Don't Be Silly

I will not sympathize with instructions.

or say that that water aint wet, or call loving something different.

I’ll lie like a tiger, get off like a carnivore

and wonder where the victims went.

Hopelessness is a terrible thing, we can all agree.

And ten years ago I poured ranch on anything I could...

ok one year ago I poured ranch on anything I could.

Now I use Sriracha and sometimes Nacho cheese.

Now stretch those paws and remember when you had nothing,

and beg for a curtain call, back and back again.

Heavy Hands 5-31-11

I'm Not Here To Fall In Love

It will be a long time before you ever see that certainty, and even longer if there’s hope for relevant consistency. Until you’re wrongly directed, by yourself, wrongly advised, by yourself and mistakenly believe there was never a way out.

And while you realize in some ways, the circular motion, while you detect an ebb and a flow, there will always be the suspicion that the circle of life is an excuse.

And like my girl Le Le says, “I don’t wanna die here.” and I don’t either.

I havent seen my kid in six months. His mom hardly lets me talk to him. It’s not fair.

On the other hand I could stop throwing all my money away on making films and printing books and drinking and cigarettes and cocaine.

I could stop the endless line of one night stands and tofu scrambler sendoffs.

I could stop pining after women that i would inevitably turn off between the fifth and ninth whisky seltzer.

I could save up for a new pair of shoes, pay my rent, pay my credit cards, send my grandma a fucking letter for once, make a meal using a pot and a pan, drink a glass of fucking water, eat an apple, exercise, get a job, get a second job, buy a car, get a new phone, move, get another job. Fall in love, be responsible, reach potential.

But I made this bed and I’m laying in it, which i think is probably a poor decision.

Eulogy for Dan Oberbruner

Dan.  Wow.  Dan.

I don’t know how many of you knew Dan, but he was a human of the male gender and his name was Dan.

He was the child of a mother and father who together engaged in sexual reproduction.  He was birthed by his mother and after that, year by year, Dan became older.

There are things I will never forget about Dan.  I remember that I would see Dan and he would see me with his eyes, which were on his face.

Dan.  People used to call him Dan because it was his name and I remember that he would spell it starting with the letter, “D,” and always, always follow that with the letter, “A.” (You guys remember that).  More often than not, “N,” would come last.  And these, as everyone here who knew and loved Dan will remember, are the letters that spelled the word, “Dan.”

Dan has died as he lived, upon the planet Earth, pulled to its surface by the gravitational force of its mass.

His remains will presumably stay on this planet for the foreseeable future.

- From the "Shift Freedom is Dead" show

Money Honey

Not afraid of the long lost sneeze. Unconcerned with an all out ambush. Don’t like the idea of getting left out, or tolerate the concept of failure but fail all the same.

There's a Pond Around Here Somewhere

open picture as link in another window for a song while you read

The boy walked the path behind the farm that was his home.  Past the chomping tractors and the lowing of calves bubbling into the air, humid with cud dew.  The wool on the boys' toes dampened as he slid between rows of corn stalks sprouting green above their amputated mothers.

He entered the glade and slapped bugs on his forearms.  He smelled the cut lumber from the plot of adolescent pines his neighbors the Millers had just shaved off their land.  He walked on a mowed lane between the Millers' farm and his family's and somehow his thoughts caught on the Stuhls.

The boy was in the same grade as Grant Stuhl and they had played together once in kindergarden at Grant's family's home in the trailer park near town.  Grant's sister Carmen had been four at the time.  Her black hair curved like a bell around her face.  He remembered her with something dark smudged acrost her cheek, like a smushed grape or ant.  He remembered her through a crack in the splintering plywood door to her and Grant's room.

And what happened to her - just awful.  There had been an accident.  Carmen came back to school, too deformed even for the mean kids to tease her, just a small armor of light metals and durable plastics.  There was one chamber for her head, one for her torso, two hinged together for each arm and each leg.  They percolated into each other every ten minutes or so, the teacher raising her voice over the bubbling and suctioning and the other kids pretending not to hear it.  The acids would recombine  and change hue, from ginger ale to manilla to sudsy red clay.

What a wieight for the Stuhls, the boy thought as he sat on one of the Millers' fresh stumps.  It was only a matter of time before something went wrong.  The teachers had told every class that the armor was experimental, to be gentle with Carmen.  There had already been several near misses.  Some acid would leak and the kids would run away from the puddle screaming and they say they had to pour filler into the hole of the head hatch to make up for what was lost.  There was no place that could make more of the substance, it had all been squeezed from Carmen's matter in one terrible instant.  The more the acid was watered down, the less Carmen there was fizzing in the chambers.  Her robot voice dragged like a slowed tape, sometimes she would turn away from a question, not being able to process the idea in it.

The cicadas started while the boy had been thinking and he heard them now.  He hadn't known it when he walked out his back door, but this was why he head come out here, to hear them sing, to get his feet wet.  It had all sealed over with snow and now here it was unwrapped for him, just for him it felt like.  He looked at the other stumps and wanted to see trees standing out of them.  The pines had been ten years older than him and still they hadn't been big like the ones in the deep woods.  How long do they have to grow to get big, if they weren't big at 19?

Well...

What is pride anyway? An unmovable object or unstoppable force, it is the combination of the two? Either way I’m broke and I have a movie to make. And I’m gonna god damn do it.

Hell or high water, smell or low slaughter. I’m gonna do it.

So go brewers and go shivering on floors, and window beds, and little ole friends and random laughter or shaking your head in shame, at yourself. I’ll do all that and more and continue this looping massacre and remember the ivory days, the ones coming clean and forgetting this fortune, which has been better for me but I’m not here to cry.

Cause cry to your momma, don’t cry to me.

I know I’m lucky. So let’s get on with it.

Sean

Ps. The Wild Introduction is now available at:

Woodland Pattern

720 East Locust Street

Milwaukee, WI

my warehouse eyes

did you know that it was Bob Dylan's 70th birthday today?
did you know he used to have an XM radio show called "Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour," where each episode had really general themes like, "Trains," "Baseball," "Shoes," "Colors?"  It was great.  He would talk a lot between songs, but I didn't mind.  He's funny as hell.  You can listen to them on grooveshark.  My favorite part was that never, ever once did he ever acknowledge that he was Bob Dylan or that he had a musical career of any kind.  He would talk a lot about different musicians and their lives and never hint that they had met or played together.  He could have been anybody.  Ellen Barkin would do the introductions, little poems that were supposed to be like Edward Hopper paintings.  "It's night in the city.  A lone watchman drinks coffee from a thermos.  Steam hisses from a street vent.  A movie at the all night theater plays for an audience of one."  Something like that.  I wonder when it was that he started wearing his cowboy hat?
Other pop culture things that seem cool to me lately:
John McClane taking off his shoes
The 11th Doctor
When Alan Moore had Swamp Thing go to space
Tree's Lounge

TRUE

At an event at the Jackpot Gallery in Milwaukee last night, where one person came up to a mike to read the first part of a serialized novella, followed by another doing a self-reflective stand-up piece, and a third plugged in her guitar to sing songs she had written.

Listening to them, I was thinking of the way the word “true” is used as a verb in manufacturing—to bring into an exact position, to align—and what we mean when we say something “rings true.” True not in the factual sense, but that it sounds right.

That’s what we do when we make art.  We try to create something that rings true.  Le Anna seeking to get the emotions right in a break-up song, Sean to be entertaining and still be Sean in doing stand-up, Parker on making characters and setting real enough to engage those listening to his story.  And a number of those watching and listening last night in the gallery with their own writing or photography or acting lives— in differing ways they are trying to bring their work into alignment with their vision of what they can create. It’s what I attempt to do in crafting an oral or digital story.

For all who make or aspire to make art, close to the surface or down deep, there is a desire to be recognized, to be applauded.   It’s there. However, I do think that the energy and the gnawing to keep working a painting or words on paper or a scene comes from somewhere else, from  a need or a yearning to make it ring true.

- Jim Winship

The Wild Introduction

Man, last night was fun. The Wild Introduction release party. Hot damn, hot damn, hot damn.

It was fun and i drank too much and repeated myself a ton.

Thanks to everyone at Jackpot and Lil Le Le.

Pick up The Wild Introduction at the World Wide Dirt online store.

baby baby.

The Wild Introduction

In a room overlooking the short side of a hill he sat drunken and chewed a leg. He wasn’t sorry or regretful. He was simply waiting. He considered the four year partition between his old life and new where a man like him, where a guy like Wally McLean, had a shot.

-Excerpt from The Wild Introduction

8 minute blog

I have very little time before i have to leave to catch a plane back to Newark, then to Milwaukee.  Eight minutes.

ground.  grubby.  grass city.  california.  qualms. togetherness, without it none of us would be here.  capitulation.  starbucks. apollo. pixels. sancho panza. rainy statuettes. weeping angels. part 1 of 2.

descart. fuck. last walks. miles of tracks. carbonization. strenuousness. laboratory. the 10:15. p, the letter.

2 minutes.  what do i have to say? did you hear about the fire at the circus?  i hear it was in tents.  what did 0 say to 8?  nice belt.  fuck.  it just started raining.  what did the designer of the juice factory say? insert punch line here.   what did the revolving door say to siamese twins?

Victoria

you can click this picture and open link in another window for a treat while you read

"What if I wrote everything I thought?  It would be exhausting."  I just read that in my pocket journal.  It is humid in this room in Philadelphia, but soft humid, like the inside of a fishbowl, cool.  I feel dense.  That could be being tired or something else.  After all these years, I understand the way I feel so little.  I change the combination of elements around me to tune the way I feel.  Is that a correct way to proceed?  Does that make me an actor with  costumes and props?  Am I a good person?  That would be the question, because I'm not a great person, though I think I've always wanted to be.

"We all try," Don Draper said.  "Being ecstatic or throwing a tantrum is easy.  We dramatize our lives so we feel something.  Being reliable is something," Albert Black said.

I saw this girl at a liquor store yesterday.  She wore a red sweater, jeans, flowery scarf, glasses.  She was staring at something.  I thought she was looking at me for a second, but when I looked at her, her gaze did not respond.  I went to dinner that night and the same girl was behind the bar, unloading a case of wine.  I wondered what her name was, what was in her head while she had waited for the case to be brought to her from the back of the liquor store.  I pictured four dots, two at the liquor store, two at the restaurant, and two line segments running parallel from one place to the other, though not intersecting.  What did Cindy (not Cindy, more like Margaret or Victoria) have beyond the line segment?  I wondered about this for probably about twenty seconds in the restaurant after I sat down.

Dare To Dream

Yesterday I ran 23 blocks because I was late for a meeting. My belt didn't do much good and my pants fell down often. I sweated like crazy under my back pack. People laughed at the lanky be-speckled white guy holding his pants and running desperately down the crowded street.

There are payphones on this side of town. So I stop and call Matt.

“Hey baby baby.” I say

I made it and dropped off my new books. They look good.

I left and walked west and lost track of the bus route. So I walked another 40 blocks to the Taco Bell. A little kid ran in the road and I dove to save him. Everyone clapped and they gave me a free crunch wrap.

I was going to take the 64 but the road was ripped up. So I walked again. It was another 20 blocks home. I stopped on the way and had a whisky seltzer at Kilimajaro, they were watching American Idol and cheering like crazy, which creeped the shit out of me.

I left and saw a crying girl by the gas station on Wisconsin. I comforted her because her husband left her. She was very sad about this.

I picked up trash on the bridge and found a lost dog. When I got home I called my girlfriend and told her all about it. She’s a model and lives in Canada so you don’t know her.

The Wild Introduction

Sweet Sassy Molassy. New book, The Wild Introduction is in the can.

Release Party!

Jackpot Gallery in Riverwest, 825 E. Center St. Milwaukee, WI, GPS it.

7- 10 PM

Books, sarcasms, great snacks, shirts with swear words, projected things, possibly live chickens...

Oh and Live performance by Singer/songwriter/totally awesome person LeAnna Eden

Check her music here

Come hang out. We will party till our heads explode.

May 9 - 16 THE WEEK OF JUSTIN'S

Permit

Think yourself different,

if you want but don’t.

aint worth it, no mercy,

no separate earth

Heavy Hands 5-7-11

silt and flack

i hear her sleeping and i see me typing.  i've erased seven sentences already before i decided on these ones. my nose is running.  it was warm out today.  i had to wear a scarf over my face while i worked in the silt today because i never did before and then my asthma kicked up and my lungs felt wet or muddy and it was uncomfortable i had thought to myself, "i would give $100 to not feel that right now." it seems like as i age, i will be more compelled to do smart things, like not work in a confined area full of soot and dust when i have asthma, like learn when it is best to keep my mouth shut and when it is important to say something, even if it is wrong.

people are important to me and sometimes the can feel like they're ghosts or maybe that i'm a ghost walking among the living and i don't know what goes in a single person's head or if a second is the same for us all and losing people scares me and gaining people scares me for the same reason and i had a thought today that all relationships are either beginning or ending.  i didn't even know what i meant by that but it was a thought i did not like and there should be two footnotes to that idea if you were to accept it.  1: that is not always true.  2: that's okay and you could think of your relationship lobby as having a revolving door and it is not a tragedy that people walk out, the important thing is that they were there at all.

i read william james one time and he was explaining the pragmatism of faith in god, defending it really, by saying that faith in god cannot be observed the same way a scientist observes a microbe unless they have faith, because having faith is what makes god possible.  the metaphor he gave, and i'm not trying to talk about god here, but about relationships, is of friendship.  you can't have a friend unless you believe that they are your friend.  believing they are your friend is what makes them your friend.  belief comes before the tangible as opposed to the other way around.

seventeen-sixteen-fifteen... etc., etc.

i should have come up with something more eye-catching for the headline, but i am no newspaper man.

TONIGHT: Jarrod Johnson's Lone Wolf Open Mic Night.  9 o'clock.  Henry's Tavern.  2523 E. Belleview Place.  Right around the corner from the Downer Theatre.  I have never had a less than really good time at them.

TONIGHT & EVERY NIGHT: Cold Wash Cycle, a new blog that is super cool that some friends of World Wide Dirt have cooked up.

what is in my brain right now?  coffee, johnny rivers, they shoot horses, don't they? dracula, the hair part, the blank page of my notebook, sex, philidelphia, camaradery, french fries and chicken sandwiches, 
is there a club that has ever had a better name than "whiskey a go go?"

Check Point

Yo Yo!

So I’m back in Milwaukee for a hot minute. And let me tell you what, its been a whirlwind week.

I left last friday from Colombia, which meant I took a four hour bus ride at 6 AM to the airport. I got there and hung out in the airport. I had pancakes, it was the second time this year, and as I feared, one time too many.

Anyways I got through customs. They harassed me a lot less with out a fucked up haircut.

Flight delay - Florida - barely make my flight to Chicago - Chicago.

Guy picks me up at the airport and we drive to Milwaukee.

Milwaukee - eat Jimmy Johns, talk with franklin, drink a beer at KP’s, pick up Tanya, hang for a second, make mac and cheese for Tanya. Slept.

Wake up. Play a couple games of Madden with Billy. Almost miss Badger Bus to madison but don’t.

Arrive at Memorial union - Sister Alyssa picks me up. We drive to Sparta. Sister Caitlyn doesn't know I’m back in the country.

Go to their hotel. She is surprised.

Eat a philly Steak, drink some pabst, play Apples to Apples, win Apples To Apples. Then i farted a couple times. slept. woke.

Went on a bike ride with my family. It’s cold and windy at first, then it’s nice all day. There were hills and busted barn, some lake, dead cow and deer skeleton.

Ate combos, some chex mix, juice, couple skittles.

Walked down a tunnel 3/4 a mile long. Yeah, for real.

Drove back to Madison and ate at Monies, chicken veggie wrap - dope.

Hung at my sisters place, watched Louis CK standup, find out Bin Laden is dead, me and mach made facebook jokes, watched King Of The hill, slept. woke.

Ate Mac and Cheese, watched Toy Story 3 with Caitlyn, take the Badger Bus to Milwaukee. Get off on 84th street, walk 28 blocks home. It’s was a hell of a nice day.

Do standup at Franks. Hang with Guy and Lil T. Lil Le kills it. Slept. Woke.

Met with the Trav Man. Went to Nick Lits birthday party. Laughed at his new ID picture for a long time. stayed out late, ate classic slice and taco dip. Slept. Woke.

Met with Trav Man and Guy and talked about Heavy Hands. Set up shoot. Talked about A Wild Introduction, new novella, or maybe short novella, or long short story, or regular sized short story. The term escapes me.

Clean the backyard, put on new toilet seat, watch NBA playoffs, play Madden again, make hummus, watch Planet Earth

-

Tomorrow - Get chicken wire, send emails, Lone Wolf Reading at Henry’s, I will read chapter one and maybe chapter two of The Year That Everyone Died - Season 1 - Rich and Free.

TYTED by the way is a drug fueled, ghost/traveling/dog/hyperlinked sex romp. Through constant editing and re-writes of the series that originally ran on World Wide Dirt I have created something passable as an American work of fiction.

Never be bored again day job folk. Can’t watch Madmen because you’re scared your boss will see. Online/text-hyperlinked/serial/drama. The Year That Everyone Died.

Friday Gallery Opening Sky High/Pop Up/Monica Canilao - yep - will be awesome Milwaukee, come join the fun.

ain't nothin like that egomania

I am a Buddhist (and that makes me cooler than you)

I am a Buddhist

And that makes me cooler than you.

I don’t worry about my hair

because I get emptiness, and I’m

too busy meditating and pretending

my legs aren’t cramped from

zen lotus position

I don’t care about money

because I am too busy reading

Suzuki Roshi contemplating 

my good karma I get from

filling space with philosophical

dharma talk for your benefit.

I get all that dharma i’ve read

but it’s too profound for you

Don’t worry though. Even though

I dwell in elevated realms, I can descend

from the bhumis to enlighten you. My pleasure.

-Mary Shippee

rainbow road

he was in a car crash and for months afterward whenever he drove on the interstate he imagined losing control again, the car flying out from underneath him, swaying into the centripetal force until the impact jams you out of it.  he drove to winsor and on the way it became night and on a long stretch between cities a new radio station caught on the receiver that played jazz under a hiss of interference.  the road was brand new and the white lines were perfect rectangles.  every overhead light was on.  there were sound barrier walls on either side of the road and beyond that, nothing.  "woh," he said.  it was entirely detached, like in a utopian sci-fi movie, like a ribbon unfurled in space (which is also a little like an ejaculation), like mario kart rainbow road.  he turned into a bend in the road, felt the gravity pull on him, sipped from a bottle of coca-cola.  two lanes over, a semi sighed.  coupled running lights pressed down the length of the road, stretching it further.  he accelerated.  the wheel hummed in his palms. shooooooooooooo