Et al

So I’ve been hitch-hiking down a long and lonesome road. Galloping around the southeast making as little sense as possible, and I mean that very literally. I suppose I mean that in general as well. When people ask me what I’ve been doing the past 3 months or so I come back with three different answers: promoting a concert series with Bigboi from OutKast, working on my novel, and relentlessly stalking Jeff Goldblum. All three are completely true, but I dare you to find out which is the most accurate.

And on this gorgeous Australia Day I finally have found my feet on the asphalt long enough to update ye olde Long Sunset. But who knows what to write about, and who knows if I should be writing at all (at this moment…not necessarily in general). 2011 has the makings of a very strange year for me (hell, read that first post, does any of that make sense? Except for that last paragraph; I was possesed) and I'll take it as it comes. Direction is important for me now, and for all of us always.

I’ve been writing this blog for a deceptively long time. Nearly six years. So many visits from Google mercenaries, so many tirades on John Kerry’s campaign style (John Kerry!), so many semi-lucid ramblings about my nights and days at the bottom and top of the brain highway, and so many ugly nights full of deep pure darkness. The Long Sunset has seen it all. And so have you.

But I haven’t been updating my recent insanity (as well as general), because I don’t know where to go with it. I used to go anywhere. I used to flip open the laptop, crack open a fresh Stella, suck down a cloud of opium and let her rip on whatever Tennessee William’s micro-drama was playing in my head at the given time. Politics, death, drugs, Orlando’s infrastructure, lies, wars, pumpkins, Smash Brother’s, walls that fell, John Kerry!……it never mattered. I just went. But I feel myself thinking more now when I post here, and I wonder if that’s positive. At the very least, it’s made me less productive.

To be totally honest, the reason I used to write this blog with such impunity was because hardly anyone read it. It almost worked solely as a back-up disc. I had some core and very appreciated readers (and some who even get my on-going Google mercenary jokes), but the difference in the amount of people who read the Long Sunset now as compared to 2006 is a bit of a crossover for me.

Easy at first, because all I had to write about was Mike. And all I still have to write about is Mike. But now I’m not sure what context to deliver those Local on 8’s on. Every time I write something now I wonder if it should stay in The Journal, or hit the TLS super-highway.

And hell, I know the answer. But I guess the whole point of this post is that I haven’t completely lost the illusion; at least not officially. I could have gone on a 1k word rampage on the State of the Union address (really John Boehner, did you think a purple tie counted as partisan? Fuck off), but has that become inappropriate in this setting? This place? I’m not sure.

So that text sat on the laptop for about 6 hours. Then I realized what I was really writing. Not a questionnaire into what the Long Sunset should contain from this point forward, but a warning. I’m going to attack this blog, my writing, and life (in its basic sense), the way everyone should, and put the pedal down heavily. Nothing’s sacred, and all is revered. I’m going to write from the hip.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

El Dia del Camino Uno

The places that are, and then, there are those places. Cracks in the seams, subtle bits of darkness flying free through the cubic walls of reality, black pavement holding true against any odds, weird white cars that whir in the night like unhinged balloons, as they float, and fall, fall, fall…..

This is the deck of cards stacked in some literal way, the true grit of the center of a southern state, the playfulness of a rubber reality with nothing but soul. Crystal empires rising in some flat humid insect filled land watching not the nest, nor the anthill, but the queen. Always the queen! And on the rotting corpses of a million ancient orange blossoms this place called Or-Lando rubs and shakes and finds corners that don’t exist. A place created as a practical joke only to embrace the joke and keep laughing.

The locals here demand exact change, and the vending machines eat dollars with such intensity that overwhelming robot greed must be ruled out, and only something supernatural and purely cruel must posses them. Oh, these nights on the road, they are a vicious toxin, and let 2011 not trick you, don’t let it lull you into thinking it’s just the weigh station before that oddly round number that means nothing in front of it. This year of 2011, twenty-ought eleven, scars the sky with sweet jet trails and betrays any loyalty all will give it.

Pulsating beams of orange light sting the orbs of any fool looking close to the interior of this matter, of this dark cold night, of these gruesome slicing days, against the pixels of matter and anti-matter, with gravity filling all and any space that confronts it. And into the wild we tin soldiers march shaped well and true. The shadows we cast not nearly as deep as the potential we try to fill in them. Red tiles of cracked rock, bleeding paintings from some distant renaissance, a palm tree stacked to neatly, like a wedding cake created with failure in mind, praying against the wind, against fire, against ice, but, yes, face them we will on this jagged crooked wench of a road, and we’ll drive over them at only our highest velocities.