TMAM Vol 03 and Various Hi-Adrenalin Bitchings

It has been a while since my last post, so there are all kinds of horrible details that I shall leave out, but since posting last I have: managed to damage my already sensitive spinal column even further; engaged in bus travel of Conditions Charcoal-Grey through Bullshit on several occasions; transcended the Bullshit barrier upon the useless advice of an MTA customer-service representative resulting in my trudging like a hobo five miles up a highway in the middle of fuck-all nowhere at 8:00p.m.; sustained massive damage to the computer-region of my anatomy.

Despite all this I continue remarkably unscathed save a deeply-rooted angst and nerve-state which I have, I regret to say, perpetrated upon some of the people about whom I care most deeply. That's about the softest thing you're ever going to get from me, so ogle while you can. I'm only half-human, after all.

I have committed two acts of art (of the Too Much Acid Man variety, and am working on a third; this third fueled by a very dangerous whiskey binge I went on a matter of days ago that was supposed to result in permanent brain alteration but instead failed miserably and simply landed me with a headache of tectonic proportions. The headache requiring an instant infusion, the next day, of two packs of cigarettes, five litres of water, eight cups of tea, a pair of industrial cheeseburgers and four naproxen tablets. Following this I doodled a bit and commenced work on a multi-panel TMAM depicting our hero engaging in one of his favourite activities: shouting from fire escapes. If it comes out well I shall post it.

For now, though you'll have to make do with this.

TMAM Vol 02

Whoo! Very positive response from various peoples on the TMAM comic, so I'm doing more! It appears he is, for some reason, a profoundly sympathetic character. In reality he was much more difficult to get on with. But enough of this extraneous lip-flappage. Here's what you really came for.

Too-Much-Acid Man

Big depressive week. Head like a bag of flies. Inexplicable bumbling incompetence during the completion of simple tasks. If I were less of a bastard, it might be seen as savant-type absent-mindedness, but I'm afraid I make myself unsympathetic.

The number of bars I have been to in the past week: two.

The number of drinks I have had in the past week: uncountable.

MTA, remarkably, has been not indecent to me, and I rank my last few rides as Conditions White-to-Silver. That reminds me. Here ya go:

Nashville MTA Rating System:

Condition White: Efficient smooth riding, each person with their own row of seats.

Condition Silver: People have to sit next to one another. Several people have difficulty operating the coin-depository and we are unnecessarily held up. Bus breakdown, detour, and lateness of schedule may also qualify the trip for Condition Silver.

Condition Charcoal-Grey: Condition Silver, plus an annoying person who insists on talking to me the whole way. Or: standing-room only with relatively cheery and well-bathed crowd.

Condition Black: Standing room only. Crowd surly, human gas emissions in atmosphere 700,000-plus parts per million. Neck and back damage caused by lurching.

Condition Bullshit: Condition Black, plus something gets spilled on my clothing, and/or someone knocks me over, and/or I have to shout at the bus driver to allow me off the bus at my regular stop, and he/she still travels on an extra block or two.

There. Chuckle at that, my invisible friends. And also chuckle at this little tribute to my University days:

Lockless, I encounter a tiny Scot, am subjected to the obtrusions of a bombastic busmaster, and return home happily.

All in the course of an evening. Suddenly solvent after a week of poverty, I went to make a trimming of the wild outsprouting of head-hairs I had inadvertently developed over the course of a month. To do so, I travelled to a mall via taxi, with overwhelmingly excellent results. As a very thin man ravaged by my years of self-abuse, it does take a quality haircut to bring out the best in me, and such was what I received.

Unburdened of my crazy bio-wig, I was thus satisfied to return home, though this time the mode of transportation was our town's beloved system of public transit, the Nashville MTA, with which I am engaged in an apocalyptic struggle. When I left the mall it was 9:30 p.m. The next bus didn't arrive until 10:48. I cast about for activities, sighted a wine and liquor shop, and autopilot took care of the rest. Very shortly thereafter I found myself on a patio outside the shop smoking Lucky Strikes with a tiny Scotsman. I will quote myself in an IM conversation I had this evening on that very topic; when asked just how tiny he was, I replied:

I could've used his head to open beer bottles. But I wouldn't've wanted to. He was very enthusiastic about a whole range of things, most notably wine. The problem, you see, is that I elected to wait for the returning bus in a wine shop. Run by said Scotsman, with whom I smoked cigarettes while he gave me a tour. And he said 'And you should see our Australian selection," and I said, foolishly, because I was on a good-hair high, "I've grown quite fond of Australia of late." And he said, "You like the Australian wines?" and I said, "Well, I like their women. Well, one of them." And it was all downhill from there. But eleven dollars for what turned out to be quite a good port (of Australian vintage) was no real pain to me.

There you have it.The man was a hell of a salesman, and an odd and delightful character to boot. At one point, I actually said "I wish I had a million dollars." And he replied, "Are you sure you don't, pally?" I checked my wallet just to be sure, but if there were millions in there, the wallet was stolidly refusing to disgorge them. But the Scotsman, whose name was Joshua, took my email address and put me on a mailing list for wine sales and wine-tasting events, which should be some weird fun and an excuse for me to vacate my little cavern every now and again for some human-type interactions.

If it weren't for the ensuing MTA battle, this could very well have been an ideal evening, but unfortunately I twisted my chiropractically-fragile neck while trying to chase down this bastard bus, whose bastard busmaster stopped at my stop when I waved to him, and then he made the "go on ahead I'll pick you up later" gesture! So I had to run, whacked in the spinal column with my new bottle of port, twisting around to see just what the hell the bus was doing. And then, surprise surprise, before you could say "Shit," the right side of my face was like a block of wood and I was swallowing funny. But the ride home was uneventful, save for the awkward staggerings of an indigent type who kept listing dangerously toward an angle that could capsise him, and when I got home I took this photograph, possibly the only photograph of a happy me you'll see for a long time, me hearties, so drink a long draught of it and savour before swallowing.


In other news, I am in love with a woman who lives on the other side of the world, it's making me even weirder than usual, and there's nothing I can do about it. I move to eliminate all spatial dimensions. A cohesive space-time continuum is so last-week, anyway.

Invisible weekend of corporeal punishment

Intro:

This weekend has passed by obscured by the hazes of excess and pain. My back pain has been an omnipresent and elemental force devouring my consciousness, and all attempts at fun have been somehow subducted beneath an incalculable malaise. I have been attempting to coerce inferior computer equipment to perform internet-telelphony services for which it is ill-suited, with tantalising but still unworkable results. From my window I see the perpetual shit-pile of the construction crew's abstruse doings, through my computer I see my dear friend Char feeling sad, and as I ride the MTA bus I am jostled to the core amid a bleary solar haze, and feel inexplicably empty.

Although THIS happened on the bus:

The other day I took the Nashville MTA bus downtown to my chiropractor for a cracking. It was incredibly hot outside, and I was all bleary from being unconscious and immobile, and I had just the tiny bit of walking-rigor mortis, and I missed the bus I was intending to take, so I walked a bit further to catch a different one. When it arrived it was stuffed completely full with humans. This was at about three o'clock. Why all of these humans were riding the bus at 3 p.m. is a mystery. It was standing-room only, and the ambience was surly. I found a spot at which I could stand and do my stuff and got out these placards that I carry around that have the names of bodily emissions on them. I hold the appropriate card up when one of said emissions makes its presence known aboard bus. What was in my Discman: Junkyard, by The Birthday Party.

The heat was just tremendous, and people were jostling against one another in a most bovine fashion. I thought about the mass of all of these people. I thought about how many pounds of meat, fat and bone it would all add up to if all of the people were rendered into those items and separated into big bins. I thought about the volume of oxygen consumed, the volume of CO2 exhaled, the volumes of other gases generated by these people if it were all bottled up and separated into pressurised tanks. Anyway, during this time I was also operating the placards like nobody's business, and people were pretending not to notice, but were noticing anyway, and finally this one woman in her early twenties started getting fidgety and commenced to make comments at a person she's sitting next to, whom I gathered was her boyfriend or husband or someone who performed a similar function. Soon they're both looking at me and talking, and the guy was eyeing me beadily, and I stared resolutely forward over the top of my glasses, cool and impassive (though I was becoming increasingly aware of this bloke's increasing interest in me, also during this time I noted that he was of a not unimpressive size, and was missing the odd tooth, and was obviously the sort of person with whom I would choose to steer generally clear, normally, for a number of reasons).

After about five minutes of this, the man with the teeth stood up and said "Hey!" and I did nothing. Then he said, "Hey, you in the hat!" (I was wearing a black fedora). "May I help you?" said I . Very cool. Inwardly nervous, though. I took my left hand off of the rail I was holding onto and prepared for unpleasantness. "Yeah, buddy, I think so." "Yes? How so?" I was sweating! Then he lowered his voice and uttered this:
"Look, mister, I hate to bother you, but you see, my girl over there really wants to be on television."

This was not at all what I was prepared for. "Er, does she!" I said, cocking an eyebrow as though I was deeply interested. I now thought the man must be mad, so I would diplomatically humour him. "Yeah, and we was wondering if you would mind letting her be in one of yore skits."

All kinds of lights came on at this point. It dawned on me that he and his lady friend must've confused me with one of these comedy-troupe people that sell their videos on late-night television. I deserved this for shaving, for once. I said, "I'm sorry, sir, but I'm not on television. If this is about the cards here, this is just an experiment and possibly an effort to improve our travelling conditions." So he said, "Then who's your buddy with the camera?" Indicating with his thumb over his shoulder. Ands sure enough, at the back of the bus was some guy taping the whole thing!

The guy at the back of the bus was just a tourist with a rather expensive DV outfit. But the whole episode made me look like a bit of a dufus, and I was shaken for a while afterward. The guy who came up to me about it was very cool about the whole thing, and I got off the bus several stops later.

Then there was the party:

I went to an art-gallery opening down-town this weekend, due to popular demand. The show was quite good, lots of local abstract artists, some of whom were good and some who weren't. The logistics of the party were handled very professionally, with very good wine and orderves and such. There were surprisingly few of the aggri-matic society-types there who like to go to art-gallery openings to pretend that they know stuff about art and try to impress their friends. Indeed, most of the crowd was composed of artists, and we had some great conversations about the future of visual art and Flash and the Internet. It was a great time, and thanks to Rob for the official invitation, but I would've showed up anyway. Got to give the people what they want.

But anyway the gallery-opening went beautifully, fantastically, but then there was this after-party. Let's not say too much of this. I made the mistake of stopping home to change out of my suit and into the All- Purpose-Uniform (abbreviated APU from here forward). The All-Purpose Uniform consists of: Black leather pants, motorcycle boots, a black silk t-shirt or other t-shirt , and a blazer. Somehow during that small interval my mind's squid got to thrashing about a little bit, making me sullen and slitty of eye. By the time I stepped out the door I was dominated by squid, malevolently staring about and all but baring my beak at people. The party looked like a big aquarium when I walked in the door. If I dropped fish food there would've been a great convergence upon it from below.

But this was all in my head! It was actually a nicely-done party; there was a bartender, and I drank martinis most of the night and made conversation that was less-than-scintillating! As was expected of me, I got to ranting in short order and a small group of groups of people gathered around me: those who thought I was funny, those who were concerned for my welfare (or so they thought), those who knew me and just wanted to talk to me, and the obligatory couple of women who thought I was attractive and wanted to find out if I'm REALLY this weird or if it's all just a big show. Wouldn't they like to know! But I realised then that I was the fish-food, and that I really needed to get the hell out of there. And so I left after three hours with a bottle of inferior-vintage Cab, went home and drank it by myself while listening to the Replacements' Pleased To Meet Me over and over and over.

The whole weekend was downhill from there

...with the exception of an isolated idea for a song that I shall explore in depth later on this week. Oh, and this caricature of me, executed on a bar napkin at the party:

I Emerge Fully-Formed From My Own Head...

and flop out onto the internet, where I thrash about, shaking off bits of grey matter. My name is Plasmatron-7; some people call me "Plaz", some people call me "fucko" , and others call me "Master", though that latter group could do for some growth. Nobody calls me "the space cowboy", "the gangster of love", or "Maurice."

This page, from this day forward, shall play host to various slitty-eyed observations and acerbic diatribes that spring to mind as I skulk in my warren, peering out through my blinds or into the dirty windows of my television and computer screens, as I cruise the city aboard the Metropolitan Transit Authority's hulking mobile human-tanks, and as I silently grow heavy with whiskey in poorly-lit bars on slow afternoons.

The effort expended in designing this site's essentials has drained my resources low, and so I shall sever this post here. The next one is guaranteed to contain some substance, though I can't guarantee that it will be a non-toxic substance. In fact, it will probably be plutonium mixed with diphtheria sludge and little ground-up bits of Hitler's moustache.