Chapter 14: Proof in Polyphony

The tones I hear are immediately alien to me, but like all hack music journalists, I will hereby attempt to describe one sensation with words designed for another: I hear a bed of harmonies, stacked thin and tall like sheets of wax paper, supporting what is clearly a loan "voice" bouncing around on top. The harmonies sustain and bend in tiny steps like an organ of some sort, but taste like a product of the 80's; like the sawtooth waves of a poorly synthesized string patch. The arrangement and melodic structures are just as alien, clearly organized but not adhering to any rules of American music that I can recognize... unpredictable and unheavy.

As quiet as the night has become, we are still unable to discern the exact source of the music in the Fisher Price city. We crane our necks in every direction but just as a melody rises to meet our ears, a car will buzz by on the busy road up near the house and sweep it upward.

I am content to keep trying but Dave is ready for plan B, "Amplifier. Gavvy, go get an amplifier."
"We'll need another extension chord or something to get---"
"ALREADY TAKEN CARE OF. AMPLIFIER!" he asserts, pointing to the house.

It takes me ten minutes to figure out exactly what the best course of action is for this new mission. I should use condenser mics if I hope to capture such a timid source, but that means I will need a phantom-powered mixer. And if I'm going to go to that much trouble, I might as well try to record it so I can dissect it later (and also present the proof to you, who even as you are reading this, think me a liar). Unfortunately I don't own a nice battery-powered condenser, nor do I own one of those small digital hard disc recorders. I run up to my room, grab my laptop (which, thankfully, is charged), my portable audio interface, a Shure SM57 and an XLR cable, and race outside. I have to stop halfway down the dirt hill leading to the backyard in order for my night vision to catch up. Dave must be watching me because he hisses, "Gavvy, get OVER here." I steer the pile of gear I'm cradling towards his voice and scuttle towards it.

I should have connected all my cables inside where there was ample lighting, but I'd been too worried about missing the tiny show. So here I am frantically assembling my portable recording rig using only the screen glow from my laptop. The micromusic comes and goes, wafting by my ears just when I think it's finally over. It soon falls completely silent, but before it does, I'm able to record this.

Chapter 13: The World's Tiniest Music

When Dave went back to his house to get a flashlight, I was sure that he would not return. I'd seen it so many times before; we're building a wall or we're jamming out in my little studio or we're working on the boiler in the basement, and he heads over to his house for this or that. When I go to retrieve him 45 minutes later, he is fast asleep on the couch or he is playing Guitar Hero. Dave always gives 110% to whatever he's doing, but he sometimes forgets what he's doing and starts giving 110% to something else (even sleep - Dave sleeps passionately, curled up in a spiral of quilts like he's doing some kind of performance art). So when Dave actually returns 6 minutes later with a red helmet, a lengthy extension cable, and a tripod with a floodlight attached, I say, "Whoa. We're actually going to do this tonight."

"Ya, dude. Let's get this fucker open."

I run the extension chord to the back porch. Meanwhile, Dave positions the tripod a foot from the northeast corner of the pool, yelling, "plug it in!" as if I intended to leave the end on the back porch, lifeless. Light flickers and spills onto the two massive doors and beyond them, reaching through the winter-dead grass towards the woods.

When he's repositioned the tripod so that the entire site is encompassed in light, he does the obvious: he grabs one of the iron rings and tries to pull the door up and open. Realizing quickly that he is standing on the door he is attempting to lift, he shuffles over to the opposite door and tries again. We can see it shift upwards, but only slightly. Dave lets it slam back into place, that loud gong sounding again, higher pitched and less muffled than before. The crevasse between the two doors coughs out dust into the artificial ambiance. The angle is all wrong - Dave can't put his full back into it while leaning over from atop the other door.
"Fuck it" he says, marching towards the Bobcat. Like another pathetic villager lining up before Excalibur, I try my hand anyway. I can't even make it rise a centimeter, so I just pretend I am examining the ring.
"Out of the way, Shmavvy," he roars, knotting a thick rope around the left door knocker and routing it back to the Bobcat. Moments later he is slowly driving away from the site, dragging the door open cautiously. There is no use trying to see inside just yet, the opening is not even visible through the dancing dust particles fogging everything up. I reposition the floodlight to cast a downward beam, and we stand their impatiently for several minutes. I, for one, am convinced that one of those things from Tremors is gonna burst forth and swallow me whole, so I stand several feet away from Dave so at least I'll have a 50/50 chance. Dave seems to share that nightmare, as he is clutching the shovel in a very weaponly fashion.

When the dust finally settles, what we find is very very very disappointing: nothing, save a musty eruption of wet dog odor. Having spent many a night with Lu in post-bathing bliss, I am not put off by it, but Dave is beside himself. "THIS SUCKS," he declares, turning on his masculine heels to leave.

But I soon realize he is not leaving, he is retrieving the rope and looping it around the other knocker. Because the shed lies directly where the Bobcat would have to be to open it, we opt to tug-of-war it together by hand on the slightest angle along the shed wall. It comes easier than the first, as if the smell is pushing up and out.

Another ten minutes of settling earth. Another bracing of oneself against the potentially emerging beast and beastly stink.

And finally, peering down in the pool without any obstruction, we see what we missed the first time. We lean in, perched over the rim, absolutely speechless (which is seriously a big deal for either of us) to find what can only be described as a micro-city. Nestled in its grimy depths, the pool is host to what must be thousands of tiny structures built from what looks like colored plastics, as if this were the burial ground for a million war-torn children's toys. And while hushed, we both perk our ears to what can only be the world's tiniest music wafting up from the southeast corner.

Day 2 in the Studio (video)

Yesterday, Rob Pemberton and I began tracking live instrumentation for my new full-length at the big nice studio Machines With Magnets. From 10:30 to 8pm we worked on the drum sounds. Expert drum tech Mike Viele showed up in the evening and has been taking care of the drum tuning and upkeep for the rest of this session. Today was another long day, tracking 4 songs. Aside from the just trying to perfect the performances, each song uses a different tuning on the kit, different bass amp, pickup settings, and pedal chains, so there's a bit of time between song takes, which are being for either urination or rehearsal (in the small guitar room).

It is a strange kind of exhausting, this process. I'm so drained at the end of the day that I can barely make myself cookies. It's an exhaustion that feels deeper than any that comes from physical labor - it's entirely emotional. It leaves me very raw... I remember feeling it just as loudly when I was recording A Bullet, A Lever, A Key. I know what it is: it's putting my baby in the hands of other people. It's really hard for me. I know if I could play all the parts myself, I would - people will never care about your songs as much as you do, they simply can't, they didn't birth them. That being said, Scott and Rufus (bass and drums, prospectively) are absolutely murdering their parts (I meant that in the hip hop sense). Here's a high point of today's sesh:

Chapter 12: The End of an Era

We worked until dusk, when Lori arrived with food: two bowls of cheese tortellini (almost crunchy, as is Dave's wont), celery sticks with raisins mashed in their buttcracks, and pretzels with salt stripped off. A few bites in, when Dave thrusts his open hand at her and said "drinky" I think, "That's kind of abusive." But when she produces a canteen of water with a sippy straw in it, I kind of tear up: this is what love looks like. Abusive love maybe, but humoring love too. Jungleboy has finished his own customized dinner, and is surveying our excavation in his evening gala - 30% Ironman, 70% Crocodile Dundee. He's loudly enthusiastic about our progress, but in a placatory fashion, which suggests that he's more interested in the delaying of bedtimes than the unearthing of worlds.
And what a world we've discovered! Just two hours after Dave first laid eyes on the buried wall, we'd managed to remove a square foot of dirt all the way around it, and down about seven feet (where it curves inward to form a cement basin). We discovered that the walls do not, in fact, extend up to the surface of the yard. They stop short by a foot or so where they meet a lip of 2 inch thick cedar, jutting out at slightly varying widths. Minutes after that was complete, we carved away towards the center of the basin, down a foot or so to where the cedar lay. The sun was setting, but there was enough light to see that this wasn't just a single sheet of cedar we were exposing - twas a series of 12 inch-wide planks snuggled together and fastened with large iron fixings and hinges on the wings. At the center rested two massive brass rings, several inches thick. As confounding as it was, we could not deny what lay across the top of this secret structure: two massive doors.

Dave is positively giddy. To say that he is a Middle Ages enthusiast would be putting it lightly. His home is all but ensconced in Medieval regalia: just beyond his kitchen he's mounted a broad sword with a bullwhip snaking around it, both of which he nods to when e're he passes. He has a light shirt of chain-male that he wears to very special parties. He obsesses over video games like Oblivion and Knights of Honor.

All the terse military speak he's been peppering throughout this process is instantly exchanged for the regal terminology of the 1400's. Words like "behold" and "betwixt" get used and overused. I try not to catch the fever but it is too much, "M'lord, how do you propose we illuminate this crypt?"
"What the fuck are you talkin' bout Shmavvy?"
"How um... I can't see anything. How are we going to open it?"
"Fetch us a torch!" he shouts at Lori who is well within whispering distance. He violently extends his arm towards the house but she doesn't move.
"Oh, ya right," she scoffs, smoldering and turning to leave.
"NEVER SNEB ME IN THE PRESENCE OF MY MEN, WENCH! BRING FORTH THE TORCH!" he volleys.
"Whatever," she shoots over her shoulder as she stomps up the driveway with Jungleboy in tow. Dave and I stand in that sour moment for a while, blushing in the dark, holding our forks, bowls, canteen and what appears to be the ashes of their romance period.

Chapter 11: An Earthly Gong

When Dave heard about the bathtub incident he was more skeptical than I'd hoped. Even after the viewing the footage, he insisted that the ladybugs weren't moving enough to convince him that they hadn't been placed there. He had similar qualms with the cel phone footage, grilling me about the jitteriness of the footage. I would've been more defensive had I not already weathered the barrage of doubting (and often downright accusatory) emails in response to my video post. So by the time his insinuations struck I was placid and resigned. I was starting to doubt it myself, really.
His interrogation was even a little humorous to me, because he was making these grand efforts to circumvent directly insulting me by suggesting that someone (with a supplementary glance towards the road outside) may be pulling a prank. But we both knew I was the only one living in the house, and the only other people in the vicinity were making a poorly-scripted ninja movie in his backyard at the time. We both knew he didn't believe me.

A series of uneventful days passed, no word from the bugs. Lincoln warmed up, despite the approaching winter.
Lu and I spent Thanksgiving in the woods behind our house eating Turkey sandwiches from the Subway down the road. We played in the leaves and watched a large Portuguese family celebrate at a campsite nearby. When they began tossing a beachball around Lu became blinded by his own dogdom, and we walked back to the house.

Things seemed to be normalizing. I grew a beard.

And then the unthinkable happened...

I shaved it off.

And then, a few days after that, something even realer happened:
I came home from the bank to find Dave scooping dirt away from the shed with his beloved Bobcat. I'd assumed that the trail had officially "gone cold" after the "find" incident, and when I jogged over to him he offered no explanation for his renewed vigor, "Hey Shmavvy, think i got something here..."
He dumped a last load of earth onto a new pile adjacent to The Mound, and hopped out of the cab.
"I think I hit a fuckin' wall!" he proclaimed, walking over to the nose of his trench (which had sloped a foot or two deeper from where we'd left it weeks ago), which was now cutting behind the shed by a foot or so. He got down on his knees and scraped away some of the dirt, revealing a little patch of greenish cement just left of where the pipe punched through. He slapped it with his hand in joyful confirmation, and to both of our surprise, there was what appeared to be a deep resonance.

"Did you hear that shit?!" he shouts, but before I can answer, he kicks it. Sure enough, we hear a very low-pitched hollow ring that lasts for several seconds.
"Whoa," says my mouth, "are you sure that's cement?"
"Fuckya, just a thin freakin' wall!"
I am momentarily distracted by his random substitution of "freakin'" for "fuckin'" - as if somewhere in his head, subconsciously, he knew that two "fucks" in one sentence just wasn't as romantic.

I jump in and wiped away more of the dirt, revealing more and more of the wall. Dave gets two shovels from the shed, and we both work in opposite directions, he trenching towards the woods and I towards the house, dinging the wall periodically to hear its satisfying report. Two feet down the line I hit a corner! The wall makes a ninety degree turn towards the river, parallel to the back of the shed. Dave rushes over to help, and in twenty minutes we've worked our way to another corner, turning the wall back along the river.

By then it is obvious what shape we are unearthing. At ground level, a half foot in or so from our trench is a rickety fence, sectioning off an area about fifteen feet by thirty feet. At one time a garden, it now barely cages rampant weeds and abandoned children's toys. And now we know that there is a thin wall of cement forming a rectangle of similar dimensions directly underneath it.

Interview on 89.5 CIUT

Interview with British girl

Chapter 10: In Plain English

I have to be honest - I think I'm losing my mind. Not "losing" like I've misplaced it, and not "losing" like I'm watching it die in my arms. Losing like the tangible loss of watching the girl you love pack her things into your ex-best friend's Volvo. It's a kicking and screaming thing. Maybe my mind is divorcing me.

I was brought into this world with a then-progressive technique called the Leboyer Method, whereupon the lights in the delivery room are dimmed, the doctors and nurses speak in hushed tones, and the newborn is placed gently in a bath of warm water immediately after exiting the womb. The umbilical cord is not cut until the baby has been massaged into taking it's first breath on its own, rather than the jarring spank method commonly used. When I was born I screamed bloody murder just the same. The tip-toe environment didn't ease my mind, couldn't heal it.

I've begun trying a similar technique to put myself to sleep at night: I marinate in a long warm bath while an episode of Planet Earth plays from my nearby laptop. I put my disturbingly adult pajamas in the dryer prior to the bath so as to minimize my body temperature fluctuation. Then I climb up to bed where Lu has warmed my spot (once again confusing it with his spot). I put on a collection of Chopin Preludes. It's a process designed to make me feel as if I have control of my life; I'm right where I want to be, living it up alone rather than enduring the stress that accompanies human interaction.

And then a strange thing happens: instead of visualizing myself as a mature adult, full of endless potential, I'm reminded of that scene in every "Psychological Thriller" where the serial killer just happens to be a connoisseur of classical music (quite often Chopin). And he's always [a "he"] listening to it while he's alone --- not alone enjoying a burrito with the latest issue of The Economist, mind you, but alone collaging voyeuristic pictures of some actress over and over and cutting curly Q's into the wall with his foot-long fingernails. Once that association with a psychopath is in my head I can't get it out and I begin to redoubt my stability; it's a self fulfilling prophecy. The darker the rings beneath my eyes, the more I stay up thinking about them.

But none of this is the "losing my mind" part. Everything I've just described would happen to anybody who is living how and where I'm living - alone in the woods in a crooked house without cel service. Truthfully, that evening routine is the only time in my day when the lines of this war of sanity (between my scientific reality and whatever this other thing is) are distinguishable. For most of the day there are things that my mind is doing to me now that my scientist brain will not stand for. Today, for instance, I didn't feel an iota of protest when the impossible happened. And so I believe that my scientist brain has left us here to prance around in the strange world we're creating.

I'm seeing distinct personalities in each of my ladybugs; a notable sense of humor, even. For instance: there are always two ladybugs on my laptop (even as I type this, one crawls across the top of the monitor while the other sits to the right of my delete key). Today one ventured onto the keyboard, which none of them had ever done before, and once situated on the "i" key she absolutely refused to depart. Even after I set her on my shoulder, she promptly resumed her post. I contemplated finishing the email without the use of the letter "i." I looked it over and realized that yes, in fact, the email was obnoxiously solipsist, and so set about retyping it with that wonderfully inclusive "we" pronoun.

I've seen them respond to speech. I was able to determine (by the grace of Google) that they don't have ears, so I do not see how this is possible. While in the shower, they play on the window ledge. I yell at them to be careful not to fall in. They turn towards me, hunch down for a few minutes, and then resume playing, eventually falling in. They make this huge helpless display down by my toes until I pull them out, albeit with a light scolding.

All day I talk to them. When I leave the house, two are always on my person, rarely discovered before I've arrived somewhere. It's somewhat embarrassing to go to the market with beetles on you. Especially those of the sentient variety, because you really can't justify killing them callously, you have to put them in your pocket when the clerk isn't watching. At home they are always within sight but rarely get in the way.

And I feel like they have been trying to tell me something for months now, and I'm too daft to get the message.... something in the way they position themselves about the house. They are in the kitchen when I am hungry. They are in the bathroom when I smell like New Jersey. Today they were already on the drumset when I felt like playing. I thought they were following me, but lately I'm wondering if it's not the other way around.

Today around 4:30 or so I went downstairs to shower and, after pulling the curtain back and seeing what they'd done, I fell backwards over the toilet, freaking Lumas out. I scrambled out, chugged some cranberry juice and composed myself before walking back in. What I saw was impossible. I knew that no one would ever believe me, so I began the hunt for a camera. I'd given the digital camera to my sister a month or two back, and so had nothing with which to document this phenomenon. I ran next door, where---much to my delight---Jungleboy and his portly friend Reese (who was wearing a utility belt above his belly, making it a "utility bra" of sorts) were filming a ninja movie (directed by JB's older brother Jesse). I managed to bring them back to the house and catch this on film before the battery died.



Jesse ran home to charge the battery (in hindsight, I don't know why I didn't suggest he just get the charger and plug it in at my house) but by the time he got back, their message had almost completely dissipated. In Jesse's absence it dawned on me that I own the world's most futuristic cel phone, and that one of its many features is short video recording (none of its features are "phone reception," incidentally). So I bolted upstairs and grabbed it, just in time to tape these two movies as my dotted friends began to disperse.






I wish I could say that this brilliantly physical message, in plain english (SEEN BY OTHER HUMANS, so I know it's real) clarifies their intention for me, but it doesn't. I don't know what "find" means. And I don't know what this means in terms of my sanity. But something tells me that acknowledging the collective conscious of a houseful of ladybugs is a step down a dark stairwell.

Chapter 9: Figurehead

Days have passed with the trench half dug, a narrow gash in the frozen lawn stopping just short of the Mound. The black pipe/hose is showing no signs of giving up down there, shooting forth from the back porch towards the shed. The project is on hold until Dave is able to get the Bobcat out there. He's been forbidden to dig by hand again. Here's why:
The night we started digging Dave threw his back out in a glorious display, casting his shovel far from his side and stabbing his left arm into the air. "ERGHH!" he grunted, clutching his lower back with his right hand, his face a frozen Maalox moment. He stayed like that for twenty or thirty seconds until we noticed the sound of digging had stopped and I swung my childhat around to spotlight him. "Dad!" shouted Jungleboy, toppling us over in a frantic dismount. Strangely enough, the helmeted boy ran directly for the shovel. I, on the other hand, moved cautiously towards Dave, who was beginning to remind me of one of those frightful Human Statues that plague me in every major city. I wondered aloud if it was a heart attack and he was so annoyed at the inference that he broke the pose and gasped, "Threw out... my back.... Shmavvy... get the wheelbarrow... from the shed..."

Jungleboy was in the shed already storing the shovel dutifully when Dave spit out the command. Within a few seconds he was wobbling the wheelbarrow towards us with his miner's helmet casting maniacal shadows on its contents. I held Dave upright with my nose dangerously close to his armpit.
The twenty minute trek to his front door was utterly cinematic. Like most of the goings on here as of late, it was hard to believe we weren't being filmed for a Wes Anderson picture. It was impossible for me to push him up the dirt/gravel hill in that thing, so Dave got out and crawled alongside it until we hit the driveway. Then he clamored back in and shouted at Jungleboy to light our way. Drawing inspiration from Norse legend, JB felt the best way for him to illuminate the path was to prop himself up on the front lip of the wheelbarrow, planting his filthy rain boots between Dave's splayed legs.
Probably weighing the aesthetic value of this perch against my personal discomfort, Dave not only agreed with this positioning, but actually supported him with one knee. But once supported, indie-Jungleboy angrily jumped down, stumbling and rolling towards the busy road to our right. Dave cursed him out between grunts and moans, upsetting the delicate balance I was attempting to move forward within. Road safety has always been his biggest battle, ever since he saw his son's face bathed in blood, screaming and strapped in to his car seat in their suddenly totaled Volvo ten feet out of their blind driveway. In retaliation, JungleB angrily resumed his totem-post on the bow of the wheelbarrow, slapping away Dave's helping hands. We hit a rock, Dave caught him with the knee, and down he went again, angry at the persistence of Dave's "training wheel." This thumbwrestling of wills played out three times while we traversed the hundred feet between our houses, until our jolty parade was finally parked at their front door.

And when she opened the door, bowl of popcorn in one hand, hairbrush in another, and no trace of surprise on her face, Lori actually said, "Again?"

Chapter 8: The Mound

When we had a shallow trench running 12 feet or so from the house, and the pipe was showing no signs of spouting, I started to lose interest. It was seven at night in the New England winter, and that means it was just about pitch black. Jungleboy was in full effect, donning a white miner's helmet with mounted headlamp and arm-length rubber cleaning gloves. I'd given up trying to help dig the trench an hour ago, and was now making myself useful by propping Jungleboy up on my shoulders and aiming his head wherever Dave was gesturing wildly. Every four minutes or so Dave would stop, and curse the fact that his beloved Bobcat was not currently parked at the house. "I could have this whole bitch mulchy if I had the Bobcat here," he'd say, thrusting his dirty chin at the entire backyard as I tried unsuccessfully to cover Jungleboy's ears.
Six months back, when Dave had purchased the Bobcat, his first Heavy Duty Man Tool, he did what anyone does when they finally get the thing they've wanted all their life (but at the moment have no use for): he hauled it on a trailer to my house, destroyed the first granite wall he could find, which happened to protect the backyard from the street, and then moved a huge pile of dirt into the middle of the wide open expanse behind my house. Though that six foot high mound of dirt was initially part of some sort of master landscaping plan, it was only a matter of months before it had a wig of weeds and turtle eggs. Since it was an awkwardly shaped thing to begin with and keeping the huge lawn clipped regularly was already a battle, mowing it was out of the question. Months later, looking at the outline of the mound in the moonlight, with it's own elevated ecosystem, I wondered if Dave saw it as the same thing I did: as a testament to the will of a man with big dreams, big tools, and very little time.

Chapter 7: We're All Gonna Die

To compensate for my outburst, I made a valiant, albeit clumsy effort to dangerize the situation:
"Dude, there is something... uh, m-MASSIVELY awry here! THIS WILL NOT STAND! Someone has rigged up a... FEEDING TUBE to something.. BIGGER than both of us!"
"Shmavvy, whathafuck you talkin' bout?" said Dave, untangling his chainy chest and trying to hide the relief this afforded. The jig was up, he was just Dave now.
I showed him the hole in the floor, the sink, and the tube. His enthusiasm crept back into the room, only slightly inhibited by his unfounded suspicion that I was to blame for these anomalies.
"Davey, even if I did drill a hole in the floor, and run a tube through the wall, how would I get all the ladybugs to coagulate upstairs and go through it?"

"You have a point, Shmavvy. Well, the only thing I can suggest is that we flush water down it and see where it pops up."
It took me a moment to comprehend what he was suggesting, because I was still marveling at my use of the word "coagulate."
"No, no no no no no! Dave, we're not trying to commit beetlecide here - this is a delicate situation! These are ladybugs, not fire ants or something."
He stared at me blankly. Clearly the subtleties of insect infestation were lost on him.

"Ok, Gavvy, then we dig," and with that he tossed me a little shovel (for the record it is not clear if the shovel was actually on his person, or just nearby. My bet is on the former). I could see that in his head there was this action music that should've queued right when I snatched the shovel smoothly out of the air. When it didn't sound right, Dave hummed his own: a hybrid of the A-Team theme and The Imperial March. I know Dave well enough to know what scene he was playing out - the one from Predator where Dutch decides to start building jungle weapons and makin with the blackface. I accompanied him on the beatbox as he grabbed a man-sized shovel leaning against the back wall and stormed out through the back porch.
As he began to eyeball exactly where that pipe would most likely be exiting, we had that awkward moment that always punctuates an impromptu vocal duet - he stops humming but I'm not sure if he's just between verses or whatever so I continue beatboxing a minute too long. He shot me a look like I was disturbing his visualization process so I tried to segue into an ol' timey whistle. Look #2... Silence.

"It's coming out here," he said, pointing to a spot a few feet off the corner of the house. Then he looked up at the sun for almost two minutes (I think he was trying to give me the impression that he was checking the time). With a sudden burst of energy he declared, "Let's do it!" and commenced wailing on the frozen ground with the shovel. I tried to join in but the shovel he'd given me was more of a trowel, and every time I got down on my knees to try to get a chunk, muddy snow shrapnel from Dave's frantic stabbings sprayed my face and made me spit. I backed up and just let him go to town, feeling useless but excited.

Chapter 6: Lock and Load.

When Dave showed up sixteen minutes later (he needed four minutes to "suit up," it would appear), I kind of laughed at him. I regretted it immediately. Now I wish I could say that regret was rooted in compassion and good conscience, but I know that in truth I regretted it immediately because of how it deflated his composure, poise, performance, etc. which I would've liked to burn into my brain a few moments longer. I'm not going to flatter myself and suggest that he put on the tool belt for me, but I'm nearly certain that he exchanged the tools that normally lived in it with those he felt were more pertinent to the situation. Of course, he did not know what the actual situation was, but taking into consideration the weaponry he'd amassed, I have reason to believe that Dave thought we would be hunting vampires.
There was a calculated symmetry to his costume: matching hammers dangling from the thigh loops of his Carharts, two cordless nail guns holstered in his tool belt, along with thirty feet of rope and his jack-razor. Two-inch chain crisscrossed his chest, holding what I later discovered to be a pick ax, strapped to his back. He held in his gloved hand a sharpened broom stick. And duct-taped to his right forearm (yes, his forearm) was a small flashlight.
When I laughed out loud there was a look that flashed across his face for a split second. I believe he was already so invested in this action-packed version of himself that he'd forgotten how abnormal it would appear to me. But that look was quickly replaced with embarrassment as he let out the breath he'd been holding, now long and disappointed, and quickly tucked the makeshift spear behind his back. In that shame-full, fantasy-popping moment I saw the inescapable behavioral parallels of fathers and sons, and I was jealous of both Dave and his son Jungleboy, simultaneously. I wanted a son whom I could pass on my few endearing traits (pancakes, great dancer, rap) to, and I also wished I had a dad whose enthusiasms mirrored mine so exactly. When I saw Dave cast off his superhero id in a small fit, the accuracy of heredity smushed my nosed, braided my heart strings, silenced me. This is why:
Over this past summer Jungleboy developed a very welcome habit of waking me up early most mornings by standing at the end of my bed, mute, and fully decked out in one of the hundreds of costumes he's amassed. Some mornings I saw Spiderman. Sometimes The Hulk. Sometimes Boba Fett. And it was mutually understood that I was to respond to this wake up call by feigning extreme terror. There was one time he did actually scare me... I was half awake, just about to sit up when there on the stairs, sporting the mask from Scream and a butcher knife (yes, a real butcher knife; yes, he's five), rose my human alarm clock. And honestly, I wouldn't have been so easily scared by a midget version of the dude from Scream if he hadn't climbed the stairs in that manner - sideways, facing me the entire time, slowly revealing his top half above the horizon line of my floor, as if on an escalator. [He got in serious trouble for that one. Apparently, one of the neighbors had seen him marching resolutely down the street and through my front door, masked and gripping the butcher knife. They thought he was going to kill me in my sleep. Dave really reamed him out---not for the knife, or for waking me up in my own home, but for walking unchaperoned along the busy road that linked our houses.]
One morning near the end of the year, Jungleboy must've run out of costumes. When I rolled over onto my side, there he was staring at me in a veritable patchwork quilt of heroic villainy: the claws of Wolverine, the plasticized flaming wrist bands of the Human Torch, the utility belt of Batman, the tights of Superman, the spiked shoulder pads of the Road Warrior (that costume was a Dave original), the helmet of Darth Vader, and the face of Skeletor. When I burst out laughing he dropped his scepter and bolted. I felt so low I spent the whole day after that trying to get him to play Leggos with me, telling him how I was laughing out of terror, etc., but still it took hours for him to even speak to me. He hasn't done the spandy-gram thing since.

In that short fifty-foot walk from Dave's to my house, Jungleboy had become so invested in the WolvtorchBatSuperRoadVadertor persona that its comedic value had escaped him. And now an identical caught-off-guard reaction was expressed by his father when I guffawed at his vampire hunting uniform.

Chapter 5: The Underground Railroad

Things are getting strange at The Chainsaw House. The house ran out of oil so Lu and I went away for the weekend and saw possibly the greatest movie of our young adult lives - No Country For Old Men. When we returned things were slightly askew - tiny things, but things you notice if you have few things in life to take notice of. The stereo subwoofer was on, the fancy knife set I gave Lumas for his bachelor party was tipped over, and all the interior doors in the house were open, sans the front door. The bathtub was spotless (since it usually looks like a Dalmatian, there was no mistaking something was amiss). We asked Lori next door if she or Dave or Jungleboy had been in the house but she said they'd been in PA for the weekend visiting the grands. Had my roommate returned? None of his stuff was there, and I'd taken his key from the counter where he'd left it and hid it in the stream, so he would've had to break in. He'd never even been in the kitchen since he moved in, so I don't see why he would've been fiddling with the knives --- or cleaning the bathtub for that matter! He'd never even used it before, let alone cleaned it. On the other hand, some of his archery equipment (no comment) was still in the basement, so perhaps he was just getting his leftovers... and opted to... tip the...knives over?

At that time our spotty friends were visiting and I guess when you're already dealing with an army of uninvited guests, one more doesn't really ruffle your truffle. After PB&J and a trip for Lu to the Loo we happen to be situated in the living room for the Grand Exit at 5:30.
You know when you're driving along the highway and it's not quite sunset and you look to the right and there's a large pack of dark birds cutting the strangest trajectories across the sky, synchronized so exactly that you really couldn't say who the leader is but it's clear that they know? And there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to why they move in the direction they move, but they do it convincingly anyway? Well such was the phantom-orchestrated exodus of my Ladybugs. Within seconds they were gathered 'round the hole in the corner of my living room, flocking in from all over the house. In the hallway at the foot of the stairs, I ducked just in time to avoid a face full of beetles who were on their way in from the studio upstairs. By 5:30 they covered maybe a third of the living room floor - 10 square feet or so!
We ran down to the basement, and there they were, shooting through the hole and into the sink, like a polka-dotted oil leak! It was at this time that it finally occurred to me to investigate the plumbing of that rotty sink. Though the faucet was clearly hooked up to the hot water heater and wherever cold water comes from, the drain was clearly not meeting up with the main sewage line... not only was the pipe made of newish rubber (not nearly as dustified as its siblings), but when they reached the far wall, Hot, Cold and Poop ran out under the front of the house while Blacky continued west, underlining the adjacent wall, hugging the underbelly of the bulbous rock foundation (which kept this house "historical" instead of "firewood") and headfirst into the wall facing the backyard. Holding that rubber pipe, I could feel them in there, migrating through my hands to wherever this wormhole delivers them.
I went out to the backyard to where the pipe would logically emerge, but it wasn't there. Back inside, I could see that the pipe hits the wall at a downward angle, so it makes sense that it would be underground somewhere. But Lu and I searched everywhere within a 30 foot radius of the house and we didn't see a single ladybug. I called Dave, who was still in town at work. Now, when I call Dave, depending on what exactly he's in the middle of, he'll either become the most enthusiastic person ever or the most annoyed, I wasn't sure how he'd take this new information regarding his property. Either way, he always greets me with "Gavvvvvvy" which warms my heart immediately. This time he called me "Shmavvvvvy" and I kind of stuttered and momentarily forgot my purpose in calling.
Before I could ground myself, he hit me with, "YOU FIND A ROOMMATE YET, SHNAZZY?"
Not only did the question catch me off guard because I remembered the whole weird thing about somebody being in my house when I was gone, but I also considered drawing out the conversation for as long as possible, in order to see how many variations on my name he could come up with. But with Lumas groaning at me, I snapped out of it and cut to the chase, "Dave, dude, there is something weird going on under the house." Now, one of my favorite things about Dave is that he somehow expects cryptic foreboding lines like that, like he knows his life is a b-horror movie. Most people would respond, "What do you mean? PLEASE CLARIFY" but Dave just goes, "there's a machete in the back corner of my garage, I'll be there in 12 minutes."

Interview for Imeem

ML: Gruvis Malt has been inactive since the recording of 2005’s Maximum Unicorn. During a WRBU interview (01/25/05), you stated that disabling the band was “an excuse to make more music.” Since that interview you have released six solo records, a collaborative EP with One Drop, and are about to wrap the second release from GM spin-off, Ebu Gogo. Now, nearly three years later, can you say that you are satisfied?

GC: No, I’m not satisfied. Let’s hope I know well enough to stop making music when I am.

ML: You have released a diverse body of work ranging from hip-hop, to rock, to electronic, to folk, to gospel. Do you feel the diversity in your songwriting confuses some listeners? Is it possible that your range of styles has made it more difficult to establish yourself among more easily recognizable acts?

GC: There is no question that the diversity of my work has inhibited digestion for those attending a live performance. I’ve sort of “toned it down” for the live show, opting to do sets comprised of similar styled tracks instead of the more scatterbrained approach I began with in 2004. But I hope that in time it’s that large variation of styles that will become what’s attractive about my shows; that you will get a smorgasbord of musical approaches in a single show… but I think you have to gain listeners’ trust first and I certainly don’t have it on a widespread level. Artists like Beck, Mike Patton, Frank Zappa, and Bjork have/had that kind of trust, and I think it allows for much more creative freedom over the long term.

ML: Your music on record often attains a high level of complexity; many of the arrangements are extremely difficult to translate live without a full back-up ensemble. When performing alone, you have compensated for this by using a sampler to construct each layer of the song, part by part, building the instrumental right in front of the audience [see 90 East video]. Do you feel compromised or empowered to experiment by this limitation?

GC: This is a good question. I’ve felt both, and very strongly on both ends. I had several moments on the last tour where I felt really low because I didn’t feel like I was doing the songs justice. But then there were wonderful moments where the improvisational aspect of building songs organically like that was extremely liberating. With the looping format I’ve made 90 East breathe far heavier than it ever did on record. Overall, I’m disappointed in my lack of mastery with the looping stuff – I’m capable of so much more with that format, and I do believe that most of my more linear songs can be realized properly using it, but this year I’ve just made a conscious decision to devote what time I have to recording and writing instead of live performance. I think a truly great song is one that moves you with a 200-instrument arrangement as well as a simple voice/piano or voice/guitar arrangement. So, if I have any good songs, they should be effective in any format, as long as I do it well. That being said, I currently have two good songs.

ML: Since 2004’s Dark Age and Hypotenuse, the recording quality of your records has noticeably increased, notably on 2007’s A Bullet, A Lever, A Key (ABALAK). Describe the studio setup employed on your first two records as well as what you have been utilizing more recently. Do you prefer to work at home or in the studio?

GC: Those first two solo efforts were big learning steps for me. I did them mainly in my bedroom and mixed them mainly on headphones, which is somewhat disastrous. It’s only natural that I would get better at low budget recording, the more I do it. I don’t have much of a “setup” actually… I work mostly in Sonar for multi-tracking, do my sequencing in Reason, sometimes Acid, and recently Ableton Live a little bit. I work with a Motu 828 mkII soundcard that I should be upgrading for this next record. I use very little outboard gear. I just can’t afford it, really. I mix on a pair of Paradigm Mini Monitors that sound great here but don’t relate to the outside world so well. This is why when I can afford it, I have Rob Pemberton engineer the drums and bass, I do everything else remotely, and then we mix it at his small studio. I’ve found this to be the most cost effective way to make a decent sounding record, like ABALAK. If you look at some of the greatest songs of all time, they rarely come from an era where sound quality was optimal. But it really doesn’t matter, because the content shines through. I think I feel the same way about my recordings – I know sometimes they don’t sound as good as they could if I had more money, but I’m fine with releasing them if I feel like maybe the content will shine through.

ML: Dark Age and Hypotenuse established two distinct approaches to vocals that are echoed on ABALAK and For the Love of Pete, respectively. On these records, you show your ability to jump between unconventional rapping and singing. Which artists do you draw the most influence from between these two very different styles?

GC: For singing, I probably listen to more females than males: Nina Persson, Jennifer Charles, My Brightest Diamond, Inara George, Fiona Apple, Feist, Emiliani Torrini, Bjork (pre-Matthew Barney), eh… there are like five million these days. For bros: Rufus Wainwright, Sam Beam, Jonsi (of Sigur Ros), Michael Jackson, D’Angelo, Rob Crowe, Dave Gutter, Elliott Smith, Jamie Lidell, Stevie Wonder, Anthony Hamilton, Freddy Mercury, Jeff Buckley, you know… dudes that sing. Right now I’m about as interested in Hip Hop as I am in Indie Rock – I find the population in those genres a bit overwhelming and I really don’t want to put the time in to sift through all the thesaurus rappers and bands with animals in their names. I know in general I’m more interested in the cadence of a few MCs than I am in their actual lyrics. And I’m more interested in the rhythms of certain drummers than I am in those certain rappers. So I don’t know… Kool Keith and MF Doom still entertain me… I like some of the lyrical work on the Gorillaz records? Maybe more important than which singers I’m influenced by would be who I draw influence from lyrically (it’s a much shorter list): Rufus Wainwright, Feist, Elliott Smith, Joanna Newsom, Leonard Cohen, M. Ward, Tom Waits come to mind, in the music world. I don’t know, this list sounds entirely uninspired and dated to me, but the truth is I haven’t had much time to draw influence from other musicians right now. I’ve been in a little bubble for a year. I’ll be ready to pay more attention to the work of others when mine is done.

ML: With the exception of Grace Land, your records feature guest musical performances by former band mates, friends, and family; however, you make it clear that you write all of the music yourself. How do you manage this? Do you play every instrument or do you initiate ideas from your keyboard and translate them to other instruments afterwards?

GC: If it’s an instrument I can’t play myself, and I can’t possibly synthesize it, I’ll ask someone else to play the part. I’ll either play the part out for them on piano, or provide them with sheet music, or more often than not have a demo version of the part for them to follow with. That latter approach is how I’m doing my entire new album: each part is “demo’d” by me, and then track by track I will replace the poor version for a live performance. That approach allows me to make sure each part functions the way it needs to, and also allows the performer to hear clearly how their part fits into the whole composition.

ML: 2006’s Hospital Hymns is the only one of your records that has not been released in hard-copy form and is only available via the iTunes store. Why? Can we expect to see it in hard-copy form at any point in the future?

GC: I have strong feelings about the marketing/sale of religious/spiritual music. Feels dirty. I printed up 1000 copies of Hospital Hymns (sans artwork) and gave most of them away on the U.S. tour with Facing New York. Then I gave the remainder away to anyone who ordered something from the Integers Only Online Store. Five One Inc. was very excited about the album, and wanted to release it, but being an EP, they felt it would be ideal to just handle the digital release. I agreed under the terms that any money earned by me from those sales would go back into promoting my records. This way, since I never see any money from it, I can pretend it was never for sale.

ML: You’ve voiced your discontent with the music industry on tracks such as “Lemon” and “The Great American Bottleneck”. Who is most to blame for the glorification of sub par musicianship, absence of integrity, and lack of originality in mainstream American music? Does the blame fall on the labels, the musicians, or the listeners?

GC: Capitalism is to blame, if we want to waste time pointing fingers. The version we have in the U.S. is based on greed, not craftsmanship. So it’s not really shocking that there are Godsmacks and there are Nickelbacks --- any more than there is McDonald’s or Peavy – these are just practicing Americans (probably not a coincidence that both “bands” license their music to the U.S. Army). I don’t care about blame anymore. I used to think that lowest common denominator music was holding me and my peers back, or getting in the way of more interesting work being heard. Now I just think they’re making our job easier. The more of them there are the more original I sound.

ML: You’ve released three fictional records to date [Grace Land, Hospital Hymns, and ABALAK] that involve elaborate themes, characters, and events. How do you go about preparing to write such a record?

GC: Each record comes about a different way. I never made an album because it was time to make an album (If anything, people in the industry have suggested I slow down on that tip; spend more time promoting). Like every artist, each record I’ve done is inspired by or a reaction to something going on in my life. Grace Land was something I wanted to do because I was fascinated by the mundane and remedial jobs usually held by the most eccentric or awkward people. I remember being very excited about the BBC Office around that time, and I’m sure the influence shows. I also was very tired of writing lyrics, and I wanted to collaborate with my good friend Cyrus Leddy. He’d been noticing this guy Tivoli on his many visits to Staples, and so suggested that we do something about him. He began interviewing Gary, and then adapting those interviews into prose. I cut that up into couplets, and then constructed music to support them. Cyrus coached me through the performance of them, and the rest is sort of history.
Hospital Hymns I wrote because I was working in a Hospital stockroom for a stint and there was this little closet-sized “chapel” that was just off of ICU. It was the only carpeted area besides an office in Women’s Care, and I thought it was strange to have this little haven for the religious in the midst of all this science and sterility. It seemed thoroughly disproportionate to the amount of emotional events that were filling up the halls everywhere else in the building. And there were heavy debates about spirituality and religion coursing through my family at the time, so I wanted to design a character that would polarize my listeners, and maybe have them assess where they lie on that spiritual graph, so to speak.
Many of my songs are written when I’m working at creativity-stifling jobs; emerging from them with a song makes me feel like I’m getting something out of it (besides $8/hr).
I don’t have a set method really for writing a record: sometimes I just start spewing stuff, and see which idea is the most fun to work on at the time, and most times that will snowball into a record. Sometimes, like in the case of ABALAK and Home, the concept comes first, in a burst, and then I craft the songs to fit it.

ML: The themes and events of your records seem to dictate the way you perform vocally. For instance, ABALAK spans a lifetime, and you pay close attention to reflect the passage of time and how your character’s age and predicament affects him by altering your voice accordingly [76-year-old Gavin sounds very different than 28-year-old Gavin]. The same can be said of Grace Land and Hospital Hymns. Will you ever run out of voices? Do these dynamics keep it interesting for you?

GC: Yes, role-playing is a nice way for me to break up all the non-fiction, and exercise that acting bug that we all think we have. That being said, I don’t think my tones are that varied – not when held up againt say, Billy Bob Thorton or Martin Short. That sounded pompous. I should’ve compared myself to musicians, but I can’t think of any.

ML: On 2006’s Grace Land, Gary Tivoli is credited with having helped with the album artwork; what role did he play in the telling of his own story?

GC: See above… Cyrus found the drawings for the album art on the wall of Tivoli’s bathroom, believe it or not. When Cyrus asked him about them, Tivoli told him they were drawn “from memory.” He was none too pleased when he found they were gone, but we figured giving him album art credit was a fitting apology. In general, we didn’t tell him about the album until we could hand him a copy. I think Cyrus gave him a copy.

ML: A Bullet, A Lever, A Key (ABALAK) presents a grim account of what may happen if you were to abandon your musical endeavors and attempt to change direction at this point in your life [at age 28]. You’ve presented this frustration in your earlier work, yet ABALAK is arguably the most refined attempt to depict this inner turmoil. Where is this pressure to conform to an alternative lifestyle coming from? Is ABALAK self-justification for your career choices or more of a response to external pressures?

GC: Well, to answer the first question: I feel the pressure from everywhere really. Not from any particular person, though many elders have rudely hinted that it may be time to “grow up.” This is just the pressure you feel when you’re 29 and you still don’t have health insurance, and sometimes your electricity gets shut off. Even your body is constantly telling you it’s time to nest and have children.
And in answer to the second: it’s a little of both, but more than either of those, it was written as a warning/encouraging word to other “struggling artists.” It may be an original vehicle for the message, but the message itself is nothing new: Be true to yourself, to thine own self be true.

ML: For the Love of Pete is a compilation of songs written for Jenny Lederer, a girlfriend you were in a relationship with for six years. Not only did you release this record post-breakup, but the cover image features the two of you holding hands and the album artwork would lead most of us to believe that this relationship is still alive and well. What part did Jenny play in putting this project together with you?

GC: 10 of those songs were given to her over the last six years, so I asked her permission to compile them into an album and give them to the public. In conjunction with that request I also asked her to help with the artwork. She graciously said yes to both. She did all the photography, and most of the graphic layouts. She also did her profesh spell-check. She’s extremely talented in all three of those fields, so it was a step up for me to collaborate with her, and I’m very pleased with the result. As far as the status of the relationship, it is not alive, it’s over. Shortly after that artwork was shot, crappy things happened and I lost my grounding altogether, got into a really bad spot and asked that we cease communication. It’s hard on the kids, but at least I’ve resumed my motor skills.

ML: In 2004, you discussed your intention to record a children’s record for your nephew. The project has temporarily been put on the backburner. When do you plan on resuming work on it?

GC: Now that I have 3 new nieces and two nephews, it is even more imperative that I finish it. That being said, it will have to wait until my Home album is safely birthed. I will probably start tinkering with it again in June or so, if I haven’t completely fallen off the deep end.

ML: Ebu Gogo are currently in the studio with Rob Pemberton recording record number two. Pemberton did a fantastic job engineering Gruvis Malt’s Simon in 2004 and one of your most recent releases, A Bullet, A Lever, A Key. Chase Scenes 1-14 has a homemade and live feel to it. What can we expect in terms of audio quality on the new record?

GC: Well this one is going to be interesting because we’ve employed him to capture everything much better than we did on that first recording, but then beat it up pretty bad. We really like the filthy sound of the first album, and this one needs to be that flavor, but 3.0. We want it to sound very very large and dirty. But this record is a much different color than the first one, so it will be interesting to see what that sounds like.

ML: You have been hard at work on a new full-length record titled Home due out next year. Can you provide some back-story and details?

GC: Home is the story of my relationship with Jenny, from beginning to now. In addition, it’s the synthesis of all my work up until this point. Musically, it makes sense of everything I’ve done, or at least features the deployment of ideas I began to play with on previous records. It will feature a female vocalist on half of the songs, playing the role of Jenny, singing lyrics she wrote with me, in the middle of our breakup process. There is a lot more to say about this record --- it’s the most important record I’ll ever make ---- but it will be more of a conversation, and less of a monologue if people are able to hear it first. I need it to be done so I can close that chapter of my life. I’m trying to make a record that has no regrettable element to me, so it’s a long process. I also am trying to properly depict the most loving situation I’ve ever been a part of, so that’s a tall order.

Chapter 4: Caught Polkadots.

Today my timing was impeccable. I was as prompt as a nazi, from 10 am on. [I suppose I could've chosen a better simile there, but you get my point - for a man without a planner, calendar, or wrist watch, I was frighteningly on time for each of the days events.... lunch and shower].
At 5:29, the window at the base of the stairs was spotless (except for all the dirt and marinara spots) - not a ladybug in site. I craned my head around the corner, and by this time Lu had finished his Quantum physics research and was nosing around the corner below me. From the kitchen we would've resembled the Three Stooges (minus Rick Moranis). Clear! Sure enough, upon further inspection the kitchen walls and ceiling were spotless as well (except for the fur and peanut butter smears)... had we missed their exit? Had they adjusted their schedule? We searched the bathroom... the only ladybugs we could find were the two that perished in this morning's shower.

And just as I started to abandon my hopes of ever solving the riddle of my foul-weather friends, Lumas, doing the maximized bladder dance from somewhere in the living room, barked 3 times, paused and then barked 3 times again. I rushed out of the bathroom to find him aggressively sniffing a corner where my roommate's couch used to be. I nudged him out of the way to find what looked like 1/2 inch hole in my living room floor. There were no ladybugs near it, but I can assure you Lumas has seen many holes in his day, many of a wider, filthier diameter, and none of them put his britches in such a tizzy. Too dark to see in the hole, I set a lamp down by it, ran down into the basement (Lu of course forcing his way by me on the stairs) and searched the corner. In a few short seconds I found the lamp light pushing through the cobwebs. It was hard to get a good look because it was above a filthy old sink, but when I finally got up on the sink and shined my cel phone around the perimeter, I could see that it was a nice clean drilling, a man made hole, all the way through the floor! Before I could get down, Luisimo jumped up on the sink to get his own angle on things. And insodoing he rocked my cel phone right out of my hand and into the slimy sink.
When I recovered my balance and dismounted, I leaned into the sink to find a wonderous thing: illuminated by the dayglo yellow-green of my never-in-range Wackberry, the tail end of my Checkered army was making it's way down the drain.

David "The King" King

I saw the Bad Plus perform at the Regatta Bar recently. It may be the best show I've ever seen. Watching David King play the drums is like witnessing the Christmas morning of a 5 year old whose mom is the CEO of Toys R' Us. If you play the drums, watching him will make you want to quit. If you don't already play, watching him will make you want to start. I believe he's reached that level of ability where he isn't inhibited by his body in any way, so what you're seeing is a man-shaped conduit for relentless rhythmic inspiration. His cymbals are like competing toys, he loses interest in one mid-phrase and you get to watch him rediscover the other with this huge surprisey smile on his face, and then lose interest in that one and either switch back, or dedicate this full-bodied enthusiasm to some other area of his small kit.
Why is he better than any other drummer I've ever seen, many of which may have more technical proficiency than he (that being said, even their most recent record doesn't fully demonstrate how limitless David King sounds)? Because David King is in love with music and he doesn't censor his PDA for anybody. In addition, he allows his sense of humor to be part of the drumming. It's written into the music. I don't see anybody doing that right now in music. I see a bunch of bands who are ultra-concerned with how they appear to everyone else. And the majority of musicians I know are incredibly funny people, but don't allow that side of their personalities to manifest in their music. Or if they do show their funny side, they don't do it in a well-crafted and interesting composition, they do it in some half-assed spoof. Like this.

Chapter 3: Swarm and the DLS

At 5:20pm today, I stopped reading my own blog, and put LapTop in sleep mode. I stood up quite gradually, so as not to disturb Lumas, who, as you know, insists on being the first down the stairs if I opt to descend them. And if he thinks there is a w-a-l-k in his immediate future, he will launch himself down them with furry abandon, and this would ruin the element of surprise that I knew we'd need. So I sort of meandered towards my doorway, and when it was clear that he was either dead or lost in one of his complex trigonometry equations, I put my slippers on and went downstairs. It was now 5:28. The window at the base of the stairs was Beetlemania. The kitchen walls and ceiling had the beatlemeasles. The bathroom was like that scene in the Matrix (part 3?) where everyone's in that rave cave dancing and celebrating humanity, except they were ladybugs (none of which were wearing Ray-Bans) and they were celebrating the fact that I couldn't use my toilet.
We stood quietly in the center of the room and waited. When the clock read 6 and they were showing no signs of packing it in, we returned to the less-pulsating upstairs. I was disappointed to say the least. I tried to work out some harmonies on track 8 of my new record but my short-term memory was shot - I couldn't remember a word five seconds after I read it. I was consumed with resentment toward these little housemates for throwing off the pattern (and making my blog, the one about how they're so punctual, look stupid).
I wonder if I am using the whole ladybug thing to procrastinate and distract myself from the daunting task of writing the last song for this album? The sensitive new age guy in me is convinced that they are an integral part of the process of this album, I just can't figure out what part that is... And just as I began to consider exactly how much more of my time could be afforded to this mystery, mom called to remind me to set the clocks back.
We ran downstairs at 6:38, now 5:38pm (!), and they were gone.
Every
Last
One.

Chapter 2: My Biggest Fear Has Manifested.

I know what my biggest fear is. You ask anybody that (if you're lame, you'll ask them on your first date with your "I don't beat around the bush" face on), and they will think for a minute, and then describe something tangible: spiders, black dogs, plane crashes, Goldie Hawn... I disagree with these answers. I think fear should be measured by the damage it does to your life, long term. Like, when I'm watching an M. Night Shamalamama movie and suddenly--- no wait, I'd rather stir fry my own feces than watch another one of his holey Twilight Zone ripoffs ---Ok, it's like when I see that scene in Peewee's Big Adventure where Large Marge's face gets all bug-eyed and clay-like. My breath hitches, I jump up a bit, maybe even urinate briefly, but overall the scene ends, Peewee bar-top dances to Tequila, and life continues... after maybe a few weeks of nightmares, it's forgotten. I don't believe there's any serious, life-shortening damage - no more than a fleeting moment of happiness (say when I find out that one of my chocolate-covered bananas had survived a fall to the sticky kitchen floor) makes you live longer.
To me, true fear is able to affect your life path. I think you know fear when you're in the front lines of a real-life war (like Iraq! :) ). I think you know it when your girlfriend is coming home later and later. I think you know it when you run guns in Haiti. I think you know it when you've worked at a major label all your life, and suddenly Napster happens. It's a gut thing, it's cancerous, and you can only put a name to it when the room is entirely empty except for you and it and you're sludging about like Arnie's mom when you know you weigh only 140 lbs soaking wet.

More than death, more than love, more than financial success, more than Clint Howard, the fear that has eaten away at me since I was 15 is the fear that I'll be a bad father. Yes, it sounds kind of like something Alan Alda would say in a made-for-TV movie, but it's true. Fact is, I am not happy with the performance my father gave. I find it decidedly insufficient [he's making efforts now, sort of, and I'm trying to understand him better and why things went the way they went and I think that I haven't given him much credit for what he's been through, but then I don't really know what he'd been through 'cause he's never expressed it]. But truthfully, I don't know many people these days who are happy with their father's track record. And I have to admit that I have a genetic makeup that would facilitate patriarchal failure: I have tunnel vision when it comes to making music. I can forget to eat for an entire day if I'm pushing a song in the right direction. I could forget to pick up my girl at work if I'm excited about a drum track (that's hypothetical - I would never offer to pick my girl up from work). There is an intense selfishness in the creative process of writing music. [I've always felt like people will call you "selfish" if you aren't successful---in the traditional sense of the word, not the spiritual sense---and "self-assured" if you are. People's perception of whether that selfishness has a negative or a positive connotation is entirely determined by how much money it makes you. Either way, it is that selfishness that allows me to create as much as I do, for better or for worse]
Lately, Lu(cifer) has gotten into the habit of reminding me to take him out - he walks up, noses my thigh, then jumps on my lap, all 66.6 lbs of him. I've never forgotten to feed him, and I'm not saying I would forget to feed a more hairless offspring, I'm just saying I'm terrified that I could end up as that guy in the movie who misses his son's big game and the wife keeps saying, "now you're not just letting me down, you're letting down YOUR SON!" and he's working on a serum to stop cirrhosis or something and in the last scene when he's receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, his son is for some reason smiling and clapping, maybe from all the meth he's on, and the overall message is "S'all good!" But I know it's not. Even if they do discover that my music cures cirrhosis, I don't wanna live my life waiting for my kid to eventually forgive me, population-saving lifework or not. I'm determined to improve my DNA. Sometimes I think that this is why I'm turning all these albums out at breakneck rate: I'm trying to clear my creative calendar so that I can put my all into a daughter's Halloween costume. I don't know if I should give myself the option of parenting and writing hits, because the two won't like each other, I think (Will Smith is perfect proof of this). Eh, maybe everything would be fine, and I would just raise my own Castleton 5 or something... The point is, I fear it. I know I do, and I'm lucky to be able to put a name on it. But it is a scary cloud to carry.

And today, folks, these fears in me and of me were justified. I saw the potential failure I'm working so hard to avoid - I will be a bad parent. How do I know? Because this happened:
Today, while Lumas and I watched our doorway swallowed whole by our ladybug friends, one landed on his nose. A LADYBUG LANDED ON LUMAS' NOSE, HIS EYES CROSSED, AND THINGS STAYED THAT WAY FOR WELL OVER 30 SECONDS! I ask you, if our brave new world of cross-media gadgetry, built precept upon consolidating precept in order to answer the increasingly immediate needs of our collective narcissism, exists for any reason, is it not to capture this all-too-CGI moment of reality? Read it again: A LADYBUG LANDED ON LU'S NOSE, AND HIS EYES CROSSED. HE DIDN'T EVEN TRY TO WORK HIS TONGUE TOWARDS IT. THEY HAD A CROSS-SPECIES TEA PARTY ON HIS SNOOT, AND I DIDN'T HAVE A SINGLE CAMERA THING WITHIN REACH!!
Now, If that's not providing for your child, I don't know what is. And people, today, I failed him. I failed him, you, myself, and the good people at Walt Disney. And I failed this blog.

There was a 34 year old woman living next door with her boyfriend. She had terminal cancer, and it was very visible. She loved horror movies, chain smoked, talked about Johnny Depp and how much she loved her cats. One night we were sitting on the porch, talking about both subjects and I asked the obvious question (facetiously), "What would you do if Johnny Depp came over and threw your cat against the television set?"
She was noticeably put off by the question but answered that she would get postal on JD. The next morning I got a call from her at 7am asking me to return their Mission Impossible 3 DVD right away. "Just leave it in the doorway." Things got weird, and I sort of pulled away from interaction with them after that. She never ever went outside, so we didn't really see each other for months. A Few weeks ago, the lawn that her boyfriend always kept well manicured began to get jungly. Their tent/car port thing blew over and nobody uprighted it for a week. A few days later, he came over to tell us she'd died. His face was a warzone - so much hurt and yet this whole blossoming relief thing. It was strange and beautiful. He'd loved her so much and so well that he'd spent every minute of the last two years taking care of her and placating her and getting her every Johnny Depp collectible possible on ebay. Their house had become an air-conditioned cave, he'd lost all his friends, he was anesthetizing every day with the product from his parents' vineyard. They spent their nights regulating the pets' calorie intake.
She hated chemo, had given up 6 months ago, and if he loved her, he had to let her do it. How do you watch someone give up on life in front of you? How do you handle knowing you are not enough of a reason for them to try to live longer? I'm not blaming her, I'm saying - if that situation was in my life, I don't know that I could bear it. This guy is the strongest person I've ever met. His name is Al, and his knowledge of fear makes mine look... like that of a college student?
And the reason I mention her at all is because the ladybugs showed up the day after she died. And I'm not saying that they are her, I'm just strongly suggesting it. And maybe I'm trying to be gentle with them because I should've been more gentle on that night when I pushed her two worlds together.

Our tiny fleet has been multiplying rapidly. They now arrive around noon in the hundreds. They leave promptly at 5:30. We only realized it today, because we checked the clock when we saw they were gone. I don't know quite how they get in or out, but I have in my head an image that I can't shake until I see for myself that it's only my imagination (I will know tomorrow at 5:30):
Do they exit out of their prospective entrances in single file? Do they indeed have tiny insect briefcases and punch tiny time cards? How else could they be so punctual and efficient? Where do they have to be at 5:30? Are they making house calls? Have any of them ever got the nerve up to joke, "Ladies first!" while holding the door for the next?
It is precisely this mass exodus that keeps Lu and I calm when they're swarming. They've infiltrated the bedroom, the studio, the kitchen, the bathroom, and the vestibule. I'm kidding, we don't have a vestibule - who do I look like, Daddy Warbucks?
We are trying to be accommodating, but today I found one in my pants and I really feel like that's my personal space.
This morning I saved 19 from a showery grave. I lost four, and had to cut my shower short because they refused to recognize the peril of the drain. Even with my helping toes angling them towards higher ground, they insisted on turning completely around and marching towards their death. This was my Schindler's List of Beetles, my Atlas Complex at it's greatest: "if I could've saved just one more..." I'm surprised how much it upsets me, but then when you live virtually alone you start to value every guest like they're your last.
Speaking of living virtually alone, my roommate, who fits the profile of a serial killer, has moved out. For the last two months he was coming home less and less, until he would only be here 2 or 3 times a week, and usually from 3am to 7am. He slept only on the couch, never on his bed. He never mentioned moving out, I only heard about it from the landlord, who said that my roommate was having financial issues and would have to leave. Even the night before he left, he didn't mention anything, just talked about the Red Sox. I heard him loading stuff out until 11 this morning. Now, we've never had a tense word between us. I know that he probably thinks I'm a homosexual due to my complete lack of interest in the Red Sox and barbeque, but I honestly don't think he has any ill will towards me. That being said, I find it strange that he never said goodbye, just left his key on the counter. It's not me, right? That is abnormal... right?