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Want you to lick my blood off your paws

Written by

wolf howl

Songs: Ohia – Lioness

Do you know how Eskimos take care of a wolf problem? I heard this in a sermon illustration in middle school.

What they do is dip a sword or machete of some sort into a bucket of blood. Then they let it freeze. Then they dip it again. They repeat this until a thick coat of blood builds up around the blade. Then, at night, they stick the sword, hilt-first, into the snow and go to sleep.

The wolf’ll come by and sniff blood and take a closer look. She’ll lick it. Then she’ll lick some more. Soon enough the wolf is essentially deep-throating this thing and, like a freezy, it numbs her mouth. She doesn’t feel it when it starts cutting. She can’t taste the difference between the sword blood and her own blood. Eventually, with tongue and throat sliced to ribbons, she bleeds out, a pool of red and bloodlust on the white white white snow.

I told my mother this story in the kitchen once. She stopped me. “Why would you tell me that?” she asked. She didn’t want to know.

I was furious. How could someone willingly blind herself to a truth about the world? Here was a fact (I heard it in a sermon; it’s probably apocryphal). I couldn’t comprehend not collecting as much information about the earth’s workings as possible, regardless of squeamishness.

My mother probably doesn’t remember this. It was years ago now. As I age, graceful as dry heaving, I think about it semi-frequently. I’m coming round to her side.

There are certain things about the world I’d just rather not know.

[The Lioness.]

Posted on May 19, 2013 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

Your heart is hard now

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Deerhunter – Sleepwalking

On Sunday afternoon I took a long nap in which I dreamed I was worried about my future. I couldn’t sleep later that night because I kept worrying about worrying about my future after I woke up. I’ve also been going through a few weeks of not really feeling things. Naturally, I went for a walk around my neighbourhood at 1am.

My discoveries from that walk:

  •   At least one inhabitant of this leafy suburb enjoys the sensations delivered by blueberry-flavoured condoms.
  •   A bunch of randomly blinking yellow traffic lights usually improves the look of a street late at night.
  •   The old man in the corner house near my street – otherwise known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s relative – loves watching Seinfeld reruns more than he cares about repairing his wall, five years after a car smashed into it. Fair enough, dude.

I came home after a while, mostly to sit on the step near my room so the dogs could lick my face. I still couldn’t sleep after that, though. Washed my face (I think) and went for another walk at around 3am.

Thoughts from that one:

  •   Walking is possibly an overrated way of helping you thinking about your problems, but a great way of helping you forget about them.
  •   There are definitely more cockroaches than humans in my neighbourhood.

[Monomania.]

Posted on May 14, 2013 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

Your look when you’re older

Written by

Thom Yorke

Atoms For Peace – Before Your Very Eyes…

Brrrringgg. Walter woke and slapped at his cell phone. The ringing continued. When, through the sleep in his blinking eyes, he managed to get his screen in focus, there was nothing on it. The ringing melted into buzzing. It was steady; there were no gaps like his ringtone. Walter put the phone down and dropped his head into the pillow. The tinnitus ringing continued.

It’d been 13 days now. Tinnitus woke him up and tinnitus hummed him through the day and tinnitus made him afraid to try to sleep at night. Someone had installed a vuvuzela in his eardrum. He compensated with a whirring box fan and some music (Pandora) from his cell phone at night. During the day, the buzzing threatened to swallow conversations and concentration.

Walter hadn’t subjected his ears to concerts. He listened to music — on the rare occasions when he turned it on — at an appropriate volume. He could count the times he had used in-ear headphones on three hands. Wikipedia claims 20 percent of 55 – 65-year-olds cite its symptoms. How did 47 years of careful, conservative living land him in the worse-off 20 percent?

At work, Madge babbled bubbly about some new protocol. A new shortcut key. All Walter could hear was ringing. He wanted to answer the phone. He wanted to click Stop. He wanted to stab a screwdriver in his ear and hear, even momentarily, silence. He wanted the doctor — appointment on Tuesday — to tell him this was temporary. He said, “Nice. Got it, Madge.”

[Amok.]

Posted on March 19, 2013 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

I don’t know about my dreams

Written by

Matthew Woodson

James Blake – The Wilhelm Scream

Walter often recited of the expression, “cut off your nose to spite your face.” But he didn’t spite his face; he spited his nose. It was long. It had a crook. The tip had stuck out of the water during his baptism 35 years ago. It still felt different – that last half an inch exposed to the whistle of the wind with the rest of him submerged. That last half an inch crawling with the bacteria of sin.

The power sander out in the garage called to him. He could make this all right. He could grind his way, half an inch, into heaven.

His nose wasn’t the only thing he thought about cutting. Sometimes Walter imagined lopping off his hands with a cleaver. Maybe he’d bleed out. Maybe he’d pass out but eventually heal, living the rest of his life with stumps to poke and prod at a keyboard with. Almost certainly he would be fired, left to starve to death, but probably unable to literally feed himself anyway.

Trying to picture picking up a chicken nugget annoyed him, so mostly he daydreamed about setting himself on fire. He would bring a red canister to the gas station and fill it with gasoline and he would pour that gasoline all over his body. The smell would sting his nose. The damp, dark spots on his clothes would spread. Then, he would use the fingers that he had decided not to chop off and strike a match. For a few moments, he would just let the match burn, staring at it. Eventually he’d hold it close to the fumes coming off his clothes and catch flame.

He knew from something he’d read that once your skin burned the heat wouldn’t hurt. Your muscles don’t have a mechanism for feeling that sort of pain. Walter figured he could last to that point, when his outside was charred. He had two qualms. One, without another fuel source, like the wood piled beneath witches, could the human body sustain a fire, or would it just peter out? Is muscle tissue flammable? Two, what exactly would kill him, if anything? All those witches died, so surely this is a viable means to death, but exactly how did they go? Did the flame eventually melt the lungs and prevent breathing? Did the heart stop functioning? Perhaps at a certain pain threshold the life switch disengaged?

Once it becomes a goal, extinguishing life can seem difficult. For example, a bullet through a brain sometimes doesn’t penetrate the right folds and the person can go right on living, just, you know, retarded probably. Failure at suicide seemed to Walter the most shameful possibility in the entire universe. So he kept clacking away at his keyboard with his fingers, inserting mortgage foreclosure data to scrape by some sort of living, too afraid to even attempt what he considered the only out. Every once in a while he rubbed the tip of his nose with the back side of his palm, sniffling slightly.

[James Blake. Matthew Woodson.]

Posted on March 13, 2013 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

I was riding, I was riding home

Written by

sparrow

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Push The Sky Away

I spent a month in Shanghai living on Sigh’s couch and trying to convince her roommates to play badminton with me. The Dutch one kept putting the accent on the last syllable (badminTON) and using it as a verb (badmintoning), which made me giggle. The American pretended to be interested (he had a racket and birdies), but then would suggest we go to his cycling class or whatever the fuck exercise group he joined. I didn’t seem able to convey that, no, I actually just really like badminton.

I eventually played with a Belgian girl who shaved half her head and worked in fashion, designing stylish baby clothes or something. I remember she was excited because she’d just sold a line to some Russians. She was awful at badmintoning, as she also called it, also to muted giggles. I get annoyed playing people too far below my skill level because I feel like a dick for winning but don’t want to insult them by blatantly not trying. In between sets she sat cross-legged on the blue court and drank from a water bottle.

This girl talked incessantly. In the two times we hung out, I said maybe 50 words, with her more than content to fill the hours with a repeating cycle of stories. Mostly she talked about guys hitting on her, sort of in a complaining tone since she had a fiance back in Belgium. But she led them on pretty severely, so she either was unaware of the signals she gave men, or — more likely — enjoyed the attention and then humble-bragging about it later.

Like I mentioned, we hung out twice. The other time I came over thinking we were going to play badminton, but she wanted to go to dinner first with some friends. She couldn’t find the key to one of her bikes (it ended up being in Sigh’s apartment, in the Dutch guy’s room), so I rode her bike and she sat on the rack behind me. In China, there’s a lane on the far edge of the road for bicycles and motorized scooters. I pedaled under streetlight-illuminated night for about half an hour. The lights in Shanghai are purple-hued and magical and surreal — they feel like watching a movie set in Shanghai, except you’re actually there. Two of her friends were moving back to Europe the next day, so no one had much interest in talking to me, let alone speaking in English. I pedaled back in the eerily beautiful Chinese lights, her voice trailing behind us into the darkness. She begged off badmintoning that night since she’d had too much to drink.

I took two things from this experience: 1. I can’t play badminton now without thinking of the bastard word badmintoning and giggling, and 2. the American roommate’s birdies. I stole them across the Pacific in my luggage.

[Push The Sky Away.]

Posted on March 5, 2013 - Tunes - 1 Comment » Share

You’ll never die

Written by

scorpion

Youth Lagoon – Dropla

Hi kids.

Today I’m going to tell you how scorpions mate, based on a lecture my dad came up with in 1989. I remember watching him type it up on our IBM computer, which had a black and white screen (blue and grey, really) and ran MS-DOS, which was, like, the coolest thing in 1989. The four-year-old me – much cuter, a tiny bit shorter – used to play “Jeopardy!” on it at every opportunity, which is why I turned out this way. Anyway, to scorpions.

“Scorpion mating is usually initiated by the male. When the female is receptive, the male grasps the pedipalps (sorta like scorpion hands) of the female with his, and together they walk backwards, forwards and side-to-side . . . there is no true copulation. Instead, the male discharges a sperm transfer capsule (spermatophore) from his genital orifice which he glues to the substrate. By parading, the male directs the female over the spermatophore which she picks up with her genital operculum.”

In other words: male scorpions are cheeky motherfuckers. Apparently, males sometimes inject the females with venom to pacify them so they don’t lose interest. Sometimes the baby mama can get her revenge by eating the son of a bitch, but Wikipedia says this happens infrequently.

[Wondrous Bughouse.]

Posted on March 4, 2013 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

Your childhood is over.

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Swans – Lunacy (ft. Alan Sparhawk & Mimi Parker)

There was a car crash on one of our nation’s highways two nights ago. A drunk police officer was responsible. Three people died: a mother and her two young daughters. Three others, injured. Media outlets printed a picture of the older daughter, prone on the road, wearing a mask of blood. The next day, there was a protest. There were clashes with the police. A racist journalist said the police should gun the (mostly black) protesters down and “plant cabbages” where they stood. Today, a famous musician got off ridiculously lightly for beating the shit out of a citizen a few years ago. In the global/national/whatever scheme of things, this isn’t really big news. But it isn’t not-news either. It’s just what happens here.

I wish this was fiction.

[The Seer.]

Posted on February 27, 2013 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

My unfounded theory

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My Bloody Valentine – Wonder 2 (mp3 removed)

Eating, shitting and sleeping. That’s what life essentially consists of, according to my dad sometimes. There’s a level of truth to this, reductive as it is, if you exclude things like doing drugs, talking about and wildly exaggerating drug stories with friends, travel, getting into relationships, sex, playing video games, The Internet, and enduring the manifold awkwardness that modernity confronts us with on a regular basis. Still, the three things mentioned at the top of the paragraph are different, because they retain meaning despite the fact that we do them all the time. P.S. This is 63% of why Louis C.K. is a transcendentally funny man.

Ever have a 5-second epiphany, while watching some professional sporting event – football in my case – about how utterly, completely absurd it is? Like, a bunch of humans running at insane speeds, physically jousting with each other, often violently, stretching themselves to the limits of their own strength . . . in order to kick a round piece of leather into a mesh netting. What? I mean, I love it, but I have no idea why. It is not an unhappy experience, though, simply a weird one – a gentle reminder from your own mind of how strange your existence is. There is something to be said for being disoriented (or disorientated, if you’re British).

The new My Bloody Valentine record is quite brilliant and you should buy it if it’s your kind of thing, but you didn’t really need me to tell you that, really, because almost all of the Very Serious Music Critics can tell you and have already told you that. I do, however, have a theory about this record, one for which there is no real evidence.

My theory is that each song on m b v represents – well, not “represents” but has some sort of strange relationship with – different types of sexual encounters. These include: sensual, lovely, romantic sex; contrived, camera-voyeurism sex; graduation sex; sweaty, tight, period sex; a type of sexual encounter which has not yet been experienced on this planet, but which, if it were to take place, would happen in the back of an airplane charged with unloading apocalyptic explosives upon humanity (“Wonder 2″).

According to this theory: The album took 22 years to be released because, well, Kevin Shields took his time accumulating the necessary experiences. Then he turned these things into sound.

[m b v.]

Posted on February 26, 2013 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

Make my sad songs sincere

Written by

puppy dog eyes

The Magnetic Fields – No One Will Ever Love You

I’m second choice with the dog even. Third, really. Rawles prefers either roommate over me.

If we’re alone in the apartment, he’s affectionate. He’ll burrow into my chest as I’m watching soccer, or prance around in excitement as I put on my shoes, or sleep in my bed, his chin resting on my stomach. But when someone else is around, the pecking order is clear.

Sometimes, when the humans are sitting on the couch watching Modern Family or something, I’ll call Rawles and pat my thighs. He’ll jump up, walk over my lap and snuggle with the roommate next to me.

For Valentine’s Day I bought myself 69 Love Songs.

The Magnetic Fields – (Crazy For You But) Not That Crazy

Because we live in the Western world and read from left to right, the steak knives on the left endure much heavier use. In the row of six along the bottom of the knife block in the kitchen, the far right one seldom leaves its slot. The two middle ones probably haven’t breathed fresh oxygen since we moved in three-quarters of a year ago.

The mug in the far right corner of the cupboard would probably leave a dust ring. The bottom small fork might have never tasted a human tongue.

Lately I’ve taken to remedying the imbalance. I shuffle the steak knives. I rotate the cups. I extract my silverware from the bottom. Everything deserves to be held on occasion.

I can’t tell if I’m OCD or just lonely.

[69 Love Songs.]

Posted on February 23, 2013 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

sensitive torso

Written by

Daniel Horowitz

Brian Eno – Becalmed

I need tea tree oil right now and tea tree oil is the only thing I need. No rest till tea tree oil. I gave away an almost-empty bottle to the people camping in my backyard to keep the mosquitoes away. We didn’t use to have mosquitoes. There’s a crater-sized ditch in our yard where we tried to dig a pool and never finished. Now the bottom’s choked with murky water and mosquitoes breed with fevered purpose. Did you know people who eat a lot of bananas attract more mosquitoes? I know that because for about a month I ate, like, a lot of bananas and mosquitoes went nuts for me, and then I stopped and so did the attention. Also, I read it somewhere.

Sometimes when I lie down I imagine the nerves in my fingers going out like burnt-out light bulbs one by one, and then my hands, and my arms and legs and feet too, gradually all my extraneous senses dropping out like a bad connection. Actually, truthfully I’ve only done that once or twice. I could probably sell it as a new form of meditation, but like, kind of unsettling meditation. That’s very 2013, I’d say. I don’t know where you’d stop, though, with the nerves dropping out. Like are you just a really sensitive torso, or do even your tastebuds fall away? If you get good at it you could stay like that for ages; unfeeling. You wouldn’t even notice the mosquitoes. Or maybe you would and you’d just let them bleed you dry.

I could tell you approximately how many mosquitoes it would take to drain a human body, one bite apiece. If that’s something you’d like to know. But first I think I’ll just lie here for a while. Think maybe I’ll start my own count.

[Another Green World.]

Posted on February 19, 2013 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

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