I was offered the opportunity to be a part of yesterday’s BOADRUM 9 in Troy NY, and turned it down…to remain on daddy duty.

Boredoms. 9 drummers. Me backstage with EYE.

Instead, it was blanched broccoli, Elmo diapers, repeated readings of The Little Island, and gauging how many inches I can actually pinch these days.

Cooley dispatched intermittent and rabid media files my way last night. Here are some of them:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cooley (and his companions Herb and Tanner) are planning to write all about it, so I’ll leave it to them to tell you how awesome and life-changing it was. I’ll just go pre-rinse some cloth diapers instead.

Sunsets over the Verrazano Bridge, sleeping beneath the stench of mothballs and death in my grandmother’s house while she separated into smaller and smaller pieces that headed along the shore of Upper New York Bay, through the Narrows, and out into the ocean … her children, my aunt and uncles, the way they carried her in a small rectangular blue velvet (aquavelvet) box, taking turns, her to there and there to over there, as they disappeared into a white Lexus SUV and sped away down Shore Road. Sorting through pictures, divvying them up amongst those present.

I am clenching. My phone is disconnected due to a landlord error. I think my liver is rupturing. My computer at home is bedridden with infection. I am at work at 6:30pm on a sunny Wednesday evening.

There is no need for memory. Time to go home and smoke cigarettes.

Change is coming.  I’m getting rid of things and replacing them with others.  I’m becoming a robot again.  This is a good thing.

The first police car I was ever in … my mother took me to see Moonraker somewhere in downtown Brooklyn … I remember the shuttle motif, and Jaws’ nasty silver grin … and afterwards, I wandered behind as my mother strutted down the sidewalk … I think I got distracted by a TV in a window, really … honestly … and before you knew it — nothing but legs pacing by, cold and impersonal, and I was lost … started crying before you know it (hey, I was 7), looking to the left and right, searching for my mom’s slacks … people stooping to console and inquire ”You lost, little boy?” … cops show up soon enough, questions and tissues, then in the back of the car for the short ride back to Bay Ridge, 59th St (between 8th and 9th) … the worst part was my friends on the block scoping me out as we cruised up the street, checking me out with wary, suspicious eyes … I was guilty before I even hit the sidewalk.

The next day, in the car lot a few buildings down, John Fox and Anthony DeStefano beat me down behind a rotting brown Charger. I remember the car because it looked just like my father’s, and even at the time, the whole thing seemed significant … it was like being in a Raymond Carver or Richard Ford story, saying to myself, over and over, You will never forget this moment.…

So…a week ago I got a ‘get well’ card from “The GLC”.  Wasn’t sure what to make of it, butnow I’ve gotten email correspondence from them as well.  Turns out GLC stands for “Girls Love Cooley” (I thought it was “Good Luck Club”).  I’m down with it.  Random anonymous adoration is cool in my book, and just what I need, in fact.  Too bad I’ll probably never get to meet them, though, cause you know, Cooley loves girls, too.

This new Manitoba “Up In Flames” CD is both inspiring me and making me want to abandon everything musically.  It’s that good.  Mmm.

Okay, here I go.

I’m at that phase when I’m doing something where I’ll scribble lots of meaningless ideas into a notebook (“shorten…listen to older demo, take out hiss, add strings, re-record, feed piano-loop thru delay pedals, build on melody, backwards ebow, equalize drum track”) until some of them make sense/or appeal to me.  Then it’ll take weeks or months to force myself to actually sit down and execute them.  I got 5 minutes of basic tracking done.  Yee fuckin haw, man.

So, no raincoat. Oh well. Towed car. Oh well. It’s snowing here, cold, wet and white, but in 12 hours I’ll be sipping a yellow beer in San Jose, and in the following days swim in both the Caribbean and the Pacific … what’ve I got to complain about? Right. So I take it slow today … I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow, I learn by going where to go. Fine. I shower slowly, and shave meticulously, a close shave that I seem to think will last longer .… it’s so quiet when you’re doing this, looking at yourself in the mirror for so long, quite a personal and often reflective time … steam obfuscating the edges of clarity … I started wondering if terrorists, if practicing shavers, did this before a big event … then I started thinking about 9/11, if Atta shaved or not, and if he did, what was he thinking about in a hazy hotel bathroom looking at himself in the mirror, and then I figured I should stop thinking like this because it’ll wind up freaking me out.

So instead I came up here to write a quick entry, drink a cup’o, and listen to Miles and company. I hope April treats you right, intrepid reader.

Better yet, I hope no one else has the gaudy pompousness to call you “intrepid reader” for a long time after this moment.

And be careful when you feed the pigeons. Bohumil Hrabal fell out of his window and died upon the cobblestones of Prague when attempting to do the very same thing.