I haven’t really got any thoughts on the State of the Union address, so consider yourselves spared from a thousand words of nonsense on the subject. I didn’t get to watch it, as it came on in the middle of the night over here and I wasn’t about to stay up, wasn’t interested in trying to find a torrent of it online to watch a pirated copy of the goddamn State of the Union. How nerdy would that be? Even I have my limits, after all. It’s not like there’s anything new or interesting for that guy to say, anyway.

And apparently he knows it, because there was a line in there about calling on Congress to pass legislation outlawing the buying and selling, among other things, of human life. Well, hell- an unprecedentedly unpopular lame-duck President due to give his final speech, who can fault him from trying out an Abraham Lincoln cover? It’s kind of cool, really, dropping his own fucked up spin on an oldie like that, kind of a punk rock thing- like Sid Vicious dragging himself through “My Way” or the Dead Kennedys doing “Viva Las Vegas” to close out their first record. Why not? There’s little to lose; he couldn’t be less popular even if he stripped down and rolled around in his own shit and broken glass like GG Allin, so he may as well rip through a perverted version of a Lincoln classic. Circumstances like his were the ones under which punk rock was created, after all. Rumors from his closest advisors of him strolling around the west wing in a leather jacket emblazoned with rather be hated than ignored will likely pan out to be true, and he’ll have turned into yet another aging punk rocker, trying to figure out how to maintain some dignity in the quest for integrity…

Henry Rollins has done a pretty good job of that, but it’s largely come at the expense of the edge he had in previous decades. We had tickets to see him on Saturday, and it was a fun night- which isn’t how anyone would describe seeing that guy onstage twenty years ago, when the Rollins Band was cranking out “Gun In Mouth Blues” and “Burned Beyond Recognition”, when spoken word was the thing he called reading terrifying, miserable hand-written pieces about brutality and picking fights with the audience. Now he is a comedian, and a funny one. His hair is grey and looks appropriate on his head, and of course he wore slacks and a t-shirt and shoes onstage rather than showing up in a pair of shorts and nothing else. Well, mellowing with age is probably a healthy thing.

I don’t know if the act he’s doing now would have had the same effect on me when I was a teenager as the one he was doing in the nineties; I suspect not, I reckon he’d probably just be a funny comedian. His more recent books were at least partially about having a TV show and were half-full of some silly jokes- not as inspiring as get in the van. Well, hell- if he cranked out another get in the van at forty-seven, he’d have failed completely to evolve. The fire may have died a bit, but that’s part of grace. When it doesn’t- that’s when you end up with people in trouble.

Of course there’s an exception to this rule, but that exception is Nick Cave, and he’s an exception to most rules.

Wow, George W Bush to Henry Rollins to Nick Cave in a seamless transition- I’m playing jazz tonight! And here I thought I’d fail to connect any thoughts at all after the brain-death I experienced yesterday around two AM after breaking the 100,000 word mark on weathered.

I brought up the novel today in a job interview, which was weird- how long has it been since I had a job interview? Or, hell, a job? But it seemed like the time to do such a thing, and so I went and hung out with the people who own Magma Books in the basement of their Clerkenwell store today for an hour or so and we chatted about writing and books and America and Texas and then they offered me the job, which was good- I honestly had no idea if I was interviewing well, because I don’t remember how those things are supposed to go. Mostly I just sat on a couch and had a decent time with some people I just met, and now I’m supposed to go back on Monday to work there part-time.

It’ll be a different view of London, and one that I’ve wanted for a while- that of a person who has things to do here and doesn’t spend hours locked in a room with a keyboard. We’ll see how it goes, but I’m looking forward to it. It’s been a long time since I could say anything like that.

Tomorrow night is Explosions in the Sky, which should be great. I haven’t seen them play in over three years, and I think they’ve been making the best music of their career since then. So the days are looking up, and they weren’t looking bad before.