Anthem.

You want to go out Friday
And you want to go forever.
You know that it sounds childish
That you've dreamt of alligators.
You hope that we are all with you
And you hope that you're recognized
You want to go forever
You see it in my eyes.
I'm lost in the confusion
And it doesn't seem to matter
You really can't believe it
And you hope it's getting better.

You want to trust the doctors
Their procedure is the best
But the last try was a failure
And the intern was a mess.
They did the same to Matthew
And he bled 'til Sunday night
They're saying don't be frightened
But you're weakened by the sight of it
You lock into a pattern
And you know that it's the last ditch
You're trying to see through it
And it doesn't make sense
But they're saying don't be frightened
And they're killing alligators
And they're hog-tied
And accepting of the struggle

You want to trust religion
And you know it's allegory
But the people who are followers
Have written their own story.
So you look up to the heavens
And you hope that it's a spaceship
And it's something from your childhood
Your thinking don't be frightened

You want to climb the ladder
You want to see forever
You want to go out Friday
And you want to go forever.
And you want to cross your DNA
To cross your DNA with something reptile.
And you're questioning the sciences
And questioning religion
You're looking like an idiot
And you no longer care.
And you want to bridge the schism,
The built in mechanism to protect you.
And you're looking for salvation
And you're looking for deliverance
You're looking like an idiot
And you no longer care.
You want to climb the ladder
You want to see forever.
You want to go out Friday
You want to go forever.

Photographic Investigation For Untitled Writing Project / The OTB on W. 49th St. / 5-03-07

My name is Trystan Trazon.
Formerly Trystan Phillip Toole of Greater Seattle, Washington. Currently living on the margin between Queens and Brooklyn. Ask what brought me to this city, and I’ll ramble off a list of excuses. I make music, I write plays, I shake martinis, take my paychecks, then dance myself into debt. I've spent most of my life shooting my mouth off and am now understanding the authority that comes with being an attentive listener. I'm the world's tardiest answerer of voicemails. I don't always write (or for that matter, speak) in complete sentences. I am preoccupied with pop culture revivals, past revolutionaries and public indecency. But mostly I’m preoccupied with this absurd reality of people, in spite of their collective resistance and capacity toward suffering, forever struggling to just get along.

Really, this blog is here mostly as a means to condition a kind of self-narrative. By that I mean (and I've said this many times before) the idea that "if you didn’t write it, it didn’t happen". Brick upon brick of my self-referential memory have left an entire fourth wall open to the crisis of forgetting. I am showing signs of a geriatric at the age of twenty-two. I need to build this wall, or rebuild it, as the case may be. Even if it means reversing the chronology. Otherwise, there really is no excuse for this blog. Maybe to defend the declining relevance of neosocialist theory. And oh, to post YouTube videos of Jennifer Hudson.

Yes, mostly just that.

So enjoy at your risk. Just don't say I didn't warn you.

Keep With The Bliss,

Trystan Trazon.

Dedicated to all The Nobodys & The Somebodys

“At long last love has arrived,
And I Thank God I’m alive.
You’re just too good to be true,
Can’t take my eyes off of you.”
- Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons

We open on a jetliner, suspended mid-song.
Playing courtesy of Phil Spector before The Wall of Sound Shakedown. It's a veteran theme, an orphan angel in the zeitgeist, lowering his bow to the young in love and newly emanicpated. It should be a fanfare for change, but you hear it as an oath of good riddance should the plane shake-and-shudder to its fall somewhere between Southeast Pennsylvania and the modern dregs of suburban Jersey. Not that these are thoughts which you, yourself, can account for. You've been drinking bourbon and soda since you crossed the Mississippi River. The coffee must have rattled your nerves this time, but that bitch sitting behind you reading The National Review certainly isn't helping. (Why is it men, and always men in planes are reduced to the back of their furniture?) She's crushed both knees into your seat, killing your stereophonic bliss, leaning invasively into that disparity that splits your dream from imminent suspicion. You keep listening to the song until it barges in from the left like a sprawling citadel--that view of Lower East Manhattan which hints at the beginning of the end. And its here where the woman behind withdraws both her knees to release you into the mystery. And there she has left you, in that space between to swim and retrieve how your story is to begin.

This will be a story, you've decided, of wishes and exonerations. A story of cosmic retribution. A story of arrivals and departures. Of disappearance. The belief in magic. Of small-tales, tall-tales. The search for paradise. Of half-lives and the flight of angels. Of past, present and future converging at a streetlight. Of resistance, then the courage to give in. Of friends. The music of an accident. Of foiled rivals. Of lightening storms. Of rain on the rooftops. Of requiems. Of premonition. Of trains and boats and planes. Of big cities and small towns and put-upon accents. It’s the story of the big balloon, and the man who gave up trying to save the world.

It’s a simple story, really.

You probably know it already.

And this is not what happened, but it’s how I remember it.