Pretty swell(ed)

Been pretty busy for awhile now, and the most evident sign of this is the list of people I've been trying to catch up with for some time, and how long it's taking. I guess this is at least partly an attempt to catch up, from my end. In early March I started a new job....

The week after brought on the SXSW Festival, a big music and film shindig in Austin. Last year I posted three blog entries about it. This year I saw no films and since I was working, didn't make it to any of the hallowed free day parties, until Saturday. But I was able to get out to free shows almost every night, and then go home to attempt the overwhelming task of planning the following night. Slept 20 hours in the first five nights, and it was a bit rough, but manageable, as always. Saw Shannon and the Clams (excellent '60s style rock and soul), the Rubies (crazy garage rock from Japan), Off With Their Heads (awesome "contemporary" punk), Andrew W.K. ("When it's time to party, we will party hard"), and Mariachi El Bronx, which is hardcore punk band The Bronx's mariachi incarnation, with full regalia and instrumentation. Holy shit, that was something. It ended late Saturday night with Eric and I sneaking into a parking garage for the Vice after-party, drinking Mexican beer on an escalator.

Then I got sick. My Skee-ball teammate Sarah diagnosed it as South By SARS, which was going around at the time. Then Mom, aunt Marion, and cousin Dan came to visit. They hit the town hard during the day, and we had wonderful times at night, punctuated, of course, by good eats. Most notable was Buenos Aires Cafe on the East Side, where I had Milanesa a la Napolitana. That's breaded beef cutlets "blanketed" with ham, mozzarella, and homemade marinara sauce. Those Argentines know how to eat. We also hit the Texas State History Museum, the Museum of Weird, and the recently-renovated (but still rocking) Cathedral of Junk, before the family left on Monday.

Then Tuesday I had a nasty ache in the gums, and woke up the following day with an excessively swollen cheek. It was up to the eye by Thursday. Turns out I had an abscess, and will have to get a root canal. Bummer. Got some antibiotics for the swelling, and some hydrocodone for the pain, and went to the library to get Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, to prepare myself for feverish and delirious drug-induced dreams....

And all this time, although busy, I'm thinking about things. Too much. Thinking about what seems good, what seems bad, the past, the future, and how they all relate to each other. When I'm caught up in the evaluation of the moment, I forget about the moment itself, and that life is made up of infinite moments, spanning the spectrum of emotions, consciousnesses, directions, and physical sensations - like the pain of aching gums. And like an abscess, these life-measurements some times swell. And then you take antibiotics and hydrocodone, become drowsy, and fall asleep. And wake up the next fucking day. The swelling goes down. Oral metaphors can be drawn out forever; I'll switch references to The Big Lebowski: "Oh, you know... strikes and gutters, ups and downs." And when you think about the totality of this life, all the ups and downs, how much effort can you put into the evaluation of one moment, when another one is already here?

Now, on the flipside, this oscillatory view of life is not an excuse to not strive for more authenticity, for more of the qualitative in each moment. In fact, they go hand in hand: try to achieve the qualitative in every moment, and don't worry too much about the outcome. Maybe it's idealistic, but what would the diagnosis be without the drugs?