It is almost New Year's Eve and it is supposed to be cold. I feel like Matthew Thompson (a.k.a. Matty T-Rex) on a rainy Easter a couple of years ago. He said, "It's supposed to rain on Good Friday. And then Easter's to be sunny and nice." Almost New Year's Eve and it's about 55 degrees out. I need it to be bitter and dreadfully cold, because I usually spend the night inside laughing to myself about how cold my high school marching band is in the stupid parade they go to every year, and which I ditched without fail. I want to be able to savor every moment my army-trained former band leader and his troop of snotty jocks (my band had jocks, go fig) have to pain their feet and chap their wet lips playing in the malicious cold.

The leader of my high school band is Mr. Johnston, Mr. Bob Johnston, known among his ass-kissing desciples as "Mr. J." I didn't call him "Mr. J" even once, because he asked us to. I used to have a mild respect for this man. I wouldn't have, say, defended him in a knife fight, but neither would I have kicked his dog if the opportunity presented itself. Over time I developed a surpassing dislike for the man and his disciplinarian policies. He acted like a drill seargent, and didn't even make up for it by teaching us to play. When I became a senior, I expected that he'd at least award me the privilages he routinely gave to seniors. When I was an underclassman, nothing irked me so much as his allowing seniors first pick of any candy he brought in, special recognition at concerts, more authority as section leaders, priority seating, and a more personable attitude. He gave me the final insult by being inconsistent about these things toward me when I became a senior.

I spent most of my time in his marching band as last chair, because he didn't inspire me without enough enthusiasm to practice (my three former band teachers had all done this, and I had always been first chair). Toward the end I would sit in band at the end of every schoolday, frequently after school, and even over the summer--it was like a football team in terms of preparational intensity, because all he cared about was winning parades and performance contests; I would sit there in a mild haze, drunk with alienation, boredom and contempt for Mr. Johnston. He shared a name with Bob Dylan's producer, which just drips with irony.

I fell into joking with the kid in the chair immediately above mine about Mr. Johnston's closet homosexuality, inbreeding, physical and spiritual ugliness, and fanatic need for control. I would write vulgar comments on the sheet music he had given us. I was, incidentally, a trombone player in this band, and you can only guess what I did with the word "trombone." It's probably not what you're thinking. At the end of my first semester, senior year, I was absent on the day everyone passed in their music, which would have afforded me anonymity. When I showed up the next day and he asked those who still had music to pass it in, I handed it to the flugelhorn players sitting to my right. It passed down the row, producing giggles from some, looks of horror and surprise from others (mainly freshman girls or effeminate guys). Finally, it reached the tyrant himself.

Mr. Johnston called for me to stay after. My ride (who was about to take me to tryout for his ska band--I failed) stayed with me. We sat there, showing a mixture of sheepishness and defiance, as Mr. Johnston made the usual show of disgust, betrayed confidence, and intolerance (he read some of my comments, which were very witty if I may say so myself, with such a tone of anger that I thought he might pass out from so much blood in his head and bile in his chest). I sat there with my ugly chin beard (my nick name among a few members in the band was "ball sack"; I hadn't yet learned to trim my peach fuzz) and keep my eyes down, my face sardonicaly smiling. "Stop smiling, goddammit! It's not funny! And look at me!" He called my parents, at about eight in the evening, and told them all about it. He also assigned me to sensitivity training with the school counselor, which was kind of like forcing Churchill to take a crash course in rhetoric. I will admit that I am extremely insensitive when it comes to conversation, because I'm always trying to make jokes I know people will take as insults. However, as to the reason he gave for sending me to a counselor--insensitivity to homosexuals and other ethnicities--I can only say he was a bit inaccurate.

I couldn't get to sleep easily for a few days becuse of a new, strong source of anxiety he had shoved down my throat. Later it would be because of Napster, which kept me up until 3 a.m. nearly every night my second semester, causing me to fall asleep in the middle of many A.P. European History classes. Thus, although I still remember many of the terms (Warsaw Pact, Maginot Line, Citizen Genet) I forgot most of what I learned about modern history.

Anyway, point is, I want that bastard to freeze his ass off this New Years in whatever show-off parade he forces his students to perform in this year.

If anyone has not gone to the Elephant Six website and downloaded the mp3s and listened to them, do so. It's the most amazing thing I've heard in a while. (And Jeff Mangum really is inspired, as his commentary makes clear, and Aeroplane somehow really does relate to the life of Anne Frank, whom Mangum really was obsessed with, and so on.)

Nothing has happened in my life lately; I have also been thinking about nothing. Thus, I will write about someone else's life and thoughts, in the first person, just for fun. Perhaps a nine year old Japanese American boy in Ohio. Here we go.

I don't understand why my parents won't buy me a samuri sword. They keep telling me to "be attuned to my heritage," and yet they won't buy me a samuri sword. I just don't understand. I'll keep asking them. Something might happen if I keep asking them. I've never even seen one, except on TV. There was this one show where a guy had a sword and he was screaming as he jumped out of a window, "banzai!" I wonder what he meant, sceaming about a tree. Maybe he was jumping out of the window because of a tree. I don't understand it. They keep pushing me about my school work, too. They make little deals with me, like I can have a samuri sword when I'm fifteen, but only if I agree to take pre-calculus next year. It's boring is what it is, but what can I do? It would be terrible if I still can't have a sword by the time I'm fifteen. Maybe if I take calculus instead of pre, they'll give me the sword this year. Gonna go ask them.

Christmas. I get a warm feeling just from saying it, in the area of my groin. The warm feeling then seeps down my pants and leaves an uncomfortable odor. Christmas. It comes on like a friend with promises of shiny objects and musty paper and sweets, and it leaves me with that feeling you get after someone has driven over a puddle and sprayed you. Some got in your mouth.

My brother put on Van Morrisson today. We were sitting in the living room and discussing the relative virtues of each brilliant song while my grandfather (we call him "Papu" as a joke) mimiced his high crying tone on "Who Was That Masked Man?" and laughed with the insidiousness of trans fat. "He soun's like he's cryin'," he said with a sailor's accent and a shit-eating grin on his face. The kind of grin that could wilt roses. "You're right," I said, "that's what he's going for, actually." He responded, if you want to call it a response, "The music's good. I got no problem wit da music. Guy don't know howta sing, doh." "Well, he's not Frank Sinatra, but maybe that's a good thing. And he wrote the music, you know." "Guy don't know how to sing. 'Eeeh-eeh-eeeh.' Like he's cryin' or sometin'. Heh-heh-heh," he croaked.

I really don't go for it when people say, as this ghoul's second daughter did over dessert, with the heaviest Bronx accent there is, "Van Morrisson is a little better than Bob Dylan, but I just don't like his vo-wace. Other people sing his sowngs and they're gowd, but when he sings . . . I don't really like it," she said ironically, with a huge shit-eating grin (runs in the family) as if the person she was talking to would agree. "Who do you like?" I asked. I should have refrained. "Barbara Streisand, or Celine Dion, Frank Sinatra, they have real voices." I won't go on. My heart died today, as a little bit dies every day. Soon it will be gone, and then the world will be sorry, let me tell you. Or, alternately, the world will go on just as it does.

And now, in the same vein as Scott's blog, the top 10 albums I bought this year (because the albums I bought that came out this year were all disappointing, with few exceptions, and the exceptions aren't worth mentioning); there should be absolutely no surprises on this list. I could have included plenty of other albums (I bought hundreds) but it would be lying. So, truly the best albums I bought this year:

Morrissey, Bona Drag
Yo La Tengo, Electro Pura
Yo La Tengo, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One
Belle and Sebastian, Lazy Line Painter Jane EP collection
Modest Mouse, Building Nothing out of Something
The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground
Spiritualized, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space
Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs

There is no tenth, because I can't think of one without looking at everythng I bought this year, and that's probably a good way to judge. These albums are the ones which have stayed with me, which I have listened to for longer than the week after I bought them, which I will continue to listen to for a long time. It's a boring list, but it's as accurate as I can make it. I would most likely have been able to include the Beat Happening box set if I hadn't lent it to a friend soon after getting to Santa Fe. I really haven't spent any time with it.

This blog is now officially once again active, now that I have lost each and every last one of my readers. I only ever had three, so I'm not that concerned. This just means I can spend more time with myself. And, by the way, for anyone who doesn't know (because Scott fucking knows), I am back in Maryland. I will be here until the middle of January, unless I can find some way out of here. This state does nothing to fill the hole. Instead, it rips it open and makes it a bit more gaping every hour.

The night I got home, my father said to my brother and me, as he was going to bed, "No walks." I imagine everyone who reads this (all three of you, god bless you) knows what this means. I'll elaborate for my own benefit anyway. It means, "don't escape from my evil grimy clutches; I've had you for twenty-one years and I'll be fucked if I'm letting you out now. You are not permitted to leave my cloying, soul-killing house, because when you do so, the only thing you do is smoke, which makes you morally disgraceful as well as offensive to me personally. I cannot legally kill you physically, so I will do so mentally. Wallow in the psychological pit of boiling blood which I have created for you. Good night." That 'good night' I just threw in there to remind you that this is, after all, my father, and that's what a normal father may reasonably be expected to say. That's what my father presumably considered, only to replace it with "no walks."

Oh, and Eric is home too, and today we both took a bus to Manhattan. I found out that we had this ability just the day before, when my mother called and asked if we wanted to go with her coworkers to Manhattan because someone had given up two tickets. I haven't slept for about thirty eight hours, and I have seen altogether too much to even remember, but here are some poems I wrote in the Klee room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On "Portrait of a Yellow Man":

Although you might think
Dignity is expensive
You ain't seen nothing

My lips are bovine
My features are painted on
I am still a man

On "Small Portrait of Girl in Yellow":

Do you like my smile?
I am not looking at you.
Like it if you must.

I spent centuries
Sitting with my gaze just so
Can I get up now?

On "Collection of Figurines"

left
Fear is perverse in the face of so much indifference. Keep half an Eye on everything and cook it in your glowing blue third eye opening inward and outward, rising like an ecstatic cold sun. Eating fire only leads to a frozen stomach. Material is interconnected, but spirit spills all over the place. Nothing stays still.
opposite
Jumping blind leads to unmitigated joy. You might as well laugh at danger because nothing bad is possible or even conceivable. What would "bad" mean when the world is you? Play with yourself. It's fun. Whee! (splash)
center
The senses are limiting and unnecessarily stern. Experience everything that exists with a single simultaneous sense organ at the center of your being. Knowledge is neither subjective or objective; truth is meaningless, if beautiful, but sensation is an endless shot of whiskey burning everything with sheer all-encompassing intoxication of knowledge, like a circular angle. Which do you choose?

On "The man under the pear tree"

Fruit hangs like boobs practically forcing you to pick it, so you do. Glaring vulgar sexuality of desirable juices which proves you are not innocent, because if you were you wouldn't understand. A single inch of earth produces a mile of flowing plant energy. Man sees spot for self in universe, takes it. Even if the fruit never falls, he's satisfied. Tree thrusts growing limbs to eagerly dispelof its masterpieces, so readily it must have a slave mentality.

Some other one-liners:
"My bellybutton is the only proff that I, too, was once human."
"I gaze at the constant spectacle of nothing going on."
"My head is a melting former ice sculpture."
"My tadpole body slithers down the chair of myself while you politely suppress peals of laughter."
"The sun falls beneath my knees to fully illuminate my sordid, unhappy genitals."
"Slothfully, we will devour your oozing, suculent enthusiasm with fishlike gracelessness."

Klee is awesome.