I’ve listened to barely anything else since Jason Molina died.
Your look when you’re older
Atoms For Peace – Before Your Very Eyes…
Brrrringgg. Walter woke and slapped at his cell phone. The ringing continued. When, through the sleep in his blinking eyes, he managed to get his screen in focus, there was nothing on it. The ringing melted into buzzing. It was steady; there were no gaps like his ringtone. Walter put the phone down and dropped his head into the pillow. The tinnitus ringing continued.
It’d been 13 days now. Tinnitus woke him up and tinnitus hummed him through the day and tinnitus made him afraid to try to sleep at night. Someone had installed a vuvuzela in his eardrum. He compensated with a whirring box fan and some music (Pandora) from his cell phone at night. During the day, the buzzing threatened to swallow conversations and concentration.
Walter hadn’t subjected his ears to concerts. He listened to music — on the rare occasions when he turned it on — at an appropriate volume. He could count the times he had used in-ear headphones on three hands. Wikipedia claims 20 percent of 55 – 65-year-olds cite its symptoms. How did 47 years of careful, conservative living land him in the worse-off 20 percent?
At work, Madge babbled bubbly about some new protocol. A new shortcut key. All Walter could hear was ringing. He wanted to answer the phone. He wanted to click Stop. He wanted to stab a screwdriver in his ear and hear, even momentarily, silence. He wanted the doctor — appointment on Tuesday — to tell him this was temporary. He said, “Nice. Got it, Madge.”
[Amok.]
I don’t know about my dreams
James Blake – The Wilhelm Scream
Walter often recited of the expression, “cut off your nose to spite your face.” But he didn’t spite his face; he spited his nose. It was long. It had a crook. The tip had stuck out of the water during his baptism 35 years ago. It still felt different – that last half an inch exposed to the whistle of the wind with the rest of him submerged. That last half an inch crawling with the bacteria of sin.
The power sander out in the garage called to him. He could make this all right. He could grind his way, half an inch, into heaven.
His nose wasn’t the only thing he thought about cutting. Sometimes Walter imagined lopping off his hands with a cleaver. Maybe he’d bleed out. Maybe he’d pass out but eventually heal, living the rest of his life with stumps to poke and prod at a keyboard with. Almost certainly he would be fired, left to starve to death, but probably unable to literally feed himself anyway.
Trying to picture picking up a chicken nugget annoyed him, so mostly he daydreamed about setting himself on fire. He would bring a red canister to the gas station and fill it with gasoline and he would pour that gasoline all over his body. The smell would sting his nose. The damp, dark spots on his clothes would spread. Then, he would use the fingers that he had decided not to chop off and strike a match. For a few moments, he would just let the match burn, staring at it. Eventually he’d hold it close to the fumes coming off his clothes and catch flame.
He knew from something he’d read that once your skin burned the heat wouldn’t hurt. Your muscles don’t have a mechanism for feeling that sort of pain. Walter figured he could last to that point, when his outside was charred. He had two qualms. One, without another fuel source, like the wood piled beneath witches, could the human body sustain a fire, or would it just peter out? Is muscle tissue flammable? Two, what exactly would kill him, if anything? All those witches died, so surely this is a viable means to death, but exactly how did they go? Did the flame eventually melt the lungs and prevent breathing? Did the heart stop functioning? Perhaps at a certain pain threshold the life switch disengaged?
Once it becomes a goal, extinguishing life can seem difficult. For example, a bullet through a brain sometimes doesn’t penetrate the right folds and the person can go right on living, just, you know, retarded probably. Failure at suicide seemed to Walter the most shameful possibility in the entire universe. So he kept clacking away at his keyboard with his fingers, inserting mortgage foreclosure data to scrape by some sort of living, too afraid to even attempt what he considered the only out. Every once in a while he rubbed the tip of his nose with the back side of his palm, sniffling slightly.
You asked me to stay.
A eunuch is on the gravel. Ceramic stalls on one side, clotheshorses on the other. The Eunuch sucks on a honey-lathered Filbert paintbrush. Aristocrats pass on his lefts and rights, mulling over chiffon ball gowns and Armani waistcoats. Softly, he mumbles into the backs of aristocratic knees, the kind made from freeze-dried couscous, “You asked me to stay, but I have a few reasons to leave.”
Kyary Pamyu Pamyu
Happy 20th birthday, Caroline! Nobody knows whether you’re a clock or a bomb.
I was riding, I was riding home
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Push The Sky Away
I spent a month in Shanghai living on Sigh’s couch and trying to convince her roommates to play badminton with me. The Dutch one kept putting the accent on the last syllable (badminTON) and using it as a verb (badmintoning), which made me giggle. The American pretended to be interested (he had a racket and birdies), but then would suggest we go to his cycling class or whatever the fuck exercise group he joined. I didn’t seem able to convey that, no, I actually just really like badminton.
I eventually played with a Belgian girl who shaved half her head and worked in fashion, designing stylish baby clothes or something. I remember she was excited because she’d just sold a line to some Russians. She was awful at badmintoning, as she also called it, also to muted giggles. I get annoyed playing people too far below my skill level because I feel like a dick for winning but don’t want to insult them by blatantly not trying. In between sets she sat cross-legged on the blue court and drank from a water bottle.
This girl talked incessantly. In the two times we hung out, I said maybe 50 words, with her more than content to fill the hours with a repeating cycle of stories. Mostly she talked about guys hitting on her, sort of in a complaining tone since she had a fiance back in Belgium. But she led them on pretty severely, so she either was unaware of the signals she gave men, or — more likely — enjoyed the attention and then humble-bragging about it later.
Like I mentioned, we hung out twice. The other time I came over thinking we were going to play badminton, but she wanted to go to dinner first with some friends. She couldn’t find the key to one of her bikes (it ended up being in Sigh’s apartment, in the Dutch guy’s room), so I rode her bike and she sat on the rack behind me. In China, there’s a lane on the far edge of the road for bicycles and motorized scooters. I pedaled under streetlight-illuminated night for about half an hour. The lights in Shanghai are purple-hued and magical and surreal — they feel like watching a movie set in Shanghai, except you’re actually there. Two of her friends were moving back to Europe the next day, so no one had much interest in talking to me, let alone speaking in English. I pedaled back in the eerily beautiful Chinese lights, her voice trailing behind us into the darkness. She begged off badmintoning that night since she’d had too much to drink.
I took two things from this experience: 1. I can’t play badminton now without thinking of the bastard word badmintoning and giggling, and 2. the American roommate’s birdies. I stole them across the Pacific in my luggage.
You’ll never die
Hi kids.
Today I’m going to tell you how scorpions mate, based on a lecture my dad came up with in 1989. I remember watching him type it up on our IBM computer, which had a black and white screen (blue and grey, really) and ran MS-DOS, which was, like, the coolest thing in 1989. The four-year-old me – much cuter, a tiny bit shorter – used to play “Jeopardy!” on it at every opportunity, which is why I turned out this way. Anyway, to scorpions.
“Scorpion mating is usually initiated by the male. When the female is receptive, the male grasps the pedipalps (sorta like scorpion hands) of the female with his, and together they walk backwards, forwards and side-to-side . . . there is no true copulation. Instead, the male discharges a sperm transfer capsule (spermatophore) from his genital orifice which he glues to the substrate. By parading, the male directs the female over the spermatophore which she picks up with her genital operculum.”
In other words: male scorpions are cheeky motherfuckers. Apparently, males sometimes inject the females with venom to pacify them so they don’t lose interest. Sometimes the baby mama can get her revenge by eating the son of a bitch, but Wikipedia says this happens infrequently.