about Thanksgiving and family

Turkey baked in a bag. Mashed potatoes and green beans. Pie and whipped cream! And the Cowboys. We cook it, we eat and watch the game together. This is how Thanksgiving has been for several years: just us two. And if the game is boring or the turkey is dry—who cares? I enjoy Thanksgiving, this family holiday, because it is not Christmas. Fewer people, no presents, no long buildup, less stress, less drama. What it is is the casual closeness, the informality I used to think defined our family in the best of times.

 

an exercise for lost souls

I write it down right now so I can remember later what I was feeling before my neuron system failed for circuitry though it tried to create a mirror calculation and specially summoned biological courage that takes pleasure in deception of appearance and the art of measuring out the primal needs of social connection. Can you hear your own heart pounding? You pray for death as you crave life with her.

My God: What do you do if you still have the appetite, the craving, but you don’t have the stomach for it anymore?

noise rock album reviews like this one

Takomaha winds up the air so it coils in your brain like a diamondback

When Takomaha turns up the volume on “American Basements,” feedback is already singing through the amps. The bass drum kicks, slipped by a hi-hat tap. A tumbling drum phrase articulates the tension welling inside a tooth-grinding bassline. And from this descends a vocal, clear and confident.

This musical introduction halts when the guitar suddenly rips chords into air already made humid and bright with noise.

When the scaffolding we've erected starts to fail, it makes this music.

The promotional copy compares it to This Heat, At The Drive In, and A Place To Bury Strangers. Takomaha debuted with a self-titled EP in 2022, and on October 29, the Oslo band will deliver its second, “American Basement,” on Loyal Blood Records.

The second song, “Scopekreep,” starts with cutting rhythms—drums and bass tumble over lovely dissonance scattered by the guitar. This music is about mood and intensity. The lyrics pronounce the mission: “Out here doing the Lord’s work / just out here doing the Good Lord’s work.” The monotone vocal rides the building volume. Then tension gives way, and the song transitions to a groove that again unfolds into a noise-rock crescendo.

The single posted below is “Tropical Slitwrist.” This eight-minute gunner opens with big dissonance, then steps back and up again with expulsions of sound. At 2:30, the bass and drums exact a tension-filled jam. But at 3:15, the song goes dark-dancehall electro and builds in volume. At 6:30, it bursts and the bass hammers. But this is brief, as the song drops back into the dark electro whatever. It finally moves toward closure at 7:30, cutting back and forth between the core synthesizer accents and the full noise machine.

creative writing exercise 7H

A fucked-up 14-year-old skates in the church parking lot and says to you, "This is how we pass the time in the evenings." You feel hard-focus, ready to toss away a talent to organize groups, and walk away, seeing people watch you and whisper in passing, "This is happening constantly."

Her plush old van looks crazy in front of my house even though neighbors know bad. She is high and says she has acid. We are older now. She wants to take me to the playground, and I say, “This is perfect.” Her dad had just said, “I know with me you feel less alone, but now you’re going to have to be on your own.” She told him, “You don’t look sleek. You lack style. You look weak.” Then she tells me, “I know what you need. And where to get it. And what it costs.” She says the night will go up in stoges and to start counting.

a quick one about a Motorhead sound-alike single

Last month Wet Denim released a single called "Double Fister." The song combines the heavy hard rock of Motorhead with a little peak ear-worm glam-metal Poison. The vocal is raw, the playing is tight, and the song don't need nothin' but a good time. (That's a Poison reference.)

The sound is a picture of leather, amp buzz, and stacked empty beer cans. Traditional, hard, raw, and catchy. You might find that stack of beer cans in Indianapolis, Indiana, the band's last known location.

 

 

a joke

The police offered to take me to the detox center, but I, of course, refused. Why would I even go? So instead I walked to the library, and this lady followed me. I knew she hated me, so I stayed away from her. She gave me the middle finger from across the street even though I didn't do anything. Later she emailed me a picture of herself having sex with three guys and she wrote a description about it all in the email to me. I did not know what to feel. Then I saw one of the guys in her picture sitting in his Mazda3 in the Safeway parking lot looking at his phone and shouting at it super-hard. We all heard it. She must have sent him one of the pictures with me in it.

 

about friends sending links to shitty music

Good aggressive music has some passion. The drummers are supposed to have a swing, barely perceptible variations of volume and pace. They aren't metronomes. Varying guitar strums, an improvised accent here or there, a quick adjustment as the music moves the musicians. The music has to move the people, not the other way around. Parents worry about their children, some bleach in children’s hair, some court dates replacing violin lessons.

a review of an album I liked—“Fear of the Plow" by noise rock band Haraball

Haraball make the raw, resentful sound of years squandered

Haraball deliver ugly defiance from the pulpit, and its hostage flock, having listened to the band’s unwelcome homily, so exhorted, have neither the time nor energy to hope for the best, for they expend their reserves steeling themselves for the worst.

Six years have passed since last we heard from Haraball, but this Norwegian noise rock band just released “Fear of the Plow.” The sound wears the spit of punk and hardcore and exudes a lack of reverence and dismal determination forged by life’s hard training.

Song structures are simple, but the music brims with texture and tension. For example, “The Squatter” stews in frustration. Having bottled it up too long, the lid bounces over the hiss.

And I like “Prison Cheese,” with its customary reverb and echo on vocals that pronounce and admonish, the bowling drums, the bass like a rolling slicer, and guitars full of subtle noise.

“Fear of the Plow” follows 2019’s “Hypno” and was released September 19, 2025, on the label Fysisk Format.

 

something about John Updike's book "Rabbit, Run"

He is young, but desperation already has set in.

 

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is 26 years old and, with a tumbledown marriage and unserious, demeaning sales job, faces the deeply disturbing possibility that he peaked in high school. Rabbit was a star basketball player—a natural, at home and in control on the court. High-school Rabbit never could have imagined such a sorry life awaited him after graduation.

A few pages into Rabbit, Run, Rabbit runs from his problems, including his pregnant wife, Janice. He finds his old basketball coach; but coach, too, is unmoored these days, and scandalized.

Coach finds Rabbit a prostitute named Ruth. Ruth and Rabbit spar but seem to enjoy being together. That sours, too, and soon, at the urging of a lonely local priest, Rabbit returns to reconcile with Janice, who just gave birth to their second child. But Rabbit himself is a child still, and a monstrous one, who spoils the fragile peace at home and runs back to Ruth. That goes bad. And back at home, the new baby drowns in the bathtub as a distraught Janice binge-drinks.

John Updike was 28 when he published Rabbit, Run, his second novel. He was noticing, he thought, a lot of guys who seemed to peak in high school, so Updike wrote about that and, for his efforts, won a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a reputation as a premier American writer. Updike wrote several sequels to Rabbit, Run; many critics consider this series Updike’s most important work.

This was only the second Updike novel I have read, the first being 1965’s Of the Farm. Unlike the elegant prose in Of the Farm, the writing style in Rabbit, Run borders on stream-of-consciousness—lots of rich imagery and detail relayed in flowing, haphazardly punctuated sentences filling page-long paragraphs. And this surprised and put me off a little because my concept of Updike is of a polished Northeastern intellectual, a writer for The New Yorker, a Man of Letters and so forth. Maybe there is no inconsistency there. But the writing was good, no doubt, so I stayed with it and, into the second half, I began enjoying it.

At times I also get the impression Updike was trying to remind the reader, Remember now, these are working-class folks, not too bright. But the main struggle was Rabbit himself. I have a soft spot for self-destructive, deeply flawed characters, which Rabbit certainly is; but he is also a conceited bastard who often treats people terribly and expresses barely enough desire to do otherwise.

Here are a couple of my favorite parts. Right in the middle of the book, Rabbit and Ruth are having one of their punchy talks and Ruth says: "You're so mug, is what gets me. Don't you ever think you're going to have to pay a price?" Then a couple pages and many words pass—her thoughts of him, of what she likes about Rabbit, of her past with men from early on, of this fling and her anxiety, of how Rabbit is so screwed up. Finally, the flow of her thinking leads into Rabbit's response:

... That was the thing about him, he just lived in his skin and didn't give a thought to the consequences of anything. Tell him about the candy bars and feeling sleepy he'll probably get scared and off he'll go, him and his good clean piece and his cute little God and his cute little minister playing golf every Tuesday. For the damnedest thing about that minister was that, before, Rabbit at least had the idea he was acting wrong but now he's got the idea he's Jesus Christ out to save the world just by doing whatever comes into his head. I'd like to get hold of the bishop or whoever and tell him that minister of his is a menace. Filling poor Rabbit full of something nobody can get at and even now, filling her ear, his soft cocksure voice answers her question with an idle remote smugness that infuriates her so the tears do come.

"I'll tell you," he says. "When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery." The tears bubble over her lids and the salty taste of the pool water is sealed into her mouth. "If you have the guts to be yourself," he says, "other people'll pay your price."

Another good line comes when Rabbit returns after the baby has drowned, and his father in-law tells him the undertaker has the body.

Rabbit wants to cry out, it seems indecent, for the undertaker to be taking such a tiny body, that they ought to bury it in its own simplicity, like the body of a bird, in a small hole dug in the grass. But he nods. He feels he will never resist anything again.