ozzy raze it seems right that i was never quite my clearest self when i heard your voice. most nights it was the smoke that made soft what was jagged in me. in the gutted garage gord called his cave, "sweet leaf" was the most massive riff i'd ever met. tyson talked about all the vocal tics rob zombie stole from you and narrated a nature scene over "orchid". there was "war pigs" on warped vinyl at the vine_court place and "symptom of the universe" changing shape just past the four minute mark. on a bed of acoustic guitars and claves, you invited me to step into your dreams. the man i thought was my truest friend until he lied his way out of my life smiled and said, "that's some sweet soul music." he wasn't right about much. but he was right about that. 250722 ... ancasa.reyn my mom gave me black sabbath's master of reality for christmas in 1971 for reasons i don't understand my guess is that she asked a record store clerk what a sixteen-year-old might like i think she also got me grand funk railroad's e pluribus funk that year i recall knowing exactly what it was since the album cover was designed as a large coin and she wrapped it as it was anyway I guess i liked black sabbath just fine the lyrics were pretty good —always a priority for me— i played the record a lot over the course of a few months it was the only record of theirs i would own, though when the band came to toledo in 1975 i somehow managed to get a job ushering at the sports arena as i recall, though, the band refused to go on until contract issues were resolved i decided not to wait and left at maybe 9 maybe later i think they finally went on around 10 i didn't pay much attention to them after that but i don't think my heart was really in it in the first place as loud bands went the who were more my style but dylan, jackson browne, james taylor, and the many configurations of crosby, stills, nash, and young are the ones that most held sway with me loudon wainwright iii, john prine, martin mull, the band but ozzy i basically forgot about him until his tv show made him a thing again and even then i didn't pay him much mind 250723 ... ovenbird In the summer of 1971 my father worked as a junior ranger at a provincial park in northern Ontario. His experience prompted me to apply to the Ranger program myself when I was about to turn seventeen, but that is where the similarities end. I had a transformative experience rooted in deep friendships and nature. Dad had an LSD drenched free-for-all. He befriended a meth addict living in a tent in the park and remembers the poster she had of Jesus crucified on the “T” of a syringe plunger. He describes the locals as “extremely friendly” by which he seems to mean they gave out drugs like candy. When his summer job ended he decided he didn't want to go home so he lived with a girl he'd fallen in love with for a couple weeks. Her mom was not in the picture. Her dad was a miner. Dad spent two smitten weeks at her tiny house in a miner's village listening to the inaugural 1970 Black Sabbath album on repeat while this girl worked her way into his imagination and never really left. Today, while my mom takes my kids to a water park, my dad and I are in the living room with the stereo cranked listening to the entirety of this album that immediately transports him back to a summer that defined his adolescence. There's something magic in the opening peals of thunder when you're listening at a volume loud enough to vibrate your rib cage. The vinyl pops and hisses underneath which always feels nostalgic to me. And so dad and I are both transported–him to the bedroom of a girl veiled in hallucinogenic memories and me to my childhood living room where my small mind was fed on the crackles of old vinyl on the turntable, and voices from an era before I was born. 250724 what's it to you? who go blather from