It was a gray and wavy day when the U.S. economy finally fell apart–like cellophane placed unskilled over a pencil eraser.  It was October 3rd, 2012–almost four years from the day that the Great Economic Credit Reform of 2008 was passed.

Columbus, Ohio has always been known for its bars and restaurants and today was no exception despite the reality that there were very few functional public establishments left after the credit dried up.  Many businesses and institutions floated their immediate future on credit–their payrolls, their current stock, their long term viability–which meant that when the easy credit dried up so did their long term prospects, their option to own their current month’s payroll, and the stock on their floors.

When people stopped buying they also stopped building.  The construction industry, from the timbers in the forests to the cranes on the 87th floor–was all predicated on the illusion of an ever-growing future fueled by inexhaustible resources.  This was the 13th most ignorant fallacy of reasoning that American citizens had ever deluded themselves over.

An inebriated man shuffles with the scuffle of worn up and worn out tennis shoes that he lifted from the empty racks of a Kohls store that had been abandoned for three years.  The shoes didn’t match but they were the same size.  The man became the country and had been looking to remove its burden from his shoulders with every drop of whiskey he could beg borrow or steal.

After walking nearly three hours in the brisk windy streets of Columbus, the man finds the bar in which he will take his next drink.  Columbus still retained a bit of its former beauty as it lay nestled and forgotten on the banks of the Olentangy river.  George Washington’s best friend surveyed this land and found it agreeable and planted a flag and started a war with those who lived around here before them.

The drunk saunters into the bar and sits on the floor next to a man wearing a snipped off tie and a fairly clean but wrinkled dress shirt.   The drunk takes a shot of whiskey from the beast of a bar man with his handle bar mustache and balding head.  Whiskey is the only drink anyone serves any more because it tastes like the failure now the foundation of everyone’s lives. And everyone drinks for free as long as it lasts.

They had seen it all being lived around them and they worked for their mortgage and their kids education and their two vehicles and the gas that went in them. They bought firearms and took classes for the permits.  Many of the towns and villages across the country became self-enclosed and isolated as that was initially the place that the multitude of hopeless and helpless gathered to seek strength in numbers.  The problem was that human beings had become so isolated in their worship at the alter of the Cult of Individuality that they had forgotten what it meant to work in a close-knit community.  There was much violence and murder in the early days of the collapse, back in ‘10 when they were saying words on the 24-hour news channels like blip on the radar, small setback or the always famous potholes in the road to recovery.

The drunk man who was now the country looked at the drinking man with the clipped tie, gestured a toast and both drank to pissing into the void.  The drunk asked the man what was with the tie.  The man told him that he was one of the last financiers left trying to save the global exchange market and that when it had finally died and the body had grown cold, he grabbed the scissors on his desk and clipped his tie.  He said it felt like the right thing to do.

The man gestures to the bar tender for another shot and doesn’t look at the drunk but talks to him all the same.  He says that we live in a world of scarce resources and these scarce resources, based on their price and the other party’s willingness to pay that price, are supposed to be allocated to the most efficient uses.  That’s what market pricing does–it puts a value on our limited resources and makes sure they get to the most effective places.  It’s the beauty of the free market when it’s unhindered by political regulation.

He pauses and reflects a moment and asks if the drunk ever read that book Atlas Shrugged.  The drunk says no and the man goes on.  He said that the people leading us were pretty much the scum of the earth.  He said that our country just went financially bankrupt, that we didn’t even make it 250 years without suffering an economic collapse of the collective value of our labor.

But then again, he says, leadership all over the world, in business, politics, and even art has been morally bankrupt his entire life.   He says that our politicians took our currency (which wasn’t tied to physical assets like gold that can be weighed and measured), and they created a bunch of fake value in the treasury which had no merit, no backing, and inspired no faith in other countries around the world.  He said that our currency used to be considered as the world standard of exchange in value and stability and now look at it.

The clipped tie man takes his drink and says the thing he was created to say, possibly to this drunk and possibly in this place.  He says a thing so powerful and true that it could have saved the world if the right people had been wise enough to listen to it and act when they had the chance to do something about it.

The man drank the whiskey, gritted his teeth and kept his eyes closed as he talked.  He said the standard of our currency is the standard of our character.

The wealth in the vaults of a country’s treasury is supposed to equal a portion of the collective value of its citizens’ labors, dreams and ambitions.  Our government sold off on our dreams in 2008 and they didn’t even think twice about it.  He says, I wonder what the founding fathers would have thought of that. He says that he told a lot of bad lies in good places in his life and wondered what the founding fathers would have thought of him.

The beast of a bar man walked up with two amber colored bottles.  He offered them to the drunk man who was his country and the snipped tie man who was nothing anymore.  The drunk reached out and took the bottles and handed one to the man with the slouched head who still sat next to him.  The bartender said that those were the last two he had, hell probably the last two in the city or all of existence.  He kept them cold in a bag he placed in a secret spot of the Olentangy and that these were the last two cold ones left and the men looked like they would put the best use use to them.

The drunk looked at the bottle and smiled.  He said hey do you remember these?  The labels on the little mountains turn white when the beer gets warm.  The man looked at his bottle and the drunk saw the tremor of a smile threaten the gloom of the man’s mood.

The drunk put his arm around the empty man’s shoulder, clinked his bottle to his and said here’s to pissing into the void.  The man straightened up a bit, looked at the drunk, raised the last cold beer he would ever drink that had the little label that turned from blue to white and he said we’ll do it better next time.

The sun slipped away and the banks of the Olentangy settled into the darkness one more time with the people who loved living in the drunken peace of its presence.

photo credit: DerrickT

a

sweaty jumper cables

I have been putting off writing this post for a few months now because I’ve been in denial. They say that admitting the truth to yourself is the first step to recovery.  So here goes…

“Miranda Sound is breaking up.”

That wasn’t so bad.

For those who don’t know, Miranda Sound is the best band you’ve never heard.  I don’t know why you haven’t heard of them if you haven’t yet but I tell you it’s a crime against word of mouth that these guys aren’t headlining shows at your local amphitheatre.  Actually, I take that back–they are best when they are on top of each other, switching instruments, sweat dripping from their foreheads, and singing into the pickups on their electric guitars in claustrophobic bars.  Miranda Sound is the James Brown of Indie Rock bands, the hardest working men in entertainment.

Were.  Gotta start saying were.

I remember the first time I saw them play–at Easy Street Cafe in Bowling Green, Ohio. We were all students there and I knew Dan Gerken from my Philosophy of Religion class and he knew my girlfriend at the time who later became my wife.  Dan was in a band called Ten Forward (I’m assuming named for the lounge on the Starship Enterprise-D from The Next Generation).  Billy Peake was already lead singer and guitarist for Miranda Sound and you could tell he was talented even though he had a way of staring through the crowd which creeped me out a litte at the time.  But this quirk must have been young musicians nerves because when I saw them play Comfest in 2005, they had their shit together.  The sound was tight and they moved as one.

Dan Bell cracked those fucking drums like they owed him money.  Sean Sefcik ran bass grooves that sounded like water patterns they changed up so quickly.  And Gerken and Peake with dual vocals and dual lead/rhythm guitars are (were–I mean) like some crazy siamese twin call and refrain pattern that touches the deepest nerve endings in the bottom of one’s ear hole.

Indeed, truly hearing Miranda Sound is a bit like falling down a well where sound is coming at you from the bottom, sides and from someone screaming down the hole at you as you fall.  And it sounds so good at times, even when its dissonant, that you forget that you’re falling.  Well, everything that goes us up…

And themes.  These guys got themes for dat ass.  Gerken, who with all his degrees has more letters after his name than Carter’s has pills, was once referred to in my presence by another mutual friend as, “The dumbest smart kid we know.”  What this means is that he is able to take high concepts and break them down lyrically to mold together with the music and create a mood that evokes the right emotion to accompany the lyrical images. And Billy is certainly no slouch in the writing department either–he’s written some killer tunes like “We Could Be Land Owners.”

In the end, this is the heart of successful music and these guys delivered the goods for four albums, each of which has become a pillar in my late twenties and early thirties.  Every time I listen to these albums, I will be drawn back to those mysterious years after college which drifted from finding a career to getting married to having kids to buying a house and establishing a grown up life.  How the hell did that happen and has seemed to come out okay so far?  I don’t know but I do know that I’ll be listening to Miranda Sound’s music for the rest of my life.

They’re that good and they will be missed.

Don’t believe me?  Go here to download the entire Western Reserve album for free and make sure to listen to it at least five times in a row.  You will begin to hear the magic that happens when these guys play.  Pay particularly close attention to “The Lull of Youngstown,” “Take it Where You Can Get It,” and “We’re Making Amends.”

Then, go to iTunes and buy the other three albums.  You won’t regret it.

Also, if you live in Columbus, make sure to carve out Friday August 15th to make it to Miranda Sound’s final Columbus performance ever at 9:00 PM at The Ravari Room.

Photo is from Miranda Sound’s MySpace pics

a

I knew this kid when I was growing up, his father was a taxidermist and he stuffed all the family pets when they died. They had five or six stuffed dogs, a couple cats and a turtle. I remember being completely creeped out seeing these glass-eyed former Rovers and Dixies and Buttercups, but now I’m thinking I didn’t appreciate the opportunity for character study.

I mean what the fuck was his father thinking?

Yesterday, we finally went and viewed the Bodies exhibit in Easton here in Columbus. I have heard about this exhibit for years and have wanted to see it since I first heard about cadavers in various stages of dissection being posed dribbling basketballs, writing at desks, and conducting an orchestra. It took us two hours to complete the tour and by the end, I was just numb from viewing body parts. I had seen enough sliced down the middle penises and siloconized vulvas to last me a life time.

A lot of this was stuff I already knew, having spent two years in Pre-Pre-Med as an undergrad (yes, you read that right–I was a science major with emphasis towards Pre-Med before Chemistry 2 bit me in the boo boo and knocked my life for a loop). But there were two factoids that escaped my past study of the human machine and blew my mind yesterday.

1. Every drop of blood in the body goes through the heart once per minute: This is a bit unnerving to me, thinking of all the blood in my body squirting through my veins and arteries every second so that each drop hits all the chambers of the heart once a minute.
2. Each human being spends 30 minutes as a single cell before mitosis begins: For some reason, this really puts the conflict of the individual into perspective for me. It seems we spring from this unicellular source and spend the rest of our lives fighting against the constant divisions that upset us each day, trying to get back to that sense of oneness that poets put distance between themselves and it with words and what the true mystics aren’t telling anyone about.

Was the exhibit a bit gross? Not to me but I could see where some people have problems with it. Do I care about the rumors that most of the bodies were supplied via Chinese hard labor prisons? Not really. I like to think that their bodies after death are worth more to our species than they would be rotting away in some prison graveyard in the East somewhere.

All in all, viewing bodies was an enjoyable learning experience that I would recommend.

a