten gallon hats with holstered guns prowling the alleys, and ladies in their corsets and finery trying to woo them to bed. It seemed so silly in that context, the way real people and real events were distilled to some basic essence of their existence and then launched forward, forever, as a default representation, a perpetual archetype. It struck her then that she, here, was no different. She was an essential part of someone real, someone else who was, no doubt, slumbering peacefully in a bed far away while Sirat wandered through the ghost town. Sirat was suddenly aware that she was a dream, a bit of fluff given form and the semblance of someone else’s life and forced to interact with an imaginary world… she felt inconsequential, then, ashamed of her own lack of solidity. She was angry at having been called into being at all, and saddened that her existence would surely end the moment the real she woke up.

But the dream Sirat, solely through that realization had woken herself up and removed herself from the control of another Sirat’s dreaming mind. She was no longer tethered to the brain that had invented her. Her existence was her own. This was not a concept she readily understood. If there was a difference in her before her self-realization, it was too subtle to notice. So the dream Sirat still felt very limited even as she stepped out from her real self’s shadow to become something greater that the woman that had birthed her.

Sirat, strangely self-aware and anxious about her fate, struggled with meaning. She felt faced with an existential crisis, saddled with a condensed life that she felt needed some purpose, some goal, some form of achievement in order to validate its having happened at all. Lost amidst the ruins of a never-was town, however, she wasn’t sure what to do. She rushed from building to building, hoping that beyond each door there would be some sort of sign or direction. She flung open old doors to musty pantries, to outhouses, to bedrooms and to jail cells and found nothing but dust and dirt and ghostly white cobwebs strung between chipped paint and molding wood. With each failed door, she grew wearier, more frightened and more distraught. Her eyes began to feel heavy, her legs, leaden. She moved with slack muscles and pained joints and felt like collapsing. In the corner of the old saloon’s dining room, beyond a busted player piano, Sirat found a dirty blue mattress, stained with blood and bile and coated in a fine layer of deep gray dust. Depression and fear overtook her. There was no point to this brief exercise in existence, she told herself. There was no end goal, nothing to do, nothing to accomplish. Tears rolled down her cheeks and her whole body shook with heaving, anguished sobs. She was convinced her time was near an end and she had nothing to show for it. There had been nothing, here, in this dirty ghost town… nothing but empty rooms and debris.

Sirat took a deep breath and slumped herself, morose and worthless, into a heap on the mattress and fell into the dreamless sleep of a dream.

As Sirat slumbered, her mind set on pause, time, in its weird dreamy way, still flowed about her. Though she was no longer engaged, the world of dreams was still in motion, and a shadowy little creature, a shadowy little imp, had made her way into Sirat’s ghost town. Once, she had been the consort of a fellow imp, a dastardly little creep that demanded to be called “Thimble,” even though it wasn’t his name. Her name, however, was no secret. She was called Shair.

Shair, like Thimble, had been crafted by dreaming magicians, by men and women who dedicated themselves so wholly to the arcane arts that they practiced those arts even whilst asleep. Imps were the dream-toys of these magicians, built for purpose, to fetch and to test and to serve. Some imps fled their dreaming masters, some were emancipated upon their owners’ deaths. Others, like Thimble and Shair, had slain their magicians to gain freedom. Once, the two imps travelled the land of dreams together, side by side. Thimble, though, grew weary of their partnership and sought out the company of a newly wakened dream, a woman named Kara Frost. He abandoned her in a swirl of formless fog, and she hadn’t seen him since. Travelling alone, Shair would sometimes hear stories amongst Woken dreams, she would hear of how Kara Frost and Thimble had saved so many from the death of oblation. And so Shair, jealous Shair, dedicated herself to the opposite. She had slain her master with no remorse. Surely the destruction of those her former lover and his new escort had rescued would ease her suffering. She was pitiless in her hunt, tracking down those who bore the salvation offered by Kara and Thimble, obliterating their minds and their memories and taking their heads as trophies. In a black bag slung over her bruise blue shoulder, Shair carried the heads of a hundred dreams touched by the waking hand of Kara Frost. Even with so much death on her hands, however, she still felt the sorrow of abandonment.

Eventually, Shair began to wander, lost in confusion and sadness, and in those wanderings she stumble across the ghost town built by the dream of Sirat. Shair loved these places, these miniature hollows of human dreams. She loved exploring the streets and alleys, loved how they ranged from so simple to so convoluted. This one, however, seemed drearier and emptier than most. She was shocked that no one wandered the streets. She was amazed that the place was so lifeless. Like Sirat had, Shair walked amongst the buildings, opening doors and looking for a reason to be there. Eventually, she came across the slumbering form of Sirat on the mattress.

And Shair, then, saw a similar confusion and a similar sadness on the face of the woman lost in her dreamless sleep. She felt an inexplicable kinship with Sirat, a tether she hadn’t felt since walking with Thimble. She smiled for the first time in a long while, and she bent next to Sirat and kissed her softly on the cheek. Shair felt a shock go through her, a wave of cold as she appropriated the sadness of the woman. Shair ran her clawed hand through Sirat’s black tangle of hair. She drew in the dread and the gloom that had afflicted Sirat, and expelled it into the dreamscape as black crepe exploding from her talons. Sirat stirred, her weariness abated, her sadness expunged. The act, for Shair, was redeeming, powerful in its kindness, and Shair suddenly felt a profound hollowness that had come from slaying the dreams saved by Thimble. A heavy remorse set in, a sickness of consequence, and Shair was overtaken by the memories of those whose heads she carried in her bag. As Sirat woke, newly and confusingly content, Shair cowered back into another corner of the musty saloon. A floodgate of guilt had opened upon the poor imp.

Sirat, aware now that Shair had stolen her anguish, saw the imp cowering and felt a wave of sympathy. She could see the hurt in the poor creature’s black eyes, and she wanted, now, to help in any way she could. So she offered herself up to Shair, she offered her assistance as payment for the kindness Shair had extended to her. And Shair, then, knew how she could atone for her sins.

She asked Sirat to lay, again, on the mattress. Sirat complied, nervously, while Shair retrieved her bag of trophy heads. Shair asked Sirat not to move and Sirat didn’t, even as, one by one, Shair removed the heads of the slain dreams from her bag and cracked them, like fresh eggs, over Sirat’s body. She emptied the contents of each cracked head onto Sirat. From one, microscopic cities of glass fell like twinkling dust and dug into Sirat’s skin and eyes. Another produced liquid volumes of chromatic essence, which stained Sirat like a painter’s rag. Others released models of staircases, dollhouse furniture or tiny soldiers determined to die in some far off conflict. One merely produced the smell of French bread and cobblestones from a faux Parisian alley. All of these, the contents of all one hundred heads, were absorbed by Sirat and became part of her.

And Shair explained:

She had obliterated these dreams, destroyed their minds and befuddled their memories. But the essence of them, of who they had been and what they had created, still existed inside of their heads. By releasing them, Shair had given them to Sirat, breathed new life into them as a new life took them over. Sirat was a library, now, of these dead dreams, and Shair was convinced that they could remake them all, if only Sirat would accompany her to the places she had taken them from.

And Sirat smiled, broadly. She was suddenly full of purpose, full of meaning, and full of direction. With no reason to remain in the ghost town, Sirat and Shair set off to old parts of the dreamworld, intent on restoring what Shair had, in madness and in sorrow, so cruelly destroyed.

The ghost town crumbled behind them as they left.

The French Alley Sabine

Sabine awoke, but not really, in a different place than she expected. While her eyes had opened, she was still in bed, dreaming of waking up and turning restlessly in her sleep. She was unaccustomed to the feeling of being in two places at once, as newly dreamt dreams often are. It was all so new and stunning that it took her a moment to get her bearings, to identify herself amongst the swirling morass of fluff and detritus that would become, as she inhabited it, a carnival barker’s yelped version of a dusky French alley. She took note of herself, barely dressed for being in public and far more attired for sleep. As she moved into the coagulating street, naked footfalls became encased in socks and then leather boots. Her thin camisole blossomed into a white t-shirt and black jacket. Denim spiraled around her bare legs like ivy to become a pair of jeans. She felt better, then, less vulnerable and more engaged with her newborn surroundings.

From the periphery of her eyes, misty blue and white nothingness began to congeal into blackish red brick towers, rising up along moistened cobblestone sidewalks reflecting lamplights that grew like time lapse cornstalks from the void. The skyline they formed was ragged and fake… roofs jutted in exaggerated angles and cut against an evening sky that looked like dyed cotton pulled over dark pigment soaked watercolor paper. The buildings looked cartoonish and queer, even if the feel of their mortar lines and pitted bricks seemed genuine. The lampposts developed snaky curlicues of wrought iron that bloomed from the base and bulb like weedy tendrils, cutting into the color of the false sky with their own malicious silhouettes. Oddly positioned windows flickered up with worm yellow light that spilled into the darkening world and made for stages of delicious little shadow puppet theaters. It was all very unreal and lovely in its unreality. Sabine’s dream was pleased with it, and didn’t think it odd, at all, that drifting in with an accordion cadence and mournful violin cry came another young woman with a creeping little imp on her shoulder.

Sabine knew, the way dreams do, that the woman was named Kara Frost and that the imp was called “Thimble,” even though that wasn’t his name. She knew them from a fabricated personal history, and accepted it easily, even though this dreamt Sabine had never existed prior to tonight’s slumber and certainly had no past dealings with anyone, imp or otherwise.

Kara Frost walked with a deft arrogance, almost regally, though her imp seemed far less noble. She had about her the air of knowledge, the confidence one gets from knowing a secret, or, in Kara’s case, a whole host of secrets. Kara was, in her own terminology, Awake and she planned on Waking Sabine as well. She knew the landscape of the dreaming world, and traveled it with ease. She had spent the time since her own self-realization convincing other bits of dream that they could, in fact, exist without the need of their sleeping creators. It was that awareness that allowed her to remain hale and hearty while so many of her doppelganger sisters had perished upon the “real” Kara being roused by the alarm clock. Thimble had shown Kara the graves of her previous selves, all laid out in depressing cemetery rows in the endless fields of a firehouse from the real Kara’s youthful memory. She felt a certain obligation, then, in meeting with other dreams and showing them how to step out from the destructive shadow that their real world counterparts cast. Kara showed other dreams how to Wake Up.

All of this, the way back story is inexplicably related in dreams, was known to Sabine as she watched the slow march of Kara and Thimble into her cartoon alley. Just seeing the glimmer of reality in Kara’s eyes was impetus enough to the newborn dream to conjure up, without thinking, a café front complete with serpent coiled iron chairs and table, red and white striped parasol and a vaporous, faceless garcon to take their order. Without a motion, Sabine, Kara and Thimble were all seated under the umbrella and the phantom waiter was pouring pale blue champagne into crystal flutes for the trio. Some dreams had difficulty comprehending what Kara Frost offered them, but Sabine saw, immediately, the promise of life, nay, immortality, in Kara’s Waking. There were no words exchanged amongst them, not in any traditional way, but newsprint pigeons, torn from old paper, frayed of edge and stained sepia with age, fell into the twilight alley and acted out the conversation in telex typed English and hand scrawled French. Sabine smiled as her representative bird wrote out everything she wanted to ask of her free-dream savior. Kara smiled as her own avian surrogate spelled its way through her timeworn pitch. When their conversation ended, Kara held out her hand and the paper birds crawled into the skin of her wrist like some blood borne parasite. When she had fully ingested them, their heads poked through the black of pupils and whispered, in a tiny fortune cookie string, a goodbye to the newest recipient of Kara Frost’s assistance. Even sour faced Thimble offered up his little claw to be shaken in gratitude by the beaming Sabine.

With a rise of her dark eyebrows, Sabine offered a place to Kara, a fixture amongst the morphing alleyway of this dreamland caricature of Paris. One of the brick buildings, frillier than the others, bent itself down, like a wind wrestled tree trunk and opened a submarine hatch on its roof to Sabine’s benefactor. Sabine, like many of the dreams aided by Miss Frost, wanted desperately for Kara to stay on and expose the world of dreams, unfurl the secrets of its manipulation and the key to finding some meaning in this new and possibly infinite life. But Kara never relented, despite desiring a bit of respite from her mission. In the real world, Kara’s other was fond of telling the story about a little girl saving starfish on the beach. A curmudgeonly man, of course, tells the girl that what’s she’s doing is hopeless… there are too many starfish to save and the little girl’s actions are meaningless… that they don’t matter at all. The little girl, of course, responds as she tosses another starfish into the life-giving sea, “It matters to this one.” Kara Frost, unshackled and eternal since her Awakening, felt the same way. While her mission could be difficult, sometimes dreary and possibly ceaseless, she still needed to do what she could. Sabine was a starfish easily cast in the ocean and given a new life by Kara’s actions. There were countless more dreams to save.

As Sabine’s French alleyway began to sprawl from its original set, Kara felt sure that her newest rescue would do just fine for herself. Sabine was already raising a cast of thousands from the ground up to ease what could easily become the maddening isolation of being Awakened. It was smart, Kara thought, and as a menagerie of beautiful people were giving a sense of life in Sabine’s new world, Kara and Thimble snuck out a back door Thimble drew onto the sky with one of his many charcoal pencils. This one, Kara marveled, had been so easy.

Somewhere else entirely, a real Sabine opened her real eyes as two cats screeched angrily at one another outside of her bedroom window. The dream of Kara and Thimble and the newsprint birds and cartoon buildings stayed put in her brain for only a minute before dissolving into forgotten steam and soup. It would have been the death of the French alley’s Sabine under normal circumstances… but that Sabine was spared by the kindness of a dreamt Kara Frost.

Monday's Playlist: Black

So, last week I dug into my depresso music and pulled out one of my mix-CD's that really made me feel like shite. Things continue to look bleak on my horizon, so I've gone even further back, digging into my old cassettes to find this miserable masterpiece from 1999. It's another tour de force of sadness, this time clinging to some grunge stalwarts and other alt-rockers. I literally listened to this tape until it snapped. And when that happened, I remade it and nearly wore it out again. Enjoy!

1. Mess - Ben Folds Five (from "The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner")
2. Still Remains - Stone Temple Pilots (from "Purple")
3. Head - Meat Puppets (from "No Joke")
4. Sober - Tool (from "Undertow")
5. Ugly - The Smashing Pumpkins (from "1979")
6. Three Speed - Eels (from "Electro-Shock Blues")
7. Doughnut Song - Tori Amos (from "Boys For Pele")
8. Softer, Softest - Hole (from "Live Through This")
9. Medication - Garbage (from "Version 2.0")
10. Pillar of Davidson - Live (from "Throwing Copper")
11. Something In The Way - Nirvana (from "Nevermind")
12. Immortality - Pearl Jam (from "Vitalogy")
13. Zero Chance - Soundgarden (from "Down On The Upside")
14. Nutshell - Alice In Chains (from "Jar of Flies")
15. Miller's Angels - Counting Crows (from "Recovering The Satellites")
16. Breaking The Girl - Red Hot Chili Peppers (from "Bloodsugarsexmagik")
17. Roseblood - Mazzy Star (from "Among My Swan")
18. Falls To Climb - R.E.M. (from "Up")
19. Bullet Proof.. I Wish I Was - Radiohead (from "The Bends")
20. Bizarre Love Triangle - Frente (from "Marvin The Album")

Palinic Rage

So, I seriously get a little blinded by rage whenever I think of Sarah Palin's idiot comments regarding her son, old people and the wholly fabricated Obama "death panel." It makes me furious that this whackadoo a-hole, who supposedly serves (well, served, since she just up and quit her post) the public, is in the same business of whipping up the already frightened and befuddled masses of America into a terrified hysteria as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. At least those three ne'r-do-wells are pundits, obvious extremists whose purpose is more to entertain than to inform. But Sarah Palin is NOT a pundit. She's sort of a real politician and, as such, her words end up carrying more weight than a series of talking heads' do. She has a cult, a large one, of fervently devoted Palinites hanging off her words, because they mistakenly believe she is a.) an independent thinker, b.) looking out for their best interests and c.) not a steaming pile of nutjobbery. And this is dangerous. I can forgive cable news freakos. With their incessant stream of misinformation, lies and exaggerations, they're just doing what they get paid to do. But Palin seems to be on a different track entirely... one in which she is setting herself up as a moral authority and a figure of importance, cementing her reputation as a right-wing queen and giving her crazy army their marching orders. She's doing this by spewing outright lies in a performance that makes her fearmongering vice presidential campaign look tame and professional by comparison. She should be taken to task for this. She should be publicly humiliated for being a modern-day Joe McCarthy, the worst sort of personality our political system can puke out. She should be ashamed of herself, not only for actively working to keep this country in the dark ages, but by doing so in such an underhanded and wholly vicious way.

It bothers me because she is fanning fires where tremendous combustion may be imminent. She is doing a grave disservice, not just to us lefties looking for real progressiveism, but also to her own side's ideaology. Personally, I welcome debate on this topic, and I honest-to-God wish that the Republican party would chuck these politics of fear, the same tatics that bludgeoned our country into sad submission throughout the Bush administration, and offer up some legitimate concerns and counterproposals to the health care reform package. But instead of providing thoughtful, rational disagreement, they stoke their already loony and absolutely mortified base into mob mentality loudness and nebulous agression... who does this help? What good does this do for the country, when your opposition is based only in knee-jerk reactions free from the constraints of logic, understanding or reason? It's another sign of the right-wing meltdown... and that meltdown has grave implications for everyone, leftists included. As the Republican party continues it's ever-quickening descent into old-school Puritanism, Salem-style, there is a void of genuine fiscal conservatism left in the wake. Reasonable people are fleeing the right just as rapidly as the right is fleeing from them. And my side, of course, will view this flight as a mandate, and begin to get too big for its britches, like groups in power always do. And the pendulum will swing too far and people will be put off and a new, more powerful right wing will grow up as moderates on both sides of the aisle feel abandoned once again. We NEED the balance of reasonable, intelligent conservatives... but the current right wing seems hellbent on ignoring those folks and raising up cuckoos like Palin to raise the banner against imaginary boogeymen.

She's the closest thing we have right now to a honest-to-goodness supervillain.

One of my biggest regrets in life is that I didn’t take my education seriously enough. I bumbled my way through high school, only graduating because of a kindly English teacher who didn’t flunk me even though it would have been perfectly understandable and defensible if he had. I was, however, still a walking disaster through most of my junior and senior years, and the whole concept of college eluded me. I just never applied. So, after my inauspicious graduation, I stumbled through a terrible semester of menial labor and then enrolled in the local community college. I actually excelled, there, in what I affectionately dubbed “high school part two.” As bad of a rap as community colleges get, however, I met wonderful people there, students genuinely interested in learning and professors genuinely interested in teaching. Most of my classes eschewed busy work and rote memorization for honest-to-goodness discussion, understanding and intellectual growth. It was a wonderful environment where I developed a passion for ancient history, philosophy and western literature. And then I decided to take the plunge into the larger university system where I failed as miserably as I’ve ever failed at anything ever. Several factors added up to this spectacular educational cataclysm, but all of those factors were well within my control. At the core of it, I was bored with what school could teach me and I was arrogant enough to think I could learn it all on my own. I skipped classes to do personal projects, to fret over a suicidal girlfriend, to waste the opportunity laid out before me in an effort to preserve a life I didn’t even want to lead. I was put on academic probation, lost my financial aid and dropped out unceremoniously and so abruptly that I had to sublet my room in the apartment I’d leased for the forthcoming year. I went back to work, returning to the place that had employed me in my initial school-less gap, and quickly lost even the idea of returning to college.

The chip on my shoulder became unwieldy and huge. I was angry. I was angry at my brilliant friends with their fancy degrees and interesting, well paying jobs. I was angry at the vague system that had allowed me to fall through its cracks and wind up as laboring detritus still living with my parents. I was angry at employers for demanding some sort of proof of intellect before opening their doors to applicants and I was angry at society for valuing a piece of paper over actual reasoning assets. But mostly I was mad at myself for frittering away my youth, for squandering my abilities and for just surrendering because I was too lazy, proud and stupid to do what needed to be done. And I’m still mad at myself for it a decade later. The idea of returning to school crops up periodically, but it feels hollow to me now. I respect and admire adults who work their rear ends off and hold down and job and get a new degree, or finish an old one, I really do. But for me, I feel like the victory would be lacking. At this point, I feel like all I’d get is a participation ribbon years after the golds, silvers and bronzes have handed out.

Part of the problem, of course, is that I lived past thirty. I never really planned on that. Honestly. I just assumed I wouldn’t make it. I felt like a weakling, a runt kicked around by circumstance, too lacking in form and structure to hold up under the seemingly continuous bad weather of my youth. But time has a way of blunting disaster and eventually I just stood up, brushed myself off and continued on with my life. But the time spent in fetal position depression, or trying in vain to shake off crippling anxiety or just accepting the sub-mediocrity of my post-dropout days left me with very little infrastructure for success. Had I crumbled when I assumed I would crumble, it would all be moot. I always lamented all the preparation my brother put into his infrastructure. He worked hard to build up, brick by brick, the foundation of a successful life. And when he had gotten to the tipping point, the rollercoaster crest where all of that labor and tedium was about to pay off with almost limitless possibility in front of him, he got cancer and was slowly killed. His hard work evaporated in a steam of medical bills and handicap. It all vanished and he died and he never got to really enjoy the fruit of his labor. My assumption was I, too, would be gone before my thirtieth birthday, so why bother? Work was hard. Screwing off was ridiculously easy. I was out of my parents’ house, making a living enough to always eat and have a roof over my head. What more did I need? As my friends developed adult habits and acquired adult accessories like houses and kids, I withdrew deeper into my menial existence. My twenties slipped by, unremarkable, uninteresting and unfulfilling. I blinked at the halcyon days of my youth were gone. A decade went by with little to show for it. And I was still alive.

And now, of course, I struggle with my mediocrity. Now that it seems I'll be here a while, such a basic life devoid of responsibility, of challenge and of achievement seems awfully horrible. But I have no solidity upon which to erect a more interesting existence. I'm 31, lacking in practical skills and my work experience amounts to that of an industrious teenager. Worse still, I seem absolutely incapable of advancing myself... I sabotage myself under the banner of not being able to fit in with the talking piles of b.s. that make up the majority of management. But in reality, even if I could stomach the non-stop nonsense that goes along with being in the upper echelon of a multinational company, I can't imagine I could ever really succeed in that world. It's nice to pretend there's some nobility in it, but it truly comes down to my utter lack of follow-through, commitment and maturity. I didn't plan to end up this way. And I need to make a change. But I'm not sure how.

It's not a new issue... I've dreamt up more possible futures for myself than I could recount. I've found myself being passionate about a topic for as little as a week, dedicating myself to it wholly and then backing out because it's grown tiresome, stagnant and dull. My poor wife can't keep up with the multitude of lifelong dreams I seem intent on living out for small stretches of time. And while variety in one's dreams is certainly pleasant and makes, maybe, for interesting conversation, my absolute inability to focus is crippling in regards to actually making something out of myself.

In the end, though, the worst of it is that this is probably where I've topped out. It may not be the fault of my stunted education, my unwillingness to plan, my fear of responsibility or my lack of discipline that is keeping me from excelling. Maybe, scarily, my mediocrity is solely the result of the fact that I'm just mediocre. Most people are, of course. It's explicit in the word. But nobody wants to be mediocre. Nobody pushes ahead with their life's plans thinking, "How wonderful it would be to have my work, my achievements, my existence be basically on par with the rest of humanity." But that's what happens, right? Most of us tumble into the big space beneath the apogee of the bell curve and we never get out. As much as I would like to think my talent or my brains or my encyclopedic knowledge of Beatles' songs would separate me from the rest of the herd, they probably don't.

But as another work week ends and a new one looms just around the corner, I can't help, sometimes, but feel defeated. I can't help but feel like I should be doing so much more. Maybe that's the biggest problem of all.

Monday's Playlist: Hold On

So, I went through a really bad patch (quite) a while back... really bad. I was a total wreck, a big bloody mess of a person wandering through my days in a haze of whacked out depression. I've always had a tendency to romanticize misery, to paint it as something sort of pretty and tragic instead of being honest about just how pathetic I was. Even now, full aware of just how terrible that time was, I still sort of whitewash it for nostalgia's sake. I remember lonely twilight meanderings on streetlamp lit sidewalks listening to sad bastard music and lamenting/loving my indie film isolation. I have no desire to ever go back to the reality of that time, but every now and then I revisit the edited version by replaying some of my miserable music selections from that era. Even just sampling the playlist below makes my heart ache. These songs are exquisitely sad, I think... even if the lyrical content doesn't always match the vibe of the music, it's guaranteed to bring you down. But they're not just syrup thick misery... they're tuneful, sometimes hopeful, sometimes even a bit triumphant in their sadness. This isn't a definitive list of ultra sad songs by any means... it's just music that defined a certain very wretched moment. I think of it, now, as musical sedative for the days when I'm just too darn happy.

1. The Bleeding Heart Show - The New Pornographers (from "Twin Cinema")
2. Hold On Hope - Guided By Voices (from "Do The Collapse")
3. No Signs of Pain - Azure Ray (from "November")
4. Your Ghost - Kristin Hersh (from "Hips & Makers")
5. Suicide Life - Eels (from "Blinking Lights & Other Revelations")
6. Our Time Has Passed - The Pernice Brothers (from "The World Won't End")
7. Mr. Ambulance Driver - The Flaming Lips (from "At War With The Mystics")
8. Salesman At The Day Of The Parade - Rogue Wave (from "Descended Like Vultures")
9. Lonely As You - Foo Fighters (from "One By One")
10. Honey - Tori Amos (from "Cornflake Girl")
11. Except For The Ghosts - Lisa Germano (from "In The Maybe World")
12. Mad World - Gary Jules (from the "Donnie Darko" soundtrack)
13. NYC - Interpol (from "Turn On The Bright Lights")
14. I've Been Waiting - Sixpence None The Richer (from "Divine Discontent")
15. Cut - Plumb (from "Chaotic Resolve")
16. Breathe Me - Sia (from "Colour The Small One")
17. The Movies - Earlimart (from "Everyone Down Here")
18. It's All In Your Mind - Beck (from "Sea Change")
19. Invitation - Richard Buckner (from "Dents & Shells")
20. The Shadowlands - Ryan Adams (from "Love Is Hell")

Fleeting Affection

Twilight sprawled out wide, a deep rushing blue dotted with newly glowing streetlights and warm cricket buzz rising up into the sky. Rachael loved this time of day, especially on a quiet evening, devoid of traffic, devoid of kids on bikes. She loved the stillness, the way that the dimming light made everything softer and prettier… she loved the tranquility of it, and the sheer static magic of freezing the world between light and dark, between day and night, between sun and moon, and creating a sort of hidden alley free of the constraints of time. She imagined the world, every evening, just stopping for a brief and beautiful moment to catch its breath before trudging dutifully forward. In these hidden moments, and these moments alone, Rachael was in love.

The object of her fleet affection was a nameless face across the street. A new boy, her age, lived there. He was tall, too skinny, and he mostly kept to himself. He didn’t, most times, seem very interesting at all. But like electric lamps and headlights and fireflies, he took on an entirely new dimension in the gathering darkness. Before the black could obscure him completely, he would become someone else, someone different than anyone that Rachael had ever seen. She couldn’t articulate the change, exactly, and certainly didn’t need to. Nobody knew about her secret love. Rachael barely understood it. But it happened every night that summer. As the sun set and the moon rose and the world paused to catch its breath, Rachael would meet him in the street between their houses.

Lit up by the pale glow of the suburban streetlamps, Rachael would take his hands and he would take hers and they would engage in a chaste and electric kiss, the kind that causes teenage girls to raise one leg slightly behind them in a show of romantic abandon. And in those moments, Rachael and her fleeting love would exchange words, barely sentences, that displayed a sort of eerie synchronicity. When the moment had ended, he would return to his world and she would return to hers and there wouldn’t be a thought between them of the other. But for the minutes beneath the streetlight, they were the only thing that mattered to each other. Neither questioned it and neither delved into it. They just accepted it and allowed themselves, in the moment, to be wildly in love with the other.

Phaedra Steals A Book

As silently as she could, Phaedra slipped the old book off the sleeping wizard's shelf. She had spent months preparing the draught that finally knocked him out, and even with all of that effort she was unsure of how long the effects would last. Gyrith had a way of surprising her. He was more resourceful and cunning than his superficial bumbling would ever let on. Still, she had studied the man for nearly a quarter of a year, now. Her mission was nearly complete. She didn't even breathe as she removed the leatherbound tome from the bookshelf.

Success! There were no magical alarms, no protective spells, no little impish guards... Gyrith probably didn't even know the value of the book. As he continued to snore in his favorite chair, Phaedra dropped the volume into her satchel and crept from the room. All she needed to do, now, was slink out of the cottage and into the wishing well out back. Then she could return the volume to Chryth, a ransom for a clue to the whereabouts of her brother. She didn't like betraying Gyrith like this, but she was certain that he never would have helped her knowing that his father was involved in the deal. It was better this way. Phaedra wouldn't even have to say goodbye to the old magus. She was better at sneaking out in the middle of the night even when she wasn't stealing.

She tiptoed through Gyrith's kitchen, trying not to disturb the pots and pans as they scrubbed their copper clean. She narrowly avoided being nicked by a knife flying from dishwater to its flatware drawer bed. She didn't like Gyrith's kitchen. It was always this active, day and night, whether she or Gyrith used any dishes at all. His utensils and plates insisted on cleanliness, and that meant bathing once a day. It was, in Phaedra's estimation, a waste.

She crossed the threshold of the back door, her heart lodged squarely in her throat, and realized that, while the book may not have been protected, the entrances to Gyrith's cottage certainly were. A white field of light blocked her exit and dispatched two tiny blue sprites off into the study to wake their sleeping master. Phaedra panicked. She tried to bound through the light, but of course she failed. She fell back onto her behind, disrupting a flow of spoons to their resting place. They hit the ground with a shriek and a clatter. She cursed and stood up, and tried desperately to remember a spell to negate Gyrith's simple barrier. She muttered the words, hoped for the best, and ducked through the light again. It wasn't perfect... the barrier dyed her skin bright blue as she passed through it. Still, she was outside. She could deal with the side effects of the botched casting later. She made a made dash for the wishing well knowing a newly wakened, wholly enraged and likely very insulted Gyrith would be right behind her.

She was right. The old wizard came bounding out the cottage door, suddenly flying, aloft on a mixture of rage and simple spellcraft. He was howling like a banshee, wounded and mad, and the sound of it sent a shudder of guilt and fear up Phaedra's spine. She was so close to the wishing well, now, but she wasn't certain she could make it. Her concentration wasn't great enough, her command of magic not yet disciplined enought to make casting any sort of spell under these conditions possible. She was limited to the speed of her legs, and they didn't seem to be fast enough... especially when compared to the velocity of an airborn wizard.

Terrified and desperate, Phaedra fumbled through her satchel and produced a small vial of dark blue liquid. She didn't even know the contents, for certain, but she drank of it anyways, hoping the effect might save her from her raging friend. There was a sudden itch on the back of her shoulders, a wild sensation that nearly caused her to drop to her knees to attack it with her fingernails. She overcame the urge and kept running, but the feeling continued. It started to crack and burn, like her skin was desert dry and shot through with deep fissures. It hurt like hell, but she kept up her pace as best as she could. It was evident that bits of hardened flesh were shedding from her shoulder blades. And that, of course, was disconcerting to the young lady. She grabbed at the spots on her back and was surprised at the bony knobs that were now protuding from her skin. They were growing fast, too, upward and outward, ripping the fabric of her blouse and jutting out into the fresh air. The knobs were quickly growing into full on appendages, and soon they were sprouting feathers like blossoms on a pea vine. She was growing wings! It was only a moment before they were there, fully developed and useful, and Phaedra beat them as hard and as fast as she could. She left the ground, flapping her new wings, and able, now, maybe to outrun her pursuer.

When Gyrith saw this, he let out a horrid shout of anger and increased his speed. It wasn't enough. Phaedra was nearing the well. Gyrith knew the well in his yard was an onramp to a sort of metaphysical highway. Worse, it wasn't his and he had no rights in defending it. If Phaedra made it there, there was no spell in his repetoire that could stop her escape. His eyes lit up with yellow bolts of hot lightning. He thought, quickly, on a way to detain the girl without killing her. His options were limited. His imagination, however, was not. From a small bag around his waist, a bag always filled with bric-a-brac and nonsense, Gyrith produced a small black screw. He waved his palm over it, said a little incantation to himself, and then launched the screw, like a barroom dart, at his erstwhile apprentice. His aim was ridiculously accurate. The screw flew arrow straight and lodged into the back of Phaedra's neck. She squealed as it pierced the skin.

Obviously there was more to the screw than just a simple sting. As it hung in her skin and Phaedra, still aloft on her new wings, tried in vain to pry it out, the threads of the screw began to move. They reconfigured themselves into a grotesque approximation of a face. Phaedra, from her angle, could not see it, but when it began to speak, she could hear it perfectly well. The screw's voice was eerie and shrill, like a far off hawk's cry, only drenched in echo and speaking in words from some long lost language. Phaedra tried to block the sound of it out. She didn't know what it was going to do, but she knew it wouldn't be good.

There was no stopping it, though. As Phaedra tried to keep from listening, the screw wormed itself in deeper and deeper, until its "mouth" was buried beneath her skin. The pain was excrutiating. The effects were worse. The screw's shrill words moved up into Phaedra's brain through the veins in her neck. She couldn't block them. They were words of control. The screw was taking over Phaedra's conciousness, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

The screw halted Phaedra's flight and had her hover, frantically beating her wings like a hummingbird while Gyrith caught up. The screw demanded that she retrieve Gyrith's book from her satchel and return it to him. She had no choice but to comply. Gyrith smiled, mirthlessly, as she returned his possession to him. She fought, but to no avail.

The screw, however, had plans beyond what Gyrith had programmed it to do. It whispered another command into her skin. She shuddered, terrified at what it was telling her to do. Against her will, she dug back into her satchel and pulled out another potion filled bottle. She cringed as her hand uncorked it and dumped it down her own throat.

Gyrith, still reveling in his little victory, realized what the screw had ordered her to do. And he went pale.

Phaedra's blue skin, like that of a snake, sloughed off of her body. Underneath was a form of writhing, sickly green. It was made of maggots and grubs and other wriggling things. Her new face was horrific, a yellow-eyed death mask with tongues spilling out from all sorts of incongruous holes. Her hair was pitch black and writhing like a sea anemone's tentacles. She was something other than Phaedra now. She was something abyssmal and cruel and powerful and incredibly dangerous. And she was wholly in control of the rogue screw.

Gyrith knew, then, that a long night had only just begun.

Unstuck

Slowly wandering through the yard at dusk, Annette looked up into the darkening sky and tried to maintain a sense of self even as the barely visible panoply of stars above made her feel tiny, insignificant and alone. If she had been the crying type of girl this would have been a moment, maybe, when a tear or two would have streamed down her soft cheek. She couldn’t explain why. She wasn’t sad, exactly, and not quite upset. She was just slightly overwhelmed and slightly underwhelmed and she felt a bit of a mess inside. Annette was not the crying type of girl, however, and whatever difficult-to-express emotions she was feeling, she kept them as tightly bottled as usual.

The word she used to describe this unpleasant and annoying sensation was “unstuck.” Annette felt unstuck rarely, but when it happened, it was hard to remedy. It was a vague sense of non-accomplishment, of disgust at her own perceived mediocrity, of nebulous worry that she was missing something better and a prickly fear that she had settled for too little. She wasn’t displeased, generally, with the state of her life, but she did, at times, ache for something grander or bigger or more exciting than her day to day routine could throw at her. While most of the time that routine settled on her shoulders easily, like a comfortable shawl, other times it felt like an unbearable burden of obligation and repetition. And when she acknowledged that weight, she felt herself becoming unstuck from her life. And she disliked that feeling a great deal.

And so, as the world draped itself in its starry quilt, Annette moved in slow motion through the cooling evening air, feeling every footfall as it sent tiny shudders through her bones and nerves and muscles. She was very aware of the cricket chirps, a far off freight train, the cries of children at play and the low level hum of traffic on a nearby busy thoroughfare. She was very steady in her breath and very measured with her heartbeat and she felt uneasily at ease, a condition that she was all too accustomed to. It brought with it a sort of melancholy nostalgia, the type of creaking bone weariness that falls like soft rain in a crackling, black and white old film. It brought with it a set of memories, of half-forgotten waking dreams that began to unspool in her mind’s eye. It brought with it a heaviness that made her slump, cross-legged, on the newly damp grass.

Things were fine, she would tell herself in those moments of being unstuck. But they weren’t fine enough. As she sat on the lawn, her hopes, usually tamped down by reality and subverted into half-attempted hobbies and diversions, rose up out of her like curling steam breath on a frosty winter morning. Her eyes, normally heavy lidded and rimmed in sleepless black circles, opened wide and began to sing out with brilliant color and radiance. She was almost luminescent, barely lit by a sliver of silver moon, but somehow glowing of her own volition. Her veins were lit from the inside, spidery highways of hot pink and electric blue showing through the pale shell of her skin. Shafts of white shot through from her fingernails, phasing through the night air and rising up to the spackles of drifting black clouds like ten miniature spotlights. Quicksilver seemed to pour from her shimmering mouth, lifting up into the air, zeppelin-like and beautifully awkward, and it formed unheard notes from some imaginary symphony still being composed in the recesses of her brain. Owls beat their wings above her and flew from the crests of nearby trees to form a halo of ghostly feathers around her flowing, liquid hair. The bones of dead things rose up from the ground beneath her, clattering and yellowed with age. They seemed to build up a cage around her, a barrier wall to protect her. The air around her crackled with electricity and power. Her neighbors’ televisions lit up with white noise static. Their phone calls were shredded with a squall of shrieks and whistle. Annette, unstuck and unglued from her life, was Screaming Potential, a being of pure creative energy, like a pocket of God alight in the midst of her tiny suburban neighborhood.

There she saw it, every thread, every conceivable movement and motion and possibility. Reality lilted around her, made of nothing more than crepe streamers of reflective chrome, filaments of pulsing emerald, drizzled lines of deep crimson and shadowy strings of smoke and soot. They drifted about in insanely intricate patterns, forming geometric webs and slippery amoeba wheels that spun into amorphous nonsense before reverting, strictly, back to grotesque organization. It was revoltingly complex and disturbingly simple and it would have driven Annette mad if her brain were still designed with folds of gray matter and neurons firing across synapses. She was greater than it, now, though… aloft in the formless and rigid sea of creation. Her life, her tiny little life, was spilled out in marvelous array across a hundred, a thousand, a million… an endless parade of happenings and moments and instances and events.

Her childhood rewritten in every conceivable language.

Her first kiss, retold in infinite variety.

Each and every version of her love and her desire and her want and her need flashing in seizure strobe chromatic chaos across the depth and breadth of all time.

She saw the best of it, the worst of it, and the crushing middle space in between it all as she stared off into the types of woman she could be, should be, could have been or would become. She felt it, then, the twinge of insignificance burrow into her skin and cut, razor sharp and scalpel accurate into the deep gory bends of her soul. And all at once, the power was cut, the show was over, the damage was done and the curtains, singed by the stage light heat, were drawn. The potential drained out of her, lost through the pores in her skin, through her nostrils and her lips. She felt a nauseating loss of control and a wave of gut-kicking dizziness that sent her crashing, still cross-legged, onto her back. The cold dew of the grass was refreshing and the stars above were still lovely and still gapingly vast in scope.

Things were fine, she told herself. The world righted and she sat up, barely aware of what had happened but aware enough to still need to stifle the urge to cry. She wouldn’t cry about it. There was nothing to be done now. Choice after choice, circumstance after circumstance had led her here. And it was ok. Not because of anything she’d done, not because of any fate or destiny or reasoning or plan, but solely because it had to be ok. She was blinking and she was breathing and her heart still pumped and warm blood still coursed through her veins. She had no choice but to accept it, to break down the wild hopes and stuff them back down where they belonged. She had a life and it was enough, even if it hadn’t been the bliss filled adventure she’d been promised as a little girl. She swallowed her dreams back down, felt a shudder of regret or remorse or worry or something maybe a little like all three and then held her breath as some dark tufts of cloud shut out the moon and left her alone in the dark.

Things were fine, she told herself. She lifted herself up from the ground, brushed herself off and meandered inside the house. Things were fine. But they weren’t really fine enough.

Addicted To Buzz

So, there's not much I like about corporate culture. In my admittedly limited experience with suit-n-tie types, I've found a disconcerting lack of substance made up for with an overabundance of cliches, worthless aphorisms and buzzwords. Corporate stupidity is a target that's as big as the broad side of a barn, and yet these types of folks still seem to permeate the highest levels of management (and bubble up from the ranks of we in the underclass) despite the obvious ridiculousness of their world view.

Tonight, I overheard two young execs speaking in a tongue that can only be mastered after sitting through endless meetings and watching far too many Power Point presentations. It was as if, after seeing their hundred thousandth consecutive slide, their brains melted into an utterly useless goo unable to string together a sentence that wasn't lifted from the spiral bound materials they foist upon the attendees of management training seminars. I was embarrassed for them... even though they probably have a lot more money than I do. It's just such nonsense, and it bothers me that they are either unable or unwilling to see that. It makes me hate them oh so much.

In the effort of restoring some semblance of respect to the men and women who run our nation's great corporations, I'd like to propose a moritorium on the following phrases that make them seem like mindless idiot lemming drones ambling for the nearest cliff. To wit:

1.) "Throw him (or her) under the bus."

I actually think reality television is to blame for the proliferation of this phrase's usage, but it's been adopted, now, by the suits and they use it ad freaking nauseum. Scapegoating is one of the most widespread of corporate hobbies, and it seems like hardly an hour goes by without somebody throwing somebody under the bus. And it's always described that way. Always. No one is ever cast to the wolves or crucified by their coworkers... nope. They are invariably thrown under the bus. It doesn't take much of an offense to be thrown under said bus, nor does being thrown under the bus always bear out some great consequence. "Dale took the last cup of coffee," one suit might say to another. "Way to throw Dale under the bus," the other suit might respond. And then a hearty laugh will no doubt be shared. It takes on an even more annoying cast when a suit will declare their own integrity by refusing to throw somebody under the bus. It takes guts to not blame somebody for your own failures... it's less impressive to not hurl them under a large machine.

2.) "Drink the Kool-Ade."

This started out correctly, a reference to the Jonestown massacre and a sly warning not to get suckered into buying into a bad idea just 'cause everybody else is doing it. Somewhere along the way, though, its connotation morphed, and suits decided (unaware of the irony) that drinking the Kool-Ade was, in fact, a fantastic thing to do. There's no shortage of stupid ideas in corporate culture, and the execution of those stupid ideas requires people with some semblance of critical thought to throw their hands up in disgust and obey the poorly designed policies, even knowing the outcome will be bad. These poor workaday schlubs are forced to drink company Kool-Ade on a regular basis... and since their compliance validates the ill conceived ideas of the suits, they obviously think that drinking the Kool-Ade is beneficial. It's sad and funny how appropriate the phrase is, but it's maddening to know that the people using it incorrectly (and all too often) will never understand the joke.

3.) "Low hanging fruit"

Yes, yes, I get it. This can, I will begrudgingly admit, be sort of a useful phrase. There are legitimate instances of companies being festooned with easy-to-correct problems that should be tackled prior to investing a lot of time into more involved and costly programs. But in the hands of a clueless suit, EVERYTHING becomes "low hanging fruit," regardless of whether it's low hanging, or even fruit at all. By tossing around the term like so much confetti, corporates muddy the meaning of it. "We need to start with the low hanging fruit," one of them might offer up, uselessly, when pitching a project. He doesn't know, in this case, what that low hanging fruit might be, but he's fairly certain starting with it is a good idea. When the project begins, one of his bumbling supervisors is sure to ask, "Did you get the low hanging fruit?". And God forbid the project leader can't answer in the affirmative! "Of course we did! We started with the low hanging fruit." "Ah," the superior suit thinks. "That's a good place to start." I guarantee that no low hanging fruit was harmed in this exchange.

4.) "80/20 Rule"

I don't know if this is as egregiously misused in every workplace as it is in mine, but I hope there's a special circle in Hell reserved for people who throw this phrase into their speech like they'd throw croutons onto a delicious chef salad. The real 80/20 Rule is sometimes called the "law of the vital few," (or something similar). The premise is that, for a lot of things, 80% of the outcomes are determined by only 20% of the causes. In business, it's often true that about 80% of a company's profits come from about 20% of customers... not always, but often. The gist is, of course, to focus on that "vital few," because that's your real bread and butter. What I have heard, time and time again, however is the "80/20 Rule" being used as a replacement for the idea of something just happening about 80% of the time... like, if a suit wants to know if something you're doing is common, they'll say, "How often does this occur? 80/20 Rule?" Or, say, in the course of a dialog on a recurring problem, somebody brings up a rare or unique set of circumstances... a corporate type might chime in with, "Let's stay on track here... we want to focus on what's happening the majority of the time. Keep the 80/20 Rule in mind." It's another case of interpreting the phrase absolutely incorrectly. They're not focusing on the vital few, they're focusing on the majority of cases... wouldn't it be easier to substitute the esoteric "80/20 Rule" with the more commonly used (and harder to muck up) phrase: "most of the time"?!

5.) "Value added"

Sweet merciful buttercrackers, if I never hear this phrase again, I'll be thrilled. It crops up daily, as suits with no practical experience try to determine which parts of an underling's job are and are not "value added." Determining how something adds value, or why it might not, is usually beyond the scope of their inquiries, but figuring out whether or not things are value added is a crack-addictive pasttime to the folks high-up on the ladder. What constitutes value added, exactly? That's easy... any action that adds value is value added! If an action doesn't add value, then of course, it's not value added. It doesn't matter that knowing the value an action is adding is generally not feasible for execs who have as little understanding of the jobs they oversee as possible, and it's unimportant that they are in no posistion to correct any action that isn't value added. The money's apparently in making long lists of the steps required to do a job and then assigning them to the appropriate value added or not value added category. If only another suit could step in and point out that ignorant dudes and dudettes compiling lists of meaningless assertions on whether or not things are value added is distinctly not value added. But that would blow their minds.

So please, let's stop all this making fun of corporates behind their back and get them the help they need to ween themselves of the buzzword habit!

Wouldn't that be thinking outside the box?!

Monday's Playlist: Film Gris

This week's playlist is another soundtrack to a non-existent movie... "Film Gris" is my imaginary Tanantino/Ritchie-esque tale of hyper-vocal gangsters, Mexican werewolf smugglers, corrupt FBI agents, a desperate Texas ranger and a mysteriously dark femme fatale all looking for the same big score just north of the Tijuana border. It's not quit a film noir, so I thought "Film Gris" fit the bill a little better. All of the songs have a kind of timeless quality to them... whether they're dark ballads (like the Richard Buckner and Nick Cave songs), subversive spy anthems (a la Radiohead and Portishead) or neo-psychedelic garage rock (as with The Bees and The Coral). "Close Behind" by Calexico makes the perfect closing credits to the unseen narrative that winds its way from the frenetic opener to the southern twinged latter half of the soundtrack.

1. Chicken Payback - The Bees (from "Free The Bees")
2. How Indiscreet - Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire (from "The Swimming Hour")
3. Honey White - Morphine (from "Yes")
4. Big Exit - P.J. Harvey (from "Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea")
5. Another Man's Vine - Tom Waits (from "Blood Money")
6. Shadows Fall - The Coral (from "The Coral")
7. Bright Blue Tie - The Fiery Furnaces (from "Gallowsbird Bark")
8. Lyrics of Fury - Tricky (from "Pre-Millennium Tension")
9. Half Day Closing - Portishead (from "Portishead")
10. Paperbag Writer - Radiohead (from "There There")
11. Fried Neckbones & Some Home Fries (Dan The Automator remix) - Willie Bobo (from "Verve Remixed 2")
12. Boys, The Night Will Bury You - Richard Buckner (from "Since")
13. Tumbling Down - Allison Moorer (from "Miss Fortune")
14. Cada Beijo - Bebel Gilberto (from "Bebel Gilberto")
15. The Guns of Brixton - Nouvelle Vague (from "Nouvelle Vague")
16. Latin Simone - Gorillaz (from "Tomorrow Comes Today")
17. Where The Wild Roses Grow - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (from "Murder Ballads")
18. Blacklisted - Neko Case (from "Blacklisted")
19. El Payande - Lhasa (from "La Llorona")
20. Close Behind - Calexico (from "Feast of Wire")

Seven Cover Songs That Squash The Originals Like Grapes

I love cover songs... I love hearing new versions of songs I already enjoy, even though I rarely think that the imitators match up to the imitatees. It's fairly uncommon to find a cover that can compete with its source, but there are certainly a handful of remakes I'd be just as happy to listen to as the original. "Caroline, No" by They Might Be Giants, for example, is pretty much just as good as the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" cut... and I like both Cowboy Junkies' and Lou Reed's versions of "Sweet Jane" for different reasons.

Every now and then, though, I'll hear a cover that TOTALLY blows away the original. They're as good as gold... Here, in no particular order, are seven cover songs that squash the originals like grapes:

Johnny Cash - "Hurt" (originally by Nine Inch Nails)

I love the original "Hurt," of course... I grew up in the Nineties... it's required by Gen-X/Y (whatever the heck I am) law that you must think fondly of "The Downward Spiral." Still, for as tortured as Trent Reznor can sound, Johnny Cash sounds legitimately hurt as he sings a folk rendition of the industrial mope-rock classic. While Trent seems like an angsty high schooler scrawling sad rhymes into his notebook, Johnny Cash makes the words resonate with honest-to-goodness emotion. And, class act that he was at the end, he substitutes a "crown of thorns" for Reznor's more yecchy image

Jose Gonzalez - "Heartbeats" (originally by The Knife)

Jose Gozalez, a Swedish singer-songwriter, took The Knife's nice-enough (but relatively bland) electronica song "Heartbeats" and transformed it into an absolutely haunting acoustic guitar ballad. It's the a rare cover that not only totally alters the original, but wholly transcends it. Usually, these sorts of exercises result in the mutilation of a good or great song. In this case, Jose's radical reworking of his fellow Swedes' techno track elevated a middling song to something fantastic.

Clem Snide - "Beautiful" (originally by Christina Aguilera)

I'm not sure when, exactly, the trend of indie bands recording pop hits began, but I'm a big fan of it. There's a lot of great pop songs out there, pop songs that hipsters can't touch with a ten foot pole for fear of having their music geek pass revoked. Clem Snide allows us to listen to Christina Aguilera's self-esteem-bolstering anthem without having to turn in our nerd glasses. What's more, though, Clem Snide replaces the syrupy arrangement of X-tina's version with an awesome jangle-rock sound that wouldn't sound entirely out of place on an R.E.M. record. The empowerment lyrics about liking ourselves even with our puzzles left undone are a lot more palatable in Eef Barzelay's faux-country drawl.

Feist - "Inside And Out" (originally by Bee Gees (as "Love You Inside Out")

This might sound mean, but what doesn't sound better when NOT sung in Barry Gibb's irritating falsetto? Leslie Feist totally kicks this song's funky rump, in no small part because her voice is infinitely more pleasing than anything the Brothers Gibb ever put on record. Feist maintains the disco vibe of the song, but speeds it up and adds some squiggly synth sound effects that I think you'll agree are pretty spiffy. Once you hear hers, the original sounds excrutiatingly slow and empty.

Cake - "I Will Survive" (originally by Gloria Gaynor)

Ok, sure, Gloria Gaynor's version is a disco classic... but it's so overplayed and, well, just kind of lame. Lame the way most disco is lame. It's great for bad movie trailers and (I assume) drag clubs, but it's not all that fun to listen to on its own. But Cake's version? It's like a fun sandwich topped with tangy funyonaise! Granted, it doesn't sound all that different from any other Cake song, but what's wrong with that? You've got plunking bass, jazzy trumpet and John McCrea's sublimely monotone vocal. Plus, it throws in an unnecessary cuss word.

The Postal Service - Against All Odds (originally by Phil Collins)

Despite my loathing of Phil Collins, I always kind of liked "Against All Odds," even though it was ridiculously sappy and tailor-made for rom-com soundtracks. There was something prettily and eerily heartbreaking about it, even though Phil kind of, well, over-emoted all over it. The Postal Service did everyone a great service by covering this song and giving it the sort of understated, streetlight at three a.m. mood it really deserved. Their version starts out with barely a whisper, and evolves into a sparse little lament. It retains all the best aspects of the original while excising the ham-fistedness that marrs Phil Collins' version.

Neko Case & Her Boyfriends - "Bowling Green" (originally by the Everly Brothers)

One of the last hits for oldies radio staples The Everly Brothers, Canadian alt-country hottie Neko Case remade it for her first album. And it's awesome. It's peppy, rhymes "lucky" and "Kentucky," and makes reference to the fact that in Bowling Green, unlike other parts of America, they let you "think your own mind." And, because Neko Case is singing it, and not the ultra-square Everly Brothers, it won't gunk up your speakers with lame. Oh, that's not fair, really... I like the Everly Brothers... just not nearly as much as I love Neko Case.

A Bride Of The Stars

When I was a child, I spent a lot of time in the woods and bluffs in central Wisconsin. There was something, as a child, palpably magical about that area… a feeling born, perhaps, out of my awe for the indigenous cultures of the region. There was still a lot of wilderness out in that part of the state, then, and I believe there is a power in the unsettled land, a sort of natural magic that gets tamped down or suffocated wherever our mystically sterile civilization lays down its sewers and roads and power lines. In the middle of the woodlands, though, there was an energy not easily described, but simple to experience. It was an energy that filled your bones and muscles, lifted you above animal instinct and deposited you somewhere else entirely, a full step above the dirty ground we wander on for most of our lives. It was a realm of spirit, of nature beyond biology. I couldn’t put any of this into words, back then… but I knew it was different than where I came from. I knew that, while I was out amongst the wooded frontier, I was basically living in another world entirely.

I had my own small tent when we camped out, and it was a frightening and freeing experience, being unbound in the dark, wild nights. While my parents slept some distance away, I found myself freakishly attuned with the night, my senses heightened, my brain far more aware of my surroundings than I was necessarily comfortable with. I was listening for every cricket hiccup, every owl shriek, every twig snapping in our vicinity. I was on edge in a primal way, on guard, protecting something spiritually valuable from cruel and hungry flesh and blood. In this way, I would eventually fall into an approximation of sleep, a hypnosis or trance that rendered my five senses active and watchful even as an essential part of me drifted, no longer incarcerated in that base, bodily prison. Again, I didn’t know this at the time… but in retrospect, it’s clear that my soul walked free in those mystical woods. And when I would rise in the daytime, my arms and legs and lungs would be absolutely exhausted, but I would still feel refreshed in an entirely different manner. Even as the dark circles would form under my eyes, and I would be unable to stifle chest racking yawns, I would feel more alert, more cognizant, more alive than I ever felt after sleeping in my bed at home.

My travels, at night, were understandably remembered as dreams. They were, I suppose, a form of dream… the experiences I had, there, were not “real.” They never truly occurred in any physical way. And yet they happened, and I remembered them… in that way, those travels were no different than any other dream. But there was a much stronger clarity to them, a vividness that I do not come close to replicating in my normal dreaming. There was something intangible about them that, now, leads me to believe that these dreams were not manufactured by own imagination, but were, instead, moments that I lived. That delineation, I suppose, is moot. Either way, I have memories of my soul walks, and that’s all that matters.

By far, the most memorable of these events occurred when I was nine.

We had spent most of the day hiking through grassy, blunted hills under a gorgeous red rocky bluff. Eventually, we came to a river, a deep hewn ribbon of clear water that was wide and shallow and full of migrating schools of blackish fish. A golden eagle periodically dove into the water and retrieved one of the dark fish in its talons, its meal’s scales suddenly bursting with color and sparkle in the midday sunlight. There were, according to our guidebook, numerous Indian mounds nearby, and I would’ve sworn there was something almost holy about that place. It felt like a convergence of the magic I described earlier… as if it somehow pooled up and stagnated right there at the riverside. I felt strange being there, as if I were a trespasser or an interloper… as if I didn’t belong at all. But there was nothing unfriendly or unwelcoming about it. It was more, I suppose, that I was unworthy of being there. It felt, maybe, like I hadn’t earned the right to be in that sort of sanctuary. My parents may have felt the same way. None of us spoke for a long time. It wasn’t awkward or unpleasant… it was more reverential. I think my folks had similar experiences in these places, but we never talked about it. I’m sure we all felt a little bit crazy for feeling it.

We returned to our campsite, made dinner over the fire and watched as the dusk caressed the sky to sleep. There is a different sort of completeness to the day when you don’t have artificial light to eat into the nighttime. It feels as if living through the twilight is a sort of accomplishment, a notch to mark off or a box to check on your list of goals. The rhythm of night and day, in the wilderness, is more noticeable and more real than it is where I live. Our lives, in cities and towns, blur the definitions of the world in motion. We exert our control over darkness instead of letting it hold sway over us. And while it may make us feel as if we have a dominion over nature, there’s a different sort of satisfaction to be had by succumbing to the night and laying down to sleep when the fire burns out. Relinquishing that false authority we try to grab, here, has amazing effects. I may not have known, then, why it felt so good to sleep in the pitch black of those woods… but my guess, now, is that by falling back into our rightful place, into our role as subservient to the planet, we gain a measure of security and comfort that we lose when desperately clinging to power that isn’t ours. The anxiety that comes from feeling alone in a world of billions is all but erased when you remember you’re not isolated from the world in any way.

That night, again, my body stayed wide awake while my spirit fled.

And where I wandered, that night, was to the sanctuary at the riverside. I remember feeling called there, as if I heard someone summoning me to the grassy banks of the shallow water. It was serene, there, under the moonlight. Everything was white and deep blue, all washed in the color pallet of dreaming. My heart soared just being allowed there, again, and I sat amidst a thatch of cattails and reeds and dipped my bare, spirituous feet in the cold river.
I don’t know how long I sat there, breathing in the air of trees and flowers and rushes. It felt like mere minutes, but the moon’s movement overhead contradicted that assumption. Eventually I was joined by a chalk white man wearing the elaborate and beautiful costume of a medicine man. He sat next to me on the bank of the river, aged and gouged with kindly wrinkles. He was radiant and warm, and I was happy to see him, even without knowing who he was. He had a strong, weathered face, but he smiled with such sincerity that I had no choice but to feel at ease. He had a long staff, decorated with beads and feathers and tiny leather pouches, and he dipped it into the river water, rippling the reflection of the moon.

He spoke, then, in a language that seemed older than time, and although I shouldn’t have understood a word of it, it made perfect sense to me.

The shaman said, joyfully, that he had been called to that place, that night, to perform a wedding. He shook his staff as he spoke, letting loose a very primitive sounding rattle that reverberated through the river valley and was echoed in the throats of owls and raccoons and other nocturnal creatures. Soon, many of those animals had gathered themselves by the river, as guests, the shaman said, smiling, of the bride.

I asked, then, bolstered by the kind demeanor of the man, where the bride was.
And the old man looked at me with eyes darker than the sky and pointed upward. The Stars, he told me, were to be wed tonight.

And who is the groom, then, I wondered.

The old man closed his dark eyes and laughed. He told me that the groom had not shown himself, but would. He said that many suitors had been rivals for such an amazing lover, but only one would have the honor of making the Stars his bride. Those suitors, he told me, would arrive soon, and I, apparently, was there to greet them all.

It wasn’t long before the shaman's words proved true. A great bear, tall, regal and imposing and possessed of slick, black fur, made his way from the woods to the opposite side of the river.

“I am Bear,” he stated plainly, and in a strong and fearsome voice. “I have come to wed the Stars.”

From out of the tall grasses of the fields came bounding a dappled, brown stag. He stood next to Bear on the riverside, his coat and impressive rack of antlers gleaming in the moonlight.

“I am Deer,” the stag said, proud and arrogant in his beauty. “I have come to wed the Stars.”

Slinking from the rushes came a smaller figure, a gorgeous red fox with a thick tail and a sly, angled face. He stood between Bear and Deer, grinning with a cunning that sent a shiver down my vaporous spine.

“I am Fox,” he stated. “I have come to wed the Stars.”

Rising from the ground came a small whirl of bellowing breeze, strong enough to topple some of the long grasses and bend the stems of the wildflowers across the river. From it appeared a noble and cool looking warrior, blue and vaporous and impressive in his stature.

“I am Wind,” the man said with a ringing fury in his words. “I have come to wed the Stars.”

And finally, amassing like fog on the bank of the water, gray swirls of ether came together, clinging and heavy, eventually drizzling into the form of a young man, thin and sallow, and appearing very tired. He was far less than the other suitors in every respect. He carried himself with little power or confidence, and he certainly didn’t strike as startling of a figure as the great Bear or the beautiful Deer or the intelligent Fox or the stately Wind.

“I am Cloud,” he said, almost sadly. “I have come to wed the Stars.”

The shaman looked at the gathered suitors with a critical eye. "Only one among you," he said in his ancient language, "is worthy to make a bride of the Stars. Only one among you shall have such an honor to live with her in the sky." The old man punctuated his declaration with a rattle of his staff, and stretched his arms out toward the light spackled heavens. He stayed incredibly still for a moment, his beaten face beaming with a sort of barely contained joy. He was listening to something that none of the rest of us there seemed to hear. "The Stars," the old man said, finally, "demands a tribute of you! What would you offer for her hand in marriage?"

Bear spoke first. "I can offer my strength, dear Stars," Bear said loudly. "I am the strongest creature in the forest, bigger and bolder and braver than anything."

The shaman listened again. He shook his head, then. "The Stars has no need of a mate with strength," he said. "She is strong enough on her own. The Stars rejects you, Bear. I am sorry."

And Bear hung his great head low and sulked off back into the forest.

"And you, Deer?" the shaman asked. "What do you offer the Stars?"

Deer lifted his majestic head up with a definite arrogance. "I can offer my beauty, dear Stars," Deer said proudly. "You will be given the gift of my graceful form."

The shaman listened to the Stars and shook his head. "The Stars has no need of a mate with beauty," he said. "She is beautiful enough on her own. The Stars rejects you, too, Deer. I am sorry."

Deer's brown eyes filled with tears and it bounded away, wounded and sad.

"And you, Fox?" the shaman asked. "What do you offer the Stars?"

Fox grinned slyly. "I can offer my intellect, dear Stars," Fox said. "I am the smartest creature there is, full of cunning and wit."

The shaman listened to the Stars again and shook his head. "The Stars has no need of a mate with intellect," he said. "She is cunning enough on her own. The Stars rejects you, friend Fox. I am sorry."

Fox scowled, angrily, and slunk into the woods, offended.

"And what of you, Wind?" the shaman asked. "What do you offer the Stars?"

Wind took a deep breath. "I can offer my power, dear Stars," Wind said. "I am the most powerful thing there is, able to bend trees to will and bring up waves from the deepest lakes and rivers."
The shaman frowned. "The Stars has no need of a mate with power," he said. "She is powerful enough on her own. I am sorry, Wind. The Stars rejects you."

The Wind was crestfallen. He moped and wandered back into the woods.

"So it is up to you, Cloud. What do you have to offer the Stars?"

Cloud looked up the Stars with his big, wet eyes and said, meekly, "Privacy is all I have to offer you, dear Stars."

The shaman looked intrigued. "Privacy?"

Cloud smiled. "When the Stars are shy, I can be there to cover her. When she is modest, I can hide her from the prying eyes of all you, here, below her. I can blanket her, keep her safe from your watchful gazes. And when she is proud and boisterous in her beauty, I can step away and I can let you all bask in her twinkling glow. When The Stars wants to be seen, I can open myself up like some great curtain, letting her luminescence spill out upon the earth. And when she becomes shy again, I can be there to block her from view. I can offer her privacy. I can offer her control."
The shaman grinned widely, his mouth a locked cavern of yellow stalagmites and crooked stalactites. He was pleased with Cloud's response. Out of all of her impressive suitors, the humble Cloud had the most to offer the strong, and beautiful, and brilliant and powerful Stars.

"You have much to give, friend Cloud," the shaman said, happily. The Stars accepts your hand. She shall be your mate.

Cloud was beaming with happiness. A cheer went up from the gathered animals at the river, and the shaman opened his hands in dutiful benediction. There was a tremendous gladness that settled on the holy place, and I couldn't help but be warmed by it. The old medicine man began to speak his ancient language, but its secrets were hidden from my ears, now. The beautiful, timeless words spilled from his papery lips and filled the night air with a resonant sound that blurred into a droning, cicada-buzz chant. Soon all the creatures joined in and the scene was staggering in its alien beauty. There was a rattle in the old man's hands, and a shaker of beads that signaled the union of Cloud and the Stars. And when it had commenced, and when the gentle cacophony of the shaman's chants were finally complete, Cloud ascended from the river up into the sky to take the hand of his new bride. Another cheer burst forth from the throng of animals, and they returned, then, to their woodland homes.

The shaman smiled at me, then, and thanked me for my attendance, once again speaking a tongue I knew. He had a tear of joy running down his battered, leathery cheek. He put his spindly arms around me, and hugged me tight. I didn't feel I had much choice but to hug him back.

He gave me one final nod and then made his way back into the wilderness, leaving me alone, ghostly and content at the sanctuary river. I looked up into the sky and saw Cloud joyfully embracing his new love.

My body, then, awoke and my spirit was ripped from that place and was plunked, unceremoniously, back into my squishy, fleshy form. And I struggled, then, as the sun approached on the eastern horizon, to make myself believe I had really been there and that it hadn't been some mental fabrication. In the end, of course, it didn't matter. Daylight took up its reign in the sky, and The Stars were sent away for the time being, while Cloud remained behind, like a gentleman, protecting his new bride as she made her exit. And I watched, and I thrilled for them, happy in their happiness, smiling in their completeness. I spent the days that followed whistling the wedding chants I'd heard in my dreams and wondering who'd make a husband, someday, of the Wind.