Flush it Friday: Reach Out and Flush Someone
My final summer in Seattle is seeping through the walls. I’m moving back to the East Coast soon, and I’m wondering what I’ve missed. Slotting right back in where I left off is folly, nothing there is in stasis, waiting for my return. I’ve been outside of that web of connections, and plunging back into it is a blind risk. What I’ve mainly known of my friends the last few distant years is the tiny gifts we’ve flung across the country to each other. They’ll reintroduce you to things you yourself had forgotten, or show you what you missed. One friend I had a fairly stable trade with: I sent him pewter figures for games we used to play, he sent me pewter pins of bands we used to love, each a small eidolon of the ghosts we used to be. One fellow I had sent a book I’d quite enjoyed, some gaslamp vampire hullaballoo, and some time later he paid me back a hardback Dracula book from my homeland of Iceland.
In the anthropological repertoire of David Graeber, he talks about how networks of small gifts were how some traditional societies wove and re-wove their social bonds day after day, and how particularly large or important gifts were more of a recognition of unrepayable generosity on the part of the receiver, where the giver would otherwise be devoid of redemption. They might also be, more minutely, recognition of unfathomable depths of one’s persona, a plea for understanding, like a sonar ping of identification to hopefully bounce back in kind. Whatever tangled mess of heartbreak and hope props this person up, the gift seems to say that at least you can detect one small facet of their inner self, enough to share this piece of your life with them, even if it’s all you can say for sure anymore.
What was the last gift you gave to a friend? When was the last time you spoke to them? I’ll go back to my Pallbearer dive now.
The Void Rot train keeps rolling, car after car, through the TovH Station:
Is Dublin Death Patrol a reference to Margaret Thatcher? Is there any point to Max Cavalera having a side project that isn’t Nailbomb? Questions left unasked by our top minds:
Refined grind for your confined mind, putting all my Spears at ease:
You can’t keep a cringe band down. Alestorm proactively supply their fans with a handy bludgeon to dull the effects of pubescent frontal lobe development:
CarcassBomb sets up her stall with fresh wares aplenty, at prices that you should probably shut up about and not mention to the local constabulary if you know what’s good for you:
Take the Turing-Ov-Hell Test and see if you can figure out which reviews are from real trve metal warriors, and which are from fvlse posers:
G/B/Us below!
