(Caption: "Kent Couch leaves his gas station in Bend, Ore., on Saturday, July 5, 2008, riding a lawn chair rigged with more than 150 giant party balloons in an attempt to fly to Idaho. He is equipped with a BB gun and a blowgun for popping balloons if he gets too high and three 15-gallon barrels of cherry Kool-Aid for ballast to release if he gets too low.")

BEND, Ore. (AP) - A man has taken flight in a lawn chair hoisted by more than 150 large helium-filled party balloons in a bid to ride the wind from the central Oregon town of Bend all the way to Idaho.

Kent Couch was wearing a parachute Saturday morning as he kissed his wife and kids goodbye, patted his dog and took off at sunrise from his gas station.

This is Couch's third lawn chair flight in as many years.

He hopes to do better than last year, when he flew 193 miles before running low on helium and had to land in the sagebrush of northeastern Oregon.

june 20

the nice thing about working from the midtown office is that midtown fucking sucks no matter where you're going home to. my bed left yesterday, with a big assist from mom and dad and the car, but the mattress is still here on the floor, like in the beginning - it's so fucking sad, but weirdly beautiful - I am so blindly in love with this place - to see the house kind of decay into the semi-feral state it was in when I moved in. we smashed a lot of stuff at band practice last night, or at least the other guys did. my fortune was pretty boring or irrelevant at least. there's really nothing left to do but grind it out from here. also, have the most epic party in house history this weekend, you know what it is, we're not going to get rained on 3 parties in a row, we are not that doomed, are we?

june 20th we had maybe the most 'mellow' or actually just weirdly under-attended party in 502 history. sean was in town!, but it rained again, there was a lot going on that night, people were saving themselves for this week? I dunno. once I got over my rain- and party-related anxieties and started drinking things got pretty nice though, with a zany kitchen set by Puttin on the Ritz, gratifyingly incorporating Caitlin's decoy pigeons, and transcendent, dimly-lit performances in Aron's bedroom (in the Casiotone for the Painfully Alone nook!) by Zeke Healy, shredding bluegrass at 502 for the third and final time - and, amazing dude that he is, he even figured out how to play Landslide, allowing me some deep and necessary musico-spiritual closure - and Julianna Barwick, who overcame the repeated ill intentions of the rain gods to play a gorgeous lullabye-set, maybe the coziest, dreamiest performance in 502 evar. I've got some camera-vids but I gotta figure out how to upload them

may 22

I just suddenly started getting my fucking young buck on over here, bawling my motherfucking eyes out in this dismembered, bleeding room, needing to work through the next 48 hours straight or so on doing impossible things for my job, this is really feeling like a fucking online diary right now and sorry etc but for the record I am pretty far past the breaking point already and I have a very long fucking way still to go, so I really do need everyone around rooting really, fucking, hard for me right now

I've been almost kind of keeping it together for more than a month now, the last time I really lost it like this was the last May 22, def maybe the most amazing, beautiful night ever at 502 when greg reynolds and mariko endo danced in the yard, and the dead science played covers of classic souls songs sampled by the wu-tang clan in the cabaret of my dreams, pictures below, seriously lynchian, sorcerous vibes, this has always been and always will be the house of my dreams etc

another day in paradise

in sharp contrast to the brutal stress of the actual work going on here, it's fucking beautiful out in the outdoor office today.  one of the infinite number of things I will never stop missing about this place is the awesomeness of being on the ground floor and having this nice ground level outdoor space.  no matter how shitty things are going, it's always kind of reassuring to be able to step outside your door and smell the dirt, hear the birds, see the bugs, etc.  we've got a pretty amazing roof on our new place, which I have not and am never going to talk about on this blog, but no first floor.  

Todd just stepped out looked around, saying "another day in paradise," "yeah we've still got a few left."  it's true.  I'm trying to enjoy listening to Mr. C's classic 2004 Bossa Nova Carnival episode, which I have enjoyed so many times out here throughout summers 05-07, but I'm having a hard time connecting to it

bad fortune

after keeping them at arm's length for most of the past month, all the heavy fucking emotions wrt the final extinguishing of my home here at 502 are predictably rising up again, and also predictably this is coming at an utterly hellish time work-wise, with all the lack of sleep and dark feelings that come with it.  I just ordered Thai food from Thai Sesame - two curries, one for dinner and one for breakfast - and got choked up telling them my address.  you can kind of put it out of your mind for awhile sometimes but basically things just get worse all the time

anyway, one of the posts I meant to do before I and this lodge and this blog disappear is to note, for posterity's sake, the uncanny relevance (time will tell wrt accuracy) of the fortunes I've gotten from Mr. Wonton over the past couple of months

"you will make many changes before settling satisfactorily" (back in March, just weeks before the news)

"don't fear!  every ending is a chance for a new beginning" (I was and am still maybe not ready for this one)

"through greater effort and hard work a precious dream comes true" (hah hah yeah right)

"everyone around you is rooting for you.  don't give up."  (this one really got my waterworks goin when I got it a couple weeks ago during a particularly dark moment and again now)

the breakup

the coincidence of my Fleetwood Mac/TUSK obsession and the prolonged, bitter, crying-every-damned-day heartbreak I am feeling wrt the imminent loss of my home and my 502 fam and the lovingly textured life I've made for myself here is taking my experience of the album, and my situation here, to new and maybe kind of weird places. suddenly, I too am living with a doomed love, torn between the desire to solidify my memories, savor the remaining happy moments, to cling to a dream destined to be extinguished, and my anger at having all these positive things suddenly recast in shades of such negativity and sadness; the need to channel that anger outwards and, failing that, inwards; the obsessive need to revisit the scene of suffering, to repeatedly pick at the emotional scabs before they can heal.

I wanted to make a note of this up front to enhance the truth content of this ongoing bloshery for the close readers of this blosh, but also to kind of keep it out of the individual song posts, which deserve better.

that said, the synergy of the emotional content for me is intense and maybe a little embarassing - it's been a minute since I've gone through one of these heartbreakathons, I hope it isn't too fucked up of me to be experiencing these feelings over the loss of a relationship with like a "thing" instead of a person, but,

1- a home is not just a "thing," it's a locus and mediator of specific social as well as logistical and Chinese delivery-related relationships etc, all of which will be irrevocably altered and/or lost

2- as I remarked to Steve during one of the more somber minutes of the Timbaland power hour Friday, a big part of the sting of a romantic heartbreak is the sudden catastrophic loss of ego that comes from losing someone that was a major part of your identity, both your own self-conception as well as your social identity (and value!). as Chris noted at the same power hour - and I swear to G I am gonna put in more of an effort to not derail power hours or other festivities with my bummer burden in the weeks to come - he has never really known me other than when I was living at this house, which is definitely true for him - I remember vividly the crazy night we first bro'd down, when I had first moved in, on Lily's birthday in late May 2003 (I am so sorry Lily I can't remember if it's the 24th, 25th, or 26th), back when the walls were pale yellow and I just had a mattress in the corner, and Jeff, who has since become such an integral part of the house after an initial failed attempt (the universe has a way of course-correcting etc), came by with Chris and Jon Posen, 40s and late nite Morrissey riffs! - and is definitely true for so many other of my closest friends. 5 years is a long time, especially in New York. it's like when I busted up my face at that show a couple years ago and looked at the stitches under my lip and chin and realized that I'd never look quite the same, but while minor facial scars are kind of cool, this just totally fucking sucks

I'll probably have to get a new blosh, too. I am pretty sure it is going to be called The Blue Room

update update

apologies for not emphasizing this on Friday, but Alexis's post includes an important and Weezy-featuring remix of the major and mandatory dance/R&B/pop-rap jam "GOT MY", one of the last works of the recently late + great R&B songwriter (Aaliyah, Destiny's Child, Ginuwine, etc) Static Major, jammed this hard in the van for an hour or so last night

3 recent improvements and 3 goals for further improvements to be achieved in the next week

recent:

1 - 1.25 yrs later, got my replacement passport in the mail today, thx fam

2 - here at the lodge-house we get our cable TV 'informally' and don't really get all the channels - as I like to say, we get just enough so that there's usually something on you can watch if you're just in the mood to watch TV, but not so many channels that there's always something on that you want to watch, if that makes sense. the fun part is that the channels we get change every once in awhile - I wish I'd been keeping track of it, but I feel like maybe once a year we get a few new ones and lose some old ones. well, we just got sci-fi, bravo, comedy central, and fox news, bitches. haven't checked for YES yet but I'm crossin my fingaz. not sure if there were any casualties, we'll see

3 - added Google shared items feed to the right side of this blog page, inspired, as I am in so many ways, by Nate. this will be a place where I put special links that I am not nec gonna blog but are very special in their own unbloggable way

to be achieved this week:

1 - fix bike

2 - NEW CHAIR, my back is killing me owowowowo

3 - shave

change

"Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal." - Schopenhauer

(via the Gmail 'web clips' robots that constantly, unobtrusively bring me nuggets of wisdom/news/etc that so often kill me with their appropriateness, it's mind-blowing and kind of intensely futuristic and just really fucking real to see what bubbles up from the unholy, 3.5 GB monstrosity that is my inbox)

the green lodge

it's saturday night in my room, and I'm surrounded by 6 cans of Coke arranged around my desk and floor, I am trying to figure out which one is the 'current' one and which are half-kills that have potentially been sitting around for as long as two days. I put my ear to each can, listening for the carbonation level, I'm pretty sure it's this one, but it doesn't sound quite fizzy enough. is Coke less fizzy than Pepsi - my usual cola of choice until recently, for some reason - i.e. are my fizziness expectations just too high? did I put it someplace weird that I haven't noticed yet? how horrible would it be if I accidentally drank an old one! should I just drink a beer instead? within arms length of my computer on my desk and on the floor there are

- 5 empty vitamin water bottles (3 formula 50, 1 b relaxed, and 1 rescue)
- 2 empty beers (Budweiser and Kronenberg)
- 1 unopened beer (Kronenberg)
- 2 mostly empty glasses of water
- 1 almost completely full glass of water mixed with one of those vitamin C powders that was acai berry flavored and disgusting
- 1 half drunk bottle of Very Old Barton bourbon, a birthday present from Alexis, who is officially in blog limbo thanks to the new blog-city redesign - will she bother to make a new site at teenjeoparty? will she blog on a new site? will she ever bother blogging again?
- 1 mostly drunk bottle of Chilean wine, appropriately enough
- 1 half-drunk coffee

because I am just lazy, and NOT a disgusting person lacking in personal hygiene, there is no old food anywhere in my room, thank you very much, although there IS 'current' food, a recently-delivered general tso's chicken that I am eating with a knife because there are no clean forks and mr. wonton never provides plastic forks (should I feel bad about hating this environmentally conscious measure? isn't not having to do dishes one of the joys of ordering out? would I order out less if I had a dishwasher?), and I was hungry and didn't want to commit to doing dishes because there are a bunch right now.

I am slightly confused about the placement of my current beverage b/c I just came back to my room after a failed attempt to watch some of the Democratic debate on TV. I heard it started at 8:30 so I checked it out then but there was just a lot of NFL pregame-esque bullshit, I felt bad enough for wanting to watch it in the first place but staring into this fathomless abyss of punditry and politics-as-shitty-entertainment (literally like 'here is what political consultants are saying about the storylines that the campaigns are likely going to be pushing to spin the news tomorrow') really just made me feel terrible, so I came back to my room, which has an exposed green light bulb and green-painted walls, where I work and eat and record music and occasionally sleep, where I have lived for four and a half years, which is longer than I have blogged, and I ended up writing this blog.

actually there was kind of a cool moment in the pre-debate coverage where Democrats were shaking hands and exchanging whatever (undoubtedly psychotic) pleasantries politicians exchange in these kinds of situations with the Republican candidates as the former took the stage directly after the conclusion of the latter's debate (giving the false impression that it was just gonna start right there with maybe a quick bathroom break for the moderator and not like a half hour break for pundits to talk about questions posted on fucking Facebook). the liberal elite just stays up later, it is what it is! anyway it was kind of like when the cast of one TV show meets the cast of another TV show on one of their respective TV shows, like Flinstones meet the Jetsons, which I thought was funny.

I was right, it IS this can.

I'm going to read the NYT liveblog of the debate to see if it will be worth leaving the room to watch a little bit of it, just to sample the flavor. then I'm going to work on some music, possibly with Aron, who has been doing something I barely understand to a set of bike handlebars and also knows how to spend a quasi-productive Saturday night at home alone, even though he has a girlfriend, which is a powerful and frequent testament to his quintessentially masculine dedication to solitary, obsessive pursuits. he's been working on the handlebar thing for hours, and it involves a saw somehow. later I hope to watch "Lost Highway" which I was inspired to rent by Timmers G on New Year's Eve, it's his favorite Lynch, and Dav also recommended it the other day. I'm interested to see my reaction to it after spending a couple of days in the past week researching just how fucking psychologically damaged Lynch prob is due to his terrifyingly deep involvement with Tr*nscendental Medit*tion. also on his audiobook thing he mentions how he thinks the movie was heavily influenced by his obsession with the OJ trial, which was going on while he was writing it or making it or whatever, because he was seeing OJ playing golf and shit and wondering how he could be so chill (with the implication of course that he really did kill her), and ended up researching fugue states, where something awful happens and then you just kind of split off a new personality and life. the video's already 2 days late, and after racking up a really embarrassing late fee on the last disc of Twin Peaks I am keen to not draw too much more attention to my weird renting habits, but I might be too late and the only thing I really want to watch after this is "Fire Walk With Me" (again)

lil wayne

thanks to the magical secret blogosphere of Google Reader's 'shared items' feature (Nate, Chris, Sean, Vern, and Wayne, I'm right there reading with you), I just read what I'm pretty sure is the best and truest essay on politics in all of human history, via Wayne's reader and written by Timothy Burke, that is going to be absolutely mandatory reading for everybody - but right now I can't get a web link to work? more on that later. UPDATE: it's here

more importantly, did you know that Wayne, with significant collaboration from his wife Becca, is going to be a daddy vvvv soon? and that in his compulsive musicological nerdery he's already analyzed, sampled, and remixed little Nico's currently enwombed heartbeat? yeah Wayne is awesome and parenthood is really fucking adorable, and considering her impressively brainy lineage and the awesome and well-rounded playlist he's working on for the little lady I'd say the odds are close to even that she'll be using fruity loops before she learns to walk. congratssss!