A Guide to the Outdoors

Aimee, you found me in the woods, like you should, like they do in all those books you read but never learn, you just dream, you just dread, you just drown me out with the words and worlds that swirl in your head. When my magazines burn, all the people that turn into monsters, but just for a second, then they’re dead and they’ll leave the earth like me.

Aimee, you found me on the globe and acted surprised like you didn’t know we’d cross lines, we’d meet here but only one of us would be speaking. And it’s not you, it’s not me, it’s these trees above us creaking. And I am one with their roots, with the air you breathe see, I’ve asked to be returned like all the poeple in the pages of your magazines burn.

You cut me down, you built a house, you surrounded yourself with my flesh. I was always at least three steps ahead of you. With one screw loose, and it’s only used to out live me, so here it is.

Mercury

Don’t be discouraged, dead fish on the beach. They were probably just swimming in mercury. It’s too bad about this planet, and summer flings, and summer vacations and mercury. So curl me up in your coils, spin me inside of your heat, hold me until my blood boils like mercury.

Fish Sticks

Is there a sign on the back of my head that says desensitized? Well I’m sorry I said anything. You sang a song and then learned to sing and said that you missed the songs you sang before you learned anything. In a fishbowl on the beach, I know the salty water stings, but it’s not hard to see from a bowl the world’s out of reach. I see my face in the lake at the end of a pier. All the fish seem to wonder what I’m doing here, when I hold my head under and hear them all scoff. I just open up my mouth and let my mind jump off. It says there’s a sign at the end of this swamp that says destruct, it’s fucked it’s done it’s just mud, no such dumb luck. Construct new huts, blind new kinds of ducks then make them occupy new titles like on the royal aisle, where they print up a phone book as thick as a bible. You were baptized in a river, I was thrown off a bridge. Then I landed on a crab you slept with seahorses. I started having seizures, you started having kids. You found your inner self, I found my inner fish. And my other car is a boat, it has a boat name. I thought we both came, but no. No such conch, no pontoon, no one is listening to you. The sun does wonders to your brain the way it burns right through. I am swimming in a trough, I’m sure you’ve written me off by now but just when I think that all is lost, I see you stepping in the water. To me every edge of the lake is a fifty foot cliff and once you are swimming with me there’s no way out of this. So let’s just turn back into amphibians. Let’s just tread until our legs give in. Let’s start over.

Water Towers on Fire

Water towers on fire will take care of themselves. While everybody’s at work, counting down the hours. That’s what I like about you, you are someone I admire. You take care of your own damn problems. Like a water tower on fire. Now I’m taking off my belt. It’s time I teach you a lesson. And like the phone I wish you were off the hook, we’d sell off these cheap thrills and head for the hills.

Like a barrel full of monkeys, you are a fuck load of work. You can string me along, make me laugh until my stomach caves in, or the string breaks and I am down for the count. It sure is nice to know you like me around.

Florida Panther

They swam in pools of bottled water. They kissed in booths and catering. So he puts on a shirt with pockets and decides he’d like to go hunting. His fan boat dancing in the mangroves, blue crab buried in the sand, they say you’re never quite the same, after you’ve seen a Florida panther. Not everybody loves the call girl with tattooes of tarantulas. She says she’s never felt so happy now knowing that I never was.

Rubber Stopper

I brought the rubber, you brought the rubber stopper. I brought the ball you brought the ramp. I hooked my hose up to your flowing water but never offered you a hand. I love to see you at your most productive. I love to watch you wait for me to do something.

Yesterday, ruby Tuesday, the race was off and it seemed that the room had gotten loud. I struck my finger in her eye socket misdirecting the crowd. Look at my love and say something constructive. Look at my love and tell me it’s not something. See how these people get replaced by machines. And see my love it’s like a living dream.

I tricked her into seeing medicine balls, pulling ropes, and making beds and we decided after watching dominoes fall, we’d rather stay outside instead. And when we kissed it tasted just like candy. We tasted it until the sun came up all around us. We spent the night out on the trampoline. Like two machines, but we were making love.

Reasonable Doubt

She must have rolled fifty feet after she fell to the base of a tree at the bottom of a hill. Leaking, we see every color of the rainbow dripping from her shell. Bodies don’t bounce as far as I know, as far as I can tell.

She was one in a million but still I couldn’t take my chances. With her bones just like rails and railings just like branches, justice may just call out from the grave, call out with some answers. We see her face on the surface of the lake, so we go in after. And all I ever think about is reasonable doubt. I was beside myself and welled up like a cell and then burst in a court room. The sea breathes and so, even the deep will soon turn to shallow and then suddenly you’re swimming, once up to your knees, “hey where did the shore go!?” We all agree the body is at sea now, just like a boat. But all I ever think about is reasonable doubt.

Heat Vents

Yesterday I got lost in a heat vent twice, I know I should have kept out but it was too damn enticing. I thought I knew my way back but must have got turned around because the vent I entered into no longer vent where I remembered. Heating ducts do take me to an altered mental state where one has trouble breathing air, but no trouble feeling great. To travel inside of a body, travel inside of a vein, if the home is where the heart is then the attac is the brain. Like a drain, for the dust, for the pain, for the unwanted items. Items in your heat vent tend to stay and die for years until the day their body crumbles and gives you dusty tears. Filling space you thought so safe, in your room you feel the most. Are you breathing heated air or are you breathing heated ghosts? Oh no.

Now I see it softer than an ice cube and its sticking to my tongue. Static starts to build and fingertips are stung. It’s like I can taste electrons now, just the slightest hint. I’m still the only one I know, it seems, who dreams of being lint. Well, now I’m lint. I’m no one that important. I’ll just collect myself in the corner, be some sort of tangible form of boredom, Sampled, trampled, and never very farm from where you are standing.

I’ll be collected and killed off like skin cells and run off and sneezes and secrets and clues and insects and refuse and bleeding and breathing and heating and keeping the secrets bottled then fleeing. Sparking, exploding, head first into black holes, digging and digging and deeper and faster and farther than anything that has ever lasted and all that I hear is the devil laughing. It keeps me together, it keeps me from blacking out, whiting out, I always know that he’s always right and he’s always right and he’s always here and he’s with me tonight. And although he’s losing and hooked up to tubing, I hear his voice through it and it sounds like dust, when he musters up, “I love you.”

Goodness Gracious

I’ve got a driver’s side arm. I’ve got distribution. I’ve got people in a rut. They know I love them but they don’t know how much. It was an interesting angle to be laying in when you say we’re on the same page. When you say I should be singing your praises, anxiously waiting for the next note you play me. You’re crazy.

Of all that I’ve received, you gave me something that I never knew I needed.

I never knew I was frozen until you turned on the heat. To reveal oceans full of honesty but not a drop of confidence, too busy treading just to keep my head above a sinking conscience. It was like I stopped having dreams and started having manifestations. No longer in a state of I cant wait because I made it. I went from having hope so low, to having a surplus. I went from burning my days by to burning daylight with a purpose, turning virtues into habits into consciousness. Then I said goodnight for real for once and it sounded like this, “goodnight, goodness gracious goodnight.”

Listen to Meet Death with a Handshake at his website or by clicking below.

The songs on Blip Tape feel slightly slower and more lo-fi, especially when compared to those on Goodness Gracious and End of All Purpose, giving the album a relaxing atmosphere–you can almost tell that it is an openly-recorded live session composed in a print shop amongst letter press equipment and empty wine bottles.

Boil Over is the one familiar song, first heard on snapbox, though the recording on the album feels slower and more deliberate. The song was recorded again for Goodness Gracious, but didn’t make the final cut.

My favorite thing about the tape, though, has to be the album art; it’s beautifully pressed onto some really nice stationery. As the folks at Slanty Shanty say,

This tape is a truly limited, one-of-a-kind item. All of the tape inserts have been pressed by the hands of the artists themselves. An amazing part of any cassette tape collection.

You can listen to “Turn Down The Offer” by clicking below.

I only ever learned the hard way.

I downloaded her free live cd and got her most recent EP, & The Way She Likes It, a few days later. The first thing that I noticed about her songwriting was that it was expressive in a way that most modern music isn’t. As she puts it:

The songs sound like your saddest memories sung to the tune of your happiest. They’re catchy, relateable, and filled with an unavoidable message of hopeless hope.

Fingers Crossed, our first glimpse into the new album, sounds great. It’s a little more polished than An Eight-Song Tribute but it doesn’t lose any of the “quirky charm.” You can listen to Fingers Crossed by clicking below or by visiting Allison Weiss Was Right All Along.