I can't afford Austin, I can't afford New York!
"No dates to miss, no home to phone
No face to kiss, no good alone
No family, no history, a permanent delinquency
No will to smile, no room to cry
No time to think, just watch, don't flinch
Why yes, that's you in your millionth clinch
You murder every time you blink
Some flee disasters for their lives
You flee the spawn of grubby lies
At one with graveyard dust and shipyard rust
Too loose to trust
You'll heal so much faster
If your homeland is your master
No dirt-cheap Adriatic sun
No heart of gold, back of the gun
No death camps built for less than fun
No white man's bond, no civilization
No right to more than birth and death
From the driveling drones of the former West
Their credo dead like Brezhnev's bones
Their headless spears and special malnutrition zones
No death camps here, I tell you
Just grey convenience Hell
Ten civil wars un-ended
'neath billboard signs which yell,
'You need someone pretty
Someone English and shifty...'
Let the dirt cover all, cover all, cover all
Let the dirt cover all
For it's the mother of us all and our bed when we fall
We belong nowhere
And by the way, you're dirt! Dirt! You're dirt!
Always know your worth
As you roam this mirthless earth, you're dirt! Dirt!
No sleep, the 'phone, God knows what time
Just a wordless click on the end of the line
And a thud at the door out back in the dark
As some wirehair creature spins 'round the yard
Why do you run? Why do you hide?
Why do you bruise and then decide?
You didn't mean it, you didn't see
Well, now you're run to rags and so is she
You'll drink the Balkan brandy
You will forget your name
You will become a captain
And you will lose all shame
You need someone pretty
Someone English and shifty
Let the dirt cover all, cover all, cover all
Let the dirt cover all, cover all, cover all
It's the mother of us all and our bed when we fall
We belong nowhere
Let the dirt cover all, cover all, cover all
Let the dirt cover all
From the veil to the shawl
From the flirt to the brawl
We belong nowhere, we belong nowhere
We belong nowhere..."
-The Fatima Mansions, "Belong Nowhere", Lost in the Former West, 1994
Oh dear Lord, he has returned! Yes, I'm back and I was never that far away! I was just extremely occupied with work and DJing and many other things, then I didn't feel like updating for a while, and finally my Internet went out for over a week. So, what did you miss while I was elsewhere? Well, not much. It's been a fairly uneventful month despite how busy I've been. Most of it's been comprised of constant shifts at work and at the radio station, including two eleven-hour work days for the Capital City Classic (SIX high school basketball games one right after the other for two straight days) and then a 2-6 AM DJ shift on Monday morning, which completely kicked my ass in. I was so fatigued that I didn't end up going out for New Year's Eve and slept from 8 PM to 8 AM this morning. My family's also been really broke lately from a domino effect starting with Ethan's eye last month (which is much better now, thankfully) to TWO bounced checks from the grocery store. I'm half-surprised that we had any money for Christmas at all, even more so that I received jeans and new shoes. Ethan received a replacement for his broken X-Box as well.
Hmm, speaking of Ethan, he broke up with his girlfriend of three months because she's been way too clingy. He's handled it really well and tries to be respectable but firm about it; however, she still comes over without warning de temps en temps (all the more unnerving/disturbing because she lives across the county line). He's tried to remain friends in spite of it all and still goes to her house to hang out with Victoria and her sister. Certainly much better than what happened with my little ten-day wonder from September, Kennie. Well, actually that wasn't terribly messy either, but we're not speaking anymore because I got a little short with her. I don't really understand what she wants from me if we're not dating and if she's more attracted to someone who has no interest in her (and yet she still believes he has a sliver of interest despite it all), so I'm not going to waste my time on anyone that indecisive anymore. I would protest that she's got it all wrong and that I don't mind speaking to her, but - as sweet as she can be - she's the last person I want to deal with right now. I'd really like to help her come out of her shell and get her to meet people, but I won't be able to tolerate her if she's going to call me every other day and gripe about her love interest from afar that doesn't like her, act ambivalently about our friendship, and wonder why I don't call her every day when she knows I'm busy and we're not even in a fucking relationship together, much less dating anymore. She's 30, for Christ's sake, and yet she's the local answer to Janet Frame - she's so painfully shy that she didn't like me looking at her face for too long unless she was in some state of undress, and when that happened she was more concerned about how her body appeared and less so with her face, so that was the only time she could ever make eye contact with me for longer than three seconds without blushing and turning away. I want the next person I date to be without attachments to others, and I don't want her to replace me. Hell, I want someone who fucking deserves me. I CAN afford to be choosy, despite my certainty that I'll be single for the rest of the decade if I am that way - after all, nobody ever seems to want me for a sunbeam, not around here anyhow. I'm neither an impressionable Libertarian, emo, or a grungy vegan ideologue faux-anarchist bike kid, so my chances are absolutely fucking nil. Then again, anyone who falls for someone that fits neatly in those three categories doesn't deserve me either, much less my respect. This year's going to bring out a harsher version of me, less willing to be treaded upon, more confrontational, more willing to take the initiative for once. That doesn't means I'm going to abandon my sense of politesse or what little charm I do have, but I simply feel unwilling to take shit anymore. This will be the "year of decision" for me, to quote The Three Degrees. I suppose I do have a New Year's Resolution for once!
Aside from work and DJing, I haven't gone out too much. I spent Christmas evening with Ann; initially we went to a party but neither of us were feeling it and she was rather sick, so we went back to her parents' place and she fell asleep during The King and I. I toughed it out to watch Annie Hall and The Wire. (I just finished Season 4 of the latter, by the way. I'm glad there's one more season to go; it really is the best show on American television, and probably my favorite show being made nowadays alongside Spooks/MI-5.) On Sundays I'm usually at 80's Nite at The Beta Bar dancing with Forrest, Becky, Lauren, Michael, mi madre, and whoever else happens to be around that particular night. Last Thursday I spent the evening hanging around with Bradley; we ventured over to Sahara for dinner (didn't see Gina and Ann there, sadly), listened to music, and watched Cocteau's Orpheus. I haven't been watching too many movies lately because I keep sitting on them. I had Inland Empire and Andrei Rublev for a month but never got to watch them, partially because I was so busy that I didn't have time to watch three-hour films. The former didn't have subtitles, either, and the volume was too quiet, so I needed to turn it way up to watch it and my neighbor hardly seemed to leave his apartment for a month straight. (At least not long enough for me to watch it.) I've mostly been sticking to television shows since they're shorter, so I've been watching more light-hearted fare on DVD like Danger Mouse and Pinky and the Brain. However, I saw Control in the theatre two weeks ago with my mother (a little more eventful than I was led to believe!), The Kingdom yesterday at home (not as political and cutting as I'd hoped), and I've been renting Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 16-hour-long 1980 movie-converted-to-miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz disc by disc. Today I watched episodes of Firefly because I couldn't think of anything else to do and then tuned into the WVFS Top 50 as decided by the DJs. I'm very disappointed with the Top Ten, of course; I knew it would read like a Pitchfork best-of list. Panda Bear, The Field, that dishwater dull Radiohead album taking the Number One slot, snooze fucking boring! However, I was surprised by some inclusions. I'm glad that The Terminals and Parts and Labor made the Top 45 (nothing else I listed in my Top 30 discs made it aside from LCD Soundsystem, but I didn't want to list reissues in my list because half of my Top 30 would have been older albums if I'd done that, and I feel like it defeats the point!), and I was shocked that The National didn't appear above the Top 40. It wasn't one of my favorite albums of the year at all, but I thought it would be in our Top Twenty easily. I'll post the full list as soon as I can find it. I also like how Animal Collective made the Top 35 and yet it was voted "most disappointing" alongside Interpol. I could care less about Animal Collective, personally, so it's hard for me to feel disappointed by them, and five years ago I figured Interpol would never be able to top Turn On the Bright Lights, so I can't say I felt let down by them either. (And Jandek was tied for most annoying! We really aren't populated by hipsters, are we? There's only about five or six of us that understand his cult following. I actually do like Jandek a lot, though. A lot of his music is bleak enough to off yourself to, so I find him profoundly moving and painful. There's far more life in his music than fucking Radiohead, who should have broken up after Amnesiac. One of these days I'm going to send a huge fuck-off money order to Corwood Industries.)
That's just about it for me. I have little else worth reporting. Actually, I've had a number of very odd and interesting dreams lately, but I can only remember two: I dreamt that blessthearrows was dating my little brother, but then it veered in a completely different direction that bore no relation to anything that happened before it. Basically, the government was cracking down on sodomy (particularly as depicted in pornography), and a certain George and Laura were viewing tape after tape initially in disgust, but after about thirty videocassettes they caved in, if you get my drift. It was really odd, to say the least, nothing I ever wanted to picture from them at all. I also dreamt that I saw The Fatima Mansions in concert and Cathal Coughlan changed the lyric of "Belong Nowhere" (the song at the top of this entry) to "You need someone pretty, someone Danish and shifty!" Thank you for sticking with me through this sordid and abrasive entry. I reward you with some more music below:
Flaming Fire - "Natural Light Catastrophe"
(One of the best drinking/dole songs ever. Surprised it hasn't been endorsed by hipsters yet, with all the Austin/San Francisco/New York-name checking. Hell, Kentucky Shroud hasn't received much notice at all outside of our radio station and probably WFMU as well. Kudos to the guy who requested it during one of my DJ shifts, as I nearly missed it.)
H.E.R. - "Dusty Beach"
(Another new song. Very gray and the voice is an acquired taste, but I like this a lot. These two songs will probably be among my "favorite songs of the year" list, which I've yet to sort through but will be posting fairly soon, hopefully.)