I need the shining to stop, I need my rest. The difficulty in these situations is making yourself vanish. It’s easy to stare down like a million, tiny points of light. Even for the skilled, it is increasingly hard to become that one, singular point of darkness, of nothing. But, you see, I find the darkness, the vanishing point to be where the real opportunity resides. Of course, it could be full of billboards, already. My hopes and dreams lying beyond sight and filthificated with commercialism — it’s the game I play.

Procured Ambre a setlist from Ben Folds with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Life is good.

Ben Folds occupied that piano shortly after I snuck this picture. That would be the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra behind the piano. It was pretty rad. (See also: Ambre got a setlist.)

We’ve been sending out messages in the major keys. I fear the airwaves will grow silent without us, or they’ll just fill with screams. From down here, we can feel every shift, every subtle movement, every shadow. The clowns have deprived us of the necessary grease paint, so we dare not travel in the daylight. If you hear our songs, respond in kind. You don’t have to take your clothes off… to have a good time… oh no…

…rural rodeo rectal ranger.

We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites have successfully convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that – a fantasy.

The mercury-vapor streetlights made the snow look like orange creamsicle shavings floating down from the heavens. I’d venture a taste, just in case, but they burn skin, so they’d probably burn in the innards, too. I’m tired of gelato…

I find myself dreaming a lot. I’ll walk into a room and find myself standing inside a series of Wittgenstein’s logic problems. I’ll turn around and she’s brushing her hair, telling me she’s gone. I’ll find myself flying on wings of harmony, in two-dimensions and three. I find that wrinkles in time become rhymes. Tone poems become snow and I’m covered over by it. I can never find my nice shoes when I go out to a fancy dinner. Good ol’ boys from LSU chase me down Sunset Boulevard then take me out to dinner in New Orleans before thrashing my skull-parts. The squirrels know martial arts and dress as ninjas, protecting me from the were-rabbits haunting the town.

Swimming seemed like a grand ole’ idea. How he convinced most of us that we needed the water to breathe, I may never know. How he convinced several others they needed the water directly on their grey, meaty inner-head bits, I can only guess. He was great at hide-and-seek and unmatched in badminton. Of course, it was very difficult to concentrate when he screamed shuttlecock in his strange, almost-British accent. He screamed a lot playing badminton.

New Jersey has secrets to tell us! So we hopped in the car and began what, by all future accounts, would be called a terminal case of vehement stupidity and sexual exploration. The newspaper would claim the trouble was noticed when we paused in Maryland to play Custar’s Last Stand with a class of preschoolers. That certainly was early in the troublemaking, but the real noticeable actions were there before if anyone had been smart enough to look.