A Report From the Field

Friday Night
The Wreck Room
Bushwick, Brooklyn
The band is Alien Whale
Alien Whale is played by Matt Mottel (Talibam!), Colin Langenus (ex-USAISAMONSTER), Nick (Necking)


There’s something inside my body that seems to prevent me from swimming like a whale. I think it would be like learning foreign grammar or belly dancing: teaching the hips something unexpected…I’d have to teach my hips not to exist. That’s impossible of course, but the humans in Alien Whale seem to have it done with the gusto of a rock fall.

1 hour back.
I’m bunched up, my chest one-third it’s usual size, on a desolate night-street near the basement of the bar in Fight Club. Somewhere nearby a plane is taking off unheard. I’m pressed by the ceiling of a maroon Dodge Caravan onto seventeen city-blocks worth of undelivered Vice Magazines. Traffic hisses outside and peace makes rounds like a nurse in the form of a pipe.

Periodically, I catch myself looking for snakes.

2 hours later.
I saw an alien whale
It spoke with itself without remembering
and then became a normal man

1.5 hours before.
Goddamn these men have their shit together. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m reaching for stars through a window. My hands have gone numb and I can’t feel the glass. Distribution? Income differential? Where, how, who to sign? I’m looking for signs and they’re goosing me like a flock of angry bats. Max Hodes got awful quiet, and then it all turned red.

It was normal social deference. I was ignoring the feeling of being tested. You know the average running-away-from-home-into-a-brick-wall feeling. It happens to most of you every day. It happens to me too. It’s probably just the color of the bricks becoming more and more interesting, but everything takes on a red hue and I can’t seem to breath enough, nor really take a breath. Time has stopped being behind me (so I know that the drugs have really kicked in. That’s still how I think sometimes: “the drugs,” as if they were a crowd of locals angry that I killed their god.) I forget my feet, loose my face running into a crowd ahead, and quietly rip my shirt open whimpering for sobriety to come back to the farm, like a dog missing its master.

“I wish I was having your experience.” Says Matt. He’s in the pack and misses no master.

Words are bones. These words are mostly a protuberant skull and hundreds of massive vertebrae. This could be the word of God. All experience is glorious, worthy, radiant, and to be shared. I think I’ve sown my lips shut. How would it be if I were instead a pressure cooker preparing to blow?

Only there’s no preparation. There’s no mind. There’s splitting open and there’s melting and there’s crisping in the hot sun and there’s the Ausberger’s squeeze machine and there’s the Rainbow Bridge, one hundred thousand miles long.

I don’t think about the whales. I’ve loved them all, humpback’s most of all, since I was conscious. I sanctified my love for cetations, the greatest of all creatures, with a serious of National Geographic documentaries on behavior. Breaching, diving, singing, breathing. Thereby, I found my spirit guide when I was six years old. And so I worshipped Moby Dick, the hero of whales, and I sang, and I held my breath under water.

0.5 hours thereafter.
One foot in front of the other. I’m silent, drunk in a tunnel, gulping down dirty water. Not tripping, but high enough to view everything as being utterly surreal. There’s a crowd of people who are not next to me. There’s one sadly fascist woman guarding the door, demanding X’s on my hands, or retribution in the form of $5. Her game is Sad Resolution. Not playing, not paying, not getting paid. She’s a volunteer and doesn’t see the use. She has beautiful lips.

A desert island ties off the room and there are mirrors behind me. Music schism and shining all over. Oh what will become of me Sad Shark says to Inflatable Girl. Nothing investigated so thoroughly as this journal. A sad bit of wisdom…forthcoming. Music from the PA: distant thuds timed oddly with broken kneecap salad. No windows or walls to speak of. Flattened rest-of-space-for-eternity. Just imagine that all space in the third, fourth, and fifth dimensions was compressed into a cube measuring 20x20x12 and that you reside at the very center, covered in musicians who have their shit together more than you ever thought you wanted to. One the one hand, its like swimming in an orgy of slugs. On many hands, it’s like being in school: like a punch to the heart.

The room says “Caught in a Trap” in the fine print.

The ground reflects the sky above like a sheet of ice. Harsh Captain of the Nazi Guard voices hiss and blow messages of exultant hatred. Get back you devils.

Then the DJ drops the beat. GOOD GOD! FUNK IS THE WAY OUT! EVEN ZAPPA-LEVEL FUNK BUGGERY DOES THE TRICK!

Pawn takes bishop; chatter takes clarity.

Sad and misfortunate weakness, says the weak, to be the showman. That’s me.

Twenty minutes have gone by.
Note #1, is like an ice pick to the forehead.

Freakish paranoia is as one leads oneself through a rocky tunnel.

I think I’ll call this “Reports From the Field.”

Greater sensations of floating. This is about suspension, off world in a greater way…but first! There are choices to be made. Feed back! I’m jamming back. Not I but WE! WE WE WE! Fusion ritual! Park! OUT OF THE PARK! Galactic tribunal to iron horses. Fireside chats with dad about venereal disease. Fuzzy disturbance in wave emissions of standing water. Rise feather light. Themassivemovements of a whale sped up, from human perspective, in the temporal perception of the slowly decaying beast. Coming to a rest can take the bat of a sun’s eyelid. My poor Yankee heart doesn’t know how to cope with riding into a dream like thunder.

AVAST ye great nothing! Stand astern may I yet be done with you in some more violent fashion. Here my call! THIS IS THE RIGHT TIME.

Almost. Its arrival is nigh. AND THERE’S NO PREPARRING YOUSELF. YOU MAY FIND YOURSELF IN THE END-TIMES OR THE BEGINNING OF SOMETHING FAR MORE MONSTROUS AND DOWN!

Time. Now playing on me a dream of doubt repeating, like a string of stamps laid over one another.

JUMP! LEAP! STOMP AROUND FOR JOYE! In transient space and moral conflict, jump these bones out of contraction. Breath perfumed steel and the tarnish of ancient blades.

Could Colin Langenus be the next Hendrix?

A horde of excuses wanders in and settles into my lap. I take them in and feed them, and keep them as my own. What they came in for, I no longer remember.

They are playing the “I’m Missing It Blues.”

I woke up this mo’nin,
Tim had passed me by.
I woke up this mo’nin,
Time had passed me by.
But I said, “Time you Keep On faster.”
As I watched her flying by.

But wait! There’s hope for you yet!
But wait! There are no easy answers!

Slap me out lordy slap me out. Lift me down from atop this down n’ out. Bear my body. Shout! O lordy.
O
O
O
O
O
O…
Lordy.

Pull the string. The cow says the sign says “This way to the jam.” This is your time, if you want it.

Discord closes doors. Hit them running with the Jam or you fall away and produce a racket like this: baby birds pulling themselves back to the nest by the points of their soft beaks. Sometimes we’re lost. It can be like meeting long, lost family in a rotating restaurant. Togetherness comes on like a symptom as the lights go down. Wrenched gut, vomiting, shitting myself, bleeding out the ears.

The moral of the story is that one can give, give, give. “The love you take is equal to the love you make.” – the Beatles
Therefore, the new golden rule must be: make
















love!

Now, put them on the same page.

End music. End scene.