Every sound
is your sound
Every car
is your car
Every man
is your man
But me…

I don’t sleep
I can’t drink
I can’t write
I don’t think

Take some time to heal, boy
Find out how to feel joy

posted by Matthew

-

HYPOTHESIS:

People don’t change. They just come to see the same actions in various lights.

EXPERIMENT:

 

OUTCOME:

 

CONCLUSION:

posted by Matthew

I have to get all this down before the feelings aren’t so strong.

This morning you told me you love me. I didn’t expect it. It felt like a new feeling I had never felt before: closure.

We didn’t work. It took me six months after I broke up with you this time for the sadness and the pain to knock me out. So unexpected. Where had it been? Where had I been? You’d been through the pain months ago. Over the course of four and a half years we’d broken up and gotten back together a few times. Things just never completely worked out.

But this morning, we talked about when we first met, we talked about some good times. We talked about the things people say to each other in a healthy relationship, things we either forgot or didn’t want to say in our relationship.

We laughed at your dorky pajamas and my recent emotional distress. We hugged and kissed and cried.

I want to write everything I remember about being close to you, holding you. Your body, I can still sense it. You are beautiful.

I think we let each other go this morning. It wasn’t a revelation. It was just time.

I hope I’m not burning a bridge by not contacting you for a while. The last thing I want to leave you with is more feelings of me not being reliable. Somewhere I know that if you need me for something, you wouldn’t hesitate to call. I’ll be there.

It feels like I’m growing and becoming nicer. You are the nicest person in the world, I truly believe this. You have loved me more deeply and strongly than anyone ever has.

I have so much love and respect for you.

I have a new sadness tonight. A sadness that honors our togetherness and its place in our pasts.

I’m sure our stories will intertwine again, and soon enough. A month, a year? Who knows what that looks like? It’s not important.

Your love and your being have made me into a better man than I was four years ago.

I am honored to have shared the time we did. I will always honor that time.

Thank you, Katie.

posted by Matthew

The Continuing Adventures of Womp-Wompa

posted by Matthew

This love was a steal, some say a grand bargain
Now we’re just some silhouettes on a recycled paper target
Poor and billionaire alike, they take their aim and fire
Who cares where we run as long as it’s for miles and miles

Take the love and run, girl
You take love on the run

This thing called Forever, it’s got a lot of false starts
That leave us squinting at the little
Carbon copy imprints on our hearts

Take the love and run, girl
You take love on the run

You’ve got mine and I’ve got yours
Funny how we always turn our backs
When we finally reach the shores

I took your love and ran, girl
I took love on the run

The last
place they’d look
The first
place we met
Meet me there at midnight
Then we’ll take our flight

Let’s take our love and run, girl
Let’s take love on the run

posted by Matthew

I read a comment recently that wanted to disqualify the TV show Caprica as a gone-too-sooner based on its merits that it “creepily sympathized with terrorists.”

On Caprica, the first few episodes were brilliant. Without revisiting the show, I can’t be sure why the last few suffered. I seem to remember an early cancellation condensed the editing, killing the pace. But that’s behind the scenes stuff.

If you found the terrorist sympathy creepy, all I can say is that I don’t think the teenage rebels and whatnot were meant to be all that likable in the first place. I think sympathy (really, empathy) with characters emerges mostly because they are just people with a camera focused on them. TV shows that reveal subversive motivation aren’t necessarily espousing an ideology. Sympathy is a human reaction. Can a work of art, propaganda or commercialism ever truly be sympathetic? More to the point, can a work of fiction?

posted by Matthew

I’m not all that superstitious. I don’t knock on wood. I don’t throw salt. I don’t cross my fingers. I avoid black cats only because I’m allergic.

Contrary to all that rational thinking, two key superstitions persist for me.

The first has to do with creativity. When I have a new idea for a story, I daydream about it, sometimes unintentionally. It plays out in my mind’s movie theater. When this happens while driving, I can pass exits. While showering, I can run out of hot water. When a deadline for my day job presses on me, I can get really creative (and Kevin Costner-esque in terms of runtime).  There’s excitement, too. Sometimes I talk about it before I write about it. I share less than I did in the past. I’ve cultivated this belief that sharing stories before you had finished a proper first draft killed them. There is this finite amount of energy infused with incipient stories, so I believe, which can be entirely depleted upon writing it or gabbing about it. The writing usually creates more energy for writing, while the gabbing just ruins everything. It’s absurd, ridiculous. If anything it’s my excuse why I’ve never had any work published or produced beyond a blog post or letter to the editor. I am afraid that sharing certain ideas hurts the possibility of them coming true. Superstition!

I just returned from a trip to Los Angeles. It wasn’t a trip full of jaw-dropping epiphanies, but it did reinforce some ideas in my head. I want to be a TV writer. I probably need to move to L.A. to get that train chugging. Writing professionally, it used to be this big romantic lifestyle, always somewhere in the future, but attainable. I’ve spent my twenties not writing professionally. There was blogging and journalism and the little adverts here and there, the online review responses and the copy in the emails. No substantial storytelling.

The second superstition is similar to the first, but applied to real life plans and a particular character flaw I perceive in myself. When I’m ready for a life change (seems to be a 2-3 year cycle), I start telling everyone about my new plans. I can’t help myself. Even though I believe talking about these plans will jinx them. Also, I just despise talking and not doing. Not to mention when you tell everyone around you that you may be leaving, it’s basically telling that person, no matter how new to your life they are, that your relationship with them doesn’t really matter. Is that always the case? No, of course not. I want to move. I want to tell people I’m planning on moving. I’m excited at the idea. I like talking about it. Clearly, I can’t help talking about it. I just feel like a dick after I do.

I’m going to be 30 much (much, much, much) later this year.  Everyone around is already tired of hearing about it. I’m tired of hearing myself say it. There’s the possibility if I keep talking about it, maybe I’ll stop aging. But that’s just silly superstition (boom, full 180 from the beginning, you knuckleheads and hooligans).

posted by Matthew

First 24 hours in Los Angeles observations…

A flat land surrounded by cardboard cutouts of mountains.

Traffic, motorcycles weaving in and out.

Couldn’t find In And Out Burger, so went to Clayton’s apartment and walked to Umami Burger Los Feliz.

Clayton doesn’t like lists.

Betty the Gamecock at Home Sweet Home with Clayton and newly met Diamond plus a Jennifer Lawrence look alike sighting I said looked nothing like Jennifer Lawrence.

Plenty of bars surrounded by young people.

Noticing these semi-funky au naturel haircuts with not a lot of gel having very recently taken to my own first semi-funky haircut some may call hipster, but it’s inspiration is far more embarassing: click here to find.

Beer spilling at Cha Cha Lounge then a food truck everyone ate quesadillas except for me (I have now found bladder relief in back alleys of both NYC and L.A.)

posted by Matthew

from my measured mound of clay
within the divot top
I pulled
I plucked
that arachnid
granddaddy long-legs

across me wires
spool and unspool
each thin touch anoints
the skin beneath

he will come
i cast him out
he will come

a pleasurable exile
a victimless conspiracy
the stick throws the dog

posted by Matthew

By the time Ramona Falls took the stage at Snug Harbor in Charlotte last night, Ash Wednesday had given way to Valentine’s Day.

There are skulls everywhere in this pirate-inspired venue. Hanging on the walls, hiding in the rafters, on flags and in pictures, even the spinning disco ball has taken on the form of a skull. But there were also leftover Mardi Gras beads everywhere. Some even draped over the horns of a steer skull mounted on the wall. It was a bit unnerving. But I wasn’t going to let someone’s skull fetish or my own (apparently, easily evoked) fear of mortality spoil my excitement.

I walked in to the sounds of the refreshingly counter-intuitive Social Studies, everyone’s favorite subject in school (admit it, because it was the easiest), and now a band that’s putting out music that on paper shouldn’t work. The confident lead singer with her deep, sultry voice and some Mates of State meets The Doors on keys, a soulful guitarist (who deserves a few more solos during shows), tight on drums and a seamless bass. Your homework: Check out their video  for Terracur, the best of the band’s individual talents working together are on full display. Also on display is their ability to make dudes jump off high things in their tighty whities.

On stage, both Social Studies and Ramona Falls rely on lots of masculine, often heavily-percussive rhythms juxtaposed with soul-bearing, vulnerable lyrics you almost always need to Google and read as poetry. Maybe that’s the current Modus operandi for indie rockers, but the crowd last night wasn’t being served any brand of formula. It was raw and intimate, a treat for the 50 or so in attendance.

It’s difficult to pin down the influences of Ramona Falls, a more conceptual outfit.

Brent Knopf, lead man of Ramona Falls, is an auteur singer-songwriter. Watching him on stage, you sense a mind full of creative carousels, cogs and whirligigs working in synchronicity. A leader and a director, during the show Knopf’s band mates looked to him for inspiration and collaboration.

As a producer of intricate, dense tracks, Knopf is perfection-oriented. At one point I noticed him give a wonky speaker above his head a stern look, maybe even a bit of a stank-eye. Had he willed this malfunctioning object to correct itself, as if by magic? Telepathic implications aside, the guy is just damn good at his job.

Late in the set, Knopf announced they were going to play a cover song. Granted, Charlotte isn’t known as a music town. But it was at this point something very special in the music world was about to happen, and the city may have been on the verge of devolving into Bane-like chaos for it. The cover song was ’Wet and Rusting,’ a track from the Menomena album Friend and Foe.

There are a few of you out there. You know who you are (that would be me). We sappy few who pine for the rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub days of Knopf’s former band Menomena, which still lives on despite his departure. But it’s time we moved on. Valentine’s Day falls during Lent this year. Time to give something up and find a new love.

At one point, swaying to the songs, I looked around and all the skulls dressed in all those beads didn’t seem so morbid.

From the ashes of the first iteration of Menomena, we’ve got a new Menomena and now Ramona Falls. (If you hadn’t noticed, we’ve been hurtling toward this forced Jesus/Phoenix metaphor since the first sentence.)

What a Valentine’s gift to treasure: Quantity and Quality.

posted by Matthew