flaming lips

these pictures are from the flaming lips new year's eve eve show here in san francisco. i like them because i cannot see the difference between the crowd and the balloons- to me they look exactly the same and that would probably make the band happy.

brushes with death : a list of ways that i could almost be killed here at this spot that i am sitting in now

(note: in no way a death wish but rather a wish for near-death which can be "rejuvenating" and "life-affirming" and all those words they use on afternoon television except of course "weight-loss" and "he left me for another woman".) end note.

1. ceiling collapse.
The ceiling above me is notoriously thin with a few scars- most notable is the fist-sized hole around the fire sprinkler. A co-worker has dropped items through this hole and onto my head so it is possible that someone who carries a hunting knife on their belt could be upstairs, right above my office and let's say he's put on a few pounds because, oh, his wife left him and to compensate he's bought a donut maker and is attempting to master the most awkward yet good tasting donut possible (let's say espresso and cream cheese). And in his attempt to fill the hole that lost love has left him with, he's put on weight.

So the once trusty belt which holds that very important hunting knife which he carries now into a music club just in case that rabid raccoon that leapt at him from behind those dumpsters one wretched night a few years back, just in case that very same raccoon is hiding behind the soundboard.

Ok, now let's say that the belt has been pushed from one hole to the next ever since that damn donut maker came into this lonely man's life; this poor belt, jealous like so many of the man's once proud possessions, jealous of this 3 foot square device that cuts, fries, and turns donuts while dispensing them onto a cooling rack automatically (oh, remember me, your electric razor? your bill counter, your tie rack, me your once-loved blender of juice? remember me!). This belt has been pushed from one hole to many so that there are none left only the snap of brittle leather that sends the whole thing to the floor upstairs above, hunting knife and all, to the floor right above the thin ceiling in my office.

So with the belt in a dead heap on the carpet the knife hops and skips, bounds out of the protective sheath and right into that fist-sized hole above my head, where it picks up speed, falling the four feet or so through the hole and through the space above my desk until it lands twap! right into the letter "G" on the keyboard in front of me- inches from my head and just a touch away from the "T" and "H" keys that my pointer fingers rest on to type the word "the". near death baby! feeling ohsogood now!

2. gangster gunfire.

I am sitting behind a window which i'm guessing is not bulletproof. It's funny, i never even considered 'bulletproof' to be an issue until enough moon-eyed people approached me here asking if it was. It's nice when random strangers are concerned for my safety, even when (in doing so) they bring up dangers that i had never considered. Bullets? Here, around me?

But they may have a point. I have only been close to a few guns over my well-protected-but-still-somewhat-erratic-just-not-tending-to-be-violent-life. And three of those guns have been here, near this window.

One of the earlier gun experiences worth noting from the days before i arrived behind this window was in Switzerland. Johnny and i had just arrived in Zurich after a disastrous 2-day train ride during which, among other things, we ended up in the wrong country. When we finally arrived in Zurich we were exhausted and I for one could not wait to fall back into the bottom bunk in a sock-smelling room at a youth hostel field with 10 Polish guys that liked to sing as loud as they could in low registers at 5:30 in the morning.
So it's early and i'm pretty tired and everything is golden morning sun, with the smell of nuts roasting from inside cauldrons on the streets. People are bustling about, heading off to work at the banks and chocolate factories and other Swiss places- all of us boarding a quaint lil trolley, painted up festive for the holidays with a big bell that anyone, not just the conductor mind you, a bell that anyone can ring! (Where in Amerikkka can you do something like that? i dare you to try to hit the horn next time you ride BART)
The trolley is packed with a nice assortment of businessmen and women, bankers, ski instructors, yeti's, chocolatiers and a guy with a hat and a submachine gun standing next to a little old lady who snacks on a bag of chestnuts. I seem to be the only one alarmed by the guy with the submachine gun. I thought this was a peaceful nation.

Another gun was on the ranch i used to live on in the high desert of northern arizona. It was here that i really cultivated a belief that i could fend off any advisory with the powers of:
1) the mind
2) waves energy
3) complex poetry

Like any good developing belief this one had been tested many times before; starting in my later years of high school when i would antagonize, antagonize and then avoid a fight by slinging confusing phrases at any would-be attacker.

It was on this same ranch that my defensive skills were really put to the test. On a night we were throwing a party with lights and repetitive dance musick i stood alone on a dusty road about a quarter mile away from the rave collecting money and or tickets. It was kinda silly- i mean it was like 2am and i'm standing in the near dark on this dirt road with only a card table and the stars to keep me company. But it was my shift so i had to do it. Anyways this evil van rolls up with like evil bumper stickers on it and a dark, dank bed in the back where evil people would lay and do evil things to eachother while listening to crap like the red hot chili peppers. :::Shudders:::
The van of 5 people does not want to pay the $5 each to get into the party. They don't care much for our openhearted trade policy nor do they agree upon the always generous "pay what you can" offer. In short, this transaction is going nowhere. This van has no choice but to turn back around and drive the 8 miles of dirt road and 30 miles of pavement outta here and back into civilization. And i guarantee that place will not be any more tolerant with the way these people do business. When their evil van runs out of gas the attendant will not offer to them a trade of music, drawings, poetry or organic drugs for gasoline. He just won't.
They don't like hearing this and the males of the bunch step out of the evil van to tell me so. We trade words and i probably laugh a bit as i tend to do when faced with people that make threats at me. This laugh is not meant to antagonize but of course it does. Really I just think it's funny when, after thousands of years of existence- with babies and war and all these different types of breads, i find it funny that we still get angry over stupid shit. And sometimes I just hafta laugh. I don't remember certain if this is one of those times but chances are it was.
So this one guy steps behind me while i'm talking to his friend, telling him "comeon, this is how we make a living, we're a buncha ragamuffin pirate artists living out here in the dirt, give us a few bucks" and suddenly i feel a sharpness in my back, right next to my spine; it's cold and pointed and doesn't feel like anything else especially when he leans in close to my ear and whispers "I have a knife to your back. Let us in."
Yes, that's right. He said a "knife". Not a gun, i know- as I'm sure now that I have misled you, this story is about a knife. The story i thought that i would tell did take place in the desert and it did involve a gun and an lcd-crazed acid-maniac who, after we asked him with all of our 5 shaved heads to please leave the fucking desert right now thankyouverymuch, pulled out a gun and shot it straight in the air. Apparently the shaved heads didn't scare him (as they tended to do). And when the bullet came down it landed just a few feet away from our dear friend josh (who i believe had a full head of hair at the time but never less was always too kind to be scary). So yeah, that one was a gun and this one a knife. At my back.

Important to understand is the relationship i had with my demons at that time. What could be best described as an open relationship, my demons and me hung out a lot and had no problem sharing this with the rest of the world. This was a battle i fought in public, the dispelling and embracing of the wretched blackness. Now the demons and i have a quieter, more private relationship. Where once they slept in the master bedroom on the floor near my shoes, the demons are now like old friends who come by late at night, asking that i throw down the keys so that they may come on up and spend the night close. I put them on the couch and try to forget that they're there. Sometimes the demons stay for a few days and sometimes they just break in at 4am to surprise me, only to leave with first light. It's just that i don't give them as much attention as i used to and for that they cry out. I'm sorry, you just hurt too much and i can't put up a good fight anymore; oh shit, i know- just go ahead poison me anyway. I have so few defenses now but maybe i can take it once more. Blast me with that black stuff.

Back then i embraced the battle because i felt that the demons were an inescapable part of me that i felt could, with love and practice (and complex poetry) be tamed. I used to go out into the desert late at night and stand on a hill with my arms spread inviting the darkness to pick a fight with me. I wanted to overcome them but mostly the demons just killed my heart. That's probably why I am at the place that i am now. I didn't win that fight. We have the occasional cup of tea together now, my demons and me. Whenever we get together i just want to pull my arms in close and it is then that i really regret quitting smoking. We are no longer on that hill and I guess that I'm far too exhausted to climb back up there.

*This would be the perfect place to put a poem i wrote back then called "demons and angels".

I spend a great deal of time near windows. At work, my nose is about 2 feet away from one all day long. Because of light changes i can see people through it half of the day and the other half of the day people can see me. Seldom do we all see each other at the same time. I guess it's a bit like role-playing in that way; i like to watch and oh, now you're watching me. Please don't look now. I'm eating. Please turn away.

I've seen some intersting things through this window. Once, a great white wolf dog was being chased through traffic by about a half-a-dozen people, 2 of which are the rhythm section of a fairly popular indie rock band.

Just yesterday a police car pulled up on the wrong side of the street, sirens lit up and festive. The driver jumped out, and gun drawn straight out from two stiff arms, yelled at someone to get down on the street; which this certain someone did, face first into the cigarettes and gum that decorate our sidewalks. Just atop some of this gum and slightly to the right of the gun a girl was trying to get her bike unlocked, her bag of groceries from the health food store so close that the cop might've been pointing his gun at her jar of tahini. The cop yelled, many other sirens came racing up dressed in black and white chrome and steel, other guns were drawn and the girl continued to unlock her bike just inches away from it all, seemingly unfazed, her mind quite possibly distracted by visions of POM juice animals being massacred for no reason other than to color the juice blood red. But that's another, far more tragic story than this.

This is about windows and not even the one with all the policemen and gangsters in it either. This is about the window is in my apartment that my bed pushes against, the one that my sleeping head lays about two feet from each night. (So, for those keeping score, that's more than half my day within two feet of a window.) ((for those keeping metric score, that's 60.96 centimeters.)) (((that's more than half a day on the days i work for those who scour sentences for inaccuracies.))) ((((but if you do that then why are you here anyways?))))

This window can be pretty noisy. Not the window itself but whatever's behind it, which i suppose is usually cars and people and arguing people and people on drugs and people on drugs who argue in cars and (once) a 19" crt monitor which seemingly fell from the sky and landed hard in the middle of the street creating a mess of cars with people arguing in them for most the night.
It can get noisy and it took a little while for me to get used to it. I'd tell myself that the street is an ocean, that the cars are waves and the sound i hear is the tranquil pound of the sea hitting up against the shore. The sirens are whales, the garbage trucks make the crunch of coral against coral while the manic, once high school theater star turned drug addict screaming at his lover and feigning suicide in the center of traffic is a dolphin. A sweet, bubbly, smarter-than-thou dolphin coming off three-weeks of shooting speed and sacrificing any reasonable thought collected since childhood to the fires of self-hate. Cute lil dolphin!

Last night was different though and I didn't need to make an ocean. Sometime soon after i hit the bed something unnatural settled in, a strange force overcame our fair city. It was perfectly quiet. All at once, and for a few short minutes, no one was in their car driving by, no one was on the street, no monitors fell, and no trash needed to be picked up. It. was. perfectly. quiet. As if some city-wide decree was passed that said "Do not do anything between 2:01 am and 2:04 am" and everyone complied because if you did your name would be submitted for a chance to win a fabulous new i-phone and by golly, i'll surely be quiet and not do anything for those few minutes because i'd sure like one of those i-phones dont'cha know.

It was quiet, perfectly so like a baby wrapped in her first blanket, quiet enough that i think the moon shone brighter and took on a fullness seldom seen over these skies. I was taken by the silence, not yet asleep but entranced, what a jewel the sound of nothing is in the city!- in those moments of quiet i'm sure that many took steps closer to perfection. Me, I tumbled out the window, all of me falling out into the world and back into time and into another window that i slept under.

Let me try to simplify this because it all makes very little sense to me now anyway. I didn't actually fall out the window, no, that would hurt and be pretty embarrassing (and noisy)- what happened is that my mind slipped out the window and traveled backwards about ten years prior. entering through the window of a place where my 10 years ago self was on the brink of sleep, in nearly the identical state that i was in last night in bed. At this place these two "me" consciousnesses met and exchanged information, my "now" consciousness telling my 10 years ago self about the state of me in 2007 and my 1997 self registering that and creating a sort of deja-vu that i can now remember experiencing that night 10 years ago. The deja-vu information that i felt in '97 was:
a) i live in san francisco.
b) iam different in that many of the things that were so important to me then are not now.
c) this is a problem.
My initial reaction to this in '97 was sadness and disbelief- i had a very distinct ideas then that are at odds with the deja-vu information about my future self that i was receiving. Basically, my future self worried me.

Recipe for Change: Cookies

Here's a Recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies with Chocolate Chips and Pieces of my Back and Spine for added Fun!~

1 cup sugar, white
1 cup sugar, brown
2 eggies
a sledgehammer
2 cups flour
1 cup pieces of my spine and back
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 tablespoon baking soda (or is it powder, can never remember)
My dad once put out the "Terrible Patio Fire of '77" with the stuff. My brother Chad was in his high chair taking in the late afternoon valley sun, which at that point was tinted silver behind the veil of Star Wars (as was everything then).

Chad was screaming but in those days this was not unusual. His screams had become a sort of beacon for the family, a theme song even. We would tap our feet and smile, proud of the range his voice was developing, growing closer as a family.

On that day some fallen leaves had gathered in a pile and whispered together some diabolical plan that involved rubbing and friction over and over until those leaves weren't piled any longer, just rising smoke and pieces of once-was-leaves forever scarring poor Chad with their brutal display of flicker and heat.

The screams rose and grew sharper, filing out an edge that eventually cut through to the rest of the family. “I think Chad’s really upset.” And he was as the fire lapped up at the base his high chair.

Dad arrived out the dropped door of the Millennium Falcon, dressed in loose fitting summer wear and carrying a large box of baking powder (or was it soda). Holding onto a conveniently dropped strand of wire, he grabbed mom around her waist and swung through the patio door, shaking that box of baking stuffs until all was covered in a thin sheet of powdery white, smoke and remains, while Chad held onto the rest of his screams for another day.
1 bag chocolate chips
1 cup butter, soft as a bunny's heart
1 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 350. Don't bother greasing a pan as it's kind of a silly old-wives tale to do so and just creates more work.

I'll stand with my legs spread slightly apart, gripping the sledgehammer as a third leg in the middle. At this point please turn off the musick. Don't worry, we can put it back on it's just that i'd like to get the full sensory effect of this next part of our baking.

I will rock the sledgehammer between my legs a few times, building momentum. I may breathe deeply but may not as that sometimes reminds me of trying to be too serious and this is not that serious of course because this is just baking cookies.

Now i will swing the sledgehammer back over my hand and smash it all the way against my back. i will do this with as much force and as many times possible so that we may retrieve as many goodies as we can for our cookies.

You can put the musick back on now please. Thanks.

Collect the pieces of flesh and put in a bowl with both sugars. DO NOT MIX IN THE PIECES BONE AND SPINE NOW. Mix together with the salt and vanilla, and add the two eggs.

In a separate bowl (& this is very important as two people that i trust very much insist that it needs to be a separate bowl) mix the flour and baking particles. Then put it all together in (the first bowl? the second one?? a whole new bowl??? i could never figure this out) the biggest bowl and beat until smooth.

Add the real good stuff- the chocolate chips, the pieces of bone and spine and mix by hand.

Bake on a cookie sheet for 12 minutes. Cool on a rack and ENJOY!