Cheap Acoustic Guitars, Your Expensive Art Books, Superglue Callouses, and Joseph Cornell

I recently mail-ordered a forty-five dollar beginner’s acoustic guitar from a discount music store online—one of those surplus places—I imagine there are thousands of Mexican and foreign-made guitars hanging in, well, hangars, for miles on end, the whole place smelling of pine, cedar, and rosewood, as they gather dust, become birdnests or squirrel hovels, and hang there in wait like a mobile attack vehicle from Star Wars with its droid battalions waiting to be deployed like a sonic army of bad cover songs and the myriad complaints of the new guitar player trying to learn major chords without the buzzing sound of poor form before the technique and callouses are developed.

The guitar was brought right to my door by UPS, and it was warm from riding from Colorado in its triangular box inside of its rectangular box. I tore it open, tuned it up and bent the strings—the humidity of the travel in a tractor trailers and vans, and the Southern heat, had played hell on the lite gauge strings that come with the guitar—and after several tuning attempts and basic strumming, she decided to hold her voice and resonate as I proceeded to play for the next two hours solid. The strings were thinner than I prefer, so I got pretty cut up—I have not played regularly in a while.

So, I had a guitar a few years ago named Inez. She has come to a mysterious fate, which I will not get into, but, that being said, I decorated her lovingly with stickers, drawings, knife-cut engravings, a Joy Division wave motion sticker on the inside of her body which you could see through the sound hole, and she was a dreadnaught, so when I played her I was vibrated throughout my body like YoYo Ma furiously shredding at the Australian Symphony Hall on the last day of his life. I was immediately, being inspired by the lost and misplaced Inez, compelled to decorate the body of my new guitar in any ragtag way possible.

So, I went about the Guthrie mode in my own way of “This Machine Destroys Fascism”—at this point in my life, I am just trying to destroy personal depression. It just so happens that, a few hours after receiving my guitar, I was going to Fellini’s pizza in Atlanta and to Little Five Points. I thought about going by Junkman’s Daughter to get some stickers for the guitar, but they were closed by the time we made it over there. I decided to go into Criminal Records, which is just plain awesome anyway, but they didn’t sell stickers. I asked the guy at the counter if they had any free stuff then—nicest guys there in the world, and I left with American Football, The Cars, Criminal Record promotional stickers, etc. for my cheap guitar’s makeover into a Machine Which Destroys Personal Depression.

I got home and placed the stickers on the guitar rather unclimactically. I wanted to cover the whole thing up like an old suitcase stamped from every country on the planet in its travels. I started looking around my bedroom for options—I asked my roommate if she had any glue or Superglue, and yes, she did, so I was in business. It only seemed logical that I would grab a pair of scissors and start chopping images out of my giant one hundred and fifty dollar Joseph Cornell coffee table collector’s art tome.

If you are at all familiar with Cornell, you know that he would approve of me cutting up his own book of cut-up and found art in order to create something “artistic” or to transform the mundane—of course, a guitar is never “mundane”, but, at the price of a cheap guitar, at less than fifty bucks, you may as well personalize it and make it into a conversation piece or an outward expression of the graffiti of your mind. So, I got out the scissors and began tearing into Cornell’s tome, or collected by others tome, NAVIGATING THE IMAGINATION.

He was described as an “assemblage” artist—in terms of the boxes he made with found objects--which I think is a misnomer to a degree—he was definitely influenced by Surrealism and Dada, but I think that he saw his “assemblages” as manifestations of his own internalized world and not external shells of contemporary culture or modernism as some sort of critique or political statement. His work appealed to a childlike sensibility of the game or the diorama, and whereas Dadaists were attacking a war machine, per se, I always felt that Cornell was attacking the potential loss of innocence in us all.

Chopping up a very expensive art book to paste things on your guitar might seem like a bad idea to many of you—however, it seems like he is here with me, Mr. Cornell, and I think that, once I am done with the ritual of this guitar’s decoration, with its indie rock and Cornell encrustation, that I will have a machine which kills some personal depression. I haven’t done anything with scissors and Superglue for a long time. Interesting sidenote here—as I played with pasting things on the guitar, Superglue crusted over my new callouses, and so I could play even more.

Thank you, Joseph Cornell, for crusting my fingers with the epoxy maybe you even used upon your instrument[s]. Sorry to be so Romantic, however...

I have only gotten so far, but here is my Cornell guitar currently--

Civil War Pterosaur, A Comment on My Shoes, and The Descent

While doing some research for a fiction project I am currently writing, I came upon an interesting image, which you can find below, of a pterosaur, supposedly, photographed during the Civil War and surrounded by a small gaggle of Union soldiers. It is an immediately symbolic image, whether credible or not in terms of the capture of a real cryptobeast corpse, due to its nudge to the Old South itself being a dinosaur. I’ll get back to this—meanwhile, this is me as a pterosaur.

So, recently, I was walking about a mile from my house. I went into a convenience store to get a Powerade. There was a guy there, about six feet tall, scruffy, a bit husky, dark hair. He had a shirt on that he had modified—sleeves cut off, and the sides both slit down so that you could see the sides of his torso—to cool himself off, I guess. He was in line behind me, and it was a slow line. He made strange eye contact with me several times, and I could sense his unmitigated hostility. I’d say he was twenty-something, and I assessed him as a Cro Magnon asshole almost immediately, and, apparently, he was assessing me as some type of asshole as well. The word “asshole” being important, as you will read in a moment.

I walked out of the store, and he walked out after me and got in his Jeep, which was open, the flaps up and off. He bought a 12-pack of Bud Lite Lime, which I have, to my shame, must admit I have drank plenty of. He had a hound dog in his Jeep and a friend—some other dude—who I did not get a good look at. I started walking back home on the left side of the road. I could feel his visage like the sun on the back of my neck, so I turned around, and, sure enough, he was staring at me for some reason…

So, I start walking down the road, and he slows down and waves at me—I wave back.

Then, he says, “NICE SHOES, ASSHOLE.” And tears off rending his tires.

I couldn’t help it; I started laughing hysterically. I wasn’t sure if I should be insulted or baffled. My shoes were purchased for cheap at a thrift store, but I thought they were nice—I mean, hell, I was wearing them…

I remember seeing his tanned ribs in his fashionably torn white tee as he drove away triumphantly in his open Jeep after having insulted a roadside stranger. I also immediately felt better about myself as a “being” because, if this guy has to act like this, to experience some sort of catharsis, then I must not have such a bad life after all…

So, I was his Pterosaur. His cryptobeast. He could not define me. He could only insult me. Put my head on his wall. Colonize me from his Jeep. So strange. I mean, maybe he wanted to kiss me, and I would not oblige that, but I would give him a big in the rain Kevin Spacey American Beauty hug in the garage if that’s what he needed…I mean, I do what I can…

This all being said, I just watched THE DESCENT. My roommate and I are on a summer horror-flick binge as we grind towards Halloween. Well, this movie was set in Appalachia, if you’ve seen this film, and the female cast descends into a cave system to be attacked by troglodytes in a gore-fest of enjoyably horrifying and claustrophobic screams and scares. These trogs are also cryptobeasts, and they are blind, and they remind me of the Jeep-guy. Everything is consumable. Everything is food. Humans are expendable. We are not even human. The pterodactyls scream above the jungle. We walk home in our thriftstore shoes.

Anyway, these soldiers around their catch—the dinosaur, the Dead South, the Jeep-bigots, the ideas of terror above and underground, the hollow earth as empty as our hearts…

I wonder who will stand around my body after I am shot down. They will strip off my shoes. Find my wallet empty. Have their picture taken with me.

Because I will be a great mythic beast. A curse for your visage and memory. A thing you can’t forget, asshole.

Trump Disclaimer, Falling Asleep to an MK Ultra Youtube Documentary, Galaga And Subsequent Disturbing Dream About Courtney Love

On being asked already why I have not mentioned Trump or politics yet in my new blog, which is only four entries deep after I complete this one, I will say this: that man permeates way too much of our culture already, written or otherwise, and not in a positive way, and I am not going to use this space for a continuing discussion or analysis of his possibly country-crashing circus. It’s not that I am not extremely concerned—I won’t even emote here prolifically to qualify that. Suffice it to say, around Douglasville where I live, if the Trump bumper-stickers emitted tractor beams, we could all be towed wherever we pleased all over town without spending money on the constantly fluctuating prices of petrol. Regardless of how the Electoral College functions, or despite the value of the vote or vote-tampering by foreign bodies, the general scuttlebutt and feel of where I live demonstrates that the fellas and damsels around here wanted that man for their president. He has overtaken the White House like a cross between The Blob and Jabba the Hut, but my forum is no White House—it’s more like a dirty pub in the middle of an ancient library which serves great burgers and has an underground passage to an indie-rock club located in a planetarium/observatory, and I am sure he would be as uninterested in coming here as he is unwelcome to in the first place.

That being said, I fell asleep yesterday afternoon for a short nap—set an alarm and all that. I had begun listening to a Youtube documentary about MK Ultra programs in anticipation of the second season of STRANGER THINGS before my nap, and I lied on the couch and just let it keep going. The video was only about an hour long, and so was my nap, so it was over when I woke up to do some more work. About the time I fell asleep, they were discussing deprivation tactics in combination with sodium pentothal and LSD in order to manipulate, control, or create a Manchurian Candidate or for the purpose of truth serum technology for primarily Cold War spy issues and Russians…wait, now I am thinking of Trump again. Okay, so, here is the weird part…

While I power-napped, I had a weird dream about Courtney Love. She and I were lying on what seemed to be a hotel room bed, both naked from the waist up and talking. We were both very young in the dream—I am 45, and she is currently 53—and I remember thinking that we both looked pretty good. We seemed to be in our twenties in dreamland, but I was not aroused or attracted to her. She kept talking about going to Jack-In-The-Box, and I was explaining to her that we don’t have those around here—she was not pleased. She also mentioned that she needed to go makeup shopping, but that I need not accompany her, and we had a Galaga arcade terminal in the room in the corner, so I told her I was content to stay and play free Galaga. About that time, my dream ended due to the alarm, and the Youtube program had already proceeded to the next video in its endless MK Ultra loop, which, in and of itself, could most likely also be used in a deprivation experiment for programming an individual.

So, anyway, I had a random thought about Courtney Love and MK Ultra—like I said, it gets weird. I simply started googling Courtney Love and the CIA, MK Ultra, Project Monarch, etc. All sorts of stranger things emerged from the Cloud—by the time I spent about twenty minutes on this search, I went down some pretty dark territory which you can look into yourself. The gist of it is that Love’s father was involved with these programs, and the conspiranatics postulate that she was activated as a Manchurian Candidate to kill Cobain for his agenda of encouraging creativity, personal freedoms, gender equality and gender identity respect, and general punk rock aesthetic of free thought. Of course, the more I looked, and I forced myself to stop looking, the crazier it got, and I will warn you there is some dark territory to be found on this search. Oh, right, why is this weird?

I postulated that, obviously, one of the shows had been speaking about the MK Ultra/Courtney Love connection, and so I must have incorporated it into my dreams by over-hearing. I went back and re-watched the two programs which had played during my short nap—one in its entirety, and the other which had just begun when I woke. Neither of them ever mentioned Courtney Love, ever, but one of them did mention the use of psychedelic and rock music as means of mass programming of youth culture. I know I could have somewhere or subconsciously picked up on the supposed MK Ultra/Courtney Love connection—however, you need to understand—I was obsessed with Nirvana when Cobain died and was in college learning to play guitar by covering their songs. I read everything I could get my hands on about his death and have watched several documentaries over the decades, but it never occurred to me that he was a government hit by his wife who was manipulated from a young age by the CIA—you know what I mean? I never heard of this conspiracy theory before, and my friends will tell you I've been into conspiracy theories for entertainment value for years.

Then it occurred to me—the surrealism of the current White House and administration makes it possible for me to think, even on a subconscious level and in my dreams, that any weird conspiracy may be viable. Then, the zeitgeist which has already picked this up makes it pretty easy for me to, most likely, google anything beside or with “MK Ultra” and get a result—to test this, I just picked a random word from my brain—“kangaroo”. Unbelievable…see just the links below...there was a lot more...many more white rabbit holes, if you know what I mean...

Incidentally, I finish this entry just wishing that Galaga console was here--I've got my Catcher In The Rye, my tin-foil hat, and my cyanide fake tooth, but I just want my ship to get captured and rescued so I can kick ass in the bonus round.

Google Search of MK Ultra and Kangaroo

Google Search of MK Ultra and Kangaroo

Google Search for CIA and kangaroo

My Weyland Corporation Tee Shirt—“Building Better Worlds”

Recently, I acquired a tee shirt based upon the Aliens film franchise, and most recently referencing the films PROMETHEUS  and  ALIEN: COVENANT. I am the proud owner of a black tee inscribed with the WEYLAND-YUTANI CORP. logo and the phrase, “Building Better Worlds”. This shirt has garnished me lots of attention on the streets of Atlanta, Carrollton, Douglasville, and otherwise here in humble Georgia. Depending on the nerd demographic in any random location, it is an instant conversation piece.

First of all, let me be frank—I am completely against all policies of the Weyland-Yutani corporation as it is presented in the Alien franchise. I remember, actually, as a youngster, and after seeing the first Alien film, that I realized, maybe for the first time because of that film, the ruthlessness of corporate entities. In order to smuggle a hideous alien lifeform back to Earth, or otherwise, this company was completely willing to sacrifice its entire crew, or anything else that might get in the way of further study and utilization of the so-called Xenomorph. I am going to try to continue this blog without too many spoilers, but be warned now before you read another word if you have not yet seen ALIEN: COVENANT.

So, basically, from what I can gather so far in the Alien saga, in terms of the millions of years of history which it spans, after seeing ALIEN: COVENANT. an ancient giant race, the Engineers, created humans, humans created A.I., and then the A.I. combined a virus created by the Engineers with human DNA in order to create the Xenomorphs. The Weyland-Yutani connection has to do with the manufacture of the A.I. units and space travel, and because of the creation of the Xenomorph, they want to collect and, most likely, weaponize the species. I am not in favor of such company policy, or of weaponized genetics in general, but, I must admit, if the study of jellyfish could cure diabetes, I’d be all for it. Of  course, I’d rather it be cured by all of our fat asses laying off the Mountain Dew and Ben and Jerry’s. That being said, when I wear my Weyland-Yutani shirt, I do so with an immense sense of irony that a broke-as-a-joke poet like me is advertising for an imaginary futuristic technocracy which is also reminding me that these companies already exist and are funding expeditions into space outside of government regulations with A.I. science and the great singularity in mind. In terms of A.I., just go to the Google Artificial Intelligence site to have your mind blown: https://research.google.com/pubs/MachineIntelligence.html

Anyway, so whenever I go out with this tee on, Alien saga enthusiasts spark up conversations with me at random—on the sidewalk, at the entrances to eateries, at the convenience store, you name it. One fellow even said it’s pretty funny because people not getting the reference will simply wonder what company I work for or am advertising for. Weyland-Yutani is building better worlds because, as I wear its tee, I spark up conversations, by proximity, about intelligent extraterrestrial life, the dangers of artificial intelligence, the evils of the military-industrial complex, and the fact that Alien vs. Predator movies suck. On more than one occasion, people have told me that they want to go back and watch all of the Alien movies in order to re-establish the timelines and the references and the overall evolution of this Xenomorph species.

So, this tee shirt is building better worlds. If nothing else, I have seen it make nerds put their cell phones down for a minute and have a pretty decent, and sometimes outright, intellectual conversation with a stranger. It has opened doors to conversation with strangers. The only conversation a Xenomorph wants to have with you is the scream it hears when it rips out of your chest or implodes your skull with a retractable jet-action projected barracuda jaw attack. The only conversation a major interstellar corporation wants to have with you is why in the hell did you detonate its mining ship to try to save your crew and why did you behead its synthetic A.I. unit? Yet, the conversation surrounding the tee shirt is remarkably personal, humorous, curious, and human. That makes me very happy and more prepared, in some ways, to have nanobots and alien viruses use my body as a host to a possibly heinous and terrible future.

Rejection From Beijing, Golden Corral, and the Pleiades

Yesterday, at 6:30pm, I had an online Skype interview with a tutoring company located in Beijing. The questions were pretty pedestrian, and there were a few issues with language between the interviewer and I, but nothing major went wrong. I answered questions about my background and academic experience, teaching and education, and then taught a simple sample lesson, regarding English terms for the parts of one’s face, to the interviewer. Although she was rushing me and admitting to having many more teachers to interview, she complimented my smile, attitude, teaching method, use of slow and methodical speech patterns for the potential young student, etc. I was told that I would be informed within twenty-four hours of my employment or not with the company. When I finished, my roommate and I packed into the car to go out to eat…I think she was seeing it as a “celebration” for my interview, and, to be honest, I found myself very optimistic about getting the job.

We could not decide where to go, and I think she wanted some cheap steak—we were initially going to head to Atlanta to eat at The One-Eared Stag, but that was putting a potential hurting on the pocketbook. So, we opted for what I call “the trough”—the cafeteria style smorgasbord buffet extravaganza known euphemistically as the GOLDEN CORRAL.

I have often thought that the creators of this moniker for this restaurant were overtly making fun of its frequenters. In other words, they are directly referring to us as the cattle to be fed. However, it is true enough; people were packed into the place, and the bustle of cutlery ringing, dishes clattering, and the general din of conversation provided the public ambiance of the marketplace. I overheard several conversations of the tables around us—the couple behind me was speaking of a disgruntled alcoholic relative who “just can’t straighten out”, one toddler was screaming bloody murder through most of our meal, and two kids philosophically contemplated the existence of the chocolate fountain and all that could be dipped into its dark disgusting undulations. I had a bit of steak, salad, and steak frites on my "first" plate. I washed it down with about a half gallon of diet Coke. Our waitress was a salty old grandma who had the feel of a Marlboro ad from a seventies magazine. At one point, I went to go get another small piece of steak—the guy who was there initially was gone—a lady walked up to get my cut—I said medium, and she quickly hacked off a well-done burnt end and slapped it on my plate and turned and walked off. A cobbler couldn’t have done anything with that piece of leather, let me tell you. The A1 sauce concocted in hell couldn’t have softened that hockey puck of “beef". Basically, I felt pretty awful by the end of it, but I was full. Yes, I had bellied up to the corral. The place is definitely a microcosm of the humanity of Douglasville—primarily African-American, Hispanic, large families, and seemingly working class folks filling their plates with every eclectic offering you could imagine, from fish tacos to deviled eggs. 

We got back home close to 9pm, and I just had to check. I felt compelled. Sure enough, I did not get the job. It only took them under three hours to decide. I im’ed my interviewer to ask if she could illuminate to me why I did not qualify—after a long pause and staring at the dancing ellipses, she replied that I was over-qualified in many areas, but that I was under-qualified in teaching young children. Well, in their proposal for job eligibility, they never specified this issue. In any case, I was a bit disappointed and should have at least waited until morning for the news, but I am just neurotic that way.

So, I slept a few hours with the TV on and woke around 3am. I got into bed, but could not fall back asleep, just running with the marathon of anxiety in my mind. More like a triathlon, I’d say. I put on one of my favorite podcasts, and the most recent offering was about aboriginal Australian tribes and their genetic origins and mitochondria. The interview began to discuss the Pleiadians, alien migrants to earth from the Pleiades star system who appeared Nordic and could interdimensionally travel. The episode’s host and guest basically came to the conclusion that those who question things and who are “different” most likely have Pleiadian DNA in their systems, causing them to nonconform or to generally not fit into current ideas of civilization.

I started wondering how many Pleiadians were with me at Golden Corral—or, was I even one of them? Did I not get the job because I was a Pleiadian or because I was not one? Are the children I would have been tutoring Pleiadians, so they require more than I can offer? Could I cop out and just blame all of my life’s issues and failures on the fact that I was of a superior alien race and thus was never meant to fit into this society anyway? Do Pleiadians eat deviled eggs and drink from chocolate fountains? Do the seven stars apply their gravity to the soda machines, pecan pies, mashed potatoes, and baked spaghetti of the Golden Corral? Perhaps the drunk relative who can't straighten out is mourning his separation from his Pleiadian intergalactic true home?

In any case, I am stuck in this star system for now. Applied for four more jobs today. Graded papers online. Then wrote this to you.

Pleiades Myths

What IS An Iceberg Skeleton Key?

One, sometimes, has to wait ages to find a sole purpose. When I was growing up, a poison was in the air, or at least a vapor that I myself could not properly discern--it was the idea that one should follow one's dreams and, if someone did that, everything would work out like a personal Shangri La . Ninety per cent of Hollywood told me this, and being born in the seventies, in a post love-child haze, in a small Alabama town which I idealized, and not having the Vietnam War personally touch my immediate family--well, chasing my dreams seemed to be quite practical, a way out of a mill town or a family situation with a stepfather I abhorred. I loved to draw, and was pretty good at it, I wanted to learn to play music, and I was writing what I barely was able to whisper to myself were poems, while listening to The Cure, Joy Division, The Clash, and Gang of Four. Now, I find myself a struggling professor, at age forty-five and, although I have chased my dreams for thirty odd years, that pursuit has turned into something quite painful, ecstatic, unexpected, and relentlessly challenging. I have written thousands of words of poetry, started a novel, drawn hundreds of sketches, learned to play the guitar, traveled, fathered a child, published two books of poems, published in dozens of journals, edited journals myself, hosted a radio show, earned an MFA in my craft, taught on the college level for 15 years, and still I am not sure if I am any closer to happiness or understanding that I was those thirty years ago when the beginnings of my obsession with language and aesthetics began.

So, I am not sure at the onset of this memoir blog how deeply I will delve into all of the mistakes, misdeeds, triumphs, and regrets of my personal life. I am writing this first entry to explain, a bit, the title of my blog, Iceberg Skeleton Key.

I became obsessed with a certain type of language "machine" in grad school--I was trying to create images which acted or reacted like fulcrums or possible fuel cells or trapped kinesis. So, I invented phrases, such as "hourglass in a sandstorm", "submarine lost deep down in your voice", "Bible in a landmine", "middle of a burning bridge", "birdcage rain forest canopy", etc. I was trying to create linguistic devices which demonstrated potential as they unwound in the reader's liminal and liquid cerebral space. I wanted to invent things that dissolved, unraveled, imploded, or pulsed with ironic potential and strong imagery, acting like Jean Tinguely machines [see video included below]...of course, I knew I didn't have his vision or scope, but the inspiration was there nonetheless.

Thus, this blog, yet another blog of writing about writing and about being a writer [a crime in and of itself to be undertaking], is waiting, for the almost half a century of my life, to melt the ominous obstacle so that I may finally grasp the key to what all of this has meant. Perhaps writing some words here everyday will provide more fire for the melt, and maybe the waters which disperse may provide more slake for my thirst. I don't really know yet. I hope that the iceberg melts enough for me to find the key before I leave this world...I am a bit afraid that it won't, and I can't currently afford the blowtorch or dynamite.

I will write this memoir a bit every day--not always about myself--but about things which I hope will interest or inspire those who love to write or otherwise. In doing so, maybe I can help the reader with his or her own machine, which needs to expel its awesome energy and greater potential--that's what many writers, alive and dead, have been able to do for me.