good morning ~

(click the link / toad I saved to listen)

My Big Breakserpent from the garden

Went for kind of a chopped/screwed/slowed/reverb thing in today’s track

My buddies in the great Denver band A Place for Owls recently put out this really interesting collaborative LP featuring songwriting, production, and overdubs from a bunch of their friends (including me on one track!) - they’re extremely sweet fellas and they hit the heartfelt guitar band song sweet spot (especially now that it’s fall)

I am lately really fascinated by the strange and beautiful music made by Sally Daley, a Franciscan nun and organist who put out a bunch of new-age-adjacent cassette tapes with a heavy religious music influence - feels otherworldly and holy simultaneously, here’s a link

Accidentally cut a snake in half today
Felt bad about it
Kept thinking to myself
That my whirring blades
Drove the serpent from the garden

Last summer on the way to Boise
We stopped in the town of Eden
We pulled into a truck stop called Traveler's Oasis
And at some point in its long history
They had added a food court
That was themed after biblical paradise
The Garden of Eden, you see
A waterfall, living plants, paper mache rocks
And a giant snake entwined above you
Leering as you enter
It was kind of a "we have Buc-ee's at home" situation inside
Very expansive, decision fatigue immediately
I got tater tots from a Taco John's counter
(But all the various branded restaurants used the same single kitchen)
When we pulled back onto the road
It did feel like we had eaten of the apple
We contained a knowledge we could not unlearn

There's a very particular smell
That bubbles up when places have an indoor water feature
The waterfall in Eden smelled exactly
Like the various fountains in the mall we used to go to all the time
And those fountains smelled exactly the same
As the water rides at Disneyland
It's a small world after all, pirates, they smell the same
And what's even weirder is that there's this pirate themed bar
Right in downtown Catskill, I drive by it like five times a week
They have parrots and skulls and kind of a grotto thing going on
You can do tiki drink type rum drinks there
And it's weirdly in the basement of this house
Where apparently Martin van Buren the president once lived
There's a historic plaque about it outside
And in the summertime they have a little poolside
Kiosk style kinda thing in the front yard
Which seems like, you know, the kind of place I should be going to all the time
I'm generally into kitsch, the quaint entertainments of another era
Particularly when the attractions are a little sun faded or forgotten
And when I was in high school the house I lived in
Was pretty aggressively pirate themed itself
Tat still calls my mom "el capitan"
And we had a framed treasure map
And a ship's wheel on the wall
I also love the weird meta-ironic quality
Of a tiki bar
Feels like whenever I'm in Las Vegas
I'm dragging someone to a bar that'll light a drink on fire for me
(one of the few circumstances I will truly enjoy alcohol)
But the pirate bar in Catskill, I'm just never there

The first time I ever tried to go was at the end of a strange night
Caleb and I toured together in 2019
And after one particular show
We ended up playing weirdly psychosexual ping pong
In this male model's rundown old house in Hudson
One of those nights where someone kind of seizes upon
The opportunity of a touring musician's transience
And kind of performatively lies through an entire hang
(thinking, what? I'll never see these people again?)
He made us and our two friends feel increasingly
Uncomfortable, disassociative
But we kept playing ping pong
And his house was so empty
Finally we got out of there
And the internet said the pirate bar was open
So I made Caleb and (I think) Sammy drive there
But it was 2am, might have even been a weeknight
Not really a time for bars to be open in this neck of the woods
Later, long after we moved there
I tried to get a group of people to go there during Upstate Art Weekend
And it immediately gave everyone a headache
I think it was the smell
The indoor water feature smell
Is it airborne bleach? Or some other kind of chlorinated thing?
Or does the water get kind of mildewy as it filters through the pumps?

But the other thing is that the pirate bar in Catskill
Feels like a place where you could really knock back enough drinks
To really get you into trouble
A place for Drinking, and a place for people who Drink
I don't like that energy, can't settle into it
And really I'm too scared of getting a DUI anyway
To really enjoy a bar I'd have to drive home from
(and where we live, every bar is a bar requiring a drive home -
would some kind of taxi / ride share service even go to Climax?)
A wedding or visiting friends, then maybe I'll overindulge
But very rarely outside of music do I ever hang at a bar

Shortly after I drove the serpent from the garden
We were deep among the trees
Picking our own apples from the orchard
The one great place we could walk home from
A historic, family-owned apple farm that is just crushingly delightful
Firecracker
Amarilla Soul
Ludacrisp
These are some of the names of the varieties on offer
The person at the counter encouraged us to eat as we went
Try 'em all, we don't care!
(earned their confidence when I complimented their Chemical Romance shirt
in return they complimented Gracelee's Pu$$yrap shirt
and after that they kept saying 'sick' and 'slay' to us
as we went about our agricultural transactions)
We went from row to row
Grabbing all the most beautiful fruit
Tomatoes, too, the last of the season but still bountiful
But the shiniest, most beautifully mottled apples
All lay just beyond our reach
The ones most kissed by the sun
Seemed the ripest and most appealing
And so I hoisted Gracelee as high as I could
So that she could pick the best of them
Into the bags we brought from home
The final tally
24 pounds of apples
Maybe eight pounds of tomatoes
An assortment of baked goods
Some of the fruit will go to friends
Others will be juiced
The rest will live in fridge drawers
Until they are selected once again
Polished on a t-shirt
And enjoyed with gusto, that's paradise

But what about you? What forbidden knowledge have you deliciously acquired lately? What evil beasts have you driven from your person? What’s your preferred varietal of apple these days?