Loudness.

One of the bigger problems with the speed of which things transpire in the urbane is the lack of time for quality reflection. There isn’t much connection made of experiences when you are stuck in micro blog mode or facebook trolling of which both I’m a repeat offender. What opinions that evokes in people matters and doesn’t matter with the shifting of lunar pulls on the tide. There always comes a time to return to these dusty confines of the internet and ramble. And what better time than utterly depleted of energy or will to socialize.

I’ve been in hyper mode to the point where nervous ticks and paranoia are being ironed out into elaborate rituals. The idea of accelerating to a pace until it becomes a natural momentum is both frightening and exciting. There’s a bit of adrenaline that slams into your system when events are left to happen in a random order. Your schedule is your own and your bike takes you where you want to go. You go to sleep when you need to. You wake up when duty calls and you operate at half mast, full time.

You rise from the depths of a restless sleep with the ghosts of previous days dragging chains across the kitchen floor. Echoes of words and phrases spill out your mouth in a sort of hazy aphasia as you robotically perform the trivial. Its a rich hallucination of sounds, rhythms, and cadences that beat against your temples as you struggle through the nausea.

Does it get old? It depends on how you look at it. Do I wish things were different? Yes and no. I fear sometimes that I’ve passed one too many forks. That I’ve circuit bent my core existence so much that any chance at recovery into a normal, peaceful lifestyle would be impossible. That whatever genre specific or subcultural archetypes I draw and steal from are so varied that its a near loss for anyone to meet your duplicate. That a peer group consisting of people like you would cause the space time fabric to undulate upon itself and poof out into the rabbit hole leading to bizarro world.

As I sat at the bar in a little hole in the wall on the south side listening to the most diversely twisted selection of discarded music ever, it was mentioned that maybe I had spent one too many years in art school. That my strange obsessions have grown over the years. That my constant thirst for eccentric blingery has led to some mutant Shadowrun. That the old ways of throwing names of things you haven’t heard of around have evolved into some sort of neo evangelism. Its a desperate attempt at synergy. To understand the very nature of Chaosmosis and act as an agent for it. To keep things ultimately hetereogenous and to push things forward and backward if need be.

Blame my Dad’s father; son of a Swedish Immigrant who was in turn the son of a tall and wiry shoemaker we refer to as Grandpa Malm. Arnold Olson was a fiery orator who spent a fair amount of time preaching in churchs in San Francisco before relocating to Logan Square during the height of the conversion of its cultural makeup. He ministered to mostly African American parishioners and was lauded for his particularly passionate and quite loud method of spreading what he considered gospel.

He convinced people unflinchingly that he was the genuine article. How he did that is beyond me especially when the subject matter was such tripe in my pagan eyes. But he had that quality in his voice, one that when passion wavered into anger was quite fucking scary to witness. But deep down his drive was to communicate and to spread his perspective. When he couldn’t do that, it must have dipped into other outlets. THe business of projection couldn’t be separated or edited. It ultimately consumed him, leading him to let the passion steer him clear off the road one day.

What didn’t kill him left him incapacitated in a nursing home, ultimately falling victim to a stroke that left him in a time warp. I remember those days well. Not out of any love for the man. Its too complicated of a story to impart in a blog. But out of personal dynamics I couldn’t quite understand, the man and my mother hated each other with a passion. And a choosing of sides in the prepubescent mind had reached its end game.

The why’s and the how’s had to do with my father. No matter how contrasted we both were as people even at an early age, there was always a deep and mutual respect that existed. I remember vividly going to the assisted care on my own accord. I remember sitting there watching him twitch as he attempted to converse with a living phantasm. I remember the thoughts shifting in and out of timelines, lucidity and amnesia firing off as neurons sparked and flamed. I could imagine the smell of burnt smoke or diesel fumes coming from a rusty breadboard or ancient carburetor.

And all three of us sitting there, humble in our own way, trying to commune in a natural way. One devoid of definitions or standards. Real humanity. Egos bludgeoned by the brutality of daily existence. Hard lessons doled out with an iron fist; him speaking more decibels in his disheveled state to us than he could ever speak to any congregation. A living, breathing work of art, acted upon by time, space, and chance. A sigil posted as another warning, crafted in a runic bent while we laid the torch on the pyre that day.

Its incidentally the last memory I have of him, sitting in that chair. My grandpa Elich’s death in the hospital is drastically different and deserves much more verbosity than I’m sure myself and whoever is reading this is able to parse. But in the end, Arnold Olson was a victim of his own strengths… his passion for life. The same lust that killed my dad’s brother on his bicycle, incidentally.

What do you do? Live in fear? Wonder if the same thing is going to act upon yourself? Hide yourself in a deep, dark corner of the world and write words and phrases unto yourself to keep you company. Throw the lever in the opposite direction and live recklessly waiting to be consumed in the ultimate act of immolation.

You do neither.

A friend of mine recently had an animal of theirs have a stroke. In the current state, the over twenty year old feline is still unconscious in a coma after the vet visit. The whole incident has traumatized my friend into admitted that she never wants to own an animal again.

Another friend of mine had their heart crushed. And when I say crushed, its all relative. I’m the first to admit that the gravity of romantic damage is all within the details. He’s given up on the whole concept altogether, instead drowning in a vat of generic trysts.

Everyone thinks they can control the future… correct the mistakes from the past. Cheat death. Live forever. Rave out. Never grow old and never die, on some Wilfred Brimley shit. They can get married, have some children, and take comfort in the predefined cycle. Or they fall so far left on the dial that they believe its all a sham and drown themselves nightly in some mind wiping… hoping to forget that Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore.

I’m trying to give up on both of those. I’m trying to learn to track stand at the stop lights. Both following the rules and breaking them at the same time. Its harder than it looks. Most of the time I fail. And believe me I’ve wiped the fuck out hardcore.

But when the weather is easy… and the time is right… and all the necessary groundwork and foundations have been laid.

I promise you it gets easier. The peaks and the valleys in the mix smooth out. The ebbs and the flows aren’t as drastic. And you come to expect that this bullshit about the compression war is all a result of lazy eq’ing.

You can live loud in balance.

Or at least I’d like to continue to kid myself that I can for just a little while longer.