AtomicWorkshop

The Absence Of God

Adam — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 21:31:16 +0000

Come whatever may, this is what is: static shock and foster homes, 15/16 scale models of every significant sickness. You stare at your hand for an hour or two and pray for movement. The numbers won’t line up or tell their secrets and certified mail stubs only gawk at you from their position above the Earth’s mantle. Suddenly there is no air in this room and the clock spits violently at the fan before blinking itself into submission. Tokens of affection litter the imagination: a fantasy of veins and accidents; unspooling cassette tapes with a pencil; counting to two billion in an arrhythmic cadence. The cosmos part for angled handrails and your chest just hangs open, creaking on its hinges. You dream of passing the apartment but those people are gone for good and it’s best to leave them wandering their backwards alleys– still, a walk would be nice. Learning to cook would be a change from holding miniature UN meetings from the comfort of a darkened floor when everyone forgot their headsets and communication is pointless. Instead, scratch and sniff and rock incessantly. Eat some chips. Think about another bottle of water but don’t move. If feeling sane felt this bad we’d all choose the short jacket and consoling walls of white so you crouch in the corner and press your head to the floor and take deep breaths, losing count for the ten thousandth time and almost not forgetting. This emptiness is not comfort, no matter what the wizard promised, so you fantasize and theorize and contemporize your look, your waist line, reforge some connections as you calculate the loss of others without much severity. Some snow might be healthy—a tsunami would certainly wash this feeling away. Water up to the waist is always a way of half drowning and a decision must be made before that door can be opened again. ‘What’s that?’ you say to the grasshopper on the window sill, stretching its viola legs out to the setting sun. ‘Some air would be good for me?’

Well, good for me.

Editors note: the time has come, dear friends, to find warmer climes. This will be the last time I post on AtomicWorkshop, having been given a little space of my own by the indefatigable Ben Sheldon. So for the faithful readers, few though you are, my musings and semi-literate rants can now be found at Innocent Abroad in their entirety– new things to come, you know, when I get around to it.

Cheers,

Adam

206-764-HERO

Adam — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 07:02:25 +0000

Recently I undertook the monumental task of driving from San Diego to somewhere north of Seattle and back in roughly four days– and despite gas prices, Oregon cops, awkward reunions, dodgy motels, and a heat so oppressive even Jesus would have been soaking his robe in wine coolers and wearing it as a turban, it was a rather pleasant trip. But I saw something in the great state of Washingtion that gave me pause, and the more I ponder it, the greater my cause for alarm.

Washington is a sedate place, at the least the immediate acres to either side of I-5, and with the exception of a small tract of Seattle proper has very little traffic. Still, carpool lanes quite frequently expand the road to three or four lanes, which my companion and I found very useful—and then I began seeing the signs, posted every two or three miles over a large portion of the state.

(more…)

Untitled

Adam — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 04:03:22 +0000

Minor details in a minor key—Bandoleros throwing chubby young women over their shoulders; the view of Africa from a balcony; the longest of nights, darkest of days; months by the pool. I look and look, but never see your face. If decorative bottles and tins of pills were currency we would be rich, you and me—our golden bodies in a constant stage of merger, avoidance, repetition, healing. If silence was a drug we would have been Venus-bound from birth. These eyes never stop searching, devouring features and landscapes—the brain struggles to keep pace, dedicated to the act of remembering. These arms, long exhausted from reaching, have atrophied and died but the hands still keep a sullen vigil, making notes the first Wednesday of every third month concerning how little has changed in the atmosphere. Poison is still poison, after all. A mile is still a body of water. Three drinks is still catharsis. I must have taken two hundred pictures of the Eiffel tower and felt no closer to Paris, no closer to home, no closer to the way your smiling mouth constricts a straw, no closer to Heaven, or Jesus, or Lindsey—lost somewhere in the mountains of Italy or the desert just outside Las Vegas. It’s ugly, and we’re no strangers to the concept, knowing it never matters how a story began so long as you control the ending. What we’re left with is a cowboy hat and bi-annual beer, a nervous tic, another half-dozen equally worthless lovers. What we’re left with is nothing we haven’t paid for—thirty thousand words and an unquenchable rage. Fill a bucket with pennies and you’re left with thousands of uncovered eyes, blind from birth. Tell someone you love ‘goodbye’ and ‘God bless’. Sit by her grave and write a brand new vernacular. Drive up and down the coast for ten years and tell me how the sun feels on your skin. I like the keeping in touch, if that can be said to be what this is.

Adam

Dearest _______,

Adam — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 19:31:47 +0000

I want to write you a letter but I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand. There’s something within me that has a tendency to twist and manipulate words. Another part easily misinterprets action and language. Another part never knows which direction is down yet screams for me to find my way to some arbitrary home. This is important because you need to understand that to understand me, or this letter.

I want to tell you that your energy is infectious— that when you enter a room I am infused with a vitality that’s disorienting. You shake with excitement or pleasure or anger and I want to be that catalyst. Your eyes are magic and I lose myself in them so I jest but rarely look. You seduce me with your influence and honesty, your simultaneous strength and fragility (we both know my history of tragic women), the way you dress and walk and dance. Tonight I have this intense desire to see you dance— to hear your heels click across a hard surface.

I need to tell you these things because I’m tired of letting fear keep me mute. I want your arms wrapped tightly around my neck. I want to fall asleep tonight with my fingers in your hair. I want to see your shape when stretched out on a bed: the perfect angles of arms and legs, the curve of your hips, a length of back in moonlight, the shadows thrown across one wall when you mount me. I’ve seen the cracks in your façade—woken in the early morning as you stir, kissing my hand and hugging it to your chest. I want to seep inside of those fissures, gently prodding everything within reach to understand what it really means to be inside of you.

You frustrate and confuse me, challenge and enrapture me. You’ve haunted me across oceans and train tracks, between drinks and during commercial breaks, before sex and after breakfast. You exist in such a special place within me but I doubt these words make sense in the way I’ve intended them. It’s not that I couldn’t love anyone else, or that I must have you. In this post post-modern world we’re not that intense. It’s simply that for tonight and all the nights I dare look forward to you will exist this way in my thoughts, and I want to exist similarly in yours. I want you to miss me when I’m gone and look forward, as I do, to honesty, comfort, companionship and love— in whatever form we find it, no matter where it takes us.

If I awake in the early morning—some day—at any distance in the future to find my arm hugged tightly to your chest, lips grazing my fingertips, I will have succeeded. Until that day, it’s just another day.

Adam

Sport For The Sake Of Sport

Adam — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 19:33:40 +0000

It’s World Cup time again, America. I know it’s hard to miss because you don’t really understand or like ‘soccer’– football to the other 95% of the world that could give a shit about Terrell Owens and Coors Light. But I do have a problem with the scant few moderately knowledgeable people that follow sporting events not authorized by ABC and the NFL—mainly because the vast majority of Americans lack the capacity to understand the spirit of the World Cup and instead lapse back into their partisan shells and decide to use the competition as some sort of springboard for their hackneyed agendas.

The politicization of sport has gone way too far. Every asshole who argued that Iran should be banned from the World Cup as a warning about the unacceptability of their nuclear ambitions should be fired out of a cannon into a brick wall suspended over a bed of nails. FIFA is not a god damn political organization, and neither is the Olympic Committee (thought they’ve tried to play the part before). These periodic international competitions are the world’s best chances to actually be brought together by the universality and utter neutrality of sport. You root for your team—you root against your team’s rivals—you root against whatever teams have the best chance of beating yours later on. Politics should play no part in the equation, and the pettiness shown by so many people (especially, I’m ashamed to say, Americans) utterly corrupts the beauty of the last major international sporting competition not completely overrun by commercialization.

80,000 German fans boo when Argentina subs Cambiasso for Riquelme in the 71st minute because they know a fresh defensive midfielder that late in the game doesn’t bode well for their team. Americans belie the fact that they know very little about soccer and even less about the true spirit of competition by saying ‘Gawd, France won? I hate France and I hope they lose!’…… What? Can you really be serious? France (the World Cup team) made the semi-finals and you hate France (their government’s stances and their ‘innate’ arrogance) so you hope France (the athletes that have nothing to do with any of that stuff) lose? Isn’t that along the same lines as saying ‘I hate the economic policies of the industrial West so I will kidnap and murder their humanitarian aid-workers’? For fuck’s sake people, confine your petty squabbling to the appropriate venue.

So Americans root against the Mexican team over immigration (because the better they do, the more Mexicans feel compelled to immigrate???), against France ostensibly over the thrashing they took in our press over their non-support of ‘Operation Iraqi Quagmire’, and against Iran because that’s the nation taking up most of the attention of our national press at the moment. But then Mexico plays Iran and flawed logic hits the fan because instead of thinking ‘which team will improve our chances of advancing?’ we’re stuck with ‘Uh oh, I can either root for illegal immigration or nuclear armament’. But maybe that’s predictable– Americans are notoriously uncompromising when it comes to their ‘ideals’, and having no knowledge of these teams or nations outside of vague political stances, it makes sense that they prefer to transfer the policies of governments nearly as bumbling and untrustworthy as their own onto the athletes of other countries. For many Americans the World Cup is not even about sport—it’s about that same errant string of patriotism that allows us to spend 1.5 billion dollars a week to have a 200,000 man camp-out in the desert (imagine all the marshmallows) while children’s eyes are disintegrating in central Africa from unclean water and countless blessed, holy, white Americans will go without food tonight.

If you’re worried about political issues, go vote. Elect politicians who will actually address your concerns in a constructive and non-reactionary way. But leave it out of international competition. The World Cup is one of the last bastions of sport for the sake of pride and sport, still immune (more or less) to the blatant commercialization that mars every homegrown athletic competition—no commercial breaks, no trading or buying players like cattle, and even a semblance of sportsmanship when an Italian player goes down and the Ukranians, behind by 3 goals, kick the ball out to give Italy a chance to collect their injured man. And best of all, no politics— do you think Portugal gives a shit about British policies when the game ends and they exchange jerseys and hug in the middle of the field like brothers? This is a real chance for international dialogue and unification— until the undiscerning eye of the venture capitalist sweeps across the competition and decides that every nation with a welfare state deserves to lose.

By all means America, get interested, get involved, call it football and root for your team— but if one more mother fucker bags on Zinedine Zidane for being a ‘cigarette-smoking, wine-swilling surrender-monkey’ I’m going to take a machete to their face.

And oh yeah, VIVA ITALIA!!!!

Adam

Cocktails With Kelly

Adam — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 08:39:48 +0000

Everyone watch the blonde fondle a horse.
The table is set for six hundred.
The ancient symbol staked on parchment paper;
light from tiny candles; cattle farms
Cascading across the most beautiful tracts
Of small-town repetitive West.
Just try to peek inside the tent.
It’s like a lost world in there
with the blinding flashes of a photo booth
Spitting passport pictures of women
Stamped across the smiling visa of my face.

Dig yourself another grave:
Lie quietly, not knowing
Sunday or summer
Lover or space heater
Conscious effort or circumstance
Manipulation or honesty
Truth or truth.

If I get one more glass of Chardonnay
Maybe we could make right today:
The old friends’ fiancés eye-candy stares
At long distance lovers suddenly entrenched
in the clinking glass futility
Of self fulfilled prophecy.

Let someone else drive us home.
Dig your heels into the dirt.
Hold onto your resolve in the confines
Of hurtling steel ribbons spanned by plastic.
Meet the spastic spinning
with hands increasingly clasped,
Folded across a lap.
Tremble as they trail over ass and thigh
touching the slick warmth,
Tongue tracing nipple,
Taste of sweet white and cake,
Tattooed you arching and moaning
Braceleted hands twisting through hair.

The piano buzzes loud enough to wake us.
The car alarm cuts off a promise, a prayer.
A goat bleats and these dreams just turn stupid–
Mary’s little lamb lays beside a plate.
Door jams are magnets for shins and skulls.
A raccoon could be a gopher, giraffe
Or god damn pygmy elephant because who is left
To decipher this language—
The repose of dry, the passion of wet?
And what of those standing
in the graduation line doing both,
Doing all: speeches, sex acts, heavy mornings,
Phone calls that cloud the head,
Fingers you can smell all day?

And where does it lead—
this avenue of anxiety
unamused,
unmeasured?
He whispered
‘Do you want me?’
And she hugged him
as if to say ‘no,
but maybe I could
turn my head this once.’

Catch The Wind

Adam — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 17:38:18 +0000

—But where did it go? The lake had dried almost overnight and within weeks everything was dead, the few resilient beasts concealed in the clay of the empty river bed, gummy membranes retaining water. The last tribesman wanders the dusty expanse, squinting before the harshness of the sun, searching for rain clouds across the skyline. That same sun, once precious giver of even heat, had seemed to spasm lately, growing steadily larger and hotter. All the tribe was dead or gone, their bodies mummified quickly in a heat so appalling that after the first round of burials not even the strongest could bend to dig fresh graves. Some had attempted to flee—to find water; to find a shady place where green things could persevere in spite of the sun— but they were dead too, a trail of silent bodies reaching for each horizon. He tried once to dig at the riverbank with a sharpened awl to get at the precious morsels of water trapped in reptilian flesh, but couldn’t crack the hard clay and finally resigned himself to death. Every tough and fibrous plant had been chewed, every insect eaten for token nourishment— he only vaguely recalls killing the last of the emaciated goats so the children could drink their blood. Just days ago there were still six clinging to life, but he awoke one morning to find all had expired in the night, knees tucked in tightly to their chests, lips cracked and hanging off. Each morning since he had risen quietly, dragging himself to the large outcropping of rock that marks the far west of the tribe’s territory, surveying the sky for clouds and land for signs of movement— but with ever increasing heat the ground only seemed to swell and shift and he understood in a very visceral way that nothing was alive but him. At night he watched the sky in earnest, witnessing the seize and shake of stars– planets blinking around a dying sun. The heat was no better then and for the past several days he had slept very little, musing on his ending. They must have offended the gods: given too much tribute, or the wrong kind. He didn’t know, having followed his heart in supplication as he’d always been taught. Maybe some adumbration of the divine still existed: he was still alive, after all. But with a rapidly distending belly and a throat raw from dust that even saliva refuses to remove, he knows his god has abandoned him, the waxing and waning of those affections hurting more than heat or hunger. In the morning he rises one last time. His eyeballs sting and begin to crack as he crawls to the escarpment and blinks in vain, seeing nothing but black blurs and swirls of dust; fountains of flame leap from the sun’s surface. No cloud. No man. No beast. He wants to scream, but lungs, slowly filling with viscous blood, refuse the stifling air. With nothing else to do he sits on the great rock with his head in his hands, waiting for rain, knowing death will come first.

The ‘Song Birds’ Suck… Again

Adam — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 20:28:21 +0000

This reviewer recently had the unique misfortune of catching the early matinee performance of the ‘Song Birds’ at Third Street Elementary, expecting an uninspired but nevertheless professional performance. Make no mistake—though it sounds cute enough, this show was simply awful– there’s no musical precedent for how pretentiously nauseating these blaspheming 8 and 9 year olds were. Rife with aureate vocals and blatant performance gaffes, the ‘Song Birds’ showcase was an ultimately embarrassing forty minute ensemble of Jukebox Hits of the ‘70s complete with several so-called ‘soloists’ who couldn’t sing their way out of a kid-sized body bag. In fact, the most entertaining aspect of the entire show was the fat girl in the top left who scratched her crotch halfway through the third number.

Considering that the show was patently awful from start to finish, it’s difficult to pick which parts to highlight. Without a doubt, the most egregious bit was an extremely truncated version of the Three Dog Night classic Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog. After butchering the intro due to bad timing, they proceeded to belt out “Jeremiah was a bullfrog/He was a good friend of mine/he never understood a single word I said/and we all had a mighty fine time”. As if the sheer act of performing the song wasn’t insult enough, some anti-free-speech fascist decided to censor Three Dog Night’s reference to ‘wine’, which our White Lord Jesus himself was fond of drinking. The exclusion of alcoholic beverages from the program was even more onerous considering the inclusion of Little Richard’s loving tribute to anal sex ‘Tutti Frutti’ which was sung with uncharacteristic (and slightly disturbing) zeal. I silently prepared myself for the equally bad rewrite of Marvin Gaye ‘Let’s Get It On (Our Thinking Caps!!!)’

If Obie Benson hadn’t died of lung cancer last year, he surely would have put a shotgun in his mouth over the cover of The Four Tops’ ‘Reach Out, I’ll Be There’ with the young man soloing “Come on, baby, reach out to me!” sounding like a Van Morrison with Down Syndrome. The trip-hop version of Dobie Gray’s Drift Away (or was that just the Uncle Kracker version?) was equally reprehensible, the troupe of singing bastards caterwauling off key to one of the finest couplets ever put to music. The only redeeming value of the concert was the middle-aged conductor, one Mrs. Pennywise Westmoreland, who gave near-seamless direction to this mostly apathetic group of ‘performers’ and should not be held accountable for the overall sound, something akin to Dylan’s 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue, had His Bobness undergone a vasectomy the morning of each show.

As a professional reviewer of serious art, I am incensed by the audacity and carelessness exhibited by this gaggle of god damned children who couldn’t muster one believable bit of musicality betwixt the sixty of them. Not since The Polyphonic Spree has there been an amelodic bunch of cunts so intent on destroying music. Nor in recent memory has there been a bigger group of self-important jackasses displaying such an outstanding lack of relevancy to the fragile times we live in.

If these children are any indication of the future of music, you better stockpile those Shakira and Mandy Moore records, because it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Your faithful reviewer,

Jamie Mayweather III, Esq.

An Open Letter To All My Ex’s

Adam — Mon, 22 May 2006 19:29:00 +0000

As I look out the window this morning
I see your faces in newly pressed snow,
sheets of ice on the barn door,
patterns of fog on the windshield.
I see shades of your eyes in burned-out stoplights,
urging me forward, forcing me to stop.

Let’s get one thing settled: I know it was your fault too.
I just painstakingly take the blame because it’s more compact then;
aerodynamic. I become sleek with guilt, hurtling obsessively onward.
It never mattered if we shared the ending or what came after—
That is for me to cherish and ponder, regret and demolish,
Reconstruct until it makes sense, resembles a reality I can understand.

III

I know that besides death there is no ending,
And even then we can’t be sure. I know that we all need, want, crave—
We’ve all sat on sofas and listened to lesbian mothers
Cry with their children. I know now that nothing is guaranteed,
Not even the prospect of a perfect memory,
so I’m going to write everything I remember about you:

You were stunning, placid, peaceful.
You were thoughtful and well read, tragic to a degree.
As the lowest common denominator, we were intense.
I fed you pasta dishes and desserts, drank beer or wine,
(orange juice in the days before I had this monster sedated.)
I worshipped your body, if only for a night—
became violently angry if only internally.
I missed you whether I wrote a novel about it
or dreamed of burning your house down again and again.

I have wanted to kill every single one of you.

To be quite honest, I’m glad you left.
If you hadn’t I would have forced you to leave, or left myself–
any conceivable end so long as the ending was tragic. Tragedy
makes us feel alive, and in that respect I owe my life to you–
But let’s not be melodramatic. At some point we must accept
that we are who we are and whatever it was about me
that you hated so much, I still do it:
I’m still passive aggressive. I still bite my fingernails.
I still eat out constantly. I still have trouble getting out of bed.
I still don’t like to have sex with a condom. I still love writing,
laughing and Grazianos more than I will ever love you.

I still drink.

VII

But I don’t believe in crying foul, maligning, disdaining—not anymore,
because where would you be without me? Who would have shown you
what not to do: made the dopiest of new lovers
Carey Grant by comparison? From me you gleaned freedom and guilt,
a love for boxed wine and mixtapes.
Leaving gave you fear and self-loathing, tiny yellow birds,
new ways to masochise, violent altercations in the car.
Your leaving allowed me candor, passion, fire.
My faceless anger bloomed, enabled by your apathy and disdain.
Your leaving prompted my greatest excavations and I’ll admit
its better this way, just don’t pretend that I welcomed your leaving—
I would have shattered a thousand windshields to make you stay.

VIII

I guess the point is that there is no point.
You are my internal debtors, outward anxieties,
IRS agents, fondest memories, best, worst or non-existent lays.
You are my chewed-on slippers and the dog that refused to fetch them.
You are in every god damn song I have ever heard
and every piece I have ever written, composing syllables
and sonnets within me, fusing together bits of glorious memory,
delete-able as my parents flesh.

One day I will die
and your children will notice that faraway look in your eyes
and you’ll try to explain
but they’ll just roll their eyes and tell a friend
’some guy died’
like it never really mattered.

Adam

Songs From ‘The Rock’

Adam — Thu, 18 May 2006 22:58:39 +0000

For the past four weeks I’ve been obsessed with music. I haven’t slept much. I haven’t eaten much. Surprisingly, I haven’t drank (too) much either. Honestly, I’ve just listened to music. This recent obsession coincided with a deeply troubling existential funk that arose like a wide, black cloud as a reaction to several things: my anxiety over Bloom’s anxiety; Gourevitch’s sobbingly sad account; the 45-second flowering and apparent death of a very meaningful professional opportunity, and the inevitable cranial bruising that results from prolonged contact with a blunt object, brick wall, immovable attitude, or entrenched emotional position. Compounding and eclipsing this is concern over my own perceived diminishing health (both physically and mentally) which I attribute to the sudden acute awareness of living an utterly meaningless life in a savage and inarticulately uncaring modern world so blinded by the light from split atoms and Sex In The City reruns that it refuses to face its own insurmountable insignificance.

Perhaps predictably I have turned to music for solace, and through this funk I have listened to music virtually non-stop, craving the relative sincerity of recorded thoughts of warmth, hope, or at least depression roughly the same size and shape as my own. That these sounds of pure, ecstatic, life-affirming expression are created by machines in a studio and transmitted electronically to my auditory cavities is a wonder of love and faith that has buoyed me immeasurably as I survey the blighted landscape of possibility which seemed so wide a matter of months ago, with snow in my hair and a foreign hand in my own. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about music, contemplating the mixtape and the ‘life we have lost in living… the wisdom we have lost in knowledge.’ It makes me pine for the days when mixtapes were necessarily an art form, when the amount of time and energy necessary to make one actually meant something. Of course, not every mixtape made twenty years ago was a labor of love (we’re not all Rob Gordon, after all) but it’s beyond argument that easily transferable, arrangeable, and burnable digital audio files have taken the quality bar on mixtapes down considerably.

It was into this artistic milieu that I ventured, attempting to do something conceptual with the mixtape that I’d never done before. To showcase the sheer dexterity and endless possibilities of personal mixes, I decided to create two autonomous tapes for two young women for whom I feel very differently: One to a girl that might describe me as nothing more than a ‘deeply cared for failure’ after a brilliant crash from the heights of possibility to the inimitable struggle to remember each others birthday every year, and the other to a girl I’ve never actually met before (an odd undertaking in and of itself). The catch was that I wanted to use the same artists for both tapes to show how any style or band can be used to different affects when placed carefully in the context of a mix. But a problem arose: at what point did the quality of the mix supplant the aforementioned rules of conduct? If I found a song that was perfect for one tape and could find no suitable corollary for the other, would I sacrifice a great song for a less perfect one in order to maintain the rigidity of the rules? Would it be permissible to put the same song on both tapes? If one is attempting to show how the same artists can create different moods with different songs, how could you ignore a song universal enough to fit multiple moods? In the end I decided the mixes themselves were the proper end, and any red tape existed solely for my own creative and experimental purposes, so I settled on a compromise of two flex artists per mix with the understanding that the same song was acceptable as long as it didn’t become a front for my own infernal laziness.

It took me two weeks and more hours than I’ll ever admit, but hastened by a personal deadline of a Wednesday birthday lunch meeting (which I was promptly stood up for—stood up be an ex???), they were completed. So without further ado, I share them with you:

#1 ‘My Little Heart Attack’ For Elizabeth on her 21st birthday

01. Islands – Jogging Gorgeous Summer
02. Mountain Goats – Dance Music
03. Decemberists – Engine Driver
04. Okkervil River – Song Of Our So-Called Friend
05. Joni Mitchell – See You Sometime
06. The Streets – Dry Your Eyes
07. Jack The Original – It’s Okay
08. Elected – It Was Love
09. Elliott Smith – Someone I Used To Know
10. Deseparecidos – Man And Wife, The Latter (Damaged Goods)
11. Hidden In Plain View – Garden Statement
12. Jack’s Mannequin - Rescued
13. Rocky Votolato – Suicide Medicine
14. Rainer Maria – Terrified
15. Carissa’s Weird - Yours Truly, Ugly Valentine
16. Rilo Kiley – More Adventurous

#2 ‘Sing Me Something: The Kahlua-Fudge Brownie Mixtape’ For Kaitlin

01. Jack The Original – Sing Me Something
02. Elected – Would You Leave With Me
03. Mountain Goats – Dance Music
04. The Streets – Could Well Be In
05. Deseparecidos – Man And Wife, The Former (Financial Planning)
06. Joni Mitchell – People’s Parties
07. Okkervil River – Black Sheep Boy
08. Rocky Votolato – Portland Is Leaving
09. Jack’s Mannequin – Miss Delaney
10. Elliott Smith – No Name #1
11. Teitur – You’re The Ocean
12. Jason Robert Brown – I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You
13. Rilo Kiley – The Absence Of God
14. Hidden In Plain View – Halcyon Daze
15. Decemberists – Of Angels and Angles
16. Rainer Maria – Clear & True

Was it a success? I don’t know for sure yet. Undoubtedly I completed the tapes in roughly the way I wanted, but I think the bigger question is: where does one go from here? Do I try this again with two more people and switch it up again to test myself and the limits of expression even more? More people? The mixtape EP project? I don’t know, and this is what I love about music, and when you get right down to it, about life. The possibilities are infinite, and while that can be a crippling proposition to the psychologically fragile, it truly is the spark that makes this life worth living.

Put away the coffee spoons, Eliot, I’m feeling better today.

Adam