Golgotha and Her Leap Second

Its New Years Eve 2008. I heard there was going to be an extra second tagged onto this year, and I am not sure how to communicate that to my alarm clock. I haven't looked into the reason WHY there is to be one more second than what was previously planned (i.e. NOT FUCKING WITH TIME), but I am about to leave this posting effort for "a second", and go investigate.

I'm back.

"The official Keepers of Time will add a leap second to the world’s master clocks (in the U.S., that’s the U.S. Naval Observatory) on December 31 at 23:59:59 UTC. This extra second is necessary because official time depends on two timescales—one that uses atomic clocks and another that is dependent on the earth’s rotation—and they don’t match up perfectly.


An atomic clock (Credit: NIST)
Atomic clocks (that’s a NIST atomic clock on the left) use the internal resonance frequency of atoms to measure time. The atoms generate pulses at regular intervals. Count the pulses, and you have a clock that is constant and very accurate.

Earth’s rotation is the traditional form of timekeeping. It is what defines a day. However, while we call a day 86,400 seconds, it is really 86,400.02 seconds. All those .02 seconds add up over time. In addition, the earth’s rotation is not constant (it has been slightly slowing, and 900 million years ago a day was only 18 of our hours). Time as we know it changes.

To remedy the discrepancy between the two timescales, extra time is periodically added to the atomic clock; this is the 24th leap second since 1972." ~Smithsonian.com

Okay, I get it. Can you imagine putting "Time Keeper of an Atomic Clock" on your resume at Chik-Fil-A? To this day, I still refer to brown and orange color schemes as Chik-fil-A. See how everything I analyze devolves into manning an insufferable post in the depressing live culture of the world-of feeding the world? Whatever. I am straying here. When I was first told that I would be "given" an extra second on my day/year, my head took me straight to the Great Space Coaster where I got on board, stepped into a magic world, and road on a fantasy to a place just on the other side... But I get it, and I wonder how many people being told tonight at the strike of 11:60pm, that they have been gifted a second by atomic clock keepers, won't also get on that same Space Coaster trying to figure that shit out. I picture a swell of drunk thinking-putting a giant pause in the gash of global revelatory intelligence at the stroke of midnight. How will we recover from that? Do the Keepers of Atomic Time feel ANY sense of responsibility?

Jesus... I didn't come here to talk about that at all.

So. This weekend Blind Butcher will be taking a three day camping trip. I was looking at my wonderful "Ghost Towns of Texas" books to find destinations around the campsite. I came up with four places I think would be worthy of going to. Two of the places are typical ghost towns. Lumber or Oil drove the economy. A fire or the railroad skipping the town or dried up derricks shut these towns down. One of them has the oldest steel-constructed oil storage tanks in Texas. One demonstrates a primitive design, and the fourth place I want to go is Jasper, Tx.

A couple of weeks ago, we went to the Bolivar peninsula. A few months ago, Bolivar suffered the sting of death in Ike, and the town is in a sense.. no more. In an attempt to be conversational with the Executive Chef I work for, I mentioned this trip to him and briefly summarized my impressions of the devastation. He asked me why I would choose to go there, (i.e. to such a depressing location, instead of any number of other upbeat hot spots where life was normal and there wasn't any disaster or loss.. the kind of place where you could slide your Corona bottle over the tabletop from your lawn chair, and conceal the unsightly image of unsightly beach goers or devastation while you are trying to catch some rays, dude.)

I kept my response to him brief, because as I have said before, you have 10 seconds to report the news to his flooded audience of a brain, before his mouth turns down and he gets fidgety because somehow you aren't talking about his lordship. I could cook a perfect quail egg, based around the accurate nature of his lack of an attention span when applied to his environment.
My response to him should have been, and always feels like it should be "You are fucking stupid." Instead, I said something like, "yeah.. we have a beach pass we haven't used since before Ike, and want to see how Galveston faired. " Sounds vapid doesn't ? The amount of time it takes you to say "fine", if he asks you how you are- doesn't fucking matter. He was gone before the words jumped out of his freckled mouth. I have no idea how he even had the structural integrity to actually pick up through the years, the process of wondering how someone else might be doing- LET ALONE ASK THEM and pretend to care.
When rebels give up on discourse and resort to fire, I understand.

I am going to Jasper Tx. I don't know what the majority of people polled think of or would even know about Jasper, but I can tell you what the mere mention of the town's name does to me. It kills me. Every time. James Byrd was killed in Jasper on July 7th, 1998. 3 men picked him up near a Casa Ole and steps from MLK blvd as he walked home from a party after midnight. (If he had been given an extra second on that night...) Byrd rode in the truck bed, and they took him out of town. On Huff Creek Road (Rd 278) they pulled over on a sandy spur and beat him. They spray painted his face black. They tied his ankles to the hitch and dragged him 3 miles. After two miles he lost his head. Somewhere before his final resting spot, he also lost his right arm. His body was found at an entrance to the old segregated church on Huff road. The few residences along Huff road were said to be black owned. Marlon Forward was six years old when he and his step-father found Byrd. Marlon thought it was a dead deer.

This weekend, I intend to go to that Casa Ole. I intend to drive around the area and get a feel for Byrd's environment. I intend to take a left onto old Huff Creek Road and set my odometer to zero, before I crawl along that road and end at the cemetery.

Byrd isn't buried there. He is buried in a different cemetery northwest of the site on 278. I also intend to go to his grave site, which is modest and surrounded by a wrought iron fence that measures about the same dimensions as his actual coffin below. I don't know what I expect to find in the general feel of the place, but I can tell you that it will be emotional. I will take photos. And I will also find some kind of memento during my trip to Jasper. Call it a crucifix if it makes you uncomfortable.

I anticipate that people might say, like the Chef, "Why would you go there?" Why do jews, Muslims, and Christians hang all over Golgotha every Tom, Dick and Harry second of our atomic clock? Why is the Earth littered with elaborate and dodgy relics of devotion?

Anyways... There is one more place I want to go, I want to drive an hour or so through the Piney Woods region to Caddoan Mounds. Around A.D. 800, Mound People constructed several mounds in their communities in the area. I won't go into their history right now, because a domino effect of death from boredom from listening to my telling, would wipe out the Universe, but I promise to revisit them in the near future... with pictures of their mounds.

Happy New Year, readers. I did take a moment to step out onto my patio with my champagne at 12:01 and I heard all of the gun shots in this densely populated edge of Houston. I heard all of you loud and clear releasing tension. But I still maintain, that at least 10 percent of the cracks and bangs I heard, were firecrackers and sparklers in the hands of children celebrating in driveways and corner parking lots. It hardly covers up the sounds of a violent reminder that men will always war. Hearing the gunshots for half an hour, I arrogantly appreciated what it must feel like to live in a war zone, or exposed on an open Texas plain with nothing to your name or defense but the people you love in the home you hide in... seconds from the front lines.

My resolution is to maintain the perimeter. Cheers to you and yours. Use your second wisely. I lost mine.

Deciphering Tombstones: Mary Traylor

"Death is a sting, but the grave a victory"

Deciphering Tombstones: J.M. Powell

I still have not quite figured out what this epitaph is supposed to mean really, or where it originates from.

"Mark the perfect man and behold the upright, for the end of that man is peace."

Old Waverly cemetery

SkandaLo, Motherfuckers, SkandaLo

Texas is Satan's ashtray. If you don't believe me you are either a moron, from someplace worse (i.e. Florida), or you're one of those annoying-as-fuck native Texans who thinks that if this huge turd-state had seceded from the rest of this country in the first place, things would be just dandy. Seriously, who could possibly be this loony?

We here at Blind Butcher have this thing about driving around. We get all goofy at the thought of carousing about the extended Houston/Gulf/East Texas/Piney Woods areas looking for ghost towns, taking photos, and generally absorbing the feel of the place in all its disheveled glory. In the last year or so we have been to Victoria, Edna, Lake Texana, Livingston, Huntsville, Texas City, the Bolivar Peninsula, Goodrich, Swarthout, Willis, Waverly, Old Waverly, Conroe, Diboll, Lufkin, and Nacadoches (in no particular order). There have been other points in between, but these were the main stops along our meandering. If there is one thing that unifies this massive chunk of southern and eastern Texas, it's the way people in rural areas hobble life together from pieces of the past. Homes are often a mad jumbled combination of bits of this and that which are then tied together like some sort of odd puzzle. I guess when you have little to no income and are practically off the grid you do what you have to in order to get by. Financially and emotionally speaking, I get the drift. Having no money makes you get creative.

Creative architecture or not, as an outsider passing through, as an observer, seeing trailer after shack after burned-out horror-house, the accumulated effect is a wee daunting. Or at least it was today.

Today's jaunt brought us to the Nacadoches/Lufkin area. We were in search of this cemetery in what is the remains of a former town called Pluck, named after the "pluck" of the citizens to settle in such a difficult location, though it was also suspected of being named for the citizen's general "orneryness." My kind of town.
The problem with today's trip was that it rained like hell damn near the entire time. Me, I love, as in fucking love, rain. Still, all lovin' aside, traipsing about with a five year old and a two year old in tow, through the mud, in a total downpour, is tantamount to child abuse, so we settled on driving about and getting more of a feel for the place in the stead of a more in-depth mingle with the natives sort of deal, which is what we always prefer.

The feeling I got was depression.

Mind you, I am prone to being bummed out, it's no secret. Life, for me, can often devolve into something close to agony. Whatever. I always seem to find more reasons to enjoy it than to suffer it, so it works out. The shitty light coupled with the endless rain was not painting a happy picture of the pine woods and their seeming menace (to me anyway). Even this far north it appeared as though hurricane Ike had some effect on roofs and signs and things.

For me, the best part of the Pluck cemetery (okay the only part, really, since we were turned away by the shitstorm,) was this sign out front:

"CEMETERY ENTERANCE"

Enterance? How can you paint a fucking sign and still get the spelling so catastrophically wrong? I mean for fuck's sake, take a moment and consult a dictionary if it's that hard to get it right. It's a cemetery. Dead people are being honored there. I mean, to me cemeteries are wasted space on a practical level, but still, "enterance"?

Nice.

And on and on it goes, mile after tragic mile, husk after shed after rusted hull, the decaying flotsam of our disposable culture all Mad Maxed into oblivion by these scavengers of our collective soul.

I can't believe I just used the term "collective soul."

Also, take another, closer look at the photo at the beginning of the post. Expand it and look closer at the sign on the left. The place is called SkandaLo. I don't know why, but I think that a hair salon called SkandaLo is totally fucking hilarious. There's no explanation for it, I just think calling your joint SkandaLo is genius.

And while you may not agree, notice the near-total dilapidation of the little strip center there. Notice the shabby-assed purple paint job on D-Cache, the store next to SkandaLo. Notice the way the pavement is cracked and the sky is grey and the building is ancient and the whole thing has a Bukowski level of hopeless waste to it.

Fuck me. That's it, I'm ending it all right now. Or, you know, after I play some more Star Wars Force Unleashed on my son's DS. That shit is the bomb.

See? Yin and Yang, day and night, night and fuckin' day.

Oh well, SkandaLo as they say...

There is a sound that is far removed from my history of recent experience that I hear when I step out onto the patio this Christmas morning. It is the sound of a kitten crying to be let inside. You may think it disturbing for me to tell you that I liken the sound of this desperate kitten, to what a toddler stuck in a well would sound like... to her parents.

Merry Christmas.

Enjoy receiving jesus.

I'll be back tomorrow.

christ Has a Mass

Christmas is the cancer that comes back every year, malignant as fuck and pissed off. I'd say it brings out the worst in us, but it's hard to see how much worse we as a race could possibly be at this point.

I hate everyone. Really, I do.

And yet, through that one-dimensional gibberish, however true, I am also able to embrace the duality of tendering a very passionate and possibly endless well of love for a select few.

The rest, well, the rest.

I haven't punched anyone since high school.

All told, this is a small miracle if you consider just how intense my anger is even at the ripe young age of forty.

I can readily admit to being emotionally damaged, stunted in a very real way. I know that I am a master at creating turmoil in my wake in as much as I relate to the people around me.

Honestly, I don't really care too much about that, generally speaking, but for those unfortunate few that I care to consider close, knowing me is like a barefoot hike down a broken-glass covered path in total darkness. Pain is a certainty. I'm not proud of this.

I tend to foster this extremely uncomfortable duality in my everyday life, and quite frankly, it is a fucking tightrope that I am getting very tired of walking.

I want to hit someone and I want it to hurt. Not anyone in particular, just someone. I want to channel my anger through my arm and direct it right in between the crossed eyes of some total piece of shit just begging for it.

I know it's all just macho spouting. I know that. I know it but I had to say it.

I have no desire to go to jail, be fired from my job, or find myself shot on the side of the road. Maybe talking about it in here, boring you to tears, forcing you to regret reading this (and rightfully so), maybe by doing all this I can avoid the real deal and work on getting over it. Again. And again. And a-motherfucking-gain.

I'm no christian. I'm no theist. I'm no god believer/lover/even needer. I do not in any way have a need to celebrate the birth of anyone born thousands of years ago, and even if I had such a desire, I would exact it on my immediate surrounding life, not on the entire fucking world.

Blah, blah, I know. Temples to commerce, tithing for the god of currency, prostration before the gods of greed, selfishness, arrogance, ignorance, ugliness, guilt, horror, rage, lonliness, terror and emptiness.

This is Christmas, and I hate it.

It takes almost nothing to set me off, to get the wheels turning, to flip a switch and get me to see the actual path as it lays before me.

Is this the season of your undoing? Is this the season from which you will distill the very essence of failure and meandering hopelessness?

It's mine.

Is this the all-consuming wave of defeat that surrounds everything you can even imagine before even you can imagine it?

It's mine.

Is this the moment where you turn away from the blast, avert your eyes in hopes that you will be able to see once again the illusory gilded parapets from which your empty optimism will rain down like a filthy storm and wash the streets clear of reality?

Enjoy it, it will end soon enough. Just like this post. Just like the remaining shard of my dignity.

Nothing ever works. Nothing is ever worth the effort, the paper it's printed on, the price, the time, the trip. Nothing.

And everything.

god died for us. Maybe one more favor. Maybe he could stay away. Better yet, maybe we'll finally realize he never was.

I hate you all. Christmas too.

I feel better.

Exhale. And bed.

Piercing The Veil

A long time ago, when biblical people were making biblical rules and blazing through tablets and chisels to advance barbarians into a civilized future of war, and even back when poets and privileged men who were provided education jerked the contents of their inkwells off into a seemingly bottomless ream of thinly sliced forest- I wasn't anything close to being a twinkle in anyone's eye.

When I lived in Sodom, and geographically very near to Gomorrah (one of many), I was a struggling young woman trying to pay the bills. Hollywood is not friendly to anyone. Hollywood is a grave of dreams. I shared a small one bedroom apartment with a friend, and we barely made ends meet as we raced to stay ahead of the snakes of reality, who were clearly prepared to swallow us whole if we so much as stumbled in our resolve to survive. Barely above amputation, I managed to eat and stay warm and not die at the hands of an endless supply of murderous ones.

The neighbors I had at the time kept to themselves mostly, and I always appreciated that because-deep down inside, I felt they were all completely not right. I carried myself with an absurd amount of planned action and can only describe my demeanor as controlled aggression. At any moment, even while in the safety of slumber in my own home, I was prepared to die, and die in any number of imagined violent encounters that I found myself fearing. Environments where the crazy lives of your neighbors bleed over into yours can do real numbers on your mind.

The bedroom I slept in was very small, and one entire wall was a mirror. I shared this mirrored wall with an older man I don't remember actually seeing. I could never make out the sounds coming from the other side of the mirror, save for the beating of several women I had heard. I had caught glimpses of women through the curtain as they would leave and make their way down the stairwell that was central to the courtyard of the small complex off of Highland Avenue. I used to write occasional angry poetry for local zines, which sucked. Both sucked.

Years have passed and I have had many living situations. I have lived beneath a man who beat his child in the bathtub, and I was so distressed about it that one day I thought a rust colored stain was blood seeping through the ceiling over the tub of my apartment. I have lived next door to gang bangers who would be so fucking loud just so they could force you to tell them to shut the fuck up.. so they could shoot you. I have lived next to fag after alcoholic and chain-smoking fag and listened to their late night bitch sessions with friends about god knows what, and each time they all would eventually dominate the arguments because they were self righteous and gay. I have lived next to native families who slaughter caribou. I have lived next to a redneck roadhouse. I have lived in a tenement full of bodies and drug users. I have lived in a tent in the wilderness and on sheets of ice on the Bering sea. Understand?

For some reason, all of those things are poetry to me now because they are no longer an immediate cause of my stress. I can look back on all of those faces and try to recall how I felt and what I did, and it isn't so bad if I consider all of the ways things could have been worse. What isn't poetry to me today is the fact that our new downstairs neighbor (who we share an entrance with in this quad complex) has been putting his cigarettes out on the carpeted stairs in our already depressing and dingy stairwell. He's a young guy with pierced ears and he probably is a typical jock/party boy set loose on the world, who hasn't been living long enough to know why its important to be a good fucking neighbor. What is missing in the way I form this memory I am having, toward an end of reading this experience as poetry down the road, is my involvement.



I think he needs to be taught a lesson for his behavior, and for this I will need to get involved which is how the poetry is written. What lesson and how should it verse? You tell me, because my anger is no longer constructive. I am so completely aggravated by the behavior of people in a large city during super-evil-capitalist christmas that its been hard to stay positive.

My last christmas (while totally miserable as it was during a divorce) was in a quiet and consumer-dark place on the planet. It was a remote island with only one little store the size of the office of a bondsman. Now I live blocks from the fifth largest shopping complex in the United States. Everyone is on their way to buy shit and they ride your ass to every other entrance if they aren't in front of you slamming on the breaks at the rest of them. I'm not suggesting that last years holiday season was a discreet and humble affair, I'm suggesting that it wasn't a straight up butchery axed out by cheaply packaged angels, snowflakes and the disease called sugar that we swim in and drown in at the same time. I mean, come the fuck off it. Do something nice with your time instead of shitting an odeum of glittered and greedy losers into every intersection of my god damned life.

At work, I listen to people talk about not being satisfied with this year's coach purse, or about the exciting 20% discount on a pair of $500 dollar boots that they will be getting their hard to please wives. I have $5 in my account, if its still there, and I have got to tell you that it is a private hell to have to suffer through listening to boastful and obnoxious stories of privilege as I wonder how I can possibly compete in this slaughter of reservation in a gluttonous mine field of excess and poorly executed compassion? I can't compete. I won't. In fact, not only will I not exercise my good will (because being tolerant is enough) I will start as of tomorrow, telling people that I have a mysterious illness that is killing me. I will tell this to people until New Years Eve, when I will be miraculously healed, by an anti-god. No?



I wanted to mention one other thing. I will proudly be representing Blind Butcher as the carver at my hotel's company christmas party.

Some good music and movie recommendations to wrap up a shitty year

Sometimes life kicks you in the balls, and 2008 has certainly been a year that my crotch needs ice (and a little lovin’). Music is certainly an inspiration for me, and movies are an occasional needed escape, so I thought I would share some things I came across. I will try to avoid obvious bands, because what good would it do me to tell the readers of this blog how much I like Neurosis? Preaching to the choir does not appeal to me.

MUSIC

God is an Astronaut - I’m really into bands like Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Explosions in the sky, and the like. Of all of the instrumental, post-rock bands, I’d have to say that my three favorites are Red Sparowes, Russian Circles, and God is an Astronaut. The latter of the three has everything that the others do, but they subtract the metal and add a stellar, sort of 80s new wave and ambient sound at times. The band appeals to me more so than the others of the genre at this point. Other similar, notable bands: Mono (Japan), Gifts From Enola, and Yndi Halda.

The Protomen – I never knew that there was a genre called Nintendocore. Their music is based entirely on the Mega-Man video games. When a friend recently told me about them, I wasn’t too interested in listening, but since I pride myself on being open minded (and not a douche-bag), I gave it a go. The sound is familiar to me, but I had not heard of many of the similar bands when I looked them up on last.fm. I hear bits of Queen, At the Drive In, and Death From Above 1979. What’s also great is that they did a cover of No Easy Way Out from Rocky IV. They’re not afraid to be cheesy as hell, and it works for them. Supposedly, then never come out of the characters they are on stage, even in interviews. Strange, but whatever; I like the music. Devin Townsend, eat your heart out.

Murder By Death – Indie meets Johnny Cash, but in a really good way. They played one of the best shows I have ever seen. There aren’t many bands these days who sing about whiskey, bar fights, and runnin’ from the law.

Screaming Trees and Bad Religion – I know these are well known bands, but I can’t believe I was so late in hearing them. My parents should have done the deed about ten years earlier; then I’d be much more on the ball with a large chunk of the music I like.

MOVIES

Slumdog Millionaire – Probably one of the best movies I’ve seen in the theater all year. With crap like the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still coming out, it’s quite refreshing to see something really good. Hell, even Synecdoche New York had some good parts, as depressing as it was. So, if you get the chance, go see Slumdog, or rent it when it comes out on video. I liked The Dark Knight too, but again, I’m trying to list the not so popular/obvious ones.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring – It’s a Korean film that came out in 2003, but I saw it recently. It’s a Buddhist tale that shows the different “seasons” of a man’s life. The entire movie is set on a lake, with a floating temple in the center. The film uses imagery more than dialogue to tell the story, so much that one might not need the subtitles be able to understand what’s going on.

Both of the movies I mentioned are worth seeing with a significant other, if you’re so lucky to have one.

At least some good came from this shitty year. Anyone else have any movie or music recommendations (or books, for that matter)? I’ll do my best to post once a month, Mr. Butcher.

Reunion: Muscle meet Muscle.

Today I butchered.

I pulled the muscles from the bones. I slid the fat from the skin. Sometimes it was hard to tell what was fat as I worked my gloved fingers between the thick but velvety skin of my suckling pigs. Baby pigs. I called off the exercise when I was removing skin from the face of one and an eyeball presented itself. I put the head back on the metal grid that elevated their meat which was set upon a sheet pan.

"I can't do the heads." I say without emotion to the sous chefs. They look at me, get it, sort of get me and tell me to shut my eyes to do it. I register their positions, they register the look on my face and I don't work on pulling apart the piglet's heads and they don't force me to... They refer to my issue with having anything to do with these pigs, as "Charlotte's Web".

One day, I went into the walk-in for a flat of eggs, and freaked out when I saw a pile of baby pigs on top of each other in a large and clear plastic Lexan. I started to cry, and tried to pull myself together, before my brain spiraled out of control. The pigs were new on the menu. The Chefs talked about them excitably. Some creole personality bred and sold them and one of the chefs seemed pretty enthusiastic about his menu creation. Slowly, my distaste for seeing or dealing with the baby pigs became common knowledge in the kitchen. I won't go into all the reasons why I should be comfortable with death, or all of the incredibly sad times where I was responsible for the death of animals-because they were already dying and living another moment was just cruel torment. When baby animals pile up for butchering, I have feelings about it.

I once overheard the chefs talking about the pig farmer's daughter who came to deliver the meat with him, and appeared very sad and mortified. They were touched, and that was the end of the touching.

My issue with the suckling pigs has a lot to do with how they are cared for in death. Piled on top of each other in a dirty tub.... Say what you want about how you would react. You aren't me.

I finish pulling muscle from the spinal cord. I feel the sections of the spine, and resort by default to lessons learned while in emergency medicine as I deconstruct this life. Every vertebrae has a number, and word on the street is that, each one of these babies is responsible for illuminating problems with certain body systems. Its hard to marry the meat with the philosophy sometimes. How you wed either one of those with compassion and dignity in death, I have no idea... I tried to save lives and now I prepare them in death for consumption by the Elite who choose to live in bubbles of hotel like luxury.

I replay images from channel 8 that show me mind blowing science from the world of our brains on the front lines. Neurons are shown as lightning bolts racing from one exciting explosive point to the next through a Great Space Coaster/Thunder Mountain nebula of the royal purples and navy blue that is our soulful grey matter. I wonder if that PBS electricity that passed through these pigs was between my fingers now, hiding from the process and now free to escape with the grease and bloodless muscle that I worked through my man-hands. I wrapped up the pulled pork. I wrapped separately the two heads the size of deflated children's footballs, and placed them on top of their shredded neurons and fiber which I had placed in a stained metal hotel pan. I placed them in the "protein cooler."

i did those things in the afternoon.

In the morning, I cleaned and handled herbs and fruits and vegetables that had been harvested as food. They were dead things that would bring many people wonderful flavors, over artfully arranged table settings, amidst incredibly tasteful lounging. Red meat of man suckling on a field of greens outside room 101, I think to myself.

I return to work after leaving and going home for an hour or so, where I get on the computer and try to find meaning in the meaningless tangle of 2 dimensional posturing that is our electronic global community.

When I return to work, after a useless break, I am to carve. I do like the drive to work sometimes. I hate everyone who can't drive like the professional I am, but there are moments, when the lights are all green for me. There are times when I want to go right at a red light, and there isn't an asshole in front of me waiting for the green to go ahead.

My carving station is like something from the Shining. Guests enter the dark and elaborately gothic room far away from me. They slowly mingle like a virus and eventually descend upon me like a plague mass. What they see as they approach me is obvious in the amount of time it takes self confident people to reach me. If a party is four hours long, it might take most of them half an hour to investigate what their eyes keep training on in my corner.

I am the only light all around me in this old hotel's mezzanine and it would appear as if I offer some kind of terrifying prize, judging by the trepidation and greedy curiosity of the hotel's guests.

And if I hadn't just butchered baby pigs, I would agree with how you feel about me if you were seeing me for the first time, dressed all in white, under a red light and ready to carve while you stall or grossly act out your sense of deserving.

Below my face, a loin and a carving knife and my folded hands are illuminated by a red heat lamp. I am a boardwalk gypsy and each curious person who approaches me, when they team up and get the nerve to knock on the witches door, gets a different card and a different cut of meat from this carcass that I select for them. I decide how thick. I decide how thin. I decide how rare. I decide how well done. I hand over the baby to the beast and retreat back into the red light. Some make eye contact when they take carvings from me. Some don't know how. Some want to.

Some never have looking into my eyes cross their minds.

My hands have cuts and burns and punctures in endless creases. I wear condoms on my fingers to keep lemon juice, salt and vinegar out of them. I exist under a microscope and receive no reward for the supposed glory that my deliveries kick off.

My head is a crime farm rescued only by the blessing of imagination and ignorance.

I may spend my time butchering in a cave, as the rest of the world laughs and trades diamonds and crucial injuries on the street above. Those streets could be burning, and I would expect it. Sometimes the hotel fire alarm system goes off, and nobody panics. Everyone rolls their eyes and pretends to choke, but I don't trust the comfort of the crowd, even if they understand why I hate to see the pigs arrive and depart so coldly. I make fun of them for dying with me in a fake Apocalypse as it literally happens 9-5 anyway. They make fun of me for being sensitive about pigs.

Just like when I was young, I see teeth. I do see your magical demonstrations of life all around me. I see bodies encased in rigid and entombed personalities. And just like when I was young, when I lived in the shadow of your pyramid's construction, I manage one more roof which I have deconstructed in your wake.


I am a servant at the Dance even now. I won't be coming to your reunion.

Stoking the Friendly Fire

If pressed, I would have to admit a certain, uh, inner conflict over the idea of friendship. Seriously, what the fuck is a friend anyway? It's really just another in a long line of nebulous ideas in life that seem to take on such monumental importance without any of us actually really agreeing on what it is.

With the advent of the whole social networking phenomenon, it is amazing to see just how easy it has become for us to expand the boundaries of what a "friend" means.

I have always thought myself clever for telling people that I have almost no friends and a lot of acquaintances, which, while being accurate, is not really that clever, and is really more pathetic than anything else.

Still, at the end of the day, how many people can I claim as someone I could rely on, as someone I could trust to tell something deeply personal without being embarrassed or concerned that it would somehow be used against me later on? Would I even need fingers to count that low?

It all started with MySpace. I was getting in touch with "friends" I hadn't spoken with in years, and while that in itself is interesting, it's also a little dubious. There is a certain novelty to seeing pictures and personal information about people you lost touch with but maybe have wondered about on occasion. It's cool to see that this person is now fat and has a billion kids, and it's cool to see that so and so is now the king of a small island country, but really, how superficial?

It seems as though Facebook is now eclipsing MySpace as the place for wasting mountains of time for the folks I have known over the years. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but it may be the semi-anarchic nature of the way Facebook works. Unlike MySpace, there is not a ton of options when it comes to personalizing the look of your homepage. In fact, everyone's page pretty much looks the same. The difference is that each page contains different sorts of information. You can put as much or as little about yourself up there as you wish, and it is all laid out in a sort of chronological list of updates that all network together on your screen. You get a running tally of whatever nonsense your "Friends" are doing at any given moment as long as they too keep up the ruse.

In all fairness, I have had the opportunity to get back in touch with some people I have cared about in my own retarded way and in that sense I am pleased with Facebook for that reason alone. Beyond that, I have also located and in some cases, contacted people who I more or less don't really give a shit about at all.

And I should also add that I am not a great friend to anyone. I can admit that. I know that I am hard to get in touch with, and hard to remain close to. This is something I cultivate, truth be told, and I do so because being too close to damn near anyone is something I pretty much find to be repellent. While this says more about me and my misanthropy than anything, I am well aware that this rends me fairly unappetizing as someone anybody would waste too much time bothering with.

It's not quite that black and white, but for the sake of argument it'll do.

We're all getting older. Nothing to be done about that, ask Heather Locklear. She'll tell you, were she an honest woman, that the best thing to do is to roll with it and not to fight kicking and screaming all the way to the plastic surgeon like she has obviously done. Having the opportunity to surreptitiously reconnect with your past without having to get your fingers dirty is a fantastically alluring way to sample the wares without buying anything, and in this world, that is like an axiomatic principle for daily life.

It's no wonder Facebook has captured the imagination and the free time of the entire galaxy. Facebook is a buffet of sociological flotsam drifting around just waiting to be skimmed from the surface.

When I think back over the years and remember how easy it has been for some of my supposedly closest friends to shut me out when things were maybe too uncomfortable or uneasy, or for that matter how easy it is for me to simply drop off the face of the earth, I realize that someone needs to start a new sort of networking site. The new site could have all the stupid as shit games and contests and mindless fan pages and useless discussion boards and whatever else that gives us a reason to mill about looking for a mildly entertaining diversion, but it would all be centered around people you know, not people who are your "friends," because really, who the fuck really has any actual friends, and why in god's name would they want to share anything about that with the entire galaxy?

Whenever you are actually hoping for a little galactic inspiration, look no further than Star Wars. As any self-respecting nerd will tell you, everything you need to know is wrapped up in the world sprung forth from George Lucas' fevered ego. The rest, as they say, is doo-doo.

America Eats Its Youth

This is my young cousin who I guess is the new typical lost and confused youth of America. Still comes as a shock to me though. The kid grew up in a large condo in Queens with a view of the river and Manhattan - the only child of liberal New York urbanites. He is as mild mannered as these pictures probably tell you. It is easy to see through the camouflage isn't it?

Smart dude, he went off to college, scholarships and all, but couldn't hold it together grade-wise (probably from too many nights playing D&D or some such geekedness). Ashamed with himself he decides to join the Air Force. Past generations in the family would have joined the priesthood I guess, but other family dramas in that arena probably lessened the appeal. 

As if there is any appeal in joining the Air Force. Now he's in line to dismantle IED's in a foreign desert.

The inspirational movie Stripes aside I never had any inkling of a dream to join an armed force. And if I did, it certainly wouldn't be entry level one. I think I'd hold out for officer or military doctor or something.

In this Age of Information some of us, seemingly sheltered and privileged, still get eaten pretty good.

Lawful Neutral Gelatinous Shambling Cubes from Tatooine, and Shit

I never made it in the world of role playing gamers. I never made it because I never tried. I never tried because it just wasn't for me. There comes a point in one's life where you become privy to something approximating wisdom. Actual wisdom is of course reserved for those with actual insight. For the rest of us, the overwhelming majority of us, these shards of insight are placeholders, but they do their job all the same. One of such moments for me was the realization that I didn't have the patience to actually learn how to even play Dungeons and Dragons.

You know how much I loved playing video games. Soon enough I'll regale you with tales of comics. I know that I am easily an associate of nerds. I also know that I am able to walk the line between geekdom and mainstream normalcy without ever actually being either fully embraced or belonging in either.

At my mother's job, some lady convinced my mom that from her description of me (no doubt inflated to paint me out to be some sort of genius in the rough as only a mother can do), I would be a prime candidate for the new game everyone was talking about, Dungeons and Dragons.

When my mother brought the original game home, I bought her sell of it before I even opened the box. I loved the idea of taking on a role and using your imagination to conduct all sorts of adventurous shit with a bunch of guys who were as into it as I was.

The only problem was, once I opened the game and began to read the directions it was about as exciting as doing homework, something I also never found entertaining.

My gaming career defeated before even coming off the ground, it would be a few years before I am sitting with Mike Gunn up in his room, altered, when he whips out the Gary Gygax gaming manuals and monster books. I gotta tell you, when you are stoned, those monster books are pretty fucking genius. Hell, sober, the idea of a Gelatinous Cube is a quality mindfuck. Ditto for the Shambling Mound. That stuff is gold.

So, maybe Mike was of a league well above my own in the brains department. Maybe Mike not only took his SATs, maybe he also got like a 1500-and-something on the damn thing. Maybe. Okay, definitely to all of the above.

Regardless, he still wrote a poem called the Wayward Youth. Geek.

See? I walk a line.

In time, Mike convinced me to help him try and get a group together so we could play D&D once and for all. I gave in. I admit a weakness for the dorkside. Mike, naturally, was the dungeon master, a role which is apparently something like being a geek Jesus of some sort. You create the world, populate it, map it out, and fill it with all the crazy shit that a bunch of geeks would cop boners over like trolls and elves and fucking gnomes and shit.

God, what a disaster. Despite the group's claims of experience, it was quickly obvious that Mike was the only one who had ever played the game at all. The whole way with which you have to determine the "alignment" of the character you play as was even less familiar to them then it was to me. I at least knew about being "lawful neutral" and all that goofy-assed stuff. These guys were pretty much just drinking and talking about all the girls they would never ever even dream of actually fucking, like, as in all the girls in the entire world. There was some dice rolling, some florid prose from fucking Golem over there with his notebooks and graph paper, and beyond that, a lot of diversions. We called it off and went on an adventure all our own involving a bong and a bag of weed.

Yeah, so, I'm no gamer.

Still, I can go on and on in my mind about the joys of mutant powers, the ideas of Philip K. Dick, the philosophy behind various films, books, albums, ideas, etc... and that is where it's at with me.

I think what has separated me from the grade-A ultra-dorks is the way guys like that are able to singularly focus on one thing so obsessively that it is very difficult to break that spell. Me, I am kind of like that, but at the end of the day guys like Mike Gunn have me beat. Guys like that can literally spend months in a row plotting out every single detail in a D&D campaign as if the very fate of man stood in the balance. Me, I always get distracted at some point. Simply put, something else simply grabs my attention, and with that the tangent train is out of the station.

What I wouldn't give to have a mind like that.

Wait, what am I saying?

Jesus, what a fucking geek I am.

Game on.

Blind Butcher's First Creative Writing Competition

Hi kids,

We have a contest for you to be a part of. Last night, while looking into nearby ghost towns to visit, we came upon a website that is undeniably one of the most ingenious collections of the absurd. Ghosts of America is home to some of the greatest blurbs I have personally EVER heard put together, shy of some zombie haikus I have recently been told.

Here are a couple examples of sightings that people have posted on the site:

"A ghost of a man with a red shoe, a pipe, a windmill, and a partially decomposed semi-transparent body can sometimes been seen rolling down 105 East in a Hover Round wheelchair, but he can only be seen in a mirror."


"The ghost of a bum has supposedly been made out on frequent occasions trying to touch something in a rubber boat on Lake Ann. If you talk to the local residents, this spirit is most likely the tormented spirit of a resident who used to have a home here in Willis."


"The bloodcurdling ghost of a conquistador has frequently been seen sitting at a coffee table in a Centralia mobile home flickering a lamp. Residents allege that this ghost likes scaring foolish folks who are brave enough to disturb the quiet in Centralia. Nonetheless, this ghost certainly is frightening; one that is preferably not disturbed."

The individual who can come up with the best "ghost sighting" will win a 12x12x1 gallery-wrapped original painting of your story as seen through the perverted eyes of the Blind Butcher. (That's in inches, by the way, so don't get all crazy on us.)

Submissions should be made here in the comments section.

The deadline for the contest is next Wednesday at the stroke of midnight. Enter as many times as you like.

Special consideration for victory will go to those entries which most effectively capture the jilted style of the website. (Hint: using terms like "distinguished" in an equally terrible fashion is the straight dope.)

Make the entries as long as you wish, just remember to make them read in the same pseudo-formal style as those on our inspiration: the most ridiculous of websites.

This ought to be fun. Now, let the games begin!

The Swedish Cross-Eyed Polish Zombies From France

What a fucking day Sunday was for the Blind Butcher. We had the pleasure of taking my kids to Huntsville State Park and running around like idiots and kicking a Scooby Doo playground ball with reckless abandon. We rocked the backroad highway 75 to avoid the traffic on I45 and in the process took advantage of the scenic passage to grab some photos of rural life (quickly becoming one of our favorite things to do). In our meanderings we happened across an ancient Catholic church. The place was built, apparently, to attract the somewhat large number of Polish immigrants in the area at the time. To me, all I could see was the perfect location for the ultimate Omen film.

Let it be known that I fucking love the way empty churches look out in the country. And this particular church was intensely creepy. I guess I tend to think that churches are just creepy, period. A bunch of people get some cash together and use it to build a big building just so they and their pals can get together and share their love of something no one can actually prove exists. But not just any old something, no, these sorts of folks build actual temples to appeal to their emblematic tokens of faith-based imaginings. It's too much for me. But the buildings themselves are like living museums to hubris, and that I can get down with. Beyond that the aesthetics are the bomb. Churches are such brilliant monuments to folly.

Imagine a big powerful dude, and then build him a house. Never actually have any evidence of his existence, but feel justified in demanding others control their lives in the name of this dude.

Moronic.

So, after getting stuck in traffic and spending way too much time ogling the giant penis of a statue in the name of Sam Houston (a big dude in his own right, and one who actually existed at some point in reality), we headed back to 75 and took the scenic route back towards Houston.

Sometimes, when you are on the road, there comes a point at which it quickly becomes clear that you will not be getting to your destination at any point close to when you planned, and worse still, you will have to make new plans in order to accommodate this temporal shift. Today was such a day. Fortunately, my kids travel unbelievably well, a fact which I can only attribute to their being my kids and my being a comfortable traveler myself.

Next up: For weeks now we here at Chez Butcher have been not only aware of the upcoming Gojira show at the newly opened Houston House of Blues, nay, we have been debating our inner selves as to whether or not we could afford the hefty ticket price to get in the door. And you gotta know that we are big time Gojira fans 'round these here parts. That Gallic juggernaut gets us all moist in trou'. Part of the inner struggle for us in regards to attending shows is due to our having trouble committing to much these days what with being divorced parents with pressing demands on our time, but even worse still, the other major part to our fear of concert commitment is the financial bit. Shows are fucking expensive. Tickets for this show were $28 a piece. That gets you in the door. That's $56 for the two of us. If you want a beer for god's sake then you get to shell out $7 a piece for them. We each had three of those.

At the last second, and after much internal debate (and several fruitless attempts to talk to an actual human at the club to get information about when Gojira would be going on), we made a mad dash to the venue.

After a quick consultation with a couple of very serious looking crew members outside the venue, guys with piercings that outnumbered fingers, we were able to figure out that Gojira was on at that very moment but that we would be able to catch the bulk of their set if we hurried, which was good considering we were already downtown and willing to go bankrupt to see the mighty French band.

It only took me a credit card and $56 to get us into the club. I may be wrong, but I think you could get a BJ at the Bunny Ranch for less. I could be off on my math.

The Houston House of Blues is about the least-most House-of-Bluesy sort of place you could possibly imagine - anywhere. You have to climb 3 floors just to get into the fucking place, and the building it's in looks like some sort of Las Vegas nightmare with its Journeys shoestore and its shiny lights and pristine, vacuous exterior. If Robert Johnson were alive today, he would take one look at that place and burn his guitar in shame. I mean, with fucking Dan Ackroyd at the helm, I guess I shouldn't expect some sort of juke joint out in the boonies with chili pepper lights, holes in the floor, and patrons with gold teeth, kicking back malt liquors and blithely rocking tears in the crotch of their pants... their good pants.

Once in the club it was time to ignore the entire world and just enjoy Gojira. And god damn did they deliver.

Gojira is a very precise rhythmic machine set to the tune of death metal with a decidedly environmentalist twist. But who cares about the lyrics with music this gargantuan? The focus of the Gojira sound is their masterful drummer, but that almost takes away from the way in which Gojira is able to create a complete sound with the entire band. No note is out of place, no beat extraneous, no vocal line over the top. No, the entire band understands their role and executes it with the utmost ability and intensity. Admittedly, the bassist was a little too intense in his stage performance. I know heavy music gets people all goofed up, but whenever you are playing as though every note out of your instrument was handed down from the lord himself, then perhaps you are entering the arena of theater and leaving the world of reality. There's absolutely no reason for anyone in Gojira to act like they're any heavier than they already are.

That, or maybe the bassist was simply blown away by his own band night after night. God knows they blew me away Sunday.

If I had any complaint at all about their show it would be that while the set was mighty and downright beautiful, it could have been quite a bit louder and more intense, sonically speaking. I blame whoever was at the board. I thought the soundman was holding back, until we heard the headliner, In Flames, hit the stage.

In Flames also suffered from the mediocre mixing work at the sound board. It was as though the soundman was afraid to turn it up, as if perhaps the neighboring tenants were bitching about it being too loud, a concept which is practically a Houston institution it happens so often in this shithole of a town. Houstonians get huge boners whenever they can call the cops and simper about the band being too loud.

We were not fortunate enough to catch the openers, 36 Crazy Fists, a metal band from Alaska, which is in itself a coup of sorts and something that would be dear to the Unspeakable for reasons obvious to anyone who knows her. Beyond that, the semi-coheadliner, All That Remains, bailed on the show for what was billed at the door as "Medical/Health" reasons whatever the fuck that means. I guess what it meant was that we caught two bands Sunday night, and the first, as I've said already, was the balls. The other band was In Flames.

I've heard a ton of their stuff, and while I like some of it, basically their "safeness" is pretty tedious if you ask me. Having said that, they sounded pretty good, they were very well rehearsed and they are a very solid band. I just want more threat and intensity from metal in general, or at least a little less selling out to pop sensibility. In Flames came off as trying really hard to get at that carrot dangling in front of their frostbitten Swedish noses. Even worse, they had some of the most obvious and mainstream lighting I've seen for any band ever. They even had this one lighting effect, which they mercifully only used once, which was basically a swirling array of flowers.

Flowers.

Death metal flowers.

It was painful.

They also used some sort of disco lighting that looked like it was lifted directly from Studio 54 or some shit. Not too metal.

And I love metal, it consumes my musical taste to be quite honest, and I am a fairly forgiving guy when it comes to metal. And I think that even taking that into account, we are still left with the fact that In Flames are poseurs. Sorry, but they are, and that is simply that.

What they do for melodicism, for bringing metal to the masses, they also undo by simply pandering to the obvious so deeply that they eventually undermine their own efforts by becoming pussies with distortion pedals.

Except for their bassist. That guy is massive. It's awesome because the rest of the guys are wee little Swedes, but this bassist dude, he was like 6'2" or so, full of metal hair, and chunky. The rest of the guys were little. Little Swedes. The kind you hope would make you meatballs and sing you folk songs in the frigid winter nights.

In July I had the great fortune of catching the At the Gates reunion show. At the Gates is also Swedish, also a death metal band, and also pioneers of the melodic sound that would eventually define the genre now known as metalcore.

Thing is, At the Gates were totally fucking genius and the crowd were on it. The jockfest retards at tonight's show were too busy taking their shirts off and hitting people to notice much of anything outside of cock-pulsing beats and this-side-of-gay disco lighting.

One thing I noticed was that both At the Gates and In Flames had band members sporting the 3/4 length men's capri-pants look. Say what? As the Unspeakable said knowingly, "Swedish." 

 Nuff said.

The only thing those of us here at Blind Butcher could do to debunk the stupidity of the shrunken-balled eunuch party directly in front of the stage was to bum rush the pit and work some of our mojo.

It was ugly in there. Muscular pituitary inbred hillbilly rapists were in the pit, shirtless, sweaty and hungry for damage. This scene led the Unspeakable to start yelling, "BECAUSE I'M A LADY," to the people in front of us in order to get us up front without incident or pause. Once that plea wore out, she was able to get us in place by shouting out "OH, I'M GONNA VOMIT." I get the expulsion of pent-up frustration that motivates people of lesser intelligence in the pit, but I don't really understand why clubs tolerate such ignorant displays of violence in the same venue that frisks you and runs a metal detector over your genitals at the door. What, getting broadsided by a 250 LB gorilla isn't an act of violence because you were too close to him as he worked out why daddy dick-slapped him as a youth? Fuck that, that's as stupid as a $7 Guinness in a can.

That's when we began shouting at the band between songs. You know, as a social experiment.

"WHY ARE YOU SPITTING SO MUCH?" to the vocalist.

And...

"YOU'RE TOO BIG," at the bassist.

And my coup-de-grace, "WHY ARE YOU SINGING IN ENGLISH?" to the melodically inclined Swedes.

Pure comedy gold.

Anyway, if you see that Gojira is coming to your town, get thee to the show post haste. They are touring the states for the first time ever and they are pretty much at the top of what metal has to offer at this very moment. Yes, they are that good. Do it. Go. Really.

And if you can't catch them, then forgo whatever useless CD you were eyeballing by that Pitchfork band you cop boners over and buy some Gojira instead. If you actually take my advice and do so and come away unhappy, well then go fuck yourself, because you're lost in some sort of reality that is cloaked in the shroud of tediousness and pretentious flaccid blight.

Seriously. Check our Gojira. The longest most painful nights are almost bearable with Gojira to wash it all down. Well, almost anyway. You can take care of the rest with cheap grocery store Guinness for $8 a six pack.




"Look honey, it's a cross-eyed zombie!"

Fuck, I am hilarious.

Some random pictures from past couple of months.

Livingston HEB




Giant Crosses outside of New Orleans... Or Alabama or Mississippi.. can't remember.



Nutria at Meyer Park. This was kind of gross, because in the pond where these guys were swimming around, there were a few dead nutria with what looked like smashed heads.. but maybe these other Nutria ate their comrades brains or something. I don't know if they are herbivores.. There was a moment where I saw one nutria sitting up erect on a distant log with it's back to us. It could have been a Wind in The Willows moment. A big fat rat contemplating life in a little man made pond in the center of one of North Houston's wealthier neighborhoods-- surrounded by mansions and fallen comrades.



Moments Cabaret. John and I started doing commercials for Moments and another classy joint called Treasures around the time I shot this picture. We would say things with a breathy and dripping speech impediment like, "Where the ladies pee standing up and two nipples aren't enough... (pause)... Tweasures." Or, "A lap dance is like being farted on by a dirty angel... Momentsssss." Or the coup-de-grace, "Meet Shasta, the chipped-toothed asphalt-faced crusty-sequenced-thonged homeless wandering three-legged leper... Tweasures."

yeah. Why actually grow up?



Hung Dong vietnamese market on 290. This reminds me of when companies name and market products in other countries and come to realize that the translation for their fruity beverage is something like grandmother's vomit or the car name that translated as "won't drive".. or even the "probe" car... Anyone who has ever had a rectal or vaginal exam.. might not want to drive that.




Houston chronicle guy clutching his papers in Kingwood or Shenandoah area.



We returned to the Hillhouse, so that I could leave a letter for William.

I hope all these images aren't taxing your page load. I have more that I want to share from some offroading trips. We may hit another ghost town this weekend.