Markers. Ants. Tectonics. X. & Pain. & Illness.

OK.
I’ve decided to try and give myself a bit of a kick to start writing my small ambient musical themes.
I’m terrible at picking band names. Famously terrible. At least among my friends and bandmates.
Ask anyone.
But that’s beside the point, what’s done is done, right?
I found a scrap of paper that had written on it: mybeautyofwickedness.com.
Which I think is just one of those random site names I think up, and then check to see if they’re available, and that one still is available, but I thought it was too long for a band name.

But I liked the word wicked, both sarcastically, in a silly way, and in a more serious but at the same time how can I possibly take myself seriously with a name like that, sort of way.

Then I started looking for words to go with it. I settled on deep. To me, it sounds like a band that would consist of a bunch of guys with really long greasy hair wearing tight leather pants and screeching about the devil. That image makes me laugh, so I’m going with it.

When I do finally manage to post some music there, instead of the screeching, you’ll find ambient music of various types. Sadly, I don’t screech very well, but I can make a guitar make some sounds that you might find screech like.

I’ll work on it. In the meantime, like all good mySpace people, I want friends.
So, please look for: www.myspace.com/thedeepwicked
And I’ll befriend you faster than you can The Deep Wicked. Hee. It makes me smile every time.

He was often a considerate man, not using both of my eyes at once. But in the deep left field, if I’d lose the depth of the falling baseball, and find the baseball searing down my face or chest, leaving the stitching bruised in my skin, I’d know my father had been there, borrowing an eye. Once, he took my legs when I was running from third to home, and I only knew what had happened when I woke up behind home plate, having slid all the way, my teammates faces like shrunken heads on a string circling above me. I hadn’t been wearing a shirt and had landed on my back, where there’s still small flecks of gravel beneath my skin. Am I safe? I said. The game went on. That sumnabitch, mother said, dabbing at my back with alcohol, picking at me with tweezers, showing me one bloody pea of gravel, only cuz he loved baseball so damned much. He never knew when to leave well enough alone, she said, and poured the alcohol straight into the bloody patch. There, she said, I hope he enjoyed that. I tried to imagine a world where I couldn’t be in the field, sliding from foot to foot, the batter no more than an inch high so that when he hit the ball the sound was of no use, only the arc mattered, and how my legs twitched which way to go before I did, my cleats throwing the smell of the dirt up into my nose and my whole body striving without memory. But if he dawdled, there were disasters. Bloody noses from line drives. The mark on my back healed but scarred. And what he does with my hands, well, that’s something else again. Where did you learn to do that? one woman asked, and I couldn’t tell her, my father, and even then I don’t hate him. Stealing from me, mother calls it, but he most times returns what he takes, though when I stand up from reading, my head aching, and discover my leg doesn’t work and have to catch myself and realize he’s been tapping my foot, using my eye to take the words. Or how some of my fingers will never curl the same way again. Then I do curse him, and search for him in my blood. At those times I can take him, you better believe, I can find him where he hides, and send him straight to my heart, where he’s broken into a thousand beats and centered in each cell. Then he can’t fight, though I feel him try, squeezing my heart, the ache the same pain folding me as when I first knew the word father combined with loss absence empty. He flows to my skin and evaporates, goose-pimpling the skin, as my sweat did after each game, leaving the dawdling line of salt across my forehead arms legs and back. I hate to feel him go, to force him out, but a person has to be alone. Empty. Sometimes. And then I can thump my chest as I say his name, and in that echo and skip, I know he’s gone. Though he’ll gather and return. I know you’ve felt the same thing, finding your hand or leg or arm dead to you, tingling, no longer yours, but don’t ask for my help to sound your body. I don’t know you. What has been taken.