MINDSCAPE

  Note: I wrote this in about thirty minutes while thinking about a different story I had written years ago. I read it to my girlfriend and she liked it, and I trust her judgement. I love you, Mandy :) The people have no reign over the forest. They like to think they do, with their uprooting of trees, their machines for killing the greenery, their buildings which trump over the gravesites of these genocides. But the weeds still come up on the periphery. The trees still stretch around the walls. Deep in the forests, the plants overtake. Remnants of human activity. Lost houses, burned bridges. Rubble not made in nature but built to destroy it. But in the end, nature wins out. Decay, they always decay in the end. Walls built to last crumble, the insulation and frames spilling out over years of degradation. I have seen the same places over the course of decades and I have watched how with each season, the metal rusts a little more, the sides bend further and further, these things built...

    Note: I read  Naked Lunch  and said "hey, I could do that!" This is a compilation of things I've been writing since around October up until when I cut it all together in January. I cut up pieces of the paper and taped them into one long strip, then rewrote them into something in a normal format.  The content of this story is based in memories and dreams. Death Knell You see everything revealed to you as if it were a dream. Things move in and out of your vision and you are a passive observer. You are not there, the people around you are not real, they don't see you. You were supposed to die today. They were going to euthanize you. Had a disease or something. You don't remember but for some reason you're here another day. At least physically. Your mind is elsewhere. You woke up panicking but she calmed you back down, pulled you into the right reality; a glimpse into another life. It was your last day today and you didn't want to go. You couldn't leav...

  Note: Extremely short story I wrote based on an experience I had with my girlfriend. I really like it and it's the only thing I've written and been proud of in a while. Found floating in a bathtub of snow, the voices come through the ears from the ice skaters and the walkers and the wind but the birds do not scream and the cars echo through this flattened white landscape. The ground glows in the lights but someone has turned them out, someone unseen protected from the grip of frost flipped the switch and sent the world into darkness. Stumbling through snow banks cleared and frozen over and slipping on the blue-white sheets. Nicks in the ice. Footprints from the past. Palimpsests unearthed by the wind which blows misted clouds into the eyes of onlookers. Angels on the ground but none in the black sky. The city and towns sap the heavens of their power, they grab them and steal their beauty for their own bastardized purposes.  The world falls away. Sensory deprivation from free...

The Story of   Jungle Jim’s  Jungle Jim’s as an idea is something I’ve been wanting to do for almost as long as I’ve been consistently making music. A concept album about my favorite store has been an idea of mine for a while, and especially given the fact I was from around  where the only two locations were, it seemed fitting for my kind of music. I actually have a notes document with a bunch of ideas for song titles/concepts for albums which I’ve had for years, and one of the first things on it is “concept album about Jungle Jim’s.” So naturally, I never got around to it until after I moved away. Jungle Jim’s came at a weird point in my life. A lot of my albums I remember the process of making at least a little bit, but Jungle Jim’s was recorded at such a terrible era in my mental stability, I feel like my brain has blocked out a lot of the recording process. That, combined with the fact that I would be up for hours—until six in the morning sometimes—working on these so...

  The Story of davEP This one took forever to make because of a multitude of factors, the utmost of which being that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make another DAVE album. DAVE 2 was supposed to be the last one, and seemed so final to me. But I can’t just not write music in the way that I do, it doesn’t work like that. It’s my fatal flaw as a musician.  A lot of the making of this EP was a blur because, for most of it, I was running on too little/too much sleep, was suicidal, and drinking far above safe levels of caffeine on a near-daily basis. Monster Energy and honey-roasted peanuts fueled the creation of a majority of it, and I think that shows. My mindset when writing the parts for davEP, and Jungle Jim’s especially, was something like “well, I have nothing to do today and, even though I really want to, I haven’t killed myself yet. I guess I’ll work on music for the next couple hours.” And thus, davEP was thrust into the world a few months later.  The bass parts were p...