30 years since No, I Can't!!!

they're HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm perfectly aware of where our love stands But the plain fact is that you owe me eight grand If it helps to jog your memory I lent it to you on Tuesday, when we were drinking

Alpha Desperation March / Transmissions to Horace / Bitter Melon Farm

push furniture in front of the door

Daily Goat #046: Sail On (cover) - Transmissions to Horace

Sail on down the road 'Bout a half a mile or so Well I tried to make you stay But now you're going It was plain to see That a small town boy like me Just wasn't your cup of tea That was wishful thinking I gave you my heart and I tried to make you happy You gave me nothing in return You know it ain't so hard to say "Would you please just go away"

You come to comfort me But I don't need your sympathy And the way you look at me Well it's condescending I feel my stomach churn And didn't you ever learn Not to tell somebody something if you don't mean it I gave you my heart and I tried to make you happy You gave me nothing in return You know it ain't so hard to say "Would you please just go away"

Sail on Sail on Sail on

i've thought about this a lot and if i had to explain recorded sound to a ghost or a time traveler or an alien i would play them the recording of california song from this tmg show. the quiet simplicity. the person in the audience who shouts "i love you". the way after two lines, john leaves his mic and all you hear is the crowd, but it's small enough that you can pick out individual voices. the person with high voice who hits every note and you can hear their smile. the way the quiet of the first verse turns into a emphatic chant of "i've got joy, joy, joy in my soul tonight". the guy who sings the song the regular way while the rest of the crowd holds a note, and ends up being the only person singing in the audience for a moment. the way the john and the crowd keep singing "you really got a hold on me" until it's just peter's bass and everyone snapping along. the little improvised lines john sings before he says "thank you very much" and the crowd erupts. humanity at its absolute finest for real

i love albums now. if you have a favourite album rec it to me

i love you taboo vi: the homecoming i love you songs for petronius i love you the hound chronicles i love you chile de arbol i love you transmissions to horace i love you hot garden stomp i love you taking the dative i love you philyra i love you beautiful rat sunset i love you yam the king of crops i love you zopilote machine i love you why you all so thief? i love you orange raja, blood royal i love you songs for peter hughes i love you sweden i love you songs about fire i love you nine black poppies i love you nothing for juice i love you tropical depression i love you full force galesburg i love you new asian cinema i love you isopanisad radio hour i love you the coroners gambit i love you on juhu beach i love you jam eater blues i love you all hail west texas i love you devil in the shortwave i love you tallahassee i love you bedside recordings volume 1.2 i love you we shall all be healed i love you the sunset tree i love you come, come, to the sunset tree i love you dilaudid i love you babylon springs i love you get lonely i love you heretic pride i love you satanic messiah i love you black pear tree i love you moon colony bloodbath i love you the life of the world to come i love you the life of the world in flux i love you all eternals deck i love you all survivors pack i love you transcendental youth i love you beat the champ i love you blood capsules b/w dub capsules i love you goths i love you selected goths in ambient i love you marsh witch visions i love you hex of infinite binding i love you aquarium drunkards lagniappe session i love you from the lake trials i love you in league with dragons i love you welcome to passaic i love you sentries in the ambush i love you songs for pierre chuvin i love you getting into knives i love you jordan lake sessions volumes 1&2  i love you dark in here i love you jordan lake sessions volumes 3&4 i love you bleed out

Leon Francis

one man's OPINION....

My QOTD :

“The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.” -Declaration signer and founding father, Dr. Benjamin Rush

If you're like me, the current trajectory of our Republic, the rejection of God and the openly hostile atmosphere towards Christians is alarming to say the least! And in the span of my brief years, I've witnessed this country, a country founded on Judeo-Christian values, Capitalism, and a republican form of government , slowly embrace many forms of Statism to the point where we now have an openly socialist candidate running for president on the Democratic ticket!

It leaves you scratching your head wondering what the hell happened! The answer to that stares you in the face every morning as you wait at your kids bus stop or drop your child off at school.

I believe that the biggest contributing factor to our slow but steady rejection of our founders dreams of a god-fearing representative republic, and our slow creep towards tyranny is compulsory public education a.k.a. government schools.

Our founders understood that a morally astute populace would reject tyranny, and the virtue of the self governed would see them electing equally morally astute representatives to lead them.

I wonder what they would say if they could see us today?

By underestimating our enemies result, and allowing the moral fabric of our country to decay to such a point as it has we have left our beloved Republic vulnerable!

Think about this for a minute:

1. Getting rid of religion is one of Saul Alinsky’s 12 Rules,

2. Lenin tells us that Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism,

3. No 17.of The Communist Goals- Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum.

4.No 28.of The Communist Takeover- Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

You see, Our enemies understood what our founders believed to be true, in order to destroy a society and subjugate them,you must first de-Christianize them! That de-christianization happens slowly but daily in our public-school systems. This institution is by design destabilizing and will overtime destroy the moral fabric of our country. And I say by design because from its founders Horace Mann, right down to the architect of Common Core, The folks we entrust our children's education to have been in large part [S]tatist\socialist.

It is the reason why millennial's believe the lefts rhetoric about "separation of church and state".

It is the reason we have our current president, and why the socialist candidate running for president on the Democratic ticket is so popular.

It also explains the hostile atmosphere and open hostility on religious freedoms today.

Despite all of the warnings we received, we have entrusted America's most precious resource to enemies of our republican form of government. If we are not careful and proactive, The country we hand to our progeny will be one where Uncle Sam wears the jackboot of a tyrant…

That's my two cents for today, feel free to add yours…

the bleed out cassette looks so good omg, what other albums do they have on cassette?

as of right now you can purchase bleed out, dark in here, getting into knives, and a 20th anniversary version of all hail west texas available through the official tmg merch page! in the us, anyway. those same albums are also available to buy through merge records' page. i own gik and ahwt cassettes as well so if you look through my tags for those albums you can see pics.

historically, the mountain goats have been a very cassette-oriented band. if you look through their discogs catalogue page, you can see at a glance what albums have only been released on cassette.

[image id: the classic discogs table, listing the mountain goats' albums Taboo VI: The Homecoming, The Hound Chronicles, Transmissions to Horace, Hot Garden Stomp, and Zopilote Machine. Taboo VI: The Homecoming, The Hound Chronicles, Transmissions to Horace, and Hot Garden Stomp have parentheses off to the right side of their names that say (Cass, Album). The "Cass" of each of these is circled in red. Zopilote Machine has a white rectangle next to it that says "3 versions". An arrow with the words "click to see" is written in red next to that.]

the cassete-only albums are mostly the albums from the 90s, stuff from tmg's mostly and totally independent eras. Some of their most famous albums have actually never been released officially on cassette, despite being recording on the panasonic. I would die for a 25th anniversary cassette release of the coroner's gambit.

they also release some special material on cassettes occasionally, like songs for pierre chuvin or all survivor's pack. songs for pierre chuvin did eventually get a cd release but irrc it was about a year after the fact?

the exception here would be hot garden stomp and the hound chronicles, which were released together on cd in 2015. they're not listened under their individual album listing on discogs because that cd release is not *technically* the same album.

other than the albums that you can buy from their merch store right now, the best places to find their cassettes are ebay and depop, or if you have any local thrift stores, those are good too. but they can be pretty hard to come across. songs for pierre chuvin cassettes are common-ish on ebay but tend to be very very expensive.

tldr: tmg's three most recent studio releases and a special version of ahwt are avaliable to purchase through official means atm. other releases have been made and thrift stores are the best place to find them in my experience. discogs is my go-to to search for what has been released in what formats, and you can tell by going to the tmg catalogue page and clicking on the album title you're interested in.

i could go on, but those are my basic thoughts. hope this answers your question!

Comparing Vesper and Horace a bit in how they treat working and resting

I'd like to begin this post with a helpful diagram

The simplest way they differ is that Horace is contantly creating more work for himself even when, realistically, he could just take a break and still be ahead. It's a sortof frantic feeling that he always needs to be working on something, pushing towards a goal, because science is never rally finished. He's always finding something new to try because he doesn't want to stagnate. Plus he is genuinely deeply passionate about all the work he does even if he ends up stressing himself out.

Vesper, on the other hand, deligates work at almost every opportunity and still had piles of things to deal with every day. And because she's so dedicated to her job and the empire as a whole she gives it priority over other things she might rather be doing. She'd like to spend the afternoon doing physical training instead of reworking a blueprint for the fifth time, she'd like to go sit on her balcony and watch a firework show, she'd like to have a few hours to put on music and relax as she tinkers with a personal weapons project, that just isn't typically on the cards for her.

Horace willl very frequently put off self care or forget self care entirely (eating, sleeping, brushing his hair, etc) in order to keep working. He sees it as a frustrating interruption of his process. He WANTS to keep working. When people try to help him, tell him he's been working too long and needs to take a break, he'll either brush them off or reluctantly agree. Usually he's able to relax and be less grumpy after sitting and resting for a bit. Some days he's still high strung, anxiously waiting until he can justfy going back to that project. Vesper will typically try to set a schedule. She'll decide to take a break and eat at 1:00. But then at 12:30 someone brings her a treaty that needs to be revised and sent out for approval by 1:15, so lunch gets pushed off to 1:30. Then in the middle of that project Panza will send her some files and ask her to research a certain group or planet and get whatever information she can to him by 2:30. Lunch gets pushed off to 2:45. She finishes the treaty, is well on her way to finishing the research, when a communications officer informs her that they have a transmission coming in from a diplomat and they need her to answer it right away. She answers the call, gets permission to submit the research at 3:30 instead, and when she returns a set of blueprints has been placed on her desk and need to be revised for the engineering team by 5:30. Lunch is no longer happening, but she plans to have dinner at 6:00. When 5:45 comes around Bakins comes in to ask her a question about one of their operating protocols. She's tired, she's snippy, she's harsher with her answer than she needs to be. At 6:00, Bakins and Beyett come in with fresh food from the Citadel's kitchens, and Vesper stops everything she's doing to sit and eat with them. (This doesn't even include the part of her job where she often has to stealth her way off planet, through cities, and into the bases of criminal organizations to take them out and reclaim any contraband or rescue any ESR hostages, or when she's required to go with Panza to diplomatic affairs, or make TV, Radio, and online appearances, or go to training facilities to work with the lower-level millitary personell there, train troops, sort out promotions, etc).

Horace could easily justify taking a few days off. If he did nothing would really change. His students could complete their courswork online and email him if they need help. Their grades would still get in on time, and he'd still be on track to collect whatever data he needs for his current experiment. He just chooses not to, instead choosing to keep fixating on his work. If he were to take a day off (some times is forced to when he's unwell enough for Baxter to notice) he doesn't really know what to do with himself. He'll read a book, watch a documentary, do a puzzle, but it all feels like he's just wasting time that he should be spending doing something more important. Vesper would like a day off. She's usually able to justify one or two a year when things are especially slow. She'd eat some nice meals, work on some personal projects, dance a few routines instead of working out properly. But most of the time she just can't justify doing that. There's too much to get done and not enough people to actually do it. She's always deligating things to her LTs to get done, but she doesn't want to overwhelm them. She usually sticks them with the things she really can't stand, like meeting with delegates or doing financial paperwork, while doing the bulk of the remaining work herself. She'd give them more if she thought they could get it done without skipping meals or staying up late into the night, but she knows that's just not realistic. There is another part of it too that deals with her fear of being replaced. If it WERE easy for her to just pass off all her work and take a day off whenever she wanted, then what good is she to keep around? Eventually someone would notice that things run fine without her. At least being constantly busy proves that she's still valuable.

there is a recurrent theme in the alpha couple series (one of many) and that is the intensity of knowing someone so closely and intimately that you have developed your own language together, and yet you are drifting imploding, spiraling, changing indetectably and can no longer comprehend the language you have created. when that change happened is not something you can determine, and if it will return to you is something else you cannot determine. the decision to be made next is whether to hold onto something which is fracturing and painful and tearing you up inside and unintelligible at times, or to push through and seek out this something that was precious to you which you have somehow lost touch with along the way. the fact that this something you seek will likely destroy you has crossed your mind but has done nothing to sway your determination.

and then you started mumbling unintelligibly so what are you saying anyway

“Star Dusting” -- Transmissions to Horace

and I know what you're saying and I know what you're saying it for but I'm not listening I'm not listening anymore

“Alpha Double Negative: Going to Catalina” -- Songs for Petronius

I speak in smoke signals and you answer in code the fuse will have to run out sometime something here will eventually have to explode

“Have to Explode” -- Tallahassee

cradled in the gentle tonez of the piercing whine in going to cleveland

WHEN I SAW YOU THERE SOMETHING INSIDE ME CHANGED

come out, come out, wherever you are

the mountain goats + cruelty of nature

[ontario / faithless bacchant song / going to santiago / the bad doctor / the garden song / woke up new / onions]