New Song Lyrics

The bivouac smells like the hair of a dog
Take your bummer's cap and fill it with hog
There's a hospital rat called Jimmy the Weed
When the ball opens up he's nowhere to be seen

I've got forty dead men in a cartidge box
And the fresh fish behind me with their wollen socks
So go grab a root and get up your grit
Or leave the pop skull and boil your shirt

I was wallpapered when the orders came in
So I found a Sunday soldier and stood behind him
I peacocked about like a high-falutin wig
Poking somebody's darling with a twig

A baby-waker rang on our eastern flank
As the breastworks came down we loaded buck and ball
And a peaked pie eater took his pig sticker out
He found a butternut and stuck him in the mouth

It's all you can do
to be a man

Mercy Rings

I was recently visited by the three-ringed angel of death. Naturally, the succubus waited to strike until the first week of my newly activated Xbox Live account. I played out the stages of denial, donned a set of scrubs, wheeled in the operating table, and resuscitated the machine with the classic towel trick. I did this multiple times before finding the nerve to set the console into its cardboard coffin and send it into the river of repair.

Defeated and dejected, I lumbered into the living room and looked upon my dust-laden Xbox, with its twisted, umbilical controller cords, Robocop flak-jacket shell and darkened eye. I pulled it from the shelf, reattached its life-support cables and hit the power button not knowing which game, if any, was in the tray. Thus began my rekindled romance with Morrowind.

Elder Scrolls: Morrowind is the game that can claim the most hours of my life. So when the title screen flickered on and the music came crooning from the speakers, I was transported to a familiar place. The layout of Balmora came back to me like a drive through an old neighborhood. Even the controls were there- natural, instinctive, comfortable…

I had no interest in firing up an ancient save so I instead selected “New Game” and found myself on the prisoner ship, about to step out onto the shores of Seyda Neen once more. Unpacking my bags in Bethesda’s world has become second nature. After my custom character creation in the Census and Excise Office, I quickly stole the lime ware platter and droppped it before the guard could get to me. He dished out his usual reprimand before letting me off with a warning. I retook the platter and swapped it for a sword, smiling like the spy who’s always one step ahead.

After a few hours of game play I reached the decision, once and for all, that Morrowind has more to offer than its modern counterpart, Oblivion. The world is more nuanced, with a terrain that constantly challenges expectation. Oblivion is beautiful, but the lush green landscape becomes oppressing, if not inescapable. The caves, forts, outposts, Dwemer ruins, and cities have more variance in Morrowind. From the insect-shell city of Ald’ruhn to the Telvanni architecture of Tel Mora, and to the Imperial/Nord style housing in Caldera, the experience is rich with diversity. The volcanic Ashlands sprawl outward into the more habitable coasts, with alien shrubbery and airborne predators. Some places are downright desolate which instills an real desire to escape to brighter pastures for an occasional breath of air.

The transportation is creative as well. Some Vvardenfellian found a way to splice into the nervous system of giant insects called Silt Striders, and the drivers make ground by tinkering with its actual physiology, pulling exposed organs like a set of reigns. It was nice to have a horse in Oblivion, but I hope the sequel has more in the way of foreign species.

Another shining aspect of Morrowind is the option of joining a house faction. No one said it better than Hasphat Antabolis: “The great houses hate each other- theft, murder, assassinations, secret raids, standard stuff.” Depending on which house you join, you are given a unique insight into the various political intrigues of the land. Although these great houses come from ancient Dunmer tribes and it wouldn’t make sense to have them in Cyrodiil, Oblivion could have offered something in the way of politics. Morrowind has a much higher replay value due in large part to the endless quests offered by any one house.

So there I sat, latest victim to the red ring conspiracy, basking in the glory of a generation-old entry into the Elder Scrolls series. Take your time Microsoft- I have old friends to visit.

Top Ten Fighter Game Character

My brother asked me who my favorite fighting game character is and after a seconds thought I answered Bayman from Dead or Alive 3. He was the Russian special-ops freak who could snap every limb in alphabetical order. He was the patient counter-attacker's wet dream and he made us all wince with terrific agony. He could string together a brutal series of breaks that made the toughest opponent look like a ragged CPR doll. Who is your favourite?

The Waiting

This summer is a torpedo that failed to launch. It’s sitting half way out the barrel and the crew is in panic, knowing the damn thing could go off at any moment. I’m the dumb bastard who volunteered to poke it with a broomstick. Either it explodes and my outcome is sudden, or it dislodges and sinks like a sleepy tomb, saving the crew above. I wonder what the explosion is like ringside, to see the burst and the brightness. I’d rather catch it in the face than be the men on top who slowly drown as the ship goes down.

How do I define the destruction? It could be any of a number of things. Success, failure, confidence, confusion… a new self awareness, a new attitude, the ability to write or to fail at writing, the ability to love or to fail at love… It is only one thing when broken down: change. I am the torpedo, the crew, the ship, the ocean, and the creatures inside. I am the sunny storm that warms the water and the dark glacier that cools it at night. I am the silent poet, the fruitless killer, the chordless balladeer. I’ve heard someone say that the awkwardness of morning is better than the loneliness of night. I will push the torpedo to see if they were right.

I used to think that France was my destination, but now I know it was just a stop en route. I sat in the shiftless trains and depots and restaurants and became Parisian. I smoked Gaulioses, drank 1669, sang Montand, and slipped through the streets of Picasso. I traced Miller from New York to La Place de Clichy, I rang up tabs, told stories, gallivanted and danced the Carmagnole from Paris back to Minnesota and now I’m broke. My soul is a food stamp, my heart a pre-paid debit card. I spent all I had, so I push the torpedo for a new balance.

Since I’ve been back, the work has been tireless. I’ve sung to hundreds, gyrated my hips, stomped my feet, clapped my hands… I’ve put in extra time meeting and greeting and loathing and seething. I’ve wished farewell and welcomed anew. I am still thirsty. The people wanted Petty so I gave them Dylan. The people wanted Lessing so I gave them Rimbaud. Then someone noticed I was giving myself and now the sound of chirping lulls me to sleep in a fantastic boredom. I took away reference and watched the eyes of the audience saturate with bovine wonder. There’s no time for this man, they say. So I push the torpedo from more time...

Musing

The man who accumulates is inexorably inferior to the man who creates. We have totems of success in America that can only be appreciated by the cruel,
capricious, and diabolical. We have no placard for the imperfect man, no reward for truthfulness. Honesty has become a failing, a lack of couth, a sign
of poor upbringing. If everyone encountered satori out of wedlock, marriage might stand a chance. To look upon a loved one's shortcomings with satire is to
accept them. Anything else, the want of change, is solipsistic, self-serving, and unrealistic.

Rasan Rolenkirk

I’ve been thinking about a concert I heard on the radio a couple years back. Rasan Rolenkirk in Germany, 1972, blowing mad notes out of a brass instrument. It’s 36 years since the recording, two years since I heard it for the first time, but the memory of one note has remained with me ever since. The song came to me from the tin space of public radio on a hot summer evening, the kind of hot when leather becomes magnetic. I was sitting in my car somewhere in the heartland, festooned with a misery of some trivial sort. His song shuffled between three distinct themes until he broke the cycle with a lone, mangled note that dripped from his trumpet like a string of spit, thin at places, thick at others, wavering like a nervous mother up at night. He held the note like a foot on mankind's neck until I could nearly envision the legs of convention thrust and shake before falling limp. Strip the biology of life to a single prehistoric sludge and squeeze it through your fingers. You’ll find the same note there, shrieking like a child blowing on a blade of grass. We who can hear this note are mad. It follows us around every corner, it intrudes upon the rhythm of our lives, it stalks and distracts us. It can be heard hissing along with the whip of our often recalcitrant tongues. It is a general’s call to arms. It is why painters paint, writers write, singers sing...

I can see myself grown old, sitting at the end of a table, white beard, red cheeks, bellowing with mirth while recounting the sordid tales of youth, laughing at children prancing around the table, stuffing myself with bread and game, whiskey and wine, grabbing at the soft rears of women with flaxen hair and aquiline features… The scene is set so vividly that I can smell the cork on the table, the musty breath of well-fed friends, I can hear the pots being set into the sink, I can feel the warmth of a loved-ones lips upon my neck like a warm, softened tamarind. This image wilts if the story changes only slightly. I do not see myself sitting there a banker, a merchant, a line cook, or yoga instructor. If I seem distant, or avoiding, it is because of this image, and my need for it to be real. Sorry babe, but I have to write something tonight.

Part of the Introduction

The world is a bountiful oyster, the only problem is my lack of stomach for anything mollusk. But at least now, through my ageless perception, I have come to understand the origins of that cosmological sucking sound. It is my fellow man, slurping with fury, hoarding the shells, leaving not a scrap for the modern urchins and gamins, the artists and thinkers. These robotic philistines run full speed toward the line, their mouths agape and drooling, their bovine eyes drying in the wind, their sclerotic brains knocking around their skulls like an almond in a guitar...

The novel is being replaced. I am a blacksmith in the modern era, hammering out archaic tools and holding them to the light of this century like a fool waving a rotten piece of meat before his starving family, or the dehydrated idiot drinking from the sea. In a world this profound and lovely, America has no place for me.