a spontaneous, desperate urging in fewer words than are in this sentence

PLAY FROM YOUR FUCKING HEART

I Just Want to Forget

I can't do it. Spiked hair, spiked drinks, the most banal music conceivable, the most desperate-yet-spoiled people imaginable, matching smiles, gladhanding, pretedetermined futures, pervasive marketing, just do what your parents did and take the life that was advertised to them, and don't ask too many questions, and no, I can't fit in here. I don't even try anymore. I won't go through the motions. Are you uncomfortable? So am I. Your discomfort will probably not last as long as mine. Maybe that's my problem. Maybe. Maybe. Then again...

Substance: Wolf Eyes - Human Animal, Final - Reading All the Right Signals Wrong, Rotten Sound - Cycles, Fushitsusha - The Caution Appears, Parlamentarisk Sodomi - De Anarkitiske An(n)aler, Santogold - Santogold, Official Secrets Act - Understanding Electricity

I Can See Through Time

All of you. I can see all of you. All of you with a future in the academy, I can see you. I can see you teaching first year political science courses and graduate seminars in anthropology, spending late nights in offices cluttered with unread papers and empty coffee cups, drunk and misty eyed at dinner parties, where you silently fume at how difficult it is to communicate with the majority of other people.

All of you with a future in business, I can see you. I can see you backslapping and clinking expensive scotches in exclusive clubs, spending early mornings in offices cluttered with valueless financial instruments and steaming cups of coffee, drunk and libidinous at office holiday parties, where you prey on young blood to recapture an elusive and lost sense of youth.

All of you with a future in the arts, I can see you. I can see you balancing the asceticism your means impose and the indulgence your will necessitates, spending long afternoons in quiet bedrooms with sleeping lovers and blank tablets, drunk and reckless at parties you've snuck into, where the vulgar tendencies of moneyed tastemakers frustrate and sardonically amuse you.

Just a sampling to be sure, but so many of you are tipping your hands to me. I can see straight through it, straight through time. I crave mystery.



Bedrock: Curse of the Golden Vampire - Mass Destruction, Techno Animal - Brotherhood of the Bomb, HEALTH - S/T, Wormrot - Abuse, Graf Orlock - Destination Time: Today, Weekend Nachos - Unforgivable, Dälek - Gutter Tactics, Discordance Axis - The Inalienable Dreamless, David Cross - I Drink For a Reason, Frederico Fellini - Satyricon

Lungs

I am back from Mexico City. All kind of bilious and yellowed mucous is frothing in my unhappy throat, and Montezuma has taken his revenge on me in spades. I started getting sick after I ate a hamburguesa at Burger King (I know, nothing else was open, OK?) called "El Furioso". Yeah, I know.

Maybe it wasn't the food that did it though? Maybe it was the thought of that meal after a day where I safely toured where The Other Half lives, amid dirt floors, stray animals, corrugated tin roofs and an absence of clean drinking water. Perversely, I laughed, both at my own decadence and self-loathing/self-pity. It didn't, and to a certain extent still doesn't, feel real.

Yeah, when it hits you, you will know. Until then...

Affinities: HEALTH - Get Color, Zola Jesus - The Spoils, Birdflesh - The Farmers Wrath, 3 Inches of Blood - Battlecry Under a Winter Sun, Young Widows - Old Wounds, The XX - XX, Wire - Pink Flag, Fever Ray - S/T, Final Fantasy - He Poos Clouds

Fin de siecle

9 hours ago I watched a man who had been teaching at this university since the early 70s give his last lecture ever before retiring. He finished his career with some Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at the close of day
Rage, rage against the dying of the light

And then he frantically urged us that if we didn't rage now, all would be lost for us in the future.

Jesus, man.

Motivation: caffeine, Drive Like Jehu - Yank Crime, Q and Not U - Different Damage, Sex Machineguns - Ignition, Squarepusher - Big Loada, The Tuss - Rushup Edge, The Smalls - S/T, and all the reading I've done on successful urban agriculture programs in Havana, which gives me some hope to rage against the drying of the light myself.

I have a phobia that someone's alway near...

It's all catching up to me now. There is no time for anything but study, caffeine, and grindcore, all day, every day (at least until December 14th). Two days ago this meant staying at the library until 3am grappling with a presentation on Marxist ecology (which went well, thank you very much), which meant that the trains had stopped running, which meant an hours walk home. As I turned off onto a darkened street I hadn't walked down before, a car pulled up behind me. Strange, I thought to myself. Why would pull over here? Nothing here but a chain-link fence, and me, alone, walking beside it, and virtually no lighting. Oh.

I pulled my headphones out (which at the time had Reign in Blood, conveniently enough, playing at top volume). I quickened my pace. I looked back and I saw the driver get out and pull something out of the back seat. Oh. I quickened my pace again, and kept looking over my shoulder. He was following me now. Oh.

Then I saw him cross the street. Perhaps he was going to the seniors centre to drop something off, I thought to myself. No sooner had this thought crossed my mind that he broke into an open run directly at me. I sort of sensed that one coming. Backpack full of library books (so much so, it was literally bursting at the seams) I ran as fast as my legs could carry me. I heard shouting over my shoulder - I'm still not sure if it was "where the fuck are you going" or "what the fuck are you doing", but I didn't want to stick around and find out.


Long story short, I smoked his sorry ass. Backpack full of books nonwithstanding, I could run way faster. I suggest that all would-be muggers of Calgary do mroe cardio, because self-preservation lends my legs more speed than greed or malice lends yours.

Support: Storm and Stress - S/T, Grizzly Bear - Veckatimist, Watchmaker - Erased From the Memory of Man, Darkthrone - The Cult is Alive, Kool Keith - Lost in Space, Fyodor Dosteovsky - The Grand Inquisitor and House of the Dead, Boredoms - Soul Discharge '99, David Harvey - Nature, Justice and the Geography of Distance, debates about the merits of academic inquiry, and the Vietnamese subs from the bake chef that have been a staple of my diet for about four years running.

I am the eggman...

I really liked the graffiti in Germany. It always meant something, it was always some sort of invective or witticism that stirred me, even if I only understood 18.2% of the scribblings proclaiming that "Grüner Kapitalismus is Schiesse" or advocacy "für Sozialrevolution jetzt!". Grafitti in Canada seems so boring. So uninspired. Until today.

Leaving the university I saw a tag that said CUNT in big huge letters. Juvenile, I thought to myself. Then I walked a closer and I could make out some script just over the offensive term that I could just barely make out. Walking closer, I could see that it said WALRUS. Someone wrote Walrus Cunt on the Math Sciences building and I still can't stop laughing at the thought of it. Dear lord.

Stuff, stuffed together: Talk Talk - Laughing Stock, Fuck the Facts - Stigmata High Five, Circle Jerks - Group Sex, Immortal - All Shall Fall, Darkthrone - A Blaze in the Northern Sky, John Bellamy Foster - Ecology Against Capitalism, the brown stock simmering in my kitchen