I do not know who I am or what I am doing, but I am on the bloody tongue of downtown Reno and every part of my body is either sickly or humming like blown speakers. My feet inch across the pavement like snails in existential crises, and in my sloth I try to determine which buildings are oppressive regimes and which are defenseless territories as dictated by height and the weapon-potential of rooftops. No comfort in that of course, they’re all fucking snakes, the lot of them, they just remind you that the people who touch you will one day stop touching you.
Okay, trying to keep it together now.
It is fucking vicious, this night. How bad months turn into bad years. I finger the clickwheel on my iPod as though if I added any more pressure no one would survive the matter. I hit “Idle Hands” by the Gutter Twins, which I think is the single from Saturnalia, though I shake at the implication that anything from that record could conceivably hit the airwaves without turning all of Clear Channel’s suckling children into burning car wrecks, every subsequent song merely adding to the pile-up until we are listening to Nickelback’s “Someday” and staring into our palms, remembering the awful things we have done and cursing the blood for never drying.
About halfway into the tune, which thus far has efficiently combined an Eastern-tinged guitar riff with pure dread, the kind you keep weapons under pillows for, I feel a savage ache in my gut, and I think maybe it’s because Greg Dulli is whispering awful things into my ear (“let your hands/ do what they will do” no no no, Mr. Dulli, they have done enough, stop, please, I can’t). Either that or it’s because Mark Lanegan is wildly digging what I eventually recognize as my grave.
There are 11 other tracks on this motherfucker.
I am not going to live through this.
None of us are.
