Copyright © 2009 by SIDEDOWN LLCPublished by Blindsided BooksPrinted by Magcloud

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Designed and edited by Joshua Wentz

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IN THIS ISSUE

The Mosquitoby Zachary Crabtree

Climbing the rock slope to the Loch Raven Reservoir three teenagers are plying branches loose, lifting legs over rocks and plough through the dirt. Five had made it to the rocks’ peak over the waters edge bright with a silver line. Summer weather and the buzzing of mosquitoes within the humidity, cloudless-thick heat as the teenagers drink beers. Ants crawl on the cracked stones and plants; mosquitoes fly to the lining of the forest and the sloping rocks buzzing in the humidity. The sheet rock cast out under the hot sun. The sky was a thick magenta with stripes of high-flying cirrus clouds streaming in the glossy atmosphere. The reddish-orange sun had flown over the skies and the waters for centuries over Baltimore with deference to the land, the city and the waves washing against the pebble shorelines.A young woman in a blue and white swimsuit was shivering at the edge of the precipice. The sun beat on her sweaty temples while her white feet were shuffling on rocks. Sitting on the rock was a tan-skinned man with a purple football jersey. In the afternoon, the air was cooler than it had been earlier, though still hot. A shirtless man stood beside the cliffs staring out over the water toward the other side of the reservoir where bluish-green trees grew along the rocky shoreline. Mosquitoes bite at exposed limbs and flesh leaving a red bump on the skin, bugs always buzz off before the hand slaps the arm. “Are you going to jump?” shouted the man in the football jersey. “I don’t know!” the woman shouts on the ledge. “She won’t jump,” says the shirtless man, “I will,” she says. “Not yet. Wait a second,” she said and looked downward at the jagged rocks tumbling toward the swirling pools of bluish-green reservoir waters. “Watch out for the snapping turtles!” shouts the shirtless man. “I don’t believe that!” she shouts. “There are eels! And giant squids!” shouts the tan man. “There are no eels beneath the rocks, they swim further in the water around the very bottom.” “When are you going to jump?” shouts the man in the football jersey. “Give her a second,” says the silent fellow on the rocks. Tiny ants crawling towards a Styrofoam cooler with National Bohemian Beer melting ice cubes. The water leaked from a crack in the box and dripped on the rocks towards the cliffs. One of the guys pulled a gold and white can from the six-pack and snapped the aluminum lid. He took a sip. The beer tasted cool and sour-sweet, it was still good and for thirty-cents a can, cannot be beat. The factory closed in the city but brewed to the north in Pittsburg. A statue of Bacchus stood at the gates to the factory even though the factory has been closed for more than a decade. On each can are the printed words: from the land of pleasant living. The temperature was unpleasant with thick poisons transparently in the air from cigarettes and mosquito trucks. “Yes, there were trucks spraying for mosquitoes in the summer, poison for the mosquitoes, but we have to live in it,” said the silent fellow on the rocks. “Let us live with the mosquitoes.” “Pass me a beer,” says the man in the football jersey. “She is not going to jump,” says the tan man, “she is going to fly.” Birds chirped in the birch trees along the edge of the cliffs as four teenagers climbed the steep path of gravel and dirt through the forest and to the cliff down the sloping rocks to the edge of the pebble

shoreline. The dirt slides beneath their shoes gripped the dirt with their soles. Pebbles break off and totter to the shore, leave tiny splashes in the water and the widening rings ripple on the shiny watery surface. The bright sun bathes the cliffs and the landslide in a heavy radiance and sizzles on arms, hands, legs and feet also on the revelers on the ledge and the teenagers on the shore. “There was a little boy that drowned here,” says one of the teenagers climbing down the pebble slope. “That is only a myth,” the second says. “His foot was tangled in the drifting seaweed, last summer,” says the teenager. “You will never drown,” says the second. “So long as you aren’t afraid. When you are afraid, you’ll struggle. The more you struggle, the closer the water rises above you. Swimming is the most natural thing in the world, so long as you are not afraid.” The woman on the ledge stares in the pool of the reservoir with her thin legs and neck arched. The man in the football jersey sits on the rock with his beer while another beer is lifted from the cooler. They soak rays on the sun-drenched ledge. The gravel slopes to the lower shore where a sheet of smooth rock jutted into the shallow water for several yards before dropping off into the watery depths. “Don’t slip!” shouts one of the four. “It is very slippery here and you might not keep your footing.” “I am alright!” the teenager shouts to him. The third person in the group sat by the edge of the water, leaning against stones overhanging while a fourth lagged behind. There was a man with blonde-hair and blue-eyes wearing a white Tee shirt with an armadillo silk screen. A woman had brown hair and blue eyes with a sharp nose and thick eyebrows. She had a white blouse and frayed blue jeans. She was wearing a pale green swimsuit under her clothes. The third person was sitting by the shallow pool of water on the smooth rock. The last was a young man with short, black hair and a diamond-shaped face, bright short sleeves and blue shorts. “The cliffs are really beautiful at dusk,” said the man with the armadillo. The third person threw a stone across the shimmering surface. Little fishes with nimble white-scaled bodies swam around the shallow, nipping water particles. Gravel lined the pool with seaweed and sharp limbs of broken trees. The brown-haired woman folds the cuffs of her blue jeans to her ankles and has her bare feet extended in the water displacing the perfect pool of water with transparent ripples. The fishes gather around the rippling, darting about with the drifting waves. A larger fish swims from the school and starts through the watery screen of the whirlpool. “That fish is looking at us,” she says. “Is the water fine?” asks the man with the armadillo. “It is warm,” she says. “Watch out for snapping turtles,” the third person says as he picks a flat rock and throws it skipping on the water thrice before slipping into the reservoir. “There are no turtles,” says the man with the diamond face and white shirt. “The snapping turtles swim over there beneath those rocks, far off.”

“We shouldn’t be swimming here,” says the brown-haired woman. “Be careful of giant squids,” says the third person. “There is no such thing,” she says. “There are, but they are dead and preserved in museums,” says the man with the armadillo. The mosquito buzzes passed the lobe of his ears and in front of his eyes to a spot above his right temple and swats at the side of his head. The skin on his arms, feet, legs, face and neck are exposed to the mosquitoes and the sun. Skies change to orange-blue as the evening passes. “It is strange,” says the man with the armadillo. “There are certain things I expect to see every morning. I woke up thinking of warm bread, and in my mind I was thinking of an armadillo and that is now on my T-shirt. I have Thomas’ English Muffins for breakfast.” “Look out there in the water,” the third person narrates. “The water is darker further outwards. It gets deeper too. The water gets as deep as one-thirty or forty, if someone swims out there, wait for the drop at fifteen feet or so.” “There is a city underneath here,” says the man with the armadillo. “The lake once was a valley before it was a reservoir and in the crevice of the valley is a Native American city where there are ghosts that haunt. The houses are made of clay bricks with seaweed, and the water has an eerie thinness like black, chimney smoke. There. Church steeples float to the surfaces and poke unsuspecting swimmers that sink deep enough to where flatfishes founder in the mud— “That little shit!” says the brown-haired woman as she shot her foot out of the shallow pool rippling the transparent waves. “It bit me! That little shit bit me!” She points at the puckered face of a white-scaled silvery fish. The schools of fishes disperse in the quick distorted fade of water. She puts her hurt foot in folding hands, resting on the pebbles. In moments, she reaches her hand in the pool after the fishes but it flickers out of sight as her finger flicks the pool. “There is no use splashing,” says the man with the black hair. “The fish jump with the slightest disturbance in the waters.” He stares at the broken waters, flies and mosquitoes circle the air and ants crawl on bright rock. “It broke skin,” she says showing the wounded portion of her big toe where a brown scab had been bitten off, noisome. “We can capture the fishes,” said the third person, tossing a fistful of pebbles from the shore to the shallow. Tiny splashes across the waves cause fishes to scatter away from the slowly sinking projectiles. He looks in the pool as the water settles in straight glassy mirror. The fishes swam beneath the reflection of sunlight and clouds. The man with the black hair picks an insect between his fingers from the dust. Tiny insect legs grapple with his fingertips as they slide off like twigs on concrete. Flicks insects in the waves. Submerges with the current, struggling with thin, twisting legs while in the swirling pool a fat fish gobbles the bug. “Either way,” says the brown haired woman. “I prefer not to talk in metaphor.”

“Just think,” says the third person. “We are out here, but in the world, people struggle to stay indoors in the hot weather while we go out.” The mosquito stuck its mouthpiece in the back of the man with the armadillo between his neck hairs. The heat smothers all talk and the lights in the city and stars shining in the blue and violet striped evening says its night. “Besides,” says the man with the armadillo. “Suffering is there, it is real, not imaginary,” he says while scratching the red mosquito bite. “I could sit on the cliffs and sweat,” says the man with the black hair. His skin glows with sweat along the back of his neck, his forehead, his face, his arms and legs. “The weather has become cooler,” says the brown haired woman. She searches out over the bluish-green eaves and the lush green trees. The man with black hair takes off his white shirt and steps in the shallow with his hands balancing. In the warm water, he walks on the flat sheet of rock carefully, his left leg lifting over his right, little fishes squirm around his prostrate form as he floats. Behind him was floating driftwood while on the cliffs were voices talking over him about defense and offense, linebackers. Rolls in the water, drifting waves and the strokes of his arms outwards into the deep reservoir beneath his head swimming creatures that jettison from the depths in cool waters splash over him. He closes his eyes and holds his head under waves; the reservoir maintains a lower water level over the years because of higher temperatures and lack of rain.

WHY DO YOU MAKE MUSIC?

RPM CHALLENGE PARTICIPANTS ANSWER THE QUESTION

WHY DO YOU MAKE MUSIC?

To connect with that intangible other-world where all artistic inspiration comes from. Some pray or meditate, I make music.

KAVIN

I really don’t have anything better to do.

NAIR

Music for us, is like breathing, if you don’t do it you’ll die.

ANOTHER CULTURAL

LANDSLIDE

I really don’t have anything better to do.

NAIR

It’s a way of getting some of the stuff on the inside...out.

VIVIAN CIRCLE

I do it for the attention.

MUSIC FROM A TINY ISLAND

To entertain myself and because it’s just something I have to do - otherwise I’d be even more bored and miserable.

SHALLOW PEOPLE

I make music because I can’t not do it.

ELKO WEST

Sometimes it’s the only way to let my feeling out. I never cried over the death of my father-in-law and the pain it caused my wife until I wrote a song about it.

COLIN GARVEY

On some very fundamental level I think I make music to be loved.

STRUMMINDUDE

Because, goddammit, sometimes you want to hear something, and it just doesn’t exist yet.

ABSINTHE & THE DIRTY FLOORS

It keeps me out of gun stores.

OBLIQUE STREET

For this year’s RPM Challenge, I decided to create a daily podcast in addition to the albums I was working on. This ended up being extremely time consuming, but also extremely fun.

Over the course of February I was able to create 28 episodes of RPM cast, featuring a total of 66 different artists. Some of the music was in the demo stage, some were finished songs, and all of it was incredibly interesting.

Now that the 2009 Challenge is over, RPMcast will be continuing on as a weekly podcast.

by Joshua Wentz

The main point of doing the podcast was to help promote the music of others, but I found that the most enjoyable part of the process was the realization that there is so much amazing music being released into the world... FOR FREE! RPM has provided the world with over 1500 albums over the last three years... most of which are incredibly good.

You should have a listen.

www.rpmchallenge.com