Archive for the 'Random Stuff' Category
A New Song: “Fuck You, Melissa”
October 19th, 2008
Here’s a new “song” for you all to enjoy:
Derek C. F. Pegritz, “Fuck You, Melissa”
It’s seven minutes of vituperative, bipolar spleen and disappointment. I’ve classified it as “industrial,” but lest you ridiculous cyber-goth children who believe that bad trance music with ridiculous vocals is industrial be misled, I’m talking “industrial” in the oldskool “machine noises, distortion, and jagged audio sculpture” sense, a la Einsturzende Neubauten or early Skinny Puppy. There is a bit of IDM thrown in, though, and lots of twitchy, glitchy atmospherics and raging feedback.
All Things Pegritzian…and I do mean ALL Things!
August 31st, 2008
Here’s a quick heads-up for fans of all things Pegritzian: I’ve just started a tumblelog over at Tumblr.com.
“Jesus, Pegritz,” you say, “why the hell do you need another freakin’ blog? You’ve already got this one, plus your Footnotes to the Human Species thing, your NONFICTION! thing, and that Oneirophrenia site you never update…not to mention countless others that even you forget that you have!”
Well, here’s the cool thing about having a Tumblr log: it acts as an aggregation site for the RSS feeds of all my other sites. Whenever I post something new here on PEGRITZ(.com)!, a link to it with an explanatory excerpt is automatically posted on the tumblelog. Whenever I post a new chapter to a story over at Footnotes to the Human Species or any other site, the same thing happens. Anytime I update any of my sites, links to those new updates will technomagickally appear as links on the tumblelog! It’s basically a one-stop shop for all things Pegritzian—and, best of all, it has its own RSS feed. In essence, subscribing to the tumblelog feed is like subscribing to all relevant Pegritz-related RSS feeds at the same time.
But wait! There’s more! Tumblr.com also provides a nifty little no-nonsense interface for posting Random Junk, like cool quotes, pictures, links, and…hell, just about anything else you can think of. This is not the kind of material I’d post on, say, this blog or on Footnotes because I don’t like to clutter up content that I regard as more important or relevant to a site with random videos of cats doing silly things, links to amusing articles, miscellaneous pictures and other such errata. But I still like to share that kind of information with folks who enjoy little tidbits of weirdness along with more substantial content. So, not only will the Pegritz tumblelog index the meatier content of my primary sites, it’ll also serve as a dumping ground for the assorted, individually-wrapped chunks of mind candy that I’m constantly stumbling on around the ‘Net.
So, hey…if that’s your kind of thing, or you’re just trying to tidy up your RSS feed collection, then enjoy The Collected Works of Derek C. F. Pegritz.
Technorati Tags: tumblr,tumblelog,rss,pegritz
An Ancient Emptiness
September 4th, 2006
It’s Christmas Eve, or Christmas Day - maybe Easter Sunday - maybe even Labor Day (though I think only WalMart and the little fruit stand over the hill from me actually honor that holiday anymore) - and I’m off to visit some friends in Uniontown this evening. No matter whose margarita party or DVD-fest I’m going to, the route I take from my middle-of-nowhere digs into the Capitol of Fayette County will take me right through Uniontown’s center of commerce: the square of malls, shopping centers, gas stations and restaurants bordered by Matthew Drive, Route 21, New Salem Road, and the hoary ol’ National Pike itself, Historic Route 40.
Joe Hardy and the other County Commissioners can pretend that their newly-renovated(-and-gentrified) Downtown is the economic heart of Uniontown, but everyone knows that the county’s cash-flow pulse really originates from that Quadrangle of Retail Titans on the city’s western flank. The place is a fecund swamp of capitalism, with the Uniontown Mall (home to the venerable old department-store chains Sears and JCPenney), WalMart, KMart, Lowes, Home Deport, and now Target rising like lotus-blossoms above the concrete lillypads of their parkinglots, and all manner of smaller businesses and restaurants crowding around them like so many eager frogs poised to snatch with their tongues some of the innumerable dollars buzzing around the big stores’ honeyed bargain-bins. Take a drive past the area some afternoon. The intersection of Routes 21 and 119, right below the WalMart/KMart/Lowes plazas, will be choked with traffic drawn by the sweet pollen of Falling Prices and Blue Light Specials. The parkinglots will be packed solid, people swarming like ants in the glare of so much windshield-shattered sunlight. The strip of restaurants along Route 40 by the Mall will be crowded with hungry shoppers and a hundred different species of thirsty vehicles will be queued up at the nearby Sheetz like beasts at an oasis. Hell, even if you drive through the area at four in the morning, you’ll still find the place abuzz with activity, because most the restaurants, and the WalMart, are open 24-hours-a-day.
But today….Today, this holiday, is different.
As I come round a bend on Route 21, I can see the WalMart plaza on my left, the KMart/Lowe’s plaza just a bit beyond it. And - just as I expected them to be - they’re empty.
The halogen lamps burn atop their metal trunks but their light falls on bare, filthy asphalt gridded with chipping yellow paint, shining with a strange, confused glare in puddles of melting snow or rain or motoroil. The WalMart’s doors are bright with empty light and the big red letters flicker with alertness…but no one’s there to justify the light. The smaller stores along the plaza’s crescent, even the Shop n’ Save, are dark and still. A chilly, hollow feeling shivers through me, a pleasant melancholia. I slow down. There are other cars on the road, sure - other people no doubt going to visit friends or family, too - but none at all where I’m so used to seeing them.
I hang a left at the stoplight by the Taco Bell (also cold and dark, even its neon OPEN LATE sign snuffed) and slowly, reverently, drive through the eerie stillness of the WalMart lot. I turn my car’s CD player off and listen to the minimalist whispering of my tires on the pavement. Even empty as it is, I can’t bring myself to violate the order of the painted lines and drive slantwise across the lot - that would be tantamount to driving against the grain of ley lines. I drive slowly up an aisle to the front of WalMart and sit there for a moment, letting my mind drift like a piece of windlifted litter through the…the nothing. Here, where there’s usually so much - cars and trucks going in and out, here and there, back and forth; folks pushing squeaking carts, pulling squeaking children; sun- or moonlight splashing over everything - now there’s just…artificial light falling like luminous dust on vacant benches, speedbumps covered in frost, squashed pop cans and random pieces of paper, a lone shopping cart lying on its side in its corral like a sleeping calf. And me. My mind busies itself with metaphors to fill the cathedral silence of the empty lot.
A day or two before, most likely, I had been a part of this place’s usual hustle-n’-bustle. My car sat in one of those handicapped spaces over there. I crossed the sideways-striped pedwalk in front of the sliding doors with hundreds of other folks, going in with a wad of bills rustling quietly in my pocket, coming out with a bunch of stuff rustling loudly in a blue plastic bag. I’d probably been singing quietly to myself, as usual, as I went about my business, and when I’d hopped back into my car and fired her up, the sonorous booming of my woofers had muscled into the air.
Now, just the gentle purr of my idling engine sounds huge in the ceremonious silence. I’m not in a hurry to grab my purchases and go, to escape the mercantile hubbub and go home to my quiet house. The world is quiet tonight.
I take a quick turn through the equally-empty KMart parkinglot - and spot a lone figure pushing a mop within its locked doors…a ghost earning time-and-a-half haunting the still light and the silent ranks of registers.
A moment later, I’m cutting across the Uniontown Mall’s parkinglot as I head for Route 40. I’m a little more familiar with this place’s emptiness, as my friends and I have spent many a late night at the 24/7 Eat n’ Park just below the Mall - but there’s a qualitative difference between that familiar afterhours emptiness and tonight’s more pure emptiness. If you drive through the Mall parkinglot at 3am on, say, any other Saturday night, you can practically sense the tension of the next day’s workaday crowd, smell the future exhaust, feel the rumble of tires on the macadam. But tonight…this is rest. This is one of the Mall parkinglot’s few days off. Well, except for the small huddle of cars clumped up against the front of the Carmike Cinemas - the movie theatre’s always open - and, perhaps, the Boston Beanery at the other end of the structure…but even they lock their doors and turn off their sign on some days. Regardless, the Zen vacancy of so much untrammeled asphalt seeps through me like a cool, gentle breeze as I pass through it, enjoying the sight of quiet where usually there is so little.
These moments of abandonment are growing fewer and fewer with every year. They used to be familiar, a run-of-the-mill sight, back when I was but a pup in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Almost nothing was open twentyfour hours then, and many businesses - even massive retail chains like KMart or Montgomery Ward - didn’t even open up on Sundays at all. The Sabbath was the first empty-lot feast to fall beneath our civilization’s exponentially-accelerating consumer culture. Now every streetcorner has a 24/7/265 Sheetz, or a GetGo, or even little mom’n'pop convenience stores populated at all hours by bored teenagers begging for a holdup just to add some pep to their allnight shifts. The world doesn’t rest anymore: our American civilization eats No-Doz for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; our economy has beaten the tyranny of night and sleep, religious observation and tradition. There are kids being born right now who will regard the old 9am-to-9pm era of business as being hopelessly primitive, wasteful, and tedious.
Is this a bad thing? No, not really….I’m always stopping at WalMart at 1am when my shift at the Herald-Standard’s composing room/ad-design department elapses. If I run out of peanut butter at 4am on a Thursday morning, I can just run out to the Sweet Pea’s on Route 21, or the Giant Eagle in Uniontown for my fix. Hell, if I need a new mouse or a new keyboard for my computer at midnight on Labor Day, I can always swing by WalMart for that. I haven’t enjoyed a “typical” 9-to-5 lifestyle or work routine since 1997: working the night shift at the newspaper has gradually rendered me nocturnal, and were it not for 24/7 superstores like the Big W and allnite gas oases like Sheetz, my life would be flatout impossible.
But still….There are times when it’s comforting to see the world at rest. To see the sliding doors of Capitalism locked and all the lights turned off for just a little while. To see empty parking spaces and to feel no urge to duck into the ”sweet spot” closest to the front of the store before someone else snags that primo chunk of parking realestate. There’s an eerie peace to be found in a paused world, because it’s now so uncommon. Peace and quiet are rarer than radium today, and I relish the handful of minutes I get to spend once or, at most, twice a year passing like a ghost through sleeping parkinglots.
What Is It?
August 29th, 2006
No, we’re not talking about Crispin Glover’s transcendentally-weird film, we’re talking about this very dead, very strange thing found in Russia.
Is it a dead Skeksi? Or one of their “good guy” counterparts, the Mystics/urRu?
Or maybe a giant ground sloth?
Whatever the heck it is, credit for its “discovery” on the ‘Net goes to the lovely Monica, who managed to dredge it up and deliver the pics to me so as to redeem an otherwise boring morning with awesome cryptozoological specimens!
