TO ABSENT VOTERS:
CHANGE GONNA COME,
TODAY IS THE DAY,
A MEANINGFUL MOMENT THROUGH A MEANING(LESS) PROCESS

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TO ABSENT VOTERS
The Lucksmiths
Spring a Leak
Matinee : 2007
[Buy It]

CHANGE GONNA COME
Otis Redding
Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul
Rhino : 2008
[Buy It]

TODAY IS THE DAY
Yo La Tengo
Today is the Day EP
Matador : 2003
[Buy It]

A MEANINGFUL MOMENT THROUGH A MEANING(LESS) PROCESS
Stars of the Lid
And the Refinement of Their Decline
Kranky : 2007
[Buy It]

On Tuesday I woke up feeling so unloved that I decided to build a war in a bottle, to occupy my mind. I cleared the debris from my drafting table with a sweep of my arm: Bristol board, t-square, protractor, compass, pencil and fountain pen, tallow and wick, all clattered down into a great unruly pile on the floor. I assembled my materials around me: the bottle (faint whiff of rotten milk), the long thin implements, the model glue (a sniff here and there, for inspiration), the jeweler's loupe, the preassembled pieces (tabs already punched and folded, slots already spread and slotted), the headlamp and desklamp, the little tubes of brightly colored enamel, the wire brushes, the metal scraps, the ashtray, the crumpled pack of unfiltered Pall Malls, the strike-anywhere matches, the bourbon and snifter, the coffee and cakes. Leaning over the drafting table, wearing the loupe and headlamp, hands steadied by nicotine and caffeine, head fortified with bourbon and glue, I slid the long thin implements into the bottle and began to erect (carefully, carefully) the masts and sails, the concertina wire and sandbags, the anchors and gallows, the snares and trumpets, the standards and coats-of-arms, the light bulbs and halos, the monocles and gold braid, the fiber optic bundles and bales of twine, the golden arches and red crosses, the crab grass and grids, the loamy smell of swing sets, the black eggs and blue shields, the encyclopediae and cyclone fences, the snakes of Iceland and the ice of Snakeland, the unfinished bridges and flying buttresses, the helices of debt and ownership, the NO TRESSPASSING signs and bicycle chains, the fumes of munificence, the oubliettes of credit and the bores that drill them deeper, the president, the president's dog (reliable companion in times of universal strife), the president's faith, the Old Testament and the New Deal, Alaska and Russia, the red states and the blue, the white houses and the black, the volcanoes and horsts, the cirri and contrails, the weather reports (ignorable evidence of divine impartiality), the almanacs and oracles, the morning papers and evening news, the blogs and mp3 aggregators, the op-ed pages, the Atlantic and the Pacific, the ironclad ships idling in pools of offal, the buried pipelines, the independent security contractors (new cowboys of the civilized range), the baroque, the romantic, the modern, the national anthem and John Cage's prepared piano, the aleatoric explosions, the strike-anywhere ordnance, the zithers and lutes, the wolf intervals and pink noise, the lenses and celluloid, the maltese-cross-and-pin rigs, the aspect ratios and maskings, the particle accelerators and atom smashers, the light and the motes of dust, the cycles of punishment and largesse, the stochastic spin of warfare, meteorology, and rhetoric, the mavericks and messiahs, Wall Street and Main Street, the ivy and vines, the rhetors and their cunning devices (spinning against a larger spin), the postal workers and their intrigues, the comptrollers and rural dioceses, the impotent rage of the service class, the crowds and their madness, the salvation by fire, the burning effigies and subterranean cells, the devout and their terrible conviction, the evangelicals in eelskin boots, the polymers and carcinogens, the white rap critics, the dangling chads and butterfly ballots (mostly Question Marks, Monarchs, and Mourning Cloaks), the great funnel clouds of money, the effervescent rain of money, the stormy lakes and fiery pits of money, the skulls, the ulnae and tibiae, the catacombs of surveillance, the windmill farms and emission offsets, the sun and the moon, the chicken sexers and internet poets, the solar panels and mall photographers, the hall of mirrors, the glass in the hall of mirrors, the silvering on the glass in the hall of mirrors, my nested reflections in the silvering on the glass in the hall of mirrors, the nested reflections of the bottle, the nested reflections of the long thin implements, &c. When I stood back to see what I had wrought, I thought it pretty fine as wars go and named it "Snakeland." Critics, however, have pointed out (repeatedly, with glee) that there are no snakes in Iceland.