The Churn: Diminished, It Returns

HI. IT’S ME. I’M BACK &

I see you[1]…

… standing there like a ghoul, cornered in the crevices of your own misgivings.

What gives?[2]

Embarrassed to feel blue in your Halloween muscle suit?[3]

Do you feel insane?[4]

I’m sad to say, I feel the same. And for no good reason at all, I’m afraid.

I’m afraid, and that’s alright.[5]

I’m alright[6] (or maybe all right[7]).

Are you alright?[8]

Don’t answer that just yet, at least not until we’ve gone[9] through all the

GOINGS ON

Alright, Good’s debut LP, Yard Sale, will drop into your life on November, 19, 2022. Sit tight, stay frosty, and stream “Big Green Field” while you wait.
New gigs! Keep an eye out for an Alright, Good date, come November.[11]
Old gigs! Every member of The Butter is still gainfully[12] employed.
Middle-aged gigs![13]
Tom Garvey will soon be the proud father of his very own banjo. Don’t be alarmed if …

To modern eyes this instrument may not look like a banjo. It has no circular wooden body, no metal parts. Instead, a flat piece of wood bisects a round gourd, forming the neck and sound chamber. A piece of animal skin sits taut across a circular hole cut into the side of the gourd, a skin that creates the top of the instrument and the soundboard. Around this white circle, the maker has cut intersecting lines into the gourd. Strings extend from the bottom of the gourd, across the soundboard, over a bridge that holds them up, and along the board-like neck to where it comes to a triangular point.[10]

It is indeed a banjo.
Babies are dumb. Crows are not. Click here to learn why crows are as smart as seven-year-old humans.
If you’d like to befriend a crow, give it a shiny object to play with. Or maybe write the crow a little tune on your brand-new banjo.[14]
Donny’s plants are dying.[15] Venmo him, please.
Donny will not use the money to purchase a banjo.[16]
Mind your gourds. They don’t take kindly to change.[17]
All are invited join various members of The Butter as they go Elsewhere[18] for a night of great tunes[19] and even better cheekbones.[20]
No, the banjolele does not count.[21]

AND NOW, A PLAYLIST FOR YOUR TROUBLES

(PSST … THIS IS A LINK)

“Everything That Feels Good Is Bad” — Whitmer Thomas
“November” — Wednesday
“Androgynous” — Nation of Language
“Buddy” — Time Heidecker
“Problem with It — Plains
“Early Morning Waiting” — Alex G
“Easy Listening” — 2nd Grade
“You Taught Me How To Write A Song” — Mo Troper
“Sailor Mouth” — Why Bonnie
“Waiting for Music” — Diners
“I See You” — Bonny Doon
“Beautiful Out” — Worst Party Ever
“Erica’s World” — Game Theory
“I Don’t Want Control of You” — Teenage Fanclub
“Waking Dreams — Nico Headley
“You Know I’m Down” — Frog
“A Modern Lay” — Slaughter Beach, Dog
“2 Days” — Antarctigo Vespucci
“Dark Morning ( Magnetic)” — String Machine
“Just Friends’ — Ok Cowgirl
“Pretty Pictures ” — Indigo De Souza
“Life’s a Lie” — Katie Von Schleicher
“Gold and Red and Laughing” — This Is Lorelei
“Good Times Are Gone Again” — Fred Thomas
“Cooler When I’m Sick” — Whitmer Thomas

THIS MIGHT BE A GOOD TIME TO GET A SNACK LEST YOU GET STUCK INSIDE THE SHORT & PRETENTIOUS ESSAY OF THE WEEK:

AGAINST SLEEP

For those keen on living happy, healthy lives, there’s no substitute for a proper portion of high-quality sleep night after night after night after night after night.

The science makes clear that 6, 12, 18, or (for some up to) 24 hours of sleep nightly creates a clean barrier between your conscious (waking) life and all that unconscious bullshit burbling underneath. Given enough sleep, we can function like the motherfucking gourds we were always meant to be — decorating the dim hallways of our lives with grace and dignity.

Pretty cool, right?

Sure. It’s great to be a gourd.[22] It’s great to have that kind of clear and conscious purpose.

But what if we threw our vegetal whims to the wolves and said fuck it! What if we didn’t sleep at all?

Well, I don’t know what the science says (it’s boring & I’m sleepy), but I’ve skimmed a few books. So, I think I’ve got this.

If the rested mind keeps consciousness clean, then the sleepless brain does just the opposite. It shatters the barrier between waking life and its unheimlich underbelly.

Without sleep, sensations that seem familiar — “friendly, familiar, homelike” — are shrewd tricks: familiarity performed through the lens of the unconscious.[23] Though the dream state might not reign as it would in the pure fantasy of the REM state, it has more purchase than we care to admit.

At its best, sleeplessness elevates our everyday into cycles of abjection: little implosions that queer the line between the subject (I) and its object (externalities & the unconscious).[24] This abjection creates an atmosphere in which our silly little subjectivities can run free.

And frolic, they do, inhabiting any object they think might deceive our eyes half shut.

They conduct a chorus wherein corner stores[25] and cold cuts conspire against to our composure, break into the bleakest burrows of our brain, bringing our batshit inclination to alliteration into the limelight.

In other words, shit gets weird.

Though our silly little subjectivities run freely into the objects of our reality, they can’t (or maybe refuse to) consume them. You know what those cheeky little bastards do instead?

They loom — just fucking loom — “within abjection,” manifesting all of those “dark revolts of being,” emanating (or maybe battling some entity) “from an exorbitant outside or inside,” wavering “beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the unthinkable.”[26]

Before we know it, our insides are out and or our outsides are in or most definitely somewhere in between and we’re left without language to reduce or action to conceptualize or abstraction to analogize ourselves out of this this whacked out parallel of a world, so what we to do?

*Yawns

We buy a banjo.

And we sing a little song.

Go to bed[27].

THIS IS THE PART WITH THE POEM & YES, IT IS OBLIGATORY

“Phaser”

When I first saw you,

the triple point on the phrase diagram, necessitating the use of an electric arc furnace,

I executed a headspace extraction.

Words cannot express how I felt about

Utopia, a hopeless dream or hopeful fantasy,

observed as rays in gas discharges, extracted to develop a conception of the enigmatic world

of the hidden inwardness, drinking the absence of stronger interspecial attraction.

Consider the woman with hemorrhages,

siphoned to volatize carbon [a process “understood” by far too many “scholars”].

I would die! she said, knowingly, her soft laser tongue acid testing the solubility

of the acetylene and acetone swirling around the endamoniacal subterfuge.

Why must you give your spectromatic dilations to the Other?

My deepest apologies. That’s just my ego moaning, longing for the day when it can get

more depressed reading YouTube comments, more depressed than expected because I wanted him to die —

nested, like an if among thens, screaming

WELL, THAT WAS NICE, I GUESS. LET’S PIVOT AND REVIEW A NEW RECORD CALLED

The Older I Get The Funnier I Was by Whitmer Thomas

“Oh tonight, under these lights, I will try […] Yes I will try”[28] to say why I feel so much more attached to this record than any I’ve listened to in a good long while.

But I can’t because it’s super late & I really do need to get to bed. Sorry.

[1] Bonny Doon

[2] Another Michael

[3] From “Basketball #2” by MJ Lenderman

[4] Oh, it’s a call back

[5] Alternate Take by Fleetwood Mac

[6] Twin Peaks covering Black Sabbath

[7] Radiator Hospital

[8] Lucinda Williams

[9] Adrienne Lenker

[10] Excerpt from Well of Souls: The Banjo’s Unwritten History. “It’s decorative gourd season motherfuckers.”

[11] By Wednesday (the band, not the day)