Friday, July 25, 2014

Chaos at Feast

I’ve given a name to the past month of my life.

I call it Chaos at Feast.

I’ll admit that as names go, this was not my first choice. It has a kind of pretentious teenage boy quality to it, don’t you think? I considered Lucifer Sam for a while. Jennifer Gentle. The Judge. The Kid. Tyrone Slothrop. A Spoonful Weighs a Ton. Ann Botkin. Black Paul. Even plain old July.

But I ended up going with Chaos at Feast because, well, I guess the month I just lived through feels like a Chaos at Feast and anyway, it’s started responding to the name, so now of course I am stuck with it.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

We Need to Talk About Wayne

I worried about Wayne Coyne once.

It was in 2006. It was when I heard a song called “Mr. Ambulance Driver.”

“Mr. Ambulance Driver”  was a new Flaming Lips song and it was the first single from a new Flaming Lips album but it was… it was old.

Old as in elderly. Elderly as in decrepit. Decrepit as in the sound of millionaires trying to create a reasonable facsimile of earlier glories. “Mr. Ambulance Driver”  sounded like a Flaming Lips cover band and when I heard it, I worried about Wayne Coyne.

But that was in 2006 and now it is 2014 and it seems like everybody’s worrying about Wayne Coyne these days.

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Totally True Tales of Dana, Chapter 1

There once was a young girl whose name was Dana.

Dana lived in a big grey house with her mom, her two sisters, her four brothers, and a three-legged bulldog named Trigger. Their big grey house sat beside a dry red road made out of dirt which ran into a slightly bigger road made out of gravel. And the road made out of gravel ran into a road made out of concrete, and the road made out of concrete ran into a convergence of streets, and this convergence of streets was the town square of a place you’ve never heard of, right in the middle of Oklahoma, which is equally far from everywhere.

The town where Dana grew up was a curious sort of town where the dogs outnumbered the people, and the snakes outnumbered the dogs, and the tumbleweeds outnumbered the snakes, and the churches outnumbered the tumbleweeds, and nothing outnumbered the churches except tornadoes.

Now, it might seem strange to you, or wrong, or it might even seem to be a lie that there exists such a town where churches outnumber people, but in the town where Dana grew up there was exactly the right number of everything. There was the right number of people and the right number of dogs, the right number of snakes and the right number of tumbleweeds.