Wolf Eyes

The first time I listen to them, I am reminded of the farm, of home.

If you know of the band Wolf Eyes, and their style of “build and release” static tension as a noise band, this contrasts sharply to the bucolic sense of life and ease of the farm. But if you’ve felt the horror-movie rise of slow suspense that is their magic touch build along your shoulders and wrap around your neck, you also know that contrast is a tool regularly employed in their grating, grinding musical productions. And you know that there is nothing easy about this music.

I know next to nothing about this band from Detroit, Michigan when I listen to it for the first time, nothing except what some cute indie-rock kid has told me about them.

“They are really the best of the noise music bands. They’re the easiest to get into. They’re just… so wonderful!” he says, hands waving, either in punctuation or for lack of exact description. Days later, after listening to them myself on MySpace, I can’t exactly describe their breed of perfection either, except to say that it is every rusted metal gate blowing in solitude I’ve ever heard. Every creepy, creaking protest of car-wreck metal death, or ancient, clanging tool bouncing and reverberating off corrugated tin walls comes lurching at me from the past as I listen. Eyes closed, ears feeling through the landscape of sound crafted before me, I “see” the complexities and things no one writes about in contemporary music because they’re too dense to grasp, blended into the background shadows of nuance and imagination.

I listen to three samples on the band’s MySpace page(http://www.myspace.com/therealwolfeyes): "Live at Heath's," "Live in Columbus," and some untitled track. and then I listen to them again, three more times.

The music isn’t exactly off-putting, nor is it really music though, with a harmony or rhythm I can follow. And yet… there is structure, timing, mood—the elements of music exist in their billowy, mushroom cloud breakdown of sound and comfort. The basic motif, although it changes for each song, is that of tension and deliverance.

Normally when I think of the supreme excellency of build, and pain and climax in this genre of sound, I think of Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor’s angry, melodic suspense, but the sound and the vision-- and thus the scope one receives in looking through the sound of Wolf Eyes, is not at all that of NIN.

The only fan with a “name” on the band’s top friends list goes by “Steve,” others include “greenmist,” “Demons” and weird records. Friendly hellos from other friends, and cryptic messages like “let the smoke rise!” make the page feel almost… homey? in a way. Like there is truly something for everyone, an appreciation for music and sound and craft in every genre, and these guys deliver it to the complex minds who need to get inside discomfort and deconstruct it, organizing order and shape in the meantime.

Without saying anything (decipherable), this attention to craft and development speaks volumes about the “psychedelic” essence of their sound. Music, and its interpretation takes shape in the mind’s eye and ear differently for everyone, but really, that’s what music is. The crafting of an aural picture cut from the sounds and tones of instrumental variations around us, layered with our own lives.
In Wolf Eyes, I see the family farm, rusted and rickety and left to its own devices, and I feel the death confines of darkened hallways in every 70s slasher flick I’ve ever seen. But because I feel these things and am released from the dark decay of my own inner trappings and crawling skin, in the end, the pain is manageable, in doing what it has set out to do.

The in between

He is half a world away; I'm laying on my living room floor, which is as cluttered and thick with "shit" as his vocabulary at this late hour.
"I mean look at your myspace page. It's like you think you're omnipotent or something."
If I were sitting, if I even had a chair in my apartment to fall off of, I would have. Omnipotent. No, not me. Not anymore. Death, or near-death, takes that away from you, takes away youthful wrecklessness and assumptions of invincibility.
So I tell him.
"Yeah, well, you know after my stroke I didn't know who I was, if I'd ever be ok again, if I still had it. Once I knew that I did, to some degree, I could come to Chicago and make it here. But I had to maybe... put on pretense? Re-invent myself? Fake it, to get it back?"
"Fake it? No, you're not faking it."
"So do I come off like my shit don't stink?"
Laughter.
"No, no, not that either."
"Arrogance."
"No, just... your voice. And as a writer, as long as you get the facts straight, that's the best voice to have."
"Yeah, thanks. Sometimes I feel like I am faking it, like it's still just a show because I don't know if I've got it, if I can make it."
"You can.. You're the most driven friend I have. You've always had it."
Sarcasm. And laughter. But proximity.

Dreaming of...

I've been dreaming of home--Nebraska-- a lot lately. A week ago, I had a dream of careening down a narrow ditch roadway with various members of my extended family in a hurry and making everyone but my dad mad. He trusted me, even when I didn't trust myself and almost lost a passenger out the door (we were in a Green VW) and then put us all in the ditch. He was totally unflapped. Then a couple of nights ago there was a dream about a friend's mom having ovarian cancer. Last night there was the weird one with my former boss. Then this afternoon, as I was waking up from a nap, all of my teeth (on the bottom) were falling out, my dad was asking what was wrong, I was in my kitchen picking up my teeth and taking care of the same friend with a sick mom.

I have no idea what all of this means, but I feel like home is trying to get at me somehow. It's obviously inside of me, even if I don't necessarily appreciate it as home.
One of my friends used to say "you can get the girl outta the farm, but you can't get the farm outta the girl." I used to cringe and remind her to never say that about me or around me and other people. But I guess she's right. Even if only in her dreams and my nightmares.

Stuck

It is so real that I see the fine layer of road grime on the parched ditch grass as I run up through it. I hear each step of my foot hit the ground, hard. But I don't feel it, don't feel the grass scraping against me or the jarring of the steps. I hear my breath coming in quick whooshing gulps, but don't feel breathless or choked when I wake.

I'm running from my old boss, except now, in the dream he is my boss, me and only me and two others are left and I think he's about the kill the old man. He's gone crazy and we've already been to court to resolve some issues, but for some reason the three of us were in the field behind the farm this morning, and he saw us, dropped what he was doing and came running after us.
My friend Kelly, from high school, takes off with me, but the old man knows he's not going to be able to run far. I want to be as far away as I can from him before E catches up to him so I don't have to hear anything. Kelly and I ran cross country together, but I don't think either of us will be quick enough to get away so that we can just maintain distance.

We went to court because he had unleashed upon a couple of co-workers, and thinking I'd be spared the fury, I setepped in to help and also got pummeled--pulled down and trampled and kicked in the kitchen, stuck against a low cupboard with no escape. That's how working for him (in the dream) felt, like we had no escape.

I don't know what our jobs were or where we were, but it looked like the land was my parent's farm, the one I grew up on. The interior of the house was not my childhood home, but I can't place it as any place. I can't even remember the other people in the dream, but it wasn't anyone I used to work with when I did work for this guy in real life. He looked pretty much the same, even wearing the blue and black poncho he's so fond of. But his temper, toward me, at any rate, was never this extreme in real life, and when I start running, when I finally get off of the windrowed field dirt and onto more solid, gravelly ground, I start to wake up. This is why I'm aware of my sensory overload and yet not really alowing myself to feel it. I think I make myself wake up, because this is terrible. I don't want to think of him on some crazy rampage. I want to call him or text or email or something to make sure he's ok, see what he's up to.
But I don't.
We're not connected anymore in that way we once were, so for now, this was just a bad dream. But I don't like feeling unsettled and shaky and... so affected when I wake up from something, so it's probably going to stick with me until I do something about it. Or get out of whatever trapping situation I'm really stuck in?

Epiphany

It came to me this afternoon, as I was finishing up my day of serious, dedicated writing at the coffeeshop.

On the day that I had my stroke, maybe even at the exact moment it began, I was reading my favorite book, "Swimming to Cambodia," by Spaulding Gray. He's a great monologist and actor who appears in Roland Joffe's film the Killing Fields, which is shot in Thailand but "takes place" in Cambodia during the Vietnam war and the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Watch it, it's excellent.
Anyway, he's in Thailand, searching for his "perfect moment" on a Thai beach, eating mushrooms and throwing up in the sand and thinking about life and why he can't get lost in the water and why he can't get married and why the Thais have so much fun and how Marilyn Monroe died. It is, as I said, my favorite book, stream of consciousness beautiful.
So now, I'm writing my book. People ask me all the time if Thailand has anything to do with it, and until today, until my epipany, I've said no, but it apparently, somehow, has had something to do with it.
The day of my stroke was the day the tsunami fucked up the beaches in Thailand. The beach that one mr. Gray had visited and tripped and puked on in STC. The second question my dad asked me when I woke up was if I could remember talking abou t the tsunami the morning we left the house. The first question was "how are you," and the answer to it was "what?" and the answer to the second question was also, "what?"
So the next part of all of this is that Gray died while I was in the hospital. He too suffered from brain trauma, a result of a car accident in the UK. He committed suicide and was found right round the time I got out of the hospital. His book, Thailand, my stroke... it sounds silly and fucked up and all sorts of crazy to make connections in this way, I know. I do. But somehow it feels like there's something there. Closure? On that part of my life, the life I had before the stroke? The life that ended that same morning for me and thousands of others? I got to go on living, but not as I once had. Finality? Kyle and I planned this trip sometime in the first year after I got out of the hospital (I think) and now it's finally happening. Closure in that, and what the past two years have meant in a connection sustained? I set a goal of completing my book by March first not because I knew for sure that I'd be leaving for Thailand, but because March felt right. I could have said "July," or "next September," and any other month. But this is working our perfectly.
Perfect. I'm always looking for a perfect moment in my life, without knowing what that perfect moment is or what perfection might even be, although it becomes in the weirdest of ways, and not always in what others see as perfect. Of course I've been hoping for a "perfect moment" of my own, on some beach while there, but it probably won't be his beach, becuse in an interview years later he said he went back and it was commercialized and fucked up, and I have no idea what it will be like. I don't know what I'm looking for.
Maybe that's the message I was supposed to get today. I don't have to know, it doesn't have to make any sense now, but at some point it will?

(click here to buy the book. DO it!! please)

I knew Hillary when...

In the dream the house is in South Dakota, although in real life, it is in Nebraska, 30 miles from where I grew up. I am not particularly close with the family who owns the house, but nonetheless, it is their rural house I dream of. The dream takes place in the kitchen.

The room is dimly lit, sun washes in through a wooden framed window, warming the pale yellow walls and bringing in the open South Dakota plains. A mother, with brown hair, is puttering around, doing dishes, putting them away, staying busy. A blonde woman sits at the bar-style kitchen divider, her back turned toward me as I walk in, hunched over papers and newspapers and folders spread out over the bar/counter.

I talk to the mom for a while, in real life her name is Glenda, but in the dream I don't address her by anything or even know that she is my friend Chrissy's mom. Finally, I sit, facing the blonde and talking about last night's election poll results before I even ask or check to see who she is.

"Did you see how badly Obama stomped Hillary? I knew he would! People love him, and I think that Hillary is washed up, especially here in the Midwest. She should get out while she still can," I say, settling into my own seat. When she looks up and I see the drawn, pinched face of a woman campaigning for more than the presidency, I realize that Hillary Clinton is at the simple, solid farmhouse in South Dakota/ Nebraska. What the hell is she doing here? I feel like an ass. What's going on? Hillary?! She knows my friends? I thought they were Republicans...

The room is quiet, until she smiles, gives a solid, standard little shake of the head for composure and looks at me, head supported on bent wrist.

"Yes, well," she manages to say, before giving a polite "oo, bet you feel like and ass" laugh. Before anything else can be said, Bill walks in (yes, Clinton), drying his hands on a blue washcloth.

"Hey ladies, what's going on in here?" He asks, jovial and relaxed. Hillary looks at him, a withered and small glance, tired. He feels the tension of what just happened, even if he can't pick up on it in words. "Uh, I'm going back outside." Outside, where Bob (my friend's dad) is, is safer than the sad and somewhat silent female congregation of inside, where we are.


The dream ends here, and as the scene fades away, I'm left alone in the room wanting so badly to call the media contacts I have and tell them where the Clintons are hiding out. In the dream, which happened last Sunday, I know that rough days are ahead for the Clintons, becuase they have been hiding out, escaping the media and the public's scrutiny. That would never happen in real life, mind you, but it did in the dream. I want to call the NYTimes, the Washington Post, anyone, I want to tell the media where these people are hiding out. Yet I don't want to rat out my family friends and draw down the Media Big-Top upon their lives. It doesn't seem fair. Now that both NE and SD have claimed Obama for their own (go teams!!) in real life, I guess it was a bit of foreshadowing, to know they would, in the dream. But bigger than that, I see it as me still wanting very much to be part of the media circus I once aspired to. Last election cycle I LIVED in Washington, D.C. and planned on a career in the media circus. Now, I'm happy to be in Chicago instead, but am still yearning for that place among the bylines and big names of the profession.

Guess Hillary and I aren't so different after all....

Schoolhouse/rock

I just spent the last hour getting versed on the differences between "dating" and "seeing someone" and "hanging out" and just being "friends" and "leading someone on" and "shitting where I eat" and even "dinner."


I guess the rock I was living under did too good a job of shading me from the sun, since I didn't seem to know my head from my ass on this topic, and the sun would have been a pretty good indicator of "up."

Here's what I learned.

1. I can "hang out" with someone if he's not an adult. Or if she's a girl friend. Or even a woman I've made out with can now be "hung out" with. But I cannot simply "hang out" with someone who might like me, or I might like. That would be a "leading on" of said person. Or else he can't be an adult, because adults don't just "hang out." Apparently, other female friends can "hang out" with non-adults they're making out with and eat pizza with them, but I can't. Maybe when I'm older. But then I won't be an adult. What?

2. "Seeing someone" means you are having intimate relations, like eating pizza together and sharing hand-drawn pictures of each other's homes over discussions of showers. You might also be "sleeping together" at said homes," "making out," "giving head" or going to concerts with guitars and clowns. I got lost somewhere between the concert and the cotton candy stand though, so don't quote me on that.

3. "Dating someone is when you actually get to have "sex," which is something like inserting Tab A into slot B, except there's no bacon involved, and those cardboard bacon packaging slots are the only ones I'm familiar with. Near as I can tell, you begin "dating" someone after two weeks of eating pizza, sleeping together and giving or getting head. But not before. That's still just "seeing" each other. Maybe clarification comes in the shower? I should check.

4. If one of your "friends" invites you over for "dinner," you just might be going on a "date," unbeknownst to yourself. Those "friends" are sneaky bastards, they are. If that "dinner" is scallops and three other courses, it's a "date." If it's pizza and three other courses, it's just "hanging out." I had pizza and three other courses with these educators tonight, so that made it "hanging out." I had to check my notes at one point just to make sure I understood this concept. I think I do, but for next time I have to apply it in real life as part of my education.

5. "Leading someone on" is buying him a ticket to the circus and telling him there will be guitars. If the guitars are not present, I hope he notices the elephant's leash more than the one you're using, but I have no footnotes to reference.

6. "Shitting where you eat" should logically follow "dinner," but it has nothing to do with food. Unless you work in food services. Or the alley behind my apartment. This term refers to "dating" and/or "seeing" someone you work with at their home, the circus, a concert or in bed. Also not to be done with pizza, dinner or scallops, it means that you cannot spend time with this person at all, unless you are just "friends," or "hanging out." As far as I know, though, if you are just "hanging out" with your co-workers at work, you're going to get fired, and the whole thing becomes a moot point anyway, eradicating all boundaries and opening you up to all sorts of options.

And isn't that what we all want, anyway?

I mean, I want to eat pizza AND scallops AND bacon for breakfast AND maybe "dinner," too, with my adult friend whom I might or might not be interested in while we may or may not be at his house or in my bed. If I want to "see" him and not get or give head prior to "hanging out" with him in the shower, do I have to quit my job, and can I go to the bathroom after having sex without leading him on? Will the clowns have the guitars, or do the elephants play them?

I just want options. Doesn't everyone? I thought that was the beautiful thing about living in America and being cute and making it to 25 and having opinions and intellect. That's the thing about my rock. I didn't have things cut so crystal clear-as-mud then. I didn't know what I could have been doing wrong or missing out on, and under a rock, you'll take anything you can get. Now I want to explore the worthwhile options that come my way, in my own way. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not ready for another rock just yet, and all of this sounds like fun stuff to explore. Except for the "shiting where I eat" part. I already sleep where I eat (sort of) so that would make things all sorts of awkward for me at home, too.

Oh, and one last thing I missed the powerpoint on: I have no idea what "friends" are, but I know they are the sorts of assholes you CAN hang out with, share six courses of dinner and great conversation with (even while shitting), regardless of whether guitars or clowns or adults are even present.

Nightmares and dreamscapes

it is 6:46 am, and I have just woken from a dream.

In it, I am in my great-grandfather's old red barn, which sits on the land he originally homesteaded when he emigrated here from Czechoslovakia in the 1800s.
In the dream, it is my grandfather's barn instead, even though my granpa never lived on that farm or worked it in all his years, owning his own land instead. At one point (the 40s) my dad lived in the small house next to it, with his first wife. This barn is a source of contention among my relative in Houston who want to tear it down (and now own the land), and the relatives in Nebraska, who want to preserve it, even in its decrepit state. This is all true in real life. Parts of my dream involve scenes that are not but were true in the dream.
The dream:
I face the western wall, looking at images from the late 1990s of people I went to high school with. The only sense of any family I get is that of my nephew Ben, and I can't even be sure he's on the wall. There are tacky glamour shots and birthday greetings and faded computer print- out pages stapled to the wall. Sometimes it is a wall, somtimes it is just a support beam and I'm focusing on the wall behind it. Whatever it is (when not switching forms) it is supposed to be a wall of commemoration, a wall of celebration in my family, and I cannot understand why pictures of men and women four years older than me are on the wall, looking frozen in time in their leotards, poufy hair cuts and wide-armed tanktops.
I am in the barn alone, taking pictures of it, after seeing a picture of it on my dad's wall for the first time, a shot of its hayloft through some pines, aesthetically pleasing. I've actually seen this picture for years, but am just now figuring out that it is of the barn. I decided to take pictures inside the barn, to preserve it before it is gone.
When I enter, there are things hanging from the ceiling, old, dark metal things with cobwebs and decades of farm grime blanketing them. I can't make out any of them, and as I move underneath, among other planks and boards of wood that seems to have fallen over time, I find clothes and throw them into a bin of some sort; a black hoodie that lookes like mine and maybe another sweater, but certainly a black hoodie.
I make my way to this wall of pictures which feels like and alter of some sort.
At first, I'm just taking pictures, using the small digital camera I have in real life.
I kneel down, I use clever angles, I capture as much of one scene as possible. When I kneel in the dirt, the whole thing smells like ancient decay and I feel age, but it doesn't smell correspondingly. Or at least, I don't remember if it smelled.
Behind the beam/wall, is somehow another wall (in life this would make no sense, it probably doesn't now either).
This wall is green, covered in years of moss. Soft, green textured moss. Up high, toward the ceiling and illuminated, are horseshoes. Horseshoes hung above a doorway signify good luck, and these shoes look as if they have been up there generating luck for as long as the barn has been standing. I am trying to get a good, framed shot of theses horseshoes and the soft beam of light and drifting dust motes, and it isn't happening, the shot I want. Think Norman Rockwell painting.
As I'm moving around to get this shot, I run into something, to my right.
It is clear. And round, an orb of some sort. Gelatinous, not in that sense that it feels jello-y and squishy, because I don't feel it or see it, but in that sense of bouncing right off of it with a miniture vibrational shift up through my shoulder and head, like they do in the cartoons, wavy, wiggly "blluhhuhhhh" lines to show bounce.
I bounce back to where I was standing moments ago. Bounce is the wrong word because it seems to imply some speed, and this was not quick. I shift back? At first, I have no idea what I ran into. I can't see anything there, but something is keeping me from getting the perfect shot, of the horseshoes and softly aged sun.
I try again, and it has made itself solid. I still can't see it, and it has no shape, but I know it's clear and round. And standing its ground. There is no way past this thing, and I realize that it's not good. It's something evil, something unhappy, and I'm instantly scared. But I stay.
For whatever reason, I wrap my arms around it. I don't think I want to, I think it sort of forced itself upon me, and I'm trying to protect? myself. I start praying, using words and images and entreaties-- not to it, but God and his forces. I'm reassured that I'll be ok, I'll walk out of the barn.
This thing and I keep on hugging, in a corner-ish area, on the southeastern part of the barn, near the door, and I feel nails digging into my hand. I'm certain they are nails, although I can't see anything of any sort and I still sense that this thing is round.
I don't know if I hug this thing out of existence, but I don't think so. I think I take it into me.
And then the dream ends.

I wake up on my left side, arms wrapped around me as much as they can be, with a pillow sort of underneath my right arm. I am shrouded in a soft, white blanket. The sun is coming in through slats in the blinds, and my stomach hurts. I can feel the dream in my brainstem, in my stomach, my right leg, my foot. I am not scared or crying, but full, almost sickened by taking in too much. I feel like I have that slight vibrational hum of life and activity. I have no idea what that means, because I AM alive and mostly active, so I have that anyway. But this is new and different (no, I'm not pregnant, it's not possible) and it is making my stomach crazy, which is why I mention it.
And this is the only reason I think I took this thing in, truly.