#174

After checking back through, I have managed to determine that this is the seventh and therefore final post of Album Week 2019! What a journey. What a stupid, stupid journey.

Album Week 2020, if society is still standing, if there is still a Blogger to make posts into, if life still animates my bones and organs, if it is the will of God and I am graced with the strength and wherewithal to keep on going--Album Week 2020 will be better. It has proven more difficult than I had anticipated for me to approach the subject of music in broader terms than "I make it, and particular recordings of it have great personal significance".

Something to work on.

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Leaving a Mountain Goats album for last, a last which is also seventh, is really playing into my own hands. Speaks a lot about me as a person who creates and person who makes choices and a person who derives great significance from the numbers of things, their own choices, and the act of creation both in a subjective and in a sense relating only to the absolute. So my own hands are adversarial in this situation.

What I mean to say is that I often choose to make things harder for myself than they need to be. Instinctively and deliberately, in ways large and small, I put a little spin on life to give the whole act that little "fuck you, Joseph" it so lacks.

The only salvation that I have is that all of this is pointless. And that the absolute relates absolutely to the particular, and the particular subjectively to the absolute. Those things.

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Why is it important to have a copy of All Eternals Deck? It isn't. But if you ever did come into possession of the CD in its jewel case, new with all its liner notes, and you read those liner notes at a wooden table by a kitchen window with a fifth of whiskey in front of you like an hourglass and they contained your tarot, unpullable and fake, a gift from a stranger who somehow knew what you needed and brought you real medicine for a physical ailment, and somewhere down the line you lost them, you might be tempted to go out and reclaim what you had lost.

These days, in this time in which we live, it's so deceptively easy to go out and replace what was, especially if you're not particular about the conditions and are able to identify the active catalytic objects: a bottle of whiskey and a the liner notes to All Eternals Deck. Probably Maker's Mark. We liked Maker's Mark, we liked picking the wax off before cracking the bottle. It's easy to get a bottle, no problem, and they're all full of the exact same molecular arrangements. All the CD's have the same binary etched onto their surface.

That's only when what matters is the poison, and the poison is the same. Taken through the mouth, taken through the eye, taken through the ear. The poison is the same.

Medicine doesn't really operates like that. You can try to force it to, though. 

Final analysis, whether anything is toxic or healing is in the dosage, and the condition of the system.

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Lost my first copy of this album in a friend's car somehow, left my replacement in the pocket set into the back of the driver's seat of my old Subaru when I sold it to some dude for a hundred and twenty bucks and him having to tow it outta my driveway, and the third one I left in the CD changer of my Honda last summer when I sold it for four hundred, letting myself be screwed over a barrel in the interest of getting the thing over with quickly. I was in a manic frenzy of unburdening.

When the album came out I was losing a lot of stuff too, but not on purpose.

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This took all fucking day and into the night and it's trash! Not even any frigging good at all.

Therefore, hey! Got a great idea, based on how much time and energy I've sunk into this: part two of my post about All Eternals Deck will be the first post of Album Week 2020. I made it too hard. I will cheat if necessary to make it good next year, I'll write it ahead of time and edit for quality and completeness, or I'll just have notes or something but when AW2020 kicks off it will be, if not worth it, at least fully concluded. I made it too hard and it's less than professional and pointlessness did not save me but check it out: I do not give one fuck.

Sincerely, sincerely I cannot bring myself to give a limp dick's flop. 

ALBUM WEEK 2019 MOTHERFUCKS

WASN'T READY

I ADMIT THIS

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Looking forward immensely to regular production. This self-consigned musical purgatory I was not prepared to handle has remembered to me the simple joys of carelessly rattling off fripperies and being very dramatic. Can't wait to get back to not knowing what's supposed to happen. I was thinking of maybe doing other projects like Album Week for other parts of the year but AW has proven as much and perhaps more than the blog can support in terms of rigid rather than spontaneous continuity.

It did its job, though. Been able to pull some stuff off the backburners and do some basement work. In this mixed metaphor, the backburner stuff involves material life things that have been happening that I been trying to get a handle on how to talk about and describe. The basement represents thinking, not necessarily consciously about writing but not unrelated to writing in general, but usually not related to the blog; the stuff that books are made of, and the stuff that you think might be too real for books but let's keep writing and we'll see what there is to see. 

Anyway, real talk next post, but I might take the weekend. Fuck it, May's not gonna be a month with a ton of posts. Wanna get this right, and weekend shifts really thrash me these days.


--JL