The Plan

Ok, so I have a plan. I think it will work. Because I know there there is goddamn NOTHING as bad as being unemployed and not having a plan and just staring at the TV or internet to read the depressing trivialities of celebrity gossipy while the bills accumulate, hang over your head, and you put everything off until tomorrow, and you are afraid to answer the door.

There are no jobs in Denver. No one is hiring. I applied to be an industrial window cleaner today and had a referral from someone who worked there and I'm waitlisted for 2 weeks and it sounds dubious. At the lodo restaurant I applied to there were 10 of us waiting there by the time they told us to go home because the manager couldn't interview so many people that day. So I'm going to the ski towns to try and scrounge work around the hotels. I think that will work. And if it doesn't, I'll try another city. There are some nice things about Denver and the front range but I'm not dating anyone, there are no jobs, the music scene is large but shallow and doesn't pay, and the state of political activism is about as lively as my bank account.

First, I don't have enough change left after digging through my seats to pay gas to get anywhere. And I can't pay the $25 parking ticket that will soon double if I don't pay it or the bills. So I am selling the Waldorf Microwave 1. I love this synth. Wavetable scanning with analog filters. Makes me hot. But analog filters don't pay the bills. There's an add for it on the Denver Craigslist. On the very remote chance that any of you are interested just make me an offer.

Then I will fill the car with warm clothes and the camping & outdoor kitchen & survival stuff, nice work clothes, resumes, and food. And find something. Housing arrangements will work out however they will. I'm not too concerned with that. It may be arduous to spend a winter in the Colorado mountains. But I know that no environment is worse than the prison of an unemployed individual's apartment. Intimately. I know. So I will at least have beautiful sunsets, sunrises, and scenery.

For free time I will engage in outdoor activities, and the rest of the time I will hang out in coffee shops drinking good coffee and reading and writing my stories of the Colorado Trail and Hard Living in the West, as well as political propaganda. I will consistently submit my written work to various outlets in an attempt to become a more established writer person. That's the most realistic option I can think of. I think it will work. And if it doesn't there are at least 4 other states out here I'd be interested in living and working in.

The dustbowl refugee had a coal car and a hobo jungle. I have a Subaru and a nice 4 season tent from REI. My path will be arduous at times. But I can't stay here. And the revolution is taking too long. So I have to do something.

The struggle continues.

They Hate Our Freedoms

Police being... generally dickish... messing with students and clearing them out of the city, so as the rich and powerful and discuss their failed economy without the distracting nuisances of, well... the voices and the signs of the assembled pleebs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etv8YEqaWgA




“Americans are asking, 'Why do they hate us?' They hate what we see right here in this chamber: a democratically-elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

-President George W. Bush, during an address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American people, United States Capitol, Washington, DC, September 20, 2001

The Frat Boy Foreign Legion

Article: Animal House in Afghanistan

(http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/09/animal-house-afghanistan)


Letsee... dumb people doing dumb stuff that's covered up by dumb corporate managers and dumb politicians in a dumb war that our dumb president is escalating while the dumb electorate sits on its ass reading facebook. Yeah... Makes perfect sense to me. There was never anything honorable about fighting for imperialism. This just shows you how bad things have decayed... the frat boy foreign legion... that's who they can find to do this crap.

We are a nation of god damn chloroformed, sterilized sheep to be putting up with this.

I am not spending another winter

Looking at want ads, doing gigs type jobs here and there that pay slightly but leave me unstable and nervous, not leaving the apartment cause it costs money to step outside, and going to a depressing dark club once a week to drink cheap terrible beer. I'm also not working for another Denver employer like the past FOUR Denver employers I've had who all lied to me about money and hours... where they hadn't outright stolen my tips.

Today I applied at the one restaurant that posted an ad for servers on craigslist. There was a dozen of us there, sitting at the bar, not even being offered a glass of water by the ice-queen bartendress, and 10 of us left not even speaking to the manager because he did not have time to interview so many people. I'm giving Denver like another week, max, for jobs. After that, there's nothing really tying me here. I'm selling the waldorf, loading up the car, and heading to the ski towns in search of work. If that doesn't work, it will be another state. Probably New Mexico, Arizona, Utah or Nevada. But if I'm going to be broke I'm going to be broke somewhere with a better view than there is available outside of this apartment.

New Album - Ghosts - Online, + Entire BE Back Catalog

It has been one month short of a year when the last of my tracks was completed... then one postponement and hang up after another... finally... after 17 months...

Mastered and all with some nice contributions (tracks 1,9, & 12) by Dan from Worms of the Earth, you can listen for yourselves + free DL:

http://www.archive.org/details/Savage_Ideal_Ghosts_Dance_Lightly_On_The_Puncheon_Floor


Like a lot of people from the South I caught that bug where you get obsessed with the history and keep reading about it and visiting it... naturally I was drawn to the darker / political aspects... which is pretty much all of it. I filled up an entire folder of notes and had written 25 pages without a thesis by the time I realized that every question I had already had a book written about it by someone else that pretty much told me what it was I was trying to figure out. So rather than refighting some old beaten to death literary question of the past, I made a musical tribute to that... region.

The basis was a lot of samples / field recs I did in the old mines and rail yards and natural settings of the mountainous areas... some friends also helped me do more recs in an industrial park in Atlanta and in New Orleans. Then there was guitar and moog... with filler sounds here and there.

A lot of the poems I wrote in the past year dealt in a similar vein... I posted some around here you may have seen.

Also, I just got done re-designing the Buried Electric site at http://www.noisenobodys.com. That's the monkier I came up with in 2003 for self releases. Now we're on release 008, with 009 just hung up for mastering. So the whole catalog is pretty well organized there now which it hadn't been in the past. 003 is PRETTY ROUGH production wise (has some B sides though)... but that was probably inevitable. Everything else I'm pretty darn proud of though.

A City That Prides Itself on Forgetting its Past.... Revists one

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-alvear/stonewall-2009-police-rai_b_286649.html

http://www.sovo.com/thelatest/thelatest.cfm?blog_id=27160

http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/atlanta-police-raid-gay-136646.html

http://www.projectqatlanta.com/news_articles/view/rain_or_shine_the_eagle_rallies_continue/


How could something like this happen in Martin Luther King's home town?

The following occurred about a mile away from my home in Atlanta, Georgia at 11:30 p.m. on Thursday, September 10, 2009.

Mark Danack was watching the football game at his favorite bar, The Eagle, when he heard somebody yell, "HIT THE GROUND!" He thought a fight had broken out. The lights switched on and up to 30 cops were yelling, screaming and ordering everyone to the ground. The police had raided the bar.

For what?

"Shut the f**k up!" a cop yelled at one of the bar patrons who asked why they were being forced to lay face down on the grubby floors.

An acquaintance saw the police shove an 80 year-old man to the ground because he was moving too slowly.

Why?

"No questions! Do what you're told or we'll arrest you!" The officers threatened jail time to anybody asking why they were being held against their will.

The search and seizures began. Everything in everyone's pockets was taken away.

Why?

"None of your G-D business! Get back on the floor and shut the hell up!" Driver's licenses were taken and put through a laptop screening.

What are you looking for?

"I said SHUT THE F**K UP!" Three paddy wagons were waiting outside.

Nick Koperski was enraged. He knew he had done nothing wrong. Yet there he was, lying on the floor, face down, his pockets emptied. He had it better than some of the others, like Du-wan Ray, one of the bar's managers. Ray was handcuffed on the back deck.

Why are you doing this?

"I hate queers," a cop said. Other officers -- some plain-clothed, some uniformed -- walked around the bar demanding to know who was in the military, threatening to report them to their commanding officers.

"This is a lot more fun than raiding niggers with crack!" Du-Wayne Ray heard one white officer say this to another; other cops were high-fiving each other.

For almost two hours, Mark Danack, Nick Koperski, and sixty other gay men were forced to lay face down on the bar's filthy floors. The drivers license screening revealed nothing.

Sixty two men and the cops didn't find a suspended license, a criminal prior, nothing. Not even a parking ticket.

The search and seizure uncovered nothing. No drugs. Not even a joint.

Finally, the men were ordered to leave but without their cell phones, wallets and other personal belongings.

Not a single man was arrested.

Or given an apology.

Or given a reason for why they were held against their will.

Or how they could get their personal possessions back.
Welcome to Amerika.
Facts and quotes were sourced from my acquaintances who were victimized by the police as well as the city's gay paper, Southern Voice, its mainstream paper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, its unofficial gay portal, Project Q Atlanta, its progressive paper, Atlanta Progressive News, its alternative paper, Creative Loafing, its PBS station, WABE-fm as well as the four local TV stations: ABC-affiliate WSB News, CBS Affiliate, WGNX News, NBC affiliate WXIA News and FOX affiliate WAGA News. The photo above used for illustration purposes only.
ANALYSIS: Anatomy of a Southern Sex Panic.

Postscript:
Eight staff members were arrested and put in jail without bond. The charge: Dancing in their underwear without a permit. If it were not for the intervention of two Atlanta City Council candidates who contacted a judge who then set bail, the men would have spent the weekend in jail.
The lawyer retained to defend the bar made this public statement:

"The situation is such that they [police] were coming in for the least serious ordinance violation of all time -- dancing around in their underwear.

Usually such violations will lead to simple citations to employees of an establishment. But the fact police searched all the customers is a direct violation of constitutional rights.

They had no right to search them, look in their pockets for drugs or detain them. At this stage it seems to me what occurred was a serious constitutional violation to everyone in the place."



Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-alvear/stonewall-2009-police-rai_b_286649.html

The Guilty Hearts

Unbeatable Wall- Street
Left society panic-stricken
And destined to disintegrate.

The widespread human depression
Took forcible possession of many
Who were broke, and dead.

My son is now a lunatic,
In confederate expression
He acts out on a radical path

Fully awake, and notoriously bloody.

A Patriot ambuscade of the scalp- hunters
Cruelly attack the guilty hearts
And politics.

The great harlot takes her turn with his knife
Basically telling him
What a piece of crap he is.

Open war
In cynicism, crime, and poverty.

No More Restaurants

Personally, I'm pretty over restaurants. I think they are destroying food. Food should be a high point in someone's day, as it always is in mine, tasty and bringing people together. Instead restaurants have turned it into this hell of exploitation and long hours.

At the higher end you're basically an entertainer for bored rich people that you have to pretend to be friends with, and everywhere else money is worse. Let's see my two last such jobs? Oh yes... pouring wine as the banks that crashed the economy bribe Democratic Party senators and governors with freebees... and the other, working for an incompetent, obsessive small businessman in every worse sense of the word with an overbearing wife and a Napoleonic complex, who highers incompetent / young / inexperienced / desperate (me) people just so they won't resist when he illegally steals from them, but with the end result that food critics give us bad service reviews, business still doesn't pick up and he continues to loose money, thus further increasing his comfortable dependency on stealing tips that the Division of Labor doesn't give a damn about and every lawyer admires the handiwork of while circling my cries like sharks with the smell of blood in the water, anxious to steal the same money from me twice.

To heck with that. Waiting is for the birds. I'm looking at stuff now that pays less but has better hours, less stressful pretension, and will make me feel less complicit in what has essentially become a hobby of the idle rich and politically bought off. As a consolation prize I want to find a nice dinner table and begin hosting free dinners once in a while at my house for friends and acquaintances- both to share my enjoyment of food and in protest of the notion that the only point to learning about food, drinks, and service ought to be to make a profit in off by ingratiating yourselves with the class enemy.

The Writing is on The Wall

That pretty much sums it up

Denver... 28 Days Later

Denver. It's been 28 days and 253 miles on the Colorado trail. Snowed last night and I think I have protein / vitamin deficiency. I was a little slower on schedule than planned but a great trip. Decided to split it in two and finish the other half next year. Took me 5 min with a thumb on Highway 50 to meet some friendly Czech mountain bikers who drove me all the way to Denver. Feel good. Stories to tell... :)

I had

The occasion to rely to something from the comfortable free for through hikers internet of this lovely Leadville Hostel.

Leadville... the last, best... of the Colorado Mountain Towns. The perfect mix of deformity and kindess that makes small town America worth being a part of....


Something in my personality makes me hate the "LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME, I JUST DID THIS, BUY THIS, COME TO THIS, LISTEN TO THIS, BLAH BLAH BLAH" Self promotional hell. Personally I'd rather just look weird and focus on the music. Ignore the audiance... my keyboards are turned sideways. Have some kind of lead singer even if they must stare at something. I do feel in part that the alienation and pathetic, rupert murdock enriching advertising scams we all faciliate with our own internet profiles are a signifiant part of why I became a utah river guide, why my favorite films are vanishing point and zaberiskie point, and why I am currently walking for 480 miles across Colorado to leave the stench and the nightmares and the beer and the decay of the overpriced, jobless, venerial hell of American Civilization as far away as I can for as long as I can possibly afford it. The best thing left that you can do in this country is drive across a desert into a sunset on your way to play a concert. So get out there and do it, however you can. Get the hell out of the shoebox nightmare of plasma bleech and virtual pretention.

I don't know what the answer is. But these things I do feel. As a poor substitute for an actual way out of this mess it's all I can offer at this time.

Comradely,

My humble $.02