Good Music

Good music bleeds. Good music cries when it is sad, and it screams when it is angry. Good music goes beyond what the critics say. It stands tall and says “fuck you Rolling Stone. I kick ass despite you.” When the undertaker comes, a good piece of music will knock him on his ass. When the floods wash away mankind, a good piece of music will float atop the waves of washed-aways and swim before the survivors. Good music is strong and heartless while at the same time merciful and loving. Good music is a beaten dog that will not surrender to maim and mange. When the last pop tune flies off the shelf, good music collects dust in the back row, uncannily aware of its own magnificence. Music dies in the memory, and leaves a lasting imprint on the mind; good music, that is. And all this, is to say nothing of great music.
Great music is a massacre to the temporal lobe, pinching every nerve and bursting every blood vessel. Great music inspired the rise of Sitting Bull and begat the fall of Rome. Only the greatest drums served to win the harshest battles, and only the strongest horns helped to wake the most calloused soldiers. Great music suffocates when you hear it, and from sea to shining fucking sea, great music will venerate the plow and manifest itself within the mind of the homesteader and the Gold miner alike until every god-forsaken soul has the spirit within him to do whatever god-forsaken task his mind is set out to complete. Great music is a sinner in the hands of an angry god. It defies nature, right and wrong, left and right, up and down, life and death, choice and fate, depression and ecstacy, drugs and sobriety, heirarchy and democracy, killers and doctors, lawyers and saints. Great music is a cancer to mankind which we do not rid ourselves of because the pain hurts so fucking good.
Great music is the orgasm that sex can never acheive, and it is the experience that life can never physically quantify.

In Love with a Voice

          Have you ever fallen in love with a voice? Something low, loving and longing? I have. I wonder what the voice sounds like when I can’t hear, or what it would sound like if she spoke to me, as I have never spoken with her. I hear her soft, heavy tones on a regular basis, and I’ve never replied. She sings songs; sometimes I sing with her. I want to every time, but sometimes I know it is best to listen.
               I lie on the floor and let her notes breeze past me. I wonder what she sounds like in the morning. Would those vibrations hit my ear in the same, perfect, way? When the highs rang out, would I still shiver? When the lows hummed, would I still be frozen? I imagine myself closing my eyes, rolling over the bed and allowing our lips to gently touch. She would still be singing, speaking, breathing. Her sounds would tickle my lips, and I would quiver in ecstacy. I would be drawn closer, she would speak quieter until her words were more physical than audible. This is my quiet quiet love of her soft resonance; this is my desperation for her…viberations.

Live

School will come and go.
It is the lovers turned friends
and friends turned lovers
that will be remembered.

It is the hard times
and the hands held
and the cards dealt
and the money lost.

It is the tragedy
and the comedy
and the fate
and the future

Overall, it is the experiences
and the inexperience
and the experimentation
and the excrement that is thrown at us.

Life is the loud noises
and the sad silences
and the biting kisses
from people you do not sympathize with.

Life is the death of our own mental slavery
life is the enslavement of the beast of time.
Life works for those who work it.
Work lives for those who know not how to live.

Still,

Work hard,
Live long,
Kiss gently,
die strong.

Caress the back of the unknown lover
Hold tight the shoulders of a wary friend.
Kiss the lips of the life-long light-hearted.
Perhaps, your own heart will be lightened.

Climb a tree.
Or a rock.
Spill your blood
while the people around you applaud in amazement.
For your show is theirs.

Fight wars overseas,
or under sheets.
Scratch the former,
anticipate the latter.

Deny the rules.
Defy the rules.
Satisfy the soul
by drinking deep the natural liquor of life
to obtain a drunkard’s enlightened stupor.

Above all, live every day
expecting, and willing,
to give your last breath of life,
in the same world of wonder as you gave your first.

Drive

She loved the sound of Cobain’s voice. I adored the sounds of hers. And we both loved the taste of a long drawn cigarette in a short lived moment. Our lives weren’t long at the time, and they seemed to be getting shorter. We enjoyed the precious little pleasures while debating the world’s preposterous pressures. All the while she kept sneaking glances at my button down shirt; the one with brown and gray dampened stripes that seemed to fade into the musky gray background, reminding me of Rocky Road Ice Cream.
“It’s an interesting shirt.”
“I found it in a box on the side of the road in New Orleans.”
She laughed. I laughed. We stole another precious moment, seizing the opportunity to sacrifice another five minutes of our lives for the stress relief that the cigarette companies guaranteed. They weren’t liars. They were right. I was going to die. Happily. She smoked slims, I smoked 100’s; a Virginia girl and a Marlboro man, face to face in an L.A. delicatessen. Well, an L.A. Starbucks with a view. The fresh brewed coffee played off the smoke, and gave life to the room; the sort of life that you would assume permanently encapsulated the life of James Dean, until, well, he drove his Porsche off the road after doing a driving safety video. Either way, we lived like nu veau Deans, and we dreamed of crashing our Porsches in order to go out in just such a blaze of glory. Unfortunately, we would have to settle for something much less expensive. Tangent. Back to my shirt.
She had seen one like it before. I had worn it before. I asked her where she’d been, and told her where I’d been. We’d both never been. I had lied about New Orleans to make the conversation more interesting. The silence wasn’t awkward. It was long, dreamy, hopeful and sad. It was a silence that screamed “get me the fuck out of LA!” and it was a pause the sparked a spurrious conclusion.
She put out her cigarette in the tastefull Starbucks tray next to the three cigarettes that already had occupied it, and, grabbing my hand, we stood up.
“Let’s get the fuck out of LA.” she said. And we began our planning. First, she wanted to make on honest man out of me, so we picked up a map in a gas station, and hit the road for New Orleans.
She drove, and I rode bitch. Twenty and licenseless. In order to pass the time, I continued the conversation about my shirt: where I got it, why I liked it, how much it cost, and my consideration for buying another just like it.
“If you say one more thing about that god damn shirt you’re riding in the engine compartment.”
I did not say one more thing about my god damned shirt, and the ride proved to be much more pleasant. As we drove, we smoked. As we smoked, we died. As we thought about death, we really needed another cigarette. The topic of conversation soon rolled around to expenses. I had twelve bucks and a deck of playing cards. She was brutally attractive and on good terms with her father. We weren’t going to have to worry.
In love, lust, or luck we left our homes and lives with nothing but a fake story of a scholarship opportunity and a cooler full of capri-suns, in hopes of going someplace just for the sake of saying we’d been some place. A few hundred miles ahead and a long trail of ash behind, life was good. It may have been short, but for the next week, it would feel oh so long.

Her name was either Jennifer or Jane. His was something along the lines Daniel. Jane was a beautiful ray with porcelain complexion and long locks eschewing any possibility of negativity in her world. Brushing up against her lips would feel like moist rose pedals, and her eyes, when she was sad, would sink down inside and darken to the more aggressive shades of green. When she was happy, they would light up without having changed that hypnotic color, and they would beam through everything around her. She was long, luxurious, and lovely, even with a cigarette hanging daintily from her lower lip. The smoke from the stick was as sensual as sin, and the bitter fragrance only made her more exotic; more uncontrollably desirable. The light tremble of her fingers taking the cigarette as she relaxed between drags was like the ecstatic shiver that runs down every man’s spine when the woman they want gently brushes against their shoulder. She was preposterously pretty and cordially canonical; like candy and coffee to the brain and soul.
Daniel was pudgy and shaved once a week. The two of them had wonderful conversations about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (sex). They also spoke about morality (it’s not fair unless you go down on her too.) And popularity (size does matter).
The day waned into night and the line on the highway in Jane or Jennifer’s pretty blue eyes got longer and longer; blurrier and blurrier. They had money but none to spare, so they pulled off to the side of the road. Aquafina, Cheetos, and cigarettes maintained their voracious appetites. They side on the hood of her navy blue Volvo, and took a look around. They hadn’t given much thought to where they were going. It was about ten P.M., and they’d been driving for a good four hours. A look around revealed an enormous fucking parking lot.
“Where are we?” Inquired Daniel, who had never seen such an enormous fucking parking lot. Jennifer – possibly Jane – took out her palm pilot and checked the on board GPS.
“Quartzsite, Arizona.”
Daniel puffed thoughtfully. “What’s there to see in Quartzsite, Arizona?”
“The world’s largest parking lot.”
“I’d kind of like to see that.”
“There it is.”
“That’s an enormous fucking parking lot.”
In light of recent observation, they decided to spend their peaceful November night parked in the lot, which had a ten dollar fee. When they woke in the morning, they found the enormous fucking parking lot transformed into an enormous fucking flee market. And as Daniel wiped the sand from his eyes, he wept a little bit, for this was the stuff of dreams. The bargains, the buyers, the sellers, the traders. Music and Churro wafted through the air, and his stomach rumbled. Jane-ifer concluded that, since they were going to be their for a while, they may as well stock up on some needed supplies.
Walking through the rows upon rows upon rows upon rows upon rows…
Upon rows upon rows, they managed great bargains on a glowing plastic rosary and a box of old records that someone’s ex-husband probably wanted back desperately. With the necessities out of the way, they proceeded to pick up the eccentricities of water and food, and a bottle of tylenol, which they were assured was not tylenol, thus guaranteeing that it was tylenol and not anything good. November is cold in Arizona, but that doesn’t matter to the Arizona sun. It burns in cold or heat, and the ground is quick to reflect. They got back to a sweltering leather interior car, and found that the engine was too cold to start. The perplexing paradoxy did nothing but delay their exit.
They smoked and they drank, and they heckled passers-by. Another hour found them drunk, haggard, and forced to spend another night in the enormous fucking parking lot. Fortunately, Arizona sunsets were beautiful. Like LA, the smog settled into the basins and made for spectacular color gradients and dazzling shimmers and shines. Their was no sea salt to accent the night with a cool and fresh scent, but the sky was larger and the people were quieter. The parking lot cleared late in the day and they hit the road with a sense of a fresh start and a real sense of detachment. Pointless as say “I slept in America’s largest parking lot” may be, it was still something that could not be said for many. The rules of sights and roads were skewed from that moment on. Completely free to see all that was around them, the two wanderers saw all that was around them.
Daniel was sullenly quiet as the road passed by. A night on an Arizona highway was different. Hughes of red painted the rhe rock walls that jettisoned from the ground. Cactus abounded; the real kind that you buy at Lowe’s or Green Thumb Nursery. They were hideous in their natural habitat, but when you thought about them, all that came to mind was how each time the cactus branched represented another hundred year. Damn near every cactus they saw was older than Daniel and Jane combined. He would die before they would, but they would stay in their place, storing water only to be raped of it by cruel birds and desert moochers. Daniel gathered as he grazed, and he left not a crumb at his way-side.
He mentioned to Jane as his thoughts drifted, “ People don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what?” she asked.
Half speaking to himself, Daniel continued, “They don’t drop their lives off at Starbucks and hit the road.”
“Well maybe they’re all wrong.”
That seemed to be the most plausible explanation. The world was wrong, and they were right to roam and not contribute; to treasure the things crafted by those without the privilege to enjoy their own creations.
“Don’t you think it’s selfish to take advantage of a world that we haven’t contributed a single thought to?”
Jane or Jennifer had never thought of it that way. Her Dad worked hard so that she wouldn’t have to. She would go to school and see the world the way Kerouak and Whitman saw it. She loved and adored the world she saw, and wish that everyone could, but her tragedy was her lack of solution, or the where-with-all to contrive one.
“Fuck ‘em.” She said. And they fucked ‘em and kept driving.