Head full of sermons, mouth full of spiders.

"Though an autumn time lullaby..."

I don't know how often I'm going to be able to post over the next couple of weeks. This quarter has turned out to be pretty insane in terms of workload. I spent every night last week working until about 1am. I can't complain too loudly about my courses this quarter, though, because so far, most of 'em have been great. Well, all of them have been great, save for the online Hebrew course. The suckitude of Hebrew has been more than made up for by the opportunity I have this quarter to wade through Alvin Plantinga's magnum opus, "Warranted Christian Belief." What a gracious and massive intellect.

On Friday afternoon I spent an hour and a half talking to a therapist/psychologist guy about all things Brian in order to be allowed to continue the progression towards a ministry position in my denomination. I've never had the therapy experience in a formal setting before, so the whole experience was awkward and totally jarring to my emotional well-being for the first few hours afterward. I basically felt like I had just pulled down my pants in front of someone I just met, and I hadn't even had anything to drink beforehand. The factor that made it hard to deal with was the complete absence of evaluation or assessment at the end of it. The therapist basically said that he'd look forward to the follow-up appointment in a couple of weeks. No "Brian, you seem to be a stable, emotionally-fit kinda guy," or something of the like. Then again, he also didn't tell me that I was "crazier than a shithouse rat," so I guess it can't be all that bad.

The rest of the evening was used to cope with the strange feelings. Essentially that means that Mark and I drank a bunch of beers and had our "aspiring musician" pretensions hopelessly dashed by watching the first half of Martin Scorcese's documentary about Bob Dylan.

What an amazing film. It's so awesome and weird to see contemporary Bob (interviewed, I presume, by Mr. Scorcese) being completely candid and forthwright, not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. The highlight of the first half of the film is when he talks about his highschool sweetheart, Echo. He claimed, with a sly glance at the camera, "she really brought out the poet in me." That cracks me up, for some reason. Second in line, in terms of highlights, is the performance of "Ballad of a Thin Man" from Newcastle, England, in 1966. Admid boos and taunts of "go home Bob!," and "rubbish!" Bob, perched in front of a grand piano, belts out in an overdriven yowl incisive lyrics lost on every booing rube in the audience:

Because something's happpenin' heeeeeeeeeerrrrre, and you don't know what it iiii-i-is, do you, Mr. Jones?

That megaphone-timbre of his voice combined with the wild, thin, mercury sound of his band was just the most recent in a litany of sounds that have hit me in the gut this week. There's something about fall that makes sound much more vibrant, expressive and potent to me. Maybe the sensitivity to sound is inspired by the air of melancholy that rustles through autumn leaves, or the 15 minutes I have every morning to listen - to really listen hard - to music on the walk to school, but I can't say for sure. What I do know is that my morning walk has taken on the cadence of "So What" from Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue," so the sounds are not just rejoicing my soul, but my legs, too. Also, last week at work a co-worker was playing some Irish instrumental ballad cd and I heard a penny-whistle dirge that posessed such razor-sadness that I had to sit down. I instantly felt like I was standing on the shores of Galway, mourning the loss-at-sea of my betrothed (her curly red locks visible leagues below the dingy-green waves of the North Atlantic, I'm sure).

The most pleasurable listening experience so far this fall has been the new mini-album collaboration of Iron and Wine and Calexico. It's expansive and breezy - sorta like if Sam Beam built a house, and then Calexico came and opened all the windows. Last winter, Mr. Beam got me through a rather miserable January. The general chaos and din of life was muted by the dense calm of the music - soft, stable and quiet, like a bucket of snow. If "Endless Numbered Days" feels like winter, then this album evokes fall to a tee. It's aged and wise, swaddled in pedal steel (the most autumnal of instruments) and punctuated with orangy-red maple leaf blasts of Calexico's horn section.

Anyways, this is by far the most scattered blog entry I've ever written, so it'd probably be wise to end it before I write another paragraph that doesn't have a whole lot to do with the preceding ones. Before I go, I should say this: Over in the "comrades" links to your left I've added the blog of Mike Dubose, a fellow alt.country nerd from Bowling Green, Ohia. One time I rode with him to a roadhouse in Wapakaneta, Ohio to see Slobberbone. Such mighty rock. I think my ears are still ringing. Also, he's the only man I know who may have a bigger rawk-crush on the Drive-By Truckers than yours truly.