They Will Never Learn

Harry Patch (In Memory Of) – Radiohead, free download

Another song, and hopefully more later.

i am the only one that got through
the others died where ever they fell
it was an ambush
they came up from all sides
give your leaders each a gun and then let them fight it out themselves
i’ve seen devils coming up from the ground

In other news, last night I had a dream three girls at Reed tried to welcome me back from a winter in Berlin, and I pushed the fattest one out the window.  When she hit the cement, she burst into a million coins, after she yelled out that my dog is infinitely worse than her dog.  The other girls went running towards my fridge to steal some apricot beer and rip my drawings from the kitchen hallway walls.  The girl with bad hair went and stole all my Radiohead CDs, and the whitest girl tried to console me while stretching one hand out the window to pick up the coins from the cement (it was a very long, rubbery hand).

i’ve seen hell upon this earth
the next will be chemical but they will never learn

Words Don’t Count

New story underway.  I’m still negotiating how much I can steal from real life, and what I want characters to reveal about themselves.  Maybe describing a story isn’t as helpful as sharing the music that goes into it.  Life now is like a shallow tide swept away all my castles.  My past four years were supposed to be mine forever, but now they’re stoney markers of life long past, headstones of other people’s decisions, but not my own.  The people I love aren’t people, the lessons I learned impractical, the friends I made mostly a scattering of lonely socialites looking for ladders to climb and someone to tell their unfortunate secrets to.

I don’t have many secrets because I don’t have much of a sense of privacy.  I have statements that I abide by, or mantras, and they change.  Here are some.  You can’t hide from the truth, because the truth is all there is.  Words don’t count.  People do.  And the people are gone.  My life is starting over in land-locked Berlin.  When I’m lucky, and ready, I’ll turn around and send the right words to the right people.  I don’t have friends, I only have very good readers.  Dignity can’t be held hostage for the price of a plane ticket.  Berlin doesn’t extrodite most American criminals.  You don’t have to erase everything and everyone that hurt you, but you have little control over anyone else’s lives with the exception of your presence in those lives.  If you withhold your life from others they’ll often resent you.  Disappearing isn’t as complicated as you expect, and it’s often easier than dealing with transitions, or watching people forget and replace you.  However, once you’re gone it’s really hard to reappear, and you will regret it when your past is an empty path with very few people left to account for it.  The benefits of having a relatively empty past are the ability to focus relentlessly on the present.  That’s how writing can really help you, to record the past that otherwise might not exist.  And the few people that do remain, after you pulled a pretty swift disappearing act, those are people who you could switch lives with.  Those are your people.  They know your past.

1. Unexpected Delight feat. Laura Darlington – Flying Lotus
2. The Truth feat Roisin of Moloko and J-Live – Handsome Boy Modeling School
3. Oh Happy Day – Edwin Hawkins Singers
4. The Recipe – Locust Toybox
5. She Came Along – Sharam feat. Kid Cudi
6. Travelin’ Light – Billie Holiday
7. Testament (ft. Gonja Sufi) – Flying Lotus
8. You’re Everything – Bun B feat. Rick Ross, David Banner, and 8-Ball & MJG
9. Caravan – Blur
10. Das Erste Mal – Stereo Total
11. The Black Ghosts/Full Moon – DJ Trife
12. In This World – Moby

Hope the music does something for you.