day after st. patrick's day
just got back into high point from a large triangle shaped journey through the heart of the south -- a strange trip all told, and if i could i would describe everything that i've seen, but i cannot, and even if i could, much of it was the eternally onward-stretching highways, the anti-horizon, for a horizon is the limit of vision, but the road stretches just a little further on.
saw the everybodyfields play at The Garage in Winston-Salem, -- last Saturday night -- we got drunk and they crashed on my floor -- it's about time i did that for someone -- karma, really. I'm paying back that cosmic wheel bit by bit, as I go -- except that when it doesn't feel like an obligation, but a privilidge, that's love. I've certainly crashed on my fair share of couches. I had plenty of time to think and reflect lately. Staring out the window is conducive to that (for me, anyway). It's not so much boring as entrancing. It's a mental state induced by the recollections of a thousand car trips from every year I've ever been alive. Looking out at the blur of countryside that makes up most of America, the gnarled dead tree stump that draws your attention as it makes itself seen, then disappears between the cedars, then is clear out in the open again: reminds me of another tree I saw on a misty thanksgiving drive when I was eleven, and facing the faceless rush of human traffic, this antlike rush and rest, this frenzied hurried macro-organism that of which I am a small, but important part. Important in my little spider web of the universe, anyway.
I was comparing this St. Patricks Day with last St. Patty's day -- Last time I was homeless, carless, a zombie in L.A., walking on feet that festered in shoes which I was too embarrassed to ever take off, walking, painful, evntually limping. i spent st. patricks day night with pat fitzgerals, whom i knew from memphis, and malani coomes, a freshman when I was a freshman at U of M. There was another girl there, pretty, pretty girl -- I met her that night and she was a painter who came from Tennessee as well -- I think Nashville -- and she'd just gotten divorced or broken up with her musician husband. A spontaneos band of Tennesseeans, out in southern california. the strange thing is this girl had seen me at Governor's School back in 1998 (a whole millenia ago) -- performing Macbeth at the Night of the Show. Crazy how things work. I might have gotten her number and begun the ritual mating dance, but I was a broken man -- in a week or so I'd be flying out of L.A. with everything I could carry and licking my wounds in TN. The week before I'd slept in the doorway of a church -- The big one On Highland and ... Yucca? The one with the tower and the giant red ribbon. Didn't have a car to sleep in. My phone was dead. I'd read most of the day. Tearing through this book about an Irish mobster back in the twenties, not that it was good (it was mildly interesting) but because tehre was nothing to do. nowhere to go. battery was dead. I'd try to reboot the phone -- to jumpstart itr and see if I could have enough time to dial someone but it was no use. And -- frankly -- I was sick of asking people for help. I felt like a bum. I probably smelled like one too. You could probably tell by my face that there was something desperate and haunted. I limped slowly to James' place, but the gates were locked, then limped up to Ryans, but didn't want to yell, didn't want to bother anyone, I just wanted to go to sleep. So I made my way to the church, having considered this for a spell in my head, I was drawn there, and matter of factly laid down in the lee of an archway, to cover myself from the wind around me; the other bums, sound asleep, had sleeping bags and thick blankets. I had my sweatshirt, which I tucked my knees into and pulled my arms into and ducked my head down as much as I could, and laid down on the concrete -- this little grey sweatshirt embryo in the doorway of a church. I laid my glasses nearby, against the wall.
Last night I was in Columbia South Carolina -- we were supposed to have performed there, but Chris was sick. The day before we'd performed in Athens, TN, and he had puked six times throughout the course of the show. Really, super professional about it -- I have so much more respect for Chris now. He's hit all his cues -- the second show I had to go get him from the employee lounge toilet and we just made it on stage -- he'd deliver his lines and then duck backstage to quietly puke in a trashcan. So the shows in Columbia were canceled, and I took Chris to a clinic and they charged $107 to listen to the same story he'd been telling everyone, tapped him on the stomach a few times, said it might be a stomach virus and perscribed nausea medicine and told him to drink a lot of fluids. $107. I could be a doctor. Chris was in a bad way all day -- laid in bed all day and all night with two things of gatorade beside him, and so i decided that me and sarah would go to the art museum. The Columbia S.C. art museum was kind of weak, all told -- but they had some cool stuff in there. Stuff to lean in and consider, and stuff to step back and question. i like museums. i used to go to the MFA in Boston every now in then, in lieu of church, and start in Egypt and move on to Greece and Rome, then over to Indian and Middle Eastern, the Far East, the Japanese rooms, and then over to the later European paintings. In Columbia they had an exhibit of sketches by Welsh Victorian-era artists. Very fine pencil work. Some beatifully rendered effects, and I leaned in close to look at them, like I did in Boston, the Mogul indian ink drawings, so finely inked, the line as fine as hair.
Chris still sick back at the days inn -- I go back, watch some stupid motorcycle movie with lawrence fishburn, go out, have a guiness and order crablegs -- to go. Back to the hotel room where I watch basketball, drink a 40 of Schlitz, and tear into these crablegs armed with only my teeth, my fingers, and my wits.
So. A year later, a may still be a bum, but a tremendously happier one, and amazed at where i was then and where i am now in a little year.
postscript: thanks to everyone out in CA who ever gave me a couch to sleep on and a shower to use.
saw the everybodyfields play at The Garage in Winston-Salem, -- last Saturday night -- we got drunk and they crashed on my floor -- it's about time i did that for someone -- karma, really. I'm paying back that cosmic wheel bit by bit, as I go -- except that when it doesn't feel like an obligation, but a privilidge, that's love. I've certainly crashed on my fair share of couches. I had plenty of time to think and reflect lately. Staring out the window is conducive to that (for me, anyway). It's not so much boring as entrancing. It's a mental state induced by the recollections of a thousand car trips from every year I've ever been alive. Looking out at the blur of countryside that makes up most of America, the gnarled dead tree stump that draws your attention as it makes itself seen, then disappears between the cedars, then is clear out in the open again: reminds me of another tree I saw on a misty thanksgiving drive when I was eleven, and facing the faceless rush of human traffic, this antlike rush and rest, this frenzied hurried macro-organism that of which I am a small, but important part. Important in my little spider web of the universe, anyway.
I was comparing this St. Patricks Day with last St. Patty's day -- Last time I was homeless, carless, a zombie in L.A., walking on feet that festered in shoes which I was too embarrassed to ever take off, walking, painful, evntually limping. i spent st. patricks day night with pat fitzgerals, whom i knew from memphis, and malani coomes, a freshman when I was a freshman at U of M. There was another girl there, pretty, pretty girl -- I met her that night and she was a painter who came from Tennessee as well -- I think Nashville -- and she'd just gotten divorced or broken up with her musician husband. A spontaneos band of Tennesseeans, out in southern california. the strange thing is this girl had seen me at Governor's School back in 1998 (a whole millenia ago) -- performing Macbeth at the Night of the Show. Crazy how things work. I might have gotten her number and begun the ritual mating dance, but I was a broken man -- in a week or so I'd be flying out of L.A. with everything I could carry and licking my wounds in TN. The week before I'd slept in the doorway of a church -- The big one On Highland and ... Yucca? The one with the tower and the giant red ribbon. Didn't have a car to sleep in. My phone was dead. I'd read most of the day. Tearing through this book about an Irish mobster back in the twenties, not that it was good (it was mildly interesting) but because tehre was nothing to do. nowhere to go. battery was dead. I'd try to reboot the phone -- to jumpstart itr and see if I could have enough time to dial someone but it was no use. And -- frankly -- I was sick of asking people for help. I felt like a bum. I probably smelled like one too. You could probably tell by my face that there was something desperate and haunted. I limped slowly to James' place, but the gates were locked, then limped up to Ryans, but didn't want to yell, didn't want to bother anyone, I just wanted to go to sleep. So I made my way to the church, having considered this for a spell in my head, I was drawn there, and matter of factly laid down in the lee of an archway, to cover myself from the wind around me; the other bums, sound asleep, had sleeping bags and thick blankets. I had my sweatshirt, which I tucked my knees into and pulled my arms into and ducked my head down as much as I could, and laid down on the concrete -- this little grey sweatshirt embryo in the doorway of a church. I laid my glasses nearby, against the wall.
Last night I was in Columbia South Carolina -- we were supposed to have performed there, but Chris was sick. The day before we'd performed in Athens, TN, and he had puked six times throughout the course of the show. Really, super professional about it -- I have so much more respect for Chris now. He's hit all his cues -- the second show I had to go get him from the employee lounge toilet and we just made it on stage -- he'd deliver his lines and then duck backstage to quietly puke in a trashcan. So the shows in Columbia were canceled, and I took Chris to a clinic and they charged $107 to listen to the same story he'd been telling everyone, tapped him on the stomach a few times, said it might be a stomach virus and perscribed nausea medicine and told him to drink a lot of fluids. $107. I could be a doctor. Chris was in a bad way all day -- laid in bed all day and all night with two things of gatorade beside him, and so i decided that me and sarah would go to the art museum. The Columbia S.C. art museum was kind of weak, all told -- but they had some cool stuff in there. Stuff to lean in and consider, and stuff to step back and question. i like museums. i used to go to the MFA in Boston every now in then, in lieu of church, and start in Egypt and move on to Greece and Rome, then over to Indian and Middle Eastern, the Far East, the Japanese rooms, and then over to the later European paintings. In Columbia they had an exhibit of sketches by Welsh Victorian-era artists. Very fine pencil work. Some beatifully rendered effects, and I leaned in close to look at them, like I did in Boston, the Mogul indian ink drawings, so finely inked, the line as fine as hair.
Chris still sick back at the days inn -- I go back, watch some stupid motorcycle movie with lawrence fishburn, go out, have a guiness and order crablegs -- to go. Back to the hotel room where I watch basketball, drink a 40 of Schlitz, and tear into these crablegs armed with only my teeth, my fingers, and my wits.
So. A year later, a may still be a bum, but a tremendously happier one, and amazed at where i was then and where i am now in a little year.
postscript: thanks to everyone out in CA who ever gave me a couch to sleep on and a shower to use.