Lucky #520 (published in G-Vegas Magazine. March 15, 2008)

“The thing about music is that there's no rules, you can do anything.” A-sharp

I have no idea how to start this, so I'm just going to start it. I've been through half a dozen failed shots at this story and I'm starting to think I left my brain in the 21 Eleven parking lot. My last few attempts were uselessly clever and collapsed under their own weight in the first 500 words, so I'm just going to say what I'm thinking.
I know a really nice guy who happens to be a really good rapper, and his name is A-sharp. You should listen to him. He's one of the founding members of 520 Entertainment, and he's just recently come out of hiding with an arsenal of fresh songs. He shows up with a bemused half smile and a CD full of beats. You don't know what to think of the good natured dude with the smartass glint in his eyes, until he picks up the microphone and opens his mouth.
“The thing about music is there's no rules, you can do anything,” A-sharp told me one night at my house. We were drinking ghetto blasters, listening to Deltron 3030, discussing the advantages of the Nintendo 64 over the PS2. A-sharp is very conscious of language. He's very careful with labels and names, he knows how easily music can get pigeonholed to death. From his beginnings as a blues guitarist to his current lyrical somersaults, it's been a long road to what he does now. A-sharp is to a point where his music is entertaining enough to make the booties shake, relevant enough to make the fists pump, and smart enough to make the brains grow.
Why did he disappear, though? Why haven't we heard from him in several years?
“ When we first started we performed a lot more. Me, Chris and Carl, it was just us three then. We performed at ECU talent shows and Dynasty and s*** like that. Then Chris moved to Atlanta. I kept performing. I performed all summer, back when Scores was still called Scores...Then, when Chris came back, we started recording. We didn't want to do shows because we didn't have a complete album to give away or sell, so it just seemed kind of pointless to be doing shows even though it wouldn't have been pointless, but we thought it would be at the time. We just got stuck in a rut of recording and recording and recording.”
It's tough to survive this scene without selling out or burning out. Downtown clubs change hands fast and often, but variety stagnates. The same tired cover acts shuffle members, jaded ex-rappers host atonal karaoke Tuesdays, and there's always the snide refusal of any booking agent who “knows how this town works, buddy, and can't help you out.”
Maybe A-sharp's years in hiding were to save his sanity. Getting off the ground is always tough, but the Greenville scene can be openly hostile to original music. This gets me down, but I hear only hope and optimism from A-sharp. He's been making connections at a lightning rate since his reappearance, specifically in the sensational Roanoke, Virginia, hip-hop scene (if you haven't heard, there's some serious music being made up there). His growing list of connections, coupled with a “divide and conquer” tour mentality make him (and the rest of the 520 crew) a force to be reckoned with.
“It's me, Chris, J-Burner, LC, my little brother (his rap name is Bones), and Haze. But yeah, it's six of us. That's why I was saying we could actually book up to three shows in the same day, because we could separate into two people groups. Right now Dan (Bones) is in Iraq, so it would be a little different, but we could still do two different shows,” A-sharp told me. “I want to focus on the east coast. We're doing s*** in NC, we're starting to spread into VA, I just want to do it like that. My friend went to Tennessee and she's going to try to get us some shows there.”
And what does 520 mean?
“Chris used to live at 520 Rustic Lane, in Belvoir, way out in the boondocks. That's where we used to write and record s***, and he didn't have any equipment like he does now. He just had a little $300 dollar Casio and the mixer was a grand, but that was about it. He made all the beats on a Casio. After a while he left, he moved to Atlanta...I had wanted to start an independent label while he was gone and I never thought of a name for it. When he came back he was like 'Why don't we just call it 520?'”
Behind A-sharp's, and all of 520's songs, are Chris's beats. Chris Knight and A-sharp started making music together in high school, right here in Greenville. 520 has come a long way. The Casio is long gone, replaced with proper beats that nod politely to modern influences while honoring their predecessors in the 90s. Chris raps too, taking the mic as often as any of the 520 crew.
Most impressive was the 520 set at the infamous/famous Turducken House's New Year's show. They went on early, not long after 10:00, to a packed house that knew all the words! I mean all the words, not just the choruses... Definitely check out the new stuff on his myspace (link at the end). I listened to it to keep my head straight while I wrote this, and it's pretty crucial. Especially “Flip It.” I can't get enough!
I'm going to totally switch gears now.
Rap is the new jazz. It's a purely American music style, and it evolves the same as jazz. The academics hijacked jazz, decrying any progress as sacrilege. Real music evolves on the streets and in dirty little house parties, in venues small enough to take risks. What do you think a speakeasy was?
Don't let the academics fool you, music is about evolution. Constant, relentless, often reckless evolution. Jazz was music by, and for, people with nothing to lose. Jazz was the cutting edge, but the academics got to it. Now it's wedding band music, true jazz was driven far underground. It's too edgy, it had to go semi-tonal to survive. Rock music speaks well, but it misses by miles on the improv front. When rockers go free form it's nightmarish... you end up with thirty minute Phish songs or worse. Jam bands are a blight on our fair planet.
Thus is jazz reborn in disguise. A real rapper, not just some Empty Vee loser flashing their pinkie ring, can freestyle like Dizzie Gillespie.
I've put it together, and I like it.
Myspace.com/adamsanturo is where A-sharp hangs his hat.
HawkSeason.Blogspot.com is a place you should never, never go.

MC Homeless and the Temple of Doom (Published Feb. 15, 2008, in G-Vegas Magazine)

It's been the weirdest January on record... so warm, and it's gone by so fast. I think it's doing something to my poor brain chemistry, and I doubt I'm alone. An owl almost landed on me the other night during my walk... not kidding. I'm not down with all these omens. Next thing, someone's going to tell me the Spazz was built on an Algonquin burial ground.
I think MC Homeless is with me on this. He's more of a Mayan doomsayer, but that's fine. He's just as optimistic as the other apocalypse-heads I know. I mean, he does tend to sound a little victorious when he says “2012 is not a random number.”
I don't know what possessed me, maybe it was the sleep deprivation, maybe it was the brainfuzz that follows my favorite high gravity beer around, but I wanted to hear the Big Hate. Specifically: what grinds his gears? Mainly I got unprintable rants on foreign policy and addled recollections of questionable legality.
“Anywhere that doesn't give me free beer for gracing their stage gets the Big Hate. Let's see... shady promoters get the Big Hate. As far as towns, though, I don't know. Every place I played on the last tour was cool,” said Homeless, whose birth name is unpronounceable by human tongue. He's been on the move for so many years now, living all over the place and touring relentlessly. He has to have played with some losers in that time... dig deeper.
“Who stands out as bad? God, I've played with so many bad rappers it's not even funny. Tali Demon. She went on tour with the Insane Clown Posse, and she had a little juggalo following, that was definitely the worst show.”
“What the hell's a juggalo?” I asked. I was convinced it was either something he'd made up or an obscure Australian marsupial.
“It was a great show, they just sucked. A juggalo is, like, ICP's fans,” he clarified. I need to Wikipedia that word... I'm still convinced it's some kind of miniature kangaroo. “Their CD kept skipping and it was the show where we were opening up for the Coup, it was that one, where I almost fought. It was Tali Demon and her Two Loyal Servents, or something like that, and it was these two hillbilly rapper guys... but, to make a long story short, they tried to rush the stage and fight me.”
“Her people?”
“Yeah, and they got kicked out. Then they fought each other outside and got arrested.”
“They got kicked out of their own show?”
“They were one of the opening acts for the Coup. I don't know why they put them on, they were just horrible redneck rappers. ICP just attracts the scum of the earth. Anybody who still wears JNCO Jeans.”
Homeless paused, smiling at something invisible for a second. “It's like the hip hop version of trailer metal. They're trailer hop. Really bad, bad news.”
It was a really nice night, one of those nights where you can solve any problem with a minimum of effort. 27 degrees, feels like 19. Overnight low projected to be 9 degrees… sunny and 9 degrees. Cold enough to think. I felt like Batman, back in Gotham City after years of vacation.
There are heroes of the national underground, too. I won’t call MC Homeless a hero, but he knows what he’s doing. Pretty much anyone can hop on Myspace, put up their band page, and book a national tour. There are benefits and detriments. I was talking to a friend the other night, and he was saying that MTV ruined the regional nature of music.
I found myself arguing in defense of Myspace. It has, in the positive, brought a new relevance to the independent scene. Music needs to be approachable. Music needs to be made by real people, not celebrities. Maybe the fever has broken, maybe the curse of MTV has been lifted. Regional success exists! In the independent touring scene is a more complex and complete six degrees of separation than Kevin Bacon ever dreamed of. The giants of the scene come through every few months, but they lift us all to the rare heights. We're in the presence of greatness, but not in its shadow.
Amen.
Then, there’s the downside. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes the most innovative band, beyond what you could imagine, shows up out of the random and blows your mind. More often, though, you’ll dig through endless strata of imitators of the latest sonic fad… and they’ll catch on faster because they sound so familiar. Still, the control is being wrenched from the hands of the mega-conglomerate record labels. Why else would iTunes, which is quickly eclipsing CD shops in music purchases, sell self-released music? There's a demographic that loves the realness, the sounds that no producer has had a chance to ruin.
Homeless and I were placing bets on the outcome to a fight to the death between Paris Hilton and Miley Cyrus. His money was on Paris Hilton, but I was hoping for mutual annihilation. It's so punk rock, really, to make your own name in the music industry. When so many people buy their way in, or are born into it (through the strange crosseyed dynasty that gave us this Cyrus creature), it's so pure to make records and tours happen through hard work and intuition. Anyone can tour once... Homeless has done it three times a year for the past four years, and he doesn't even own a car. How does he do it?
I'm not sure. He was babbling about something that really confused him in the brain. I didn't catch all of it.
“...Sublime cover bands that travel the country and put out DVDs,” he was saying. “I was at Best Buy the other day and I saw that this band, I won't mention their name or anything, but they're this big Sublime cover band. They had a DVD out of a set they did, just covering Sublime songs.”
We're through the looking glass, people. Scary stuff. Danger stuff. Strange stuff.
But strange is good... and it's not hard to get to this conclusion. It's good to not fit in. Sometimes it's good to be the nerdy little metal-obsessed rapper who's drunk at his own show. Sometimes it's good to go broke and live on the road, year after year, building an underground power base and grabbing for a tiny little corner of immortality. It's good to be at least a little strange in a town where party hats serve as aggression amplifiers and most bartenders can read your thoughts.
Save us from people who can't tell beatnik from gonzo. Save us from creativity cannibals. Send us an 120lb nerd rapper, wandering in among the roaring chainsaw drunks, speaking his own incoherence but doing it so well.
He's at myspace.com/mchomeless
I'm at hawkseason.blogspot.com and hawkseason@gmail.com
Peace.

MC Homeless and the Temple of Doom

It's been the weirdest January on record... so warm, and it's gone by so fast. I think it's doing something to my poor brain chemistry, and I doubt I'm alone. An owl almost landed on me the other night during my walk... not kidding. I'm not down with all these omens. Next thing, someone's going to tell me the Spazz was built on an Algonquin burial ground.

I think MC Homeless is with me on this. He's more of a Mayan doomsayer, but that's fine. He's just as optimistic as the other apocalypse-heads I know. I mean, he does tend to sound a little victorious when he says “2012 is not a random number.”

I don't know what possessed me, maybe it was the sleep deprivation, maybe it was the brainfuzz that follows my favorite high gravity beer around, but I wanted to hear the Big Hate. Specifically: what grinds his gears? Mainly I got unprintable rants on foreign policy and addled recollections of questionable legality.

“Anywhere that doesn't give me free beer for gracing their stage gets the Big Hate. Let's see... shady promoters get the Big Hate. As far as towns, though, I don't know. Every place I played on the last tour was cool,” said Homeless, whose birth name is unpronounceable by human tongue. He's been on the move for so many years now, living all over the place and touring relentlessly. He has to have played with some losers in that time... dig deeper.

“Who stands out as bad? God, I've played with so many bad rappers it's not even funny. Tali Demon. She went on tour with the Insane Clown Posse, and she had a little juggalo following, that was definitely the worst show.”

“What the hell's a juggalo?” I asked. I was convinced it was either something he'd made up or an obscure Australian marsupial.

“It was a great show, they just sucked. A juggalo is, like, ICP's fans,” he clarified. I need to Wikipedia that word... I'm still convinced it's some kind of miniature kangaroo. “Their CD kept skipping and it was the show where we were opening up for the Coup, it was that one, where I almost fought. It was Tali Demon and her Two Loyal Servents, or something like that, and it was these two hillbilly rapper guys... but, to make a long story short, they tried to rush the stage and fight me.”

“Her people?”

“Yeah, and they got kicked out. Then they fought each other outside and got arrested.”

“They got kicked out of their own show?”

“They were one of the opening acts for the Coup. I don't know why they put them on, they were just horrible redneck rappers. ICP just attracts the scum of the earth. Anybody who still wears JNCO Jeans.”

Homeless paused, smiling at something invisible for a second. “It's like the hip hop version of trailer metal. They're trailer hop. Really bad, bad news.”

It was a really nice night, one of those nights where you can solve any problem with a minimum of effort. 27 degrees, feels like 19. Overnight low projected to be 9 degrees… sunny and 9 degrees. Cold enough to think. I felt like Batman, back in Gotham City after years of vacation.

There are heroes of the national underground, too. I won’t call MC Homeless a hero, but he knows what he’s doing. Pretty much anyone can hop on Myspace, put up their band page, and book a national tour. There are benefits and detriments. I was talking to a friend the other night, and he was saying that MTV ruined the regional nature of music.

I found myself arguing in defense of Myspace. It has, in the positive, brought a new relevance to the independent scene. Music needs to be approachable. Music needs to be made by real people, not celebrities. Maybe the fever has broken, maybe the curse of MTV has been lifted. Regional success exists! In the independent touring scene is a more complex and complete six degrees of separation than Kevin Bacon ever dreamed of. The giants of the scene come through every few months, but they lift us all to the rare heights. We're in the presence of greatness, but not in its shadow.

Amen.

Then, there’s the downside. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes the most innovative band, beyond what you could imagine, shows up out of the random and blows your mind. More often, though, you’ll dig through endless strata of imitators of the latest sonic fad… and they’ll catch on faster because they sound so familiar. Still, the control is being wrenched from the hands of the mega-conglomerate record labels. Why else would iTunes, which is quickly eclipsing CD shops in music purchases, sell self-released music? There's a demographic that loves the realness, the sounds that no producer has had a chance to ruin.

Homeless and I were placing bets on the outcome to a fight to the death between Paris Hilton and Miley Cyrus. His money was on Paris Hilton, but I was hoping for mutual annihilation. It's so punk rock, really, to make your own name in the music industry. When so many people buy their way in, or are born into it (through the strange crosseyed dynasty that gave us this Cyrus creature), it's so pure to make records and tours happen through hard work and intuition. Anyone can tour once... Homeless has done it three times a year for the past four years, and he doesn't even own a car. How does he do it?

I'm not sure. He was babbling about something that really confused him in the brain. I didn't catch all of it.

“...Sublime cover bands that travel the country and put out DVDs,” he was saying. “I was at Best Buy the other day and I saw that this band, I won't mention their name or anything, but they're this big Sublime cover band. They had a DVD out of a set they did, just covering Sublime songs.”

We're through the looking glass, people. Scary stuff. Danger stuff. Strange stuff.

But strange is good... and it's not hard to get to this conclusion. It's good to not fit in. Sometimes it's good to be the nerdy little metal-obsessed rapper who's drunk at his own show. Sometimes it's good to go broke and live on the road, year after year, building an underground power base and grabbing for a tiny little corner of immortality. It's good to be at least a little strange in a town where party hats serve as aggression amplifiers and most bartenders can read your thoughts.

Save us from people who can't tell beatnik from gonzo. Save us from creativity cannibals. Send us an 120lb nerd rapper, wandering in among the roaring chainsaw drunks, speaking his own incoherence but doing it so well.

He's at myspace.com/mchomeless

I'm at hawkseason.blogspot.com and hawkseason@gmail.com

Peace.

How to Not Get a Job (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cave Bear)

I come to you now, hat in hands, offering a repeat entreaty. Do you seek employees? I seek employment. Maybe my people can talk to your people...

If you can use someone who knows music, then I can be of service to you. I know movies pretty well, but music is definitely my strength. I'm the worst kind of addict. I not only love and devour music, but I also make it. There's this never ending quest to surround myself with music in my life and work. Something about working in a place that sells CDs appeals to me, but I can't put my finger on exactly what.

My flexible is schedule (?). As things stand, I have a full time job and am looking to scale back and rearrange it in favor of doing something new. Specifically, pushing pertinent music on an unsuspecting town (seditious!). See, I'm the last survivor of a strange breed: the compassionate music snob. I can turn people onto The Good Stuff without making them feel inferior. We were nearly hunted to extinction in the '80s, and if you're nice I'll tell you my secret identity.

I've been told, when I've applied before, that you'll want to know my top five movies and albums. This is hard. I had the toughest time limiting to five (and couldn't always trim my list down), but here's what I came up with.

Sights:

Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

City of God

City of God (again)

Godzilla vs. Gigan

the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

2001: A Space Odyssey/Dr Strangelove (tie)

Sounds:

Red Sparowes: Every Red Heart.../At the Soundless Dawn (tie)

Tom Waits: Frank's Wild Years

Pearl Jam: Yield

Liars: Drum's Not Dead

Gifts From Enola: Loyal Eyes Betrayed the Mind

I left out some choice music. Maserati, Explosions in the Sky, Sleater-Kinney, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Mogwai, Lake Trout, the Black Angels...

***

Anyway...

I'm reliable, honest, and hard working. I learn fast and can defy gravity at will. I invented the telephone, the fax machine, and the helicopter. These facts-or any others-can be confirmed or denied by _________, who knows me pretty well.

So I can tell I need to close this bizarre diatribe before it collapses under its own weight. Please let me know if you can use me!

With clarity of intention of cleanliness of shirt...

-HS

Six Questions of Death: Jeff Blinder (published Feb '08, G-Vegas Magazine)

There’s a fresh buzz going around the national music scene, a buzz that you don’t hear much in Greenville. We’re the last to know, really, when something big breaks. People from the more cosmopolitan spots are quick to pick on us, the small towners.

But now there’s a paradox. The buzz is about Greenville, specifically, the Greenville underground. In the know, locally, are a few original bands (no cover acts!) and maybe two hundred music connoisseurs. In the know, nationally, are dozens of bands in varying stages of success who love Greenville.

They love the Spazzatorium, they love 21 Eleven and Sociology. People who don’t even know that this is a college town (not making this up) will come back again and again to play the underground, will brave the mindkilling seventy minutes of 264, will knock out their alignment on 14^th for the sake of a homemade stage and the most responsive audience in the state (probably).

The Spazzatorium Galleria is exactly that... an art gallery. It’s not a bar or a club, and it’s run in a fan and musician-friendly way. No one will make a fortune playing there, but it’s more satisfying than blasting a tired old Eagles song over last call at some doomed bar.

Jeff Blinder knows very well that music is art of a most sacred form. He books the majority of the Spazz’s acts and, with the help of a cadre of trusted locals, keeps the Spazz alive. I talked to him at his house one balmy December day. Comedy was in the air as his roommates shouted absurdities up and down the stairs. Coolest thing ever… kind of like giving an interview in the middle of a Mel Brooks movie.

Hawk Season: What is the coolest thing ever to happen onstage at the Spazz?

Jeff Blinder: There's a band, Kiss Kiss, who were pretty rad. It was kind of a more popular band, but they really let loose, and they ended up breaking a guitar and a violin and a guy was swinging from the rafters. It was one of those bands where I really wasn't expecting it because they kind of were this indie band. I knew that their music got pretty hectic, but I didn't know that their actions could be like that. Afterwards they were telling me that it was a release for them because they had some touring problems and they usually don't get that crazy but at the Spazz they felt like they could let loose a little more and it ended up with them breaking some expensive equipment. They were okay with it.

HS: Who, or what, is your biggest inspiration in how the Spazz is run?

JB: New Jersey basement shows. That was my first foray into the do it yourself scene in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and seeing bands that I'd heard about from friends play these little basements...not like big venues where I used to go, and just seeing how they got it done. (I didn't like) not feeling like I was in an environment where I couldn't just relax. At a basement you can do that.

HS: People tell me the Spazz doesn't have enough money. How real is the danger?

JB: Being a donation only place, and not making any profits, it's month to month. We have had excess money in the past, but that has run out, so December's looking real tough because we don't have a lot of shows. Basically it's just a month to month endeavor. We can never be as comfortable as we want to be, but that kind of makes it exciting too, you know? Keeps you on your toes.

HS: Who would you book if you could book anyone?

JB: I would be booking the Avett Brothers, Valient Thorr. Then I'd be looking for some of the bigger acts, maybe the Mars Volta or something like that, but those would be shows that would kind of have to be secret...There's a lot of bands I missed out on, who were kind of under the radar and then they got on the radar...They were in that spot where they would be willing to come through and now they've got booking agents and it's hard to get bands when they have booking agents.

HS: Like, which acts?

JB: Aids Wolf, that's one from Canada that I really liked and then they got a booking agent. Genghis Tron is even hard to get now, they've come through before.

HS: The Spazz wouldn't work in most towns. Why does it work in Greenville?

JB: I would say because it takes commitment from the people who are doing it, but also... I don't know. It really is an anomaly. As long as we can have music coming through and art and all that good stuff we'll do what we have to... even if we have to not do it there. There's a fight for survival, I guess. I don't know why it works, but I'll keep doing it as long as I can.

HS: The weirdest thing is the audience participation being so good and bands hear about it through the touring circuit.

JB: I just think it's, like I was saying, the comfort factor. It's not feeling like you're in an environment where you feel like you have to be kind of stressed out, kind of let loose. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it's like a house show, but it's at the gallery. I go out of my way to make sure everyone's having a good time and that no one's excluded and say “hi” and “thanks for coming” and all that, so I think they see that we like what we're doing and that the bands like to come here. With those two factors I think it makes them more comfortable and the audience reacts by participating more.

HS: All right... your sixth question of death (and the most deadly question)... the Spazz is Han Solo. Who are the Ewoks?

JB: I don't know who it would be. They'd have to be cute but kind of annoying...Some of the regulars, but not the girls. I don't know, I don't want to call out names.

Jeremy (a roommate -hs): I like to think of Jeff as Yoda.

HS: That's a good one.

JB: Donate, you will!

***

Go to myspace.com/spazzgallery. Check the schedule, yo. You might just find true love.

Anyway, until next month I’ll be drifting down the Tar in a tricked out rowboat and a Larry Bird jersey, drinking PBR tall boys and posting endearing gibberish at hawkseason.blogspot.com. Feel free, nay, encouraged to drop me a line. It's HawkSeason@gmail.com, kids.

Put on that pimp hat, it's going to be a long night. Until then....

cocktail napkin scribble (observations on a loser)

Fear drives the barhound...

Staring at dozens of TVs @ 4:pm on a Friday, offering commentary to his sidekick. 45 & embarrassed, wearing the official mustache of 1985... He knows that he can get on the train w/ the future at any time but has convinced himself of the opposite 22 years ago. It's easier, somehow, living in constant defensive cockiness, pretense @ full strength.

YES,

MOTHER FUCKER,

I AM HAVING THE TIME OF MY LIFE & YOU WISH YOU COULD PARTY THIS HARD.

New Year's Revolution

return of the peroxide blonde*this town needs a shithead*abject terror and more abject terror*Hawk Season 2012: a president for all seasons.*this nation needs a shithead

I have to tell you a story before I can tell you what happened. Sit down.

I've been up all night, racking my brain. I've been adrift all New Year's, wandering the usual spots with no luck. Turducken was doomed. Downtown was evil. Serpents and devils and shit buying drinks for other serpents and devils, the undead speaking in reverse tongues... working on their anagrams with renewed zeal.

See, three years ago I escaped Paris Hilton Island with my life and my life only. I had been there seven months, an idiot trapped by the promise of reality tv-delivered riches. I had been scalded with burning oil and set out in a fire ant hill. They made me eat sewage in a stunning $4,000 outfit and I still DIDN'T FUCKING WIN.

Since then, I've looked over my shoulder in dread that the Island Guard will find me and drag me back. Every time I hear a Justin Timberlake ringtone or a Honda Civic's glass pack I freeze and drop, paralyzed with fear.

But now it's the New Year. Several have passed since my unlikely escape, but the fear has yet to fade. I can't help the feeling that they'll be muscling me back soon, my fingernails clawing the ground as they pulllllllllllllllll.

So I've been drifting the defeated town, my face obfuscated with surrender paint, wondering if this will be the year we are all set free from Paris Hilton Island. The parties were death, the bars were vicious. I was surrounded by strange vampires, waiting to suck the fantasies out of my head and sell them to shitty authors. Panicked friends tried to fight, tried to stand beside me, but were all eventually thrown to the wolves. I wander this terrible town, mind clouded with bad thoughts, eyes clouded with the old year, begging the new one to come. Then, come the new one, I don't recognize it.

It's a wolverine in the nursery, gray at the edges of my optimism. It's the sweet taste of napalm on toast, the breakfast of a day already in shambles. Will this year be better than the last? Really, every year we say "it should be," but are never given cause to consider anything a win.

Next year I'm having a private New Year's. All my introspection this year took place in absolute crowd, and that just doesn't work. I hit all the wrong conclusions.

What I do realize, though, is that the beginning and end of a year are absolutely relative.

That said, I'm going to celebrate the Chinese New Year. By then I'll be ready.

Peace.