I find myself these days huddled in an oversized windbreaker most nights listening to Sparks, swaddled in synthetics and impossible angles. Its the angles and the hues that do it for me, not to belittle the sounds of the mid seventies LA glam project founded by Ron and Russell Mael. That goes without saying. Amidst the experimental basement tapes, shitty yacht rock vinyl, and endless recursions of satanic black metal, I find myself most at ease in a knit cap, the post ironic equivalent of a smoking jacket and the heat turned completely off in a cavernous converted warehouse space with two windows. One of those windows covered with MRI’s of embolisms. I still don’t know if thats legal or not and I’m not referring to fire code.

I sit with a book in front of me by Susan Neiman entitled “Evil in Modern Thought” that I intend to read one day, I swear. It’s fittingly bound in black and without a jacket, presumably kept by someone more affected by the graphic design of the award winning bestseller than the actual content. I find the Helvetica title in full on capitals to be very ironic when viewed upside down. It almost makes it worth the space it takes up on my kitchen island. It almost speaks like every randomly placed bit of discarded trash in my fully repurposed and reclaimed place of rest. It’s so rather obvious to me almost as matter of fact as the medical illustration of cancer that litters my left forearm permanently.

It doesn’t quite make me laugh more so smirk ever so slightly. It’s more a sense of amusement than anything. Bitter amusement, mind you. Which I might argue the most brilliant comedians are also the most luridly sadistic or masochistic. I can’t say I lean either way. I am at my heart a nihilist. Not for the sake of destruction in some comical iconic way like pentagrams, candles and black magic. I have become something far worse.

A friend and I had spoken at length about a project involved the iconic reappropriation of the African medallion; as key and powerful to our youth as a medieval electric chair, whether inverted or impaled with the body of Christ. Swung around the neck were power, ideology, and recursive though justified hatred. It fueled a decade of noise and perversion. Our idea was quite simple; to sample the form but subvert it by modifying the shapes and the geometry much like an acid trip. Pretty angles talking loud but saying absolutely nothing. As Louis Malle put it in his pinnacle work ‘Black Moon’ – “the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.”

I spent most of my life appearing as if I was useful. That objects, relationships, and crafts had a purposeful growth to them. And this is not to say that they do not or won’t still. It is to say that the scope of years and the wind that blows destroys most of everything that anyone tries to build up. Litanies and ideologies ultimately are eaten, excreted, and sunk into the mossy floor that is trampled underfoot. Some resign themselves to the old ways. Most do actually and end up compost, used up and provided as nutrients for a number of predators. Skeletons remain, mostly to wither away for a while longer like the last survivor of Hiroshima as his breath passes in the promise of another spring breeze.

My dad usually uses this phrase consistently “this too shall pass.” Huddle in your windbreaker and hope the storm passes. Drink enough PBR and listen to enough obscure records and eventually you’ll be near a beach somewhere, sipping boat drinks and listening to Kenny Loggins with your friends. A promise of warm brunch and the bloodiest of Mary’s, ready to absolve whatever Catholic guilt still exists in this neopagan world.

It all mostly disintegrates. And the trick is to revel in the loss. Because the only eternity that really exists is in your own crafted memory. How you recreated the events that came to pass in your mind. And how you restructured it all to make sense. How it came to be that this black and purple and blue puma windbreaker softens the blows. How every turn of the head speaks a story of objects selected seemingly subconsciously in passing. How if pulling back from the frame and the engine that renders whatever environment that lies before reveals the code. The simple and sad poetry of the matter.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. There is something infinitely beautiful in the bare existence that remains. Its chaos unattributed to any defined movement, genre, or revolution. Any attempt to explain it away leads off into broken arcs and circles like wafts of cigarette smoke in a lazy conversation over too many shots of whiskey. It becomes inconsequential and subject to the harsh wind chill of both my Viking ancestry and my current resting place.

The cold speaks to you with bare rabid teeth like a starving wolf on the tundra. Stripped down to the essentials and face pressed against the glass that separate life from death, you begin to see things. And you begin to see ultimately a choice exploding from the cracked fabric, splintering out from chaos.

The saddest part of that choice is devoid of all rules and restrictions, you continue to cradle your own self-respect in the post irony of nineties sportswear. In the face of the apocalypse, it’s all you have. In the wake of whatever zombie outbreak, toxic holocaust, or meteor impact, no one will know and no one will care. No one ever thinks of the sins of the dinosaurs. And still you hold on to principles as useless as they are.

I’d like to think there’s still a beauty in that, maybe.