The surface stretches for miles.

lost my faith

2010-09-07T03:01:00.008-05:00

fucking hell i miss all of you. i miss every last part of it. i guess this really does end tonight right?
it's so quiet

i know i'll take the blame

back against the wallwallwallwallwallwallwall hairpin trigger take no prisoners cold metal hollow tip ammo i hope you're proud of me now i am a gun

where do we go from here?

its really been hard for me to even listen to the material since you passed, and all those letdowns came to follow in your place on the drum kit. tonight, i started with the first show i played with you at lemp, and now i'm watching through the ones where you were out of town and we played them with gork. next is the second lemp show. and yet everything is so distant now.

are you proud of me now?

how much human life is wasted on waiting
i said none i said none

and i don't think anyone covered for you better than gork. i think i had a feeling the second night in columbia like we were playing (the four of us are dying) FOR you. i mean that. i said one thing to the crowd, got no response, and played like we were practicing with you. playing creepy crawl the former night was a let down. it was an embarrassment of a former pinnacle of a music scene that will never exist as i saw it then. sometimes, i really hate change...

so kill the king before the ghosts get hungry again.
welcome to earth. my tomb. my prison since i left the womb.

i can't deny wanting more

and that was one of the things i do remember that was worth screaming. shagy, reciting MY words i wrote, on the mic with me on our first show at lemp

"and i will keep you fed. and when it's time to collect, you won't be left behind."

was a fucking highlight of my life. i will never get that back and i will never forget that. this recording just had garrett say "thank you brian beemer." after some song we played. wow. thanks for what? i abandoned a project because it became lackluster to the original concept and i was only able to practice what i loved to do at 4am on sundays (i worked at 9am on sundays. it became the worst shit. you have no idea how bad it got when we left the sheds.)

by the end of the shows, towards the end of the sets in the last few performances, i was on my knees from exhaustion, not anger or lack of comprehension of reality...and no one seemed to give a flying fuck or notice. i needed to get back in shape, i needed to stop smoking so much. i needed to get away from my whore of an ex-girlfriend (and i swear to the fucking god or whatever your whore ass decides to worship, you were the most worthless excuse for a whore ever-broke much? fuck you anyway.) i needed to get my life back in order and all i was doing during my waking hours, to be honest, was wishing i was back asleep. work sucked, my girlfriend was a bitch and turned out to be a whore as EVERYONE KNOWS. band practice was worthless. we were turning our songs into jam sessions and i was unable to throw microphones, scream, or stay awake for these things. nor did i have any interest in being a vocalist in a jam band.

you should have seen the look i gave alan at our last practice, i'm sure he remembers it. it was in a sense pity on my part, but i know him very well. i think he knew by just looking at me, he wasn't going to hear any of his songs with my voice ever again. he asked something along the lines of whether we should play the rest of the songs/set. fill me up. fill me up. let go.

two years have gone by now and i still don't fit in anywhere else as well as with a microphone in my hand, playing with people i really communicate well with, uttering some nonsense i wrote down in my bedroom,

AND IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK THEY'D SCREAM

I WILL SWALLOW YOU ALL WHOLE

we are so naive. so corrupt, and we concede....gotta get some while you still can...it's not illegal yet.

when you beg to belong just to dull the edge, the persecution, is it all worth it?

and now i put more meaningless shit into my head, plugging in devices
just to fill the time and sit idle. am i dead already?
am i?

i need to create again. i fucking remember everything. does it have to end like this for all of us?
it's getting late. i'm saving the 11-3-07 show for tomorrow, or a few nights from now.

the solution.

i can't sleep tonight, and i don't know what to say.
i've been so scared to use my voice.
what we want isn't always what we need.
if everything fell apart, how am i still here...

these are my scars. this is what i live with.
if there is an exit i still can't find it

i wish i could return the favor

never gain weight
never grow old

now i'm lost.
the imprinted vision when the lights went dark.

a recluse.
a tragedy within corridors of solitude.

on a tiny blue dot.
where instinct only keeps us alive so long.

overrun with ghosts.
the ones who keep me awake the most.

and it's not fair.
to be reminded of where you wish you were, and will never be again.

the ice in the sun.

this is a song you will never hear - one of those silent declines.

lost my faith.

so i'll drift off once more.
and when i wake up i may come to find
the phantom within, exhausted from the stress
will stay asleep in these lines of text.

but this story has not reached its end

yet

fill me up, fill me up - Let Go
beneath the wave i take a breath
and all the could and should haves
are just footprints in the sand of the past

There are two kinds of people on the internet.

2008-05-28T01:56:00.002-05:00

Smart guys, and retarded girls.

2008-05-03T01:52:00.000-05:00

You will never understand how I feel.

"Faith is blind trust. Never trust anyone or anything blindly."

2008-04-10T09:55:00.005-05:00

Trust is great and awesome. Faith is just stupid.

Jesus is a political myth based after the egyptian sun-god Horus.

There is so much wrong with denominational Christianity as a religion, it's another form of politics.

Instead, worship the sun. You can see it, it brings you life and warmth, night and day, not to mention cultures have worshipped its existence and recorded that fact on even the earliest of historical writings.

Oh, and 9/11 was an inside job.

Oops.

2008-03-31T02:47:00.004-05:00

Yeah, I want out of this. All of it.

2008-03-29T15:11:00.002-05:00

I had dinner with my mom, grandparents, uncle, two aunts, and one of my cousins last night. You know. The extended family. We all went out to eat and it was very uncomfortable. I stared off into space most of the time. Out of my two aunts, one lives here, the other in California. The one from Cali says "so how are you," to me and I say "alive still, somehow," then she asks how work is going. What am I doing for a job? How long have I been there? "I'm a slave. I've been a slave for, let's see, four years, three months, and twenty five days." End conversation. Change topic. They start to talk about the weather, and more fox-news-depression stories. I get out my phone, due to an overflow of texts/calls. My uncle says "Brian," like I should put it down. I don't. "We're talking," he says. "I'm not. Should I instead watch sports on the bar tv? I don't even like sports. I don't watch tv." Now they're all looking at me. The waitress comes to get our orders. I'm the only one who doesn't get a 12oz+, $18+ steak. You must all feel so elite. My cousin has 3 screwdrivers throughout dinner. I'm the one called an alcoholic. They want me to go to church on Sunday. I guess work is at least an excuse to not have to go sit though worship of a god that doesn't exist while the church asks for more fucking money to help with their growth. Not once did anyone talk politics. Good thing too, or I'd probably have to leave dinner preemptively. Maybe it's because I was at the table? I hardly see those people. I hardly see anyone. They know how I feel about the American government. What they don't know is what I know about the American government. Regardless, they wouldn't listen if I even tried. Fuck I'm alone.

The best quote from that dinner was from my grandma. "You just can't run away anymore can you?" My aunt who lives here says "no." I think yes.

An Open Letter to Trent Reznor

2008-03-03T00:26:00.001-06:00

Yeah, finally.

Time to get back to work!

Regarding scientology.

2008-03-01T12:49:00.005-06:00

This really has nothing to do with scientology. Anyway. If Alex moves back to St. Louis, that's really cool as well as bold, but personally I don't want to kick Alberto out after we have told him that he's our guy. I think that's unprofessional. I think Alberto gets it well enough that we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss him just yet. We're still writing and creating regardless of whether or not our drummer is completely up to speed. I think both of them have their sloppy points that need to be worked on, but Alex has that previously mentioned point going against him as well as already leaving once (with adequate time, mind you.) However, I'm not sure we would ever get Alberto back as easily if Alex did leave again. He has a good job that he worked hard to achieve, so him even offering to do this says alot. But moving back to St. Louis shouldn't be about whether or not we're going to have to kick out the drum seat of our band, who's become a friend as well. I think I've been typing this through two songs.

move along...

You're under arrest

2008-02-18T22:05:00.014-06:00

I've been working on a few projects to keep myself busy, and all of them are getting a slight bit more attention now, post-myspace-profile deletion. Mostly words, music, work and piracy, to be honest. Over the past couple of days, however, I've seen a few different interpretations of the definition of the word punk. The Webster online dictionary has it listed as:

A) a noun, meaning an inexperienced person, young man, a petty gangster or hoodlum, a young man used as a homosexual partner especially in a prison, a musician, wood useful for tinder, and even a preparation used to ignite fireworks;
B) an adjective, meaning very poor, being in poor health, or relating to punk rock. So wait, then what's this punk rock thing? According to the same reference, punk rock is defined as music marked by extreme and often deliberately offensive expressions of alienation and social discontent.

Alienation and social discontent. There's so many that have followed in the footsteps of the few who brought the word in to existence. It makes me wonder if things will ever change, or if the bit will ever get old. Sid Vicious went to jail. Do you think that he might have been partially responsible for the 'partner in prison' definition as well as the 'hoodlum' part?
Those sideburns are killer. They say that the Sex Pistols sometimes performed with Sid's amp not even plugged in, as he was too drugged up to play his instrument.

Is this punk rock, or just punk?

Fuck.

2008-02-05T02:09:00.000-06:00

First off, I am drunk. Why? I just had to reset my drum machine back to factory settings since it completely killed itself somehow, which means I just lost every beat Allen and I have ever written on it. Sorry. This feels like the final broadcast. Machines are sub-par in comparison to time travel.

This journal has been distorted since it gained viewers. For this, I have no remedy. I'm doing all I can to make the show on April 1st worthwhile. Will my efforts be fruitless? I can only hope not. We haven't played together in ages. The instrument he is familiar with has been reverted to "fresh out of the box!" and this bothers me, probably more than him.

I'm blasting Refused - Shape of Punk to Come in 5.1 surround sound in remembrance, I will probably even wake up my neighbors with this volume. This is an epic fail. This is some karmic consequence. What did I do to deserve this? Really?

Observing

2008-02-04T01:36:00.000-06:00

Alberto has a perfectionist attitude that keeps the rest of us smiling. I'm just re-absorbing these songs we've written throughout this past year, thinking about how they will change my own performance when we return to display our art publicly. I'm not afraid by any means, but what it could be is the familiarity of how Alex would play each drum of each part. Now that I've got that off my chest, I can safely say there is probably no other drummer in St. Louis who could possibly keep up with our substantially sized chord progressions as well as our irregular time signatures.

Yes, he is doing wonderfully. In fact, he's learning the finishing touches of The Corrupt as I type this. It was his suggestion to learn it, and he asked for it by name. "This one seems very complicated, and challenging," so we went with it. He hasn't complained once, has been attentive, and loves to learn. To put things in perspective, I will leave with a quote from Alberto, because they're beckoning me to use my voice.

"I have wanted to play in a band like this since I was fifteen. I'm 28."

Nature's Revenge

2008-02-01T13:10:00.000-06:00

If it's not one thing it's another.

2008-01-31T20:33:00.001-06:00

Humans, and their fear of returning to the earth that spawned them...In my opinion this is a perfect example of Darwin's theory of evolution/survival of the fittest. One's mind is the center of operations, and it leads us to death eventually. However soon it may come, everything can kill a human. We're made up of flesh, meat, bones and blood. We're destined to expire. Even rocks erode.

It could be just my opinion that all matter will return to the place it came from, eventually, only to spawn new matter in the process. Sometimes I just wish it would happen sooner for a few.

Once more into the breach

2008-01-25T18:08:00.000-06:00

Well, as it stands, we just told our potential drummer his services are not needed. Complaints follow:

1. David did not/was not able to play a full song without using double bass patterns through at least a third of each song. This includes clean-tone guitar riffs. His reasoning being "it backs up the vocals," however, I would like to believe that my vocal chords carry themselves just fine.

2. Regardless of his feet needing to learn to silence at the right time, the rest of him just was not loud enough. We assumed it was the drum set being at fault. That is, until Alan stepped behind it, and we could hear him over both Casey and AJ. As for David, there were practices i literally had to be next to the drums in order to hear him. This is completely unacceptable.

3. The simplest song in our catalogue, Call It The Gun, was an oblivious attempt. He would play the louder, harder parts of songs fine, but when a more melodic, or quiet per say, part was being played, he lost tempo, time, and would usually drop out completely until he regained a count, if he even kept one...

4. He was hesitant to let us hear his older work (from about 2-3 years ago) until a month into our venture to teach him our material. When we heard it, we found he a) had not learned much in those years on his instrument, b) must have known that if we did hear it, we would have said "no thanks," to him traveling from New York to try-out for us (keyword: try-out.)

5. David has been here for two months, and has yet to get a job, which was how he intended to pay for a drum set, instead of playing Alan's kit the whole time. Not that Alan or anyone else minded, but having your own equipment just gives you a persona of being talented/knowledgeable on an instrument. I talked to him before he left New York, and he explained he was trashing his current drum set, to buy one when he got to St. Louis. Apparently this was a slight stretch of reality. We're all entitled to being facetious every now and then, and by all means he is human, so I completely understand why lies would be told. The question at hand, that I will probably never ask him, "Why would you trash a drum set if you don't have any money to replace it?" That shit is expensive! Any John Doe can buy a guitar for $50 from a pawn shop. Drums, if you are unaware, run $1,000+ if you want a kit that actually lasts/sounds decent. I must have assumed he would have cash saved for that kind of irrational and aleatoric behavior.

Perhaps he was running on the chance we can polish a turd. Which we can. What we can't do, actually, is turn it into gold. Unfortunately, we need a drummer that's already made of gold. Also, fuck me and my metaphors.

On a lighter note, I bought a sampler/sequencer. It's the best waste of $200 I could come up with. Thanks, sobriety! Words can barely describe the prowess that the beast is capable of, so i will refrain from using any more words in this entry.

Quite offended...

2008-01-15T02:54:00.000-06:00

So, I've just finished listening to the 5.1 surround sound mix of Year Zero again. What usually constitutes this is either extreme happiness, boredom, or anger. This time, it was the latter of the three. The person I won the Missouri State Magic: The Gathering championship with, whom I got a job at my work, then proceeded to no-call-no-show the last three days of his employment (forcing me to cover the shifts, working open to close) decided to insult me publicly. Normally, I'm not one to bother with such miniscule atrocities. This time, I let my guard down, and called him out on being irresponsible, arrogant, and ignorant to other people. I also told him to shut his trap. While there is more to my resentment, for some reason I know I should be looking at the big picture here. I shouldn't let people under 21 bother me when they say I drink too much (which I don't, by the way. I am well aware of what an addiction is.)

I read my last post, the open letter to my current favorite artist, before writing this. I've since then purchased three books by him. "S/HE", ", Said Shotgun To The Head", and "The Dead Emcee Scrolls". I've completed "S/HE", and I must say, what a wonderful work of art. I recommend it. I'm in the middle of two other books right now (Steven Colbert's "I Am America (And So Can You!)" and Kurt Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan"), but this one was amazing enough to finish in just under 48 hours of purchase.

That's right. I actually purchased a work of art. I amaze myself sometimes.

I've popped my knuckles twice while typing this, and drank my self-tapped beer twice as well. It's my second of the night. I will have a third before bed. Alcoholic? I think not. Considering my current state within the Department of Corrections, I think my choice among the number of vices I could be doing is the most intelligent/easy to detoxify.

I'm in the mood for entertainment. Visual entertainment. I heard about Radiohead doing a webcast of their new album, In Rainbows, and have yet to view it. So I'm picking up the torrent now, but it will be a while before it's finished. This paragraph is getting bland. So, all is well for the most part, the album is coming along, but now that the band has a drummer I expect the writing process of the music to slow down considerably. Likewise.

An open letter to Saul Williams

2008-01-07T03:57:00.000-06:00

Pardon my ignorance and semi-anonymity, it's a little after 1:30a.m. and I have no idea if you will actually read this. I'm currently listening to Amethyst Rock Star.

Your idea of the holy trinity (husband, wife, child) is one I can agree with to no end. My father passed on when I was very young, and since I was eight years old I have been searching for a fill to that void for quite some time. No wonder I would relate to the inner voice of Trent Reznor's, found on Pretty Hate Machine in the late 80's. I do not believe that your collaboration was coincidence. Enough of my monologue.

It seems, however, my relation and to the 'tortured artist', and the vulnerability you so describe in your open letter to Oprah (which I have just finished reading, excellent piece by the way) have started to coincide with the politics of our once-beautiful nation. I know you do not know me, and if we ever meet, I do not realistically think you may remember this. Nor do I expect anything out of this message on a social networking web page owned by Fox News. Revolutionaries such as yourself have many more people to enlighten than a single soul.

The actual reason I've contacted you, my inquiry, is part of a search to find more of your art. Your words, good sir, I consider pure gold. Bouillon, if you will. My own wordplay is coming along decently at my 25th year on this planet, and as I'm writing this, the other tab in Safari is Amazon.com, highlighting your book The Dead Emcee Scrolls, with a special to buy it along with S/he for 20 federal reserve dollars. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be harsh to someone I only know through the art they have available, but fuck that. Can I buy all of your books directly from you as e-books (along the same vein as your recent audio release)? Should I look for them in my local library and never return them? This is all coming from an audiophile thief, so please take it with a 'grain of salt' as they say. I am proud to have paid you for Niggy Tardust though, and 5 federal reserve dollars is a small price for the entertainment and knowledge you have blessed my ears and mind with. Thank Trent for that one. With all intentions to pay you, I completely forgot until the report of your online experimentation showed less-than-incredible results.

So. What would you recommend to acquire these works of penmanship? Should I suck in my pride and pay for them through Amazon? Is there another way? I'm afraid if I purchase them online, you will not receive the funds you deserve for your astonishing works of art. This is an assumption of course as I have yet to experience these literary works, though based on all I have absorbed of your voice (and the content of this message) I am excited to hold these archives of thought in my hands and in my mind.

You've recently become my favorite artist, with your impressive use of the english language, and I consider you a revolutionary (as previously stated in this message). Your poem/song Coded Language' should include "Reznor" as well as "Williams". Thank you for your time, I do hope you read this. If I am lucky, You may even answer me back. Once again, sorry to bother you. Take care of yourself, your children, and all those you love. I know you have and will.

-Brian Beemer

I can't sleep.

2008-01-05T04:48:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure what it is, but my mind is racing back and forth between my band, cards, my ex-girlfriend (if merely for the intercourse), my solo project, my mother, my deceased father, and my friends (or lack thereof...). I guess I can still be pessimistic, even now that I'm sober. The plaque on my teeth even has crossed my mind. Two entire albums have played while I laid in the dark. I finally turned the light back on, and began typing on this seldom used blog, that no one knows even exists.

Why? What is it that is keeping me up? This river of inwardness runs long and deep. It's only in these past few days that I'm beginning to see. My mind is regaining its clarity, becoming sharper and faster, more responsive, and realizing just what it is capable of. So why can't I sleep? Is this path that I have chosen going to continue to decide for itself when my slumber will come and go?

I guess time will tell. It's so late, and I'm physically tired. Mentally however, words and thoughts are consistent and plentiful. So. How do I shut it (my mind that is...) off when it needs to be put to rest? When I figure that one out I think I will feel much better. This has been a problem before, during, and after my drug usage. So it can't be that. I guess time will tell, eventually.

Once again...

2007-12-30T03:49:00.000-06:00

I'm putting off recording because I'm just not able to mentally push myself. What could be worse? I guess having nothing I want to mentally push out at all.

TITLE?

2007-12-29T11:41:00.001-06:00

It feels like the first time, but it's not. I've chosen here because others have as well. Hopefully more will hear what I have to say, and what I wish to broadcast. This is a continuation. I am merely a fragment. It is here that you will begin to see me put everything within myself together. Then tear it all to pieces. What sparked the change?

Let's be honest. The internet blows fucking asshole.