Pictures of Me Getting Licked

Above: Old Nick.

That's me, moments after yanking my head free of a giant nostril. Two Japanese tourists, apparently mother and daughter, stared on with blank expressions, talking quietly to one another. I don't know what they were saying, but I like to think they were impressed that I didn't get my head stuck this time.

Below: pedaling a giant heart. It lights up, alternating red for arteries and blue for veins, hot-cold hot-cold, but it doesn't go anywhere.

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

"Fuck!"

Oh, that word! I love to say it, I love to sing it, I love to mouth it. "Fuck!" It can be sexual, violent, enthusiastic, awed. Its sound is hard, explosive, melodious. It is versatile. It fits. It feels good. It's easy.

And I'm trying, really trying, not to say it so much.

This is not because I've gone soft. Plenty of room remains in my heart for such sentences as "I'm going to knock your fucking teeth out if you shit in my house ever again, Larry." Phrases like that please even the Lord.

Here's my real problem: vague, ambiguous language promotes verbal and mental laziness when overused. "Fuck" and "suck" are frequent stand-in words. They emphasize opinion over observation.

"That new Tore-Up Anus CD really sucked!" You might say, just for example's sake.

You have used the word "suck" to express your position succinctly. But it's much more productive to say "The new Tore-Up Anus CD's sound quality was awful, the guitar was about five cents off key, and the melodies all sounded suspiciously similar to Black Sabbath hits." That's not so hard, and it's a little more sensitive to your Tore-Up Anus-loving friend because it says that you at least listened and took a moment to build an informed opinion.

I admit it's impractical to be that long-winded all the time. Nothing's wrong with saying "That sucked!" to save breath. I just aim to make sure that my opinions are well-built and substantive. Who wants to stumble their way through a judgmental, poorly thought-out, poorly expressed inner life? Human beings are partially defined by their opinions and ideas. I prefer to learn what I can even from art, music, and people I dislike.

You have limited time left in your life to taste as much of the world as you can. Why dismiss any experience as unworthy?

Autumn in Hell

Few people know this, but for years I've obsessed over the classic computer game "Doom."

In case you don't remember, "Doom" is a run-and-gun game in which the player must escape the denizens of Hell, battling to survive while exploring strange surroundings and looking for a way out of the nightmare.

Over the years I've learned how the game works from a designer's standpoint, and found excellent tools for creating new maps, monsters, and so on. The above screen capture is from a project I've been picking at this week, a map meant to look Halloweenish and evil, as though it were Autumn in hell. Trick or treat! Senseless carnage, reflexive hand-eye coordination. I love it.

* * *

Later that night...

* * *

It is fiendishly late and I still can't sleep. I miss my friends already, though they just left a few hours ago. I used to be such a hermit, bent over my desk night after night, no visitors.

What happened? I guess the right kind of company makes these things easy. For the first time in my life I'm feeling receptive, and I have an urge to tell my closest pals: "Hey, the door is open! Come stay for a few days, work on your art, your reading, whatever. Escape." Sometimes I feel it would be only natural to form a pack of sorts, sharing food and lodgings, sleeping in a massive pile like lazy lions. I am a better person in the company of my good friends. I like to have 'em around.

Like most people, though, to be truly happy I do need a room to myself and a door to shut behind me. Every day.

But even so, most of my conscious life's been cloistered: reading and writing and studying and learning the guitar and learning to sing and learning to compose. These things eat hours like candy. Finally I'm learning to balance it out, to mingle. It feels good. But I fear the Autumn, fear the words "Farewell Summer," because when the leaves are falling my mates may all be gone out-of-state where I cannot see them. But I'll write them letters, at the very least.

Letter writing is miserably underrated. It's much like keeping a journal, but more interpersonally productive, more communal.

Alright. I have a nine-hour shift ahead. It begins in four hours.

Goodnight.

Invisible Ink

Hanging on my wall is an unfinished piece of music that looks like a line graph.

It was intended to be a loose, freely-interpreted piece with a line and dots representing melody. Performers choose whatever pitches and rhythms they want, deciding what they think the line should represent. The lower the line dips, the lower the pitch. And so on, all along its squiggly shape. It's a vague guideline.

This process of "decoding" the line to create music is similar to reading a book: a set of agreed-upon symbols is interpreted to reveal an idea. This process is so commonplace that we rarely pause to think about how amazing it all is, these systems of sharing information.

Sometimes I look at languages I can't read. I admire beautiful symbols that I can't understand—it fills me with a sense of immense possibility. Sometimes blank books have this effect on me as well, that sense of "this could be anything."

It's also fun to sometimes look at things that were not intended as language, interpreting them as though they contained messages: if I chose, I could read the tackholes in my wall as musical notes and sing them. I could arbitrarily decide that the phases of the moon dictate my attire: no pants allowed on a full moon! Why not? Who's going to stop me? I've gone mad with freedom!

Ahem.

Occasionally a certain object or set of objects will speak to me almost as though they are language itself. A few weeks ago, it was a package of poker chips: I felt I needed to buy them. I don't play poker, but the little discs seemed importantly symbolic. So I'm sitting here, pushing the chips around, stacking and sorting them by color, laying them out to form color patterns, trying to get them to reveal their significance to me.

It's strange to look at an ordinary object and sense that your subconscious associates that object with...something you can't quite express. It's a little like knowing that something in your mind is reading over your shoulder, and that creature deeply appreciates the object as a symbol. And you feel it, you feel it, but you can't quite consciously know it.

The Pee Zone

My cousin Chris wore multicolored hair, checkered tennis shoes, pink wristbands. I had a black knit cap snugged down to my eyebrows, five days of stubble, a black pea coat. We wandered a cavernous department store to kill time and (maybe) buy something.

“Now why do I get the feeling that if one of my fellow associates came around, they'd tell me to watch you guys?”

My cousin Chris and I looked up from our movie browsing to see the Electronics Department manager standing over us.

“It's an appearance thing,” the manager went on, “people look a certain way, everybody assumes they're trouble. I don't agree with it.”

“I have to do the same thing at my work,” Chris said. “Don't worry about it.” We were left with the feeling that we'd been subtly warned despite the benevolent tone—fine with us; we can deal with being watched. We love attention.

I spent a great deal of time in the chair aisle, unfolding chairs and stools into the middle of the aisle one at a time, using exaggerated facial expressions to indicate approval or displeasure. If anyone was watching us via camera, they know my taste in foldable chairs.

Finally we decided to grab a late-night meal—but when Chris and I attempted to move on to the grocery area, we found yellow rope blocking the way. Store associates walked the perimeter, which must have encompassed at least a dozen aisles. What was going on?

We soon realized that we weren't roped out, but in.

Chris noticed it first: in a central corridor between rows of aisles, no more than six inches from my right boot, there stretched an unbroken twenty-foot line of yellowish-brown pee.

Great. We were the only remaining customers in the Pee Zone. I hope we were being watched while we browsed, because that's the only way our good names could be preserved beyond doubt.

I guess that's what I get for dressing like the kind of guy who'd pee in a department store.

Delicious Apart, Terrible Together

Come February I’ll be tasting wines with some regional distributors in order to learn more about the mysterious drink and its many varieties.

Since wine is mostly aftertaste, it can be paired very effectively with food. Dinnertime wine choice is a complicated art; there are no “rules” but most people generally find that certain combinations work better than others.

For example, a dry white wine is delicious with carrot dill soup; the sourness of the wine contrasts and complements the ginger in the soup beautifully.

The same wine with a barbecued burger, though, would taste like nasty hooker ass—even though the wine and the burger would each taste great if consumed separately.

I first realized this principle of “Delicious apart, terrible together” at the age of five when, after an early-morning episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy, I added orange juice to my leftover Coco Puff milk. I gulped it down and immediately felt as though I could puke hard enough that the other end of my digestive tract would exert terrible suction and lodge the kitchen chair halfway up my asshole.

The experience forever destroyed my desire to combine liquids of any kind, which is why I grew up to be a blogger and barista instead of a high-grossing chemist.

Change Looms

For years I insisted that underwear, for men, was unnecessary. No Boxer Short Baron would ever grow fat on my hard-earned dollars. No sir. I thought I'd never be tempted, not by any loom's hedonistic fruits. Not even if spokesman Michael Jordan sheared the sheep personally and then slam-dunked the ball of liberated wool directly into my pants.

Just before the New Year, a simple law of the universe manifested. The law takes the form of a not-so-secret ancient equation:

Christmas + Grandma = Underwear

It had been years since I had last stepped into boxers. What was I thinking all that time? How did I endure the tough texture of denim jeans? When did commando-style become a way of life?

Lesson learned: we sometimes identify too strongly with ways of thinking that we haven't properly... well... thought out. It's too easy to fall into a pattern of behavior without questioning whether the pattern makes any sense whatsoever.

I am humbled—all those uncomfortable years, all that denim, the chafing endured for pride's sake, the awkward two-turn losses at strip poker.

Well, I was wrong.

And besides, a hot girl recently told me she loved guys in boxers.

But, uh. I swear. That had nothing to do with it.

14 Inches Deep

Here in Central Maine, Frosty the Snowman loves to bend us over and give it to us, hard, pretty consistently through the Winter months.

Yesterday, he gave us a full glistening fourteen inches. Not bad for a white boy, eh?

A brief voyage outside during the storm revealed that the "snow" was neither fluffy nor soft, but steely and sharp. The wind shoved the jagged little dagger-flakes between the buttons of my jacket, down my shirt collar, up my nose.

The roads were empty but the neighborhood pizzeria remained heroically open; it looked like the last remaining beacon of civilization among the shuttered and dark storefronts. Light spilled from the pizza place's windows onto the blank white expanse where the sidewalk used to be—

—and thank fucking God for snow like this, I thought. On any other day off, I would have felt like a slacker for neglecting laundry, failing to shop for clothes, forgetting to buy groceries. Thanks to the storm, though, a forty foot walk for pizza became an epic Herculean feat.

Given a choice between taking all of Frosty's fourteen inches or facing up to my own workaholic conscience, I prefer bending over.

Welcome

According to 1500's Dutch Christian folklore, this tavern hosts sinners who are on their way to Hell. All of the newly-damned are permitted one final night of drinking, gambling, sex, or whatever other indulgences they enjoyed in life.

Ready for another beer or whiskey shot? Just ask one of the nuns in residence. Feeling more repentant than thirsty? They'll pray for you by request, but again: you are already damned. These kinds of executive decisions can't be overturned.

Like the fabled Tavern, this blog will be a space for reflection, reminiscence, and raucous abandon. I'm Old Nick; I'll gradually introduce myself in posts to come. There will be discussions on Consciousness studies, music composition, songwriting, performance, human behavior, literature, art, whiskey, beer, and much more.

If you've stumbled across this page somehow and share any of the above interests, say hello!