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Friday Full-Length: Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral

Posted in Bootleg Theater on September 27th, 2024 by JJ Koczan

Easily one of the most lauded albums of the 1990s in any genre, a commercial breakthrough for Nine Inch Nails selling over four million copies, and a record whose influence can still be felt driving bands today who are considered pioneers, The Downward Spiral was released in 1994 and the response was immediate. Singles “March of the Pigs” and “Closer,” later “Hurt” and “Piggy,” were enticing and I remember being 12 years old and seeing the “Closer” video on MTV. I hadn’t heard anything like it and had only seen such gruesome sexualized imagery, well, in horror movies I wasn’t supposed to watch and in the bowels of a dial-up era internet. All that writhing and silhouetted mic-licking fit right in.

I won’t fool myself into believing I have something to say about The Downward Spiral, some accolade to throw at it, that hasn’t been said in the 30 years since its release. To be honest, the songs are such a given in my mind, from the speeding-up sound of someone being beaten as the introduction to the intensity of “Mr. Self-Destruct” at the album’s outset to the minimalist emo whispers of “Hurt” — which if you need to be reminded was eventually covered by Johnny Cash — at the finish, it is a 65-minute deep-dive into some of the darkest incarnations of pop that have been wrought since the birth of the form in the early and mid-20th century.

Every time I see one of these grown-up-five-year-old dickweeds with their Trump flags and “back the blue” stickers on their $80,000 “don’t tread on me” pickup trucks, the most entitled motherfuckers ever to walk the face of the earth whose every action is nothing more than a jerkoff to their own unthinking white supremacy, “Big Man With a Gun” plays in my head as an assault on the ridiculousness of masculinity. I’d argue that song in particular is more relevant now than when it was written, not the least for its transgressive weaponization of on-male ambiguous sexual threat, one of The Downward Spiral‘s most powerful statements, and it’s a minute-and-a-half long afterthought to the epic ending of “I Do Not Want This,” answering back a layered build-up there around the repeated lines, “I wanna know everything/I wanna be everywhere/I wanna fuck everyone in the world/I wanna do something that matters.” Turns out you just did.

There are a few levels on which The Downward Spiral is one of a kind. Trent Reznor, founder, songwriter, producer, live guitarist/vocalist, and generally regarded as the auteur of Nine Inch Nails (he also scores the occasional Disney movie, which is a demonstration of the marvelously absurd potentiality of popular culture), neither invented hard-industrial music nor made The Downward Spiral alone. The band’s second album, it followed 1989’s keyboardier Pretty Hate Machine and built on an already aggressive sound. More guitar. More drums. More force, anger and impact. Somehow “March of the Pigs” is punk. A host of collaborators like Adrien Belew (King Crimson, etc.), Chris Vrenna, Danny Lohner, Charlie Clouser and a veritable army of mixing engineers are undernoted in the narrative that’s emerged as years and decades gone on, and this can be taken as a result of the unlikely intimacy of the material.

As far as it ranges between pieces like the quiet ambience of “A Warm Place” and the unmatched expanse and impact of “Reptile” — a late highlight in the more experimental back half, alongside “The Becoming,” “Big Man With a Gun,” “Eraser” and the experimentalist title-track; “Hurt” aside, The Downward Spiral was also ahead of its time in frontloading its singles, and part of the point of that song is its exception and comedown — it is still written from a sole, lonely perspective, often read as that of Reznor himself. Lyrics in the first person. Even just considering its god-directed violence, admittedly wrought in a more liberal time — the ’90s before the internet crashed the traditional structures of the music industry and unregulated consolidation took hold, killing rock stars and moving pop in more hyper-accessible directions — a piece like “Heresy” doesn’t have an uncommon message in either heavy metal or post-modernism, “Your god is dead and no one cares,” but its subversion happened at a scale and with an audience reach that would and could not happen now. Not only would Reznor have been dropped from Interscope Records owing to the delays in making The Downward Spiral, the greater likelihood is he’d never be signed to a major label in the first place.

A person wiser than myself once told me that some records you only get to make once. That’s the album into which your entire self is poured. The album on which every second is scrutinized, thought through, executed with purpose to be what it becomes. And then it all works. I’ll gladly admit that in my own listening habits, The Downward Spiral features less than 1999’s The Fragile (discussed here) when it comes to Reznor‘s work, but part of that is because the earlier LP remains so strikingly intense front-to-back. Its quieter stretches, in “Piggy” or “A Warm Place,” “The Downward Spiral” or “Hurt,” highlight atmospherics and provide a necessary moment of recovery from the assaults of “Mr. Self-Destruct,” “Big Man With a Gun” and “Reptile,” not to mention the songs not directly next to them in the tracklisting, but part of what the album does so well is to create a sense of mania behind its craft, as though all of it is part of a single episode, whether that looks like a psychotic break, delusion, or reality. It’s not the only time pop music was used as a tool for punishment, but for sure it is among the most extreme examples of same, and its attention to detail indeed extends to every nuance, tone, noise and flourish. Not without some painstaking in the process, it is sculpted and made to be perfect unto its imperfections.

There are sundry reissues and special editions available, scores of remixes by Reznor and others that are of varying levels of interest and quality, but The Downward Spiral is a once-in-a-lifetime album, both from the people who made it and as a listener fortunate enough to be alive at the point in history when it arrived. It is the very definition of a landmark, and its resonance has not dulled in the 30 years since it was first released, however expanded industrial music has become largely in its wake.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

Something a little different, I guess. I’ve been slowly getting to know Health’s latest album, last December’s Rat Wars, after seeing them at Roadburn this year, and that led me back to their collaboration with Reznor on the 2021 single “Isn’t Everyone,” which is quite good, and back to The Downward Spiral. At the same time, I also have an Author and Punisher live video that I’ve been trying to find time to write about all week — shooting for Monday there, but it’s out, you can find it — and so there’s a tie-in there as well. Machine churn in my brain. That happens every now and again. I’ll allow that could be a manifestation of concerns for a bleak-looking future.

I don’t try to avoid politics on this site, but neither do I actively post opinion pieces separate from writing about music, and I very easily could. Very little I enjoy more than agreeing with myself, if you couldn’t tell. But I want to say outright that I am ashamed of my country for funding the genocide of Palestinian people and disgusted by the cynicism that has tied that same atrocity to American electoral politics — Benjamin Netanyahu attacking Lebanon because no one in the US who could actually do anything about it can afford the liability of telling him not to until after votes are cast. In the meantime, people die. Children die. And having lived through 20 years of wars of aggression wrought as a response to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, empty in their purpose apart from void-of-morality revenge and profiteering, to see the same thing happening again in answer to a single attack on Oct. 7 and the taking of hostages is hard, never mind being complicit in what’s been stated as the intentional eradication of an entire group of people. This is genocide. The country in which I was raised, in which I live, supports it. This has only become more disgraceful over the last year. Joe Biden, already a hero for stepping down from the election to let Kamala Harris run and give the Democratic party any chance whatsoever, is the only person who could ever break with backing Israel in the wrong and horrifying course it’s taken — he has nothing to lose, politically; the ultimate lame duck — and he’s too old, in too weak of a position, and too undermined by foreign interests sowing discord in Congress and the media dialectic. That “terrible quagmire” has become a condition of existence isn’t a surprise necessarily, but it sure does suck.

And if I need to say this too, fuck every Republican. Yes, all of them. Even your dad. Even your neighbor. Even ones with riffs. Democrats aren’t much better — to put it in similar terms, fuck like three-quarters of them — but if you want to put the two major parties side by side, one is arguing for the preservation of representative government and the other is driven by the power-mad ego of a tiny-handed wannabe despot. Donald Trump is fucking pathetic. An emblem of the wrongness of dominant white American culture and 50 years of dismantling the public education system. A fool and a tool. I didn’t think he could be president once, and I won’t be false-comforted into believing it couldn’t happen again by the Harris side’s insistence that “we won’t go back.” As the parent of a trans child, I live in fear of where American discourse is and is headed in a very real way, knowing that kids like mine are bullied into oblivion or outright beaten to death on the regular in this savage nation and met with little more than, as Stoned Jesus might put it, “thoughts and prayers” and other glad-it-wasn’t-me faux sympathies. If you don’t think these issues matter, I’ll just say that maybe they do for other people, and if not for you, that’s something to be thankful for in my experience. We live in an age of commonplace horrors even before you get to the effects of climate change as seen even today as another hurricane batters another coastline to the sound of a collective yawn from everyone not immediately in its path.

That’s my piece. I in no way promise it will be the last I say about the upcoming presidential election, social issues, or the world in general. It’s my fucking site, I can write what I want. Sometimes I need to remind myself that my time doesn’t belong to anyone but me.

Next week: A video premiere for Flourishing, full album premieres for Ruff Majik, Sun Blood Stories and maybe Sonolith (I need to check on that, it has a question mark in my notes). If I can, I’d like to review the Terry Gross album, which is out and rips. I tried to this week but couldn’t make it happen.

The good news? We went to The Pecan’s school this week for a meeting for what’s called her 504 — a kind of IEP, or Individual Education Plan, that lists and legally obliges the school to accommodations for her ADHD and other needs — and all the reports we got were that she’s amazing, she’s a pleasure to have in class, that she helps her peers and that she’s a model for other kids to follow behaviorally. Made my week. She argues all the time, and sometimes, if you’re tired, or if you’ve just had enough of fighting about nothing, it gets to be such a drag. But if home is where that needs to happen so she can keep it together a bit in the outside world, fine. Better me than some poor kid or a teacher she’s hitting or shouting at or just saying no to and doing what she wants anyway because what the fuck am I going to do about it, really? It was a relief to hear she’s doing well as First Grade digs in. The start of kindergarten, if you’ll recall (I certainly do), was a far bumpier road.

I’ve gone on long enough. I hope you have a great and safe weekend. There’s a new Zelda game out yesterday, Echoes of Wisdom, that I’ll be picking up to play with The Pecan after she gets home from Girl Scouts today, so that will be fun and is something we’ve been looking forward to. Whatever you’re up to, I hope it’s a good time. Have fun, watch your head, hydrate. I’ll be back Monday with however much I manage to get written over the weekend. Until then, then.

FRM.

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Friday Full-Length: Queens of the Stone Age, Rated R

Posted in Bootleg Theater on July 19th, 2024 by JJ Koczan

I come and go with Queens of the Stone Age. More dilletante than superfan. The first three records — 1998’s self-titled debut (discussed here), 2000’s Rated R, 2002’s Songs for the Deaf — are largely unfuckwithable, and the source of much of the influence they’ve had over heavy rock over the last quarter-century. I’ll stand by most of 2005’s Lullabies to Paralyze on a songwriting level, though its stated intent at the time was to pick up where Songs for the Deaf left off, and sure enough, that was a moment that had passed. The first half’s singles were cool, but side B was where it was really at there, as founding frontman Joshua Homme, who had cut his teenage teeth in Kyuss, let the songs get weirder and more open.

Once you get into Era Vulgaris (2007), you lose me, and though 2013’s …Like Clockwork (review here, discussed here) had s-o-n-g-s that stuck with you, in some cases whether you wanted them to or not — looking at you, “If I Had a Tail” — I reread my review of 2017’s Villains ahead of writing this piece and couldn’t recall a single track from it. I heard one of the singles from 2023’s …In Times New Roman, and it sounded bloated, cloying and willfully mediocre, and while I know Homme is too skillful a songwriter to do one thing for a whole record, I had neither the time nor the inclination to hear it play out. Maybe some day I’ll get there, and if you dug it, I’m glad. Not going to argue.

It had been a while since I heard Rated R, but had occasion to encounter the record on a recent night under Croatian stars, and as will happen, it’s been in my head (hey! that’s a QOTSA reference!) since. Time has done little to dull the potency of this material or the collaborations that do so much to enrich it, whether that’s Homme stepping aside for then-bassist Nick Oliveri‘s lead vocals on “Auto Pilot,” the raging “Quick and to the Pointless” and “Tension Head” (which was originally a song by Oliveri‘s other band, the ongoing Mondo Generator), or the late Screaming Trees singer Mark Lanegan giving a low-key career performance on “In the Fade.” What had been a basic three-piece on the self-titled grew expansive without losing its expressive immediacy or crucial hooks, and so a cut like “The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret” blossomed as a landmark while the weirdo bounce of “Leg of Lamb” and the lightly psychedelic “Better Living Through Chemistry” enriched the impression of Rated R as a whole work. Did I already say “unfuckwithable?” Okay, good.

Others sat in as well. Masters of Reality‘s Chris Goss (who also produced at least part of it, helmed Kyuss LPs, etc.), Pete Stahl of Goatsnake and earthlings?, Screaming Trees‘ Barrett Martin, Fatso Jetson‘s Mario Lalli getting a writing credit on “Monsters in the Parasol,” born in the Homme-led Desert Sessions, and famously even Rob Halford of Judas Priest joining the gang shouts on “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” for the substance-abuse shopping list hook of “Nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol.” There are more: Gene Trautmann and Nick Lucero sharing drum duties, Reggie Young‘s horns going free-jazz as eight-minute closer “I Think I Lost My Headache” slogs toward its finish, and so on, but the point is that no matter who is adding what to the cauldron, it’s all identifiably part of Queens of the Stone Age, and what would in so many other contexts be disjointed works precisely because it’s arrogant and genuinely swaggering enough to go where it wants in terms of sound and mood.

Rated R remains heavy in tone — stretches where the guitar seems to come forward and dominate the mix like the choruses of “The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret” and “In the Fade” prove the point — but there’s almost always melody to cut through, with the noteworthy exceptions of the Oliveri-fronted punkers “Quick and to the Pointless” and “Tension Head.” These, though, are still catchy in their way, and the element of danger, of unpredictability, of threat, they add to the proceedings shouldn’t be underestimated. You never know when Queens of the Stone Age might cocaine-scream spitting into your face, and as unpleasant as that sounds on paper, it’s part of what makes the record stronger and further-reaching. Dave Catching‘s instrumental “Lightning Song,” a dreamy two-minute interlude to hypnotize and set the mood before the finale, does the same thing in a different way, while the reprise of “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” in “In the Fade” gives a thematic shape to the overarching flow, even if the theme is hi-we’re-on-drugs-in-the-desert-fuck-you-but-also-let’s-be-friends.

It preceded Homme‘s well-earned reputation for onstage dickery, preceded the rock stardom that would come just two years later as Songs for the Deaf offered hits in the already-dwindling-by-then sphere of radio. It was an expansion on the ideas the self-titled laid out, ultimately, but with a character that remains singular after all this time, whether it’s put next to the rest of the Queens of the Stone Age catalog with its various ups, downs and sideways turns, or any of the literally thousands of other bands and records working from it as a central point of influence. I know I’m not saying anything you don’t already know about it, but nearly 25 years after the fact, how much is there really to say? It’s classic rock. All the more so for its defiant-seeming individualism and blend of laid-back, ultra-apathy post-grunge Gen-X cool and moments of fervent thrust, songs that have more reach than most bands do in entire careers in four minutes or less and probably weren’t self-aware enough to be pretentious about it.

As the songs play out in succession again on the mental jukebox, I’m happy to have them. I used to think nostalgia was a weakness, but it turned out I just hadn’t had enough life experience to look back on anything fondly yet. A stupid, young opinion. I find now that whether a moment is recent or happened decades ago, if it’s worth remembering at all — and so many of these moments are related to music for me that it’s actually kind of embarrassing — that’s a thing worth embracing. Most of existence is shitty and hard. Take what you can, put your head down, keep working. My life is better for having had Rated R in it.

Thanks for reading. As always, I hope you enjoy.

—

Budapest. We’ve been here for over a week now. It’s been difficult getting settled. Adjusting. The apartment we’re staying in is on the fifth floor of an old building in the Astoria (Queens!) section of town, and is designed like a bourgeois daydream offset by the realities of ants in the bathroom, breakable Ikea furniture, the busted washer, the dog peeing on the couch this past Wednesday, and so on. I’m sure if we were fabulously wealthy, it would all work out. As it stands, we spent all the money, forever, on making this trip happen and have learned the hard lesson that it’s not a sustainable way we can live. Nor can we fly home early, which would cost an additional three grand in addition to the emotional labor of admitting defeat. And we’re talking about how 95 degrees is a break from the heat. You gotta be kidding me.

There’s a lot to like about Hungary, even beyond my continued interest in learning its strange, Carpathian-born language. If you’ve ever used a European toilet, you know there are also things that America does better, and these tradeoffs are the stuff of life. Gorgeous old buildings? No ducts in any of them, and no refrigeration infrastructure, so if you want to buy ice or sit in air conditioning you’re probably screwed. And somehow this entire continent has decided that clothes dryers are what caused the climate crisis, which is adorable and hopeless in kind. I’m grateful to be here, but I don’t know that it could ever be home. Shit, Massachusetts couldn’t be home.

The Patient Mrs. has been kind in granting me writing time this week, which is how the Causa Sui review happened, how The Swell Fellas and Circle of Sighs premieres happened and the various news stories. But there’s been friction there as well. The Pecan got kicked out of day camp after a day and a half for fighting — and before you celebrate that like “yeah stick it to the man!” let me stop you; it’s not righteous defiance, it’s neurodivergent overwhelm; same reason she dug her nails into my arm the other day as I pulled her back from the metro platform where a train was oncoming — and while predictable, it’s nonetheless a sad drag that left us this week wondering how to fill our days. Yesterday we took a bus that went in the Danube River that, despite the purported AC, was hot enough that I was sweating sitting still listening to the English audio tour tell me about the various horrors the Magyar people have faced over the centuries from Huns, Nazis, Communists, and so on — “If you look to your right you’ll see a beautiful bridge. It was a popular place for suicides….” I shit you not — and struggles with food, hydration, medication don’t help. Look at me, complaining on vacation. If it helps you at all (I know it doesn’t help me), I feel like shit about it.

And bringing the dog was a mistake, but she’s a year old and we didn’t really have a choice. The Pecan stims on her though, and it gets to be a lot. First thing this morning I pulled her arm off her bending the dog’s leg the wrong way and ended up arm-barring her in the nose. “You hurt my nose,” is not a thing a parent wants to wake up hearing. I felt like shit about that too.

Life, then. I don’t know what we’re doing today yet but I know I’m coming up against time so need to punch out and get to it. Whatever it is, it will be exhausting. Everything is.

Next week I don’t know. I want to review Orange Goblin for Monday. I promise nothing beyond that I’ll do my best with the time I get and I’ll try really, really hard to be grateful for that.

Have a great and safe weekend.

FRM.

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Friday Full-Length: Primus, Sailing the Seas of Cheese

Posted in Bootleg Theater on October 28th, 2022 by JJ Koczan

Some records are just ingrained in you. As I remember it, I first encountered Primus‘ 1991 second album and major label debut, Sailing the Seas of Cheese, at about 10 years old in my sister’s CD collection. This would’ve been when it was more or less new, before the follow-up EP, 1992’s Miscellaneous Debris, because I remember when that came out. I swiped the disc and it was like my soon-to-be-pubescent, soon-to-meet-Beavis-and-Butt-Head goofball ass found a home. I’ve lived with it basically since that time, revisiting periodically, and it’s been a bit, so here I am. This album changed my life as a kid, and it still satisfies listening as an adult for more than nostalgic purposes. I count it as one among very, very few.

What a collection of songs. Into a 45-minute span, Primus — bassist/vocalist Les Claypool, guitarist Larry LaLonde, drummer Tim Alexander, plus a bunch of their friends peppered throughout — cram banger after banger. You’ve got the intro, and even that has a hook, then you get into “Here Come the Bastards,” “Sgt. Baker,” “American Life” and “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” in succession. Holy shit. And even more insane, they’re all so short. “Here Come the Bastards” is under three minutes. In less than three minutes, Primus build and launch that groove, establish and execute that chorus, and roll out a weighted tonality that still carries its heft while dancing in circles doing high-knees.

Across its span, Sailing the Seas of Cheese is a tighter record than 1990’s Frizzle Fry (discussed here), and the tradeoff it makes between atmosphere and impact serves cuts like “Sgt. Baker” — recall the first Gulf War was on when the album was being made — and the later “Tommy the Cat,” the frenetic jazz showoff “Is it Luck,” on which LaLonde shreds guitar and Alexander shreds drums no less than Claypool does bass, or the band as a whole does a number on ‘what makes a radio hit.’

Even the side B pairing of “Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers” and “Fish On (Fisherman Chronicles, Ch. II),” where they do branch out more than a little, is more delightfully odd, more weirdo psychedelic in the case of the latter — though as far out as they go into Interscope Records-backed avant garde heavy funk rock, they bring it back to the chorus before they’re done, because songwriting — and the manner in which the concluding “Los Bastardos” reprises the central progression of “Here Come the Bastards” with samples from The Young Ones laced over top is emblematic of the jam band Primus would become after reuniting in the aughts.

Consider “Eleven” — too offbeat to be a single, brilliantly drummed, catchy, something about salsa — and tucked in between “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” and “Is it Luck?” in arguably one of the least enviable positions a song from the ’90s could be in if it wanted to stand out, but it does. It’s got vibe and chorus both. It’s heavy, it’s undeniably their own, and it legitimately works in concert with the rest of the material here to do something in rock and roll that had never been done before. Not just decentralizing the guitar — because if you listen to this, Frizzle Fry, 1993’s Pork Soda, 1995’s Tales From the Punchbowl, etc., and there’s no shortage of guitar — but in songwriting and personality. This was a new kind of fun at the time, and resonates 31 years later not only because the level of craft is so high — that is, each of its three main players is brilliant — but because no one else in the last three-plus decades has managed to come along and outdo it at its own game.

The back and forth between faster and slower songs on side A, with “Here Come the Bastards” into “Sgt. Baker,” is mirrored by the dizzying “Is it Luck?” moving into the interlude “Grandad’s Little Ditty” before the “Tommy the Cat” — which, yes, has guest vocals from Tom Waits; nobody’s perfect — takes hold and builds an entire world in its 4:15, the sharp turns and razor wit of the lyrics one more reason to fully immerse. Side B’s personality is a little different, as it should be, with the banjo-inclusive “Sathington Waltz” feeling (purposefully) thrown together as if to signal that the rest of the proceedings are going to push even further into the reaches of peculiarity, which of course they do, however memorable “Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers” proves to be nonetheless.

And yes, “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” was a smash. Unavoidable for a bit there, and undeniable. As their career has played out, “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” has followed Primus all the while, and I can’t even fathom how many times Claypool has chuckled and said, “Dog will hunt” into a microphone at this point. Thousands, surely. Doesn’t matter, the end of that track crushes, taking all that we’re-gonna-do-bass low end and pushing it alongside harder hitting drums and fuller guitar distortion to create a sound that Pork Soda and later records like 1997’s Brown Album and 1999’s Antipop would continue to explore, the band flirting with the idea that maybe they were a heavy metal band before pulling the plug on the whole endeavor for a few years and sending Claypool into a wilderness of side-projects, many of them righteous — you won’t hear me say a bad word about the Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, dammit; “who wants to go to D’s Diner?” — but all of them a signifier that there would only ever be one Primus.

They’ve been on tour this year covering Rush, which tracks. I’ve made the argument a few times over the years for Primus as a heavy rock band, and I still wonder how the late ’90s and early ’00s would have played out for them if that language existed at the time, because they’ve never been about the aggressive side of metal even as they more than flirted with tonal weight. Whatever they were going to be classified as, they’d always be themselves, surely, and Queens of the Stone Age did Ozzfest too that time, so I don’t know that being heavy rock would’ve prevented the hiatus that stopped the band for a long few years in 2000, but in hindsight, it’s an easier fit as a kind of creative ecosystem than either metal or hard rock, which is where they were most commonly lumped. I’ll gladly go to bat for them having more in common with Kyuss than Powerman 5000, or any other ’90s commercial hard rock entity you want to substitute.

But what is, is, and Sailing the Seas of Cheese remains a singular work of genius songwriting and performance, one of the best records of its decade, for me, one of the best records of all time, and as always, I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks for reading.

—

I needed this, I don’t mind telling you. This week has been long, hard and largely miserable. My knee is starting to get better — still hurts to straighten it out, but I can move it more — and this morning I go for the results of the MRI that I had done Wednesday evening, so that should be interesting [update: I need surgery], but everything has been a drag. Everything. It was my kid’s birthday — the only time in my life I’m going to get to see my child turn five — and I could barely stay in the room. It just sucked. Wretched, down. I’ve felt isolated in my marriage, utterly adrift as a parent, and completely inconsequential creatively. I keep fucking up like 10 different things at one time and even little things — I knocked over an open bottle of seltzer yesterday opening my laptop on one of the tables in back of Wegman’s; a beer bottle fell out of my cart in the liquor department as I was buying booze for The Pecan’s birthday party tomorrow; I dropped his ice cream cake the other night (fortunately it was okay) — make my brains fucking boil. I feel like I don’t have the capacity to handle as much is coming at me, and that’s before you get to the anxiety of a collapsing political order happening in real-time, my wife learning Hungarian as though I might do so through osmosis and somehow thereby be able to chase down EU citizenship through my family lineage. I feel like I should be granted a duel passport just by virtue of having to tell everyone I’ve ever met in my entire life how to pronounce my last name.

Anyway, Primus, some new Star Trek last night, good music throughout the week, a steady intake of THC and cheese, an unexpected gift that I’ll keep for the rest of my life, and I’m not sure I have any right to complain, but I do. It’s been a slaughter. I get up and want to fast-forward through the entire day and just go to bed. Just be done with it.

But that’s my shit and mine to deal with. In addition to the orthopaedist this morning, this afternoon is a parent-teacher conference — pretty light fare in pre-K, and we try to keep a close eye on how he’s doing anyway, so I don’t expect too many revelations, but still, you go — and then tomorrow is the big birthday party for the kid. Bounce house, pigs in blankets, The Patient Mrs.’ mom’s ziti; all the classics. We’re expecting about 40 people at various points in the afternoon, so if you want to come by, PM for the address.

New Gimme show today. 5pm. I know you don’t care or listen, but I’m lucky to do that stuff so I’m gonna keep plugging it anyhow. Thanks if you do check it out. It’s a good way for me to dig into more of the records that come in for review.

Next week, I don’t know, a bunch of stuff. Couple full streams, announcements, and so on. If I tell you it’ll be cool, will it matter? If you’re reading this now, will you come back because of the vague promise of something good? Probably not, I think. Maybe I’m getting too old for this shit; like a half-assed, lily white Danny Glover of the stoner rock blogosphere.

Have a great and safe weekend. Rest up, watch your head, enjoy. Thanks again for reading.

FRM.