If The Forecast Calls For More Of This I'll Be Spending My Summer Drunk And Pissed...

I am momentarily trying to collect my thoughts, so bear with me for these first few lines...


It seems like the days run together like runny eggs and I can't really separate anything anymore. Stimulation; the kind that's good for you, anyways, has been scarce, to say the least. The only light from being here thus far is from one or two good souls who have rejuvinated my love and need and affirmated faith in the need and want of music.

I am trying to rectify myself. I am trying to lick the self-inflicted wounds of the werewolf-like murdering bad atitude towards myself and my surroundings. I am trying to inflict some change. It's hard, you know. And then, even then I wonder if I'm just being selfish with all the "me's" and "I's" and what not. I mean, it is my blog, but who who want to read MY take on MY feelings and MY opinions of MYSELF? "What a narcissistic prick," you would say. I don't blame you. Whatever little readers I once had in the beginning have probably faded to the two or three I began with. I guess that's not what is important, really. This is, in base and simple form, another way of journaling, in a different form. Still, you have to cater to the idea of an outside audience. So I am at a stop, folks. The curtains aren't opening, and they're not closing either, because the stagehand is out back having a cigarette and the crowd has long since silenced, awaiting the next act, but I'm still and silent.

Back to good music. For instance, I'm listening to Ray LaMontagne right now, the current song being "Hannah." What a glorious name, don't you think? Two h's, two a's, and two n's. It's genious, really. Or Anna. Same thing minus those lovely h's. Nothing really profound, just one of those things; the little extras that make life a little more worth living, for reasons on their own. I have bought six cd's so far this week. The formentioned Ray LaMontagne, two Howlin Wolf cds, (fucking incredible blues, I highly recommend them), a Sly and The Family Stone that was slytly disappointing, and two Bob Dylan cd's that were necessary to my being. To quote a friend, in reference to Bob Dylan, "that man is playing for the right team." I highly agree. I think that still so far my favorite song by Mr. Dylan has got to be "I Want You" off Blonde On Blonde. It's just so damn right. Up next to purchase: The James Gang, Greatest Hits. I have a dear friend that is dead set against the whole "greatest hits" business, but the way I see it, unless they came out with ridiculous amounts of music that lasted through the decades with real style and, say, pinasch, I might as well get the goddamn greatest hits and save myself some bucks for the sake of having the majority of good ones in one sitting. I'm not a collector, and cd's mean shit to collect. Hell, in five or ten more years I'm sure they'll be as obsolete and even less popular than the late, great, cassette tape. At least with that when you make a mix you must make it with the mindset that it will be listened to start to finish. But we are lazy these days, aren't we? Everything has to be quick and simple.

Which gets me thinking... Today I was working in the yard with my father, and we were putting benches around our pond. No ordinary benches, mind you, but solid limestone, heavier-than-your-car benches. We took these old limestone steps from a former property of ours, of which were the only bit left, (after some asshole decided to torch the place for a gas) and moved them to our house. We had to use an engine lift just to raise them high enough to put on their simple foundations and vertical pillar placements. I'm sure by now you're bored with this bit, but the point is soon to surface, so stay with me. At any rate, after all the grunting and moving and lifting and straightening, we had two large, park-style, solid limestone benches, probably weighing close to two-thousand pounds each. I, being a lazy shit in the morning, grumbled something like, "thank god that's over, I fucking hate moving this shit around." Then my father looked at me and he said, "no, you're missing the point.' 'A hundred years from now people are going to see these things and think, "how cool," because they will last that long, and they'll wonder how we did it, and you know." I love my father. He is, blow for blow, the wisest and most admirable man I know. I know it may not seem so sometimes, but that is how it is. He is my rock. The man who raised me. I am proud to say that I am the son of Michael James.

What I miss now is my counter-heart, and my counter-mind. Those two great people still reside in the northland. I have my counter-musicmen down here, but without those others I run at half-speed. Apparently this journey I have beset myself to endure has begun already and won't be stopping when I turn the key arriving home. Infact, it is seemingly more of a vacation from this life that scares me more deeply. Deep like the currents of a blue and lonely ocean that I dream about in dreams so sired by my heart that aches and wakes without me anymore. You see, these days I live internally. I never let anyone else in, really, and so I am always a mystery, but nobody asks why, because why would they? So I find myself alone in more ways than one, day by day. Of course, now its spring and love is sprung and I am done for to watch all my dear friends converge and share that sacred, lovely thing that's always worth living for, while I drive my car away into the backroads of my heart. I would almost have to stumble over Her to find Her now.

But love is ever-fleeting, such as life; such as change. We are born and we start dying and the time between is that bit of time we try to take and rearrange our thoughts and lives into something worthy of dying for. Well, if nothing else, I think I'll just die because I was born. That seems to be the simplest way to end the Day that eventually turns. Roll away, as they say.

I share with you the echoing fractions of my heart because I feel it must be so. You never ask for it, and I never ask you to read it. If you've come this far you'll come a little further. Certain things remind us we are alive, as you may know. I have been absent of those things for a time, and it hurts me and it scares me to think it might never be back, though I won't believe that that is so. If you find those things, please stick to them, with life and limb, and remember why they above all else matter; why they precede any expectation to anyone or anything.

I resign myself to sleep.

-The son of Michael James