A Marinade.

Marinade Recipe...I haven't named it. So this marinade worked well for sliced meat on sandwiches, possibly on chicken or fish. It doesn't have a thickener hence marinade and only experimenting with maybe 3 batches I abandoned it for the current green sauce I make. I did not write down the measurments I just winged it so all ingredients are to taste. Cayenne Pepper Thai Chili Peppers Black Pepper Ground Mustard Paprika Cumin Orange Juice Garlic Honey Apple Cider Vinegar ***Strain the pulp when done blending***

FOMO and Friends...

I've wrote several blog entries on my relationship with my past media career and the trajectory of it that brought me into who I currently am today. That life it seems at times so far removed from an industry at one point I was madly in love with. I found out recently that a total of 8 people had died at an old television studio I used to work for because of stress related injuries aka; heart-attacks and strokes. Fomo; Fear of Missing Out. I was over at a friend's place about a week ago watching "Better Call Saul", a masterfully done show I might add, and remarking on how post 2020 lockdowns and some during the lockdowns a lot of my friends had embarked on career choices that would dwarf their past experiences. Gigantic 200 million dollar films from known actors and directors, huge immense Oscar bait projects, high profile premier television and first time major exposure on gigantic entities after years and years of fine-tuning scripts, scrambling for money, researching archival footage, and grinding their way through the tedious granulated minutia of those projects and the expectations of their past through the tightrope gauntlet that is "Making it"; a fantastical concept in the lands of both ego and entertainment. But I was proud and happy for my friend's success's and I knew through the horror stories that they'd all earned it through and through. All those I spoke too were also truly humble. I suppose that is why after so many years removed we still remain friends. And while contemplating the unknown future of 'Saul Goodman' I was asked "Do you miss it?" And I'd thought long and hard about it. No. I don't miss it at all. Yet there is still a residual sense of passion transmutated from those years I'd spent grinding, a passion that has been honing, aging, and solidfying, I hope.

And while thoughts of ehem 'content' bubble into my noodle every now and again I refocused my energy on various other hobbies including making sauce...and I enjoy that quiet change of creative flowing energy.

“A Soft Slide Into Madness: Or How Radiohead Trigged A Psychotic Delusion and the Importance of Sleep and Ego Death.”

(THIS IS AN INCREDIBLY PERSONAL ESSAY. I INTEND ON SHARING THIS ON REDDIT ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE ALBUM THIS YEAR. I WANT THIS TO BE A PARABLE. Drink water, get sleep, and be mindful of your mental health.) “A Soft Slide Into Madness: Or How Radiohead Trigged A Psychotic Delusion and the Importance of Sleep and Ego Death.” by Daniel Louis Krone. Music has a unique way of digging up memories hiding in dark places in the subconscious. I wouldn’t begin to know how the human mind works exactly. That’s nowhere near my field of expertise. But I do know there is a place somewhere lodged deep in the base of human consciousness where the music dwells and it’s that deep primal tribal mind where the love of music hides. I wonder if there is a word out their for that sublime connection people get when they hear just the right song at the right moment in time and it shatters the ego and sheds memories like old dead skin deeper than any kind of recreational drug could. You know the feeling I’m talking about right? Maybe a riff, maybe the right lyric, or maybe it is just a beautiful voice that melts your consciousness and touches you in crevices that you may not have known your mind had. I know that feeling. I know that feeling all too well. Oftentimes when I have nothing to do I’ll just sit and listen to music and let my mind wander and slide about the lyrics and soundscapes into places my imagination didn’t previously know were possibilities. Back in May 2016, approaching my 30th, what I’m told is an important birthday, Radiohead’s 9th album “A Moon Shaped Pool” dropped. Radiohead fans went INSANE! I know this because I happen to be a recently converted one. Early morning we (My roommate and I) were woken up with a bird chirping on Instagram. An intriguing tease after they’d recently deleted their entire social media past. Then BAM! “Burn the Witch” appeared. It was a delightfully sinister and playfully animated music video that brought about feelings of nostalgia and an openness to whatever this new sound was. Radiohead was back baby! Ring the bells, light the fires, let them know. Radiohead is back! It wasn’t until shortly after that the album dropped and I was, to put it mildly, stunned by what I heard. “Burn the Witch” opens the album with its piercingly haunting violins and then builds into a nightmarish storm of clashing violins and then all of a sudden to an astounding shift in tone and tempo into “Daydreaming” as a haunting piano pushes along into the soothing arms of Thom’s more calm and quiet voice. A tone shift of this magnitude I’ve not heard in an album since Aphex Twin’s masterpiece “Come to Daddy” and its insane shift from the intensity of “Come to Daddy” to the calming playful tones of “Flim”. And it wasn’t until the line “This goes beyond me…beyond you…” in the opus “Daydreaming” that it dawned on me that listening to this album might be a journey into a new kind of masterpiece. I’d already noticed the fan favorite “True Loves Waits”, a song that had been previously played only live, listed as the final track on the album and knew no matter what this was something very special I was about to listen to. “A Moon Shaped Pool” is a memory box. Only a handful of songs on the album had not previously appeared in other forms. But it’s not that that makes it more of a memory box for me. Listening to the album front to back was like opening my own box of memories inside of my head. The soundscapes are so vast and nuanced on each track I cannot imagine the type of person that could listen to it and it not manage to snag at least one memory from the back of your head. But for me listening to this album was as if I’d heard it before, I knew that was impossible, but the deepest feelings of nostalgia and waves of memories came with every note on first listen. It wasn’t just a fishhook catching memories at the bottom of my subconscious it was a net filled with hooks dredging up things from the depths barely recognizable as memories. They were strange and exotic things with glowing teeth. Each track was another deep emotional tug. It was like the combination of Yorke’s lyrics with the other surrounding music was some kind of symphony composed specifically for my own unique human experience. The creature that emerged from the depths was something I’d tried to hide down there. It was something I knew would get me in trouble one day. It was my ego, my pride, my arrogance, my fuck your shitty wings Icarus I’ve got a sun proof rocket-ship..and then a spark happened. It was all so simple. Everything in life was so simple. The whole world was the simplest thing. You could solve all the world’s problems with one simple and easy move…building a time-machine. But how could I get the funding for people to believe that idea? ….and another spark happened. No one has ever been able to beat “The James Randi Educational Fund Foundation Challenge”. If you could prove the existence of a supernatural claim under scientific scrutiny you’d win a million dollars! It was all so maddeningly simple. You don’t have to prove any kind of supernatural anything to win you simply have to come up with a magic trick so darn convincingly brilliant it could fool the foundation’s challenge. How would I begin to do that? And another spark and another and another. They came rapid fire with the fervor of a chain-gun slicing through my mind. It was some kind of high and some kind of deep pain. I laugh at my own perpetual fear of failure. This could actually work! I won’t bore you with every bit of the tedious minutiae that happened on the way to that soft slide into madness. Needless to say I’d found myself several hours or maybe a day after that epiphany in a gas station parking lot on the phone with my twin brother a few hours prior whom I’d tried to convince I had simultaneously figured out how to build a time machine and beat the JREF challenge and asked rather nervously if I had died and which direction I needed to take to cross over. I was lost and couldn’t find my way you see. I’d figured he’d know the way. He was a very smart man after all. After all I must be dead everything now was so bright, colorful, and suddenly less like reality and more like some dream I was floating about in. During my stumbling daze in the gas station parking lot I’d missed a meeting I’d set up with a friend of mine who was a magician who I’d pitched part of the trick which was intriguing enough for him to want to drive all the way up to my place to meet with me but within the floating time gaps I’d started to lose track of that first thing that goes when your mind starts to slip away after that first crest of the delusions and illusions of grandeur…time. When I arrived back to the apartment I felt as if I was in a daze. My roommate had no idea what to make of me I’m sure. I was waxing incoherent poetry and philosophy about time machines, magic, illusions and David Murray Brockie, for some strange reason, a man whom I’d met in my previous life. He was some kind of musical space alien god…I couldn’t remember. ‘In the deepest ocean, the bottom of the sea, where the weird fishes come to meet you and me, so go slowly, and slide on out through the revolving doors beyond me and beyond you . . . and immerse your soul in love…’ It was all so simple. Thom Yorke winked directly at me when the “Daydreaming” music video dropped. I called my brother to discuss how to build a time machine, we watched the video at the same time, and thusly could track back through the digital realms of phone signals and the internet to trace back this exact moment to the point of a perfect singularity. If my brother and I could recreate this day, then we could go back to it and I could relive this madness over and over and over again and prove my point about time-travel. A point I’ll admit I was having trouble grasping onto. This epiphany was like waking up from a dream, on the tip of my tongue, but I knew, I just fucking knew the true secrets about god and the universe were right there all catapulted by a few lines in a song and a smile from an artist whose work I’ve admired directed by a great artist whose work I’ve admired. Patterns and rhythms like love as an emotion or sensation are sometimes so frustratingly hard to place but no less real. Like the antithesis of being afraid of the dark…I was entranced by a light in my mind shining upon everything but I didn’t and maybe still don’t and maybe never will have the language to describe such grand illusions, allusions. Yugen is the only word I can think of. Perfect yugen. But how do you build a time machine when you’ve died? Maybe I can explain it to someone. But my speech began to feel so disjointed. It wasn’t disjointed to me but by the expressions and reactions of other people I was talking to I’m sure that it really was. Thom Yorke was Charon and “A Moon Shaped Pool” was his boat taking me across the great river. There is still so much work to do. Time to call everyone I know and let them know a piece of this puzzle that seems to be clogging my brain, killing me. I won’t let the girl know, it might scare her if she knew, maybe I’ll just send her positive vibes…now is not the time though. She was such an intense conduit for the sexual and surreal and that just might be way too intense for my mind at this moment. I could use the time machine to solve world peace…to cure mental illness…what if Donald Trump becomes president and causes WW3…oh god it’s happening…is it happening? It it the future yet? My mind is pockmarked with gaps of memory that float in a void and loose in my head but wither when I try to grasp for their details. It’s like trying to remember a dream a day later. I’ll do my very best to remember what I can so this story doesn’t read like a 60’s italian art house film feels. I had messaged a lot of different people in that very short time period. I would be amazingly cryptic about what I thought I’d figured out. But my roommate at the time had heard the bulk of these intense and possibly insane ramblings. Now to put the ball back in my court I will say I’ve always been a rather manic person, hyper, and with a weird imagination but to my memory none of this was exacerbated by entheogens. As I had done time and time before I had one hit of weed and a light larger the morning prior, unless I was somehow dosed this sensation was all me and since it may have been days since this started…well any hit or drink would long have worn out of my system. … Thom dances like a flame does, wild, hypnotic, erratic with no set rhythm but rather feeling the vibrations of whatever song it is he’s dancing too. His dance seems to be uniquely his own, free-form, like jazz and like fire moving in the confines of the wind. His uniqueness is and probably always will be for me an inspiration of the pure understanding of what it is to be an artist. … I figured it out…I was trapped inside a video game. My brother had programmed it then to test me like all of our intellectual arguments as a child. How will I escape this trap…I should phone a friend…so I called my brother…a friend. … That was it, the understanding of everything. Symbols, totems, dreams, triggers, physiology and everything. All of the world’s mental health problems could be solved with a simple solution. Simple enough. It all starts with storytelling and magic tricks. Eureka I got it, it’s not just a time machine, it’s a genie box, the full breadth of art, storytelling, information, and medicine can all be realized. I can build this time machine…and now oh god I think I’ve already built it. It is the future and I’m trapped inside of it…have I build it yet? I can’t remember anything. Have I met Penn Jillette and explained to him that I understand about all the magic tricks, triggers, and totems and how to utilize them to help people rather than exploit them? Would Penn understand if I could find him? Freakonomics was correct! I could save the entire world, give everyone everything they’ve ever wanted, resurrect the dead, heal disease…we all can…if I just organize certain things in the right structure. Oh god, this house of cards in my mind is collapsing. Fuck, where did that idea go? ‘That Penn Jillette can be such a prick, and all it takes is a little prick to light your mind and imagination, just a little push through pain to drive you insane to see the veil the man behind the wizard and realize how odd it is that you, yourself, are god…and as god, you are capable of fixing everything if only you can layer communication and real life incentives in an honest way…then everyone can get everything they’ve ever wanted. But what if I’m wrong…what if people don’t want contentment and happiness? What if humanity isn’t ready for it? How do I build this device? I can plug my mind inside of a computer and track my own brain, map out my own insanity and teach others to do it and help cure it…all it takes is an in-depth study of art, sociology, magic tricks, triggers, psychology…I was right…it all goes back to Magic Tricks. That’s why nostalgia is such a prevalent thing in the zeitgeist currently it speaks to our naive fear of death…I have to contact Penn Jillette and James Randi and tell them this idea!’ Fuck, am I dying? Just let me slip to heaven god. I’m having a seizure right now. … I text a friend “I think I’m having a seizure, help me!” And I received and intensely apathetic response. Maybe if humanity can’t help a friend having a seizure they can’t help themselves. And then the real pain started pulsing like a demon underneath my exhausting exhilaration of the sheer fact I thought I’d figured out literally every puzzle mankind has been puzzling with since we grew enough consciousness to keep ourselves perpetually neurotic. ... An epiphany is like an orgasm for the mind and catharsis is like an orgasm for the soul. I was having these all the time vibrating through my veins and nerves and if the mind can be a metaphor for a lightning storm than my head wasn’t a few bolts it was a violent squall akin to an apocalyptic storm. At one point I thought I was dying and text a friend of mind that I thought I was having a seizure. Wait, was I repeating time again…am I stuck in the thought loops or have I actually done it…I’m literally traveling through time. I mean earlier I literally called myself hours ahead of me and asked how to cross over to the land of the dead. I suppose time travel is indeed a relative. When I was a kid I met someone who’d invented a card game where at the beginning of the game the rules were never made clear to one of the players. The main rule was the person making the rules could not contradict any rules previously established while playing. The game is like a metaphor for life when we’re all dropped in with no understanding of how everything works but I feel like at this time I was given a glimpse into the strange rules of this reality that no one gets to see, the rules that god made. But god, if you ever get to see him, doesn’t speak in English but a much more cryptic and puzzling language. … Those fuckers at the back. I’d felt like my intuitions inside my head had anthropomorphized and while walking around my small apartment kitchen in Van Nuys they were trying to talk to me as if I was on a stage surrounded thousands of darkened people flashing red lights at my head…little pin pricks. Has that prick Penn got back to me yet? Have I even contacted him? Can I contact him telepathically? No don’t be pathetic, time travel can be made real, solving all the world’s problems can be made real, but telepathy is out of reach…or is it? No wait that’s nonsense. Does anything I’m thinking make any sense? Am I really going insane? Is this how people die? I can’t remember anything. (TRY TO REMEMBER THIS AND WHATEVER HAPPENED AT ‘THE BEACH’ DID YOU GO TO A SENSE TANK…DID ANYTHING HAPPEN THERE…? WAS THAT A TRIGGER TOO?) ... Hospitals, birthday parties, Alice in Wonderland, cenobites, my childhood stuffed animal running around the valley streets, and I and my brother were in fact wizards with codes trapped inside a video game bouncing a bouncing ball off mirrors made of pure light and in the void of that complete insanity ratcheting up deeper and deeper in my mind I had a long conversation about what death really was with the most unexpected person…my father who’d died vomiting blood 2 years prior to this event. He was still alive and well in a nice button down shirt smiling. I think I’d seen the other side of death and it was both hellish and heavenly but not in any kind of religious way but in more of a Lovecraftian way. I’d seen beyond the veil and who did the veil send back other than a healthy smiling version of my old man…it’s gonna be okay…and then I woke up in a hospital…tied to a gurney. I feel like this had been a long journey. Who were those fuckers at the back and what were they trying to tell me with their loud whispers? … To end this story I’ll say at the start of it that I had not ingested any kind of hallucinogen that I’m aware of as I don’t remember taking anything out of the ordinary and that I never got the results of my blood tests back from the hospital despite asking multiples of times. Everyone has that special album though. Everyone has that album they put on and let the memories flood out of them in mass exodus. Everyone has that album they put on to let the tears and tears of the mind slide slowly out as you cry enough to fill a room, like Alice did. But I guess in this case my special album just has more teeth. I don’t know what it was about this album that acted as a catalyst, or trigger for this moment. I know that it takes more than a trigger to build this kind of a bomb though. I am not sure what the other components were or sure that I want to know but all I know is that my life is forever changed because of that moment I had with it and I’m not sure I’ll ever understand why. I know that I don’t need to. But what can I say a slide into madness is still a slide. What a strange trip. Sometimes after you burn the witch in your mind true love waits for you and you find yourself at the end of a long, long journey from the land of dreams trapped inside of your head. I felt as if I’d aged a 10’000 years mentally in my head. True Love Waits for you, in the deepest ocean, in the bottom of the sea where the weird fishes slide on out through revolving doors to immerse their souls in love. Art can do powerful things to the mind when aligned right. Epilogue: “Inspiration comes out of the glass of a rare whiskey with smoke billowing across your tongue and memories float around like the ghosts of muses when you stare into nothingness and nothingness stares back late at night near the witching hours.” I’ve no idea what sense of nonsense is floating and bubbling in my head now but only now that I must write and like Hephaestus pounding the words into my conscious I think might suit whatever end to this story I feel now no pleasure in the pounding in my head and psyche having giving way to the vices of smoke and booze only then allowing me clear enough passage in the realms of my own unreal translations from memory to dream to prose that I may parlay the fragments of thought onto this godforsaken page to attempt to get across the rarest of ideas. Inspiration, magic, and the saddest of all things ‘optimism’ was truly my undoing. How can I reconcile with this ghost that consistently haunts me and taunts me into deep depressive realms my normally manic self isn’t quite used to. Who the fuck am I? Am I my twin brother? Of course not! Don’t be silly! I’m unique I guess. What is my purpose? Does anyone truly have purpose? Fuck. I scream typing this as I swig another shot of a rare Alabama based bourbon whimsically purchased on a whim from the store I currently clerk. 600 bottles made. Jesus. How unique. How truly unique. Fuck. This shit tastes like the rarest poison. My mind sometimes clear as a bell is currently as dirty as my car. Thoughts of sex, ex-lovers, and drugs I wish I had in my possession right now won’t save me from this maddening depression. I know like most nightly squalls this will pass by morning but currently is in full force and like the spell of an ancient sorcerer I’ll write in hope that the ghosts in my head go away. This epilogue is a weak ass incantation. To set the stage for these disjointed ramblings I’m continuing to write in hopes that occasionally truth will emerge like the sweat from a fucking warthog I’ll describe currently what I’m doing and what’s in my field of vision. Currently I’m doing several things. I’ll list them because of course people (especially me) enjoy lists.1. I am smoking a pipe with a tobacco called “Pistachio”. 2. I am drinking an ice cold whiskey called (Censored) which is incredibly strong (and rare) yet causing an energetic head floating effect not dissimilar to that of absinthe mixed with champagne (one of Hemmingway’s favorite cocktails) and currently is creating bubbling pockets of memories I’m having trouble translating. 2. I am thumbing through old pages in my online journal. 3. I am listening to female folk singers that remind me of times past. Deb Talon’s “Comfort” is currently floating about the air. These currently are all the things I am doing while writing this trying to desperately make sense of my past in a synced way to then sum up all the chaos of the past 3 years since my what I’ll call my ‘time-machine incident’. I can’t. I can’t sum anything up. The words float like musing teases and then swim off into the abyss of my mind like the dangerous mermaids of Never-Never Land. The memories don’t cascade like they did during that episode they merely float out of my reach. I’ll say this to sum up my thoughts. I’d figured almost 3 years later this story deserves a goddamn epilogue. After all that’s what’s expected isn’t it? A conclusion. An ending? Some series of thoughts to make sense of the madness that is life? But I figured if I write that I’ll write it in my own way with that same glimmer of chaos and disjointed prose anyone whose read my thoughts, my raw thoughts, might come to expect. The world is in a spiral of bigotry, ignorance, divisiveness, and for some reason nostalgia thrown in for flavor. It makes so very little sense to my mind to witness a culture clinging on whatever mental comfort food available and then subsisting on the rest. I wish I could feed them all with nourishing thoughts and wisdom but I know the efforts like most artists would put such a strain on me I’d probably die again and this time stay dead. “Also fucking Jesus Daniel, what an egotistical thought, remember the last time you thought you figured something important out”…tauntingly screams the voice in my head as I edit this. The only word to describe my life lately might be impotence. Impotence to write, create, and sometimes even to feel anything. Pink Floyd I guess was right. Being numb can be comforting. However I feel I guess I’ve wrapped myself in that blanket too long and this writing is somehow a violent vomit purge I feel I must let out. Why now? I have no fucking idea. I think probably because things are starting to make sense again and that thought scares me. I’ve been in love. I’ve seen great shows. I’ve worked on great projects. I’ve fucked great women. I’ve kissed amazingly. I’ve seen priceless works of art. I’ve drank rare fluids and ate even rarer meals. I’ve seen the sunrise in a desert and the sunset on a beach and I feel in some cases I’ve experienced more in a day than most ever seem to get in their entire lives. That numbness is keeping me from exploding. And any fun or wild moments I’ve had lately are in my own way perfectly timed for maximum safety. In the most basic terms. I’m not the same man I used to be and it’s taken me far too long to get used to whomever this new person I’ve become is. My past and my psyche did not and have not simply moved on. I can still hear him inside me like an ex-lover calling late at night hoping for another quick fling I’m all too aware is far too dangerous in my experience. Waking up three years late from a violent psychotic break and leaving your home of nearly a decade behind isn’t a scar on your mental state it’s a strait up amputation and that phantom limb still keeps tickling me. Social media depresses me. I have trouble concentrating watching movies. The routine life I so hated in my youth has come back to save my life and a part of me resents it. Sometimes I want to scream at the cosmos…”For god sake just let me drown” and then pleasant simple moments come back to remind me that I’m probably better afloat. A boy whose entire youth was based on his exuberance and mania has been beaten back by the world so hard that switch in his mind has changed from mania to depression and yet somehow I’m fully aware my sticking around in this world is keeping other people afloat in the chaos of their minds. The pedantic ramblings about my dead friends Tom and Patrick or what it was like to work on a film like “Get Out” or what it’s like to manage a liquor store, gas station, and liquor store again or to describe that semi-empowering feeling of turning down good film work or what it was like to be in a mental asylum rooming with an insomniac and having conversations with a schizophrenic and being hit on by two sexy nymphomaniacs while locked up would probably honestly bore you to tears and the flair of that kind of story is not something I’m interested in telling right now. It would be so dull and predictable of me to do so and lament the times. If I concentrate hard enough I can still see the fabric that sews the entire universe together. But I try not to concentrate that much anymore. The visions come close to breaking my mind again. I’m not suicidal now. Been there done that. But occasionally the thought of simply not being around comforts me. However I find most of that comfort in the simple act of sleep which I will partake in… Now. “When everyone has gone to sleep and you are wide awake There's no one left to tell your troubles to Just an hour ago, you listened to their voices Lilting like a river over underground And the light from downstairs came up soft like daybreak Dimly as the heartache of a lonely child If you can't remember a better time You can have mine, little one In days to come when your heart feels undone May you always find an open hand And take comfort wherever you can And oh, it's a strange place And oh, everyone with a different face But just like you thought when you stopped here to linger We're only as separate as your little fingers So cry, why not? we all do Then turn to one you love And smile a smile that lights up all the room Follow your dreams in through every out-door It seems that's what we're here for And when you can't remember a better time You can have mine, little one In days to come when your heart feels undone May you always find an open hand And take comfort, there is comfort Take comfort wherever you can, you can, you can.” - Deb Talan “Comfort” from the album“A Bird Flies Out”. . . . Like a Chinese finger trap thinking too much about this ordeal, much like trying to pull your fingers apart, is the wrong answer. Since this deeply suicidal note I’d sent to my brother and two of my closest friends I’ve calmed my bones and brains from these lingering thoughts that would return in the year after like a blight on my mind. Instead I’ve tried to focus on the good things, my simple government job, and since going to a meditation center to try to help quell these fears like a gift from god…I met a wonderful girl, a love who has helped keep me calm focused and balance like a living embodiment of why I went to the meditation center in the first place so I suppose after spending my life engorging myself on the tedious minutia of coincidence I’ll leave you with the only quote that springs to mind. Another epigraph. “If coincidences are just coincidences, why do they feel so contrived?” - Fox Mulder.

Sorry This Blog Has Gliches. Age Has Made The Underlying Interface Difficult To Manager.

via GIPHY

:Looking for Cosmic Gods Inside of Trinket Shops: (Update Later to Edited Version.)

 

                                        :Looking for Cosmic Gods Inside of Trinket Shops:

                                        By

                             Daniel Louis Krone 

                  “Uncertainty, like opening your eyes wide in the dark then closing them hard then open and blinded by the sparkling silver dots created from pressure on the cornea, squint, roll, focus, then your blind again but at least you saw light somehow.” - Kurt Cobain. 

                                                        The Shower Thoughts of a Djinn

 

                      Would you wish upon a star or perhaps a Djinn, would you beg a Genie for help, or your god, as your world comes crashing in? 

                    Could you commit hari-kari with the Sword of Damocles . . . while down on your knees, begging please? 

                    Would you like to meet a god even if you knew doing so would drive you insane? 

                    Or have a quiet picket fence in the suburbs that slowly picks at your brain?  

                   Would you slit your wrist with Occam's or perhaps Hanlon's razor?  

                   Isn’t it life though you’d rather savor? 

                   Would you shake the devil’s hand even if his hand felt cold? 

                   Could you warm that hand up if you were so bold? 

                   And tell me strange little human…

How do you feel about growing old? 

….

Stars are merely the catchlight in the eyes of great cosmic gods.

Dev was looking for a god, it was the only thing that kept him going. 

Dev stared out at the sparkling desert and blew the ashes of his cigarette into the wind, remembering so many dandelion petals he’d blown in the past making wishes that had never once come true. 

This time though he was determined to finish his task. 

Dev sat far away from the nearest civilization cradling a small brass lamp in his hands as though it were a newborn. A few tears dripped out of Dev’s head onto the small brass lamp currently leaking oil. Perhaps they were a few tears of it’s own. 

The lamp just stat their as he rubbed it. He felt like an idiot rubbing such a benign and placid thing. 

Then suddenly small tufts of smoke almost invisible like steam began to pour out of the lamp until the smoke began to flood surrounding Dev. A monsoon of fog enveloped the entirety of the landscape around Dev so much that he could barely see the lamp in front of him. Then the lamp itself faded into the fog and two large golden glowing eyes floated just above Dev and where the lamp was. A voice as large as lightning bellowed through it causing giant wakes in the fog that opened up to the visage of a great floating man dressed in platinum, opal, and silver. The face looked the shape of an elk or that of a giant goat or both.  

                     Dev was frozen not in fear but strangely enough aghast in a strange climaxing of his ego.

                     The Djjinn sat upright, legs crossed and arms crossed looking like a worn out fisherman’s knot with horns. As he stood upright his old bones began to crack and each crack erupted like a thunder strike.  

Dev thought, 

                    ‘He’d done it’. 

                    ‘He’d done it’! 

                    And just as the Djjinn stood up a sound deflated Dev. 

                    It was a laugh…

                    …a laugh like Dev had never heard before. 

The laugh was very clearly mocking him but the robust voice of a man beyond age, no not of a man, an animal that learned to talk. The voice laughed a hearty laugh that shook Dev down to the bottom of his soul in a way he’d never felt in the entirety of his life. A life that to the Djjinn was no longer than the subtle blink of a hummingbird’s eye. 

                    Dev’s awe deflated as quickly as his heart dropped. The Djjinn was not this thing to be mocked. Dev realized suddenly like he never realized anything in his life: in all the splendor of his chase he never thought he’d actually find it.  

                    Dev’s sudden realization that deep down he never really believed he’d of found a Djjinn seized his body and mind full force that outside of focusing on his breathing he could simply focus on the Djjinn’s titanic laughter.

                    Dev had dedicated the entire latter half of his life to this one moment and it was laughing at him. 

                   Before Dev could even speak, the Djjinn did the very last thing he expected. Out of thin air appeared a cigarette, the size of a tree trunk, and a flame erupted from his fingertips, the size of a bonfire, to light it. He took a drag and the lukewarm ashes fell atop Dev. A shower of disinterest. 

                      A yawn slid out of the Djjinn before Dev spoke “….Not what I’d expected, ha” and like a kite in a squall Dev’s tone fluttered about as he spoke. His head dropped. 

“Dev Burman. 35. Indian American Born in Frankfort, Kentucky. Moved to

Rajasthan 3 years ago, B-Positive, favorite color Orange, favorite flower White Tulip, odd. Now that I’m here...what do you want? A Million Tulips? I’ve been asked stranger I assure.”

“Want…sir?”

The Djjinn spoke firmer, “Wishes sir. What everyman wants, fulfillment…anything. Are you a glutinous man, vengeful man, lonely man…a modest pervert?” 

Dev thought… “I don’t know what I really want right now sir, now that you’re actually here.” 

“Well you’ve got 2 more after. The first wish is usually a testing wish anyway. Throw it away. Use it on yourself. You could experience all the pleasures in the world…and for your second wish you could beg me to take it away?” 

Dev’s stomach rumbled sharply and, as if from a memory coiled up to save his tongue from drying out, he belted “A sandwich, um the best Rubin sandwich I’ve ever had.” 

Djjinn… “Ahahahahahahahah…one for the books. Game on. It’s been such a long time since I was asked for something so simple so early on. As you wish it sir.” 

‘Game on’…Dev thought, ‘This was a game?…How do I win?’

The fog around them evaporated as if cut by the midday sun. They were no longer deep in the desert but a large parking lot with a sign in front of them reading “Hal’s Delicatessen, Butcher, and Grocery Store”. 

“Whaaat”, Dev was awestruck by this appearance and yet with all the power it took to create this awe of a moment it faded into novelty as Dev was standing in front of a Deli like so many times before to anyone else a regular daily routine experience. 

The Djjinn gleefully grabbed a shopping cart and went down isle by isle throwing all the ingredients of a quality Rubin into the cart and checked out like a common customer. No one in the store seemed to make note of his strange appearance. When they were done checking out the Djjinn snapped is fingers and the world around them rearranged itself, squishing and resizing, things disappearing, changing colors, and fading in and out into the vague shape of a kitchen. Then it all snapped into clarity. “Ah, pocket dimensions…I’ve not been to that store in ages”. 

Dev stood locked into position fixated on the Djjinn now convinced this must be either dream, mirage, or the death rolls of a man’s rattled mind after freezing in the desert…but later he realized it was neither. It was a new inexplicable reality. 

“Please have a seat.” The Djinn spoke and pointed to a stool behind him. Dev sat. His entire figure moved on what seemed muscle memory alone as this whole experience had rattled him. The Djjinn then toasted the bread and meticulously began arranging the sandwich. He moved like he’d done this 1’000’s before. He served it to Dev on a white styrofoam plate. 

Dev took a bite…his face changed expressions deeply. He then scarfed the sandwich down in 4 long sloppy dripping large bites, gulped, and burped loudly as he swallowed the last of it. 

“To your satisfaction” The Djjinn said with a smile as beautiful as it was insidious. 

Dev began to cry again as a solid wave of realization swung through him. He had the power of gods in his hands. 

“Are there any rules?” Dev spoke in a demure fashion. 

The Djjinn’s eye coiled upwards in a thick spiral before he spoke. “No! There are no rules. Rewrite history for all I care. I am beyond your realm. I can shape everything around you.” 

“Well what’s the meaning of life?” A question Dev always pondered he’d ask God. Since the Djjinn seemed the closest thing he’d ever met to a god he thought he might as well ask now. 

“Oh, another easy one. Maybe I should make you my pet when this is all done. I like making sandwiches and answering easy childish questions.” A small ticklish animalistic cackle escaped the Djjinn. “Life is what you make of it. Everything in this world has its own shape, structure, and a unique set of rules around it. They all make the best they can of it no matter how twisted and strange of shapes they are. Where it came from, who designed it, now those are different questions…want to waste your third wish on the blue-prints of the universe? Do you even know how to read them?” 

“That’s it!” Dev screamed up at the Djjinn. The Djjin then retorted quickly, “That’s all I thought I’d elaborate on so you don’t have any stupid human follow up questions.” 

“Human…you grant wishes to animals?” 

“Why yes!” The Djjinn smiled. “I once turned a stag into King Solomon.” 

“Don’t think about asking me qualifying questions until you think you’ve figured out how this works. The last man who tried this died before his final wish. I believe his last words were ‘I wish…’, poor thing, never never finished the sentence.” He paused, “Want to know what he was going to say?” 

“Meditate on it.” The Djjinn smiled and then closed his eyes, crossed his legs, and began to float gently above Dev. Sand began to slide around them. The kitchen had dissolved back into the desert. 

Dev began to do what he’d always done when he got nervous or restless. Dev began to pace back and forth and the tempest in his mind of possibilities became a squall that almost over took him until he finally settled the storm in his mind and landed on one thought. 

“I know what I want!” 

The Djjinn opened his eyes and they began to glow and flicker like there were storms fighting within his large pupils.  

“What is it?”

“I want it all, not some rich simulacrum of all but I want to experience it all, every laughter, every breath…I want to experience it allllll!”

“Ha. And so you shall.” The Djjinn lifted his finger slowly to a snap. Dev’s fear of the unknown began to quake his body and he began to dry heave bits of sand that had previously flecked his lips. The Djinn snapped. 

SNAP!

And so it happened, suddenly Dev was experiencing everything. 

Every baby’s first laugh, the roar of 10’000 orgasms, the pain of being eaten alive by fire ants, the thrill of being a cloud on the first warm day of spring…everything….then lightning struck Dev’s scrambling shape and suddenly he felt the awe of being reborn, a spark that grows to ember that grows to a fire, screams, then withers to ash.” 

The Djjinn took out another long cigarette and smothered the Dev shaped ash mound below. He then recoiled into the lamp after he took the final drag of his cigarette. 

Soon after a large sandstorm blew for 3 days strait screaming across the desert in large whips of hot and cold. It took the lamp off into another world carrying a twisted smile leering behind a nondescript brass lamp. 

The surrounding locals said the wind sounded like laughter. 

GWAR: MY WEIRD HISTORY.

 

"I think they're like H.R. Giger crossed with that old Mexican boy band Menudo (because of their constantly-changing lineup), mixed with a little bit of The Blue Man Group on crack." - Juxtapoz. 

My Experience with GWAR

By 

Daniel Louis Krone

It was New Years 2021 when I fully realized the world had lost one of the greatest masked musicians, M.F. Doom. 

I had just woke up with my girlfriend and was ritualistically burning a Juxtapoz Magazine from 2015 whose article by Nancy Strange was about the Rock and Roll Lords of Chaos themselves, GWAR, listening to a TYCHO New Years live~stream, I remembered I needed to write an essay about those strange Rock and Roll monsters and my experience with them. Times had changed but my commitment to David Brockie’s legacy remained. 

I have a strange relationship with music and art. 

If I were to write down all I was thinking on this matter it would sound like the pedantic ravings of a madman still trying to shake off the last drips of the year 2020 and other things out of his system. 

Over the years I’ve been trying to correlate and quantify my experiences, feelings, thoughts, and emotions on my experience with the band GWAR. My history in the entertainment industry is less like an artist, or craftsman, but more like a journeyman. I have an Academy Award winning film (“Get Out”) and an Emmy winning T.V. show (“The Tonight Show with Jay Leno”) on my resume. Currently I work a retail job for the Government in Alabama. 

This journey has been very strange. I’d told myself at the age of 30 I’d want to direct a film I was proud of…I did. I told myself in 2020 I wanted to finish that film…I did. 

The GWAR project started out around 2010 when the idea of doing a documentary series on cult films, books, T.V.  shows, and music began to take seed. I’d previously directed a short documentary film titled “A Cult Influence” about the nature of cult media and fan bases of very particular and peculiar tastes. It was received moderately well.  

After the short film was featured on Slashfilm.com and a Full Moon sequel feature “Killer Eye: Halloween Haunt” I’d toyed with the idea of turning it into a T.V. series pitch. Each episode of the show would feature a new cult aspect of media. It  would showcase everything from modern Quake tournaments to The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s domination of Midnight Cinema from September 25, 1975 to present day. The T.V. show was pitched around to various producers but some egos, logistic complications, and general life seemed to snuff out that large scale idea almost completely. 

About a year after those failed pitches I’d moved into a house on Carpenter Ave. in the valley with several wild, young, party-crazy, up and coming industry movers and shakers. After sitting on the idea and working on a horror script with a friend back in Alabama I’d still toyed with pitches and unique ideas for this project. The ideas all felt dead. Once you start to study a subculture sometimes you get embedded in them and you then go down the rabbit hole to as many others you can find. Art is a language and I wanted to be well versed in as many strange dialects as I could but later realized I may have just been learning to speak in tongues. 

It wasn’t until seeing the anthology documentary film “Freakonomics”, based on the book of the same name, a different idea clicked. Since the balkanization of media into all these subgroups that already seemed to tackle the original thesis of the cults of the world I’d decided maybe a format change was best. Since you could type any cult subject into Youtube and for the most part find a decently crafted web-video on the subject I’d decided to boil it down into a feature film documentary pitch. It would be an anthology like “Freakonomics”, but each section dedicated to a particular cult of media; movies, books, video games and…bands. 

When I’d mentioned this to my friend Eliza she’d said “Oh, bands. You ever heard of GWAR? I’m friends with Dave Brockie.” And a lightbulb shotgunned in my head. 

The details of the GWAR shoot are best seen in the documentary. There are no interesting behind the scenes anecdotes. The only thing I do remember from the shoot is we listened to Tom Wait’s “Raindogs” on the ride up there and passed a strawberry field. The shoot despite a few glitches, false-starts, missed set-ups, out of focus shots, and rushes went fairly smooth it seemed. Dave was a gentleman. 

When I’d got the news of Dave’s death the energy in his interview seemed more and more apparent of how precious he was over the other subjects in my documentary. I had been editing the project with my friend Kayla in the valley for some time after I’d moved out of that old Carpenter house and as we cut and chopped I realized more and more my interviews with men like Clint Carney (Artist, Musician, and Prop-Wizard), Nicolas Caesar (Artist), Bill Shafer (Hyena Art Gallery owner featured in my previous film), Mike Van Eaton (Art Gallery owner specializing in Animation Cels), the owners of Mystery Pier Books, and Marc Sheffler (The man who famously blew his brains out in Wes Cravens classic cult film “The Last House on the Left”) all had their own individual merits but didn’t gel in the same way as Dave’s interview did. Over time I ejected all the other aspects of the film and concentrated my energy on GWAR.

In 2016 I left LA after spending 9 1/2 years there. I spent a period of 4 days in a hospital unable to go home. Somehow Radiohead had triggered a hibernating psychotic episode to wake. (It’s a long story and a very different essay.) 

I have a strange relationship with the language of music. 

This project went on after I moved back home. When I went home to reconnect with my roots it helped me reconnect with some old friends, and even an old friend whom I’d worked with in news before I’d left for LA, at the infamous WPMI, home of the Mobile Leperchaun story. After a quick few days on Netflix’s “Gerald’s Game” to “Get Out” then into a commercial for the state of Alabama, which never aired, I’d worked on another film as part of a behind the scenes crew and around then it clicked that I needed real work after the tax incentives had slowed for media and it was apparent it wasn’t enough to keep me afloat. I’d dive in and out of the project with various editors met in coffee houses many miles away. A few odd jobs at liquor stores, gas stations, and Surf Shops I still tried on my off days to work on various shows and even tried to coordinate funding for a film in New York while simultaneously cleaning horrifying toilets at a gas station on the Florida - Alabama line and trying to piece my memories back together from what happened in L.A.. 

Soon after one of my media friends died of a heart disease and I knew the work he’d done would never be seen and my passion for the entertainment world wilted. 

At one point during a serious re-edit of the material half of the GWAR footage went missing. It felt like part of this project was cursed. But I still wanted to finish it. I felt like I’d needed to. 

Sometimes you ask god for a desert and he presents you with a grain of sand and you’ll look back on that grain and be proud of your tiny contribution to a strange legacy of art. To finish this project in 2020 which started in 2014 and still having the long uphill battle of trying to get it out there feels like some kind of closure rests in that it feels finished. 

For a 14 minute short it sure feels like it was born in and out of chaos. 

Like leaving a GWAR show I feel messy and probably stained after finishing this project. 

Oh well, that’s life!

A Few Years Older Photo of Me For No Apparent Reason: