Pigs Dogs / Put him in the longboat till he’s sober / In New York shit is real
Everything got totally weird in Charlottesville and we played two sets, first one was slow and creeping, second one was a total breaker. Light cracked and future tears streamed and it was all there under dirty feet and wet and live in my hands, all future standing and shuffling and leaning expectant and stoic as West Phillies for the trolley at 47th and Baltimore, all past roaring and rioting and tearing up the 1913 seats.
I am hopefully going to be a camp counselor at Beam Camp for a month this summer. I talked it over with Matt and am probably going to New York to talk it over more with Brian later this month. Camp starts on my 24th birthday. Missing city summer will be a great delight:
Last year, oilcans bonfire and burning bikes on up Chamounix Drive to perpetual trash and full-body full-brain arthritis in the 1917s. The sun just so on the river and the art museum, and the river at home whooshing low on drought rocks and river clams and washed up muddy pike, and the mold smelled good like crossing the metal bridge the first time to play Punch Out and drink club soda, day after Good Friday, 198X.
And 1969 on dirt floors and no electricity and no ceiling, pin light and moon stabbing too-thin eyelids and distant animal sound and night sound roaring away, scrabbling at the outside, just barely weak or unmotivated enough to make it over.
In dreams, whoa, in dreams… what hasn’t been happening? Deer attacking Maria’s car on the hill and then I go out to investigate and it’s actually a pack of twenty-seven dogs, one of them is a man in a dog suit, and I go back into the house. Four come up under the window and play wild music, two on drums that make xylophone sounds, two on the winding pipes, and I am almost convinced to let them come in. Meanwhile down the dirt road a car is dead in the ditch and the gray day fire is spreading slowly and without warmth through the prickly trees, a man is crying because his dilapidated house is about to be consumed, but I wonder what he’s worried about when it’s so obviously decayed and empty. I can feel the Reservoir just through the trees and I know everything is okay but I don’t go there, I just watch the fire slowly approach. In New York in my bathrobe in the Empty City I go to a Chinese supermarket at 6AM, trying to find juice to mix with my water. I look at the produce for a long time and walk back to the apartment empty-handed. I’m surprised that I have such good direction sense and that everything is where it should be and where I remember, because I think, how many times have I been here? Once or twice before? There is no one anywhere and no sound. Much earlier, I drove my car through snow and around spiraling hills up to a stone hut, and my friends were inside reading aloud by the fire. My car disappeared and my clothes fell away and I was there naked by the fire and their voices all chanted soft familiar dog songs to me and in dreams I slept and slept