The moon hangs like the blade of an ax tonight.

I saw it as I got to Powell on my walk to WinCo and a clear line of sight to the East (by NE) made it appear, a perfect half with its open wedge ready to chop into reality at a 20 degree angle. It also occurred to me in that form because I had just smoked a mostly tobacco, partly herbal smoking blend with some broken up Coffee Cinex sprinkled in while listening to Saves the Day’s second album, and my senses yearned for a refreshing wave of synchronicity with which to make the difficulty late-night crossing of the four lane urban highway.

Of course, a moment of reckoning makes me realize that the song from which this line comes is on the song “All I’m Losing is Me” third full-length album, which I would not hear on my walk to WinCo. Of course, now I am listening to it because I am in my bed in the minutes after finishing the previous Saves the Day album my 32-year-old self was listening to.

If I were writing this on my phone it would be full of the laugh cry emoji.

But of course now I can’t confirm that the moon indeed still does hang like the blade of an ax tonight as I am inside, and in truth it has probably already risen further above the horizon so as to no longer seem to be on the verge of *SWOOP* then *CHOP* a grave canyon into which I could disappear or what have you.

A lot of splendid phrasings came to me on my walk, about where I live, how it feels to live here, and what myself and others do to occupy their time here. If only I could remember them all! The most clearly recalled one is only thanks to it being the opening line to a song a listened to a bunch at age 15 as it was the only song released on the website of my favorite band in anticipation of their big new album, after they got signed to Vagrant and showed their sonic versatile with an acoustic EP of tender almost folky ballads. I liked the song but hated and resented the album as a whole, as when it came out I couldn’t find a copy of it in the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico where I was on that much anticipated Tuesday, and so quickly it became popular in that there were other people that knew and liked the band.

I have employed a variety of writing strategy to wrangle the thoughts of a stoned walk, one being that I relisten to whatever I listened to while walking and getting stoned. However, the point of the walk was to buy some beer to drink while listening to the Tiki Cha Cha club at midnight, which is what I’m doing now (midnight:09), and I don’t want to listen to Saves the Day’s second album a second time in the span of one hour. I propose instead an alternative writing project: I continue to write about going to get beer from WinCo while listening to the Tiki Cha Cha club, and then, when it’s over, go smoke another spliff while listening to Saves the Day’s second album, investigate to what extent the moon appears tonight to hang as might the blade of an ax readied for swift and lethal descent, and if there was anything I left out.

As the host of the Tiki Cha Cha club presently narrates, “there’s more beautiful music for beautiful people just like you.” That’s a lie: he said it minutes ago and I transcribed it below the previous paragraph as it was very much in progress.

I’ve been drinking a lot, which is something I notice at the end of summer, as I celebrate the anniversary of my solar return in the moment of the year when the sun both culminates in intensity and noticeably seems to go away hours earlier, just at the moment we realize the summer, if it continued unabated, would overthrow reason and the day-to-day expectations we have of our society and each other. This late August we began to tear down confederate monuments by the dozen which is really great but instigated its own kind of horror and madness through what instigation resulted. Someone who likes to drink a lot doesn’t really need an excuse though.

Anyway: I ain’t making excuses. I drink a lot all of the time, and one of the times I like to get a little tipsy, if you will, is during the Tiki Cha Cha club, that Monday midnight KBOO phenomenon that takes schmaltz to John Waters levels, but without any explicit pinning down of what or for why. In “taking elevator to new heights” and making souflee of cheese, is this punning DJ simply the connossieur of an era when mainstream music was well-produced and symphonic, sincere and committed, and classic in a distinctly dated way at a time when every recording was both the participation in a distinct and passing cultural moment, but also the revolutionary attempt to heave culture forward.

These are questions I ask when I’m not simply wrapped up in the bossa nova instrumental covers of rebellious rock songs, dancing slowly by myself with images of Lawrence Welk melting behind a smoky haze with sunglasses on. My life is a real-time montage of someone following the script’s suggestions for being me. The arranging for Lawrence Welk’s piece “Drifting and Dreaming” finishes up as I fade through the history of the 20th century through the lens of this 100-year-old room. How many others sat up late, stared and typed in turn, paced, and thought about why here why now why this

My preference instead of leaning into this idea that I drink a lot and falling into the self-involved Bukowski fatalism of it, that it’s my personality and not my, is to see it as an element of what I do. One who fights who they are finds themself doubling done on the things that they were trying to avoid getting wrapped up in, as opposed to letting them run their course, and learning their important lesson.

I should note that I might normally having written this in my journal but I think I left it at someone else’s house. As you can see in past posts, journal entries have served as source material. Indeed, I would have loved to have sketched the moon as it hung like the blade of an ax tonight, but in truth the whole nature of this weed-review site is very much in flux. For tonight it is Philip K. Dick-style time machine in which I may use the Tiki Cha Cha club and this 21st-century laptop word processor to post-World War II noir myself into my own pulp existentialist hero in a time loop of his own making, in which I describe each narrative in the simplest terms in order to find the pattern and maybe there decode a reason why. Spanish guitar and vibes make the searching worth it, and as the woodwinds build with the strings lightly behind it’s almost as though the clarity is, if perhaps not inevitable, entirely beside the point. The strings surge and its 2/3s through an Almodovar film in which you realize the movie star was the supposedly dead mother all along and she raised him in the only way she knew she could: through film.

Well I almost hypnotized myself, but I didn’t, I just listened to the music!

I call bullshit if the host claims not to intentionally be playing with the sounds and tropes of colonialism, the problematics of reproducing an America where a white middle-class man can pick up the Hollywood recording of a movie symphony playing a harp-heavy arrangement of a stereotyped composition meant to sound “exotic,” and present himself as the international connosieur of culture. He knows what he’s doing and it’s at once a thrilling sonic voyage and the most outwardly boring part of my week. I usually put it on and immediately fall asleep. Sometime I buy Coffee Sinex on my way home and get stoned and write a blog entry in my weed review blog….

Where every night is 😀 Friday night and every morning is 😦 Monday morning. So we make the most of what we’ve got left as the world spins off its axis, where sometimes you just gotta step off…

I woke up at noon today after working too many days in a row. I had several engaging and lucid dreams. I am already wide awake and excited about the world, but the weed definitely helps. I believe it’s also clarifying something that is slowly becoming clear to me: the thoughts I have when I’m stoned are not thoughts that are important and need to be conveyed–they are thoughts that I have when stoned that feel important and like I need to convey them.

When I got to WinCo someone got my attention. They’ve been cracking down on people who live outside, and it seemed like the man among others there had just been kicked out. He held out 2 dollar bills and asked if I could buy some dog food. “There’s a can of Pedigree for 70 cents. Here’s two dollars, keep one dollar and thirty cents.” I gave him a dollar back and said I didn’t it and where the food was. He thought for a second and said, inside and then to the left. I realized it was a silly question, because through the main entrance (that forces an immediate right), everything is to the left, and I would find it anyway. I was just kind of anxious that I would get lost but really I was just stoned and everything was going to be fine.

The can was 73 cents but you’d have to be an asshole to dwell on that, and even more so to insist on giving him the 27-cent change. Most people wouldn’t acknowledge him, but of those who would I’m sure there’s a sizeable contingent that would ring up his food separate and give him a receipt. It’s cute when people consider themselves to be in a community, but to think our society at large is anything other than poorly repressed fascism blows my mind on the daily.