Funny how ‘analysis’ is right next to ‘anarchy’ in the dictionary.

I’ve been thinking about it, and I guess I may have reached the conclusion that all those crop circles out there were created by Scientologists. It just seems like the sneaky sort of thing they would do.

Please, fold my beliefs wholesale into yourself without question and save us all a little teeth-gritting and cold sweat on the back end.

I think about how –in a short ten or fifteen years– that people in even tamish sorts of hamlets will have to lock their cars up at night and never, ever forget to set the deadbolt, even during waking hours.

I mean, I still see the beauty, but more and more I feel a creeping sense of dread clawing for purchase square between my shoulderblades.

I used to talk at length with this dreadlocked boy from Winter Haven Florididia by the name of Kelvin. Given my annoying propensity to give everyone I give a damn about a smarmy nickname, I’d call him Kornflake or Kornelius. He was the biggest effortless genius about chord structure and patterns in music I’ve ever come across. He wore coveralls all day and, ironically enough, moved pianos for a living. He’d bitch to me about the fat ladies who required their instruments be grunted up to a second-floor enclave only so they could play trite hunt-and-peck melodies when the urge struck them. He was ate up by this, by their self-indulgence and lack of disciplined reverence, in the way it irks me to see a house abandoned and falling in on itself.

“Somewhere there is somebody who would love and appreciate and care for that if only given the opportunity. Why is it going to waste??”

If foliage is overtaking the house from the inside, something goes a little screamy and nutso deep inside of me.

Certain things grab hold of me and won’t shake loose. For instance, I am terrorized by mathematics, but numbers and patterns enthrall me. There are constant number games in my head throughout the day, but it’s frustrating because they require more effort from me than most.

Places like this are sweetly nifty to me.

Funny, I see all these people bemoaning the fact that myspace is so damn clunky and inelegant, but there are scores and score signed up…including the complainers.

Oh God, hahaha. (NOTE: Favorite lines are “Spain. Spain.” and “I will shoot you so hard you will shit a gun.”)

Every time I meet a kid who has been given a stripper’s name by their foolish-assed parents, I want to run out and buy said child some spangledy g-strings and pay for their pole lessons. I recently made the acquaintance of a girl named Ember. EMBER, FOR CHRISSAKES. Surely her mother knew the fate she was consigning her to, didn’t she? This angers me irrationaly.

Recently someone I know had the privilege of entry into one of the most extensive, exclusive, valuable guitar/banjo/mandolin collections known to man. Given the choice between picking up and playing one of Johnny Cash’s guitars or one of Jerry Garcia’s, the latter was the option of choice. I scream to the gods in agony, “Why, whyyyyyyy?”

I bought this hand-carved artisan mug recently. It’s black, mostly, with some ivory thrown in. It’s carved in woodblock printing fashion, with raised letters that say even if the world was to End tomorrow i would still plant a Tree today. Metaphorically it says everything about me anyone could ever need to know: I intend to live and mean it until the very damn end. That’s probably why I spent too damned much on the thing. Should anyone ever ask me to sum myself up in a sentence, I will waggle the mug at them and scowl. The mug will be filled with Mountain Dew; the scowl will be filled with heart.

I am nearing the third anniversary of (one of) my best friends’ (EV. ER.) death. I am also nearing a point where I can open a vein and write about her grimly and buoyantly and honestly. This is important. Like, in a big way.

My mom was a telephone operator for a while before I was born, all through her pregnancy with me, and a decent ways beyond. By the time I was five or six, I was playing on the country partylines out at my grandmother’s very rural home; by the time I was eight I was tearing down handsets –then bases– and reconfiguring their guts, fascinated.

I guess I like pretty things and gritty things equally. Gritty Pretty Things is in reserve as the moniker for yet another of my projects. Please do feel free to guess away in the commentses.

I don’t tend to dwell on the past overmuch, but I do miss those Southern summers I meted out in sweat and peas shucked and toedips in Storm Creek. My cousins would try to terrify me with tales of giant snapping turtles that would grab you and only let go if it came a sudden summer lightning wash. They told one that actually did (scarify me royally, that is): Seems there was an elderly gentleman who got snagged up by his left nipple and writhed in his fishing boat in agony; God saw fit to bless him with an electrical storm only two hours into his lonely, horrifying ordeal. Even at the age of five, I knew how to calculate all the negatives: Alone. Distress. Injury. Desperation. Salvation (in the form of lightning strikes) was potentially deadly, as the man was placed in a metal boat. On the water. Surely this was the stuff of damnation. All of these things occurred to my young mind as grim practicalities. I stayed out of the reeds. I watched for the fucking turtles. One could never tell.

I called bullshit on the ‘no-swimming-until-thirty-minutes-after-eating’ rule actively, loudly and often. Because, bullshit.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, was one of those braindump entries you hear so dang much about. Guess I’m about done. Kind of like trying to drink a milkshake out of a sweatsock on a bumpy country road, innit?