And when we break we'll wait for our miracle

yeah, you can hear jeff mangum finish the last of the songs from this record, you can hear him set his guitar down and then you hear the chair creak as he stands up, and you hear the wooden floor echo as he walks away, and as we lay there crushed from the gravity of everything we have just heard, we realize it has been seven years, and for all we know he has never picked up that guitar again, and might never. ever.

which is fucking devastating. not because it is a sad thought, or a glorious thought, but because of the thought of the strength involved with leaving everything as suddenly as it seemed to figure out that it was perfect.

on the first listen, you will be unimpressed, and maybe even disappointed. on the second through tenth listens, you will be indifferent. on the eleventh listen, you happen to be questioning things. you happen to notice that this is the most perfect statement in music that you have ever heard.

i am not exaggerating, because the investment was part of the reason that it is a ten-point-oh record, now, irrevocably, universally. and also because i never exaggerate.

to this day i do not know how he sings through even one paragraph without choking.

Robert Frost: remxd!

A re-interpretation of: The Road Not Taken
--------------------------------------------

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent beneath the undergrowth;

(blah blah blah)

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
Fuck me runnin'.

kayak 2005 mark II

This is a picture of me, in a kayak, in Milford Sound, on the southwest coast of the south island of New Zealand, on the evening of July 22nd, 2005.

I know it is me, because Kristina tagged it with a note that said "Tim hangin out solo".

The rest, I was able to figure out because of a thing called "context".

Or wait, maybe it was the context that I was able to figure out from the details.

But then how did I arrive at the details, if not the context?

I am confused, because I am no longer mentally virile.

Maybe it is that I have a memry. Maybe memry+context=presently.

When you figure it out, light two candles, one lavender-scented and one that's like berries. Set them each at your mountaintops, and let them burn until they are going out. When they go out, there will be a trail of smoke. The trail of smoke will travel up into the atmosphere. The wisps of smoke will travel latitudes and longitudes. The wisps of smoke will travel for weeks in the sky. The wisps of smoke will find each other, will congregate against all odds with the smoke of all of the other burnt-out candles from all of the other mountaintops. There will be a haze of used-to-be-lavender, and used-to-be-berries, hovering just above a very certain geography. The smoke will organize into a column in the atmosphere, resembling an obilisk.

I will exit the front door of my own very certain geography. I will catch sight of a dark dense obelisk in the sky, moving quickly towards me, and all of a sudden things will occur to me.

And then I shall cough.

straight to video

so i took adam's advice, and i put up a note on craigslist for platonic gettogethers, and i made sure to emphasize not once, not twice, but three times, that i was not interested in sex or relationships, and that i was being genuine when saying that i am not interested in sex or relationships, because i really actually was being genuine, with the one exception being if tina fey were to initiate correspondence, in which case i would do everything in my power to get her to make out with me, and then based on the success of that, to move on to the task of getting into her pants. i considered the odds of such a circumstance to be very low, and so i made sure to clarify that i was, in fact, being extremely genuine.

so i got a few emails from people who were not chumps. one of whom is ken. ken is a white hetero male, so we have stuff in common.

yesterday, ken and i played tennis. i am not good at tennis, but somehow i have accumulated not one, not two, but three tennis racquets over the years. the tennis game that ensued yesterday is one that alas, probably will not go down in the annals of sports history where two relative unknowns faced off and re-defined the game, because we were too busy being awful, especially relative to the 7-year-olds who were re-enacting some sort of wimbeldon championship game between sampras and agassi, in the adjacent court.

granted, i did perform much better than i expected. meaning that on several occasions, my racquet made contact with the ball, and the ball's trajectory took it over the net and into the large rectangle which defines the court boundaries. score!

so...

also, ken had free tickets to this rock and roll show last night. a band called "mindless self-indulgence" was playing. so we went. i had nothing better to do, is what i was figuring. it was at the house of blues. because downtown disney is where you need to go if you are a metalli-goth kid, duh.

the place was chock full 'o teens. and i don't mean "eight" teen. or even "seven" teen. i mean "fourt" teen and perhaps some "thirt" teens. and that, my friends, is incredible. if i wanted to go to a rock concert at thirteen, there would be many factors working against me, such as:

1. the fifteen dollars for the ticket.


2. the approximately fifty to sixty miles between my geography, and that of the venue.


3. the likelihood of parentals granting leave, in light of the fact that they would have significant trust issues with the culture present at such an event.


4. oh, also the fact that i would never find out about such a thing, since i lived in cheeklick western new york, and there was no internet, nor event listings in the local paper, nor any information via radio unless the bands were extremely, extremely popular, and besides i only listened to toronto radio.


5. there is probabyl a fifth factor, also.

anyway, the concert last night: the music was actually really interesting, in a good way. it reminded me of marilyn manson, except maybe faster paced, more for-fun and silly, just as heavy and neo-gothy and full of samples. oh shit. i just remembered that a rubber-stamped genre description already exists. it is called "industrial". yeah, that works. i am losing my touch.

it was very energetic. i might have "bopped", or girated my arms and head, but my heart is stone, and i am incapable of showing emotion or moving my body as an expression of a connection i have made with things going on around me. plus, we were much older than everyone, and jaded, so we had a good excuse. it was fun to watch, and i was not becoming distracted.

all of the other stuff that teenagers are listening to is shit, though.

i hope that this has been a suitable update. i am getting worse at some things.

Lourds of the Ring

You can buy a real actual Lourds of the Ring CD here.

And you should because:

1. it's only eight bucks.


2. all the profits go to the red cross.


3. it's got m'f'n "behold! an elf!" on it, and as humble as i am about stuff i am involved with, that song has frigging got it wrapped up.


4. that treebeard song's pretty kickass too.

If I could include a poster with each purchase, this is what it would look like:

nightamerica

1. always in a hurry for some thing

1. the cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.

1. multivitamin


2. C


3. A + D


4. E


5. lysine


6. Fe


7. B complex

these! twisted implements.

some times you should write dumb little phrases on to papers like i like to do, some times, because you never know when you will be able to stumble across it again and wonder if you used to be poignant or intellectual, may be.

my lower jaw has been ravaged, along interior gum line, interior of cheeks, one side of tongue, and inflammation and soreness around base of throat, in area of tonsils. things inside of my mouth had been going so well, but i must be back to normal, to some mysterious cobwebs of stress and doubt that go repressed and hidden except for sensitive physical tissues and sometimes headaches and somberness . awash in antiseptics and antidepressants was a story of the nineties, though. two thousands are for tongue scrapers and stiffened stares and or distractions, stiffned drinks, like antiseptics except without the gargling. we all fucking hate when i get personal, i know. i detest it too and i have no excuses.

i am enjoying a glass of milk, because i have run out of cereal anyway. i am playing my music very loud in my apartment, which i have never done in any apartment, but i do not feel self-conscious about it this time because there are no adjoining walls and no bodies can hear.

it is red house painters. they will take some blame for all of this mess.

this evening i am completely overly tired, completely overly spent even though going to bed and laying in it would not make me sleep, so i am overlyworn out for everything i guess. like a stage of recovery two days after having the shit kicked out of you by a street gang. maybe. who knows. i should take a day off of work for the first time ever, for the first time. i can't remember what staying home when you are not supposed to feels like.

i feel like it should be christmas, and i should be baing lazy on a couch on portage road.

i have a confession about matchmaking. i joined one of those sites. it does not feel correct. thirty girls filter in, two make contact, two close me out, i close out two scrubs, all in twos, it is all completely unstimulating, all assembly-line, i cant imagine a person who could make me feel more complete as wondrous as i can imagine them to be, and that is what i have come to, and that is not a tragedy, may be it is just how a few of us are, and by ourselves is the only way we will ever work. nobody will understand because i am the only one like me that i have ever known, maybe. i have had awakenings of my own, and i have come to realize that i am not so lost, no more than anyone else, just over ly selfconscious some times. they R hott, it is true, but girls have never ever brought out the best in me, only i have, and only for one day out of a thousand at that. i am a ridiculously difficult implement. tell john cusack and my grandmother that i am sorry for letting them down.

i am sorry about confessing. every sentiment is awkward, by definition.

oh, the killing headache . oh, the ice water. oh, the farmer fields drainage run-off. oh, country boy that i used to have been. swimming lessons in a small town.

i do not remember what the bell between classes sounded like. i only remember we had four minutes to get from one to the next, and it was awkward if you had to sit and stare for three and a half.

around here in the present it is finally getting to be so that it is not a parody of heat, meaning superridiculously hot, and so it is just regular hot, maybe 85 degrees, i don't know. we talk about the weather when we are out of ideas.

oh, how there's nothing to be cryptic so cryptic about anymore so it seems. i am overtired. this is the time of night when i play oh comely on a guitar, because it is easy enough to try.



i have a sense that some day i will ex scape. dont worry be cause i will write letterz.

HDD

The Duke

there is something familiar about a photograph of an old duke ellington.

maybe even more, for an old photograph of an old duke ellington.

it is a mystery.

Shockwave Rider + American Red Cross

Hello,

To all ten of you who read this.

"The Shining", which is a brilliant rock-n-roll CD by a band called Shockwave Rider, is now available for $10 at CDBABY.

The link is http://cdbaby.com/cd/tiredorbit1

Better yet, until further notice, all proceeds (or at least six dollars out of the ten) go to the American Red Cross. Which means you get a CD, and the American Red Cross gets money for helping victims of the hurricane.

Sample songs are available at the Tired Orbit Records main page, which is http://www.thetiredorbit.com, as well as on the CDBaby page.

This is a good thing that CDBaby is doing. Plus, they have lots of other ultra-independent, almost-home-made CD's from people you have never heard of. I recommend Tulsa Drone (another great band from Richmond, who've gotten props from high places), the brilliant Art of Fighting, and Flashing Red Airplane. Dunno if any of these bands are donating their profits as well... There will be a note on the left side of the screen which says something about "All Profits to Red Cross", if they are.

Feel free to pass this note around. It will give us a reason to wrest all of the remaining Shockwave Rider CDs from Phil Nunnally's sphere of influence.

Soon to be available via CDBaby, also for Red Cross purposes: those Lourds of the Ring CD's. With me, of all people, singing.

The "tired orbital" and "tiers of prog" projects will not be available until 2018. Sorry.