Bad Brains

They shaved half her head so they could break her skull open and they scooped out the bad stuff inside.

I typed those words. Me. Just now. I did. Really. I typed those words and then I got up and I paced around the room.

I stared out the window. I saw a little dog straining on a fat man’s leash, trying to go meet a daredevil squirrel. I saw a Monte Carlo thud by with a flat tire and a spiderweb windshield and no apparent driver at all. I saw flowers. Me. Just now. I did.

I thought about some things – things that were not Dana and were not brains and were not that sentence I’d just typed. I tried to drum “Moby Dick” on the wall with two jumbo-sized orange highlighters. It sounded alright.

Then I sat back down and I looked up at the screen. That sentence was still there, just like it was when I left it.

Adorable

It’s not just that she was late for class. It’s that she was twenty minutes late for class. It’s that when she finally made her appearance, she had her headphones on and she kept her headphones on. It’s that she flitted into the room twenty minutes late, headed straight up to the front of the classroom, and crashed her things down into the seat right next to mine.

It’s all of those things but it is none of those things, really, because it’s what she did next that is the reason I am telling you this.

Aesop & me

There was the time when Dana’s grandmother died, and Aesop and I smoked peyote before the funeral. The funeral was in an old stone church and we sat pushed right up against one another during the service and I remember sweating a lot. We watched the spirits wriggling in the shadows reaching out for the casket and afterwards, we compared notes about what it was we’d seen.

Aesop and I used to record terrible, terrible ambient music together. We’d send our 4-track tapes off to Brian Eno and to Harold Budd, to Steve Stapleton and to Alvin Lucier, but we never heard back from any of them and Eno would return his envelopes not even opened.

I met Aesop in a dingy record store when I was fifteen years old. The record store was called Sound Exchange. Aesop was wearing a Silver Apples t-shirt. We got to talking about krautrock and about astral projection and about whether anybody had ever recorded a good album after age fifty.

Rainy Day Women #47

The years went by and she grew sexier and sexier until finally, the people of the town took up pitchforks and torches and gathered outside her house in hopes of catching a glimpse.