I've spent the past two and a half hours writing a 750 piece on Steve Vai for Birmingham Weekly -- the fifth rewrite I've done from scratch, and I'm still unsure of the end result. Doing the phone interview with him was an amazing experience -- he's incredibly laid back and easy to talk to (unlike some other 'celebrities' I've talked to), and amazingly humble, given his gifts and accomplishments. Writing the piece on him -- and limiting it to 750 words -- is akin to pulling teeth from an angry bull ape.

Vai has been -- I'm not sure what the word is. Not my idol, really -- I don't really have too many of those, if any. Something to shoot for? The mastery the man has over the guitar, the vocabulary, the style, the unique creativity and vision -- it's humbling to witness, and inspiring at the same time. It's hard for me to hear his music and not immediately want to pick up a guitar and simultaneously fear ever playing again.

Let's compare it to reading the best of Mencken or Hunter Thompson, trying to imagine topping Warren Ellis' or Grant Morrison's situations, or making a movie that compares to ARMAGEDDON or PEARL HARBOR.

I'm joking about one of the above.

But....

Talking about love is like dancing about architecture. And writing about the one person who inspires you in your chosen field (even if your chosen fields are many, like mine) is the same.

I'm overwhelmed, and taking a break. Thank god for X-Box golf.

The sea air is crisp and cool against sunbaked skin, scented with salt and rum and coconut. It pulses against his skin with each gently breaking wave, sound and feel of water and wind in perfect harmonious tandem. He feels the white grain under his feet, brittle shoreline marked with her path into the water.

He scans to the horizon and back, brilliant moonlight reflected on a hundred rolling drifts of ocean, sparkle of stars and splash of sealife. There, near the water fifty yards away – she sits, watching the curved expanse of the water at the edge of their world. The tiny night gulls and chattering sand crabs scuttle about, ignoring her in their search for the dinner the salty waves bring in, she in turn ignoring them, lost in her dreams.

Her hair whips back and forth in the breeze, a perfect storm of golden silk. The ocean water beads and rolls down her back like tears of angels on a bronze plate, her shoulders square as she pulls her knees to her chest and begins to rock slowly in the early evening tide. The breeze carries her voice, quietly singing, and he can imagine a choir of dolphins and an aquatic symphony providing the foundation for her song:

“You’re my thrill
You do something to me
You send chills right through me
When I look at you
’cause you’re my thrill

You’re my thrill
How my pulse increases
I just go to pieces
Every time I look at you
I can’t keep still”

He wants to race across the stinging sands to her, to touch her cool satin skin, to run his hands through her hair and kiss her shoulders and hold her until the moon is eaten by the sun. He is frozen, though, transfixed by her song, unwillingly to move lest the picture in front of him shatter to be carried off into the tropical night. And so he stands, body to the ocean and eyes to the night, and watches as his heart is stolen by the angel on the shoreline, stars in her voice and not a cloud in the sky.

“Oh where’s my will
Why this strange desire
Flaming higher and higher
Every time I look at you
I can’t keep still
Oh you’re my thrill”

Dear asshat,

Thanks very much for stealing my bass amp out of my truck last night while I was loading up my gear. Your timing was perfect -- who would ever think to steal an amp before the gig? Most people wait until after the show to steal equipment.

I hope you enjoy the rock that my amp will undoubtedly buy you. My best and brightest hope is that my $400 amp only gets you $10 at the local pawn shop.

Actually, my real hope is that you come into the pawn shop to hock the amp while I'm in there looking for you or the amp. That would make me happy.

Oh, and I hope you get hit by a large truck, and survive for many years afterward.

Love,
Kenn

"...That, and the fact that I told her, when he kisses her in the ceremony, to try not to think about the fact that he's putting his lips where I used to put my penis."

More reflections

There is nothing so wonderful as receiving timely payment for a huge invoice.

Today is good.

I have added eel to my (rather short) list of acceptable sushi.

I have a new -- and smaller -- bed coming within a month.

I'm going to win the annual Oscar pool, damn it.

Steve Vai is coming to town soon. Devin's gonna be in Atlanta with Strapping in April.

Hell, even 50 Cent sounds good today.

Let's see how long we can ride this feeling. I have hopes that it will be a good long while.

"Hey, Davan, whatever happened to that Cora girl?"

"The same thing that happens to most any girl who says she finds me attractive. She went crazy."

Hey hey hey cool kids and everyone else.... My yet-to-see-print review of Strapping Young Lad's ALIEN is popping up all over the net, most notably as the first and only review of the disc on the official Strapping website (www.strappingyounglad.com). For those who give a damn, here it is, a full month before you can read it in glorious monotone:

The scariest brutality is that filled with passion, with intensity, adrenaline released with a smile. The angry outlash is one thing, but in a world of car bombs and xenophobic foreign policies and Amber Alerts, anger is the new meme, a joke told so often that the laughter is nothing more than knee-jerk reaction. ALIEN is not the rebellious young man seeking attention or euphoric release, but the laughing man with the baseball bat singing songs that might well signal the end of the world.

In many ways, this is the Strapping Young Lad that fans have grown to love. Press releases trumpet the coming of “City”, part II, and there is comforting familiarity in the haunting harmonies, the cinematic structures, the towering layers of sonic assault. Certainly, frontman Devin Townsend is at his peak, blanketing pounding rhythms and crumbling walls of guitar rumble with a unique melodic sensibility and poetic lyrical approach.

Gone, though, is the adolescent undercurrent of anger and voracious hate; this is radio music filtered through fingers that know better and shaped by one of the founders of the new wave of metal. Townsend, as usual, defies categorization, across tracks and within, venturing from thrash to pop to acoustic ballad, never pausing, breathless walk across the mindset of Armageddon. ALIEN signals the beginning and the end of extreme music, challenging the listener to let go and feel the joy of unhindered release.

I'm particularly proud of this one -- an inspired bit. If only more music came along that brought out this kind of writing from me.

“He may have died relatively young but he made up for it in quality if not quantity of years,” Paul Krassner, the veteran radical journalist and one of Thompson’s former editors, told The Associated Press by phone from his Southern California home.

“It was hard to say sometimes whether he was being provocative for its own sake or if he was just being drunk and stoned and irresponsible,” quipped Krassner, founder of the leftist publication The Realist and co-founder of the Youth International (YIPPIE) party.

The world has lost a pioneer. So I drink a shot of whiskey -- not my favorite, but appropos, I think -- and hope to one day have the same impact his work had on me and so many others. With luck, Hunter has found his peace.

For as long as I can remember I have wanted to
Silence every beating heart; every sound of breathing
Now there is something inside of me that aches as I hear you
Breathing here when you sleep between these morning sheets

I am the tears in your mouth
I am the weight on your shoulder
I am the scream that wants out
And my heart just couldn't grow colder
Now this rusty heart is my gift
This fallen love is my gift

Morning arrives on an Earth I've never seen before
Revealing a life that I never really understood
Strange, the way beauty can hurt the unopened eye
Much more than all of the filth and pain
That we're soaked in ever could

I am the tears in your mouth
I am the weight on your shoulder
I am the scream that wants out
And my heart just couldn't grow colder

Hear this voice, see this man standing before you
I'm just a child trapped inside the body of a man

(from Morning on Earth, Pain of Salvation)

"Boy is cancer free; online auction paid for medical bills":

David was diagnosed in May 2003 with a grapefruit-sized malignant brain tumor called a rhabdomyosarcoma, which was causing blindness and headaches.

He nicknamed it “Frank” after Frankenstein, who scared him until he dressed up as the monster for Halloween.

(ah, cancer humor. from the mouths of babes...)

Fuck:

hackers
unsupportive hosting support
web design as a business
Valentine's Day
couples
plagiarists
TV programmers

...and then just an extra loud fuck in general.

I'm going to drink. A lot.

If you're going to do something stupid, expect consequence.

If you're going to commit a criminal act, make sure you can't be caught.

If you're going to drop a phishing scam on a site that I oversee, don't, for gods sakes, leave your email in the code. Yeah, that means that simple html forms are gonna have to be a little creative, but when you leave your two gmail accounts in the php code for anyone to see -- especially when said code is commented "Leave your email here for lamerz cc to be sent" --

Well, it just ain't too smart.

Dumb fucker.

I think I'll just send you a bill for three hours it took me to clean up the mess you left on my website.

And I'm not necessarily confining this thought to any one area. Sure, there's feverish loss of memory -- flu is f u with a random letter in the middle, to confuse the spiders and the search bots. And there's total and utter loss of memory, for whatever reason. Some people build walls around memories to protect themselves, and some of us just have no memory of childhood, for instance. So, the last few days, by and large, are largely hallucinatory creations in my boil-in-bag brain, and great heaping chunks of time before 1985 are just missing from my world.

But what of the really meaningful times in my life, those moments that played a large part in defining who I am now? Do I remember them as they happened, accurately and with as little perceptive slant as I would like to think? And if I do, do I accurately relate said moments to others?

Was talking with a friend about some journals that she found, long ago, belonging to an ex's ex, and in between pages of high school poetry and whatnot, there were diary entries about days -- each entry about the same day would get more and more pronouncedly fictitious. And she says the scary thing about the entries was that what got expounded upon (that's terrible grammar, I think, but I blame it on the last remnants of the flu) was meaningless and trivial stuff.

I've known a few compulsive liars in my life, and mostly, the lies are placed out there to impress. And some lies are told to protect, of course -- others, egos, lies of omission.... And I'm crossing the lines here. Someone call Egon, quick... But what is the point of the lie told to an empty room? It serves only to reinforce the lie that one has told oneself.

What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.

Shakespeare. What a riot.

Anyone got anymore DayQuil?

(Special thanks to Wade, Jessica, and James for apple-juice-and-soup runs)

There's a horrible buzzing noise, flourescent light symphony. She hears it now for the first time, and wonders how she never noticed it in three years. The silence of the past two certainly left room for it.

Reminders litter the room, the last pieces of the corpse of them. No ligature marks, no defensive wounds, and the scientists would say that there's no obvious cause of death, but there lies the body, no question. And no one is to blame, really; but she wants to point and scream and pierce the soul of the world with accusations and cries of guilt.

Judge, jury, and now executioner.

She lifts the last box of her things, things that existed outside of them, before the vows, before even the night at the dirty hole-in-the-wall dive that they both frequented (his in the settlement now and new lushes in her future). She walks out into the hall, silencing the white light cacophony before she closes the door, and all that she leaves behind is the light scent of vanilla and incense and a lifetime of dreams.

Sometimes, one needs to be reminded what one already knows. The trick is having a friend that knows of what one needs to be reminded.

Isn't that neat English? Leslie's rubbing off on me.

"Modulation" (Ani DiFranco)

In order to
Say thank you to you
I must do it intentionally
But tonight with every breath
I can feel my death
Sure as I can feel my knees

You were my modulation
So that's what you will always be
We took each other higher
We set each other free

Course, neither of us were wearing helmets
And our blood was just everywhere
And when the morphine kicked in later
The censors threw their hands up in despair
And that's when the truth came marching in
And promptly pulled the plug
But you were better than any drug
You were better than any drug

In order to
Say thank you to you
I must do it intentionally
But tonight with every breath
I can feel my death
Sure as I can feel my knees

You were my modulation
And that's what you will always be
We took each other higher
Then we set each other free
We set each other free

Tierney said two other children were said to be favorites of the couple and were spared abuse.

The Dollars are accused of forcing the five children to sleep in a closet in the master bedroom with a "wind chime affixed to the door so that the Dollars would know if they tried to get out of the closet," Tierney said.

In addition, they are accused of using a cattle prod or some sort of stun gun to shock the children, securing them to spots in the house with chains, striking their feet with hammers and pulling the children's toenails out with pliers.

It's hard enough to believe in the common American god when you live day-to-day with the joys of depressive episodes waiting around random corners. Not a higher power, or a greater being, but at least, the kind who gives a damn about human affairs and existence. And you see the people that I know, and watch the misery they are in just living, trying to make it from day to day, and the willingness to put faith in such a being erodes, crumbles, falls away like ash in wind.

And then you read about something like this, and know that ten times this and worse is happening as you read.

Ash in wind.

I think it would be even worse to find out that I'm wrong.

She lays in the hospital bed as he watches over her. The tick of the machines signals another breath, in and out, digital pulses all that keep the oxygen flowing. The bleached air mercifully kept out of her by plastic and tape. Robotic lungs keep the stink of death and dying away from her, and for a moment he wishes it were him lying still underneath cheap starched cotton.

Flourescent lighting reflects gray off of sunken cheeks and closed eyes, and he wants to scream as they chant like monks how peaceful she looks. How the worst has passed, how the sunrise will bring another day, new hope. As though hope were measured by the passing of another man-made day. He knows better; the one thing that she gave him is understanding, an unconscious knowledge of what it is to feel.

And the days pass, and he passes, too; passing through habitual motion, as alive as the shape under the sheet in the hospital, and with less hope. The ceaseless tock-tock-tock of ceaseless seconds echoes in his head, no matter how far away the only clock in his home. He finds himself returning to her pillow, inhaling, breathing in her scent, tears that threaten to wash away the only physical reminder of her prescence and yet still they flow, a river that refuses the definition of banks, a healing wash that tears open wounds and leaves tracks that would make a junkie proud.

Pain junkie. Addicted to the hurt, the sorrow, the empty and all-consuming ache buried somehwere within.

And he listens to the slick and gravelly noise that comes out of her as the tubes are removed and the doctors and family and friends gathered around hope and pray that she will find her own breath, that her lungs will contract and expand like nature intended, and when she stops, the air stagnant before her face, they chant, "Breathe, come on baby, breathe," and he chants along with them, silently yet deafening to any who would listen.

And he thinks, too: "STOP! STOP THE NOISE!"

And he thinks, "Let her go this is what she wants why should she be forced to carry the pain of life this is not about you this is about her and you know it let her go let her go lethergo"

He once thought he would die for her. He still would, and one day will. The red light in front of him stares back, unforgiving and accusatory, blurred through tears that won't stop coming, his hands shaking so badly that they must belong to someone else. And he turns up the stereo to drown the noise, but the voices in his head are louder than he gave credit, and they sing, oh how they sing: a chorus of fear and despair and loss of what might have been, hallelujah, Brother, can I have an amen?

And he stands over her, the light of her last full moon streaming in through a curtained window, unabated by state-issued fabric, touching her expressionless face, eyes that still reflect the pain of the world. And he is calm, frighteningly calm, and he feels her again, inside. It's okay now. Everything is okay. Only he knows that it's not okay, it's over, it's over, she said it's over and now is his last chance to say goodbye and he can't bring himself to say the words because he can't let go and one last kiss while she's still warm, while the heart still beats and pushes the blood through her veins and her lips are red not blue and there's still some chance that a part of her no matter how sleepy will remember and then the buzzing drone of another computerized signal that life goes on even in the face of death.

Twenty four hours pass, a memorial service with hollow nostalgia and too many people that never understood or tried. He stands among them, apart, screaming inside and smiling, say hello and share a story. Never has a shadow, so surrounded yet so alone. One drink, two, six, and finally the numbness sets in, liver processing anaesthesia, gray blanket over vision, head spinning, and he screams a gutteral sound that wakes the dead, and people stare and mutter.

And he thinks, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry that I couldn't make it all right and you could have been a shining star and why didn't I say goodbye and why can't you come back?"

And he thinks, too: "I love you. If you carry that with you, then all is well with me, as I know it is with you."

But the dead still sleep, and his apologies fall on ears that can no longer process sorry, and love is another word that drifts in the air for someone to ignore.

I dreamed last night I touched your soul. It slipped gently into my hand, flesh and spirit entwined, enmeshed. We stood at the center of the labyrinth of the universe, walls and floor and ceiling covered with memories of the future and unrealized dreams within dreams, no roadmap and the void of forever looming behind us.

And together we moved forward into the unknown. And you enveloped me in serenity as we walked, smoking too much, one hand always on the left wall. Our journey would last forever (a voice neither heard nor internal made this point clear), without hope of finding the way out, but between us passed the strength to hope, the dare to dream of something better.

We passed the miles with stories and memories, songs and fantasies, pictures and fears, two lost spirits refusing to admit the inevitable. As days grew to years and decades, two souls became less lost and more than either had ever hoped, expected, dared to become.

And when the end came, with the the goal of finding the exit unfulfilled, neither of us noticed.

Nor did we care.

Forever would not be enough, and now was all I had.

It was San Jose, I think -- maybe Oakland, though. The memories blur together so badly in the autumn. Ghost images of one city lay across the next like an incomplete transition. We run and run and run, chasing the future through night laced with cigarette smoke and the sounds of broken guitars, one place to the next and the last is another casualty of our shadows.

She's asleep on the hotel bed, her mascara tracing haunted angles on her cheeks. Another night of us against the world, three empty bottles of wine and a game of tag in the park outside the school, and as she pressed her naked warmth against mine in the cool night air and whispered the last night's dreams in my ear, and I couldn't shut out the music playing from the apartment nearby:

"when you say now
well when exactly do you mean?
for i've already waited too long
and all my hope is gone"

The city lights steal in through the open window and crawl across her body, greedy fingers teasing porcelain skin. I light another cigarette and time races forward and back as I watch her breathing, watching over her, and as her chest rises and falls steadily, naked breasts gleaming with soft dawn sweat, I know that it's time to go again. She'll rise, sleepyhead good morning and the taste of dreams on her tongue to mine, and then we're off again to parts unknown, her hand in mine and the dust and brine of a new country on our clothes.

And it was somewhere in California that I realized my legs would never tire while I was running with her.

In time, we would forget why we left in the first place; eventually, even where we started would fade. This was our adventure, the rediscovery of the world that the world itself had forgotten, the remaking of anywhere and everywhere into new, home without an anchor, and the whole of the earth was ours to remake as we wished.

There's a firefly buzzing around outside of my bedroom window. It's really loud, which is odd, since last I checked, fireflies didn't buzz, much less loudly. But there it is, and I've left the stereo in the other room on, and it's a lot louder than I meant for it to be, but the firefly is even louder, deafening, and why haven't the neighbors called the police?

And every time the little bastard calls out for a mate, it's nuclear winter times ten, blinding, night to day in a millisecond and back before my eyes can register anything but snow. I can see nothing but snow, covering everything, a frozen blanket for the world outside my window; water, water, everywhere...

Flash and I'm blind again, and I wonder where my curtain has gone. I feel a hand on my shoulder, cool and soft and calming, and I close my eyes against the supernova outside. I hear your voice in my head, softly singing, Ani DiFranco musing on car crashes and gravity. I ask if you'll start over; I tell you I love your voice and the feeling of your breath on my cheek, and I can't hear you over the buzzing outside; and you tell me that it's not a firefly but the sparks of a dying sun and will I hold you until morning?

And I notice that my cats are rehanging the curtains, though outside it is snowing again and the light is no more than a full moon reflecting off of the white that carpets the world. I turn to you and you are asleep and have been the entire time; through a tangle of hair, one eye drifts open and meets my gaze, and you smile and reach your hand to my face, running a delicate finger across my cheek, tracing a line that burns a path, hot iron to wax. And you reach into my hair (long, the way I always remember it in dreams), and pull me to your lips, and I feel the heat of your soul melting my eyelids and searing my brain and blistering my skin and then cool, cool, cool, your mouth on mine, soft exploration of the undiscovered, and I taste the sweetness of your breath and my heart explodes. And I'm suddenly aware of my hand on your hip, silken skin covering a frame that fits perfectly in my hand. As we pull toward each other, I hear the buzzing start again, 100,000 notes in the night sky, your hand on my chest to hold my heart inside and the scent of you envelopes me and I am surrendering to the gravity of you and all is dark and perfect.