Vlasta called me. How she had my number is anyone’s guess. She called me and I was in Prague. Why I was in Prague is anyone’s guess. Come pick me up at the bus station. That’s what she said. Or it wasn’t exactly what she said, but it was close. How close is anyone’s guess.

So I arrived to whichever place she had declared and I picked her up. What did I pick her up in? I picked her up in my arms with an embrace. After all, it had been 18 years since we’d seen each other. She had aged, but not as much as I’d’ve imagined. She was still fit and only mildly crinkled. A good portion of Moravian women age very mildly. Apparently Vlasta was one of them. The first thing she did was offer me a cigarette. I was surprised and guffawed in my socially inappropriate way, that way that the truly important people in one’s life don’t mind. When did you start smoking? I asked. She replied I never started. I bought them for you. Ah yes! During a portion of the epoch when we spent time with each other, I was indeed a smoker. No longer, though. So I guffawed again.

Her Moravian village had been decimated and her family and friends liquefied. She was off gallivanting around in Zlín and therefore missed all the fun. The biggest question in my mind was Why did you choose to contact me instead of multitudinous others in Prague and elsewhere that you know? She said to me It was simply an arbitrary choice. I guess that my name came up in the Lottery of Vlasta. She said to me I’ve spent my whole life meticulously planning every year and every month and every week and every day. All of my efforts are now patches of greasy residue on plots of impotent land. From now on, I make each decision with the roll of a die and I will stay its course.

Kino Aero had been transformed into a hybrid cinema / bar / hotel. We went there. Why we went there I certainly can guess. One of my most embarrassing failures of memory during that epoch of wandering which was my life in the early ’00s was in Kino Aero. I sat with Jana One awaiting the start of a film. Which film it was is anyone’s guess, but I’d bet on Almodóvar. There was an “Almodóvar” festival at the time and Jana One was obsessed with Spanish “culture”. Personally, I’ve come to find Almodóvar’s films irritating at best and repellent at worst, but that’s for some future blog entry (or not). I any case, we sat waiting for the film to start and our protagonist (Vlasta) was sitting with a few friends (who apparently didn’t win the Vlasta lottery) in the row directly behind us. She caught my attention and presented me with a question that I don’t remember after all these years. The point is not the question she asked, however, but the fact that I didn’t remember her at all. My mind was, as some hick in South Carolina that I know likes to say, fuzzled back in that epoch.

It was an embarrassing moment. It still lingers with me.

Vlasta and I sat in the lobby of the transformed Kino Aero. After only a few moments of tiny talk, we fell into a so-called passionate kiss. More like a lustful kiss. Passion and lust are entirely separate phenomena. One should remember that. So, after only a few instants of miniscule talk, we fell into a lustful kiss. We groped each other. We would have gone all the way were in not for the grunting and the clearing-of-the-throating of the receptionist, who then asked if we were about to hrbit. She offered us a room, which turned out to be more of a closet with a cot and I suppose we did hrbit, but that is where the dream terminated.

Why it terminated there is anyone’s guess. Fuck um.

On the drive up to Lubbock from Seminole today for my father’s surgery, I was suddenly gripped by the memory of lying on my back on the floor of Jenn DuBois’s apartment in Galveston. Dave was also present, and later that same evening he appropriated my truck. And luckily, my SHOVEL, which incidentally was one of my brilliant gifts for the beginning of the 23rd year of my life, was in the “toolbox” that stretched from side to side in the bed of the truck. More about that later.

I was lying on my back in Jenn DuBois’s apartment in Galveston. Her stereo system was in front of me, or more accurately, in front of my feet. I was listening to, at some volume, most likely, Here Comes the Flood by Peter Gabriel (the version from his first solo album). I was addled by alcohol. I was proclaiming over and over this is the best song in the history of the universe or some such rot. There’s a high probability that I believed it during that series of moments.

Though I am not completely certain, this was the same evening when Dave “borrowed” my truck to go driving on the beach. I was possibly too addled by alcohol to join him, so I hung out with Jenn. However, I have no clear recollection. During Dave’s adventures on the beach, he got my truck STUCK. That was when the shovel came into play.

I miss that guy.

My name is Shambal Brambel and I enjoy spiking peoples’ urine samples with drops of vodka. You may ask why I would do such a seemingly cruel thing. Well, personally, I don’t find it cruel at all. I consider it one of the most benevolent acts I’ve ever participated in. Participate may be the wrong word to use since I carry out the whole shebang myself, but I shan’t edit the previous sentence because I can also consider the job (spiking peoples’ urine samples with vodka is no longer simply a thing or an act - it is my profession) a way to take part in the humanity around me.

Those that are my victims, though victim may be the wrong word to use since these humans receive a blessing, bring urine samples into our lab for various reasons, but mostly because they are forced to by their employers because in the past they have either been accused of being a “drug” addict or some sort of diseased misfit. I ensure that the results from our “lab” guarantee that the employers continue to find the victims or the blessed soiled. Consequently, the blessed are terminated of their employment - an employment that wasted their time and energy in any case. So, you see, these humans now have all the time allotted them each day to spend with their loved ones or to make art or to worship goats. In other words, they are once again a beneficial part of society.

A side affect of my calling (it is more than a mere job - in fact, it is a direct order for the almighty that I carry out my duty of spiking urine samples with vodka) is that the other “workers” in my lab, all of whom have been at some point in the past some sort of “drug” addict or diseased misfit, in the end cannot resist the temptation and binge on the vodka tainted urine. They stumble helplessly around the lab as I sit in my corner, contented that my deeds bring a soft, gentle glow to the galaxy.

Eventually, these hapless lab-rats of mine wean themselves off the alcoholic urine by moving step by step over to alcohol-free urine. They’ve even opened a “bar” around the corner that sells it on tap. Where they get all that urine, I am not tangibly sure, but I can probably guess.

The world and even the galaxy or so-called universe is a better place.

We extracted cases and cases of jars from the dispensa and from the two storage units on the other side of the finca. Some had been placed there nearly two decades ago. They were cherries and figs and myriad other comestibles preserved for an unknown future in this realm by a person who no longer lingers in said realm. She was a product of another time, of a generation and a mentality that never accustomed itself to an abundance now taken for granted.

We forced each jar open with tines of forks and now cracked blades of cheap dinnerware. Contents were poured into buckets. One by one, I lugged these buckets to the stream that flows beside the house, that flows to river Tirón and finally is lost forever to the Cantabrian Sea. I tipped the buckets and hours and days and weeks and months of work slopped into the water.

It was work with intent but in the end no purpose. It was work with no purpose but its own doing, and later, its own undoing.

I listen to Arve Henriksen as I sit in the Sala de Estar in Frezzie. The house and its surroundings are brimming with various in-laws. There must be over a thousand here. I’m not sure what the food and / or water is laced with that allows them to breed in such a fashion. Now that I think of it, it may not be the food and / or water at all, but the over-exposure to radiation which is present in the Mediterranean environs. Whatever it is, in-laws sprout from every crevice. They don’t even have to pipe each other to create offspring. I suppose this is also an aftereffect of the radiation. Many of them breed by spores and / or budding. Perhaps they are evolved motile barnacles.

Though I’ve waited until now to write about it, over the epochs I’ve considered what simplicities I need to stay content with life - to, as it were, keep the existential beast at bay. What is my metaphorical anti-depressant medication? Jesus and Allah and Ba’al help me were I ever to take the real things. They suck away individuality like a fat dude living in Myrtle Beach sucks away the meat of an oyster, leaving only its lustrous shell. Lustrous, maybe, but still a thing of pure surface aesthetic. Ah, but that is a subject for a future time, or, in fact, maybe for no time at all as I think I just summed up my opinion of anti-depressant medication. So!

Over the epochs I’ve considered what simplicities I need to stay content with life - to, as it were, keep the existential fat dude living in Myrtle Beach at bay. I admit that it is not hard for me, as long as I am given enough leash by either my personal environs or any addictions that play havoc with me from time to time when I am alone.

Yes, it is simple. But there is a very distinct division in my mind between planning the simplicities that keep the existential escalator ride to the pit at bay and the reality of making said simplicities come alive. I believe at one point in my chequered (in cheques of grey - no no - never just black and white or even the red and the black) past, I could lie awake on my floor or bed or couch in the morning and dream, wakingly, of what I might accomplish. I could be a sort of idea man, so to speak. The thoughts of the simplicities I could accomplish kept me content through at least the morning. I dare not think that just morning dreaming put me in some sort of euphoria, because most of the portion of my chequered past of which I am writing was riddled with “depression” - or at least malcontentment.

Epochs passed. Yeah, I still lie for a bit on my bed or on my couch or on my bench or floor and wonder about the simplicities I could bring to life, but I do not do it for long. Best get up and write a poem. Best rise from the murk and compose a few bars of music. Best wrest myself from the morning’s fog and type this Martenblog entry. Having done any one of these things, everything else comes easier throughout the day - and this includes further creativity.

I must stress one thing. I don’t worry too much about the “quality” (always relative to my view in any case) of the morning simplicities I bring to life. They can always be used as raw material no matter their “worth”. The act of not just being an idler - an idea man - but a being that forms a few simplicities from nothing, shuts the existential maw of infinity away. Shuts it away for at least a bit - though never perpetually. Possibly only the dreaded path of medication could shut it away perpetually, but then where would the fright and the friction be that is essential for morning frissons?

So, Mirka was driving. I don’t know the make and / or model of the vehicle because (one) I am oblivious to the automobile world and (two) everything else happening may have been a bit distracting. In the passenger’s seat was an abomination. What sort of abomination was it? It could have been a very kind abomination for all I know. I am unsure. Whatever personality traits it had, it was still an abomination, and I’m not only stating that in regard to its appearance. There was a particular smell. It wasn’t exactly a stench, but had a way of worming itself into the molecular structure of the atmosphere itself. It spoke from time to time, but only to Mirka, and in a guttural tongue unlike Czech or Spanish or English or any other language I’ve heard in the last few millennia.

So, grunt grunt uggh nngh fffmmevv it said. It may have also said ffmpeg, pronounced as a single syllable, but I cannot recall clearly.

So, grunt grunt uggh nngh fffmmevv indeed.

Mirka always politely replied to the abomination, but in Czech, as it is her so-called mother tongue.

In the back seat, where we certainly belong, sat Christian and I. We discussed Steely Dan. In fact, we were listening to Steely Dan. Steely Dan, much like the not-quite-stench of the abomination, wormed itself from an unknown sound source into the molecular structure of the atmosphere. The album was either The Royal Scam or Countdown to Ecstasy. At certain moments, we were both listening carefully, but at others, Christian insisted in singing some song from the Aja album OVER the music that had already wormed itself into the molecular structure of the atmosphere. Doesn’t this sound like?… and he sang a bit from Peg or Black Cow.

At some point during this interchange between myself, Christian, the actual music that had wormed itself into the molecular structure of the atmosphere and Christian’s inner dialogue, Mirka, to whom I’d been oblivious for some time, assuming she was absorbed in the Czech-grunt exchange with the abomination, turned to me then indicated with a flick of her eyeballs Christian. She said, do what we talked about.

So, I did!

I quickly reached over Christian, who was still humming some other Steely Dan which was out of sync with the Steely Dan that had wormed itself into the molecular structure of the atmosphere, and opened the door. I gave him a shove and he went flying. Yes - flying. The outside was not a road or succession of fields or anything terrestrial, but instead a blackness dotted with debris. Christian joined this debris.

Cut to some time in the future. Mirka and I are enjoying tea. It is Hojicha. She asks me, point-blank: Is Christian still jetsam? I say: Yeah - as far as I know.

Good.

The following is from the book I’m currently reading:

Alice, as previously formulated, resided more in my memory than in the depleted original container.

I’m making note of this, or, rather, beginning a blog entry this evening so I can gunny it out on the morrow morn. Most likely, I’ll have finished the book, as I am close to the close and shall begin reading forthwith. Many fascinating ideas lie within, though I’ll most likely just touch on this one.

So who is this Alice, anyway? In Lethem’s As She Climbed Across the Table, the idea of absence is explored in depth. More specifically, the idea of replacing substance with absence is explored. The characters repeatedly substitute an intense yearning for something they cannot possibly have for something substantial that they already have as if the ineffable is always the more attractive choice. Philip, the protagonist, pines for Alice with whom he had a serious and seemingly satisfying relationship. Why does he pine for Alice? Well, Alice chose another over Philip, and as you may have guessed, this other is something Alice cannot possibly have. In fact, what Alice wants is the epitome of the ineffable, a tangible embodiment of nothingness. In the book, its name is, appropriately, Lack. Don’t be fooled by my superficial description of events. This no ordinary unrequited love story. “Lack” is a portal into the void. He is the result of a scientific experiment gone “awry” (actually not really awry, but that’s a close enough description for the moment).

Lack will not take Alice physically. His existence and passive rejection depletes Alice. As the quote states, she is a depleted container.

I look back on the elongated, twisty road my life has taken and find many Eidolons. These eidolons are, as the quote mentions, forms that reside in my memories. They are portraits, or rather timelines, of people captured from relations I had with them in the past. They are wholly incomplete novels. But, in a sense, to me they are wholly complete. They are complete in the sense that I’ll not read them to the end, or I’ve already read them to my perception of the end. I once had a series of discussions with Jayson about how the people one relates with in life are, indeed, like books. From time to time one takes them off the bookshelf, reads for a bit, and replaces them. I’d take the idea a bit further now and claim that the majority of these books are complete, at least to me. When I reach for one from the shelf now and again, it is to peruse parts that I’ve already read, to perhaps refresh my memory. New chapters do not exist.

So, the majority of my relations from the past - I’d say the vast majority - reside more in my memory. When I make efforts to reconnect with what’s left of the person, more often than not I am presented with an aforementioned depleted original container. Whether the container is actually depleted or not is an aspect of my point of view. It may be that the book corresponding to said person on my personal shelf is complete. Reconnection is pointless. Nothing more can be written. However, the books corresponding to said person residing on others’ shelves may be quite different. They may be far from complete. They may even be in the process of being written. BUT clearly for me, they are done.

This has been my recent experience in my attempt to reconnect with Sam, and it’s probably just as well. Two people sitting around talking about old times and only talking about old times doesn’t really constitute a relationship from my view. There is nothing new to read in the novel. One can reread such things alone.

I’m still straddling the towering wall that divides possibilities in most cases other than Sam’s. In a few, however, and happily however, my own shelved books of them have not been finished. Either I haven’t read to the end or blank pages await joint scribbling.

After much speculation over quite a bit of time, I’ve come to the conclusion that the “standards” of production concerning sonic “normality” are tricks. They apply to a very small percentage of the music making population. They have been refined over decades to appeal to the lowest common denominator. And refined even more now to appeal to those who consume music through streaming services.

Like most who are in the habit of composing and recording our own music, I have fallen for this trick time and again and I must untrain myself to hear “mistakes” in production values when they don’t correspond to what the most well-known masterers and producers of the day proclaim to be “correct”. I laugh and laugh at myself when I think more closely about it. Do I follow the guide of mainstream musicians to begin with? Am I an acolyte of the pop and rock or even electronica legends? Absolutely not. So why should I subscribe to the so-called legends of sonic “quality”, as well?

However, some ideas I shall of course adhere to as they provide for my own enjoyment of the music I lay onto the tape. Clarity within frequency range and separation in stereo space are some of these. I do want to hear what the instruments are doing. Other fads like extreme widening of synth landscapes and ducking of all “offensive” resonances can be consigned to the offal pit, though. After all, I know where the dump is.

Listening to Bob Drake or Captain Beefheart or even Jandek re-reveals my essence. They are good references time and again. In the end, my music will never be for the masses. Creating an aural sheen that glimmers for the masses is pointless and actually inappropriate and dishonest to artistic vision. Flavigula is outsider music, or as Herr Jayrope says: Extra Music. Though he signs it with one of those hashtag things. #extramusic.

To keep myself grounded, I shall make note of this blog entry and come back to it often.

I failed the universe’s tenuous strands that hold its gauze together two days ago when I did not write about the dream I had which featured not Lucía herself, but a physical search for where she might be. I used to have tangible address books and there were essential to me. They were sacred. Tangible address books! Ones one could actually touch! Imagine that! And one of these tangible address books still exists and it is in a box in the closet in my bedroom in Seminole. When I was last there in March, I did not peruse it. Next time I shall.

In any case, the dream of the search for where Lucía might be. Well, we know where she is at the moment or should be at the moment and that is in New York City. Her current position in space is immaterial, however, as she exists in another form in my dreams and in my memories or even in my life. There are two Lucías. One is (usually) in New York City. The other is still in Patagonia.

In any case, the dream of the search for where Lucía might be. The moment in the dream was brief. I was thumbing through one of my sacred address books and found her page of residence. Perhaps that page was also her location - not just New York City or Patagonia. Blurry scribblings surrounded her entry and to the left was a quote I had notated from Melanie. Are my eidolons merging?

In the dream, a scroll stretched between the two cottages. It was a stereotypically antiquated scroll - one you’d perhaps expect to see in a film about warlocks or fifteenth century reformists in the Kingdom of Bohemia. I specify fifteenth century reformists in the Kingdom of Bohemia because I spent one of my so-called former lives as a paramecium in the Kingdom of Bohemia and I clearly remember the Hussites using this sort of scroll as a symbol of additional “rebellion” against the Roman Empire’s obsession with bound books. The parchment itself was veined with creases in various shades of brown and grey and one could have thought the whole would simply come apart at these veins were one to take the scroll from one side and from the other and gently pull. At my end of the scroll, in my cottage, a portion, even a great portion, was still rolled. I slowly fed the parchment into the roll at the same time that Lucía unrolled her portion.

She sat on the floor in the second cottage. The distance between us was immeasurable in the manner that only distances in dreams can be immeasurable.

On the veined parchment of the scroll were names and descriptions of teas. The teas were innumerable in the manner that only teas in dreams can be innumerable. Though I couldn’t see the writing from her point of view, I knew that for her, it was aligned “right way up” in the same way it was for me, somehow transformed as it slowly passed through the distance between cottages. We were discussing the teas.

The discussion was possible because of two small intercom boxes fixed to the floor near each of us. These intercom boxes were the sort that I soldered together as a child in the washing room of the house in Fort Stockton, Texas, which was also the house in which I first “met” Lucía via ICQ on my parents computer that now surely sits decaying for thousands of years in a vertedero surely reserved solely for antiquated computers created specifically for meeting sixteen year old girls from Argentina.

In fact, the intercom boxes appeared to be the exact ones that I soldered together in the washing room in that house in Fort Stockton. Their plastic was yellowed with age and pocked with burn marks from a soldering iron in the manner that only plastic intercom boxes in dreams can be yellowed with age and pocked with burn marks from a soldering iron. Along with the scroll, stretched between the two cottages was a thin wire, unsupported by anything, apparently connecting somehow the two intercom boxes. Her voice was crackly. I supposed mine was, as well. Additionally, a third voice could be heard faintly from time to time appealing that we use open-source software instead. I assume this detail of the dream emanated from the article I read yesterday concerning Session Initiation Protocol.

The teas were “formatted” on the scroll in a font that I can attest, as an ex-paramecium in the erstwhile Kingdom of Bohemia, did not exist in the fifteenth century. Their names were neatly centered and their descriptions and historical origins placed in paragraphs below as if some Hungarian design guru had fiddled with the html and css for scores of months before submitting them to the time travelling monks who took them back to the Hussite world. With partially broken-up voices amid gentle maelstroms of static, we discussed each tea until at last we reached Lapsang Souchong.

At this moment in the dream, the words on the scroll began to magnify. I was somehow being inserted into the parchment. Everything swelled until the particles of ink surrounded me. However, I could still hear Lucía. She was talking about the idea of smoking tea leaves. She was talking about a fog of smoke that grew to finally envelop the swell of the horizon and the curve of the planet itself. Though I was tiny among particles of ink, and perhaps even one of those particles, I heard her. I also heard the gentle washes of static, whorling. I awoke.

I dumped a thought into my “Twtxt feed” (which needs a new name, as the original idea’s association with Twitter dissolved long ago) this morning concerning the drug problem in España. I don’t normally concern myself with such issues, but I’d had a conversation with Marisa, who is a partaker of Benzodiazepine, about the fact that Spain is shoulders and torso above all other countries on this ball of steel and greenery in the consumption of said chemical.

My comment addressed social pressure, and specifically social pressure concerning appearance. You see, Spain is like a huge American High School. Everyone is under constant pressure to fit in to some sub-culture or another, or even to fit in to the micro-social groups of their work or even family. And absolutely everything is firstly about immediate appearance. The amount of time that humans here spend sculpting their looks according to myriad (and sometimes contradicting) norms is ludicrous to me. Time otherwise that could be spent in processes of creation or compassion or worshipping goats is simply WASTED with the only immediate apparent byproduct being anxiety. Excellent! What a way to live!

The stereotype of relaxation in the sun of which the Mediterranean is branded is clearly a hoax. Or perhaps it is true of those who are only intermittent residents. The populace at large live in a daze of medication without which they could not live a so-called normal life. Perhaps Spain is simply a vast loony bin. Perhaps the whole Mediterranean coast is. Somehow the irony amuses me, but, has I said in my “Twtxt feed”, with a furrow on my brow.

I blame it wholly on superficiality and the pressure to be accepted into WHICHEVER group, clique, or sect. I’ve noticed over time that there is a plague of extroversion in this land. Or, more specifically, introversion is stamped some kind of mental illness whereas obviously the opposite is the problem. The majority lack the ability to exist in solitude. In some cases, even for a single day.

The furrow relaxes.