James Chaser Memorial High School

 In a car, driving along the dilapidated, crumbling roads of imaginary Cleveland. Every guard rail disintegrates before you can take the turn. There is no off ramp. High over a brick factory courtyard, the vehicle cruises in to land softly in the rubble. Gray sky all around.  Freeway running to the side. Broken railings and holes and broken windows visible in the buildings. We sit with other parents in the rubble. I'm wearing socks with no shoes and the socks are very dirty. The other moms next to us are talking nonchalantly about recent events. They are weary yet friendly. The boys go to play with other children in the halls of the school. A rock band sets up to play to the assembly. There are bricks and rocks and rubble everywhere. The kids are missing for some time. I go to tour the band room. It is a 2-story room, set up like a music store with shiny band instruments hanging from the walls, pieces of drums. No students are present, only faculty. The band is finished. I go out to the courtyard to find the kids. They are hidden in some bushes by a tangled anarchist camp. A 10-year-old kid plays with a pair of log-shoes, rapidly slapping them up and down like a stationary penguin. We are all together with the boys and get into a car piled high with garbage and drive out of the rubble. 

Echo Chamber

 IN all honesty, part of me is amazed that human civilization has made it this far. Fall 2020. It's an election year - have you heard? Natural disasters abound - have you breathed the smoke, maybe your feet are wet if you live in Texas, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi. People I used to consider very good friends - or the closest of relatives - are now at the bottom of my secret pile of hidden-and-avoided Facebook friends. My dirty little secret. I've even unfriended a few people that I now wish I hadn't simply because they were expressing views that I didn't like. Maybe they shared a racist meme about Beyonce or were a little too strokey about their gun-fetish-as-sexual orientation. Look at me - I'm a judgmental person. How did this come to pass? I used to hold onto a diverse group of people in my life without digging in too deep about what their political stance or religious views were. I just liked them as people. Maybe I bought weed from them or went to grade school or played in band with them. Whatever was in their head was not the whole of who they were as a person and if I liked you, I liked you. But I've fallen prey to the divisiveness that so many others have - if you're not in my echo chamber, how could I be friends with you?

IN the early 2000s I like everyone else experienced the 9/11 attacks on that strange and fateful day. I was driving the produce truck in the very early hours of the morning through southern Oregon on I 5, on my way to deliver to Ashland and Medford accounts and then hitting a few farms to pick up palletized organic produce on the return trip to Eugene. Always a brutal-long day was this drive, starting about midnight and ending about 4pm - at the time legal but I believe the drive-time hours are a bit tighter in recent years.  South of Roseburg, my truck would lose all radio reception until I got over a few hills to Grants Pass, where I would pick up the NPR station for the morning news out of habit. I was stunned when I started tuning in to a staticky report about the attacks. It was hot information, coming fast - a plane had hit the trade center - no, two planes. They were on fire - more static. The aggrieved reporter was just about yelling. I hadn't heard anything like this except in old movies about Pearl Harbor or World War II. ".... the tower ... is coming down ... oh my God," the voice went along. The tower? My mind tried to get around it - was he talking about the antennae on top of the building? That didn't make any sense nor did it seem that dramatic. What was the big deal? I was about to find out as the day progressed. 

On the return trip north, I went by Brightside farm to pick up cucumbers, tomatoes and eggplant from my late friend Robert Jardeen, a notorious farmer who happened to be a wee bit of an alcoholic. As I pulled the semi in to his packing shed and got out to load the pallets, he shoved a beer into my hand. "We're going to join the army and fuck up Al Quaeda! Goddamn Osama Bin Ladin!" Of course, I couldn't drink the beer but I went into the shed where he and his buddies were watching the event on a very staticky television set. There I saw for the first time what the fuck was truly happening. Oh my god. I couldn't get my head around it. We all know now - it was a shocking day. 

Fast forward a few years and this surreal event was still stewing in my head - how could the US allow this to happen? The question burned constantly With the advent of youtube - we know where this is heading - I fell down the rabbit hole of 9/11 conspiracy theories. It all made sense. An event of this magnitude couldn't happen to the most well-militarized, well-protected country - city even - on the planet. The US government had to have an invisible hand in this, guiding things along, allowing those planes to make that triple direct hit. Part of me still believes this, although I've tried to quash this unprovable theory in my own mind. It's how my brain makes sense of an unfathomable event. But it can't be proven true, and the evidence no longer exists for a proper investigation.  Whatever the cause, the result is the same - lives were lost; political hawks had a heyday with the opportunity to further invade the middle east and Afghanistan - even though that didn't make any sense to those of us with opposing views. The hawks had the zeitgeist , they had the football and ran with it. Regardless of whether or not 9/11 was a conspiracy, it was both a tragedy and an opportunity. 

The recent fires that swept through all the west coast states were undeniably horrible. There was no benefit to any of us from the fires - 1.5 million acres and counting lost in Oregon and Washington, an incomprehensible amount. The fires had been preceded and stoked by the ultimate wind storm, the likes the Northwest almost never sees in a dry September, blowing from the east towards the sea with gusts of 50-60 mph.  On any average year there are several fires in our neck of the woods and it can become very smoky. 2020 felt different, if nothing else just because of the sheer magnitude and abundance of fires - from Southern California all the way to the Canadian border. Instantly, conspiracies started popping up on Facebook and other social sites. I understood why. Despite the obvious cause - to me anyway - that these fires were stoked by an unusual wind storm coming on the heels of the hottest summer on record, where all the timber and brush was ready to ignite with the slightest spark, I saw some other folks posting the various theories that "antifa" and Black Lives Matter instigators were starting these blazes - " how could this be possible otherwise? The entire west coast is on fire!" I understand how people fall for these easy but incorrect answers - I'm guilty of jumping to conclusions at times also. 

I started this blog in the middle of the night - having trouble sleeping these days - how about you? I was having one of those late-night moments of clarity, an epiphany that I shouldn't discount my friends that don't share my typical bleeding-heart liberal/leftist views because I might not understand the circumstances that brought them to their understanding of the world and how things work. In my half-sleep state, I vowed to myself to stop hiding from those that I disagree with and just try talking to them a little more openly and without judgement.  I've already tried hiding under a rock. I don't want to do that anymore. 

Pandemic Panic: Week 6

I won't lie: I've been enjoying the social distancing and home-isolation these past 6 weeks. We're pretty damn lucky that we are able to afford to stock up on food and toilet paper and weather the storm of partial unemployment (on Tina's part) and inability to go anywhere. Fuck I miss hiking! It sucks that we can't hit our usual spots this spring. The family took a great hike up Catherine Creek right at the start of the pandemic but before the stay-at-home order. I'm glad we got out at least that time. We've been staying busy nonetheless - I get to work from home, making sales calls from the den, next to the drums and guitars. Tina has been Master of he House, planning meals and cooking and staying on top of the kids schoolwork a well as being our point-person for food shopping. I'm glad to have her on my team. The kids have been great - they've been getting along pretty well, watching tv and doing their online school meet ups as well as playing Minecraft and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. We've had the bad mitten net set up and have been playing that every day. We get to walk around the park for a little exercise and sometimes we go throw some frisbee. I think we can probably survive this way for about a year before we start to lose our minds. I think it will really be a year before things get back to semi-normal. What do you think? Should we open up all business and just let the virus run its course or continue to isolate , to lessen the impact on our medical professionals and save lives in the short term. I like shutting down all business - I believe the economy i just a made-up story that we all agree to believe in - a strange division of resources and rules that we abide by and call the free market. I can't imagine that this is the only way to run a society, but it would be hard convincing a majority of he voting population to adopt a new mode of self-rule. Regardless of what your political affiliation is, I bet you would agree that our current government is failing, despite having some good folks working at all levels of it, government has become a gridlock circus, no longer working very well in the best interest of the people. I feel optimistic in the fact that almost everyone I know is an awesome person, despite any political views that conflict. I'm sick of politics but I'm not sick of people. People are cool and they like working together - somehow, we'll get through this and hopefully have a better perspective about life and proceed like Angels instead of Assholes.
OK I made this proto-grunge song today on the 4 track after we got back from the plant nursery  we got a couple of new blueberry bushes to plant in our yard.)
Butt Hurt

The Head of Chuck Bukowski and other news

Another epidemic, another week in the life. If there is anything the 2020 covid-19 pandemic and "shelter in place" order has taught me, it's that I'm grateful that I have a family that can stand spending every freaking day together for weeks at a time. Tina has been furloughed from her job but has been very busy around the house, helping with lesson plans for he kid's homeschooling as well as cooking, doing laundry and watching Outlander on Netflix. Louis and Henry are both doing schoolwork, cleaning their rooms and doing chores, fighting and watching a lot of tv - as much as they can get away with. Sometimes, the kids get up at 5:59 am to watch Parks and Rec or some whack anime crap in the early hours before mom and dad get up and ruin the whole scene by watching Rick Steves or Antiques Roadshow. We've been cooking a ton of food and mostly it's been really delicious. Tonight we had tacos. I feel weird that the entire economy is failing and many working people are broke with no income - what the fuck! The whole reason we have a government is to have people deciding allocation of resources and enacting laws to keep things fair - we need fair unemployment for everybody, stat. The money all trickles back up to Amazon anyway - we need to keep Jeff Bezos rich and powerful so he can save society with his vast resources. I'm sure it's on his to-do list.
I like that my friends at Mustard Relics and Dan Jones and Mr. Random have all been blogging and creating on the multi-platform internet tool matrix. I've been Marco Polo'ing with Dan as a way to stay in touch. It's a new little platform to me but it's kind of fun to leave short video chats that the recipient can watch at their leisure. Technology is just a tool, it's all mystic strands in the matrix, man.

The Head of Chuck Bukowski is a song I first started working on back in 1994. I had heard on the news that Charles Bukowski was dead, and they actually ran some interview footage of Chuck in his later years. He was strangely sober, cordial and nice in the interview they ran. He always looked a lot like my dad. Like a lot of pretentious white kids who almost went to college, I've always had a fascination with Bukowski and his gritty underworld of cretins and sad-sack misfit characters. The first two verses I wrote back in 1994 and then shelved the whole song until now. I always liked the snakey riff, it's something that runs through my head all the time while I'm bopping around life.

 Thanks for sheltering in place, and thanks for cooking at home and eating vegetables. Stay well!
-Ed in captivity

Comfortably Numb 2021

2020 is am interesting time to be alive. Western society, USA and the rest of the world have been seriously under stress for decades leading up to now, but now is a collision of multiple trajectories that we've all been cruising on for a long time.
I joked last time about the corona virus and covid-19; now the whole world is under temporary lock down to slow down the spread of the virus and hopefully not overtax our existing hospital system.
++++++++++++++++++++++++zds`````````````````````` ( the cat wrote that part)
Now, in Washington and Oregon. we've all been on semi quarantine for a week. Restaurants and bars shuttered until late April. My band's mini tour with Dan Jones and the Squids postponed, all events cancelled. Middle aged me is depressed that my victory lap tour was destined to be cancelled due to a killer virus. Bummer, dude!
I feel lucky I got to see a few great concerts in February before the shit down of society. John Cameron Mitchell at Revolution music hall was fantastic. I really dug his stories and his spot-on New York stage band, Tits of Clay. He came out in full Hedwig regalia along with his amazing back up singer, Amber Martin. I'm not sure of the guitarist's name, but he was really fantastic. I like the band Eyelids too that came up and did a couple of Lou Reed songs with JCM.  "Waves of Fear," I could here the droning bass line while I was walking back from the bathroom and I knew in n instant what song it was. Fucking cathartic version, thanks guys. "I found a reason" by the Velvet Underground sounded blissful and had nice overlapping vocals, a beautiful sound.
Robin Hitchcock is of course one of my heroes and this time we got to see him at the old Church, a cool Portland venue that is in an ... old church. We ran into a few friends on the way in - we saw Chris Dorr, a pal from Eugene in the 90s and then as we were sitting down, we happened to be sitting next to my very good friend Guy Tyler, a fabulous musician I played with also in the late 90s in the band Velocirapture 2000, or V2K. We had a nice chat and then Robin came on and played "Astronomy Domine" on the piano and we all shut up and enjoyed his set. It felt just about as disjointed as the world is at this juncture. I've seen Robin before and he is often funny but this time the mood seemed slightly down. He played several cuts from Element of Light and Eye, both great collections of songs and his partner Emma Swift came up and sang with him for several songs. Sadly they covered some Beatles songs that seemed to drain the life out of the place but then he finished strong with some of his own best tunes fuck, I don't remember now, but it was meaningful and good. I love that guy but he ain't perfect and he ain't the best piano player in the world but his voice and eternal whimsical weirdo conversation is one of the God voices in my head.
Goddamn this virus has me a bit down as I am sure everyone else is feeling queasy and scared about our collective uncertain future. I called my mom and she is doing okay. All my siblings and offspring are all getting though all right but I worry for many other folks on the margins who might but out of work by this bar/restaurant shutdown - that's a fuckton of people, out of work and expected to still pay bills and survive. Thanks a lot capitalism. Not the perfect system but that's what we've got to work with.
I worked up this song Got No Feeling that used to be a Trouble Cuts jam that fell by the wayside. I've had it knocking around my head for a few weeks now and it jiust surmises my mood during this trying time of death, uncertainty and mistrust of the government, authority and all other kinds of bullshit that prevent us from being our pure, true selves. Got No Feeling. 
 

All New Death Virus 2020

There has been plenty of hype regarding the novel coronavirus that causes covid-19 in all the local and national news. I work in the food distribution industry and we’ve been feeling the effects of a panicked population buying absolutely everything in every grocery store in our region. It’s similar to when a snowstorm hits Portland or Seattle – all stores will post record sales for the day and clear their vendors out of every single product and then the vendors are left scrambling to replenish the inventory, which usually comes from far away and takes half a week to get here. At this point, customers are over-stocked in their pantries and then sales will be in a slump, so the net effect on bottom-line dollars for stores is nil, but nil with a good dose of panic-scramble built in. I heard another sales rep in the office talking with a customer about Jared Diamond’s Collapse book, wherein he writes about how our food distribution system would likely fail in the event of a prolonged disaster since we all depend on a fragile chain of hand-offs, from the point of production (Mexico, Peru, Argentina, California, Texas) consolidated at multiple pickup points, moved by truckers (who may or may not quit at anytime and go to any other company that offers more $$) and then finally it’s all dependent on oil and gas to fuel the whole operation. If any one of those links goes down… there will be delays. If your consolidation warehouse in L.A. accidentally loses your pallet of ginger, turmeric and cherimoya, you’re SOL. Cucumbers, celery, cauliflower – these all sound like mundane vegetables, but are among the most volatile produce commodities, ‘cuz they’re staples and sometimes, farms run out of their crop sooner than planned. Can you imagine planning in Septmber for how much cauliflower, cucumbers and celery you'll need in March? No one really knows, ever.  You can’t put those things in cold storage a month ahead of time like apples, potatoes, onions and yams. Cucumbers might be $16 wholesale last week but they’re $59 this week. Customers almost don’t care, at least not in the Northwest, ‘cuz they don’t even look at the price most times – they need cauliflower for that recipe, whoops, it’s $5.99 right now, still need it. Imagine if beer was $8.99 one week and $15.99 the next – there might be riots.

I guess the moral of the story is that sickness, panic and chaos is good for business. Never mind the human toll. Steinbeck’s East of Eden touches on this, when the character Cal goes into business with Will Hamilton and they have a farmer plant acres and acres of beans in the year leading up to World War I, anticipating the food shortages since war is imminent. The financiers also lock in a low price of 2.5 cents per lb to the farmer – at the time, it sounds like a better-than-market price, but as this thread in the story plays out, we find out that they export the beans at 12 cents per lb to Britain after the War starts, making a killing. Do you wonder if there are people making similar wagers during our time of uncertainty in the early 21^st century? I wonder what bets they are placing.

I’m one of the privileged – my pantry is stocked, we have enough vitamin C, elderberry and zinc lozenges and could probably feed the family on rice, beans and canned tomatoes for a few weeks if not a month. Beyond that, we’d be forced to fish the local waters and scavenge dandelion greens while we wait for our yard garden to grown some food. I hope it doesn’t come to that.

I made this happy little song last night: Deth Virus

The Fuzz RIP

Dan Jones is my friend. We met in the mid-90s - 1995? - at Oasis fine foods in Eugene. I was a delivery driver, bringing the vegetables in my Carhart shorts and Doc Martin boots. He was working in the kitchen at Oasis deli under the brutal chef Andrew. One day I noticed a goofy guy with a faded Husker Du shirt - is this my kind of person? He gave me some guac and chips and thus began our acquaintance.
A year later he was working alongside me at OGC, receiving trucks in the warehouse, stacking broccoli and apples in the coolers and then training behind the wheel with me as we rode around town in the 1996 International delivery truck. I knew he was writing songs. Daftly, I turned down the opportunity to contribute to his demo he was making at a local studio - it became For Your Radio, a classic blast of literate folk-punk and his calling card into the local songwriter scene. FYR was first a cassette and then re-released as a proper CD. He invited me to play electric guitar with him and Derek Trost on snare and brushes at a gig at Sam Bonds, so I woodshedded on his tunes from the tape and joined his duo without much rehearsal. I went direct into the PA with my trusty Sans Amp while Dan and Derek strummed and brushed away.

"Turn it up in the monitor - I want to hear what Ed's playing!" I remember Derek saying to the sound-person. Of course Dan slipped in some unexpected yet pretty easy cover tunes on the fly - maybe 'Love's gonna live here,' by Buck Owens or a Roger Miller tune or Meat Puppets' Lost on the Freeway, I don 't really recall, but I know it was a bucketful of fun.
Fast forward to the early 2000s -  Dan and I would jam a lot in my garage, collaborating on goofy 4 track songs and trading off on instruments. I remember embryonic versions of his songs Cucumber Gods and Walkin' Blue and many others. I had the riff for The Fuzz but no title. We were already recording and Dan joined in with some cool guitar counterpoint while I stuck to the main, simple arrangement and mid section. It was a steady enough track that I was able to add drums and bass and a vocal after Dan left - voila! A song was born.  No one really asks me what it's about, but 'the Fuzz' is my memory of the sound of Bob Mould's fuzzed out guitar from Husker Du's worst lp, Warehouse: Songs and Stories. It's the most rigid, solid state guitar sound of all time and yet totally unique - it didn't sound like stupid Whitesnake or Motley Crue. It was THE FUZZ and it drilled into my teenage mind like a mosquito buzz that I could never forget.
We had a band called Activator a few years later, with John Laney on bass and Eric Jensen on drums. In 2003 we recorded 10 songs at Jackpot studio in Portland, including the Fuzz, my song Vice Squad and a bunch of Dan songs that he later re-did for some of his own CDs - Hot Pink UFO and Airport City Taxi Limousine among them. I've always loved Dan's wash of sonic guitar on The Fuzz. It sounds like a slow-motion Jackson Pollock painting, globs of sonic paint flying all over he place. Hope you can dig; hope you can Remember the Fuzz.

False Spring

Holy shit, it is a beautiful day in the Pacific Northwest. A glorious break from the rain and mud-splattered commute that normally puts me in a stellar mood right before I get home. Sick of Commute

February is usually a “month of renewal” for Tina and me – we usually take the month off from drinking alcohol and imbibing the ganj. (my wife doesn’t really like weed anyway but I most definitely need a month off, if not an all-out soul cleanse.) The side effects for me are terminal grouchiness, followed by high level of alertness, less appetite, less need for sleep and vivid dreams. I was never meant to be a stoner anyway as it might make me a mellow fellow but I lose that sense of animal urgency that drives me to claw my way through life.  Not to mention my lungs have taken a beating over the years and I have fears of pneumonia every time I get sick since I have that wonderful, leathery Darth Vader gurgle in the chest at night – ugh! I’d prefer to live long rather than be high and numb to the ragged insanity of day-to-day life. Or would I? Come summer we will see if I can still abstain. Praise Jah and pass the dutchee pan.

I fucking hate political discussions but succumbed to one over the dinner table when some family was over last night – lost my cool like the liberal shill that I am. Why is it so hard to accept other people’s points of view? I wish I could be cool and collected and just listen to other folk’s arguments and not take things personally but I tend to make an ass of myself. Sorry, world. The discussion touched on Bloomberg entering the race – buying his way in – versus Bernie and Eliz Warren and the potential drawbacks of any of them going up against Trump. In my mind, Bloomberg is a bad choice since he lacks legitimacy in the Dem base due to his past tenure as a Republican and his stop and frisk policies while mayor of NYC. On the other hand, Bernie is old and tends to repeat the same talking points over and over, older voters are scared of the word ‘socialist’ and many moderates accuse him of being just another populist but he has the strongest grassroots support of any of the candidates. I like Elizabeth since she is economically savvy and has solid policy ideas but I fear she is tanking and media is already making her seem invisible, even though her polling is better than many of the other moderate dems. I would take any of the current potential candidates over Trump but in all likelihood, it will end up being a vomitous race of hell and either be extremely close or Trump will win again. Fuck politics and fuck me for even caring when I really should be working on my survival bunker and hoarding Neuman-Os, olive oil and good vintage wines and a car-battery-powered record player and probably a shit-ton of weed and ibuprofen. We’re fucked no matter who gets in and I’m not sure any change in our political system will change shit. Love you, brothers and sisters of humanity!

I work hard most days on doing something, ANYTHING creative, even if it’s just hashing out song lyrics while watching tv with the family. I’m finally getting some lift on my soundcloud tracks. 32 tracks since January 1^st, baby! Only a few of those are old; everything else written very quickly and posted sporadically. I’ve given up caring about the idea of releasing things ‘properly’ but I probably will make a tape this year with some of the better tracks. This song has gotten the most plays - Always Stay  – maybe I should clone it and hope they pick it for the next season of Peaky Blinders so I can get $$$.

Happy Hump day!

2 am Blues

This is the rare night of no sleep. I've been sick all week and only consuming minimal coffee. Today, I felt better, ran errands - depositing money in the bank, running to Portland to get my Tascam portastudio 4 track back from the repair guy, running out to Beaverton to buy some TDK SA 90 tapes from some guy off of craigslist and so on. I had coffee at about 5 o clock - it was Valentine's day after all - so now I'm totally wired can't ya see and my thoughts have been racing all night as I lie in the dark.


I started watching a great William S Burroughs documentary on Amazon streaming. Holy shit, what genius that man was. His influence runs far and wide. I can't wait to finish it. I relate to every single bit of it so far and have a big appreciation for crazy ol Bill and his cadre of colorful beatnik and alt-culture geniuses.

One strange thought pattern that was running through my mind tonight was a clip of James Baldwin being interviewed on tv in the 1960s, how his rage was barely contained and yet utterly articulated in his response to the hosts or the panel or whoever. It reminded me somehow of the Nina Simone song, Mississippi Goddamn, and I realized that Baldwin, Simone and every non-white intellectual in the history of the USA must feel the PTSD of living in a traumatic society of inferior intellects who gawk at them and treat them like animal curiosities when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. The immense frustration of being the wrong color of genius.

Can't Always Rock It

I've been laying low and making tunes in Vancouver, land of the perpetual suburbs. During January I made a point of writing and posting one song per day on Soundcloud just as an exercise in writing. Some tracks came out better than others. I'm still making songs this way but can't realistically keep a pace of a song a day. Here's my latest: Can't Always Rock It kind of inspired by Dan Jones and his various 4 track recordings of the early 2000s.

Trouble Cuts is still blazing along. We have shows upcoming in Seattle, Eugene and Portland during March. Very much looking forward (to Death!) to getting out of town and doing some keen rock sets with our friends. Here's the schedule:

March 19 - Darrell's Tavern, Shoreline, Wa (w/Dan Jones & Squids, VooDoo Gearshift)
March 20 - Sam Bond's, Eugene, Or (w/Dan Jones & Squids, VooDoo Gearshift)
March 21 - Alberta St Pub, Portland, Or (w/Dan Jones & Squids, VooDoo Gearshift)

Hope to see some familiar faces show up! I'm not kidding myself - I'll be happy if 5 people show up at any of these (well, Eugene will be great, that I know.) I'll try to keep blogging here for the near future.

Did you see any of that great footage of Mr. Bungle's reunion shows on youtube? This one is pretty fucking great: