A-I-D-S, H-I-V!!!!!!!

I always get really stressed around Christmas. Not necessarily because of the holiday itself, or because of the accompanying obligations, though those do contribute. It's never just one thing.

But it just doesn't make me happy. It's a flood of unpleasantness scattered with too few moments of joy to compensate.

I feel obligated to spend time with my relatives. These are people who, while I have known them my whole life, I am no longer close to, and would not chose to be with over other people sans this feeling of obligation.

I additionally feel obligated to buy gifts for many of these people, whom I no longer know well enough to be able to buy thoughtful gifts for. I continue to buy half-assed gifts because getting them nothing would feel even worse.

I am not made happy by receiving gifts, either. These gifts are from people who know me at least as poorly as I know them. Half of what I get some years is just clutter that I feel bad about throwing away.

I don't get to spend time with any of the people who are actually in my social circle. The one person I love the most in the world has never once been with me on Christmas. The best I get is a phone call or two and a date sometime during the week. This year it was a craptacular date on top of everything else.

I am stuck in a place where I have no friends anymore, with no car and no public transportation. This isn't even the place I lived in high school anymore; the house is completely remodeled, and I am in a guest room almost as anonymous as and more cramped than a hotel room.

Every year I figure it won't be so bad, because this year I'm bringing X to distract me/am only here for X days/whatever. I try to insulate myself against misery by bringing reading material, my laptop, making plans... and none of it helps, because what I am doing for Christmas is inherently miserable.

I wish I could just skip the next three days and go straight to Saturday, when I can go home.

 "Why are you mean to me?"

"I'm not, I'm just severely amusing."

My proudest teenage music moment was when Metallica had a techno version of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" on the Spawn soundtrack, and I turned to my friend and said, "You know what, I think Metallica peaked. I think it's all down hill from Loaded."

Reloaded came out later that year and my friend immediately bought the album. Later that week we sat there, listening to it, tense concentration on our faces, waiting for the part where it gets good. That CD eventually ended up at the bottom of a rain barrel.

Other than that and having the good sense to realize ICP was utter shit, I was a pig in shit listening to Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Mindless Self indulgence. It wasn't until U.N.K.L.E. came out that I started buying Beasty Boys and DJ Shadow and the rest is history.

Once I had a computer and an internet connection, the modern equivalent to achieving samadhi, I started finding the kind of music that makes me feel good about my taste in music. This decade has been a good one for music discovery with the onset of the MP3, and the music is only getting better every year as the record industry crumbles, it's grasp on the peoples' taste loosening with each shuddering gasp for breath.

It kills me that I didn't discover Mulatu Astatke last decade, because Ethipiques 4 would have been listed highly in the top ten albums of the millennium, along with Django Reinhardt and Michael Jackson. But here goes a list for this decade:

10. School of Seven Bells - Alpinisms I imagine if Tibet became a sort of hipster village (a paradox for certain) this would become their traditional music. Dirty feedback reverbs in tandem with tip-tapping percussion and haunting vocals. Sometimes meaningful, sometimes meaningless, but always in earnest. This is a band to watch out for.

9. Portishead - Third I honestly forgot about Portishead for a while there. Something about the combination of record scratching and kill-me-now vocals never really had the alchemical wherewithal to make a fan out of me. Imagine then my surprise when Third came out and blew me away. Listening to Third evokes the kind of mood of a very bad man drowning; it is a whole process of horror and acceptance and finally comfort in the face of the inevitable.

8. Beirut - March of the Zapotec/Realpeople - Holland Beirut embraces all the grandiose shapes of eastern european and klezmer sounds while allowing folksy jazz roots to shine through, casting the kind of flickering silhouette that could startle Alfred Hitchcock.

With their latest 2 disc album, they've taken that spirit and replaced the candle with a 500-watt projector. The wet drip of electric synth complements Zachary Francis Condo's vocals in ways foreign to the Beirut fan, instigating a cognitive dissonance that becomes intoxicating.

When you start to miss their earlier work, you can put on the sister album, March of the Zapotec, a mexican infused slow-dance that builds and builds with the of flexibility and stamina of sexy yoga instructor.

7. Beck - Modern Guilt Fuck Beck. I mean that. Who does he think he is, making music good enough that you can forget for a second that he's a fucking Scientologist? I can't even get over that fact while writing the review, but as soon as I put on this album all of his crazy frequent flier Thetans disappear in a cloud of molten ash.

6. High Places - 03/07 - 09/07 I imagine the Universe as being an order of things. Below is the fractalling chaos of quasars erupting and popping and the reverberating purr/screech of Schredinger's cat maybe dying and maybe living. Above there is a great grid of light aligning, reminding us that there is a direction. What happens when these two meet is exactly what High Places is about.

Angelic vocals and bells chirp and tweet and poke and prod, all the while dirty percussion and reverberating atonal drone reminds us that all is not well. It is the kind of funky electro-indy wonderland that my brain enjoys on the most base of levels. Well meaning uncertainty has its limits, and not all songs are created equal. High Places is still Big Banging around, but they're definitely heading for their namesake.

5. Flying Lotus - Los Angeles Flying Lotus is a game changer. Once hip-hop producers start extrapolating his sound and working with some of the more talented MCs out there, Steven Ellison will be remembered for making rap palatable to sonic snobs and indy kids alike.

Flying Lotus vaults over the current indy hip-hop Blue Note catalog sampling paradigm towards pure bliss. Forget sampling, forget break beats and high hats and that fucking car alarm sound you hear in every dub remix, this is what hip-hop will sound like in ten years. If all goes well, next decade's top ten list will be rife with rap as the genre rises from novelty status to rival the best indy-rock available.

4. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion This is the most cogent Animal Collective yet. It is approachable, but still thrums with the bizarre sounds that has elevated this group into the collection of every psychonaut worth their salt.

3. Fever Ray If the Oughts were the decade of female lead singers, a premise I assert is true, Karin Dreijer Andersson is their patron saint. I pray at this demi-goddess's altar daily, waiting anxiously for her next gift from on high.

2. Deerhunter - Microcastle This is the kind of morose music that reminds you that things could be worse. Thusly, you end up feeling pretty good about yourself.

1. Battles - EP C / B EP If music is mathematical by nature, Battles is math that requires a quantum computer and a blindfold. It asks for suspension of disbelief, the assumption that there is a man behind the curtain. If you accept that premise you will find true pleasure in the complexly twisting sonic helix that is Battles.

Elizabeth is upstairs insulating the bedroom. The whole apartment is now snug in Dexter kill room white. It's warm now, and I am not so pleased because unlike Elizabeth I like the cold. I bask in it knowing that it can't kill me because I have blankets and I have liquor and no fucking snowman's going to make a chump of me.

Elizabeth has poor circulation because she is a women. That's OK, but god damn I hate how high she keeps the thermostat. The worst part is that she had the landlord here to look at the furnace and it turns out it needs a new dinglewhatsit and once it's installed she'll have the heat up even higher. One of these days I'm going to wake up in a pool of my sweat so deep I'll slip and land eye-first on the corner of some eager shelf, splitting my skull open like a ripe avocado. Fuck you shelf. Fuck you heat.

I had a lot I wanted to say yesterday, particularly after leaving my first therapy appointment in two weeks, but then I came home and saw the FedEx envelope and promptly forgot it all.

So.

( Reconstructing. )

...and that's the end of part one, as it's off to pick up Lora from work and to stop at the grocery store I go, so this will have to continue later.

Coming up next in my reconstructed thoughts: sex, parentification, lack of thoughtfulness, and what I am baking tonight! Stay tuned.

Where we put the magic inside you.

I'm running a D&D game soon at my friend Jeph and Christi's house, once they move in. I'm thinking in order to maintain party cohesiveness, they should all be from the same school. A horrible corrupt charter school where the teachers are sleeping with the students and with each other and the head mistress is a cunt.

The first few sessions will involve them trying not to get expelled while at the same time trying to get away with the kind of shit that would get them expelled.

In this world, magic has followed the same general course as the industrial revolution allowed for here on Earth. This means there will be magically animated vehicles, whole factories where the employees are wizards, and most lead vocalists in hardcore bands are half-orcs. Of course it is not completely parallel; there are those pesky monsters.

Holy fucking bear shit. I watched Star Wars Holiday Special and it was the lumpiest turd I've ever seen. The kind of turd you need to poke with a stick to get it to flush down. There were so many rape faces set in above horrible teeth and musical numbers. Mark (Hammel? Hammond?)'s face was still fucked up from his epic car accident, and the make-up used to cover it looked like the kind of shit you see on a dead person to make them look more like a toy than a corpse.

I honestly had to fast forward through half of it, but the combination of a six-pack and a zoom button led to me seriously fucking with everyone else watching by zooming in and out and pausing on all the rape faces so we could laugh at our own incandescent horror.

The whole experience would have been much better on drugs, but I would also have settled for a bullet in the heart. Fuck you Mark Hamblebland

It's here.

Holy motherfucking shit.

Heart stop racing, I've got shit to accomplish here.

I'm starting to think that writing is the way to concretize the identity. I have ideas that arrive and seem good, then these ideas eventually evaporate. My memory is damaged, and writing seems like the way to get out of my cognitive issues, to work out a baseline to build upon.

So I am going to start writing more. Mostly here, until I've found my voice, my baseline. I think that if I do that enough, the muscle memory of tapping out the letters and forming words will augment my memory, maybe even help me evolve a little bit.

That is my theory, anyway.

How the fuck is it one in the morning? All I've done today is fuck, sleep, and cry - and I'm not done crying yet, so I'm going to need it to be earlier than it is, thanks.

If I've been quiet this week, it's because I'm resisting the urge to try and intellectualize my feelings right now, given their range and intensity. I've actually been prepping myself for a self-induced emotional overload, which involves keeping all the nerves in my body on edge via various physical means and listening to enough music that I'm on the verge of tears at all times.

This album's been really helpful:

Lost Wisdom - Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire

I suppose it's only appropriate that it brings me to tears (I was listening to "Voice in Headphones" during my third consecutive cycle through of the album and discovered, rather belatedly, several minutes later, that my face was absolutely soaked), considering its back story, but oh god, lack of surprise does not negate emotional power. Jesus Christ.

(Ironically, "Voice in Headphones" is actually about how Phil Elverum can't listen to Björk's "Undo" without being moved to tears himself, which makes it especially meta that I, in turn, cry over his song.)

(Also ironic is that I was listening to some of Julie Doiron's solo stuff earlier and thinking about how thoroughly her voice has infiltrated my mind in the last year and thinking about how much it moves me, and of course then I start listening to this and those thoughts about her voice are basically the subtext behind the entire album. Glad to see I'm not the only one so devastated by her, not that I thought there was any possibility that I was.)

( These songs could be poetry. )

...this kind of art is the kind of art that makes me proud to be a person.

Anyway.

About that whole emotional overload business. I'm not sure how it hasn't happened yet, but apparently we're still waiting on something. First injection? Maybe, but I don't think so. I'm not sure what it is. I am assuming we're just waiting for the moment at which its resolution will have the greatest effect, but I don't actually have a fucking clue if that's true or not. That's kind of the definition of going entirely on feeling here: it's a little bit like trying to find my way around in the dark, and that's the whole fucking point.

In the moments that I step back long enough to observe myself I find it so fascinating to watch the build up, watch all the little things I am doing to prepare. The moments when I bring myself to the edge, moments when I accidentally spill over it just a little, the quietness that follows while I wait until it's all contained again. It's astonishingly sexual, which shouldn't be surprising, except that it is. This post has been in the back of my mind. I am hoping for catharsis on that level, though I'm not sure I will get it.

( Yesterday was one month since my first date with Kay. )

Also, I had a dream this afternoon that I randomly found a whole bunch of pot... maybe in my sister's room? I feel like that's what happened. And my mom was there, and she and I decided it was fine if I pocketed it, and she said I should go ahead and smoke as much as I'd like whenever I'd like, as long as I still got my chores done, so oh man, guess what's been on my mind? Guess what I want for Christmas? Yep. Subtle, subconscious! Real subtle. That would actually be a really nice gift though. I wonder if I can find a way to pull that off. Hmm.

I just finished watching the movie Frost/Nixon. It is very much my kind of movie in that I can connect very well with it. It is a story about a talk show host named David Frost who decides to interview Nixon after he is pardoned. More than that, it is a story about a wild-eyed dreamer who believes that anything is possible over-reaching far beyond his grasp. You may understand why such a story would resonate with me. The difference is that, unlike my over-reaches, his turned out well in the end. If you have not seen the movie, I highly recommend it. It is very well made and quite interesting to watch.

In this show, I discuss Jesus as a man and as a teacher and why he is very interesting to study whether you believe him to be the Messiah or not.

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

Long catch up conversation with my cousin Tim last night. Apparently the classy side of my family isn't doing so classy right now.

Among other things, I learned that my dad's fallen farther off the vaguely wagon-shaped vehicle I was under the impression he was on than I've seen him fall in years, and that at least one of my aunt-uncle pairs thinks I am at fault.

Trans people, turning life-long alcoholics and drug addicts... back... into alcoholics and drug addicts every day since the beginning of time. Fuck yeah.

Every time someone has asked me how I'm doing in, say, the last six months, I've had no idea how to respond. Yesterday I asked a woman I was doing work for how she was doing, and she took in half of a deep breath, let it out shakily, and said, "Better." Pause and a smile. Quietly, "I'm glad you're here."

And I knew what she meant, and it's moments like that that tempt me to say this has been the greatest year of my life, but it's also been the worst, and most of the time I just don't have a fucking clue which it is.

• Link: Main Page - imfdb :. guns in movies :. movie guns :. the internet movie firearms database tumblr.com/xht4ipecc
• Link: Cell Size and Scale tumblr.com/xht4irr5l
• Link: White Glove Tracking tumblr.com/xht4is39j
• I'm in the office if anyone wants to come work in peace and quiet with a nice view.
• I saw @jonrosenberg's book at @modernmyths. Buy it so his poor fevered daughter can eat! yfrog.com/1y1bswj
• After @fruitkat's tweet, I had to find out what 'chilblains' were. When I got back to work, I pasted 'chilblains' as a url #webdesigntalez
• "The “Honest” label was not created as a campaign slogan. In college, when I drank, I would talk tons of..." tumblr.com/xht4ivwy5
• Photo: tumblr.com/xht4ivxzb
• Video: tumblr.com/xht4iwhko
• McDonalds' reintroduction of the McRib has risen the Zombie Apocalypse Inevitability index by nearly 30 points.
• Assassin's Creed 2 intimately explores architecture with parkour, a voluminous codex, & item collection. Can't wait to play more!

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