Take a break.

ALL DISTORTION, ALL THE TIME
by Derrick Brown

Someone plug my lungs back into the guitar amps!
I want to live on
All distortion, all the time.

Aren’t you sick of being appraised as just wholesale?
Aren’t you sick of sailing on listing ships?
Aren’t you weary from playing cellos with ex-lover’s bones?

I want the butterfly brigade to grant me a year with no stomach drama.
I want a piano that will not warp outdoors
when the rain demands slow dancing.

I want to skew the difference between Tai Chi and Chai tea,
and end up drinking a tall glass of your graceful force.
I want to lick my hands after I touch someone that has just become
razzle dazzled by tomorrows oncoming lightning.
I want birds to come close enough to hear them speak Aviation Spanish.

“Abierto! Abierto!”

I want your record collection in my throat,
and my thumb in the electric ass of the all night jukebox.

I want my shoulder blades mounted in the museum of the most fantastic knives.

I want church in a bar. I want to pass out and hear you say Amen.
I want a skeleton night light in the closet.
I want your wow in my now so we become NWOW.
I want the light in your attic to shine down to where the sidewalk ends.
I want free shit to not cost anything. That’d be nice.
I want you to feel like a disco ball of fish hooks
so you can hang on my words and I can spin in your small miracles of light.

I want my kitchen to be a Brazilian dance floor
with a pot of your sweat in the oven
and a fridge stocked with booty lust.

I want your silver muscles cut into a quilt. Let me sleep under your strength.
I want more pony lamps. No reason.

I want to sing this feeling into all tail pipes
until I’m exhausted.

I want to smell everything.
I want to remember that the sky is so gorgeously large.
I feel stranded beneath it.

When I gasp beneath it,
I only want to gasp for more.

(Thanks to Meg Worden for the introduction.)

The Greatest Show On Earth

Like the fabled little-girl-with-the-little-curl-right-in-the-middle-of-her-forehead, when branding is good, it’s very, very good. And when it’s bad, it’s horrid.

And here’s the thing: There’s a great deal of skill, finesse, and psychological fill-in-the-blank-ing that goes into the very best branding. But creating good, solid branding is not all that difficult; it just requires a level of commitment that many of us lack.

What are you selling? You are selling a microcosm.

You’re selling small parcels of an entire, perfectly-formed, miniature world. A world with its own logic, order and beauty. This world does not exist, could not possibly exist, as a whole, on this planet. But the parcels you sell make their buyers feel as though they carry bits of this world around with them. They serve as covert membership cards, touchstones, rosaries, IDs.

Your branding needs to be utterly earnest, regardless of tone, about the world it’s selling. Earnest about its cheekiness, its usefulness, its temporary nature, its atemporal nature, its status, its cuteness, its superiority.

Believe. And then make me believe.

Consider the circus. When I visit the circus, I know that, very probably, the Bearded Lady is not truly bearded; the Alligator Girl is probably rocking a whole lot of dried Elmer’s Glue; the Wolf Boy is not some sort of lupine missing link. (And the clowns, obviously, are neither jolly nor intent on making you laugh; they are, in fact, waiting for you to turn your back so that they can sneak up on you–a fact best left for another post.)

But this is the circus, and I came to believe.

So let your production value be over the [big] top. [Sorry.]

Show off for us.

Or don’t: Let the stark, non-showy nature of your branding speak to us in reverent tones about your practical, tactical, no-nonsense world.

Commit.

Because my money can go in any direction my browser can pull up.

Make yours the greatest show on earth.

Impressionable

I remember meeting A. for the first time when I was not-quite-three years old. Although he’s my first cousin, he’s only two years younger than my father, which would have made A. twenty-two, then. There was something dangerous and a little sad about him, it seemed to me from hushed conversations I’d overheard. But he wasn’t dangerous himself: He was a sweet boy who’d done dangerous things. (Drugs, and jail time for said drugs, I would later learn.) Blue eyes blazing, he came to visit our aunt’s apartment, wearing a pin-striped suit with a pastel-colored shirt, shiny black Stacy Adams shoes, very short, gold-burnished hair, and sideburns.  He practically crackled, he was so phenomenally exciting.

I have a vague recollection of being introduced to him, of his being sweet to me, of sitting in my aunt’s living room and listening to what, in retrospect, must have been a whole lot of unsolicited advice from people who were only slightly older than he was.

What I recall with utmost clarity is the photograph.

It was time for us to go, and I desperately wanted not to be separated from A. I recall big feelings that protested going home, and the certainty that I had no way to get the feelings out of my chest and into words that would make sense to the grown-ups. And then my mother said she wanted to take a picture of me with A. We stood near the top of the stairway that led to our aunt’s door, and my mother went down onto the patio below. She told me to stand a little closer to A., for which I was glad. He put his hand down, gently, flat onto my head, and I remember feeling like there wasn’t enough room in my body for all the crazy joy that flooded me. And I knew later I’d be able to look at the photo and remember.

(A. remains a badass.)

I am he as you are he as you are me

Don’t forget: you are not immune from groupthink.

Even when (especially when) you’ve succeeded in surrounding yourself with people who get you.

Examine what you’ve assumed to be truth. Measure it against your empirical knowledge.

Never stop thinking.

Love letter.

The people I love are the ones who create. On their own time, on their own dime, because this is the way they know how to live. It is the way they make sense of the world, and the way in which they can hear their own voices. They’re the people who create because it feels like inhaling and exhaling, because to stop doing it, to ignore the call, the compulsion, would mean death. They’re the people who put on the show, write the short story, knit the sweater, burn their fingers with the glue gun, dig the fire pit, build the treehouse, practice alone and late into the night.

Those people.

Are you one of them?

You.

You’re really quite wonderful.