Pt. I- The Edification
I awoke at 8:30 with a coif soddened by saliva and a spine realigned for the first time in half a decade due to partial slumber on disjointed floorboards with my girl and
cushy speed-racer bedspread.
Had a petite Styrofoam cannican of the good doctors fine black elixir and
ate muddled embryo's with my freckled love
and our darling consort metrist and partner in crime Ms. Jones
before heading into the lily-livered haze of the morning to attend the
Calling All Poets Poetry Marathon.
The event ran from 11 AM to 11 PM and I was to feature in the first block of readers.
We arrived at the Howland Cultural Center early to find a small audience and an assortment of New York style pseudo-bagels, zeppole, and other breakfast morsels.
Sharon Butler dazzled and took no prisoners with a piece about the Muhhekunnetuk river
and the calamitous tribulations of the Iroquois nation.
Enoch Nixon performed a strong set;
closing with a shrewd poem dedicated to his brother entitled A Little Left of Center.
I was the final reader in the 11-12pm slot and performed mostly material from the new book including a piece called Orphans which I sung a cappella.
The audience appeared fairly perceptive to the tornado of stream-of-consciousness shrieks, shticks, quips and antiquated idioms if only by their xanax-blithe head nods, tick smirks, finger snaps, and the sonance of heavy hands slapping together.
I sold several copies of Gehenna before I was aborted into the gravely streets of Beacon to arrange for discount tickets to catch Marilyn Manson at the Mayhem-Fest in Hartford.
Pt. 2- A Thousand Yellow Jersey's
After an hour of stalking ATM's, a $5 dollar service charge and a slight wardrobe change,
a mutual friend of ours Amanda joined the lunatic posse and we set off for
the constitution state to heed the second coming of the Anti-Christ Superstar.
We were suddenly engulfed in a sea of churlish inebriants, shirtless testosterone monkeys, and tarts shoe-horned into vinyl corsets and 6 inch stiletto's.
Neophyte nymphets ranging in age from 16-45 in corpse paint that purchase the cliche mass delusion of miserable angst at shopping malls for $9.49 a pop, and fail to understand that their entire subculture orbits around fashion and nothing else.
Not individualism, not the practice of a counter-cultural ideology
or the perceived rebellion and resistance to the mainstream.
But enough about that,
A hurricane (a frozen fruit drink prepared with Southern Comfort)
fetched a migraine-delivering $12 USD.
A singular hot dog went for seven bucks and a small cola, coffee, or bottle of salty dasani demanded Abe paper.
I needn't describe the beer & wine list for the prices are designed to depress,
but lets just say you could buy a 12-pack of foreign for what they wanted for a half a bottle of poorly refrigerated domestic.
The first band to grace the stage upon our arrival was Kill Switch Engage,
who played a short set complete with pyrotechnics.
Guitarist Adam Dutkiewicz attempted to jig around and duck-walk in boy-shorts like
Angus Young but was sloppy,
I suppose if you were generous you could consider his effort an incomplete success.
The lights dimmed after about an hour intermission and hordes of contused,
sweat-soaked droogs in carpenter jeans with slack jaws and the word Slayer carved with hunting knives into their pellucid bacon-like backs and hairless chests flooded the primary pit and bordering grasslands.
I want to say I enjoyed seeing and hearing Slayer's performance,
however Tom Araya's vocals were barely audible through a wall of double bass drum and I'm quite certain the gun-blast repetition of power chords at insufferable volumes for 60 straight minutes has left me sterile.
We left the stands short there after to assess the quality of our hearing range and the extent of damage we had just allowed our eardrums to endure.
The ladies sucked lung-darts as we relaxed between a plastic rock climbing cliff and the unisex bathrooms and were hounded by a hipster and his doe-eyed girlfriend who were trying to sell counterfeit VIP bracelets they'd made out of rolling papers and scotch tape.
We snuck away just in time to see Manson kick off the show with an energetic rendition of the Irresponsible Hate Anthem.
He played a few songs off Mechanical Animals, Antichrist, and the newest album and ended with his haunting cover of Sweet Dreams and then an exhilerating encore of Beautiful People.
It was evident throughout his performance that although this was not the angry radical that proselytized with the heathenry of Holywood, Mr. Warner still had a few fresh tricks left in the bloody bag and just a few threads of heresy left (even if dwindling) in his act and in his voice that we could relish and enjoy.
The night ended with a dinner of honey-roasted peanuts and a long excursion of random playlists, backseat canoodling and interesting conversation on all parts.
Despite how it may seem after reading all this,
August 8th was a damn fine day!
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