the pavilion and the lonely smoker

As I leave the office and the dark haze that fills the space between my eyes and the light that I stare into day in and day out, I anticipate the brisk beauty of impending winter outside the tromb’e wall of glass to give the perception that you are outdoors when in fact you are most definitely not. I long for the outdoors on days like today. When the birds are scarce from the northern wind blowing them closer to the sun. When the slight breeze reminds you that you are just far enough from the sun to avoid the seed of cancer that it plants in your skin. When this same breeze meandering through the tree, masks the sea of cars and concrete that lie just outside of your sanctuary. Speaking of sanctuaries, well they are harder and harder to come by lately. A concrete bench, on a mezzanine level of a park that serves the city is my home away from home. A tree hangs above to give me the shade I need in the summer and, here on the verge of winter, it keeps me company. You don’t have to be an evergreen to survive here anymore. It’s as if I am again inside while outside. The modernists were all wrong. Do you know who else is wrong? Those who believe the following is what modernism was all about, bring the outside in. Sure we’ve mastered the elements but something about this is contradictory and led to the nonsense that became deconstructivism. Less is just an abstraction of an idea that shouldn’t exist in architecture. See, this nonsense fills my mind and distracts me from the important things. Back to where I was going. So just as I step outside to take a deep breath of the fresh air that never greets me at my desk, the plaza is filled with escapist attention spanning suicides filling my lungs with the opposite of air. As I proceed further from the façade the air clears for two steps and then I wait for the buses and vans to stop and I cross in front of them as I cough from their excrement. Smokers always grab the idea that they are outside because they are some sort of imbred environmentalists when this is the opposite of the case, except for the imbred part, that is of course right on. I approach my sanctuary and the inside of the pavilion, that my sanctuary flanks, is full of public radio contributors eating their curds and whey and so I take the long way around to my bench. The mirror image of my sanctuary, in the shade of one of the great architect’s building, is quite ruined because of the sheer height of the building and the angle of the sun in the winter. Atleast it steps back as it goes heaven-ward but this still doesn’t save this sanctuary in the winter, when the sun is an asset and depressed. As I progress around the block, most entrances are blocked by a bright yellow ribbon that says “caution”. I’m not sure if this is propaganda or not. Anyways, when I finally arrive at my sanctuary on the mezzanine level of the pavilion, I begin my escape from time and space into a book commenting on our fixation on the impending apocalypse looming on the horizon. Too bad this is the nature of existence. I guess this is the essence of existence but does this precede existence? Suddenly the air is thickened in the same manner as that outside of the illusion of my prison. Then I look up to the main level of the pavilion and the loner smokers of the group within the pavilion are dotting the side of the railing up and on the other side of myself. Wow, what will be your excuse today, everyone else is outside too. Needless to say I begin on my way, to seek sanctuary elsewhere because of these victims of the same blood that decided that land should become our greatest asset and one who decided a soul could be sold.

We look for the how to understand why. Who will wonder where we will walk?

My whole life is like a movie where you can predict the end but you won’t feel complete until it comes to pass.


"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience." -George Bernard Shaw

When I strip you of your function, your sleeping beauty unfolds...

This town I built
is burning down around me

This fortress forged in steel
Was mostly made of courage
Tiny guns a blazing
the bombs we built exploding
the tiny world we’re holding
With fear instilled and still I feel
The wounds of bloody Sunday

Our old dirt road is long
The trees the tracks we used to run to
The getaway, our great escape
We always took the long way
We found ourselves on Sunday
By Wednesday I forget
It’s easy til it’s Sunday

The heart I drew is shreaking across and then fading on the chalkboard
The star we blue is fading with the daylight on these old jeans

I wear this bright red shirt
You gave me on my birthday
So you won’t see I'm bleeding
You know you are my Sunday
I drink you on Monday
On Tuesday you visit
On Wednesday I wake
And starve until it’s Sunday

This story book
is drowning in the drama

I picked up that my pen
You put on a show
on all of life's stages
with red caped stories
the passion was contagious
our thoughts were dams busting wide
the river of consciousness now floods
we can finally swim to work if we go at all
in the bowels of our city we finally embrace

Dr. Jones where are you now

You told us her hair was flowing gently
Her eyes were heavy and yours were soggy burning
500 yard dance w/ at least 10 between you
she never existed yet she was there
she was the spirit inside you showing itself to us
the gap between the words
the silence between the sounds
the space that is this room
you’ve turned me upside down
red is good but heavy is better

Sense is for the weak

Sometimes I wish my heart would just ho ahead and explode…
Sometimes it hurts so bad that it becomes counter productive, the beating…I mean.
My blood is tired of traveling through the endless globular tunnels that are ever so slowly closing in on themselves. It’s always dark. It’s a little too warm unless it’s snowing outside and it never does. When you do see light it’s always eclipsed. That’s the last time I stay up all night to see one…an eclipse. They said the northern lights were to visit for a night or two. I should have just looked at the name and hit the pillow. And when that happens I wish I was dreaming but the fog that is the dream is a little bit clearer than my waking life. And then I’m not sure if I am here at all and feel lucky for it. Only that if I am then there is a fine line between me and the beginning. Everything else in not sense so let’s give it a go. Let’s execrate the words that are always there and liken the phrases to the air. Clenching the weary plastic heart and head that breathe together and the concept of together is important. So when it’s all said and done today make sure you are not alone. Please fear being alone, the deep fear that I have come to know. The opposite day as you make your way. Pull behind you a train, a long black iron coal burning train, so you will think you are alive and then realize that it killed you, and make sure you are wearing a smile before it happens, oh and a red shirt. It takes less muscles to do that. Obviously frowning is not for the lazy.

From then on…

I try to forget you but still you make yourself known too many times everyday and last night I dreamt that I saw you and I pulled my sometimes usual routine of saying hello and that was all. This customary resistance began eating me from the inside out until I my skin began to crawl with the flesh eating emotional sickness I was suffering from, so I subsequently gave in and dedicated myself to you for the night to avoid emotional death and to finally breathe again. I suddenly saw and heard nothing else but you. Everything was hectic around us, yet all was silent except for your soothing voice flowing insight with a perfect rhythm. You became a slow glowing warm and happy sunshine apparatus, lighting this otherwise dreadfully dark night and we were thus content. The dream world had a look that we together created. The smoke rising from the hands of the surrounding demons. The kitchen glowing with unnaturally white light and the energy of haste and escapism, but you glowed separately. You glowed steady and warm blue and I was enamored by your brilliance. The night and our movements proceeded to become exceedingly sporadic and we kept pursuing each other back and forth from place to thoughtful place. The most vivid moment came when we were in a kitchen connected to a living room in line with a hall leading to multiple bedrooms. It was a proportionally unrealistic linear house. We were at the edge of it because it was quite unfamiliar and we seemed afraid of being swallowed up by the foreboding that seemed to insidiously stalk within. All of a sudden a participant missing a face offered us a thimble of what he suggested was merely a type of "azucar". He hinted at the impending consequences of ingesting the sweetness, but you nevertheless and without hesitation glanced at me and then suddenly threw it back down your throat. I was then instantly full of deep fear and cold sweats and then the instant you tipped it back my fear manifested itself within you. You began turning an intoxicatingly purplish blue all over. Your primary veins first surfaced above the skin and then your arteries began pulsing and glowing with overly oxygenated bright red blood. This liquid life then became one in the same and sporadically flashed from blue and bulging to red and pulsating as you gasped for one last breath of air. After a minute that lasted a day, you couldn't withstand the agony anymore and fell to the floor, breathless. I didn't know what to do and I was overwhelmed with intense love and fear both intensifying the other. I scrambled for someone/ anyone to help. The only other being around this display of longing that would interact with us, despite the outlandish party around us, was no-face and he became your puppet master on the verge of life and death and I was imminently and endlessly separated from you, dimensionally speaking, or so I believed. Then, suddenly, we jumped to another time, perhaps our parallel/perpendicular universe that we’ve four dimensionally painted through the years of colorful abstraction, and we were reunited in extreme happiness and overwhelming love in an infinitely long van and we were driving to “now” and I slept ever so lightly on your lap. I was again in the womb and then in the backwardness of it all I realized I was loving only in a dream and I tried forever to wish it would never end and then I woke up ailing and once again slowly dying.

From then on…
I want only to exist as an idea. An idea inextricably linked to the brilliance of the idea of her and her alone.

10 minutes later I was 5 days ill

Well I haven't felt like writing much since the last album was finished up until last weekend. It might be because I took up painting recently. When I say recently I mean in the past 1.5 years on and off. My piano practice has ceased partly because of this expression and partly because I have run off two different downstairs neighbors since I inherited the piano. I'm back to writing music though and it feels like I haven't breathed in months. I finally took a breath of music and poetry last weekend and I feel again alive. Feeling alive sure can be fleeting though I guess there in lies the beauty. If you can’t tell yet, creation has become my religion. Why worship god when you can be him? Ok so I just wrote that because it scared me, but hey, my songs and my painting are my children, my creations and to me they live.
At lunch today I was alone reading the end of Demian and then I realized that reading holds time hostage assuming time is good in the first place. (side note- can a hostage be bad? I mean assuming bad is real) Then I laid down and began thinking what some would call poetry off the top of my head, relating my life to the outermost leaf of the tree above me and it became a whole story. It “grew” from the following outline…
1. The inevitable while still improbable possibility of existence (not to mention redundancy)
2. The certainty of your own uniqueness and distinctive strife
3. The realization of your impending likeness to the herd
4. The struggle to break from this without being anti-
5. The predestined march to the end
6. The beauty of this end and means to it
7. The dream of living on
8. The reality of dream
9. I’m mortality (now that is beauty, which is found in co-existing)
After playing this out, as I do most days, I finally decided to put an end to it all, at least for a while, and that is when I stopped time for about 10 minutes. The splendor of life is definitely the paradox of it all. To make sense of it all you must make no sense. That is the closest you will get to truth. This gives a hint to language and it whispers… you have been a leaf all of your life.

Thanks to a upbeat happy song

Cd release party today. Yes it is a farewell to winter and I see no shadows. Yeah.

Moving on, yesterday it was raining, freezing, and the cars on the freeway were in slow motion. The unbroken lines created by the cars trailed off into eternity, vanishing to their designated points, and to break them was punishable by death. The anonymity behind the faded clarity and pouring shards allowed for such cut throat behavior. The cold in their bones controlled the lot of them and to this I chalk up the rest. The oscillating sounds then entered my soul. Suddenly I noticed a blimp atop the public storage was trying to escape, bounding this way and that, wearing a slight smile from the extra weight he was bearing. The pessimistic flags were finally free while the birds were relaxing, waiting while their baths were filling. The sun had the day off and the sky was aloud to dress down. The moisture in the air was finally born after the gestation of the sun. The resulting finite litter showed me the world right side up and magnified it so I barely had to open my eyes. For these reasons my mind was at ease and the less thought the better. I could finally utter a smile because there was not a smile for miles. The whole entire world was blue but not me as is usual. Suddenly I was bright orange from a kind, pat on the head from the sun that lit my existential day.

New release 2-2-05

Well my solo album is coming out in a couple of weeks 2-2-05. This sounds great and all but it only matters in this imaginary world I've created called A-attack Records, now extending it's tentacles into this uninhabited world. The connotation of the name is quite disgusting and the traffic is even bleaker than the name, but the album turns its back on all of this. It takes pieces of the most precious people in my life and paints a perfect portrait of them all, creating this one being that is my friend, thus the significance of the number two. Let’s just call him Ernie. It’s something to hold onto when I sit in my room for hours slaving over 3-9 minutes of sounds to fill the void that was born when creating the previous song. Oh this vicious cycle that is creation when I should be out celebrating life. It’s just as dangerous as consumption I figure but I pride myself on the previous. Thanks everyone... and have an early listen here at the “secret” site. I’m not sure if that makes this all the more appealing or revolting, probably the latter. http://www.johnpaulgarland.com/gravity.htm

Jp