It’s been quite a weird day probably not helped by whatever residual toxins were kicking around in my body from the night before. It started out waking up to this video from 1999 featuring Alec Empire, Hanin Elias, Carl Crack, and Nic Endo inciting some pure dystopian science fact. I don’t know how to feel about it. Maybe its because I’ve been sitting around with old ladies drinking coffee and talking about the ins and outs of nursing homes all day.

It did make me pull out a copy of Alec’s solo record from 95 entitled “Low on Ice” which has far less to do with politics and more so geography. The cover depicting a winter wolf in the Iceland tundra is taken from numerous pieces of video footage presumably on tour. It’s an album I’d almost forgotten about which is happening a lot lately. I keep rediscovering bits and pieces of the past. It’s a strange sensation for someone that loathes nostalgia. To me it all reeks of mortality and death and especially at this time of year, there is way too much to remind me of such things.

Black Wednesday doesn’t help. When I refer to it as the douchiest time of year, I don’t use the phrase lightly. It’s a time to be called bro by complete strangers awkwardly commenting on your choice of clothing. And it’s a statuesque stance in the middle of decidedly modern club mashed with semi urban elite that can’t be bothered to dress the fuck down. Where you will wait for a drink for what seems like an eternity only to be greeted by piss warm PBR and a general lack of hospitality? And where you will often be reminded why it may not be a good idea for your mental health to ever leave the house again.

It is this weekend in particular where I think I’ve lost most of my faith in humanity. Countless stories of consumer trampling for the latest flat screen TV flecked with cancerous enamel. Half dead corpses lay on the kitchen island with asses stuffed with delightful pieces of wonder bread and gizzards. Ok, I admit I have developed quite an aversion to most normal things. A peculiarity that exists somewhat outside the field of normal vision. I’m going somewhat senile myself I’d gather entranced by the stirring of gravy by an eighty year old woman; the paradox in the beauty of which is astounding.

As she scraped that pan meticulously as if her life depended on it, I could hear the scrape from across the room. It wasn’t a particularly annoying or grating sound. It was the sound of contentment and of purpose. She had been given a duty to perform and that performance was of penultimate importance. There was uniqueness to the process masked in psychosis and existential blight. It was in that fucking scraping of the spoon that I felt like I heard a little bit of infinity.

Its important to note that any day after smoking anything with nicotine in it is detrimental to my holiday spirit. A day after that includes heavy drinking, nonsensical brospeak, and interaction with any population looking to get laid, tossed, or melted in any anti karmic capacity is infinitely more so. So my ears at this point are heavy with pollution. I’m ready to go off the rails and some might say I already have. How else can you deal with an hour long conversation about diarrhea, failed nursing home community meetings, and Linda Yu’s crazy ass frosted hair staring back at you from behind a blue screen?

Its in these moments of desperation you might say that I’ve been blessed with seeing it all for what its really worth. I don’t live the particularly easy life by all accounts. As charmed as one might think it all may be, it’s no more or no less to me than any one else’s. If you measure it against some standard of fascism, one might be pressed to look onward in disgust. The value of which I put on specific objects as currency is most definitely skewed. And some might argue its slack driven in nature.

We all know what my calling has become to put it bluntly. Or at least if you don’t, I’ve decided I do. You interpretation of it may vary. On the most visceral level it probably looks like an intentional form of subversion. I’m no Alec Empire standing on the roof of a moving truck inciting people to turn over cars in the name of anarchism. Neither is an elderly woman stirring fatty juices in a rectangular pan for ten minutes, hellbent on getting the consistency just right. I’m not a yarn activist and I’m not some super party promoter. I’m not even that good of an emcee to be completely honest with you at least by the very definition of whats relevant in music today.

What I do know is that I’m here from day to day. The alternative of which would be to not be here, whereever the fuck that might be. Evidently, the afterlife has little or nothing to do with stirring gravy or the aged wouldn’t be too concerned with getting their fair share of said activity in at the technical end of their lifespan. It’s the sound of life. The scraping of the pan or the scream that questions the natural state of things. Both are equally banal when you put it right down on paper depending on the editing and context. But both are loud enough to draw your attention from whatever haze you are stuck in.

And you ask the question… why or how is it that this person is living as opposed to not?

When I ask about the gravy, I don’t get a bullshit answer. Even my attempts at awkward humor are replied by pure trancelike precision. I don’t interject my bullshit politics into it. I don’t pollute the moment. This is how this life exists. A portrait and still life in circular motion like some animatronics narco daze putting on a show at the kiddie pizzeria.

And it resonates. It breaks through the tired, rehearsed platitudes and greetings to just get fucking real. It’s an alien concept that can’t be measured against commonality. Its not whats going on in your peer group. Its not pasted on a billboard in validation and stamped with a government endorsed value. Its not a pre approved credit score or status symbol laced with graphic design and market wizardry. It’s simply an affirmation of the elephant in the room.

That everything is fucking fleeting and the moment isn’t now. It was yesterday and its over. And I just ask myself a question. What do I do to become less a memory and more a ghost? Stirring around in the ether like a spoon off the rails on the proverbial gravy train.

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