Among the things I can "[verb] people under the table" at or with is volume.  Baby here doesn't employ earplugs but camps next to the amps at shows, and typically emerge from my truck so decibel-dazed I can't walk a straight line.  Yet even I don't venture into the volume range available by maxing out both my computer's volume & the independent volume control on the headphones plugged into it.  It's too much.  It's genuine unbearability.  So I thought.

THEN CHILDREN OF BODOM DROPPED THIS HERE "BLOODDRUNK" ALBUM.  And while 15 seconds into it I knew: untested volume heights must be scaled, no, not scaled, flown the fuck up. What is this shit?  Is this what it feels like to shoot coke straight into your spinal fluid?Alexi, I give you 65% of my remaining hearing all too gladly.  Alexi, it is less than the least I can give!  Alexi, for the gift of these songs I would let you personally icepick through both my eardrums, leaving me able to feel only "Blooddrunk"'s mere vibration in the floor, AND THAT ALONE WOULD SUFFICE.   And in mere weeks I get to see it performed - I get to see you tear onto the stage and shriek "We are Children of Bodom and we are from motherfucking Finland!"  I routinely count the days to CoBHC shows - this time around I'll be marking off the quarter hours, oh, oh, every ropey-spit-dripping review blowjob this record's getting in the press is deserved. 

Sometimes Li'l Copenhagen can be trying.  He may test one, he may vex.  So much so that one might find oneself vividly imagining, say, bludgeoning him with his own skateboard and pushing him into a halfpipe and watching his limp corpse roll about humorously a bit before slowing to silence, eternal silence.  Pretty, pretty hair caught in a last breeze before being slowly soaked into the pretty, pretty blood a-spreadin'.

But then one reads an old journal entry and recalls the celery thing.  The protocol for limp-produce disposal at my mother's country home involves strewing it about in a series of wildlife hot spots, then returning the following day to theorize, sans any evidence, about what may have come along and eaten it.  Copes was involved with distributing a great number of carrots and celery stalks that had passed a state offerable to horses.  Only because an unrelated chore took me over his path shortly thereafter do I know that he arranged the items into a substantial "HI GUYS".