WELCOME SCEINCE OLYPAINS, was what it said on the marquee sign at Roswell High in Roswell, NM, when a PBS film crew on campus filming some doc thing I saw recently.
Why isn't this as crushingly poignant to anyone else as it is to me? People are just about waving that shit off when I try to talk to them about it, unharmed, dry-eyed. WELCOME SCEINCE OLYPAINS, the fucking marquee read!


I sure talk about metal (heavy) a lot, but do you want to know my murkiest, enmossedest musical secret? Absolutely no album, POSSIBLY EVER, gives me as much sheer listening pleasure as Coheed & Cambria's Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV. Listening to much of it is like soaring mile-high, stomach-down on the back of a densely-feathered giant eagle, possibly of a coppery or bronze-like shade. (A less astute listener might think "dragon" here, but I'm telling you, it's an eagle you're soaring on.) The songs, Lord, the twists 'n' turns they take, they're like ravishingly overdecorated Victorians - no - that's not it at all - they're like those elaborate & heavily candy-decorated gingerbread houses - how you'd've felt as a seven-year-old if allowed to TEAR INTO one of those fuckers, that's what it's like to listen to that album. It evokes feasting, embellishment atop embellishment, in short total "goin' for it", and everyone knows how supportive I am of "goin' for it". And Claudio, ai, Claudio, you are a SINGER, sir.

Staggering in after a seven-month absence to post an always-inadvisable Too Many Pills Post:

Watching the Raiders-Niners game right now. God, is there anything the cholesterol-sheened good ol' boys who do television football commentary hate more than excessive niggerishness? The hard-ons these pigs get when Randy Moss drops a pass in the endzone, fuck, nothing pleases their greasy racial consciousnesses more than being able to wax patronizing & paternalistic about players who aren't one of The Good Ones. The flipside of this . . . Lord . . . when they talk about black players who happen to be soft-spoken, or gentlemanly, etcetera . . . oh . . . that's so bad I can't even really touch it here. "You wish your team had fifteen like him," one said recently, of I think LaDainian Tomlinson. OUCH.

All right. Leaving sports for metal, seemingly the only topics I want to post about any more (remember when I'd use this space to talk about language & usage, Current Events, all that? - yeah, I miss that girl too). Hey? Lamb of God? WHAT IS UP with the strippers-in-the-tour-bus motif of the "Redneck" video? Meugh? Wha? From a band whose every lyric, pretty much, is about either violent vengeance or dismantling the American political machine? *Dumb* lyrics, granted, much of the time, but never about goddamn *pussy*. You dicks. Most of you guys are fucking married, too. And you have such great band beards. Strippers on the bus? You hurt me in my heart, dudes.