Blacksmith's profile

You can't be a man from the start You become one through the old art Of singin' and dancin' You'll know that it's happened When she tears your soul clean apart.

"The windows into the world we are offered sure are becoming more and more decidedly nihilistic." I'm citing myself here, from a comment I left in one of my other Urbis submissions just a while ago. When I contemplate the horrible Wrongs of our history, I frequently come to the same question: How could that Wrong have been so widely accepted for so long? And then I ask myself an even more important question: Is there a Wrong, existing today, that we, and especially I, am overlooking, and in e...

Somehow I must have vomited. I don't remember vomiting, but I feel the sting in my eyes, which I'd rub if I had control of my arms. They're flailing wildly, but they don't anymore feel like mine. Not that it matters what is mine. In just a short time it will all be taken away. All I can see now is gray. All the gray from the inside of my car. It's a Corolla, which I've kept very clean for years. I've always been clean. I washed my hands 10 to 15 times a day. Again the gray. Why do I think, no...

Grades, over many years, do a very good job of convincing a student that what he thinks of himself is of little or no importance.

Sometime in April or May 2005, in a tiny apartment located in Spartanburg, South Carolina, I was staring at my computer screen with bloodshot eyes while waiting for the noise reduction to complete. At two in the morning, a better idea seemed to be playing studio engineer rather than studying for a major final exam that was days away. I had no clue what I was doing; I had never recorded music before. Mixing tracks and modifying their sound with routine effects such as reverb and chorus was, up...