Praise Jesus, Ralph! (01-29-2007)

 “I believe virtually everything I read, and I think that is what makes me more of a selective human, than someone who doesn't believe anything.??

- David St. Hubbins

When you stare into the eyes of pure lunacy, voices come out of the dark that say things to give you nightmares.

In May of ’06, I interviewed Ralph Lang. He’s an anti-abortion protestor, with personal experience in high-level Christian hallucinations on a regular basis.

I first got in contact with him because my phone number was listed in the table of contents for the Flipside, since I was the managing editor at the time. He called my room while I was in it, and I let the message pick it up, since I didn’t feel like dealing with anyone at the moment. He began talking about an article in the recent issue he had picked up which mentioned a persons internal struggle dealing with shock-tactic Christians passing out information against abortion, and Ralph noticed the writer had said that he was a Christian. He started leaving a message in an attempt to get in touch with the writer, and by this time I had noticed this was more than a telemarketer call. I picked up and began talking with Ralph. I set up a time to meet him the next day, since we had been flooded with dead bloody fetus pictures fairly regularly at this point, and I was dying to lend these people my ear, because I am a sadist.

I met him at the campus clock late in the afternoon, since I would be finished with my classes for the day, and I wanted to give Ralph full reign to run at top speed for as long as he wanted. He had a box under his arm, and I had a duffel bag, since he’d mentioned he’d be giving me things to look over. He would turn out to be fully armed.

I’ve listened to the full interview three times now. I’ve transcribed it. All 57 pages and 2 and a half hours of it. I don’t expect to erase it any time soon. I had captured on tape something that I’d never heard before: Pure uncut mental loss, in the flesh.

I’d want nothing better but to wipe him from my mind. He’s only been a horror to think about. He’s a black ghost on my thoughts. The quote above is from the movie “This Is Spinal Tap??, and Ralph has actually ruined this movie for me. The level of crime that entails; that I can’t watch this movie without breaking into tears because I now know there are people in the world who think like that. Worse than that. The disturbing irony that a joke becomes the truth, and leads you to scream at the abyss because you realize there are actually people out there lacking the mental acumen to be smarter than someone trying to be stupid. For the sake of my humor, the prime and only mark of true sanity in the world, I needed a cleansing wash on the level of a confession to purge this kidney stone. “To lift a pen is to be at war.?? Voltaire would understand a campaign to save a movie.

*************

Where to begin? The horror. The horror. Something solid is the only way to go. Make order from chaos…

First and foremost, the miracles. The visions. The staff of light. Waking up singing songs he didn’t know the words to the night before. Flashes of light while he was reading. Hearing crying souls when he prayed. Seeing Jesus and Mary. White tunnels, moving ribs, jumping words, shaking knees, leaping hearts, beams of heat from his chest. He tells me numbers. Things that don’t mean ANYTHING, and takes them as proof. Praying stops wars, and prevents 53 abortions. 1,000 souls will be granted amnesty from purgatory with one psalm, and if you say it seven times it goes on forever. The Prayer of Perpetual Recitation. The vinyl is caught, and the skipping track goes on forever. He actually said this. Is he lying? Does he actually think I’ll believe this? Is he that stupid? Nothing bodes well. All arrows point to a dead end. Mental death.

The American civil war was brought on by God to free those oppressed under the yolk of slavery, which only came to fruition in the first place due to the lack of prayer in the world. And the North won because they out-prayed the South, mustn’t forget that. People aren’t having 10, 11, or 18 kids anymore, and they’re not having them soon enough—before 26, definitely. Evolution is a sin, and homosexuality and abortion brought a flood to Asia and a hurricane to New Orleans.

I suppose nothing Ralph told me was news to my ears. I had heard things like this all before. But it had never been right in front of me like that, right there, for so long. Too much to handle. The wind shear breaks your mind to pieces at that much close contact for that long. With the benefit of months of distance now, I can attempt some cohesion. Stop the onslaught.

He constantly suggests prayer as a panacea, of almost epic proportions. And also, somehow, of simple cause and effect. Praying stops sin. To stop sinning, start praying. Like some sort of cycle, outside of which is only death. Just keep praying. The desired effect sounds to be something akin to eating all your meals sitting naked on a toilet: you don’t move, you don’t do anything. Nothing happens. Which means nothing bad happens.

A common theme runs through everything Ralph said. He wants everything back again how he remembered it. He wants everything normal again. He wants his life back. It seems nothing makes sense to him anymore, and his call for prayer is a vocalized cry for the world to stop moving so he can get back on again. He holds God as a general, with clear orders to follow. Ralph is in on the struggle. He’s begged for a reference point, and he has it. Every bright figure, flash of light, or plain-dead randomness is another sign. He’s being reminded that he has a place. Where another person would fear for their sanity if they were to withhold half the visions Ralph claims to be a part of, for him they’re just a kind word and a shine of favor on the loyal soldier who so dearly deserves it. A pat on the head, and fresh direction from someone who, somehow, knows what they’re talking about. Someone who knows more than Ralph. Someone who knows why things happen, and where Ralph fits into it all.

Victory is clear cut, and the defeated are even easier to notice: anyone who’s not Ralph. He does his part, God takes care of the rest, evil is vanquished, and Ralph goes home and fucks the prom queen. He’s hailed for all eternity as one of the chosen few. The Right. The Strong. A Hero.

What everybody wants. So how does this help me with the movie? Can I enjoy sarcasm in peace again? Can I live with some irony, not worrying that there’s a double-digit IQ skeleton rolling around out there somewhere, waiting to take a literal translation from a Bazooka Joe wrapper? Like so many other things, the answer lies nearer to the problem than I thought.

The luck of my tape recorder is in its amazing power while still being a $60 off-hand purchase. It catches everything. While driving with an open window can be agonizing when it comes to typing what the hell genius I was saying at the time, in other situations it seems to have a Zen wisdom for hearing what I needed, instead of what I was actually listening for. For interviews with random maniacal religious nuts for instance, it had the sense of mind to also catch all the background noise, the most vital of which was high-heeled shoes. Just when things seemed at their worst, I heard these beat of hard leather on tile, and a window was opened for me. I thought of women. All of them. All the ones who had walked by at the time, anyway. And there were more than a few. The tall one, the blonde one, older, younger. All the molds of the fairer species, it seemed.

Due to a genetic masterstroke of the very Thing that Ralph claims to worship, I’ve been blessed with a highly contrary nature, the results of which is that not many things can get me hornier than holding company with someone who doesn’t want me to be. So much fun! What he thought I was thinking about, how much attention he thought I was paying him, The Crusades, The Pope, every flash of light, bleeding statue, and threat of eternal fire-and-brimstone damnation from him fell like a house made of cards trying to hold ground against the hurricane from me licking my chops and rubbing my hands in anticipation. Not viciously primal, but more mental than anything. I realized there was a whole arena, a full game, with rules, tricks, victory or disappointment, that was open to me but which Ralph had surrendered in.

The chance, floating in the ether, that one of them could be for me, and I could be hers, is invigorating like car batteries hooked up to my nuts. The edge of failure or success I walk, in every goal I pursue, not just women, gives anything I do a taste of glory that would go toe to toe and beyond anything Ralph could ever muster in his wildest dreams. He’s given up the ghost. He has no wild springs of imagination. Something somewhere died for him, and with it went dirty visions, living heroic stories, and the feeling of being in on something as sublime as genius art, like this movie. Some work of voice and emotion that struck a chord for him and those of his ilk. He found no common-ground heroes of his time, so he was forced to invent one. Like a puppeteer being taken over by his mannequin, and he gave up the idea of having something of his own.

At one point in the interview, Ralph tells me of once praying a thanks to God for giving him his noble quest. Thanking the lord—“Thank you for taking me away from my life??. It’s an appreciation of a surrender. Reminding himself of the time when he threw up his hands and quit the fight. He went back to the middle ground and stopped trying.

I stared into the eyes of pure lunacy, and returned to life with a gusto. I keep Ralph’s tape like a communication from a death camp. Sunken eyes. An emaciated frame. Someone who gave up. The tapes are Metal to me now. They are Punk. They are everything that keeps me going. They are love and sex, poetry and romance. They remind me of everything I never want to be, and I run with a volt like lightning listening to them now. I am a swift wave, engulfing everything I can get my hands on. Ralph sits on his crapper, eating stale bread from a dead country, many miles and even farther years away. I no longer bother myself with minds that can’t keep my pace or know how to appreciate my movies.

Lollapalooza: Prologue (02-14-2007)

 By Friday afternoon, we were in through the front gates. It was around 1 p.m., and we showed our 3-day tickets to the man, and received our armbands. Plastic straps, designed to have impervious clasping buttons. The strip can be cut, but the latch and the plastic would hold on showers, sleeping, fistfights, and even full on grip.

Probably, anyway. We didn’t want to test our theory too much, since this was the only way to get back in for the rest of the weekend. A near foolproof idea for attendance: only the right people, who had paid full price like normal, would be wanted here. We ran into someone later trying to beat the system, but we’ll get to him later.

I had driven Bishara and I the day before, eventually taking somewhere upwards of 11 hours from departure, to get to his Uncle’s house with time to spare for the concert the next day. We had taken our time, leaving a day early, so as to leave nothing to chance on our attendance once everything started. On our way through Wisconsin we’d bought a carton of cigarettes and a pair of tar filters. The cigarettes in Wisconsin because they were cheaper, a carton because we didn’t want to run out (since we’d planned on sharing, if nothing else than just as ice-breakers for conversation), and the filters for our health. Also, because we’d be fooling ourselves if we didn’t already feel (or is that wish?) we were stuck in our own version of “Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas”. We bought the tar-filters to complete the Hunter S. Thompson package. For myself, particularly. Arrogant assumptions, it would seem, except for the fact that I was white, my 310-pound Arab friend could easily pass for Samoan, and I was a writer. Avoiding the obvious was not what we were on this trip to do.

So we bought the tar-filters, and I write this story to you making no apologies as per my flagrant following in Thompson’s footsteps. Every writer in America since the 30’s has been ripping off Fitzgerald and “The Great Gatsby”, including Hunter S. Thompson himself, so I don’t feel much guilt wishing I could be half the creative force as The Greatest Writing Machine In History, who I also happen to have been reading like a man possessed for the past 3 months. I wanted the story done, and I couldn’t very well hold off because of some guilty feeling I might get from trying to dance like an idiot in my mind while writing anything that sounded marginally exciting. “The story bores me to tears,” I’d say, “But at least I didn’t rip anyone off.” They’re great writers. They’re supposed to sink into your brain, skin, fingers, and voice.

So we carry on, with clenched teeth and clean conscience. I owe $6000 to a credit card, $375 of which are these tickets. We spent more on gas, we’ll blow more on music, and I have no one paying the bill for it all. I want to know if the art of the rock concert is dead. Will there be anymore historic moments, or is our country done with them? We may have everything figured out so well, that I stay up at night in terror, thinking it might not get any better than this.

A culture lives and dies by its music. Perhaps not directly, but you can definitely tell where the wave is going by your ears. What does it mean to people? How far are they willing to go for it? How closely do they live by it?

What would I find on this trip? Would anyone know what I’m talking about, or am I a faded kid born 30 years too late? 10 years? 10 years early? How close am I? Am I at the end or the beginning? To be the middle children of history, as Tyler Durden called us in Fight Club, we seem to be milling in groups, waiting for the hero of the microphone to lead us on an artillery of power chords, primal drums, and a mania on the verge of loss of control to make themselves feel known, and by extension, make our presence known.

I went to Chicago to see if they were there, and to see if we were ready for them.

Lollapalooza: Part 1 (03-01-2007)

 Friday rose on us passed out on the couch we were splitting. Breakfast with fruit, fluids, and vitamin C. Plenty of carbs for energy, plus the fact that anything we ate now would end up saving us another $150 of concessions later. “Cool Hand Luke” our breakfast near the point of explosion, then roam the 6 football fields worth of The Park for 9 hours.

After a near hour of death-defying traffic jammery, we pick up where I left off for you a fort-night ago: Friday afternoon, our plastic ticket cuffs, and set loose for the $6-a-beer and $7 pizza hounds and wolves. Tents run by the type of people who regretted missing Woodstock ’69 because of all the vast market that went untapped, and by some sick genetic memory now push such jacked-up prices that starving Ethiopians would have too much pride to buy anything from these 6-foot weasels.

I had arrived fully and mentally prepared to sleep in a different strange room every night. I was looking forward to late night trysts and hippie swings for the next three nights. My compatriot was not so confident in our peers. His opinion would be that too much of a State Fair attitude would be prevalent. An art show in the middle of the field, and tent for video games, and an area where you could try real Gibson guitars, all on the grounds with easy access, all would be like casting pearl to swine, unless you had a strong word for The Men In Charge, “No sir. Nothing will happen, you can trust these kids, or we can show ‘em real quick what happens if they get like anything other than pure red-blooded American listening to their Rock Music.” Everything’s put on an even keel, because there are Strong Interests in keeping the Wrong People out. Hippies and revolutionaries don’t have $300 to throw around, is the rationale.

I was afraid my friend would be right. Our only option would be spreading the freak-word around and seeing who had a working radar.

The first performance I saw was The Eels. I didn’t know a damn thing about them. I‘d only even heard their name two days before we left. Words can near barely express the insane depression I felt from the 25 feet back that I was. A crowd, people of hundreds, in calm audience for a goddamn rock show! I’m set and used to being the most manic person in a crowd, but when you’re the only person even trying to lose their mind at a rock show, something scientifically studied and designed to be socially condoned insanity…few things match the anger I felt, and I countered by attempting to channel the speed that 900 people rightfully should be clipping at.

“Those rat FUCKS!” I thought. “What are you holding your energy for? If Lollapalooza is not the most amazing thing you could be doing with your time right now, what exactly are you doing here? Get the hell out of my way instead of standing in MY front row with your hands in your pockets. It’ll just be and 150 bands and they’ll finally get a crowd who appreciates them.”

Afterward I met up with Bishara again, since my size allows me considerable better weaving to the front. I don’t really go to concerts “with” people. We ride to together and enter at the same time, but pit rules decree every man, woman, child, and geriatric for themselves, short of planting contraband on someone so they become forcibly removed. But that’s just my opinion, and I have been called too nice for my own good.

The midpoint of our day was the band My Morning Jacket. What can I say that a blinding light from God revealing the mysteries of the universe wouldn’t do better? Few things can match the feeling I got when the band hit me head-on, a fair 4 feet away from speakers the size of a semi cab.

If you know a band, no matter how well, there is a difference from what I experienced. In fact, it’s the very trick of knowing a band so well that usually prevents this feeling. The My Morning Jacket experience was zero-to-brilliance in nine seconds. You suddenly realize you’re looking at one of the greatest bands of your life, and the speed that the amazement strikes you causes auditory and beauty vertigo.

The last show of the night was Ween. It was pure drugged-up mushroom and acid joy put to music. That’s a fact. They rightfully admit to being spun-out freaks, and the crowd was promptly in tune with them. I didn’t have much to worry about as far as dangerous tension or a disappointing audience. The only off-note came when a bouncer slammed a jumper’s head into the short steel wall I was leaning against. I found myself weighing the urge to jump the divide and even the fight until I saw the bouncer-rats crowd the guy like rotten cheese and carry him out.

I stood and shook hard through about an hour of these musical freaks until they closed set, and I couldn’t move. Lucky to still have the strength to stand, I was leaning against the now bloodstained steel wall and overheard a conversation with a man and woman, the latter of which couldn’t quite figure out the mechanics of being upright. At least for the time being:

“We dropped X (that’s ecstasy, kids) at 2, and again at 6.”

“I don’t want to stay up all night doing X.”

“We’ve got the whole weekend. We should do X on Sunday.”

After 3 shows at the rate of the best 100% I could muster, that’s 300% of everything I’ve got, over 9 hours on no food or water beyond occasional park fountains. Being collapsed on my hand and knees through the sand of the baseball diamond we were standing in, I didn’t have the strength to hitch on with these fine folk onto the Craziness they apparently had waiting for them back at their hotel room. I thought a quick thank-you to them for renewing my faith in the Random, Reckless, and Excessive credo, and waited for my lungs to evolve to a higher organ.

The first thing I learned from Lollapalooza was the most haunting: I knew I deserved my sleep more that night than I ever had in my life, and as a result the idea of ever going to bed anytime earlier than absolute ear-bleeding exhaustion has been destroyed. I feel like I deserve to be punished if I do otherwise. Responsibility in a sleep-sense has been forever cursed.

Lollapalooza: Part 2 (03-15-2007)

 On Saturday, I jump in immediately for you. I’ve got a lot to cover and not a lot of patience to think it through before I write.

Perry Ferrell was the singer for the band Jane’s Addiction. He also invented this amalgamation of musical weirdness in the first place some 15 odd years ago. Needless to say I had a bit of a high opinion of the man. He introduced the Wolfmother as a band that “is the way rock was, the way rock is, the way rock always will be.” They proved well enough musically: Pushed hard, loud, simple, lyrics that only failed to make sense if you thought about them, and (the height of impressiveness) a bassist who could swing his guitar to the back and bash the keyboard at a moment’s notice. Nothing as smooth as multitasking.

The real shock I realized as I was watching them was that they’re 20. They still are 20 as you’re reading this. They might have been 20 when I saw them at Lollapalooza. Why does that matter? What does that mean? I thought about not being old enough to get a hotel room, buy a beer, or rent a car, but still having 3,000 complete strangers to do your bidding. I thought about what Farrell said about Wolfmother being the way rock was, is, and always will be. I realized that I was looking at either stone-cold geniuses in 5 years, or strung out coke addicts foaming acid from their mouths after the brain-paralyzing drug flood to their cortex on the cold floor of an Oklahoma whorehouse. I realized I was on the cusp of a new beginning. These boys had the greatest opportunity to travel to the edge and back, make all the bad decisions of a rock star, and we would be there to see if they came out from it all. We might laugh if they end up a pants-shitter on an MTV nostalgia, another corpse from the media holocaust. Maybe. But I always feel worse when someone fails at being a god. I always hope no matter how bad things get a human being can still come back and save themselves. How close to the line would these minors tread, and would they pull back just before the fall, or be lost along with everything they learned to share with us, in the last dark plummet for The Search?

Next, on to tits and funk. Objective journalist. Fuck off.

The show was Gnarls Barkley. And by show, it is a show, put on to the best of the talents of everyone involved. I had heard that in a show elsewhere in Chicago not two nights prior, the entire band had dressed up as restaurant chefs and passed out hamburgers for the entire front row. The rumor I heard was that every live performance had a different theme, with the band entire dressed in different outfits every time. Apparently today was Anyone For Tennis. White uniforms, sweat bands and rackets.

What you need to know about Gnarls Barkley is that it’s comprised of a pair of musical composers who already have a well-built personal artistic record on their own. Cee-Lo Green has the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard in rap music, and Danger Mouse is some kind of solid genius who does what geniuses are usually known for: brining two disparate things together in such a way that you could never believe anyone hadn’t already done it before. Look for his Grey Album (Beatle’s White Album music with Jay-Z’s Black Album rapping) or Demon Days by the Gorillaz for an idea what the hell I’m talking about. The important part is the part that it has to do with me: In the history of art, there are rare occurrences of a purity raising out of the actual act of creating art around it. What I mean, is that for any artist to maintain their sanity, they sometimes makes something for the exact reason that they don’t have to follow any rules for it. The act of literally working past the point of sanity to master your craft leads to such a massive left-field run that this mental exercise for the very point of pointlessness ends up being amazing beyond anything humans have ever heard or seen before. FLCL, Don Quixote, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, and more classical music than you can guess all fall into this category. This is the shine that falls on Gnarls Barkley. It’s the stupidest, goofiest crap you can see, and if you can think of something weirder, they’d take you up on that suggestion. The music is not like anything I can think of. Not in its mastery. Just in pure for-better-or-worse originality. And it had the taste of a one-off album. If this doesn’t last forever, that would be the best part, mostly because I know I had seen it. It was also the first concert I’d ever seen women flash the stage on request. But the crime was that once the band played their radio hit, 2/3rds of the crowd dispersed, even with 20 minutes of the show left. Full frontal nudity is no crime compared to the hanging-right felony of leaving a show early because you have shitty musical tastes. Your presence fouls the air. Don’t come to My Shows.

We decided the best plan for Sunday would be to leave the grounds now, since we had an epic quest on our hands for tomorrow, and we wanted to leave nothing to risk the chance that we would miss anything. The day after this would be the ultimate test. Endurance would have to be reserved. Plus, my neck felt like is was about to detach due the 15 hours in the past two days that I had been head-banging at top speed with somewhere around 9 pounds of sweated-wet hair on my head at all times. Tomorrow would be The Arena. We needed proper sustenance.

We retreated to the Lower Depths of the Main Street of Chicago and found Billy Goat’s Hamburger Pit. The most famous burgers in the world, living in the dankest possible Metropolitan Shit Corner one could fit food. We discussed the Next Day, and random thoughts we’d had in the past two days, which mostly entailed quiet heckling with ourselves to the bands that had a tendency to keep getting in our way while we waited for the real Gente con Talento. I tried to convince Bishara to request “Summer of ‘69” from Ryan Adams, but he wouldn’t take the offer. Anyone who does likewise should know that the man will have you ejected from his shows for requesting the tune, since the writer of that little nugget is Bryan Adams, a silly Canuck who Silent-B doesn’t realize is actually just as bad as he is, and so should be so honored to be asked to cover a song of one of the early progenitors of terrible white 90’s music. I have visions of Jack Johnson and Dave Mathews battling on epic proportions against the Adamses and John Cougar-Mellencamp-Forest Rabbit-Drive Thru. An elimination of beasts with sinews and guitar strings in the full moon spilling blood that would magically spring acres of corn miles high to feed the world—THAT is how white they are.

We talked about our collective let down in our peers, how the larger compendium of audience are fucking tourists with nothing more than a passing interest in what they’ve all spent $300 on. Things like that make me feel better about single-handedly going into $6,000 credit card debt in a year and a half. At least I understood how important it all was, and my days would never be the same as the tomorrow that followed them. I even blew another $140 that I didn’t have at the Virgin Megastore across the street for CDs and books. And in a typical form, I also saw another writer for a local Chicago newspaper at the My Morning Jacket show. I looked over her shoulder and saw notes about people with frisbees, footballs, and babies. She stayed at MMJ for all of five minutes. The Killing of the scene was the fact that she was able to get even closer than I was. IN FRONT of the steel barricade, because I was just a lowly fan, but this woman was apparently respectable enough to have the front view, since management knew she wouldn’t be willing to put her life on the line for the sake of hoping she can force a heart-attack to kill her at just the right climax of a solo like I do. “Don’t make a scene, now. Jesus is watching.”

The Point of our trip would be performing tomorrow. The real reason we paid this money and drove this distance. Bishara and I both knew we had actually been sitting through 2 days of opening bands. Imagine a band that you would go on a hunger strike for three days and then burn a forest down with a flame-thrower for shits and giggles. A strange image, but the only way I can begin to explain how much we love this band. Anything someone can enjoy on such a large mental quirk as being a faithfully starving pyromaniac.

Lollapalooza: Part 3......A Foreplay (04-20-07)

 Sunday. What else is there left to say? We could see the end in our horizon. We knew the hell of reality was waiting for us there. This nest, this cache, would soon puke us out to the land where all consequence would be dealt with. The Bill would come on all this Sweaty Blasting, and the tab will be paid, sir. The last battle, the final casualties, and the lessons of climax. I would be less than honest if I didn’t admit there was a gauntlet I had thrown down on myself: This Lollapalooza would see how much I had in me. How long I could go in the best redline I could muster before giving out. This would be final arena.

But first we have a funny little Jewish man.

Matisyahu is an Orthodox Hasidic Jew who raps over a reggae band. This is a mix of things that still has even me with a hung jury on the man. I don’t know if he’s for real. And even if he were, I still wouldn’t know what to think. At one point while jumping off stage, his yarmulke became detached, and he immediately reached for a towel handed to him by a roadie to keep his scalp hidden from Da Lord. “Shit”, I thought, “He’s serious.” What would that mean? Why would he be a rock star, I thought? If true music is the hymn of The Damned in search of beauty, what does this maverick have to offer if he’s already secure in the definite knowledge that he’s right?

But in the pure sense, the music is good. And for someone using music as the ultimate Rorschach test, like I do, this would mean there’s a worthwhile attempt at deep communication by the man. Something he wants me to know that I’d be missing if I just wrote him off as a pop-culture frappe.

Not just a great scam—a triple gimmick!—for a rock star to convince people he really cares about something other than free drugs, attention, and sex—“He really cares about his fans! He even offered me a towel after he came on my face!”—just the fact that I haven’t caught on yet is a testament to its ingenuity, if it is in fact all a farce. But I refuse to be cynical and let the crime of a lost human connection be perpetrated because I have a paranoid streak. Matisyahu might be the real thing. And if that’s the case, there’s nothing harder than keeping your integrity in something with as many backdoors as rock music, in which case Matisyahu’s challenge is no different from every other artist that has ever lived, only the form has changed. Matisyahu’s hat is grunge’s flannel, his reggae-rap is Slayer’s Nazi speed-metal. Confusing me means it’s either the new genius, or an elaborate musical ploy, punishable by disemboweling.

As Of Now I Think You Got Me Wrong (12-28-2006)

 My mission to discover more on the habits of this strange creature, the human, goes well. They seem to have a tendency to think and talk only about themselves, while simultaneously placing themselves in situations more difficult than necessary, due (I believe) to some elemental sense of wanting to add complexity to their daily minutiae, purposely, in an attempt to, in turn, add a sense of adventure to the lives. Normalcy is no longer normal when you have to fight your way to get there.

A great deal of faith is placed in what has occured or been suggested before them. Meaning, it appears they see the deeper mysteries of the universe as some how under a cumulative effort to be discovered by their race en masse, instead of simply to be redefined by succeeding generations, as we do. This seems to lead to an inordinate amount of self-guilt due to not succeeding on the level of their fore-fathers and parents, while seeming to forget the factor of time, somehow holding the standards of anywhere from 30 to 60 years in the past as to be pursued presently.

As per their intercourse habits, this remains the area of greatest confusion. I suggest deeper study and further gathering of evidence, but my initial report follows thusly: Imagine purposely tearing yourself mentally in half. They seem to engage in some sort of massive intellectual break: their brain wants one thing, but they seem to believe their pursuit will be massively foiled if they express any hint of their desire in their physical signals, or in conversation, and instead act in a manner that does it's best to suggest nothing of the sort. In fact, often going so far as to attempt to convince the object of their desire the very opposite; that they are NOT wanted. This can be kept on for hours or even days, some reports of weeks long, unbelievable as it may sound. As I mentioned above, this can only be successful by engaging in a heavy mental split; to want one thing, and purposely act like you don't. Although it may sound reminiscent of psychosis characteristics, I assure you, it is common business on this planet. Many reports have returned stating this, with multiple agents in the field, of all caliber.

My next report will deal with the effects of this ritual, both mentally and socially on subjects who engage in it, as well as the prevalence of cultural guilt saturating this experience, (instead of seen as natural by all other creatures previously under study) and how the humans seem somehow to regret and shame themselves from it.

I remembered where I put this (04-20-2007)

 Never doubt for a second that we rule this planet. I was naked, and the full moon washed away my shame in a river of cool air that was like melted ice cubes. Atop a mound that made me the highest in the world because I was the only one trying, I communed with dog-like faith in my power to crouch and be hidden, to stare and have clear vision, to hear and fully comprehend, and not believe for a minute that I was missing anything. I perceived everything. There was no secrets, I could not speak, I spoke no lies. The night sang like cold white vanilla, and my pores hummed the back-up harmonies.

I knew the land was flat, because I could see to the edge of it. The end of the world. And it looked like the cover of a book across the desk from me, and all I had to do was reach forward to pull it back, and reveal the depth of the material, drank deeply through my eyes, into the creases and folds, to settle into my brain.