Laboratory of Mathematics and Writing

     An old lady at the bar asks me, Are you okay? You seem rather quiet. Rough day at work?      I’m just waiting for the bus Then it made me wonder. Do I really look like a guy that’s just constantly down on his luck? Do I really give off that aura of misery? Do I appear uninterested and long to be somewhere else? Maybe I do want to be somewhere else. Perhaps atop the snow covered mountains of Alaska Or down winding paths in the forests of Transylvania Tucked away in the jungles of Guatemala Even get lost in the scorching deserts of Australia Perhaps I will travel to the moon And watch the Earth rise from Apollo’s landing Journey to the stars and skate across the rings of Saturn I want to go sailing across oceans in search of... Something Anything that will remove this boulder off my back My soul grows weary with the weight of existence Time has penetrated deep and left lacerations whose pain can only be ignored with aimless w...

I finally figured out why I like Fates Warning as much as Iron Maiden. I think it's because Fates Warning is the band that Iron Maiden should have evolved into after Di'Anno was fired. The first two Iron Maiden albums did not have Bruce Dickinson at the vocals. They had Paul Di'anno. Di'anno was a good singer, but didn't quite have that upper register that Dickinson was famous for. But that's not the most important thing here. The music of the first two Iron Maiden albums is something special. They where both raw and fiercely experimental. There was a certain punk rock attitude about them that gave songs like "Killers", "Purgatory", and "Prowler" a level of danger and menace that simply wasn't present in the Dickinson albums. There was also songs revolving around unspecific personal issues like "Another Life", "Innocent Exile", and aforementioned "Purgatory" (it's a fucking badass song, ok...