4.23.2011

i am either an insomniac or an alcoholic. i may have become an alcoholic while unintentionally self-medicating myself in an attempt to stave off insomnia. all i know is that i do not sleep before six anymore. which now that i have thought about it is not that far off from how i always was.

i am eating so many beets these days that i am surprised when my urine is not purple and my poop is not purple.

saw lightning bolt again. so good. maybe my favorite working band. one of my good friends is a drummer and i ask him about brian chippendale’s drumming. he says something like “i can’t tell if he’s technically good or not because i just have no idea what he is doing. but it doesn’t matter because it is awesome.” he tells me that the drum setup is very low and close together for a man of that size and that many of the amps behind them on stage are false. it strikes me that lightning bolt plays this music lots of people wouldn’t call music but frames it in such a theatrical manner.

i bought a record player like a month ago and have developed a disgustingly expensive habit. i am pretty much operating on a one record a day average right now. they are costing me anywhere from 98 cents to 20 dollars. if my tax refund hadn’t come last week i would probably have spent myself out of a vacation by now. four more years!

having a record player has made music interesting to me again. it is simply too easy to obtain music on the internet. it just accumulates because i do not have the discipline to listen to it and then i am overtaken by the illusion that i have no new music, when in reality i have never heard half of the songs on my computer (which is now dead). anyway i bought a record player because i was sick of not being able to listen to music in my room. i am forced into an entirely new relationship with new music and this is very intriguing. i have only bought a few of my favorite ever albums on vinyl at this point. right now i’m doing a lot of “things i always had but never gave myself a chance to get into” phase. i listened to double nickels on the dime three times in the past two days and it might be one of my five favorite albums ever. i listened to meat puppets ii twice today and it might be one of my five favorite albums ever.

double nickels on the dime is so good. there is an audacity to putting 45 songs on an album which is just really exciting to me. there are songs about vietnam and cars and coming of age and all that. it is maybe the only album i consider to be “about everything” in the way my favorite giant books are.

meat puppets ii is really interesting. this is what i wrote while listening to it for the second time today. unedited:
punk rock’s outsider attitude that it kindof shares with country, a similar sense of boredom and desperation but in an entirely different landscape. a psychedelic landscape. this seems to be a bizarre and brilliant fusion of the three made all the more exciting by the fact that none of the associations i have made actually fit together all that well.
the landscapes with their apparent permanence and mismatched rhythms seem to know that the finished picture is only one possibility offered by the puzzle. the least as it were is the finished picture, taking up the least space and ultimately requiring the least ingenuity/creativity.
i am still very concerned with the idea of time. i asked a college student what she was going to do after she graduated in a few weeks and she said she didn’t know. i was just trying to make small talk but i still am baffled by the fact that i still think in this way. post collegiate ennui is not all that different from garden variety ennui/uncertainty. i know that a lot of people after college were not at all concerned with “what they’d be doing” whether they were hippies or people who knew what they wanted to do. it seems to me that the people who were asking themselves “what now” at age 21 will likely be asking themselves the same thing all the time for the rest of their lives–when they are 30 and in the fifth year of some ten year track toward something, when they are seventy, etc. we all reach for ‘life’ and ‘death’ in equal measure. i am still not sure why time concerns me so much. the things that do not exist seem to take up the most space in the mind.

[in the margins, side of page: THIS ALBUM RULES]

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