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Music For Little Kids That Isn't a Bunch of Bullshit

9/11/2014

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Fang Island playing to a bunch of stoked kids.
Working at a Montessori preschool is great because I get to shape young minds and also be patient zero for a new kind of foot-and-mouth disease. I was listening to Lucinda Williams one day when one of the teachers told me that I needed to play kids' music, which isn't untrue but is kind of missing the part where she actually just kind of hates Lucinda WIlliams.

I had no intentions of listening to Raffi or limp-dick classical music or Kidz Bop. Because I love my job, I also had no intentions of putting on Return to Metalopolis or Zombi and being like, "There's no swearing and it's virtuosic! What great music for kids!" just to be an asshole. After awhile, I ended coming back to these albums again and again. I can't guarantee that it's worthwhile or sinking in, but you could say the same thing about math.

Jim O'Rourke - Bad Timing

I probably prefer Leo Kottke if I’m going to listen to some guy sit down and noodle around on an acoustic guitar, but Kottke gets to be a bit too much with the 12-string battering sometimes, like he wants to shred but he can’t find his pick and oh shit I’m high on coke and is this an acoustic, man? I’d probably be better off with John Fahey, but at 7:15 in the morning I usually feel like I want to die enough already.

This album is pretty even sounding until some majestic, closing-movie-credits horn arrangement comes out of nowhere towards the back half. I always end up running into the kitchen to shut it off around then, because it’s around 7:45 in the morning at that point, and I don’t feel like hearing Jim O’Rourke’s interpretation of what a Clint Eastwood western would be like if he flew to the sun on the back of a dinosaur at the end.

I put this album on after hours at the bar I work at and my buddy Zach asked if it was Al Di Meola, which kind of sucks.

Chet Baker - Chet Baker Sings

This is the Chet Baker I’d like to remember, where he looks like a detective diving cock first into an undercover job as a high school quarterback as opposed to the dude made of cigarette butts that we see in that documentary from the last year of his life. Flea is somehow more annoying than he’d be in the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Chet Baker glues his bones back together with heroin. Wonderful film.

Thankfully, the kids are still about fifteen years and several failed attempts at fucking a girl who looks like Death from the Sandman comics away from knowing anything about that documentary. For as much instrumental music as I play at the school, it’s nice to get something with vocals in. This isn’t nearly as desolate as Baker’s lispy cover of Elvis Costello’s “Almost Blue” years later, and not as flip as some of the ballads albums he did for drug money. I think the kids would actually dig it if they weren’t busy yelling over it because they’re stoked I built a four foot tower out of some wood blocks. 

Marvin Gaye - Trouble Man

I like Let’s Get It On better, but that’s practically like sex ed class and I don’t want to be the reason a bunch of future-dudes get maced because they keep telling the wrong girl at the bar that they know she sure loves to ball.

This one is mostly instrumental with random smatterings of jive soul nonsense thrown in because it’s Marvin Gaye, so who gives a shit. It’s like sexy meth head open mic rambling. Apparently it’s the soundtrack to a Blaxploitation movie about a detective named Mr. T who is also a pool shark attempting to clean up the ghetto. I haven’t seen it and I probably don’t need to because it uses a dice game as a major plot device and life is pretty short.

Whenever I put this on, one of the parents dropping of their kid will almost always do a little head nod and be like, “Yeah, we’re really jamming now!” Iowa is the whitest place on earth. Everyone owns the soundtrack to The Big Chill and has a favorite sandwich at Subway.

Toe - The Book About My Idle Plot On A Vague Anxiety

I told a friend of mine online that I was starting an instrumental rock band. He sent me back a video of Toe playing live and then I thought I needed guitar lessons more than delay pedals.

For all the weaving and patchwork of the guitars, the drummer’s probably the best part. Usually I don’t want to listen to a band where the drummer’s the best part because they think they’re Led Zeppelin but they’ve actually just been playing the same blues riff for twenty minutes while some prick does fey wrist movements on his and-a hi-hat hits.

There’s a Toe album where some girl does weird techno-pop vocal punching—or at least that’s how I remember it—over top of the band and some more EPs that are all right, so this and Songs, Ideas We Forgot are the one I end up playing the most. This band and that heavy metal shred game show where Paul Gilbert and Marty Friedman cut heads and speak very campy Japanese are almost enough to make up for all the cartoon tentacle porn and vending machines that sell used panties.

Tristeza - Spine and Sensory

In college I went kind of far down the post-rock rabbit hole while also, perhaps somewhat relatedly, secretly dating a girl who was hanging on to the last gasps of the religion she grew up with. So, there exists in me, as I'm guessing there does with many other guys my age, an odd correlation between sexual frustration and the discography of Mogwai.

It was actually the second Tristeza record, Dream Signals In Full Circles, I had back then. Like Air’s Moon Safari or Unwed Sailor’s The Faithful Anchor, we only listened to it once or twice for whatever reason. Years later I wanted to hear some emo stuff without the vocals, because I hadn’t gotten laid in a long time but was mostly at terms with it. Remembered Tristeza and checked out the wrong record, Spine and Sensory, which I like a lot more.

TL;DR: This is a good album and I don't want kids.

The Score for David Lynch's The Straight Story

Man, it took me forever to get into David Lynch. The first thing of his I saw was Mulholland Drive, which I didn’t know going into is like the length of a Wrestlemania and is either a Mobius strip experiment or just some weird fucking movie that could probably be like an hour and a half shorter. I didn’t know anything about David Lynch at the time except that he was cool enough to put tits in his movie.

I came back years later and tried Eraserhead, and thought it was like what happens when some kid gets too much money to make his entrance tape for film school. Blue Velvet had cool cars in it and I really loved Wild At Heart because it’s got Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern listening to thrash. Twin Peaks is great for awhile until that one chick turns into a knob on a cabinet or whatever. Audrey and Cooper never banging is horseshit.

I still haven’t seen The Straight Story, but I think I would really like it. Whenever I listen to the score I always mishear the kids and end up thinking they’re talking about manic depressive states and hyper-realistic alternate realities. Either Lynch really knows how to get the most out of sonic elements or I’m more deaf than I thought from years of practicing with a dumb stoner rock band without earplugs in a 9’x9’ room.

Eluvium - An Accidental Memory In the Case of Death

I only passed my Piano Tech class in college because I insinuated to my professor that my parents beat me if I practiced at home and got a note wrong. Nothing I’m proud of, but I got a B and could barely chuff my way through a Bartok etude.

I watched a dude play entire Lizst compositions from memory before and I don’t think the Eluvium dude could hack that. Not that there isn’t a lot of middle ground, but this feels like classical music for dipshits. Which is fine, because if some kid is telling me a ten minute story about how they saw a bird at the park the other day, I don’t want a blanket of piano hitting me in the back of the head. It’s hard enough trying to guess what kind of bird they’re talking about based only on the description of “my grandpa threw his cigarette at the bird and then the bird ate it.”

Sigur Rós -Heim

Depending on what part of the album is playing, parents dropping their kids off either comment on how pretty the music is or try to ignore that high-pitched, clearly-not-English nonsense that’s mixed way too high above everything else. I’ve had similar reactions to Agnostic Front tapes.

This is the last thing by these guys I really dig. The one after this sounded like Animal Collective and the one after that was pretty middle of the road. This one sounds like what I imagine Weird Al sounds like if you run his songs through one of those programs that slows stuff down by 400%.

I keep wanting this one girl at school to hear this because I think she'd get it. She randomly says stuff like “My name’s Debbie, and there’s a party in my body,” and “Oh, the concerts! My mother will kiss me!” apropos of nothing. One time she drew a bunch of random letters on a toy chalkboard and when I asked her if it says that we’re best friends she turned around and said, “Uhhh, these aren’t words.”

Gary Burton - Who Is Gary Burton?

I have three little pieces of my life that have to do with mallet instruments.

1) The percussion/jazz professor during my two years as a music major was a dude named Joe Caploe. One time he told me about how he wanted to audition for Thin Lizzy and “really fuck them up, man.” He’s a monster behind a drumset but he absolutely kills it on the vibes. (The music ones, not the Teaches a Class On Sandal Tightenting At the Y and Doesn’t Tip When Ordering a Beer ones.) He told me that in the 70s he’d play four-mallet electric vibes with “like, forty ProCo Rat pedals hooked up to it,” which may be a bunch of bullshit, but is an awesome enough thing to think about that it doesn’t really matter.

2) Some drumline instructor I knew gave me a copy of Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians back when I was really into finding similar alternatives to doing drugs, like listening to Spine of God by Monster Magnet and falling asleep in public a lot. I don’t know if I’ve ever listened to the whole thing and I’ve been listening to it monthly for about a decade. I put it on and try to follow one of the pulses, but they all fade into each other so weird that my brain is like, “Hey, this is less like watching wrestling and more like doing math. I’m going to sleep.” Now I mostly listen to Reich’s Six Marimbas, which my girlfriend hates. She never did an album with Pat Methany, though, so I like her more than Reich by default.

3) I have no idea how I got this Gary Burton record, but I listen to it all the time, especially when the only other similar options at school are moozak versions of popular songs played from a Pandora station with ads off an iPad. Those nasty, soaring notes in “Sweet Child O’ Mine” as played on a marimba are only slightly more tolerable than listening to Axl sing them now. So, fuck it, put on Gary Burton.

Bill Evans Trio - Sunday at the Village Vanguard

I want to make fun of this for paving the way for completely ignorable, low-key lounge jazz that serious musicians play because it’s an inoffensive, far-less-exciting variation on the sort of thing they want to be doing but doesn't pay anything. My first instinct in trying to talk myself out of doing that was to argue that we shouldn’t blame Faith No More for nu metal being so terrible, but that actually makes a lot of sense.

Here’s how I explained it to a four-year-old recently. Let’s say you’re playing Kid’s First Memory Game and you get really good at it. You practice all the time and develop that part of your brain that remembers stuff. Sometimes you accidentally knock the tiles off the table, but it’s an accident. One day, your friends watch you play and are amazed. The next day, they all want to play Kid’s First Memory Game, but they’re kind of dumb and the only thing they remember you doing it knocking the tiles off the table, which is how they think the game is played. Nobody has any fun and I need to take a two hour nap when I get home. Fast forward twenty years and everyone but you has a goatee and a three word band name with the word “Fire” in it.

Morton Feldman - Rothko Chapel/Why Patterns?

I have a hard time explaining to parents that this isn’t one of those Spooky Halloween Sounds albums. It sounds more like an hour of film score during the Protagonist is Sneaking Around/Has The Mystery Of A Major Point Revealed To Them parts. Also, Morton Feldman looks like something Dan Clowes would draw.

It’s between Morrissey and Motley Crue on my iPod that I still can’t work the wheel on correctly, so most of the time I end up accidentally playing the opening to Dr. Feelgood or Bona Drag. I’d never play either one of those for kids because they both usually make sure the point in their lives where they shrug off falling asleep while crying into a dude’s crotch come far too early and far too often.

Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music For Airports

This kind of sounds like some asshole in a post-rock band hooking up all their pedals and making a “solo ambient project” YouTube video after practice got cancelled one day because one of their several band members who is a barista had to switch shifts last minute, but I still really like it. I put it on when I want the kids to go to sleep at naptime and also when I want them to realize that every molecule in the world will eventually expand to a point where everything they compose will become one all-encompassing, pulsing being.
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I'm not stoppin' til all my teeth are rotten . . .

12/25/2013

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"Coca Cola" by Pity Sex, from their debut EP Dark World. I'm working on a story about this song for WhiskeyPaper.

Has it really been four months already? Here's some shit.

1) The job I spoke about previously as being a possibility, barring background checks and whathaveyou, totally happened. Now I spend five days a week telling four-year-olds about wrestling and Ozzy.

1b) I acted like I only tolerated it at first, but it's really awesome. I wore an Anthrax shirt in my school pictures, because time won't change for me and vice-versa.

1c) My phone is a veritable cesspool of adorable pictures of kids helping me cook lunch. I'm worse than a grandmother.

2) I got the NUMBER ONE HIGH SCORE on the South Park pinball machine at the bar. Suck it, automated high scores that come pre-loaded onto the machine.

3) I've been watching a lot of wrestling. I realized there's a lot of stuff from right before the Attitude Era that I haven't seen all the way through. Here's to Survivor Series '96 and The Rock looking like a Ribbon Dancer tried to fuck a pineapple.

4) I started a band and joined another one, bringing the count to an unnecessary, over-committed FIVE BANDS.

4b) This is much less impressive when you consider that, much like other prolific songwriters--not that I'm really one of them--of previous and current times, I really only write three or four different kinds of songs. I just sort of change the nuances a bit to fit what I'm doing, because I'm a liar, essentially.

5) My friend Kylie and her friend Matt (who is kind of my friend, too, though I barely know him) made a documentary about me. It's just called Werner and it's about twelve minutes long, which is all it takes to sum up my life, including gag reel.

5b) It's actually a really well-made documentary, and Kylie and Matt did a great job. I was worried I'd look like I was too serious or too much of a joke, but she blended it well. Better than I do in my life, at least.

5c) It'll be available to watch online sometime in the near future once all the paperwork and red-tape of whatever goes along with these sorts of projects is cleared. They're film students and this was for a class, so I'm not sure exactly what needs to all happen. Other than CGI enhancements of my abs.

6) I saw Charles Bradley play a show in Madison and it was pretty incredible. I still need to see the documentary about him.

6b) I missed Lee Fields the month before, though. Only so much soul I can handle, apparently.

7) I downloaded Snapchat and don't understand it. Why wouldn't you just text someone? On the bright side, I wish all selfies had a built-in disappearing point.

8) My computer died. Just flat-out fucking ate shit. Luckily, I have most of my important stuff--music, wrestling, writing, porn--on an external hard drive. The stuff I deserve to get bummed about losing is some writing and pictures. Everything else was pirated. Even I'm not delusional enough to think I had a right to that.

8b) David Atkinson is a beautiful man with a heart of gold, and he hooked me up with a replacement right quick. Buy him cigarettes and coffee and build a statue of his out of a meat of your choice. Then feed it to a homeless person, because the world needs more people paying it forward.

9) I got a hat that says BOOB POLICE on it for Christmas. Happy birthday, Jesus.

10) I became an uncle. My brother and his girlfriend had a kid and named it Maddux, which is a cool name spelled in a fucking dickhead way.

10b) My brother spells his name "Nikolas" with no "c" in it, so whatever. Hereditary, I guess. I'm just glad I'm not "Ryen" or some shit.

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That's bad, right?

Writing-wise, I'm doing better than I was when I last checked in. I've written six stories since then and five of them have been picked up. The sixth one is a really bad retelling of a Kenny Loggins song about Winnie the Pooh that Matt Burnside suggested I write about for Cloud Rodeo, and I never submitted it because in addition to being mind-numbingly shitty, I lost it in the computer crash. If I need to find it, I'm sure it's in an e-mail or Facebook message, but I might just call this one a loss. (Sort of.)

Some of the stuff I wrote is already up. The surge in writing came from the Cease, Cows contest for Halloween. They had a 1000-word cap and a theme of "hallow/hallowed" that stories needed to fit into. One submission for $5, three submissions for $10. I wrote three stories and got an honorable mention with one. (And a Pushcart nomination!)

The winner of this batch according to Cease, Cows was the story "Atavism." I started writing this under the theme of "hollow" instead of "hallow" because I'm a goddamn idiot. I gave the woman empty bones and then, when I realized I was writing about the wrong word, just decided to keep that idea and work around it. So, a haunted house, some hollow bones, and the things people do when they're afraid.

Melanie thought that humans descended from birds. Back in the middle of her snap, she paid an old man strung out on heroin fifty bucks to read her past lives, to do a palm reading on the place where her hand was supposed to be but wasn’t. So he ran his finger down the scar that sealed the end of her arm up and then he told her that God created sparrows and some evolved into humans.

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The other new thing that went up already is the story "My Friend Wallace Eating a Candy Apple at the End of the World." I wrote this last for the contest, in a quick burst. It's the shortest thing I've written in a long while, maybe the shortest thing I've ever had published. As is the way with DOGZPLOT, it's under 200 words, so I'm not going to excerpt it. You've got time to click a link.

"My Friend Wallace Eating a Candy Apple at the End of the World"

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The non-story I got published recently is a review of my bro Dena Rash Guzman's debut poetry collection Life Cycle. It's a damn fine book made by a rough-neck that might also possibly be a red-neck. Part ghost and part glitter, part sweet and part bitter. (Not everyone gets the Macho Man Randy Savage-style intro, DRG.) Check it.

Guzman’s vision is true to itself, right down to the faults. This is proof that the book has been nurtured and then shot out, more creation than craft and goddamn all the better for it.

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I almost forgot that I had a story get published right after that last blog went up, the aforementioned "There Is No Joy between the Last Thing and the Next Thing" up at Jersey Devil Press. It's about friendship and trust and moving forward, always.

When they called on me to testify, I told them I didn’t know Eugene to have a history of violence. What I meant was that spent knuckles and a dozen years of broken glass don’t add up to bank statements or toe tags, but, there they are.

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You see, I used to have a bunch of rad photos saved to my computer and I'd just pop one in a spot like this as a little space break, something semi-related I could make a joke about. Thanks for nothing except leaving me with pictures of me being a fat fuck, computer crash.

The rest of the stories will be up in the months to come. "If There's Any Truth In a Northbound Train" was the second story written for the Cease, Cows contest and it'll be up at SmokeLong Quarterly in the spring. It's about twins and fate and what it means to be an older brother, if it means anything.

I also got solicited for a couple stories by Meg Tuite, one for the Sante Fe Literary Review and one for Connotation Press. SFLR will be publishing my story "Mexico," about sleep and reality and what happens when the amounts of each get thrown off together. Connotation nabbed up my story "Banzai Skydiving" about the difference between a lack of opportunity and a lack of skill. Both of these will be up fairly soon, if I understand it right.

The Indiana Review with my story "Shoot Out the Bright Lights" arrived in the mail the other day and it looks awesome. I've never been in a big journal like this, something with history and very slick production values.

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Also, I'm the first person to mention Krokus in the Indiana Review, as confirmed by the IR staff.

I can't really do a year-end book round-up because I didn't read shit this year. Or, to be more specific, I read a bunch of shit this year, but not a lot of it in book form. I spent a fair amount of time reading manuscripts for Passenger Side and reading stuff online trying to find stuff I loved to solicit for manuscripts, but as far as books go, I didn't have a lot of luck or time.

The two books I put out on PSB that weren't my book are my favorites. They had to be and have to be and are. Justin Lawrence Daugherty's Whatever Don't Drown Will Always Rise is brilliant, the biggest heart of the hardest warrior. Matthew Burnside's Infinity's Jukebox is really that: the tunes of a lifetime, every lifetime. (ORDER HERE!)

Aaron Teel's Shampoo Horns is my favorite book I had nothing to do with other than sitting down and reading it cover-to-cover. It's dirty and tender and says a lot about what it means to grow up with nothing more than yourself and the people around you.

I read Brian Allen Carr's Vampire Conditions, too, and really dug it. Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas did nothing for me. I didn't even finish it.

I don't know why I didn't read, other than time. I know my old job killed a lot of my creativity and ability to focus on creative endeavors. Maybe next year will be better. It kind of has to be, right?

I always forget that reading and writing go hand in hand, and in a year when I played a bunch of shows with a bunch of different bands and wrote a lot of music, some strange and some in the box, for several groups, I can name a list of a dozen killer records I spun over and over again. One feeds into the other, which doesn't make it less of a struggle to think of something to pull from the air, but it does make the air a bit thicker.

There's a stack of books I bought this year from a lot of great writers. Amber Sparks, Matt Bell, Jon Konrath, David Atkinson, Sam Snoek-Brown and on and on. I know they're all talented and enjoyable. This one's on me.

Hopefully I'll tune in sooner than every four months to this thing, but incase I don't, here are my new tour dates, reading in a city near you. (Maybe.) March 2014! NO COAST SPRING BREAK!

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Thursday, March 13: Rock Island, IL
Friday, March 14: St. Louis, MO
Saturday, March 15: Carbondale, IL
Sunday, March 16: Nashville, TN
Monday, March 17: Louisville, KY
Tuesday, March 18: Cincinnati, OH
Wednesday, March 19: Fort Wayne, IN
Thursday, March 20: Grand Rapids, MI
Friday, March 21: Chicago, IL
Saturday, March 22: Madison, WI

More info as it comes. Booking a DIY book tour without doing Universities and trying to avoid book stores and the (somewhat justified) 40% cut they take from sales is hard. I knew that going in, having booked the tour this previous summer, but I forgot how often writers don't leave their house and how many places don't have reading series. I've talked to a lot of cool, helpful people in booking this, but I've also hit a lot of odd, dead ends.

Regardless, I'll be in the car on March 13th and I'll be in these cities, doing my thing. Join me if you can.

Until then, party like you want it.

RW
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Criminal, there ought to be a whole lot more . . .

2/6/2013

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"If You Want Blood" by Mark Kozelek, because who the fuck knew there'd be so much pathos hidden right there in an AC/DC song?

It's been about a month. Here are some things that have happened since then.

1) I watched Summerslam 2005 and didn't cry when the giant electronic American flag unfurled behind Hulk Hogan during his entrance. This is a semi-major life-improvement.

2) I applied for a job stocking ice and beer at a casino. I didn't get it. Two weeks later they called me and asked if I want to work part-time checking coats.

2b) I told them to fuck off.

2c) What I actually did was just not call them back after they left a voicemail.

3) I searched for "Iowa" and "Wisconsin" on PornHub. There were a bunch of videos for Iowa and all the chicks looked pretty hot. There were like seven videos for Wisconsin and all the chicks looked like they were made of stale biscuits.

4) Several dumb old photos of me were uploaded to Facebook by other people, such as this one where I'm wearing an XL Pantera shirt and standing next to a cardboard cutout of Shaquille O'Neal and this one where I'm wearing a winged battle-suit I made out of Construx.

5) I locked my keys in my car twice, once behind the coffee shop and once a week later in front of the coffee shop. The same guy from Master Key came to my assistance both time. The first time he was wearing a pink mesh shirt underneath a button-up tank top and when he went into his trunk to get the tools he needed to get into my car, he had to first take out two huge chainsaws and set them on the ground.

6) I got ordained. I'm going to marry so many drunk people at the bar.


7) I met Mick Foley.

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I MET MICK FOLEY, DUDE.

I had some stuff get published recently. It seems like I used to be stoked for weeks after something got published and now I've had three things go up this past month and I'm already back to feeling like I haven't done anything. Writing is better than meth, but only because it doesn't ruin your teeth.

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In a rare showing, I was able to write and publish an essay. It's about Neko Case, and though everything I do is, on some level, about Neko Case, this is blatantly about Neko Case and how her album Middle Cyclone made me learn things about living in and around solitude, the extent to which I should love myself, and respecting fear as it arrives in all humans. It's up over at The Rumpus, and I'd love for you to read it.

"The year 2008 tumbled out of itself and took with it the things that consumed my days. Within a month I had lost my job to the upholding of liquor laws, my college education to an unavoidable graduation, and my girlfriend to youth and general apathy.


I spent a lot of time in bed, not depressed, but reading depressing things—Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems 1966-1987, William Matthews’s Search Party, Rick Bass’s In the Loyal Mountains—often out loud. I read Heaney in an impassioned Irish accent, Bass with a gruff-yet-kind tone of wonderment. I read Matthews sitting up, as if at a podium, addressing a faceless sum of the discontinued millions.

There were certain lengths I was willing to go to in order to not be myself."

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I also had a story called "Trace" that I've talked about here before on the subject of "revising old stuff I wrote and wondering if it's all just a big waste of my fucking time." This one turned out decent for being around so long and going through so many drafts. It's up over at 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, and it'd be really great of you to read it.

"My grandmother spent her last several thousand mornings highlighting the obituaries."

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Lastly, the fourth story in my chapbook/cycle Murmuration is out there in the world now. I'm happy with how this one turned out and, like most of my stuff, it ties in with another story: The Honeybreakers are the band that had dissolved and reassembled in my story "Sometimes We Were Young." Here we find them merely dissolving, as seen through the eyes of our faithful narrator. Please read it over at Bartleby Snopes.

"Revising my dreams into the necessary shapes involved going out to the van every night and playing guitar in the street. I waited until after the show, after everyone had locked into the distractions that would take them through to morning. I would strap on whichever guitar I grabbed first and commence to shredding first against the van and then eventually to the center of the street. This was a small reassurance that my life would eventually resolve itself if attacked from compromising angles."

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The chance of me or my buddy Josh actually learning German: 0%

I've spent so much time playing music that I haven't really had time to sit down and write anything. This isn't really a very good excuse. "Write every day" is kind of the only semi-infallible writing advice out there, and I'm totally blowing it. If this new country-rock project gets off the ground, I'll be in a total four bands in addition to working 40+ hours between two jobs. My options in life turned out to be "one band that does a lot" or "four bands that don't do much." Regardless, none of these bands are getting me laid, so it doesn't really matter.

I'm also going on a micro-tour with the Oakland-based rock & roll band Victory and Associates as a hired gun to replace their real lead guitarist who can't make it because he has a real job, unlike us. My band Legal Fingers played with them back in October and we hit it off and I've been on their podcast not once, but twice, and now we're going to christen our union by piling into a van and making it smell bad for about a week. I've spent the last month learning how to play a dozen or so of their songs and in less than a week I've got to prove that I won't fuck it up. For those not in the know, this is what volume was invented for.

Well, and this.

But still, I haven't had time to write anything because when I'm not at a band practice I'm making a flier for a show or I'm being a fucking dickhead on Twitter or I'm watching The Family Feud at the coffee shop. Murmuration has been done for months now, which means I've been slacking on finishing the wrestling-themed chapbook. One story called "A Comprehensive List of the Least Worst Way To Do Everything" is done and making the rejection rounds, but "Waiting for Andre"--the story about a rich man with a bone disease who learns about and becomes obsessed with the anecdote of Samuel Beckett giving Andre the Giant rides to school--is stuck in revision hell. I've just finally got a decent grip on it after weeks of picking at it here and there, but it's still not close. The title story, "The Road Becomes What You Leave," exists only in the form of an aborted story from years ago. If I finish this book before the end of the year, I'd be surprised.

And I'm working on a novella, but the truth is that I'm not working on it nearly as hard as I'm working on my tweets, which is fucked up.

I hope I have something to show the next time I check in, but I'll probably just have more stories about how drunk girls in bars yell at me and then later on get my phone number and pretend to be Stoya. Mario Kolaric is doing the artwork for my chapbook and Matt Kish is doing the artwork for Justin Lawrence Daugherty's chapbook that I'm putting out through Passenger Side Books. So there's that. But still, I can't take credit for that. All I did was send some e-mails. I did that to Christina Hendricks and NOTHING.

That's it for now. Be wonderful.

RW
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    Ryan Werner
    (About Stuff)
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    Writer, rocker, janitor. Lover of pro wrestling, porno, and ice cream. Hater of fingerless gloves, pictures of cats, and goodbyes. 

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