While waiting for life that sucks to die, why not listen to my favorite unsigned bands: TQ's Garage Band Playlist.

Tired of taking thousands of meme quizzes just to find out they didn't tell you anything about yourself?

If so, then take TQ's Quiz and find all the truth that you have been seeking.

Darkness falls pretty fast on Valentine's day. Yeah, some people chase mates and others chase greatness and regardless that everybody weeps over the stop-and-smell-the-flowers philosophy, we'll drive the big-ego-Cadillac into the brick-wall-of-gumption every time our-desire-to-dent-posterity hands us the keys. Fuck, run-on-sentences and emetic analogies -- all the while you could be reading Foreign Affairs (shame-shame). Well the thing with my sweetie just ended and it rouses so many emotions and questions. I finally got time to update my blog (like Subtext finally getting a place as a blog-within-my-blog -- yay!) and that feels good, but did I just kill my future 'cause I'll be missing out on a wonderful person? Stevie Nicks said, "Races are run/Some people win/Some people always have to lose" and it's a hell of a break-up song, but it's so not about winning and losing. Fuck, we all lost. We lost the minute someone invented the concepts of winning and losing and we doubly lost when the rest of us gave them merit... Regardless of where you are or who you are with tonight, drink some champagne for me -- and -- if you're a bachelor and you know it, clap your hands.

Jen is freaking out about the universe and all I can say is amen. The truth is I freak out hard every night about that very same universe. Terrorized! (Fucking exclamation point). Maybe it isn't the same universe, or maybe it is but with a time zone a few hours ahead. I don't know, perhaps it's my lack of quaaludes that is killing me... I had a great yoga class tonight -- A -- mazing. It's the only thing that makes me forget about that aforementioned perplexing and disturbing universe. Not a care in the world (truly). I guess that is what yoga is designed to do. I always think of the youngest Crumb brother when I do yoga. That guy had more than a bit of talent, probably more than his older brothers, but what-what? He only sits in his (San Francisco?) apartment swallowing gauze. The world we live in is just not worth it. Just say no. I'm -- we're? -- so walled in by a commerce and media monster that it's hard to remain sensitive to anything possessing import. Eighteen dead in Baghdad; four dead in Ohio. Who gives a shit about that stuff when Matrix 3 is coming out, or when you can drink all of the great Seattle Christmas beer? Why not name your newborn Trinity? Why not be banal and apathetic simultaneously? Here's some gospel according to Lewis H. Lapham (from "Reading the mail" Harper's November 2003):

Is the truth something that we are all getting around to? Fuck, I've even read the Cliff's to Moby Dick and played bass in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, so the truth can't be that hard. Then again, fear cuts through everything. If there is a Satan, it isn't hate, it's fear. And, god, isn't it hep to have no fear? Garret Keizer ripped a verbal orgasm on this subject in his folio, "World Enough and Time" (Harper's October 2003):

QED, or more appropriately, T(QED). I'm weird because I fear. I fear, therefore I'm weird. Ah, that Garret Keizer folio -- that's the one I keep saying I'm going to write about, and now I am writing about saying I am going to write about it, which is why you are reading this in the subtext section and not in a separate post. Ah Jen, fear comes full circle, as does everything else. Like I've said in this blog before, "life is just a bunch of ironic subtext," and "try it without a fucking editor, you know." What's beyond that, you know? Perhaps it's one too many King Crimson or Todd Rundgren or Frank Zappa concerts? The fruit of the farm starts at one of those concerts. Of course, Zappa is dead, but his spirit is more than carrying on in Project Object. And, oh my god, their concert last Saturday (2003-11-01) at Seattle's rainbow was Winchell's Donut ass kicking. They ripped through "Village of the Sun" and "Echidna's Arf (Of You)" and for a moment I forgot all about fear and universes.

The destiny of mankind is torture. Pirsig talked about those who like to talk about it (the destiny of mankind part). Pirsig exchanged his destiny exposé with a treatise on motorcycle repair (factual or not, 'cause isn't truth in intent?). And I stabby-stab at all that is Hesse, or all that is musical, or all that is torture, because music is my torture, but I'll play my guitar and I'll ride my skateboard unabashedly into the grave. There are no other choices for me. I'm fresh home from a gig. Suck or not, old or not, expression of music is where I need to be, in one form or another, with or without torture. The clock on the wall may say late, but it's earlier than the cruel, mesmerizing, lifelong hourglass. That thing starts to run empty and it really makes you think that you get to turn it over and start again. Ah, but only those damn kids below you in age have replay quarters and even for them the quarters will run thin. Yeah, faith in a god might give you multi-play-ball, but entropy gives you the drain. Fuck, this is barely subtext, but I do want to explain my blog absence. The absence is a sum of desert trips and new friendships and song writing and job frustration and football watching and connecting metaphysical dots in yoga classes. The sum does not include lack of desire. If that disappoints and you're looking for my excuse, well it lies in the fact that 99% of what gets written is pure pontification of hashes on what's already been written, recapitulated, and re-written. The remaining 1% is pure genius and if genius denies (as it does frequently, mercilessly, and recklessly), then why bare your soul to be coke in the fire that smelts the genius of others? Why not just sit home and drink -- burn a little nag champa?

The gas in my tank is nearly empty. Oh, it's all fine-and-clichéd-dandy, except it's a plane instead of an automobile and that's a little more disconcerting. No hurries, no worries. It's all rather boring busyness, especially in context of that problematic tombstone at the end of the road. Subsistence farming would double in popularity if we all (if I'm allowed to say y'all, I'm allowed to say we all) had to write, "I'm going to die someday" one hundred times on the chalkboard. In the least it would take the crap out of corporate.

The (boring) details: I'm trying to manage an office football pool, put together an Ultimate team, and get my damn (massively waylaid) software project released. In the moments between I'm trying to keep this blog rolling (it was just sitting there), keep my cats happy, and ensure that I'm booked every weekend between now and Halloween. I was born Space Cadet and all of this isn't helping.

I need to cut a few corners. This subtext idea of my blog is one of them. I need to hack a bit of Movable Type to get it to work the way I desire, but software-at-night isn't quite squeezing the Charmin (does ass wipe really need a homepage?) for me right now. So, for now, the subtext won't have archives.

Tssk, tssk, transition!

Here's a foreshadow: my project at work is called PCS. For me it stands for Peace Corps Soon. My San Diego friend wants me to interpret it as Pacific Coast South. Sometimes you jump in and hang on. Other times you jump out and wiz. I don't know. I move for the pain more than the pleasure. It's idiotic penchant for perspective.

It's been a Gram Parsons kind of day. Morphine and tequila. Coffin and body stealing. I have my bags packed for the Joshua Tree desert; I will see you there with the ghosts: Brother John and Brother Gram... My good friend has been disappointed with my latest posts. Me too. Try it without a fucking editor, you know?

Truthfully, bad posts are the least of my concerns. Somehow my ticket got punched for an invisible ride on a social ship. A ship full of hemorrhaging Steppenwolves, Jesus Freaks, Elephant Men, schizophrenics, and me. It'd all suck, but I keep thinking of Gram Parsons, the Citrus heir, the father suicide, the name change, the Harvard theology studies, the Harvard drop out, the Byrds dis, the crazy partying, the Emmylou Harris invite, and then the Joshua Tree National Monument. Jesus dude, it must have been a lonely night.

Tonight, from a permanently silenced musician, tonight I find strange comfort:

Gram Parsons. 1946 - 1973. Genius.