for david foster wallace

missed, dearly.

1) I bought my older brother a copy of The Girl With Curious Hair in tenth grade. He gave me a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men for Christmas. We loved you, then. It was you, and rounds of Ginsberg and extracts from Dharma Bums in the garage late at night, sitting on the washing machine with stolen domestic beer and doing our best to channel that particular sort of brilliance.
2) My footnotes are now, and have always been, your fault. I don't think I even knew how to insert them in word processor programs until you. Yours are better.
3) I'm happy you dropped out of your philosophy grad program. Things were better this way.
4) You deserved that MacArthur Grant. Octavia Butler did, as well. No one else, though. Not a one.
5) Your books are in a box in my father's attic. It's been years. I'm going to dig them out. Them, and all of that old, trashy lesbo-fic. It's like missing a finger or two, without you and them on the bookshelf.
6) A best buddy made his students read from Consider the Lobster yesterday, out loud. Thought you should know. He came and told me about it (this hanging business) afterwards, and we proceeded to leave campus and drink one beer, and then another. We were bummed, terribly.
7) Team Dresch wrote a song in the mid-90s entitled 'don't try suicide.' It's on Captain My Captain. It's yours, if you want it.
8) Here it is. Straight from the Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, NC. We should've been there.

home/sick

Lisa Anne Auerbach's "Along the Dixie Highway"

porn shops, hot dog stands, international florists, derelict orange huts, pleather dinettes, blankets about the old(racist)floridacentricity of the term 'cracker.' Enough said. Go look.

my love affair with rick springfield's

"Working Class Dog" is nearly full blown. Thought I should let you know.

Man of my dreams:

driving down to the kenai peninsula

with copies of albums by Ida, Juliana Hatfield and Mastodon, courtesy of my dear, dear big brother, in a rented Ford Taurus (mid-size for the price of economy!). Hello, my late teenage years -- Ida and sedans. Now where's the vicodin? The bumper-to-bumper on I-95 south to Dade County?

Nowhere to be found. Just myself, two of my favorite ladies, some borrowed camping gear, soup from a box, fjords and glaciers and an old fishing town.

Did you know that in Whittier, AK, the entire population lives in two buildings? And that, before the 1964 earthquake, they all lived in one? And this one building was, at the time, the largest poured concrete structure in North America? But was decimated by the earthquake, and now lies abandoned in the center of town?

from a desk in anchorage

where a still from Mike Tyson's Punch-Out adorns the desktop in all sorts of pixelated glory.

Things to know if one is ever in Anchorage, Ak:

1) If you are looking to see outdoorsy-type hipster dykes at work slanging lattes and serving tofu scramble, the place to go is the Snow City Cafe. It is on the corner of 4th and L, downtown, across the street from the Cook Inlet. It is also across the street from
2) Pablo's Bicycle Rental, where you can rent a tandem bicycle to ride with your partner's mother, who has a bum ankle and cannot front the full weight of a typical bicycle without experiencing searing leg pain. You can also talk with a 30-something, mostly queer gentleman from Mexico-cum-San-Diego who, while adjusting your bike seat with a lug wrench, will look up at you, crack a smile with his wrench between his legs, and say "I can't work my tool right!" Family, family everywhere.
3) If you ride down the hill to the inlet from Pablo's and make a right into Resurrection Park, you will find the Anchorage Coastal Trail, which runs for 11 miles down the bay, past mudflats and high cliffs and flora with leaves the size of dinner platters. While on this ride, you may pee in the woods and be happened upon by British tourists while zipping up your jeans. If this happens, you must smile pretty and walk right quick back to your tandem bicycle and proceed to dance like a back-up vocalist for Sly and the Family Stone, to disarm them and make them forget that, a moment ago, you were urinating three feet from where they are now standing and that, if the wind blows correctly, they may be able to discern that you have been drinking far too much coffee, because every three blocks in the metro area there is a
4) roadside, drive-thru espresso stand, with an appropriately kitschy name, typically derived from regional wildlife that will kill you if you stand in their way -- bears, moose, and the like. They are all independently owned, and none of them serve soymilk or regular coffee. Do not be disappointed, for this may be the only time you can buy espresso at a place which utilizes the pun 'calf-e' and believes correctly that this makes good business sense.
5)Good business sense, in Anchorage, seems to rely on keeping a high quota of local microbrews on the menu. Drink them all, and ride the bike trails home. You will not be sorry, although you may be mildly injured. Unless you are the victim of a bear attack, in which case you will be either comatose or dead. And then, you will have died a happy wo(man). I've also heard mace works on bears, if you spray it right in their snarly faces and run really fast. Try that.
5) The world's 101st largest bear is housed downtown, at the 5th Avenue Mall, taxidermied in an enormous glass case which forms an immediate border between the luggage and shoe departments in JC Penney's. Go there. You will be awe-inspired, amazed, and surely swayed to buy a duffel bag or a pair of sensibly heeled loafers.
6) Also, in the 5th Avenue Mall, on the bottom of four floors in the middle of a shoe store, a woman died by her own hand. She threw herself off of the fourth floor balcony, and the piles of Lugz did not break her fall effectively. Alaska has a very high suicide rate on account of a severe lack of Vitamin D and because Inuits have a very difficult time metabolizing alcohol and white folks cannot deal with living in a place wherein they are so obviously complicit with a genocidal imperial legacy. Many Alaskans are libertarians, which means they do not do well with feelings of guilt. For them, the motto is "give me imperviousness or give me death." Most choose the former, but there are a handful who go for the chalk outline.
7) If you have the opportunity, head to the combined bowling alley/laundromat/bar in Eagle River called "The Homesteader." It is the only bar in Eagle River (15 minutes north of Anchorage), and it is very busy. It has undergone three expansions in the last twenty years, and on any given night it is full of folks getting down to Cash/Carter, Usher, Little Richard, T-Pain, and Rihanna. The dance floor is sunken and smooth-waxed. A guaranteed good time. You can do your laundry afterward, pitcher-drunk on Pyramid Hefeweizen. Don't bother sorting your whites.
8) You may find yourself staying at your big brother's place, attempting to make friends with a cat named Emma, after a well-known and long deceased radical lady, who hisses at you when you tell her that she is misdirecting her kitten-rage, that you, a fellow prole, are not the enemy. She will begin to come around, particularly if you bring her outside and encourage her to do her kitty-business on the hoods of expensive SUV's owned by folks with outdated frontier fantasies of becoming forebearers of their own fiefdom.
9) You may also find yourself, noon-time, sitting in your brother's pajama pants thinking you should shower and take a bus somewhere you have not yet been, which is what you will do, as soon as you finish this coffee and blow your nose.

tell me everything you know about blast beats.

Okay.

"A blast beat is a drum beat, primarily used in forms of extreme metal, made with rapid alternating or coinciding strokes primarily on the bass and snare drum."

"Early blast beats were generally quite slow and less precise compared to today's standards."

"Typical blast beats consist of 8th-note patterns between both the bass and snare drum alternately, with the hi-hat or the ride synced."

"There are a number of different types of blast beats and variations within each type that make for a rather large arsenal of rhythmic textures and moods."

"If you need even more speed then try hitting the bass pedal twice in rapid succession."

"Listen to "Overkill" by Motorhead."

"The gravity blast involves playing a basic Euro-blast pattern on the kick and cymbal but using a one-handed roll technique using the snare's rim to create what sounds like a two-handed drum roll with only one hand."

"Make sure you stretch a bit before doing it for long periods of time because your hands might cramp up."



"its the same with blast beats as it is with running, you start out slow to get the technique in and get used to the motion and as you go on you can do it longer and longer and when your at a point where you can do it long (your choice) you can start working a little with speed."

"1. Blast Beats
the coolest drum beat ever created, used primarily in death metal and grind-core."

"Praise and worship the blast beats! They are Gods! and so are the people who play them."

whirlwind

days, these. Very old and true-hearted buddy up from Durham, NC, steering a black pick-up through the wilds of upstate and interior PA with a ladyfriend in tow to end up finally, wonderfully, crashing in the cordorouy-covered spare bed for four days, led to this, in roughly chronological order: a midnight dinner of soba noodles and sesame dressing; a drive down to the isle of Manhattan for lime popsicles in the Ramble, glorious vegan mock turkey mock thanksgiving dinners in the village, west, a ride uptown to revisit the tortorous youngster years with gloriously bereft sing-alongs courtesy of ani difranco, a ride down to Harlem to find friends and lovers stoop-sitting like profesh; informal contest to see how many watersports jokes can be made in one delirous midnight car-ride north, to home, with the company of deep-fried mock chicken and terrible kwikmart coffee and john darnielle belting in full-on stereospectrumstereophonic sound, busted sub-woofer be damned; no sleep, and no sleep, and no sleep, the best vegan chocolate cake in the world, and loading said buddys arms up with rubyfruit jungle, play it as it lays, white noise (brown, didion, delillo, respective) because it's good for her and she'll thank me for it later.

And now that the house is quiet save for the whirring of fans and the slow drip of sweat down my neck, it's time for book-cracking and brain-recovery.