Humans Can Turn Demons Into Art

It was a Neil Young/Bukowski kind of night. A night where she cooked and I read old Bukowski aloud, sipping cold beer and laughing. Music about rivers, rainbows and cowgirls in the sand shot through the evening, ricocheting from wall to wall, marrow to mind.
It was the kind of night where humans don't let you down and the taunting totality of the past carries cadence and finally fits to rythyms.

Lasers, A.K.A Lazers

In response to a question I had about lasers and their importance to the late 80's and early 90's, Brandon J. Conaway responded with this brilliant letter:

At it's height, a laser was an extremely effective and scary weapon. Jonny 5
had a laser mounted on his shoulder and the Predator wiped out all of
Arnold's guerilla warfare unit by primarily using his laser. I don't know
what started the fall of the laser but it has gone from the penthouse to the
outhouse. The lasers demise has been historical.

As far as I'm concerned, the laser started losing momentum with me when they
opened Lazer Star in Oxnard. I realized then that to be good at lasers, you
don't need to be cooler or faster than the next guy, you just have to be a
massive dork. Lasers started becoming associated with dorks and started
becoming a lot more harmless.

From that point on, lasers lost a lot of steam, I think it's like, lasers
had a really bad Publicist, probably the same chick that Tom Cruise had.

Let's review:

Lasers were cooler when they were spelled like Lazers. Lasers' publicist
made an error here to go with the s over the z. It made the word laser sound
less powerful and more Euro. After lasers became ineffective in the weapon
and destruction market, they became laser pointers. This was a big blow for
lasers ego. These were pretty cool at first but lasers' publicist was
worried that it made the laser look too wussy. They had to say that even
though the laser is small and hand held, the laser would blind you if shined
directly in your eye. This theory became disastrous for laser when everyone
realized this to be false. The straw that broke lasers back was when the
only relevance laser had was for laser eye surgery. At this point, laser was
an alcoholic and very depressed and didn't even take the initiative to take
the name for it. It became Lasik eye surgery.

I don't see any way for laser to make a comeback at this point and regain
its once ferocious reputation. Put it this way, I don't think we will see
any more soccer teams called "The Lazers". Unless it's in a gay men's soccer
league.

Blah

I spoke with Dylan today. We both confessed how we are living in horrible states of depression. The worst part of admitting you're a writer, we decided, is how low you feel when you are not writing: The damned dregs of the earth; slovenly in appearance, hazed in thought and habit.
We went on about suicide and Celine. And I got to thinking about the last time Dylan and I met. We were living on separate continents coincidentally reading Henry Miller and equally wild about cunt. We arrived in the hotel lobby out of shape and licked by booze from spending the past months writing words, columns and chapters. We were each working to create our own Tropic. Not sure where that idea went. It vanished during our stay in the Village Amoedo. Maybe it went up our noses, or inside our gullets. But when the weekend was over we admitted the Tropic we wanted was a Tropic already had by greater men. So when we spoke today about our state of being, we briefly wondered if we should get into the rhythm of our time and meditate on inner monologues of self-loathing and existential worry and get bent on Dave Eggers. I guess it was just that kind of day. Hope not to have it again soon.