Love at a Reasonable Price

Live blogging the new Sludge Monster album
Put your arm thing around my shoulder
[Originally posted May 5, from about 1:30PM-2:30PM]

What Good Am I so Terrified
round round
up down
seeking
what?
“what good am I so terrified”
the narrator runs scared over the racing suspense music
we dodge and turn
through the moving pictures
the dark night

Bad Trip
“I don’t like what I see”
music still racing, worried, The Strokes a little like
We are worried we are swirling
we are not sure what is going on
the music becomes mechanical bubbles and spaces out with flutes
we are reaching with the narrator after
“visions intensified”
What does he see?
What’s the thing with the demon voice?
And what was he compelled to?
And are these flutes fluttering in at the edges and into the center for a moment here and there?
A bad trip?
Drug?
Vacation turned monster movie?
Hope turned heartache?
He said he had no choice.
But that’s what people always say after its too late to choose better
Still, here we don’t know
Maybe there were real monsters, demanding real action, and even with the dust cleared, the mistakes made, and the bodies lying this way and that, we’d have to say that, to be fair, we couldn’t have handled the situation any better: a truly unusual, remarkable, difficult situation — what with the fast-approaching monsters and the quick-narrowing options and the low visibility and moral ambiguities and one tough call following another so you’ve no time to well-consider any of them

A Dark Web
Dreamy guitars, spaced drum beats
A speeding up down the channel, caught in the current
That’s no channel! It’s an irrigation ditch — you shouldn’t play there
What’s he saying?
“I am I am”
“I will I will”
“I can I can”
Groovy, but “you’re gonna catch your death” / “nowhere to hide”
fun teenage monster movie sexy fun goes gory fun
What has “gained its consciousness this dark and terrible web, and now it steals identities and makes the real ones dead; it took my best friend, a kind and trusting soul, who could read the future’s promises, and was taken by a troll … dang ”
What happened here? The web is a spider monster’s lair?
The web is itself the monster?
A monster that gobbles your body from the inside-out and inhabits your saggy flesh?
And this friend with a trust greater than his prescience, and so now just another victim in the catalog of the not-quite-main-characters
Where are we now? We are “dang”; but it’s too late to change where we’ve landed; the movie’s ended

New Year New You
Show-tuney
Bobble your head, dare to dream of a “New year, new you”
All the possibilities!
But who wants to chase geese?
Who has that on their wish-list?
Only dogs, mostly just dogs
Is a dog grinning and swaying side to side in this alt-rumba?

Gross Job
“they got one job; it’s crazy / they come at night; while you’re lazy / they crawl … up … in … your … head”
Oh not those monsters!
The ear ones! The brain stealers and melters! Gross!
And so like getting older alone in the woods or on the park bench in your boxed apartment in your sardine can

Put Your Arm Thing Around Me
Spacey, dreamy, long chords, distorted voice alien planet landing gentle and careful touchdown with wide landing feet
Some kind of love “my old friend”
What has happened? He was anti-mattered and reassembled?
“a little different here and there” / “try not to stare” “Put your arm-thing on your shoulder / it takes a while to regain composure / you’ve got me as support”
Ethereal, longing, loving, these broken pieces put back together
Oh, the beginning, was “he’s a lot like his old molecules / just different here and there” Is it like The Fly when you come back together in a way that doesn’t go well?
No, it’s just him; but “anti-matter to matter is weird”
And the music is sparse, the voice electronic and spaced, gentle, putting on a brave face, “welcome back, my old friend, it’s so good to have you back”
Oh! Why?
Why the crumpling-up of our forms, the cruelty of change, of hurt, of broken
and yet
what a friend we have in Jesus and everyone else who just says, “it is so good to see you again”, and leaves it at that — at the only thing any good

Reverse Polarity Touch Mainframe
Are we waltzing, are we twirling around the dance floor?
A few piano key-notes to walk down the wide winding stairs in our showgirl outfits with real ostrich feathers
“water in the circuit / any way you work it / how is joy so close to terror? / are you sure, so sure this is right?”
The danger of human certainty, of rash human actions, of rushed human contact
I am wondering where we are in the slow waltz down through the hall, trapped in the info world I guess in the tunnel of ideas connected to off/on impulses

Comments Section
Movie intermission
Easy going Notes zig zag up and down slow and spaced wide the cha cha beats travel up and down but we’re just waiting to hear from you
A voice finally walks in, with a motion in between speech and song “sitting back / making sense of the struggle / don’t know the facts / a little late to the ? / so what the / so darn sure / close to giving up / close to shutting the door”
And back to banging and sawing now with the guitar suggesting upward and downward What did we learn? Must we comment?
But we want to participate in the culture!
We want to push back on the stimuli! We want purchase on this shared dreamscape! We want to be heard
We want to sound like somebody
no, we just want, to not be so alone, so much like fodder for losing, maybe better to shut the door, maybe better to make like a snail and slime back inside

Dude, Look
“Du du dude, you are an idiot / du du du why don’t you see that?”
“They’ve got toxic sludge and radioactivity / there’s an ?ugly-A? creature chasing you and me”
“du du dude, you drive me wild / du du du you are a child”
What is going on here?
The music is stalking the listener
What is the “dark ritual” they’re putting on?
“I don’t care if we die / I just want you to recognize / there’s an ?evil-eyed? creature chasing you and me”
Well, for those of us who wake up at four am worried about the United States sleepwalking into a Trump-centered, but willing-wonks-organized dictatorship; this song feels like our last many years, like, “COME ON! WILL YOU OPEN YOUR EYES!”,
but I mean, it’s also a common lament of monster movie watchers — the fools not realizing that the monster is stalking them, that the creatures are coming for them, so obvious to us with our popcorn and soda with our arm around our girl or just on the empty ragged sofa where nothing ever happens

Well, America, some people fight in the mud for democracy and freedom and not having to be afraid of government reprisals if you speak out against your government; all you’re being asked to do is pay attention, be honest, avoid obvious errors, push away from thugocracy and related incompetencies (you’re good at what you prioritize: thugocracies prioritize holding power, and shoving everybody who disagrees down into the dirt deeper and deeper past the point of pain deep into dying alone and broken) and chose the imperfect-but-workable over grand schemes of infinite perfections and grand pouts of “it’s all the same / nobody loves ME good enough anyway”; that’s all you’re being asked to do — please do it

Concerns About Raising the Dead
A high lamenting voice falling down onto the steady rocks of base and drum
“You should try me again sometime / I might just come around / I’m not so far gone, no not yet / I might just come around / I can change my mind”
This is the rat-maze-looping thought of a mad scientist This is the dark jagged walls hanging at odd angles to frame his desperate seeking after that great victory science for infinity’s sake
Who raises the dead? only “the almighty”?
Or can a human with a clear hand restart a life lost? Is death but an interruption that doesn’t ever end? And might we crunch courageously to a reopening of the eyes and mind?

Angry Ghost
“I’ve seen hurt like this before / can’t get this mirror clean / there is an angry ghost making your ears bleed many times”
How is this ghost “in the shower”, “on the pillow”, “traveling on his commute” “between breathing and the floating air and the souls of insects” ?
“I am one of those sensitive dance kids helping a mom and dad remembering what they had”
“I’m ready to be buried deep in the garden”
The words drop like slow molasses
The music goes round and round like a witch’s cauldron is stirred “confused by it / abused by it”
What is going on? How can a banshee move so gently and softly like this song flows, as it circles in eddies, and then breaks free to go easily carefully forward “hurt feet / sunburned head / look of despair / look of despite / and the ways they lie / the ways they lie / my knees feel weak / my heart feels funny / when you give love / when you …”
He “can’t get this mirror clean”
He’s not “seen dirt like this before”
The ghost and his musical home feel more sad than angry
But sorrow has a way of lashing out, especially if one’s audience can only see you as ugly, as drifting, as tatters, as cruel rags

Anger Goes Away
Merry go round? Quiet siren? Sad siren?
“Dusting off my carbon shifter, I pick up my guitar / and I’m connecting the lightning; I feel the charge shock my lips / I engage the power cells / watch the surge go down your spine / and the anger goes away / and the anger goes away”
Does it, though?
If it drifts away and dissipates like this wide-spreading music, does that mean that the anger is gone? Or has it just grown tired and quiet, temporarily forgetful of itself but not gone away?
What healing magic can we expect from the electrical reanimation of a stitched together mess of corpses?
I don’t know, but we don’t disbelieve the narrator, we don’t dispute his claim that the anger goes away, that the mad scientist and his mad creature have resurrected one another into the gentle joyful fold of sentient sympathy of aware eye-in-eye insight into the Love within each one
We think, OK, sure, sounds good, the anger, okay, sure, it can go away, the monster and his creator don’t have to be sharp edges dangerous jags crooked lines, they could be happy, calm, gentle, abiding in the Love that makes life Real

Live Bloggers: Bartleby Willard & Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson

You know how some authors publish books and then other people buy the books and read them and are struck by their merits and enthuse about and gloat over them privately and also speak of them to their friends and acquaintances in glowing terms along the lines of, “You should check this book out! It’ll shift your perspectives, widen your horizons, enliven your soulfire! You should give this book a try. I am proud of myself for having discovered it and for being ripe for the Beauty of its multitudes, and I am excited for you to read it and then infer from my recommendation that I am intellectually savvy and spiritually aware!”
?

We were thinking we would like to do that, to publish those kinds of books. But what kind of books are those? And is it possible we’ve already published one or two of them, but nobody knows because everybody’s just gotten so in the habit of never reading our books that no one knows about our great literary accomplishment(s)?

Hard to say. We’ve written a lot of books, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve written any good books.

Let’s go over our books and see if there’s any that simply need a little publicity to take their place upon some high, exalted rung of world literature. Or maybe we have a book or two that’s close to being timeless art and just needs a little tweaking.

Our first two books, First Loves: Love at a Reasonable Price Volume One and First Essays are generally understood to be failures. The former a few people started but no one finished reading; the latter no one started to read.

So then we combined the more readable stories (of the manufacture, marketing, and sale of Pure Love) and essays from those volumes, along with advertisements for Pure Love, some poems, and a few other readable writings from our websites. The resultant book was titled, A Readable Reader, and though almost no one has heard and believed this proclamation, to this day (four years and three days after the current version’s publication date) we believe this book to be readable, and perhaps even worth reading. However, the writings within this book are from like twelve to five years old; they count as a reader-friendly collection of our early works; and as such, it seems kind of sad to lead with this book — as if we’d not managed anything any good in recent years. Furthermore, how often do collections of stories, essays, and Pure Love advertisements capture the hearts and minds of sizable portions of the reading public?

Our fourth book Superhero Novella was published (most recent version) in February of 2020, making it actually our third book, yet it is clearly our fourth book because it was written in the summer of 2019 — years after the bulk of the material in A Readable Reader. Superhero Novella was a stunning almost-success. Its few readers — including its author and editor — agreed that it had great moments, and some memorable characters, but that the protagonists were rather too similar to each other and to the narrator, and that in some spots the story drags a bit. There was also at least one criticism of the hero as being too flawed to gain the sympathy that make readers want to travel with a hero through his or her tale. But we feel like there were lots of protagonists worth hanging out with and rooting for, and that even this at-least-once-maligned hero turns out to be alright in the end. Anyway, for this book to sell like hotcakes, we’d need to redo some of the characters. Picture a shower floor that has not been pitched correctly. You have to take up the tiles, and do some combination of chipping out the cement and adding in new cement to get the pitch correct, and then try again with the tiling. Now imagine a shower maker who has never learned how to work with cement in any convincing way. And so, unsure of how to create full-and-well-alive characters and thus wary of any attempts at dismantling and recreating characters and the fictions built atop them, we’ve set this book to one side for some time. Anyway, whoever heard of a best-selling novella? I mean, sure, could happen, has perhaps happened here and there. But for unknown authors, leading with a novella in this time and place seems like a good way to remain unknown.

Our fifth book — and here we’re confident of the ordering of the books — was Fixing Frankenstein, a fluffy bit of fan fiction. Or is it? Maybe there’s some value in rewriting this classic work of fiction with a narrator with a drive exactly opposite to that of the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley. Where young Mary demanded tragedy, middling-aged Bartleby demands happy endings; and Fixing Frankenstein is a study in the tension between these two literary impulses. Furthermore, the rewriting of King Lear to a quick and happy close is poetically fun and not without intellectual merit. And finally, who else is going to send the protagonists of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to prevent Goethe’s Werther from killing himself in any tongue, let alone in the original language of Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers? However, we’ve never read this book all the way through, and there’s a lot of hyperlinking from the original storyline to our interventions and back to the original story line. We’re not even sure the book technically works; nor have we given it a thorough aesthetic once-over. So we should read it all through sometime; and the fact that we don’t ever get to that read-through suggests to us that the book will bore everyone. Still, maybe it’s good; we just don’t know. And so we set it to one side and move on down the list.

The first part of Diary of An Adamant Lover (book #6) was written like 2015; and then we picked up again at some point; and then in the summer of 2023, we created a second half that is most charitably described as “experimental” and least charitably described as “more of the same old philosophical obsessions and political bellyaching”. So, well, hard to say. The first part moves along nicely, we think. And then, well, we thought we could wake the nation up to the dangers of Donald Trump while simultaneously providing us all with a philosophy that would reinvigorate democracy by helping us to share the essential reality by remembering that deep within we already share both Reality and the universal values that connect that Reality to our various realities. And so the book, well, the book — also, we wanted to speak of the Hurt. In short, the book is an interesting snapshot of our shattered little souls and so some kind of art — but does it have mass-appeal? We don’t know. We’re tired. We’re lonely. We set the book to one side.

The seventh book Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown have released into the wide world is Manchild of Elfland, part 1: Rumors of Love. Now this book has a plot and also, we believe, distinct characters. It’s a fantasy novel, but with Bartleby’s incessant metaphysicking, but much not so very incessant. So it’s Bartleby Willard, but it’s also maybe a popular novel. Right? Maybe. Let’s read this one through, make a few final edits, and then see if we can’t drum up something of an audience. Yeah, Okay, sure.

Author: B Willard
Editor: A Whistletown
Copyright: AM Watson

It turns out
You hadn’t known
Certain things you can do just fine
Certain situations you can come out smelling fresh
But then
just too shy
reveal the gap
wandering with the hole in your belly where light should be
held up by strings like a skewered man, eyes wide with shock while he stands and turns to speak one more time
right there
how long can you live right there
before the skewered man’s lips part as if to speak, but only a gurgle comes out
and he collapses —
having discovered himself much too shy for life

you’re not going to
it occurs to you that you could
you could say, nope, not doing that
but you’d rather not rule it out of hand like that
because if you decide not to, then you don’t get to
so you say, well, we’ll see, maybe a little
but you know you’re growing the flame inside and the flame is happy because it is going to get to, get to burn you up and forget itself
except that never quite works, does it?

How to make things better?
How to make things better for everyone?
Is history cyclical or can wisdom gradually win?

Everybody blames Amble Whistletown, but Amble Whistletown is like totally tangental.

Hardly even there is he!

Everybody’s try’in to make out like Bartleby Willard is the bad guy, but I’ve not seen a convincing proof that Bartleby Willard is either the ultimate or the proximate cause of anything!

You come at us talk’in all this smack, and you’ve not even worked through so much as a formal proof for how it is possible to attribute any outcome to any individual causer!

I don’t see even see a convincing description of where one thing begins and another ends!

Nope!, nor even a real attempt at such a mathematical universe!

And you wonder why we don’t take your accusations seriously.

Truth is, most formal proofs collar God as the ultimate cause of all things.

And the proximate cause — what does that even mean in this interwoven flowing jumble?!?

Yeah? What does “proximate cause” even mean in a place like this? Suppose we pulled the trigger. The ultimate blame falls — as always — squarely on God since only what is itself not caused by something outside of itself can be the ultimate origin of anything. And we’re only free to the degree our conscious moment syncs up with God’s. So, like, ergo!

Mmm hmmm. Ergo, fools! Ergo!

Yup.

[Editor’s Note: I believe the argument advanced above is that to find the ultimate origin of anything, we need to trace everything back to something that was not caused by something else, and that’s a pretty standard description of a key aspect of the Great God. And that, furthermore, humans are shackled to the chain of events — including the tumbling-together of their own ideas and feelings — except insofar as they can organize their conscious moments around God and meaningfully interpret God into feeling, thinking, and acting; which implies that a human is free only to the degree they can interpret what is prior to feeling, thinking, and acting into feeling, thinking, and acting — but to this degree they are not themselves, but are instead God. So we’re free to the degree we are God, rather than we are ourselves. So all blame falls to some degree on God as the ultimate cause and — insofar as the actions are holy and good — on God as the proximate cause. And therefore, people should stop talking all this trash at Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown.]

Authors: Bartleby & Amble
Editors: Amble & Bartleby
Copyright: AM Watson

We need to pull it together.

Oh, yeah, that’s for sure. Too much of us is much too far afield.

Too disjointed, disconnected, uncoordinated!

Too distant from the clear bright center of the conscious moment.

We to rein it in, have to pull it together.

Absolutely! That’s the ticket! We’ll keep pulling ourselves together, getting more and more compacted.

Yes, pull it together, moving ever more towards a dimensionless point.

That’s it! Pull it together until we reach the irony of the event horizon and disappear into black holes so collected and compacted as to have no dimensions, and maybe, since this is primarily a spiritual, intellectual, and emotional self-organization, no mass either.

Oh, happy day!, when we’ve pulled ourselves together until we exist as nothing but dimensionless points — spiri-mathematically described, but otherwise nonexistent!

Yes, pulled-together! Cool, calm, collected, organized right down unto zero, unto

…

And here our narrators disappear.
I guess they finally got their shit together.

Conversants: Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson

How do we go forward?
Past the drinking.
Past the dreaming.
Past the meaning to help.
Into life overflowing,
shared wisdom,
the joy that giggles

you try it
you see how far you get
you just try it

Book of Remarks Chapter 1, verses 14 through 31

And after the chilling out of John, Jesus came to Southwestern Idaho, proclaiming the good news of the reign of God, and saying — “Fulfilled hath been the time, and the reign of God hath come nigh, reform ye, and believe in the good news.”

And, walking through the Balcony Bar & Nightclub, he saw Susan Florenvalle, and her husband Ambergris (“Amble”) Whistletown, watching a drag in the midday mountain air, for they were young and liberal, and Jesus said to them, “Come ye after me, and I shall make you to become catchers of he, she, and they;” and immediately, having left their beers (or whatever it was they were so desperately clutch-stooping over), they followed him.

And having gone on thence a little, Jesus spied Thundration (“Tun”) Whistletown and his business partner Archangelbert (“Arch”) Skullvalley as they nursed their IPAs while gazing out onto the confluence of West Idaho and North 8th (restaurants sprawling out of quaint brick and/or stone buildings onto wide multicolored [all dark shades] brick-paved sidewalks) from the balcony at one end of the Balcony. The titanic (original, immortal sense of the word) editors of the timeless (literally: as in prior to timespace) Skullyvalley After Whistletown Bookmakers (SAWB) were hanging in the wide afternoon (3PM when the sun’s up until 10PM) summer air, refitting various narratives. And immediately Jesus of Nazareth (“Immanuel, which means ‘God with us’ or ‘God is with us'”) called them; and — strapping partially-edited manuscripts onto the scrawny scaly legs of carrier pigeons that shot eagerly out (wings flapping, down-shedding) to carry their masters’ half-baked schemes and rolling dreams to the SAWB staff in the SAWB Building in Somewhere Sometime Wallstreet, Isle of Manhattos, NY, USA — Tun and Arch went away after Immanuel.

And they go on to Capernaum, and immediately, on a Saturday midway between five and six in the afternoon, having gone into the restaurants bars coffee shops and common spaces, he was teaching, and they were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as having authority, and not as the pundits.

And there sat in a medium-priced American restaurant a family man (there with his pregnant wife and their two young children) with an angry clenched heart. And he cried out, saying, “Away! What — to us and to thee, Jesus the Nazarene? thou didst come to destroy my proud certainties and the self-righteousness of my revenge; I have smelt thee who thou art — the Holy Peace of God.”

And Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silenced, and come forth out of him,” and the festering hurt and its constellation of resentments and rages tore him, and cried out from the wound in his pit with a great voice, and came tumbling forth out of him, and floated over the red square ceramic tile floor as a cloud of shifting shapes, foul odors, violent shouts, scared whimpers, and wrenched sobs.

His life was there for all to see. The story of a boy’s broken hopes, a teen’s insecure settlement into the life-path offered by his church, a young man’s pride at conquest and success — a thread of unawareness ran through the whole, one heard saw smelt and felt how much he’d never admitted to himself, of need greed hope fear disappointment regret. The man — clean-cut and wearing nice blue jeans and a dark-yellow and -blue striped gator-logo polo shirt — was not embarrassed, but leaned back in the hard wooden chair, shoulders relaxed, mumbling to himself, “I do love my wife, my children, my friends, my family, my life, strangers, and all — I do, though I’d not known it, having convinced myself that grabbing was love and shoving aside wisdom,” and related self-revelations, which mixed with the ding, clatter, and bread-and-meat odors of the restaurant.

And the restaurant-goers were all amazed, so as to reason among themselves, saying, “What is this? What new teaching is this? That with authority also the shattered-glass Hurt in a human’s pit he commandeth, and it harken and heed and spill its secret confusions out upon red-brown matte 3″ square restaurant floor tiles, where — like vampires in daylight — they shrivel and die, never to muddy another conscious space again!”

And the fame of Jesus (who they called the Christ because in a spiritual crisis he had no equal) went forth immediately to all the region, round about, of Downtown Boise. And immediately, having come forth out of the restaurant, smelling of hamburgers and beer though they’d not eaten or drunk, they walked to the house of Susan and Amble, with Tun and Arch, and the mother-in-law of Susan was lying fevered from inter-dimensional travel — having slipped too quickly from the Magic Lands where Susan grew up in a dirt-road suburb of the cobblestone market-town of Potatoland — and immediately Susan rushes to her, and says she should’ve said she was coming, and that she mustn’t dimension-jump so quick and on a full stomach, and Jesus nears, lays hold of her hand and raises her up; and the fever left her immediately, and she was ministering to them — saying Susan looked thin and Amble tired, that the publishing Titans were driving them too hard, and that Jesus wouldn’t have the strength to save any souls if he didn’t get a little food in his belly.

And Tun and Arch, publishing titans (literal “titans”: gods, born and mostly dwelling, before timespace) stood off a little too one side, feeling awkward — what with Susan’s mother (like Susan, a beautiful troll woman, lithe and shapely, a little on the tall side for a female Valley troll [like 4’10”]) scolding them for just trying to run a profitable and eternally glorious publishing house the best they know how; and what with Jesus whom they call the Christ so One with the one true God, greater than all humans and gods — what with this constant (itchy, sore, and annoying — like a scab over a not-quite-healed wound) reminder that being too blessed and immortal to concern oneself with mortal woes is a characteristic of mere gods, not of The Great God, not of I am that Am.

Arch said to Tun, “The way I see it, everybody just does the best they can, given where they’re at.”

Tun said to Arch, “For sure! What else is it gonna be? We can’t all be born as God’s own begotten Son.”

Jesus, hearing them, said to them, “Here is where you are wrong. All can and must be born as God’s children in the Kingdom of Heaven. It is for this that I have come.”

Tun said to Jesus, “What about stopping Donald Trump and the Trump-infected GOP by helping the citizens of the United States of America remember they already share Reality and thus can and should share reality and thus can and should gently nudge their shared nation away from lies, corruption, and meanness, and towards honest conversation, equality and justice under the law, and procedures, rules, and norms that assume we are all in this together and can all win together?

Arch said to Jesus, “Yeah, like the campaign posters say.”

Jesus laughed and said, “That too. Do you think the posters a little long-winded?”.

Mrs. Flordevalle said, “I say, if they aren’t going to take the time to read our posters, we don’t want their vote!”

Bartleby said, “Spoken like a political strategist from a magical land where benign rules are benignly enforced by benign magical fiat.”

But Mrs. Flordevalle was busy poking Susan’s side and hips, and explaining to her only daughter — whose abandoned her for this dubious fellow and his harsher, more fractured and dangerous, more tenuous, most dubious reality — that children don’t just need love after they are born, they need love before they are born, that they might be born, and born well and happy; so she didn’t hear Bartleby’s critique of her critique of their would-be voters.

Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AM Watson