Monterey

Someone nailed a sign to a telephone pole leaning gently over the northwest corner of two dirt roads in Monterey County. It's handmade - ballpoint pen on brown cardboard. It says "I need DIRT" and includes a phone number. I drive by going east to west, hungover and smiling.

The geography is elusive. It's possible I'm heading north.

Corporate B Movies

"Dennis, I need you to drop what you're doing and pull together that report for senior management's off-site strategic session"

Pavement, 6/25, Greek Theater, Berkeley, CA, USA. Fresh.

Cut yr hair
Frontwards
Gold Soundz
Stereo
Zurich
Rattled
Unfair
Silent kid
Kennel D
Grounded
Range life
Shady lane
Ikea
Spit on a stranger
And then the Hexx
We dance
Elevate
In the mouth a desert
Starlings
Stop breathin
Trigger cut w Gary Young
e:
Boxelder
Lions of Linden
2 states
Summer babe
Here

Pavement, 6/24, Bob Hope (Fox) Theater, Stockton CA, USA. Epic.

Silent kid
Stereo
Shady Lane
Rattled by the Rush
Spit on a Stranger
Gold Sounds
Kennel D
Unfair
Grounded
Fight this Generation
Range Life
Ikea
In the mouth a desert
We dance
Cut yr hair
Stop Breathin
Starlings of the Slipstream
Father to a Sister of Thought
And Then
Fin
Conduit

Encore (w/ Gary Young on Drums)
Summer Babe
2 States
Perfume v

Morning in Tokyo

morning in Tokyo
this crow is flying around
black animal calm

renunciation
black animal in the pale sky
crow is here with me

(1)
leaves are still falling
there are no jeweled palaces
old men sing in the countryside
the light is unreliable but it doesn't matter
we have gone beyond it
we are old men or will be
we don't know the songs and can’t figure a way to learn them
we live in the cloud
we are non-believers
the jewels were carried away by cheap labor
the palaces will make adequate administrative space
we will archive the form called song
in the library called art
curated by the nothing department
there are no swim lanes in the cloud to interfere with our business
so why worry?

(2)
did you notice how that last piece ended with a question?
it's a good one
maybe a little open-ended
it adds to the ambiguity of the thing
was that what you expected?
this one will too
is that ok with you?

(3)
i do my best thinking on long flights
depending on how you define "best"

(4)
that one was just meaningless
but it will pass for ambiguity too
i'm not an idiot

(5)
america why did you forget about howl?
you should have read it more than once
it's excellent
it can debug all your fucking code
and explain your mysteries in an artful way
like why the cascades sustain a certain civic life but the rockies do the opposite
the rockies are just fucking avalanche breeders
you would know that if you ever got outside
america how will you ever know the depths of your dangerous ingenuity?
your fucking collision course is set
it runs right over the bridge out of hamlin
but you will sleep late
and you will get a late start
and it will be too late to make up the time
your children gone for fucking ever
to live in the cloud
they won't sing your songs or even try to learn them
they will discard your notions of art and reason
form new guiding principles
and go forward
this is inevitable
so why worry?