it was nineteen seventy whatever, the album animals had just been purchased & unwrapped, does anyone remember the smell of new vinyl? i don’t, and i consider this a loss. maybe there wasn’t even a smell? anyway.

i was over at my high school sweetheart’s parents’ condo, they were, as usual, out of town, and, teenagers will be teenagers. for a point of reference, the class of 1979 smoked more weed than any other graduating class before, or since.

anyway the absent parents of my HSS were audiophiles, yes, yes they were. there was a newish Marantz quadrophonic amp, and four speakers (two Marantz, two hand-built by the HSS’s grandfather). the hand-built ones were huge – four feet high and two or three in depth and/or width. i remember the phrase “80 pound magnets”. at around 1/2 volume, you could stand in the middle of the room, scream at the top of your lungs, and not be able to hear yourself.

this stereo would shake pictures off walls & lamps off tables. no idea why the neighbors didn’t call the cops, none at all.

so we had animals, and some serious bud. and everyone fell asleep but me (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, n’est ce pas?) high school french: you recover, but you’re never cured.

so everyone fell asleep, & i sat crosslegged in front of the stereo as the music & i bonded on what i can only describe as a cellular level. reading the lyrics raptly, tripping hard on the trippyness of them. instead of the old-style bar-graph type of lit-up balance indicator, the quad had a 1″ green CRT, which expressed the distribution of sound waves with squiggly lines dancing erratically towards the four corners. which was , as i recall, really trippy. i can’t even describe it, it was that trippy. and profound. oh, damn, it was profoundly trippy.

and the HSS fell asleep on the couch. typical, me wide awake while people slept, no one available for me to tell them how trippy it was, so i’m telling you now. so there i was. tripping. and these lyrics which remain profound to me to this day, even unstoned, well… i sat in front of the stereo and read along with the lyrics and when it got to that bit with the lord’s prayer from a sheep’s perspective, it BLEW. MY. FUCKING. MIND.

and while i ache to once again be that young, that unworldly, that wasted, and that mindblown, it comforts me just to remember such wonder.

Pigs on the Wing 1/2 | Dogs 1 | Dogs 2 |Pigs (3 Different Ones) | Sheep

there’s a whole ‘nother story from that night, far far less transcendent. not that i’m claiming this one possesses all that much transcendence. it’s just that the other one has so much less of whatever that is.

you fucked up old hag, aha, charade you are.

always timely, even when it’s not fiery out there.

edited: recently while roaming around my old TMobile gallery, i found this bad cameraphone picture of the iPod in question:

i told this story once but lost it in the years of blogging which disappeared during the dark days. i shall attempt to recreate:

when chris’s mom died, we got a little money, and as per my insistence, spent a good bit on electronics. there was my late, beloved ZD8000, and, there was my iPod. it was a … i forget which gen, it was a twenty gig with a monochrome screen, all soothing blue. i remember the day i bought it at target (pronounced tar-zhay), brought it home, and immediately had a fierce attack of buyer’s remorse — what, in the fuck, had i just spent (what was it) $300 on? but then i opened the box, and held the shiny thing in my hand, and all that melted away. it was like hand-candy, and i was in love.

for the next few … however long it was, the iPod was my constant companion, i would extol its virtues to anyone who’d listen, showing them the slick clickwheel & going on & on about having my entire collection of music (which is life) with me all the time.

and then came a bad night. & by bad night i mean, i don’t remember if it was when i heard the first rumor, which was that Jonathan Raffetto had been killed in a car accident, or when i learned the truth, that he’d hung himself in his garage. it was one of those things, both unthinkable. the singer/songwriter of the happiest days of my whole life was gone.

and, being an individual who always makes good life choices, i decided the prudent course of action at that juncture in my history, would be to purchase a couple of large, toxic cans of extra-gravity ‘beer’ and listen to the Jonathan Raffetto Band on repeat on my sweet white headphones.

awesome idea, right? well, then i had to pee. & so i went to the bathroom & somehow as i stood up my hand caught the headphone cord & yanked the iPhone from my back pokect & ‘plunk’ it fell in the toilet.

now, i am toilet-squeamish. i will not clean a toilet without gloves to my elbows, a long handled brush, & a queasy feeling in the pit of me – but, let me tell you – no matter how toilet-averse you are, if you drop your beloved iPod in one, you will reach into a peed-in toilet so fast your head will spin. and not just because you’re really drunk on toxic beer.

so i retrieved the iPod from the pee. it was, of course, off & would not power on**. it was dead. at that point, my future ex-boyfriend informed my drunk ass that he knew how to bake electronics. (note: if anyone ever tells you they know how to bake electronics, do NOT believe them. this is very important.) anyway. he put the iPod in the oven, & then soon after, informed me that it was getting really hot. so, i told him, take it out! but he had a better idea: he decided instead to just open the broiler door.

opening the broiler door lets cool air into the oven, which makes the oven burner burn harder. well, we know that now, don’t we? we do.

a little while later, he retrieved the iPod from the oven. it had melted the pretty clickwheel into a warped mess, and baked the ‘hold’ switch in the ‘held’ position. so now that it was not just dead but *really really* dead, well, he cracked it open just to see what was inside. who wouldn’t?

a month went by, with the popped-open ipod sitting on my art table, twisted, forlorn, eviscerated. eventually, finally, i was ready to confront the extent of my loss. i was going to make it into an art project, perhaps. but — just for the sheer fuck of it — i decided to plug it in. and when i did, the apple came onto the screen, and it proceeded to charge. the hard drive and its contents were intact & functional, indeed the only thing wrong with it was that it had been melted & pried open.

the iPod lived for a good year after that, held together with a rubber band in my purse. since it was baked into the hold state, i had no way to use the controls, but i had one of those headphones with the play/pause/forward/back controls (for beware, when you get an iPod it is much like a Barbie, it immediately needs a Malibu Dream House, a Corvette, and a boyfriend, oh yes, you will buy accessories) but anyway. it remained chargeable & playable for a ridiculously longer time than it should have, and kept me company though the even darker times that followed the night it should have, but did not, die.

i have not yet replaced it, instead making do with smartphones with unreasonably large micro-sd cards the size of a pinky fingernail, & thinking one day i may be ready for another iPod.

i’m still attached to my first iLove though.

** this likely what saved it. when the headphones are disconnected, the iPod turns off because it assumes you are not listening, & wishes to save you from draining your battery. so, all it got was wet. if it had not turned off, it would have shorted out.

& also apparently this intends to be the second in what may or may not be a series of blog posts about my wide-and-dewy-eyed appreciation for the technology i have at my fingertips these days. here goes:

there are certain chord progressions which, if you put them in your song, i will like your song, even if the genre of your music is not exactly what i consider my cup of tea. today on my way home i heard just such chords, but had no idea the name of the song, or even the band. not even the foggiest of clues, really.

so as i scooped all my stuff up out of the car on my way up home, i committed to what i loosely refer to as my memory, a snippet of said song lyrics. not as easy as it sounds, i have a notoriously lousy short-term memory & am semi-brain dead from sleep loss. so anyway. fired up the ‘puter, impatiently typing in the query as the browser was loading “if the silence takes you i hope it takes me too lyrics”. a click later i made the somewhat unexpected discovery: i like death cab for cutie! who knew? “oh no! i like death cab for cutie”, i exclaimed, and everyone looked at me funny. which was fine, i was already at amazon and less than a minute later the song was on my hard drive.

listening to it, i ctrl+t’d a browser tab and logged in to the lyricbase, where i added the lyrics & the cover art. ctrl+t again for youtube, grabbed the embedding code and clicked save, resulting in this, which represents another one of those crazy technological leaps i would have never believed had some future dude came & foretold them to me back in the day, when i would have had to hear the song who knows how many times on the radio before catching the name & artist, then would have had to get to a record store & buy it & listen to it a hundred times to catch all the lyrics (i love lyrics, but can’t make them out so well, which is why i have a lyricbase in the first place). but i digress.

if i had a point which i may or may not, it would be to repeat my absolute delight at the awesome array of technology we have today. & if i couldn’t imagine what this now would hold back then, sure as hell there’s no way today i can imagine what this future does. i don’t even care about the flying cars anymore, you know? the music will do it for me.

and just for fun, and because i can, here’s a just-turned-six year old kid playing “soul meets body”.

i just wanted what any girl wants, to be able to scrobble to last.fm from my shiny BlackBerry Curve. i heard all those iPhone kids were doing it, and i wanted to be just like them. and yes, if they were jumping off bridges, i’d probably want to do that too. or not.

but anyway. i did a little quick googling about scrobbling from a BB Curve, and found flipside.fm, a music player that works on BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices. flipside.fm “plays mp3s from your memory card, displays full-color album art, finds missing album art, creates playlists with ease, and tells you more about your music”, which is fine. it also scrobbles (uploads your current playing track to your list of played tracks on last.fm), and scrobbling was what i wanted to do most of all. kind of a long-held fantasy of mine.

another one of the promotional blurbs for flipside.fm says that it lets you explore your music collection with your little trackball, something meant to appeal to the BlackBerry user, and on the surface this sounds like a lot of fun — if you have a bunch of time on your hands to sit around playing with your telephone, which i don’t. my BlackBerry is my portable music device, my bPod if you will; i have a big-ass microSD card in there and i keep a good playlist, i listen through my Altec-Lansing T515 headphones (my highest recommendation on those, btw) when i am out & about. so i have my basic needs with my mobile music experience, among which is the ability to use the play/pause, forward/back controls with my headphones, which flipside.fm did not support. neither did it support the usual shortcut keys on the BlackBerry (n for next, p for previous, but who cares about that, i want to use handy buttons on my little bluetooth doohickey, not fumble around with my telephone, no matter how legal that is to do on the freeway as long as i’m not holding it against my face).

so that was the deal-breaker right there. i didn’t test it to see if it would work with my corded stereo headphones, because i’m not even sure where they are. however if the shortcut keys on the phone don’t even work, why would the headphone controls?

so after three exciting days of scrobbling to last.fm from anywhere i felt like it, my trial expired, and that is that. there is no way i’d fork over  $19.95 for software that takes away my preferred set of controls, and forces me to explore my phone’s music collection with my slick little trackball. i just don’t have that kind of time on my hands.

before all the scandal began, i was
about to semi-officially re-launch my old lyrics site. i built it from
scratch out of PHP, MySQL, caffeine, and obsession. i am not as proud
of it as i once was, it was my first ever attempt at a database driven
website, so not only is it so web 1.0, it’s also got n00b written allll
over it.

it does have a live flash chat thingy, that’s sort of cool i guess.

offtoseethelizard.com

the reason i built the site was because i love lyrics but hate those spammy lyrics sites with the obnoxious ads and the occasional outright attack-spyware, and i wanted a peaceful place to keep my own little collection of my favorites. it is also open to lyrics submissions (here!).

i have considered the thought of implementing user accounts so my friends could use the lyricbase and be able to collect their own favorite lyrics and whatnot, but i’m not convinced that would … you know, matter. after all, the interwebs are full of lyrics sites that have vast, vast libraries of lyrics they’ve content scraped from other lyrics sites, why would anyone but me want to bother? but anyway.

also? life feels much better if you are not all bunched up in a wad.

i gotta watch it a lot i’m better at this than you
i gotta swallow the part that wasn’t easy to chew
i got my knife in the back when i was young and unmade
i built a doorstep for you don’t leave the things you’re afraid of on mine

i am better at this than you, you know. well you do now. oh not you! personally. this is some figurative shit, i assure you. & not even derivative. no it’s out & out plagiarism with attribution as if that excuses it, which in this case it does, more or less. it’s all 1′s & 0′s man. & i am better at that than you, that’s for goddamn sure. a rule proven by its exceptions, if such a thing exists. if.

i built my house in the mud because i want to stay clean
my windows are all broken i can’t afford gasoline
i dance around in a twist thinking what luck it will bring
i watch pedestrians stalk hoping they’ll get their little fingers
on time on time on time

time is the most malleable dimension, all fluidity in motion & all & always different from each & every perspective for ever & ever amen. i love & am in love with time, head & heels transposed in a tumbling rush yes this is love, this is my love

i’m thinking this will be better when this is over
sitting on my bed getting un-sober
sleeping in the park hey man scoot over
vagrant as it seems it’s alright

amen i say oh yeah amen baby

don’t let it go to your head without a place it can stay
you can’t give back what you stole by looking the other way
i’m gonna spit it out now you’ve gotta swear not to peek
because i’ve already been to where no one cares a thing about time
about time about time about time

it disappoints me in myself that i rely completely on someone else’s words to say exactly what i mean but the way words connect things to me i have been forced to get used to it. these are john lombardo’s, ‘chrome jehovah’.

of all the hung up mistakes with names that i never knew
and you should listen to me because there’ve been quite a few
there’s no way they can connect with what it is you and me do
before the laugh starts to happen after the screaming is through
about time about time about time

unless of course i’m wrong. i’m better at this than you but that doesn’t make me right it only makes me sit & grin sardonic & feel the way this feels when it cracks my rough dry lips i lick them again against my better judgement i blame winter for this but it’s my fault inadvertent & i do wish this was an unusal sort of thing for me, don’t you?

thinking i’ll be better when this is over.

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wind stirring outside warm insistent it glides through the window open slides across my skin cool in contrast with the radiant heat of me, open

yes open. yes.

things change sometimes in ways you look back realize they have been for how long now? yes all this time & now wondering how this began & happened all the while knowing how necessary it was, this unawareness, because it left you open.

yes.

there is geometry in the humming of the strings … there is music in the spacing of the spheres ~~ Pythagoras

You hear me say this don’t make any sense As I hop up and over the fence Hooked on nicotine and phonics Fun like macro economics Still and quiet like they taught us Fun like macro economics Vigilante thoughts and a cheap guitar I am my own movie star I don’t know you I don’t want to I don’t know you I don’t want to
eve 6, tongue tied

could quote lyrics all nightlong and possibly express everything but then again maybe not, since it would be impossible to include enough context, and with me with music it’s always contextual. the elaborate process by which these things become one with the soundtrack adds anything from nuances to entirely alternative meanings to these things i quote, and yet, and yet …

Pacific Sun, you should have warned us, it gets so cold here.
And the night can freeze, before you set it on fire.

And our flares go unnoticed.
Dimminished, faded just as soon as they are fired.

We are, we are, intrigued. We are, we are, invisible.

Oh, how we’ve shouted, how we’ve screamed, take notice, take interest, take me with you.

But all our fears fall on deaf ears.

Tonight, they’re burning the roads they built to lead us to the light.
And blinding our hearts with their shining lies,
while closing our caskets cold and tight. But I’m dying to live.
dashboard confessional,
several ways to die trying
Something ’bout the whiteness of the
phone
Something ’bout the Genius of Modern Music
How can I think
How can I fail you?
Something ’bout the distance to the nerve
Something ’bout white hands of fate I don’t deserve
The bedroom ghosts
the posies, love letter boxes

between the posies and the dashboard confessional there were things starting
seeming like damn good ideas the eve6 is a little mentally healthier for me
at the moment.

How much longer will I try
before I realize I’m desperate in the situation
that I’m in again I’m exhausting yet another topic
I’ve exhausted frequently with no regrets.
eve 6, how much longer

my life is mostly dreamt in the textures my speakers spin around me and i live in a world where the surreal sensation of the loss of these latest dreams fades into a fantasy in which there … in which there is … there is no loss (but there is always kansas)

I’m woven in a fantasy, I can’t believe the things I see
The path that I have chosen now has led me to a wall
And with each passing day I feel a little more like something dear was lost
It rises now before me, a dark and silent barrier between,
All I am, and all that I would ever want be
It’s just a travesty, towering, marking off the boundaries my spirit would erase
� � � � �
And though it’s always been with me, I must tear down the Wall and let it be
All I am, and all that I was ever meant to be, in harmony
Shining true and smiling back at all who wait to cross
THERE IS NO LOSS
kansas, the wall

yes there is. yes there is. yes there is. but nice try. nothing uplifting lasting long here in the spaces where the constant chatter obviates the answer, which is here, has been here, patient waiting for the first silent moment

If you could see all the roads I have travelled towards
Some unusable last equilibrium.
Run like an athlete and die like a dead beaten speed freak,
An answer to all of the answers to yes.

If I wait for an answer,
Will the silence be broken?
Do we wait for an answer?
Do we leave it unspoken?
yes, tempus fugit

the answer, the answer is no.

change changing places
root yourself to the ground
capitalize on this good fortune
one word can bring you round
changes
yes, changes

and in spite of the answer everything is different and nothing has changed and this is endless and finished, now and forever.

All the foolish notions: When we’ll die that’s all that is.
We can never really understand the broken promises.
All along we run together (Remember?)
All along we run as one (Remember?)
When you find a perfect union, you’ve got to follow it.
yes, holding on

but the answer, the answer is no.

all of this in context and symbolic and filtered through my consciousness days or decades ago in ways i cannot ever explain, so it does express exactly what i meant, but only to me.

sorry about that