Following the Pathway

I keep starting blog entries during fleeting moments of inspiration but never finish them because I have so much going on. I know people occasionally stumble across this blog so here goes with the latest.

Life is good. I'm busy and have enough energy to keep up with everything right now. I've discovered a pattern where my UCTD flares in the springtime, perhaps caused by allergens. From end of January until the start of June, I feel like utter shit - no energy, difficulty breathing, weak muscles, just flaccid. Looking back, I can pick out numerous springs where I just dragged ass until school was out. In college I remember not being able to finish a final college project because my hands were so weak and painful I couldn't hold a pencil. When I was working at the hospital, I remember looking at the budding trees and wondering when my energy would come back (remember folks, I spent 75% of my life in the Northeast US). This year's been different. I'm not perfect but I'm better than I've been in a long time. The pain and weakness are only threatening to happen - I'm not in full blown agony like I usually am right around MDF time. I'm grateful. Perhaps the allergy shots have helped. Perhaps knowing why the symptoms happen is helping me not dwell on the whys. Either way, it's been a good spring.

Morgengrau is 5 days away from recording "Exstrinsic Pathway", our first album. We'll be capturing tracks here in Austin at Amplitude Media. The atmosphere in the band is caught between gleeful excitement and finger-chewing dread. We don't feel ready but also know we'll probably never fully be at that place. Perhaps if none of us had school or work, allowing us to jam for hours every day for weeks on end we'd feel exactly right, but that's not how it is or ever will be, so we have to work with what we've got. The whole process of getting this band off the ground over the past 18 months has been formative for me. I've been in bands for 17 years, but this is the first time I have had to pull the music out of the Non. All my other endeavors were simple compared to this: Here's your tape. Here's your CD. Here's your mp3. Go write lyrics and melody lines. No sweat.

It wasn't until I sat in my office, a metronome clacking away in my ear and utter cosmic blankness in my mind that I really began to appreciate what it takes to write good music.

Dictionary.com defines a music as "an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color." Good music, a good song, seems so simple - it flows, goes either where your soul expects it, or heads in a direction you didn't predict but are utterly delighted to discover. Like a beautiful painting (any style, insert your preference), you experience it and go "Ahhhh." It feels like it existed forever. There was never a silence where the song now exists.

I've spent the last year sitting in that silence. It's a terrifying place as there are three other people in it with me, willingly sacrificing their time, money and energy, waiting for me to pull a thread of riff out of my tinnitus and give form to the vacuum. I certainly didn't feel capable. While I love death metal, I didn't really know how to write it when I first started Morgengrau. My ears love chromatic progressions and atonal melodies, but my brain likes to think in whole numbers. Everything must be divisible by two. Notes should stay minor, but they follow the scale. Ok, so how to start? Fuck if I know. The metronome ticks, the cat chews on my velcro cord minder and my cell phone rings. Mundane life fills the vacuum, a tsunami washing away the hint of a thread. Empty, thin air.

I started resorting to something I never, ever thought I would use in the creative process: math. Let's play with numbers and see what I get. I've got one cool riff, it's contains these fret positions, so I've got 2-4 on strings E, A and D to work with. Play everything backwards. From the middle out to both ends. Trem picked notes instead of chords. Chords instead of notes. Mixing and matching like one of those infuriating "what number comes next in this series?" IQ questions.

Mechanical, perhaps. But the next thing I knew, The White Death finally had a starting riff.

I'm describing something a million experienced musicians already know. Whatever. Detailing my journey and may help someone else who is struggling. It's helped unlock what makes a song good - take a riff or two, and then use those components as your palette. Don't go dicking around up at the 12th fret because you think you're spending too much time at frets 3-8. Don't go grabbing the tube of white paint and adding that to your predominately blue and orange painting just because you can. Ask yourself, should I? Does this drive me further into the fury of this part or am I doing this because it is simply challenging to play? 90% of the people in the crowd can't see what I'm doing anyway (due to cell phones in the way, or no club lights, not close up or just being half blind) - they're LISTENING. It needs to SOUND RIGHT. All listenable songs MAKE SENSE.

I've spent endless hours this year listening to and dissecting songs. Incomprehensible riffs, once I figure them out, unlock the entire rest of the song. When I was a teenager, I didn't understand any of this. I'd try to play songs, jumping all over the neck like a retard. Fail. How the hell does he play this part? There's no way I can get up here that fast. Well… that's because he's not playing it that way. My brain likes to stereotype certain notes and progressions. If I play to that perception, I'm a supersized bag of failure on the clearance rack. If I force myself to feel what makes sense, and simply take in the note without trying to hear it (hard to explain but it requires me to disconnect interpretation from what my auditory nerve is sending) then the puzzle clicks into place.

I certainly haven't solved the puzzle of teasing threads out of the Non, but I feel like once I've found one, I've got a guide rope to lead me through the vacuum and stay on track. My appreciation of music composition, not just death metal, is so much deeper now. I will never be a truly intuitive composer, as I was never an intuitive artist, but I can leverage these new insights to find paths my binary brain may not have noticed before. I can feel my dendrites twitching, which, at 40, is a good feeling. This is what it's like to walk the Extrinsic Pathway.

2011 Revelations

Last year was an exercise in rediscovery of myself. I forged ahead with a new job and a new musical endeavor, wading into unfamiliar but exciting waters which nourished and completed me.

2011 was an interesting compliment to 2010, although mostly unblogged. Rediscovery gave way to revelation this year, a revelation rather dark and unexpected. I finished last year relatively refreshed after having been off work for a while due to my jaw surgery, and was looking forward to hitting 2011 with verve. Didn't happen. Very quickly, I grew tired again, unreplenished by sleep, dragging, leaden. Fed up, I began a systematic medical process of elimination to get to the bottom of this fatigue.

One of the consistent themes throughout my life, since I was about 16-17 years old, is being tired. I remember being 17 and struggling to walk up the hill to my house at 1pm on a Sunday afternoon because fatigue was on me like an elephant. I remember being 25 and drooping at my desk at 3pm, despite eating a relatively healthy diet and working out nearly every day. I remember being 31, walking down the hall at work, and thinking, "Jesus fucking christ, is this how it's going to be FOREVER? Will there ever be a day when I'm not so bloody, deathly tired?"

This isn't "I stayed up too late last night" tired. It's not "I eat a shitty diet" tired. It's not "I'm stressed" tired, or "I'm depressed" tired, or "I exercised a lot yesterday" tired or "I played a show last night" tired.

This is "each of my limbs is moored with a five pound weight and I could sleep for a month and it wouldn't do a goddamn thing" tired.

I've reduced stress, meditated, been mindful, gotten more sleep, gotten better sleep, eaten more protein, eaten more vegetables, eaten more organic food, exercised, stopped coffee, been more true to myself and guess what? Nothing works. I'm tired when I take care of myself, tired when I don't.

Daily I hear stories of friends bouncing out of bed, ready to take on the world. I have about one of those days a month. If I'm lucky, I get three or four in a row. The rest of the time is a gray drag I steadfastly ignore, forcing this leaden carcass of mine to live life. You may read this and be puzzled, as you probably know me as the ball of energy on stage or the person who hauls ass down the hall at work and is eternally frustrated by people who are slow. I hide it. At shows, the fatigue is pushed back for the performance and a few hours after, at work it disappears in bursts and returns as fast as it left.

Long and short is this year I decided I was sick of it and marched myself off to the endocrinologist to find an ANSWER.

Probably thyroid, I pre-diagnosed. That would be a tidy explanation of the fatigue, poor sleep, poor concentration, sporadic hair loss, weird dry-oily skin and inconstant vision. But no, levels were normal. A small dose of synthroid proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I did not need MORE thyroid hormone. Horrors, that overclocked, strangling, heart racing day.

Ok then, I'm not 20 any more so maybe the dreaded peri-menopause? Nope, levels for that were normal too. Pituitary tumor? Nope (and glad for that). Polycystic ovarian syndrome? Not that either (the doc really thought he had it nailed on that one, but I knew he was wrong).

What else? Grasping at straws, the endo ran the umpteenth blood test, this time for rheumatological factors and got a weak positive rheumatoid arthritis (ANA antibody) titer. Well, that sucks. I know several people who suffer from RA; it's a horrible, painful disease which I do not have the time for. I'm just getting good at guitar - I don't need my hands taken away from me!

The rheumatologist sent me packing to the lab with another blood test slip. I didn't think much of it, to be honest - after so many inconclusive blood tests, you stop getting your hopes up after a point.

And then I got my answer. THE ANSWER.

I tested positive for something called SS-A antibodies. Coupled with my overflowing cornucopia of lifelong symptoms, the rheum confidently diagnosed me with something called undifferentiated connective tissue disease, or UCTD.

Suddenly, every symptom I've ever had in my life made sense: a dreadful downward glissando focus pull horror movie sense that struck me with deep, numbing fear.

• In my teens: the incapacitating chest pains I used to get when exercising; take a breath and go to your knees to start getting right with the afterlife, because pain this bad can't possibly be anything other than fatal. The bizarre blistering rash I got for a few summers when exposed to the sun. The sudden-onset wave of crushing tiredness followed by body-wide warm, weak, stiff joints for several weeks afterward. The easy-to-dislocate shoulders and clicky knees. The endless, gigantic canker sores. The endometriosis and other delightful female problems.

• As a young adult: Get rid of the rash and chest pains, keep the endometriosis, weak joints and fatigue. Add exercise depleting rather than energizing me. Add generally poorly behaved lungs, particularly with upper respiratory infections.

• As a mature adult: Keep all of the above and add: the randomly swollen finger or toe or shoulder or knee with no radiological presentation. Sporadic hair loss. A bizarre stupefaction that steals my intelligence, where I can't confidently remember your name even though I've been your friend for years. Random burning/crushing chest pains. Undeniable asthma. Revisit the crushing fatigue and whole body agony. You're not supposed to be able to feel the joints in your sacrum burning like red hot rivers of lava. That was me at MDF this year. Gastrointestinal symptoms: to go or not to go or to not be able to stop going, that is the question.

As it sank in, I realized I never really wanted this day of revelation to come. It was easier to think of the symptoms as separate and individual, like the cells of The Thing, each its own microcosm of annoyance but for the most part, unconnected. Added together, this was a heavy weight. This was the sound that starts the first Deicide album. My immune system is eating my body. It has been, on and off, for the last 25 years. The toxins released into my bloodstream from my eternal inflammation is what is making me tired. No wonder. No wonder at all.

And it's never going to go away.

I grew up in the rural pastures of Western New York, playing in the creeks and streams and culverts. Seems healthy, until you think of all the farms around our property. All that fertilizer run off. All those chemicals and petroleum byproducts leaching from the highway cut into the northern slope of the aquifer feeding the well from which we drank and washed. And the creeks and streams in which I played for endless hours? Lined by summer houses with septic tanks and leach fields and in some cases, pipes dumping raw sewage straight into the water. The great, black rotting hulk of Bethlehem Steel was a mere 10 miles away; we couldn't smell the sulfurous reek of it at our house but now that I think of it, the breeze must have blown that particulate to us. Add in the cheap, overprocessed welfare diet on which I subsisted. My parents smoking four packs of cigarettes a day plus our wood burning stove belching black smoke into the house for me to breathe. My mother with her leukemia. So many female relatives acquaintances with strange cancers and fibromylagia. Let's not forget Love Canal. Oh yeah, then go to school for art and spend four years covered in various kinds of ink, oil paint, paint thinner, rubber cement and Duco glue just down the road from the deadly Eastman Kodak plant.

I'll say it again: It's really no wonder at all.

I spent a lot of this year being alternately sad and angry about this diagnosis. FML and all that.

Wasted time.

So what's the wrap up, the good news? I've made it 25 years staying undifferentiated. My last blood test was negative for SS-A antibodies. I may never fully present with lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren's syndrome or scleroderma. I don't even have enough consistent symptoms to warrant going on Plaquenil treatment. Even on my most tired days, I can still get up and go to work, still find the energy to smile and run through a few scales on the guitar. At worst, it gives me some darned good material for song lyrics.

If you've been tired all your life and the doctors can't find anything wrong and are staring to look at you sidelong while writing "psychosomatic illness" in your chart, do yourself a favor and get a rheumatoid factor blood test. You might just find out something you didn't really want to know that helps your life make sense. And in that knowing, you can understand some of the whys and the whats, and then just get on with living.

That's what I'm going to do, UCTD be damned.

Best wishes to you all in 2012 and keep checking back for news about Morgengrau, Hod, Drifter!

2011 Shows

This year was a bit slower in regards to shows... 27 in total with three of those being multi-day fests. The good thing about 2011 is I went from having one band in January (Drifter) to three in December (Drifter, Morgengrau and Hod). It's been a great year for writing new music and buying a fuck-ton of gear. The momentum continues into the new year with Hod hopping a plane to bring hell to the masses at The Gathering of the Bestial Legion V fest in Los Angeles on 14 January. Morgengrau kicks off my 40th year on this rock at Zombies in San Antonio on 25 February. Morgengrau will also be going into the studio in March to record our first album and Hod will be finishing up "Book of the Worm" for a 2012 release. Drifter will be lazy and play a few shows but mostly we'll sit around in our jam room, talk about gear and tease each other. Metal excitment abounds!

5 Feb - Legion, Birth A.D., Blood of Patriots, Pasadena Napalm Division at Emos, Austin TX
13 Feb - Peversum, Birth A.D., Rigor Mortis at Headhunters, Austin TX
26 Feb - Immortal and Absu and enough King Diamond on the PA to give you PSTD, at Backstage Live, San Antonio TX
3 Mar - Sad Wings, Chronolung at Stubbs, Austin, TX
12 Mar - Belphegor, Gigan, Blackguard, Neuraxis at The Rail Club, Ft Worth TX
3 Apr - Melechesh, Rotting Christ, Hate at The Rail Club, Ft Worth TX
4 Apr - Melechesh, Rotting Christ, Hate at Emos, Austin TX
9 Apr - Disfigured, Scattered Remains at Headhunters, Austin TX
16 Apr - Exhorder, Rigor Mortis, Hod at Emos in Austin TX
13 May - Birth A.D. and Killa Maul at Red Eyed Fly, Austin TX
17 May - Birth A.D., Hod, Warbeast, Heathen at Backstage Live, San Antonio TX
20 May - Evil United Record Release Party at Encore Records, Austin TX
27 - 29 May - Maryland Death Fest: Highlights were Hail of Bullets, Dead Congregation, Nuclear Assault, Skinless, Marduk, Aura Noir, Impaled Nazarene
3 June - Somniferum, Humut Tabal, Plutonium Shore, Spectral Manifest, Vesperian Sorrow, at Zombies, San Antonio TX
25 June - Killa Maul, Capricorn USA, MOD at The Dirty Dog, Austin TX
1 July - Morgengrau's first show, Apocalytpic Horror, 443, Kinfolk, Eviscerated at The Korova Basement, San Antonio TX
?? August - Warbeast, Legion, Hexlust at The Dirty Dog, Austin TX
16 Sept - Drifter, Sad Wings at Red Eyed Fly, Austin, TX
7 Oct - Aggravator, Morgengrau, Hexlust, Birth AD, Whore of Bethlehem at Headhunters Austin TX
8 Oct - My first shows with Hod! Two in one night: Hod at La Gloria Cultural Fest, San Antonio and Hod, Emperial Massacre, Plutonian Shore at Zombies, San Antonio TX
22 Oct - Humut Tabal and Absu at Bonds 007, San Antonio TX
25 Oct - Immolation, Jungle Rot, Engaged in Mutilating, Emperial Massacre at Backstage Live, San Antonio TX
29 Oct - Drifter at Clicks Live, San Antonio TX
4 Nov - Watain, The Devils Blood, Malign at Munchenbryggeriet, Stockholm, Sweden
6 Nov - Gorgoroth, Vader, Valkyria at Klubben, Stockholm, Sweden
18 - 19 Nov - Goregrowler's Ball, San Antonio TX: Highlights: Hirax, Goatwhore, Hod, Funerus, Cardiac Arrest, Birth A.D., Plutonian Shore, Emperial Massacre
8-11 Dec - Rites of Darkness Fest, San Antonio TX: Highlights: Demigod, Antaeus, Adorior, Cyanide, Weapon, Midnight, Blaspherian, Cruciamentum, Mitochondrion

Satisfaction

A clip from Morgengrau's second show on 7 October 2011, Headhunters Club, Austin, Texas



... and now also playing with Texas black-death-thrashers Hod - my much dreaded San Antonio double header debut night: Show #1 at the La Gloria Comtemporary Art Festival (yes, bizarre) and Show #2 at Zombies Club, San Antonio, Texas.





(click for larger photo)

Summer has been busy! Work has been nuts, my health management is nearly a full time job, and then somewhere I got it in my head that I had time/energy to join a third band. When offered the opportunity in Hod, I did not hesitate; life is too uncertain to worry about "How will I make it work?" Just engage and commit, and it will happen. Worrying is for pussies.

Expect to see me onstage A LOT in 2012.

Extrinsic Pathway

Morgengrau's debut show at The Korova basement, San Antonio. Part one of the Brutality in the Basement series, put on by Goregrowler Entertainment.

I could write a long blog about my feelings around this moment, which heralds a new era in my musical career, but for now I'll keep it simple:

I am honored to have bandmates (Nick, Reba and Prokingku) who believe and trust in this idea enough to invest their time and resources in Morgengrau. Thank you dearly, my friends.

I am grateful that metal still lives and breathes in the young and not-as-young... thank you to everyone who helped put on the show and came out to support.

Lastly, thanks to my mother, for telling me over and over that playing guitar was a waste of time which would never amount to anything. Without that condescending judgment driven by fear and ignorance, I would not be fueled with a red, burning hatred of proving her wrong, over and over, for the rest of my life.

We walk the Extrinsic Pathway.

Magickan and a Drone

Lesson from Moloch of Melechesh, April 2011.


Moloch's guitar in action same night.

Moments with true creators of magick are precious and few. This was a great honor for me.

Numb

About midway through the day, I felt it; a prickling tiny pain in the ball of my foot. Again?

Lately, I've had a problem with hairs puncturing the skin of my feet. First was in Sweden; a friend's dog was the culprit. The result was a limping trot through the park with friends; my expression that of smiling, frozen agony. The next time, I thought my new clogs had scratched my foot but instead, a 3/4" hair had embedded itself in the shape of a horseshoe on the top of my instep. The other day I couldn't get to a bathroom fast enough to rip off my sock, expecting to find a roofing nail protruding from my sole. Nope, just an eyelash, less than a 1/4" inch long, with maybe 1/16" penetrating my skin.

When I worked for the Shriner's Hospital in Boston, I had the opportunity to read many a medical journal. My favorite was The Journal of Trauma. One unforgettable article dealt with the amputation of an elderly woman's foot. Her Achilles tendon was irrepairabably damaged by embedded dog hairs. DOG hairs. Apparently, her habit was to sit in her easy chair and rub her wire-haired terrier with the back of her ankle. Over the years, thousands of hairs worked their way into the tissue, eventually causing the tendon to ulcerate and ultimately resulting in the loss of her foot.

How, I asked myself then as I still do now, had that old woman stood the pain? One hair in my foot and I'm limping like Quasimodo. This woman had thousands.

This got me to thinking about numbness.

The more schooled of you will be tempted to mention diabetic circulation issues and peripheral numbness, but humor me, please. What if she just ignored the pain, like so many other people do? What if she just wrote it off as "I'm getting old and my ankle hurts" instead of applying a little brain to analyze the situation?

Numbness has become an epidemic.

Bodies: Folks with teeth broken off at the gumline are smoking and drinking like no tomorrow. I thought breaking teeth was a torture method... perhaps these folks can only tell the truth? Dude in the supermarket topping 400 pounds struggles to push his cart loaded with eggs, whole milk, and chorizo. That black spot on your forehead that was the size of a dime last month and is now the size of a quarter? Just put cover up on it. My own mother walked around for two weeks feeling like she had a brick on her chest - she was having a heart attack the entire time but just ignored it. I just can't breathe, that's all. Nothing big. Just an elephant sitting on my sternum.

Noise: A tube TV left on will drive me slowly insane but a mariachi band blasting at full volume doesn't stop the family who hired them from talking or wake their sleeping baby. Somebody honks their car horn and I'm still crawling back into my skin ten minutes later; my neighbors passively let their chihuahuas bark at top volume for hours inside their house (I can hear those little fuckers from inside mine). A woman pushes a shopping cart with a red-faced toddler braying 120 dB five inches from her face; I have to put in earplugs in order to concentrate because of the work site radio being played from a quarter mile away.

The World: All four of your car tires are almost flat and with two little kids in the back seat, you probably don't have two pennies to rub together, yet there you are, ruining your tires, wasting gas and endangering your kids. Two million gallons of oil spew into the Gulf but you shrug, tucking into that shrimp dinner. Never mind that it tastes just a little bit funny. China infuses everything they make with melamine but god help me if I get in your way when you're heading to Wal-Mart. Your dog's had that sore in his ear for three or four months but it's not getting worse, so why take him to the vet? That rotting patch on the roof of your house? Oh, it was like that when we bought it. And by the way honey, I forgot to pay the homeowner's insurance last month because we didn't have enough in the bank account. I know there's a storm rolling in. Don't worry about it.

Me? I can tell my blood sugar level from the way my thoughts flow. At night, when all is still and dark, I can feel the arthritis in my toes, red osteo-wasps layering their nest of bone over my joints. I've felt the ventricles of my heart torque from my mitral value prolapse and have gritted my teeth against the cold steel aria of the pins and plate in my pelvis. Right now, I can feel the bone in my jaw going through a final post-surgery growth spurt; it's an itch, a blazing spark of cell division as my body relentlessly repairs itself.

I'm not complaining. I'm just aware. Really, really aware.

Daily, I resist screaming: "Look what you're doing! Your kids are fat, you're taking the elevator and teaching them to be lazy, you're too dumb to know that sign shouldn't have an apostrophe, and you'd never notice that show on TV about alligators is interspersing footage of Nile crocodiles just to make the action more entertaining. What's in your head? What are you thinking? Are you thinking? Is anything going on in there at all?"

My point is: Open your eyes! Live IN the world. Live IN your body. Look and actually SEE. Turn that TV off (they're mixing Shermans in that show about Panther tanks now), put down that chicken pot pie and listen to silence for 10 minutes. Okay, 2 minutes. What does your heart sound like? Are you tired? Are you sad, angry or happy? Can you really afford that flat screen TV? When was the last time you actually had a conversation with your kids that extended past "When do you have soccer practice?"

Don't be a ghost drifting through your life. Don't wait until later.

Be present: Feel all the pain, all the fear, all the joy.

Be awake: See the beauty, the mundanity, the terrible ugliness.

Be integrated: Reality and dreams can co-exist.

Be alive.