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"...soul of a goldfish was created below."
s Robert Plant once so eloquently put it in his first unpublished version of "Dazed & Confused," goldfish really aren't worth the trouble. Last evening I went to feed the fish here at Planet off c e n t e r and came up one fish short. I looked around and saw where the missing one was: stuck upside down between a piece of coral and the side of the aquarium. He (or she), the largest and orangest of the fish, was completely inert (save his fins' being rustled by the currents) and his eyes were glazed over as if by pus. I thought there might be a chance of reviving him, but when I fished him out, he'd already taken on the fragrance of, well, dead fish. I unceremoniously gave him an overhand toss through the bushes from the front porch. Poor little guy. Sometimes it feels like everything around me is breaking and dying, like I am a vortex of unhealthful vibes.
his "spend the whole day with the computes" thing is kind of sick, but it's allowed me to go places I haven't been in awhile. Here's a chinese idea: a collection of images on various servers that change as their respective masters change them. It's for the Mandlebrot Set, the collection of online journal keepers who post daily images. That wouldn't include me, but it would include Nancy Firedrake, and, for this week anyway, I have the ways and means to make my evil pictures pop up there. Not that I have good ideas, subversive intent, or anything chinese like that.
was listening to Soundgarden's Superunknown over and over for much of the day, but eventually I had to stop even though I kind of liked it. The whole time, you see, I found myself moving my jaws to the beat, as if I was chewing gum. It's dreary music, and it has an extremely dreary beat conducive to such peculiarly unhelpful exercises.
Back in early 1988, when I was attending Oberlin College, I remember meeting a CD-obsessed guy named Chuck Webster from upstate New York. He might have been socially inept and made out of velcro, but he had, as it happened, a keen insight into where Rock and Roll was heading. He liked Guns 'n' Roses as much as the rest of us, but he had his tentacles out. "Have you heard the music from Seattle?" he used to ask me. I hadn't, of course, and I had no desire to follow any leads suggested by Chuck Webster. But he had his way of insisting. "You gotta hear Tad and Soundgarden. They're totally rad!" he'd say as he put on a CD. I didn't understand the Seattle sound back then. As always, I'd mumble approving noises and then vanish when he'd turn his back. Eventually I got to hear and appreciate (and inevitably) be bored by all those Seattle bands, but that was years later.
Now I'm listening to the far peppier Psalm 69 by Ministry. There's no grinding my teeth to this music, I'll tell you.
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