"I got a hiccup truck,
     but I ain't no hick"
Laundromat on the Southside of Detroit

I have always liked graveyards.  They are like cornfields full of bones.   Beds of sleeping flowers, fertilized with ghosts.  Shall I awake the broken Rose?  Spill my guts to Daffodil and Narcissus?  Dry my eyes with plastic Tulips?

Have a picnic with your grandpa, whose scientific name was Larry?

Whither shall I go, when where I am is always going?

Graveyards are calm.  Thoughtful and poetic.  They make me want to stay.  Put my heart in park, hang out for awhile.  I could open up a picnic store, sell my beans to potted people.  Mangos, even.  Lipstick.  Perhaps a piece of candy.  To give your mother wrapped in gold.  Your little baby brother, playing with his lamb.

Consolation Cemetery, São Paulo

There's nothing morbid about going to the cemetery.  At least, nothing more morbid than going to the library, or cathedral.  If you want to get morbid, go to Six Flags.  Disneyland would probably make me want to die.  Why don't they convert Alcatraz into an amusement park?  Is it because the ground is unholy, hard, and wasted?  Can you imagine the screams of terror, from the people strapped into the flaming rollercoaster of eternity?  What's all that noise on the island?  What island, you say?  You know, the island with the amusement prison in the bay, where they perform the experiments.  The one surrounded by cold water and sharks.  The island which is only accessible on an inflatable raft made of raincoats.

Oh yeah right of course.  Six Flags Over Alcatraz, the amusement penitentiary by the bay.  How could I forget?  Those are just the screams of the damned you hear, strapped into The Demon.  Some guy recorded the screams, synched them to a grating, hillbilly beat, and titled them "I Love You."  It makes sense though.  Why shouldn't the vocal performance of a song called "I Love You" not make you want to hurl yourself off the edge of the nearest cheese grater?

In fact, "The Demon" was one of the first rollercoasters I ever rode.  I remember riding it with Ann Dierking from the 8th grade, who I was madly in love with.  We sat next to each other, and our arms brushed together during the ride.  It was like jumping into an electric ocean.  My heart was like a fireworks show, just beneath my skin.  As bad as it sounds on a spiritual level, "riding The Demon" with Ann Dierking was one of the many highlights of the 8th grade.  8th grade was a good year for me.  Life has been a rocky ride full of bumps, sudden drops, and thrilling loops to nowhere ever since. 

I wonder if it was because I rode The Demon....?

It wouldn't have occurred to me at the time, but thinking about it, a rollercoaster called "The Demon" is as good a metaphor for love as will ever be found.

But graveyards are nice. 

Better than rollercoasters. 

Graveyards are like gigantic city parks.  The most peaceful place in town, everyone avoids.

Mexican graveyards are interesting as well.  They're like The Rough Side of Christmas Village.  The part of town Santa advises his elves to avoid.  Colorful, festive, and slightly dangerous.

The cover photograph for Wild Irish Rose was taken in a cemetery.  Bethany Cemetery in Austin, Texas, to be exact.  It was the kind of cemetery you'd find beheaded chickens in.  Gravestones splattered with blood.  We broke down there once, in a creepy "TransVan" that looked like it was custom-built for child molesters to live in.  It was impossible to start.  You had to take off the doghouse and stab the choke plate with a screwdriver as you turned the key with your left hand.  The walls and ceiling were covered in dry, rust-colored carpet that had been there since the 70s.  It would snow on you as you drove.  You had to brush the asbestos and kidnapper vibes from your shoulders, every time you drove it.  It was a creepy thing indeed.  But it saved us at the time.  We bought it at some sort of new-age nudist camp near Santa Rosa, California.  We didn't have anything to do with the place.  We were there for the van. 

The vents in the roof had no covering, so I spent some time welding garbage bags to the roof with duct tape, later in Golden Gate Park.  I also welded a bicycle to the roof with rope.  After living in the car with 3 cats for a month, the creeping behemoth felt like the Taj Mahal.  It was a Godsend at the time.

Here it is in Shell Beach.

And Dollface, after I removed the rotten carpet from the bare metal ceiling, creating an unattractive poverty aesthetic that can only be achieved by being poor.

The TransVan was a Godsend in California, but for the time being, we were broken down in a cemetery in Austin.  We had to spend a night or 2 there.  It wasn't scary at all.  It was peaceful.  We were the scary part.  One afternoon, a kid was walking home from school, and stopped when he saw the hulking 70s monstrosity, parked in the creepy shadows.  You could tell that walking through the cemetery was his shortcut.  He stood there for a second, checking us out with his backpack and sneakers, before turning around and going the other way.  I felt like a serial killer, sitting in the van writing love songs, but was glad to see him go.  We were certainly no threat to him, but how would he know that?

A serial killer in a creepy van is another good metaphor for love.  I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Cupid lived in a van down by the river, and sacrificed chickens to Baal, while designing rollercoasters of fire and drinking expired beans from the food bank straight from the can, in the unholy wrongness of the everlasting dark.  Love is an escapee from Amusement Prison Island, who washes his hands in blood.

So wherefore all these random songs, man?  Cemeteries, rollercoasters, broken-down vans...

Where does this road of dried spaghetti lead?

The winding road of half-eaten thematic pasta leads to the 10-year anniversary of the release of Wild Irish Rose.  Which is today.  And all these songs are on it.  I recorded it in the summer of 2013, after being deported from England for no reason (I never got out of Heathrow; they shipped me back to the U.S. on arrival).  I wrote about the English non-trip for The Manifesto Club UK, an organization which is defunct, for all I know.  They took the testimony down from their site years ago.  I have never known why.  The reasons for its deletion have never interested or bothered me, so I have never asked.  I pasted the testimony in an article titled London Is Not Open, if you'd like to read it.  It documents my experience trying to get into England through the set of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, a film which documents the kind of surreal, dystopian nightmare that was the experience of Americans trying to get into the UK 10 years ago.

It's gotten worse since then, I'm sure.  Let's observe a moment of silence for all the British people who can't have their American friends over for a cup of tea.  For reasons of all the extra space in England being taken up by single, military-age Somalian men, presumably.

Recording Wild Irish Rose helped me decompress from my fascistic experience in the UK, I'm sure.  Because, with the appropriately-grating exception of "I Love You," Wild Irish Rose is more sonically and thematically subdued than my other albums.  It confronts themes of rejection and heartbreak ("Song Around My Neck," "I Can't Take Another Broken Heart"), while keeping teeth firmly bared, as necessary for survival ("Yo Te Amo ('til you die)," "I Make The Rules").  It was the last time I was able to use the sticky piano, which was in the garage.  Nearly 15 years of Siberian Illinois winters detuned it nicely.  Sometimes, the keys would stay stuck while I was recording, and I'd have to unstick them with one hand, while playing with the other.  A fluid, flowing take was impossible to achieve.  "A Moment of Silence" is full of examples of me unsticking the keys while playing.  I think it adds a lot to the performance.

Not counting bonus tracks, "I Make The Rules" is the next-to-last song on Wild Irish Rose, and the last with any lyrics.  After passing through "These Days," "Life Itself," and "Laundromat on the Southside of Detroit," which is the inverse version of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," we get to the wistful world-weariness of "I Make The Rules." 

("Lucy in the Sky" is obviously about LSD, regardless of the transparently-unbelievable statements to the contrary made by John Lennon himself.  "Laundromat on the Southside of Detroit" is the exact opposite of that.  It's a song that tries very hard to fit "LSD" into the title, while having nothing whatsoever to do with LSD itself.  It is the upside-down "Lucy in the Sky," and certainly one of the most intentionally-idiotic songs ever written.)

"I Make The Rules" is nothing like it.  If the comic relief in "Laundromat" is negative and self-effacing, it's because the ride is heavy, and maybe some of us haven't been abundantly equipped or adequately trained to deal with it lightly.  I'll paste the music and lyrics below, and let them speak for themselves.  Suffice it to say, there is no self-pity anywhere near any of it.  God forbid.  Self-pity is the worst.

Thanks for listening, and even though I never say this kind of thing, this is a musical birthday of sorts.  So, do feel free to like, subscribe, and share the videos on both my main YouTube channel, and the auto-generated topic channel.  All the videos in this article are from one or the other.  And if you find yourself strapped to the flaming rollercoaster of emotional incontinence, with fireworks shows of ecstasy and bliss exploding in your chest, even as "The Demon" drives you into the arms of an early grave,

Maybe this song will make you feel better.  "Wild Irish Rose" was a rot-gut wine I used to drink back in the day.  It was $1.25 a quart, and came in 2 flavors, red and white.  It was undrinkable, like vomit-flavored pancake syrup, or the acidic blood of aliens, but by the 3rd or 4th hit you knew you were going to make it.  Through the bottle, if not to the stars.

What better title for a collection of songs you've scraped off the bottom of your shoe?

Why not make sculptures from the bubblegum you find there?

Yaknow?

I Make The Rules

Sitting here drinking my coffee
sitting here eating my beans
I followed my dreams like a sucker
now I don't know what it means

The years keep on rollin'
and the sun is crucified to the sky
I won't take death for an answer
and today is a good day to die

I bare my teeth in the mirror
shake hands with another crackhead in the street
he says if I turn my back on him,
he's gonna slice me
but he ain't got no shoes
on his feet

     Do you think you can judge me?
     Would it make you righteous
     if your opinion turned out to be true?
     Is the reason you're so much better than me
     the fact that I'm no better than you?

Here's to anyone who's ever been beaten
so often, you wonder if you're cursed
anyone who's ever compensated for their failure
by giving up, and making things worse

Spare me your kindness and your pity
ain't nothin' sacred about my pain
I can still put a rat's nest
in your ribcage
I put broken glass in your brain

I put a pipe bomb in your voicemail
I put razorblades in your beer
I ain't deranged,
but I might be a madman
I make the rules around here

©2013 Nathan Payne