a salty slap to the nuts ( or eluding consistency)

so I got my friend's car towed this morning, the result of the Stevens Neighborhood's fluctuating parking schedule and my absentmindedness- or, as was just articulated by the owner of the car: the "pile of irresponsibility" that I and others recognize as Ryan.

I don't disagree with this characterization, as I've often discribed my life as: Piles on top of other piles- intermingling collections of unorganization on a dusty floor reflecting the mis-interest of the things that come to me in the mail, that I reach out for at the library, the remnants of the pseudo-endevors of my education lingering within reach and out of sight (thank god), or the various periodical publications that I don't ever really want to take the time to sift through.

And this anxiety I have for periodicals, for any type of text that is produced at some sort of consistent, typically daily rate- now this is a hard nut to crack. It's connected to how people watch baseball, I've now learned, this comfort of consistency that eludes me, or that I am eluding, yes that's it. The anxiety is of being talked over- DO OVER! of people talking over themselves, before they finish what they were initially trying to say- which is how I exist anyway, especially when I'm writing while stoned, where flashes of flavor connect allong themselves, alright, amidst the effort of disavowing, of abandoning these thoughts even as they meet permanence- your sentences can really take some hard turns but that's what I like anyway, in literature, characters who make swift, momentous stabs at their own definition and deconstruction. They expand across the pages in my mind, instead of being absorbed more and more into the titles and headlines, leaving less to be uncovered, leaving less- just breaths before the next concussion of darker, grosser letters.

I just don't know what to read.

Oh, don't get me started on the word "just," pitting the entirity of existense against a single contingency, an inescapably convenient condition of need. Face the dictionary like a goodboy:
Main Entry:
1just
Pronunciation:
\ˈjəst, ˈjüst\archaic variant of joust

eh?

Function:
adjective
Etymology:
Middle English, from Anglo-French & Latin; Anglo-French juste, from Latin justus, from jus right, law; akin to Sanskrit yos welfare
Date:
14th century

a little better... but it's the adverb I'm after:

1 a: exactly, precisely b: very recently 2 a: by a very small margin : barely b: immediately, directly 3 a: only, simply b: quite, very

Nothing to back it up with... oh I have to work now, but before I also wrote this, which no longer belongs, the blog is lying!

This sort of connected to the idea of the car getting towed in this idea that people are responsible for the things that belong to them, to the extent that the threat of consequence shadows over the value of the things themselves- in where they are kept, in the condition that they are left in, in the ease of their re-emergence from a catalog. Bills and Paystubs are objects of some of my worst neglect, right after the various hakneyed efforts to either continue my education, figure out how to move to Germany, or even just secure some sort of rewarding/longstanding/tolerably lucrative employment.

write

Dan:

These words are for you, they contain the significance of our mutual desires....beeevvvaaarrrre!

you "should" have written 10 pages or more, you were distracted by tasks preventing your in-habitation of "the zone."
I responded: "Just do it, man."
you responded "that's not an answer, Ryan" - a paternal gesture, authorizing your reprimanding my response.

Now, as I was leaving, I began (to write this):

I do not mean to give you an answer, but only a command- that you expect an answer to emerge, that you worship (returning over and over again to) a perpetually hypothetical existence of yourself - this is an insult to the agency of your consciousness and your force as a thinker, reader, and most importantly your capabilities as a writer (which is one-who-WRITES, not one-who-has-written). The perpetuation of the intangibility of your existence is the silence, the non-thing, which demands from you a ceaseless and unrestrained attack. This is, for instance, why I suggested that you run. The process of running is perhaps the most immediate and tangible way to devastate one's physical homeostasis in the sense that when you run, you approach directly the limitations of your body- you need air, rest, reprieve, to relent against yourself- but it is also of course similarly effective and direct in destroying intangibility and the confusing distances of one's imagination- being lost within the mundane endlessness of oneself. I compare it to the sensation I used to achieve when vacuuming the dinning area of coffman memorial union. The cacophonous whining buzz of inextricable, unisolatable frequencies, overdrive without melody, encouraged meditation and focus through the elimination of the distances of one's imagination and silence- it destroyed the distance of the aural atmosphere.

That which offers resistance to articulation is necessarily (always and already) endowed with an element of mysticism, in that it eludes the materiality of language/signification by hearkening back to metaphysical concepts of permanence, time, and ceaseless meaning-
of that-which-remains-yet-to-be-seen
of divine tautology
of a future
of not.yet.
of beyond
of UseLessNess.

sometimes people sometimes i will hear; i will experience a guitar workout so utterly rapturous that rather than performing anything resembling serviceable air-guitar playing, i in cabal with my bodily parts, brainwaves, nerves, and emotions render something generously called "convulsing." No i don't nor can't just pantomime a simple repeated downstroke and attendant head-banging: instead, an imagined audience gets extremely convincing epilepsy. Also

Have you ever achieved this feat or rockn'roll-athletic fusion: While engaged in previously detailed guitar antics, other body parts of mine were doing this strangely possible thing--my feet, that is, were launching me into the air while, while, simultaneously now, pushing back against the ground, stompin' on it, as it were? Wow!

[good song to achieve said experience to: Menomena's "Trigga Hiccups"]

I cannot, for the life and death of a clown, think of a better way to insinuate myself into a new day than by listening to the Kinks' Arthur Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire. But "listening" is an incredibly understated way of describing and encoding the action--dare I might say, without effective brevity: feeling it, letting it inform every mechanical and biological function possibly contained within my body. As many amongst us have figured out over the years, music has an uncanny ability to sublimate, morph, and generally add a sense of pleasure to banal, quotidian, and commonplace activities, such as cleaning the kitchen. For me, Arthur accomplishes a feat even greater than the simple addition of pleasurable background noise.

As I cross the threshold separating my room from the kitchen, the warm, euphoric chords of "Victoria" promise a better-than-banal dishwashing experience. Not a minute in to the track, the simple chorus--repetition of the cry "Vic-tor-ia!"--convinces my vocal chords to collaborate with mouth and tongue and teeth, eventually causing, after a few scratchy false starts, my voice to careen along with Ray Davies with a cowboy's abandon. If I am not bounding across the kitchen floor, inaccurately picking out the guitar part during the song's half-breakdown around the 2:40 mark, punctuating those lines with my best attempts to replicate the guitar-incision-as-period as well, then I might be in the market for coffee's services.

The next three tracks on the album, while fantastic, imbue less wild energy than faithful crooning along to Ray Davies' inciscively witty analyses of bourgeois British society, war-mongering and empire-building. This is when the bulk of my kitchen work, ostensibly my primary goal, is actually completed. Then...

What's this?! As soon as the drums roll in on "Brainwashed," suds are flying. I'M FLYING. I'm bouncing! The understated guitar work is excellent, but it is only to provide groveling service to the towering, strutting, king-like horns. By this time, I've startled the dog and have to be careful that my less-than-well-orchestrated air guitar windmills and scissor-kicks have not decapitated or irrevocably dismembered poor Eliot. Shoo!

For no other reason than creative laziness, I'll basically elide over the rest of Arthur's tracklist-proper; Expect to mention (parenthetically, of course, that "Shangri-La" is one of the greatest songs ever, as is the subsequent "Mr. Churchill Says": Mid-song "the-town-is-being-bombed-holy-shit-shit-fuck!" sirens, anyone?)

By the time bonus track "This Man He Weeps Tonight" hits its stride, I am wailing along with Dave Davies' searching, impassioned chorus ("But this man he weeps tonight/And his head is bow with sorrow/But what can you do sitting there?!/When you'll let him cry tomorrow/Yes you'll let him cry tomorrow"), as the tambourine prods insistently and I clutch a dampened dish towel, my ever-pruning hands cycling through various textures and being dried-out unlike the Man's tears.