(notch the case file)

My brain is the year that killed janis and jimi, jim and that curt kid who (they say) wrote my generation in the purple prose of pop songs amplifying beholden angst.

And i'm still not in the running.

A few years and and some inches ago, perhaps, but right now it looks like i might just live forever.

We'll see if i'm better for it.

(as islands)

My brain is a bomb in the gilded hand of a young punk set up to save the world in the face of creature comforts and the confounds of security most folks spend their whole desperate hours trying their best to fucking achieve.

But he could give a shit.

Sometimes the fires worth the sake of the glow and smell of smoke. there doesn't need to be a cause. a riot. a revolutionary tract pinned to the back of the man whose got no rise in this life but to bring us down to a nice innocuous size.

Sometimes it's just a pleasure to burn.

Long and hard and out of reach where no love can find you smoldering. where hope ceases to exist not for lack of trying but for a glaring lack of sympathy.

Where strange men stand proud and syssiphian, grinding against the rock alone without even so much as an inkling that there will be a moment when the crest is broken and they can stand as free as the day they first stole the warmth of heaven for all us naked shivering humanity.

And though i wouldn't dare say i have the courage to walk alongside them, i would like to think there's a part of me that understands a few shades better than i should.

I'd like to think that some part of their empty fight boils somewhere inside of me.

(nickel gripe)

My brain is the wash of sunday lust for something more in the lazy hours in between the routine baccanal and the tired retreading of the workaday world.

Just one fucking thing.

But these days are lazy as hell by nature. it's in their smell. in the blood of the dauntless hangovers marking those of us not christian enough to consider this a day of rest so much as a relative rehab clinic run by hairs of the dog and fried chicken dinners.

Grease and beer to mark my america, land of the free and home of the blase.

And cynics up against the fucking early morning shift.

(snip luck)

My brain is a fist in the neck of fool's progress.

(foraging homes)

My brain is a cheap stunt on the old line about forgiving the forgotten ones long left behind.

I am suddenly very mournful.

Dwelling in my life again and wondering when it was that gusto got me nothing but a bed and a door and this idiot box. how i grew tired. lazy. strange and lonely as hell for so much i just can't have (and perhaps, just shouldn't).

It's not the holidays. it's not my family. my friends (really). love (lively or unrequited).

It's just a gray i might have known. may still. will again that has me wishing this night could last a lifetime.

Because dawn, tonight, reminds me of falsehoods.

The kinds that make most men, but not me.

(blood shots)

My brains is a stain on unkept sheets.

4 hours again and counting...

(lightened eyes)

My brain is the shell-shocked home of those unfettered masses of humanity who still drink and breathe and thrive in the strange hollow annals of the rock and roll revelry for no fucking reason more than to remind us all that we are so fucking alive sometimes it should kill us where we stand (half-bowed and bruised for show).

In this burned sunday, i am in love with everything.

Even though there are spare hours left to sleep. even though i should be drunk. even though my life's taken such unexpected turns it's a wonder why i can still breathe in the torrid face of the lonely mornings i'm bound to see again.

And again.

And right now i don't give a damn just because there's no reason why i fucking should.

Why should i care to?

These hours are just too perfect to let go...

(high borne)

My brain is the stolen adage from dead homes and hopeless rhetoric that makes the hardest kids seem weird becas...GODDDAMN...sometimes it's just so impossible to imagine all that's wrong in this life when all you need to do is raise a toast and suddenly you're one and all with the beauty...

Some shams are all you need.

Sometimes the sorrows negate the pity.

Sometimes the cogs choke the machine.

Sometimes...

Sometimes...

The sips mark fortune.

(new meter)

My brain is the lost twist on the last dance to bring it back one more time if only we weren't so fucking blind and helpless to see six feet in front of me (before fucking anybody).

Right now i'm lost. stumbled well and pleased to be the r&r machine ready to sleep as long and fucking hard as anything...

DRUNK!

And who knows...who cares...because i don;t.

I'm just as pleased to be slurring and bloodshot and aching to be dreaming.

(in stills)

My brain is a back alley broadcast playing the suckers for a fit.

And i'm another...

Over and under the rain that's kept us sleeping all day. all night. for the first time since this city bore the name (it seems, again and again and again).

But what do i know?

My heart's not here today. i've just got my lungs and a gut.

What seems to matter is miles away. meeting. greeting. smiling that grin that's taken us all away at least once over drinks and drifts of fancy the likes of which it still astounds me i've ever seen.

Even with all this other fecund bullshit.

Old tire tracks and reason.

(open alms)

My brain is a fading history for the idiot kid and all his glory.

(rapt in glances)

My brain is a kiss lapsed along the old freakout of who we are and what the fuck we were doing way back when we first decided it was time to fall in line. arm in arm. hand in hand. hearts locked in artless symetry deciding just when and where we were supposed to be the hapless item of the year.

Lost in love and vice. the perfect rhythm of broken bodies hungry for something burning in those nights we spent drunk and fucking until dawn.

The trawling love song...

That could capture us emphatically. turn my hopes for you into poetry and your dreams of me...well...we still haven't seen those have we?

Because i'm half a punk at best. some haggard manifest between bukowski and alcoholism and the rest, as they say, is a story best told by and idiot at a creeping pace when (really) we'd suffice with a mexican howl and some cigarettes.

Smoked long and pleased because we ddin't come this far to give a shit what the other kids had to say about us kissing on the road to avenue a. it's our city, baby. our fucking home. our fucking life.

And if i were a better man i would have made everything all right.

(on a cheap burn)

My brain is the spit on the drunk boy's lips, singing the last dance for a revolution.

(gnawing the ice deposits)

My brain is a slow pair of puppy dog eyes plucked out of the back of my head in nothing short of a futile endeavor to warm the indignent squalls of my bed.

Today i almost gave up on crushes.

I don't know why.

I've been hurt (smash the violin and choke the chicken off with the strings) before, again and again. most times to my credit discredit. other times knowing full well just stepping into the first kiss that things would all end very badly. very fucking badly indeed.

And yet, through all these years i've persisted in the cheap innocence of the flutter my heart gives when the right woman walks in the room. says my name. grants me the time of day or a kiss in good company.

Today though, i wondered, if it was really all a fucking waste. not one as grandiose as my time here usually permits, but one i could simply do without. after all, crushes are always best left inchoate. soon forgotten. off the planes of adolescence only the arrested still tread despite the fast track to fucking thirty.

And right now i could do with real tangibility.

There's enough here nowadays to leave me ambiguous. to raise my pressure and ire in one flail swoop of failure. writing's odd. home's a shambles. job's a job's a job's a job. and sleep's proved so welcome to me lately it's a little fucking scary.

So why bother?

Why keep up the trend of the unrequited, unacknowledged, over-examined and otherwise interrupted life when all my friends are giving up the little death in the hopes of finding the one and keeping them pinned to the stripes of their sleeve for nothing short of goddamn eternity?

Wouldn't that keep me happy?

It seems to be working out there...

But as soon as the thought gave up it's last elipses (the kind that usually leave me drunk and listening to sad noise on the floor) it fleeted.

Who the fuck am i if not a half-drunk romantic still scribbling poetry on window panes for no one particular to read. blind. errant (HA!). and stolen as ever on the arc of familiar lips.

Yeah, it's a hell of a place to be most days. but sometimes. on these quiet nights when all i have is this machine's callow light. there's nowhere else i could ever be.

In the arms of fledgling dreams.

(unsung years in the barrel)

My brain is the tailspin of a rock and roll dream crashing through keepsakes night after night just trying to keep that old howl alive.

15 tracks. a day and a half. and almost enough whiskey to bind these reasons.

1. Hum - stars...a song found in a connecticut quarry in love and among friends. there's not a day it snows that doesn't sound that perfect riff in my ears. in my head. as good as forever.

2. The jesus lizard - puss...twelve years later and this song still makes me want to do indescribable things. evil jazz from lunatic texans transplanted to chicago. too bad she never made it out of the trunk.

3. Mercury rev - snorry mouth...there are times life still sounds like this, quite unexpectedly. and in those moments all is so perfectly right with the world.

4. Rocket from the crypt - sturdy wrists...the first record purchased by a fat white boy transplanted (by his own strange wishes) three thousand miles from his western lands. this band died on halloween in san diego and with them the loudest part of the dream.

5. Carrie nations - the end...this sound may be all i've ever asked of myself and may, one day, still achieve.

6. Screeching weasel - hey suburbia...if you don't still wish you were needlessly seventeen you might as well just lay down and die.

7. They might be giants - ana ng...one of the only tapes to survive a cross-country excursion for my mother and i was a battered tape of lincoln. it drove her crazy. it made my day and still does when no one's listening.

8. Lightning bolt - on fire...holy shit, these guys are good. see them at least once or know you've wasted your life.

9. Superchunk - on the mouth...the best goddamn love song ever written. loud. punk. and hopelessly devoted to the tumults of our unrequited time.

10. Faith no more - jizzlobber...angel dust was the first record i can ever remember hearing that changed fucking everything. this song, rumor has it, was written after three days locked in a closet and still scares the shit out of me.

11. Party of helicopters - slowdance...metallic wails from the heart of the wallflower i'm happy to have had the chance to be.

12. Def leppard - photograph...power chords will never die.

13. Archers of loaf - fabricoh...FUCKIN' A RIGHT!

14. Pavement - summer babe (winter version)...shitty beatles making sloppy racket for the smart kids (and us pissants in between). i still don't know what this song means and i don't care so long as i'm still smoking.

15. Pantera - fucking hostile...ask me about my rock and roll fantasy. then let's get drunk and fight as friends.

Rock it.