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They're wide open on submissions and pretty well only ask that you don't send them crap. So what do I do? I send them this:


Junkies know that the fix gets harder. Thurston Moore once said that "a hundred dollars used to be more than enough." You get older (like it or not, it beats the alternative) and you find the highs more difficult to obtain. You sneak, you creep, you search and you reach, but that thin horizon shrinks away just like time starts to roll along faster and faster, greasing its already silent wheels until you realize that nostalgia really is an art form. The old highs were the best simply because you hadn't yet learned what they were. Forget youth, newness is wasted on the young.

I know you're out there. Audiophiles with the same itching twitch as me. Our spike hitting vinyl at thirty-three and a third, wondering why it's so damn hard to find the same joy that came out of The Cure's Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Me. It's not asking much, is it? To be surprised again, wowed again? The first time I heard Concrete Blonde I wondered where the hell I was for the first album. The same for The Beta Band and Einsturzende Neubauten; for Elliott Smith and Low, for Porcupine Tree and Morphine.

I'm old enough to remember that Nine Inch Nails once sounded like a synth break-up and that Tool held promise; to remember when Korn didn't sound like any other metal, when G. Love was something else, when Soul Coughing dealt with "True Dreams of Wichita" and not "Circles". I remember Mark Sandman on stage before the self-defense, coping mechanism of Orchestra Morphine, recall Johnette Napolitano drunk on stage before the Blonde became blood on the tracks, shot the shit and some pool with the Squirrel Nut Zippers before they sang about Hell; old enough, in fact to have seen Alice In Chains during their "Man in the Box" craze and not think much of the show at all (breaks my heart now, as I never caught them during their Dirt or Jar of Flies days).

But, music makes you old, man. Have no doubt about it. You run and run; you keep up with the new ones and the odd ones, the ones that will one day be something like Elbow or Gomez, and the ones that will go the way of Tenderloin, The Jody Grind, or Granddaddy and you look up one day to see that the kids around you listen to Him and not to Hem; they can't be bothered with that mellow, slow (God help me, country) sound.

And that moment of panic comes. God help me; am I so old?

I remember a moment when I worked in a music store (a job thoroughly unavoidable for the likes of me) when a customer asked for a band neither my coworker nor I knew of at all. "Oh, well," she said, "it's before your time." My compatriot (and erstwhile mentor) in music store rudeness responded, "I know Tchaikovsky. He was before my time. You know why I know him? 'Cause he's worth knowing."

I've become that customer. "No Orange Goblin on the books, at all? How many Soft Machine albums are you showing?" Like that lady that insists on wearing the same hair from 1978 while touring the grocery store's many aisles, I'm walking around with my spiffy new mp3 player spinning old Jesus and Mary Chain tracks, wondering just when my multi-faceted interests and mind-wide open approach flew out the window. TV on the Radio just doesn't make me throw my hands up and say Yeah! Animal collective just doesn't move me as much as that second Fruit Bats album. Tapes 'n Tapes makes me work back through my old, concert-bought b-side .45's.

Thankfully, they do surface still, stoking that spoon-fed fire of hope that is all junkies' desire. Japancakes slid under what I thought was my finely tuned radar for years and years before reddening the dropper's neck with an homage to My Bloody Valentine. The Black Lips knocked me down with "Vini, Vidi, Vici". Battles reminded me that electronic music doesn't have to be emotionless and Matmos insists still on teaching me that music is science. Joe Lally is proving that a band leading bass player doesn't have to be Claypoolish to work a little magic and out there still is the "Sad Song" pop beauty from those cat loving members of Psapp.

Any proper junkie would tell you that making do only works in a pinch; you can't subsist on it, it will never truly feed your hunger, and radio has become something of an open methadone clinic (and methadone is the death of a junkie; kicking is healthier than its substitute). Radio has become a maddening cul-de-sac in the back road searching many of the itch and the twitch neophiles of sound. I remember thinking that Mr. Bungle's "Desert Search for Techno Allah" was the future of metal until Disturbed proved me wrong. Tool's still a bastion of thrash, but A Perfect Circle has slowed the bills from my wallet on Pussifer. Death Cab for Cutie taxi'd in on major play runways, but Low still hasn't been cleared for take-off. Cat Power has found her spotlight, but Sun Kil Moon is still playing in the shadows.

Atlanta's college stations WRAS and WREK have persisted in their pusher status of peddling surreptitious goods, but the junkie, a joke of hopefulness, like Janus, looks forward and focuses behind. Any junkie worth their salt will tell you of their hey-days, of cheap shows littered with unknowns with unheard of promise and then will lament their decline. Meanwhile, younger users tout names unrecognizable and appropriately gloat on stumping their elders. White China, sure; but was it early nineties Seattle or mid-nineties UK? The eternal recurrence of the junkie is the birth of the connoisseur and the inevitable narrowing that comes with anything that might be confused with taste.

And there's the rub. What kind of music do you listen to? If that question doesn't cross your eyes with exasperated annoyance you're simply not trying hard enough. Where do The Thirteenth Floor Elevators fit between Beethoven and Barry Adamson? Is it even worth mentioning Lick the Tins or The Jody Grind? Do you even really like Diamanda Galas or Sheila Chandra, for that matter? What about that one song by Ross Golan and Molehead? Should you omit your Scatterbrain and Faster Pussycat days? Are The Beatles and Floyd a given, now? Most junkies are known less by what they like than by what they don't (and their all too true-to-form caricatures from high Fidelity), but every one of them (us) is still scouring out that other sound not heard in the world, in the street, on the radio. A junkie's only as good as his last hidden hit. By finding the unknown (s)he becomes a greater part of its creation; lamprey whores, the junkies suck out the esoteric as best it suits them. Snobbery is par for the course. Knowing four different versions of "In Heaven (Everything Is Fine)" carries with it a certain pride; "The Lady in the Radiator Song" isn't quite as exciting as mentioning Miranda Sex Garden and if somebody tosses you a Modest Mouse reference, you've always got the BBC version of the Pixies in reserve. Knowledge may be power (it's arguable that power without knowledge is de rigeur), but it's most definitely a fix.

The junkie is a funny little creature, shirking and shrugging off anything off the top forty rack; tailor fit may not hide the tracks, but it looks smarter. We're an incorrigible bunch, but pride and perseverance are their own reward. We enjoy not liking easy things. Albums that don't hit you until three spins in are gold; albums not released are pure platinum. Gluttons all, we are never sated.

Though, possibly as a cosmic compensation, with time's harrying and harrowing ascension and speed descends a certain patience unimaginable to the twelve year old that first wet his gums on that sweet smack of music. My inner junkie still sweats and shakes with DT's in times of thin, but there's an ever-growing rotation of balms and salves to soothe him through the night. Digital, burned, magnetic, and grooved the fixes sit waiting for their inevitable call. That junkie knows best what starts a weekday for work and weekday off (which should never be confused for a weekend off); knows the proper album to smooth the course edges of a tough day; knows which tone will silence a room or start it up again, building a past as sure and as fallible as the Tower of Babel, building a future twice as unsteady as the tower at Pisa. The other face of Janus hopes that Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds tap a new vein with Dig, Lazarus, Dig and keeps on looking, searching, knowing that something new is on the horizon somewhere and he cannot wait to hear what it sounds like.

First bItChEs!!!111!!!!!111!!!!!

First what? To read 4 lines?

Will come back to this one later man. Can only look at the screen so long. Glad you are sending your shit out