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i can’t add two books that i’m reading in one post…or at least i can’t figure out how (not that i tried very hard). so i posted two times today, a sin i promised myself i would never commit.

i’m reading Robert Coover‘s book for my last assignment in creative writing (i have to write a “personal essay” on it). he’s a well known metafiction author. the book is a bunch of short stories, and they are so erratic and different from one another that they don’t sound like they’re from the same author, or the same time period, or the same country. this caused me much stress (i started eating the pages after the fourth story, downing them with glasses of water. i have paper cuts running down my throat now.).

so i started reading Ender’s Game to give myself a break between stories. it has read pretty fast and it’s interesting. i don’t think Orson Scott Card writes about kids very well. funny, because the only two books i’ve read of his, this one (thought i’m not done) and Lost Boys (one of his attempts at horror), have lots of stuff about kids. they always seem older than they actually are. but the writing is always fun to read.

if you don’t read and found the above information uninteresting, you should read, and find the above information interesting. but don’t read more than fifty pages into a book without being interested in it. there are other books to read.

i ate bad mexican food on friday night. following this was vomitting and a day and a half of nausea. not that bad, i know…but still. it was annoying.

i just posted this picture with my story, a rocking chair from germany. i drew it as a rough sketch for a big art project my freshman year in college. maybe i’ll post that sometime. it was kind of a collage ad for my site (back when it was parlor42.com–don’t go there! someone evil owns it now and you’ll be bombarded with popups.). i just drew a few pictures from my stories and pasted it to a board. the background was my favorite: i took a bunch of my stories and condensed them all into one huge paragraph so there weren’t any paragraph breaks. i think there were about 10 pages total. then i pasted them to the board and then pasted my pictures on top of that.

the story of the rocking chair came from a true story. my parents have an old rocking chair that actually did come over with my ancestors from Germany. it’s probably about a hundred years old and has held up really well. there are only a few scars from me carving on it with a kitchen knife and such when i was younger. i broke my little toe on it once while i was running to get the phone.

xanga cut off the end of the title of Elf Power‘s cd that i’m listening to. it’s called Vainly Clutching at Phantom Limbs. i bought it not just because i wanted something from Elf Power, but also because the title was so freaking cool. the link that i have for that album gives it two out of five stars. idiots. it’s not a fantastic album but it’s not horrible. it’s their first record and it shows: they are immature at times. i think it was recorded on a four track so it sounds like it was made in someone’s house. i love those kinds of records.

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon.  Complete silence–their speech centers are destroyed–except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine.  White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air.  A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs.  His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

–Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

why, i ask, is this book not taught in high school???  if you’ve ever wanted to try heroin, morphine, etc., read this book and you will want to vomit and go into convulsions each time you think about injecting anything into yourself. 

it’s an incredible book, if you haven’t read it before.  a favorite of most readers is the section on the talking asshole.  i think it’s hilarious, but there are so many pieces in the book that are so great that i don’t think i could pick one as my favorite. 

you don’t just learn about the nightmare it is to be a junkie.  you also learn interesting facts, such as the phenomena of bang-utot.  as reported in the Saturday Evening Post in the article “The Men With Deadly Dreams,” by Nils P. Larsen M.D., december 3, 1955, people have been found lying dead in their beds.  they were perfectly healthy and had no signs of murder, etc.  they believe they had a nightmare that was so terrifying and real that it physically killed them.

also, did you know that jungle rats are subject to die if confronted suddenly with a hopeless situation?

During his first severe infection the boiling thermometer flashed a quicksilver bullet into the nurse’s brain and she fell dead with a mangled scream.

–Naked Lunch

i just typed and posted firecracker.  i wrote it at about 1:45 this morning.  i had been lying there trying to go to sleep when the story was going through my head.  i remembered i do this all the time (writing stories in my head right before i go to sleep) thinking i’ll remember it in the morning and write it down then.  of course, i never ever remember it, and then i’m angry.  so i got up and wrote it down in the faint light of my computer screen.

i believe it might be the first appearance of a pickaxe in a story of mine.  maybe not…i can’t remember all the stories i’ve written.  i will say that my weapon of choice in all my stories so far is a trumpet.

as for the music i’m listening to…

incidentally, the record i was listening to yesterday and the record i am listening to today both have band names beginning with Black, and they have a very sexy history.  on my last trip to Waterloo Records i was going to get The Black-Eyed Snakes‘ new cd.  (i got the first one a year ago or so at 33 Degrees (is it scary that i know where and when i got all of my cds?), because on the front it said “With Alan Sparhawk from Low.”  being a big fan of Low i bought the cd.  Low is slow, methodical music.  The Black-Eyed Snakes are hard blues; the music you’d get beaten up to during a drunken brawl in a seedy bar.  i was very, very surprised.) 

so i was combing the used cd section at Waterloo for The Black-Eyed Snakes’ newest cd when i found Black Twig Pickers‘ North Fork Flyer album.  it looked somewhat interesting, and i liked their name, so i listened to it.  they sound like they belong in the 20s or 30s playing and stomping old country blues on a porch as the sun goes down.  incidentally, i read that a lot of the songs were actually recorded outside on a porch.  i loved it, and i knew i would never remember their name, so i bought it.

and that is the long, sexy story of how i was looking for The Black-Eyed Snakes, and instead found Black Twig Pickers.

this, as the Meave family will tell you, is a picture of me, chris.  it came from the Austin Chronicle a while back.  i think the article was about a guy smuggling drugs from mexico…or maybe to…or in…or around…i don’t know.  something about pot and mexico.  he was smoking a joint while walking on the street and two guys, cops maybe, stopped and searched him.  i think they stole his weed and smoked it. and his pocket knife (stole it, not smoked it).

which brings us to the very fun Her Space Holiday and American Analog Set show.  HSH opened, but they should have been the headlining act.  it was Marc Bianchi with his then-girlfriend (wife? i don’t know. who cares) Keely.  they both kept chain smoking and drinking beer–there were about 10 half empty bottles of beer they both kept sucking on, and then toward the end Marc emptied them all out.  this explains his somewhat scratchy throat.  i bet he drinks diet coke too.  most of the music they played was prerecorded, like the drum beats.  but the light show was amazing.  it was in a small venue and i’ve never seen so many lights in such a small place. 

so anyway, HSH and pot.  i went there with my best friend, Juan, and his then-girlfriend, Bethany.  Bethany went to a private christian school, and i think that was her first time to hang out in a big city (Austin) with people like us (miscreants and a mexican).  as HSH started to play, a guy who was standing up in front next to us lit up a nice sized joint and was offering it around.  i didn’t notice until i smelled it.  i don’t think Bethany knew what it was, but i think Juan was trying to get her to breathe in deep, which probably just meant she was getting lungfuls of cigarette smoke.  if it affected her at all we’ll never know.  she didn’t talk to me for most of the night (hard when you’ve got a Meave’s tongue in your teeth, i would think).

after most small shows i go to, i ask someone from the band for a guitar pick before they’ve gotten off stage.  i went up and asked Marc for a pick as he was cleaning up (picking up the beer bottles).  he search his pockets and said, “man, guitar pick? i play the fucking computer.”  but he found one and gave it to me.  why do they always look at me funny when i ask them for a pick?

an old ticket from a 2002 Sonic Youth show. i keep all the tickets of the concerts and movies i go to and tape them in my journal.

anyway, the signature (i believe it’s supposed to be a face) is from Jim O’Rourke. don’t know who that is? he’s possibly the best record producer/mixer/engineer on earth. he’s done a few records himself, which are very surprising and not all that good. i mean…they sound great, but the music is just not at all what i usually like (which is saying something; i listen to a lot of different kinds of music). the amount of records this guy has worked on is incredible. he’s worked with Stereolab, Tortoise, Wilco, Smog, and helped produce the High Fidelity soundtrack.

when i got the autograph we had been waiting at the band’s bus for a while after the show. a drunk couple had come over next to us. the guy was leaning on a parking meter making up french sounding words and shouting them at us while the woman was pounding on the door to the bus screaming “thurston! i have to fix your apple!” but thurston wasn’t even on the bus yet.

“give me more content!”

okay.  if noconversation.com isn’t enough for you, i’ll also write a blog.

“not a blog!  more content!”

a blog it is.