Well, fuck me, I had intended to write about Under The Silver Lake next, but I had to go include a reference to BLACK GOO in a poem concluding my recent collection, titled My Road Is A Broken Heart At War, and the goo spoke back immediately through song lyrics in the shower after I completed the poem.

The artist and title of the song represent extra onion-layers of cosmic trolling because it’s Edward Sharpe’s tune, PERFECT TIME. Are you fucking kidding me? Before getting into why this hits me so hard, here’s how the song begins:

What is a cold blooded mad man to do
With a smile across his teeth and attached full of goo
And it cuts through my junk and smash up my eyes
And sings like a song before you die

Yep, that’s weird enough, but when you add the fact that the name Edward Sharpe is ALSO the name of the former owner of the Wilma in Missoula, and that this eccentric man operated a piece of local intrigue called the Chapel of the Dove inside the Wilma where locals could watch movies and get married, well, you might start getting a smidgen of the FUCK ME descending as I transform myself into an even stranger oddity than my Gonzo-esque journalist persona.

The talismanic object I have created with an old Missoulian mailbox and an antique rifle is producing alarming results, like the Jesus sticker I put on it about an hour before I saw Sam Tripoli’s podcast about the Shroud of Turin post online. What is Jesus saying on the sticker? I SAW THAT, he says. Funny.

The time between writing something, then manifesting a culture-echo of it, is getting shorter and shorter, and WEIRDER. For example, I wrote about Donnie Darko in a poem a few days ago, then I read, later that same day, about Jake Gyllenhaal, who played Darko, rebooting the movie Road House, and in this iteration the bouncer character is from…Missoula. WTF?

Then, earlier this morning, I finished up this post at the other blog, which references H.G. Merriam, and right after posting it, my iPod picked a song from Royal City, titled “And Miriam Took A Timbrel In Her Hand”. Ok then.

“I was conscious of the necessity, if possible, of getting the Northwest states – that is, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana – to realize their common culture … It seemed as if the region had no sense of being a unit, and if possible, I hoped that the Frontier might help establish some such unity.”

If you don’t understand why these are fighting words, I’m not going to waste my time explaining. I am too busy defending narrative terrain from narrative assault on MULTIPLE fronts, and if my last poem is my LAST poem, I will move on to the next stage with a sense of satisfaction that I gave this fight everything I had while so many others just sat on the sidelines and watched.