chain not quite…uh…we’ll get back to you on that.

(original youtube post: thdudesign)

That’s the stuff.

Phrase it, rephrase it, hold it up to the light. Hammer it home, Mr. President. That’s what it’s going to take. 

Well done.

“I hate when I’m at the Golden Globes and some dude hands me Meryl Streep’s glasses like oh great now I gotta be responsible for Meryl Streep’s glasses.”

David Fincher, Director

these first cool days evoke memories
like the smell of cherry pie under azure sky
changing leaves
the turning of another year

24/7
everything spins.
the tires beneath my turning pedals spin
the way my heart once turned circles up for you

forever before those days made my heart dance too
the permanence of change
yellow goldenrod swaying in the breeze
the way you swayed into me that cold winter night.

but you are gone now, and this crisp autumn flight
has been replaced by falling winter’s white.

i feel the intensity pressing me down
into deep waters, i gaze up

through tons i want this gone

i want to believe that next fall this ride will bring me joy again
or if not next fall, then the one beyond that, or beyond that or that
that someday i won’t be hitched, bumping along
spinning behind the memory of you

i want to feel happy again, my love.
i want to believe that memories, like a photograph
fade until only the warmth remains.

i want to believe that in the end
the intensity of my sadness endured for a reason, to succumb
to the greater intensity of our joy.

just got that. really. i’m not kidding. and there *wasn’t* even any kbdsex!

 
well, not today anyway. yet.

 
to whomever did this: for simultaneously making me smile WHILE stripping me of whatever shred of expectation of privacy i had left… i dedicate this song to you. it’s magazine. from the album secondhand daylight. check it out, you randy little voyeur, you.

Sad songs are for chumps. Time to groove out on some Eno-approved 1986 big band with breakdowns that won’t quit.

and remember, cats…they don’t call it sexy sax for nothin’.

Palm hovers above the deck
to draw at last this shining card

on this sunlit lazy day we lived
what is now long since forgotten

melancholia makes us see again
that platitudes are static
while understanding of them wends its way through infinite angles
precessing alchemy

pcw.05.december.2011

My wife and I left Seattle for England in 1995. I returned to Seattle, solo, for several months in ’97 to do some work for a physics professor while my she remained in England cranking out her post-doc. Living close to the bone in Seattle, I stayed with my dear friend and fellow geek/artist Ben, crashing on the floor of his homemade recording studio.

By day I’d bust my ass on time-critical physics problems at work. By night, well, I was still drinking back then, and so every evening I’d load up a good buzz and Ben and I would get together and record something we called music, but about which a lady friend remarked “You two can call  it music if you want, but it’s sure as hell not a song.” 

As far as the combination of energy output and creativity was concerned I was at the height of my powers. Missing my dear wife added the extra spark that totally set me on fire. My skills — both as a debaucher and a pursuer of excellence – were honed to an unprecedented edge. It was the best of times and the worst of times, and I was totally alive.

Something else showed sign of life one night during my stay with Ben. It was near Halloween; peak season for a certain wild mushroom of which we’d earlier partaken…and the walls were moving nicely by the time Ben and I decided to have a look inside an old-timey tube radio he had lying around. It wasn’t working, see, and I thought maybe we could fix it. So we popped the hood and found that one of the main tubes – the power rectifier tube – had obviously failed.

The good news was we could get the thing to work; all we needed was a spare 5U4 rectifier tube. The intermediate news was that, had we the inclination to scour King County, we’d have felt lucky to find a single spare 5U4 rectifier tube. The bad news was that we were more on the level of scouring Ben’s bedroom closet.

However. It occurred to me that although we didn’t have any old 5U4 rectifier tubes lyin’ around, we did have two brand-spankin’-new  “solid state diodes”, and, in theory, we might be able to replace the faulty vacuum tube with these two tiny black miracles from the newfangled transistor era. Like keeping the carriage while replacing the horse with a chevy small block 289. What’s not to like?

We broke out the soldering iron and got to work. With some difficulty (as the radio was rather liquid at the time) we bridged the old tube socket with the new diodes.

All that remained was to fire it up.

The worry, though, was that these diodes might jolt the system. Transistors and solid state diodes are electronically “hard” - vacuum tubes, on the other hand, are soft. When you turn an old radio ON the rectifier tube comes up slowly (by nature), gradually coaxing up the voltage to all the other components. In contrast, when we turned on our retrofitted solid state rectifier it was gonna force ALL THE JUICE TO ALL THE COMPONENTS RIGHT AWAY.

Sure why not? So carefully we set up the radio so we could see the innards in the event the poor thing sparked or something, and then we turned it ON.

After the unusually blue rainbows melted away and I could see again, it became clear that something had most definitely sparked.

We looked for the cause. But try as we might we couldn’t see a single remnant of the tiny nuclear holocaust that had occurred.

Finding nothing I concluded that the poor radio had simply needed to “get something out out of its system,” and would probably work fine if we turned it on again. Ben disagreed. See, Ben has always been a little more scared of sparks than me. So to keep him happy we kept looking and making measurements, and poking and prodding. Eventually Ben reluctantly decided that the old radio must’ve needed to get something out of its system. After all, how many years had it been since it had seen even a single volt, let alone ALL THE JUICE TO ALL THE COMPONENTS RIGHT AWAY.

So we turned it on again. This time it didn’t make a peep…no spark. nothing. Then, ever so slowly, ever so faintly, it began to make a sound…a pleasant, warm sound.

Why, it was Glenn Miller and His Orchestra playing Stardust Memories! 

Try as we might that evening, we couldn’t get that old-timey radio to pick up anything but oldies stations. I’m not even joking.

***

Crazy times, man. 

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

And by “Oral Sex” I mean “Tooth Extraction”, which is what I enjoyed today.

Local anesthetic only, I said. Cause I’m just that cool. But whew, I tell you what those pearlies are IN there. Dude was drilling and tugging and yanking a pulling and twisting to beat sixty (old-timey slang especially for you, Tony). Since the tooth was biologically embedded IN (as opposed to lying passively ON) my upper right jaw BONE, all the drilling yanking pulling twisting (and let’s not forget breaking) sounds had a super-efficient BONE-DIRECT pathway to my starboard eardrum. Fascinating as they were, you probably don’t want me to describe them any more than I already have. Doc moved fast once he started. In and out in about three minutes, I’d guess, which is good because it wasn’t an experience I particularly wished to savor.

Sent me home with a week supply of antibiotic. While I’m tempted to avoid taking it cause I’m just that cool, dental infections are notoriously dangerous and hard to stop once they get going. I figure it’s no time to gamble on the efficacy of my stand-alone immune system only to end up, you know, just that dead.

Oh yeah, and hydrocodone for pain. The anesthetic wore off a few hours ago; so far, things hurt quite a bit less than I expected. How will this affect my use of the pain meds, you might ask? Let’s put it this way: I won’t tell if you won’t.

Now really, wasn’t this more interesting than just another blowjob post?

Bring on the ice cream.