DIRT IN THE GROUND
What does it matter / A dream of love / Or a dream of lies / We're all gonna be in the same place / When we die / Your spirit don't leave knowing / Your face or your name / And the wind through your bones / Is all that remains / And we're all gonna be / Just dirt in the ground / The quill from a buzzard / The blood writes the word / I want to know am I the sky / Or a bird / 'Cause hell is boiling over / And heaven is full / We're chained to the world / And we've all gotta pull / And we're all gonna be / Just dirt in the ground / Now the killer was smiling / With nerves made of stone / He climbed the stairs / And the gallows groaned / And the people's hearts were pounding / They were throbbing / They were red / As he swung out over the crowd / I heard the hangman said / We're all gonna be / Just dirt in the ground / Now Cain slew Abel / He killed him with a stone / The sky cracked open / And the thunder groaned / Along a river of flesh / Can these dry bones live / Ask a king or a beggar / And the answer they'll give / Is we're all gonna be / Dirt in the ground

YOU LOVE ME ALL THE TIME, I LOVE YOU ALL THE TIME
Courtney and I spent the day together and it was great. Since she unleashed her holy terror son on this world four years ago, it's been hard for the two of us to just see a bad movie, eat a bad meal, and sing along badly to Marvin Gaye. Thankfully, we managed today.
I wonder if my best friends know how much I love them. Ever since Mrs. Miklaski -- my favorite teacher, whose high school English classes influenced me as much as any Clash record I own -- told me that my stoicism made her feel like her teaching bored me, I've been concerned about the stoneface I sometimes wear. Until senior year I was the weird kid who was too shy to talk, but not too shy for hair dye. I wanted attention and validation from my peers like everyone else, but I was too anti-social to know how to relate to them constructively enough to get it. A lot of people misread my awkward shyness like Mrs. Miklaski did. I just didn't know how to express myself to them, so I looked to punk rock to do it for me. Too bad it didn't quite work that way. Aside from a few older druggie girls nicknaming me "Kool-Aid" (I had Punky Colour in my hair, not fucking Kool-Aid, thank you very much. [I had a crush on each one of these girls, so I put up with the name anyway. {Somehow, years later, one of them found me on the internet and revealed that she had a crush on me too! Fuck.}]), my alignment with any sort of counter culture was widely panned with the standard We-Don't-Give-A-Shit stamp of disapproval by the general population of Riverview Community High School.
Ten years later and I've shed that adolescent shell, but I'm still never quite sure how many of my real feelings make it past the cold, iron gate. Sometimes I have trouble expressing warm and fuzzy affection, and I worry that my gratitude for those I feel warm and fuzzy about gets lost in my rigid translation. So, right now I feel compelled to make one of the smallest social gestures to some of the biggest people I know: THE BLOG SHOUT-OUT.
Dayna Beaver, Dave Frazee, Nick German, Josh Gillis, Ryan Hoppe, Courtney Hurley, Ellen Maurer, Jeff Wright.
Listen, you guys. I fucking love you, even if I don't always express it like a normal person.

BAD WEEK

PART OF THIS THING I WROTE
I started writing this over the weekend, mostly to cure my growing boredom, if not my fever, cough, aches, pains and bad dreams. Somewhere along the way I got distracted and my window for profound, philosophical testament closed, as usual. So, in the interest of documenting even the most insignificant writing exercises, here's part of this thing I wrote.
---
Yesterday I spent twenty hours in bed, in and out of consciousness, hacking and feeling sorry for myself. When a bad bug hit me hard on the way to New York in March, zombifying me for the duration of my visit, I was sure it would hold up as my worst ailment of '09. Heck, I had a cold just two weeks ago that sidelined me for a couple days, but it did nowhere near the damage I was dealt in NYC. In fact, it was so minor I recall feeling relieved that the fall cold was out of the way with so little fuss.
Then, exactly fourteen days later and my nose is producing neon shades of green Manic Panic doesn't even know about yet. Two days after that and I'm fading in and out while Hank reads Get In The Van to me. Three hours later and the "Bad Girl" hornline is waking me up. Hermon Hitson comes after Henry Rollins and I certainly don't mind. Because it's in that three minute span -- awake again for the first time in hours; stiff from being laminated between bedsheets; acutely aware that my body's faculties are still offline, but momentarily feeling not-awful -- that I accomplish some of my most agile train-of-thought hopping.
---
Here, I fully intended to recount the stream of consciousness I followed out of my nap. Something about a moment of existential disbelief, staring at my hand. Something else about a series of crummy dreams I'd been having. Something else something else about the latest 20-year-old girls complicating my recovery. Blah blah blah. Then Mike B. (remember him?) called me for the first time in months only to find himself a lucky audience of one for all that rambling and more. He returned the favor with his own tales of recent misadventure. Among them was one about his new hobby of collecting vintage axes, just in case he ever decides to live out one of his classic revenge fantasies. Follow your dreams, Mike.
Anyway, we talked for a long time. By the end of the call, my tank was near empty and most of my stories bombed with the test audience. In my defense, I still had a decent fever burnin', and how does one compete with axe murder, anyway?
This maybe?

HEY UNIVERSE
It seems like any time I start writing at 3 a.m., someone gets upset and something gets redacted. That in mind, I still have one question: Hey Universe, why are you out to get me all of a sudden?
I thought we had an understanding. I try to maintain a reasonably moral existence and YOU don't run my head and/or heart and/or other sensitive organ(s) through the spin cycle. And especially not all at once.
And that flat tire you made me change in the rain tonight, when I already had a cold? Yeah. Real mature.

INCOMING MAIL,
OR RUN WITH THE DEVIL

YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED to what Fountain Park Apartments Digest is calling THE SPIRITUAL HIGH OF THE CENTURY.
Yes:
MIKE & NICK TURN 26!
Back by popular demand. One night only.

Good friends!
Good tunes!
Good booze!
Good christ, you'd better not go to somebody else's joint birthday party this Friday!