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21.5.02
It's Tragic...
...how easily it is to succumb to flattery. Hound's Home, usually one of my favourite strips, linked to this one because they dropped a character in one of their strips (a much-used Man-Man trick), but...ugh.
NP: Saint-Germain du Près-Café compilation
Matt Shepherd 21.5.02
17.5.02
The FBI Files on "Mad" Magazine.
Now THAT'S worth checking out.
Continuing the story started below...
Heinrich told me that the dead talked to him, but I refused to believe it. It was too predicable -- he was a friend, true, but he was also an emotionally-scarred grave digger who refused all forms of mechanical assistance in his gravedigging efforts. He spent an unhealthy amount of time near dead people, and having him tell me that they told him stories was a little too close to the part where he shows up in my bedroom at 3 a.m. with nothing but a shovel and a grin and tells me that the voices have issued him a special set of commands.
I mean, why encourage that sort of thing, right?
He kept insisting, though, kept blathering on about how the spirits would put words in his ear on those cold, lonely nights; always the cold dry ones, the ones where every exhale made a puff on the wind and a deep breath made your lungs crackle. He'd go on and on about it, and finally, I lost my patience. I'd had enough. Let's have a story, I said. Let's hear one of the stories the dead have told you.
So he told me.
I believed, six hours later, that Heinrich had been communicating with the dead, that they'd somehow hauled themselves out of the cold, cold ground and whispered leaf-dry words into his cauliflower ear. Heinrich could not have made his story up.
He had far too much imagination.
The dead, you see, are boring as hell. Heinrich kept me in my chair for hours and hours in the desperate anticipation that something in these miserable lives might be worth recounting, but it wasn't -- an endless litany of regrets and missed opportunities, a plodding recital of things that these pathetic losers should have done. "I should have kissed Mary Sue Becker on the tilt-a-whirl." "I should have taken the money." "I should have eaten another donut." The dead have seemlingly perfect recollections of every miniscule mistake they ever made, and repeat them endlessly. "I should have bought the Nova." "I should have turned left." "I should have taken the other way to work." And not just life-altering moments. Decisions that led to their deaths take no priority with the dead; just another footnote in the monolith of futile and desperate lives, grasping at Heinrich as the only possible audience in the world for their eternal and ceaseless carping.
I hated it. Not just because it was boring, but because it was so petty.
Years and years ago, I went to an insane asylum. I was walking down the street and saw a sign by the sanitorium gate: OPEN HOUSE TODAY. I'd never been to an insane asylum. I decided to check it out. I spent a couple of hours being given a tour of the place, seeing various rooms, the rec room, the gardens, and I even got to see a play being put on by some of the inmates. It had something to do with abuse, I can't really remember. It wasn't a very good play. I also slipped away from my tour group and spent a bit of time wandering around on my own, looking for all that medieval insane asylum equipment you see in the movies. I didn't find any, but I met a lot of crazy people. And it was one of the most profound disappointments of my life, meeting all these crazy people. I'd been raised on comic books, you see. I'd seen "Silence of the Lambs" and "The Fisher King" and countless B-movies where the villains were deliberately, divinely mad. Here, though, in the insane asylum, they were all shufflers, heads hanging and bobbing as they stared at their feet. Few spoke, and the few that did were either incoherent, or childlike, or pathetically friendly, like a kitten you've locked in a box for three days. It was a horrid experience, and I left not only feeling reduced as a human being, but shattered in my view of insanity. I'd always imagined it, fed by comics and films and TV and books, to be sort of a magical window to a superior reality, but these people were just lost and confused and frightened. Scared to death. There was no greatness to insanity, just people soiling themselves and bumping into walls. It was devastating. It felt like something precious had just been ripped out of me.
And that's the way I felt when Heinrich told me their stories, the stories of the dead. They shouldn't be that boring, that petty, that scrapingly mundane. There should have been greatness to them, some sort of majesty seeping through from the other side; some sort of "magic window to superior reality."
When he was done, Heinrich looked up at me expectantly. "That's just the beginning," he whispered, his voice aching to say more, to unburden himself of the litany of pathos that had been sunk into him every dead-black night of his adult life. I wanted to hit him for sharing what he had, to say nothing of what he wanted to share. Instead I just got up, shook his hand, said "that was the most stultifying six fucking hours of my entire goddamned life, and you can tell the dead I said so," and walked out the door.
I went home that night, and tried out impassioned frustration in the mirror for a full hour. I thought about what I would whisper, in the night, when I was dead, to anyone who would listen. What would I whine on about, my voice being mingled with millions of others, forming the midnight wind of infinite regret?
"Spending six hours listening to goddamn Heinrich," I decided. Then I went to bed.
Matt Shepherd 17.5.02
15.5.02
I've been trying for about six days straight, and I just can't goddamn feign bemused indifference.
Let's get a few things squared away here, first. When I say "six days straight," I don't mean I've been hanging out in the bathroom in front of the mirror all day squinting and screwing my damn face up. I'm not a weirdo. An hour a day, tops, spread out over like twenty minutes morning, twenty minutes when I get home and twenty minutes before bed. And when I say I can't feign bemused indifference, don't think I can't feign bemused or indifference, 'cause I can do both just fine. It's just the combination of the two always screws me up, and I wind up with scorned pride. Don't ask me how. Scorned pride every time. I've tried the lateral approach, too, a little side-shuffle over from condescending tolerance, but that just leaves me with smug tolerance which is totally, totally wrong.
Heinrich, this guy I went to school with, is the last gravedigger in the country; the last traditional gravedigger. It's all backhoes and augers and pneumatic shit these days, but Heinrich gets out there with a six-foot spade and digs 'till the splinters stick out of his palms like a porcupine handshake. He says people appreciate it, too. Not the living, 'cause they don't notice shit except for chrome and tits, he says, but the dead, they know the value of a hard-dug grave. They crave the sweat and the blood, down there in the hole, and knowing that a man grunted and cursed his way through a root, and pissed in the hole, and buried a little bit of himself down there -- that means something to the dead. That means a lot.
I asked him once if it was a little creepy, working in a graveyard, and Heinrich told me this story about when he was a little kid; being left with his grandmother for the long weekend while his parents were away. His grandmother -- Judith -- was a kind woman, stooped and fat, with sour breath, Heinrich said, always sour like she'd been eating pickes or olives six or seven hours before. Judith had had Heinrich's mother very late in life, so she was old -- into her seventies -- when Heinrich was only five, a fat seventy-something-year-old woman with sour breath, a pleasant demeanour, and a surprisingly vibrant social life. The phone was always ringing at Judith's, and all of the calls were very important to her, from her worldwide network of friends, from her neighbours, from her bridge partners -- all very important, very special, very precious. She could spend hours on the phone, and did, and even had a special headset, this was years before headsets were common, even had a special headset made so she could talk while making beans, or rice, or mounds and mounds of stinking wet steaming sourkraut. And Heinrich's parents were going to leave him with Judith, this nice grandmother that somehow scared the hell out of him, you know how kids are, and all the way there he scratched at the back of the front seat and whimpered "don't make me go, don't make me go," but they did, and she gave him a sour kiss at the door and pulled him inside, and as she shut the door behind him Heinrich had only one thought, only one thought in his five-year-old mind, and that thought was "I am doomed."
I don't want to give you the idea that I feign human expressions because I'm emotionally cold myself. I'm not. My friends and social acquaintances universally agree that I have a vivacious and dynamic personality, that I am a good listener, that I am empathic and compassionate and resonate with true human passion. I just find it...difficult...to make certain human expressions. Expressions that others find common, I can't seem to convey. When I get extremely angry -- apoplectically angry, aneurism angry -- I am told that I look extremely amused, tickled, like somebody has just whispered a joke in my ear, a joke so funny I have turned as red as a red beet. I can't control it. I don't know what it means. It just happens.
So I try to fill in these expression-gaps in the mirror, so that next time I'm at a party and somebody expresses an opinion I find personally distasteful, I can look intellectually aloof. I can summon up the appropriate expression for the moment, and not worry about my face running amok all over the party.
That's why I practice my expressions, thrice daily. I want to master them all, control my face, take advice and give advice and leave advice while arranging my face as that of someone...who knows.
Shortly after Heinrich's parents left, his grandmother dropped dead into a giant pot of sourkraut while talking on the phone. She stopped in mid-sentence, said "urk," and pitched forward, taking with her the only phone receiver into the house. Heinrich, from his seat at the kitchen table, watched her melon-shaped head sink deeper and deeper into the sourkraut until leg muscles gave out and the weight of her body pulled both her and the sourkraut pot down onto the floor. Heinrich didn't know what to do. The cord of the only phone in the house had been ripped from its base by Judith's untimely collapse, and the phone was, with her head, neck-deep in a giant pot of sourkraut. Heinrich screamed until he was hoarse, but the house was isolated; the doors were locked and he was not strong enough to turn the deadbolts, and try as he might, he could not bring himself to break a window, being a very respectful and law abiding five-year-old.
Heinrich stayed with his dead grandmother in that house for the entire long weekend, four days, sleeping curled up next to her cold body on the kitchen floor; feeding, when necessary, on the sourkraut spilling from the pot that her head was in, now congealed such that the waxy dead flesh of the neck seemed to flow seamlessly into the sourkraut itself. His parents eventually arrived, broke the door down, and rescued Heinrich, but not before he had polished off the sourkraut, which due to its warmth and acidity had begun to disintegrate Judith's actual head.
His accidental descent into cannibalism, Heinrich said, at the age of five while spending a long weekend with his fat dead grandmother, meant that not much that went on the graveyard was "creepy."
I agreed, and tried to show him my sympathetic unnervedness. Apparently, however, it came off as incredulous fear. Yet another one to work on, I suppose.
NP: Medeski Martin and Wood, "Tonic"
Matt Shepherd 15.5.02
14.5.02
THE OFFICIAL TOURNIQUET SITE
So I got the "tourniquet" thing below a little wrong, and for some weird-ass reason blogspot is putting the blogspot addy in front of it, too.
Plus, it takes a bit of finding to get to what I talk about below...you have to enter the site, go to their FAQ, and then click on the first question. Then you get the weirdest-assed Jesus Heals The Bloody Arm animation, well, ever.
Matt Shepherd 14.5.02
13.5.02
Jesus, Friend of Heavy Metal, be a Friend to Me...
Okay, so I was looking for this cool comic strip I found online and found this instead...Tourniquet, a CHORD-CRUNCHING HEAVY METAL MASSACRE, or so I thought. I was all set to Blog it, but wanted to find a page of bombastic Heavy Metal Talk about how Fucking Kickass Tourniquet Is.
Instead, as the answer to the first question in the FAQ, I am told that...
TOURNIQUET: surgical device for arresting hemorrhage by compression of a blood vessel. Spiritual process by which the living Triune God can begin to stop the senseless flow of going through life without knowing and serving our Creator.
Followed by a cross shedding a beam of light on a heavily-bleeding severed arm, at which point MAGICAL FUCKING BANDAGES APPEAR AND STOP THE BLEEDING, FOLLOWED BY THE TEXT
"He is our Tourniquet."
I think I just found my next tattoo, gang. YOU MUST CHECK THIS OUT. The Christian power of Tourniquet commands you!
NP: Yo La Tengo, I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One
Matt Shepherd 13.5.02
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