OK, apropos of nothing in particular, check out this interview with Tom Waits at The New York Times Style Magazine.
Beck and Kendrick Lamar are in there, too, if that’s how you roll.
The money quote for me — from Waits, of course — is about inspiration and how it strikes:
If you want to catch songs you gotta start thinking like one, and making yourself an interesting place for them to land like birds or insects.
Woke up around 3 a.m. feeling as though I had spent the night snorting chain degreaser, convinced my brain had liquified and was seeping out of my snout onto the pillow.
Further sleep proved elusive as Herself arose to shower and the bathroom iPad commenced making news noises. It seemed King Donald the Short-fingered had not actually ordered anyone executed during his performance before the Congress, and the media were as usual focused on packaging rather than content. A golden chest overflowing with excrement is still a box of shit, no matter how many air fresheners are working overtime in Pundit Glade.
Jesus. These people. They install a low bar in the Dark Alley of Presidential Address Expectations, and when Beelzebozo manages to clear it without twisting a cankle they all go rushing after him to see where such Statesmanlike Leadership and Gravitas will take us next and boom! Down they go in a heap, and what oozes out of their bandaged skulls and onto the Innertubes afterward looks worse than what was coming out of mine until I swallowed a Claritin-D 12 Hour and a couple-three-four mugs of hot caffeine in various flavors.
Wipe your noses, shitheads. Try not to use your sleeves.
OK, it’s been a long week.
Allergies, deadlines, insomnia, you name it.
And the news? Oy. Don’t get me started on the friggin’ news. It seems to have boiled down to @infinite_scream on Twitter, as interpreted by the band Disaster Area from “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
But I gotta admit, the way The New York Times arranged this news nugget on its homepage made me smile.
We used to have a saying in my biz: “Never fuck with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.” It may no longer apply, but we can always hope, amirite?
The only thing I have in common with Ernest Hemingway* is that occasionally I find myself at a loss for words.
Then I remind myself, as he reminded himself in “A Moveable Feast”: “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.”
And so I have: The Bicycle Retailer column is finally in the can. Next, the “Shop Talk” cartoon, also for BRAIN, followed by the Specialized Sequoia review for Adventure Cyclist.
Like Thomas McGuane’s Chet Pomeroy, “I saw a few things and raved for money.” Soon I shall return to raving for free.
* OK, so we’ve both written about drinking, eating, road trips, writing and bicycling. Guess which one did it better. There will be a prize.**
** No there won’t.
Jaysis. Some days, the writing, it goes smooth like butta.
And some days, it goes more like shitting broken bottles into a flaming toilet. Something of a pain in the keister, is what.
This is the grotesquely scenic route toward explaining the recent dearth of bloggery in these environs. With mots of the bon variety proving elusive I felt compelled to corral the few I was able to catch, hoping eventually to assemble them into a remuda of paying copy.
Nix.
Notions kept arising with malicious intent, like Martin Sheen surfacing in the lagoon en route to snuffing Marlon Brando in “Apocalpyse Now.” False paths with bad endings. Curiously shaped bricks that, while fascinating in their own right, didn’t quite fit in the wall.
Gah.
Also, it snowed. One of those obnoxious, featherweight snows that, coupled with a stiff north wind, basically glazes a steep, north-facing driveway like a cop’s donut if the homeowner is distracted by journalism and forgets to clear it first thing.
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeyit.
While all this was going on I was striving mightily to avoid the actual news, which, wow, talk about your false paths and bad endings. The road goes ever on and on. Here be dragons. This way to the Dark Side. Thus I shunned The New York Times and NPR in order to remain blissfully ignorant and focused on the task at hand, viz., to wit, earning the meager handful of coppers I require to purchase my common groats and lentils.
And now I believe I need a break from all that. It’s the weekend, f’chrissakes. The toilet will still be on fire come Monday morning.
Mad Blog Media 