Purple Haze Within My Brain

All I want to have is a clear mind. 

On the last year, I have been looking for a new challenge.
I have written several intention letters.
I have read a lot of research projects. 
I have prepared a bunch of CVs. 

Nothing worked out.

I was so close to get a tenure track position in a private university. 
All I would have had to do was to move to Monterrey and to focus on teaching at undergraduate level. Salary seemed to be enormous. 

At the last moment, the authorities decided to hire a cognitive behavioral therapist.
She apparently had no experience in teaching and had recently obtained her Bachelor's degree –I guess she doesn't belong to National Researcher's System–, but she had studied on that private university. 

A big bias. 

A colleague told me about a chance to work in Aguascalientes.
They looked for a researcher with expertise on drug addiction, or so he told me. 
I wrote a project of basic research with animal models to perform experiments in order to evaluate several potential drugs of abuse. 

At the last moment, they decided to hire a guy with an expertise on drug policies. 
They hired a guy who speaks about drugs, but from a social –rather than a neurobiological– perspective. 

I just made a resume of my last year, but I really looked for an opportunity so bad. 

I was so hopeless that I started to consider the possibility to get a job as a ghost writer.

On the last month, things changed.
My boss told me of an opportunity. 
I went to this University to give a talk about my career. 
The researchers who evaluated me, seemed to be looking for another profile. 
They say they have an excess of researchers like me. 
(Eventually I would find out that they thought I would ran away from the job due to the state of their working conditions.)

Nonetheless, one of them seemed to be interested on hiring me for a different purpose. 

I have been in contact with him.

He's interested on the relationship between gut microbiota and cognition in animal models of Alzheimer and schizophrenia.

Tomorrow I will go to this University, once again. 

I don't want to get ahead of the facts, but it seems to be a real opportunity for me.  

I will have an interview at 9: 00 am. 

The only thing I don't like a lot it's the distance. 
On times like these, I think seriously about learning to drive and about getting a car. 

Distill The Life That's Inside Of Me

Twenty five years ago, Nirvana's MTV Unplugged In New York was recorded. 
It was meant to be release as a double album, including this acoustic set and an electric live set. 

(Due to Cobain's death, the album was released almost one year later as a single album. From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah, released in 1996, was supposed to be the other half of this double album.) 

It was 1994' Christmas Eve, when I listened this album for the first time.
It had a month or so in stores. 

My dad gave us money as a Christmas gift. 
He drove us to a store where my brother and I used to buy music. 
My brother bought Kiss My Ass: Classic Kiss Regrooved. It was a tribute album on which several artists such as Lenny Kravitz, Lemonheads, Anthrax, Gin Blossoms and Dinosaur Jr. covered Kiss' songs. 

I bought Unplugged In New York on cassette. 

There were a couple of posters of the album cover in the store.
Though it was the first time I saw this propaganda, it called my attention. 
The band looked so mysterious and focused on the concert. 
They didn't seem the classic punk rockers I thought they were supposed to look like. 
Grohl was in the back of the drum set. Novoselic at the left. Smear at the right. Cobain in the middle, wearing a fuzzy cardigan, jeans and Converse sneakers, looked so attractive. 

Immediately, I wanted the album so bad and I was afraid that copies were unavailable. 
Still remember the chills it provoked me to watch it in stock. 

For the last six months, I just had listened Nevermind from a cassette a friend of mine had recorded for me. I wanted to have my first Nirvana album. 

It was a sad Christmas Eve. It was cold and dry. 
My parents wanted that my grandparents went to our house to have dinner with us, but at the last hour they called by the phone and said that they wouldn't be with us. 
My grandparents didn't like each other a lot. 

My mom served the dinner on the table.
My dad had a long face. 
His sadness was so contagious. 
He stood up and hang up the telephone. 

As dinner was cooling on the table and my dad was trying to convince her mother to accompany us, my mom was in the kitchen.
She murmured something. Maybe she couldn't believe that my dad was more concerned about his mother than about his sons. 

I took advantage of the moment and I put some whiskey on a glass. 
It was just a taste, not even a quarter of the glass. 

I stood up and walked away. 
I climbed the stairs, hiding the glass of whiskey underneath my cozy jacket. 

When I arrived to my room, I closed the door and I put the cassette on my old player -it was a late 80's Panasonic with a turntable included- and sat on the floor.  

I was naive to live albums, so it was a big surprise to listen to the crowd clapping at the beginning of the album. 
I was also naive to Unplugged albums, so it was a big surprise to listen Kurt Cobain speaking to the audience at the beginning of the first song.

About A Girl blew my mind. 

Thought how was it possible that a noisy band as Nirvana had so nice and quiet songs. 
I wanted to have a guitar and to learn how to play that song. 

I took a sip of whiskey. 
It was so hot that I almost cough. 
It hurt my throat so bad. 

Wondered how was it possible that people drove wild with that kind of alcohol. 
It seemed to be a beverage for outlaws. 
I was 14 years old and all I had drank was a beer or two, in a party of my old high school classmates. 

Come As You Are sounded so quiet and different from the Nevermind version. 
The drums sounded so quiet, too. 
Cobain's voice sounded a lot more emotive, too. 

At the end of the song, Cobain spoke again. He introduced the next song. It was a cover of a band called The Vaselines and it was a rendition of an old Christian song. 
It was included an accordion. 

Then Cobain spoke again. He guaranteed that he will screw the next song. 
It will be a cover of David Bowie's The Man Who Sold The World. 
At times, the feedback was so notorious that it didn't seem an acoustic concert. 

Cobain said that he will performed the next song by himself. 

Pennyroyal Tea gave the chills. 
I took another sip of whiskey and felt that alcohol was having an effect on me.
Obviously, it was just my impression. 
(Did I mention that I just served less than a quarter of whiskey in the glass?) 

I desired to be in that concert, listening to Kurt Cobain almost breaking through this song. 
Also I wanted to have a guitar and to learn how to play this song. 

On my cassette version of Unplugged In New York, is available an unedited version of Pennyroyal Tea. Cobain got wrong in the last part of the song. It was so evident and also so emotive. It reflected for a brief period a nervous guy singing to a bunch of strangers and whose nerves made him to forget the song. 

The side A of the cassette ended up after Dumb and Polly. 
Dumb sounded so sad. It seemed to me that it was about a drug addict feeling hopeless. 
The sound of cello was new for me. Never had thought that it could fit so nice in a supposed punk band. 
Polly was not my favorite. Thought it sounded better on the original version, maybe 'cause it was originally an acoustic song. 

Side B started with clapping and soft drumming. 
The acoustic version of On A Plain left me speechless. 
The original version of Nevermind was so noisy that I couldn't even pay attention to the lyrics and to the bass lines. 

I couldn't stop imagine myself in that concert. 
  

Demand A Sacrifice

It was a gray and damp afternoon.

My wife and I were walking thru the alleys of an unknown street. 

I was upset. She had acquired a compromise to be at a weeding party.
I didn't want to show up with her at this particular event 'cause I had the feeling that the bride was one of her best friends and also that I had had a closer relationship with the bride before I met my wife.

I was thinking how to skip this compromise, when we arrived at what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse. There were a dozen guys around what appeared to be a ticket office.

Suddenly it came to my mind that this abandoned warehouse was an underground venue in which Nirvana was about to play later.

My wife walked to the ticket office and asked for a couple of tickets for us. 
Dunno why, but it seemed that the very same day of the show tickets were still available.

Everything was going so well, but the ticket seller asked to my wife for some sort of password. She didn't know it. I got mad. 

Dunno why, but she was the only one who could buy a couple of tickets for us. 

http://www.thesenseofdoubt.com/

I was about to collapse. I was so furious. 
I had always wanted so bad to be in a Nirvana show.

Somehow she got the tickets, but in different sections of the venue. 
We walked into the venue and we took different paths.

The venue seemed to be a bull arena, except that the floor was made of concrete.
At times, the venue seemed a circus. 

My wife was so close to the stage and I was almost in the last row of the last section of the venue. I couldn't believe it. She didn't even like Nirvana as I did! 

Someone in the tribunes, so close to me, started to speak about Melvins. 
In particular, he spoke about Houdini and Lysol.

So I figured it out that it was a Nirvana show, but that the Melvins would be the guest band. Immediately I thought we were in the middle of the In Utero Tour, when Melvins opened several shows for Nirvana in Europe.

Lysol (1992) is one of the most accesible Melvins' albums.
Sacrifice indeed is a Flipper cover. 

Look For "Sacrifice" By Melvins On Your Preferred Browser

Watermarks On The Ceiling

Two years ago, I was so skinny.
For almost one year I had had an awful life. 
I had spent a bunch of money on gastroenterologists and drugs to alleviate the symptoms of reflux. Though, besides following the physicians' orders, I changed my diet and quit smoking and drinking alcohol, I felt terrible. 
My diet consisted of eating the very same food on a daily basis –a lot of regular food made me sick– and it was awful, too. 

Try to eat the same things for a month and tell me how does it feel.

I lost my appetite. 

Nonetheless, I had this opportunity to get an interview for a tenure track position at one University outside the city. 

I prepared a short talk about my research and future directions. 

It was a very cold and dry day. 

In the interview, there were three colleagues. 
One of them was a young scientist who I knew from a radio show in which I was interviewing her. Other one was a young researcher interested on the social value of food and its impact on consumer's choices. The experienced one was interested on aging and oxidative stress. He also knew my advisor from a collaboration. 

When I finished, they asked me what would I do if I got the position. 
I told them that I wanted to extend my model to study another physiological processes than the one it was developed for.

One of them wasn't sure about my murine model. She thought that my model wasn't really resembling a human phenomenon. I told her that it wasn't meant to resemble childhood obesity, but the impact of postnatal overnutrition on the hypothalamus and she agreed. 

Though I felt so comfortable and so confident about getting the tenure track position, my colleagues decided to favored another researcher -never knew who he/she was- and the most experienced of them told me so via an e-mail a few days later. 

When I came back to the city, I felt so sick. 
Started to snooze and to cough, and to feel annoyed and tired. 
I got the flu and it lasted for almost three weeks. 
It was so awful 'cause I had been sick a month ago. 

In eight days I will have another interview with the same colleagues. 

Wonder if it will be the same. 

Will it really make sense? 
Will I be favored by their decision this time?
Will the interview be just a deception? 

They say it can't rain all the time, but I'm getting used to be rejected.  
As I hear this song, I remember how enthusiastic I was the first time I went to this interview. 
Though I was so ill and about to have a surgery to end up with the reflux, I had the idea that I finally would find a tenure track position. 

The profile these researchers were looking for was my profile. 
As I hear this song, I feel ill, disappointed and mainly focus on failure.  

Kim's Caravan by Courtney Barnett

Like Blue Vibration Through The Sea

This is a recurrent dream on which I'm always in my old bedroom.

Though I know it is my old bedroom, it is so different from the real one. 

I'm late to get somewhere and I'm trying to clean up my bedroom. 

Somehow, I sense that the house is built from West to East, rather than from North to South. Everything changes accordingly. 

I feel sort of mad about time. I hate my routine. 

My old bedroom has a big fancy bed with a wooden-dark brown base. The mattress is yellowish and makes me ill. Everything is painted in pale blue. 

A big lamp is on and it irradiates a yellowish light, too.

The atmosphere is cold. 

My nose is like an ice. 

With my naked feet, I sense a soft and warm carpet. 

This is new. A carpet of the color of Cappuccino coffee expands through all the floor's bedroom. The caress is so cozy that I hate to be awake. 

I would love to go back to bed.

altrm.blogspot.com

It seems that it is pretty early in the morning. 

Maybe it is about to dawn. 

It seems one of those December days' of my first year as an undergraduate student. 

I used to wake up early in the morning. 

All my classes started at 7: 00 a.m. 

Sometimes I hated school. 

Especially on Sundays, I had nightmares about getting involved in the school with dangerous guys. They sold drugs and porno movies. I owed them money.

They always locked me inside a fridge and everything I did to escape was useless. 

I woke up feverishly from those dreams.  

At school, I felt out of place. 

My classmates were so dumb and I was so fake. 

They came from private schools and they were always talking about Europe and fancy restaurants. I had a bad temper, but pretended to be nice all the time. 

I was so angst about my future.

I just wanted to meet someone with whom I could speak about music and literature. 

I was convinced that all I wanted to do was to be a writer and there I was, studying a scientific career, dealing with silly guys who were crazy about having patients to tell them how to conduct their lives. 

I was about to leave my old bedroom, when Theresa came in. 

(Dunno why I dreamed about her. 

I always look for an explanation when someone appears out of nowhere in my dreams. 

So far, I haven't figured it out why did she appear on this dream. On the previous day, I didn't think of her, neither saw her or spoke to her. Guess she just kind of thought of me.) 

As she walks into my old bedroom, a strange sexual energy floods the stay. 

I sense that sexual energy through my naked feet. Somehow, I also smell it through my skin. It makes me feel so alive. It makes me forget about my awful routine. 

She smiles. Her lips look so fleshy. 

It seems that we have an unfinished deal and that she just came back to get over it. 

She looked prettier than she looks in the real world, but despite so I don't find her especially attractive.

Theresa is in front of me. So close to me. 

A few millimeters away from me. I can sense through my skin that she's so excited. 

She says something about the mattress or the furniture of my old bedroom. 

I try to say something, too. 

All of a sudden, she puts her hands so close to my crotch in a very sexual way.

She sighs so deeply. Then, she sticks her tongue out and licks her lips discreetly.  

Her attitude makes me feel so excited. 

I know I could make her everything I wanted to. 

Her body language says so. I feel about to have a heart attack.

I notice that she wears a yellowish turtle neck sweater.

Even though Theresa has a big breast in the real world, in my dream she's not.  

We kiss. 

She is so close to me that I feel her breast. It's less impressive than I had thought. 

Her hands are still on my crotch. I can't avoid to feel excited about her touch. 

Again, I know that I could make her everything I wanted to. 

Theresa smiles. I feel her saliva on my lips.

I don't enjoy the sensation. It makes feel dirty and low.

She leaves the bedroom and I walk behind her. 

I tell her I'm about to leave the house and she says that it is so unfair. 

She says that we started something and that we have to finish it. 

She says that I started the fire and now I just turned off the heat. 

Theresa smiles again, but this time I focus on her teeth. 

They're so yellowish and crooked. 

I feel nauseous. 

Woke up at 6: 00 a.m. from this dream, fed the kitties and started to write. 

Theresa's Sound-World