Crafting a friday from the raw material of a day = gangbuster nuit zonk times. Dear Philadelphia, where are the juice trains now that I finally need them.

I spent all morning yesterday trying to figure out how to write. I got to work through the entirety of my failed city technique, and I now feel like I’ve emerged on the other side of it as a person who is capable of doing what, as they say in Pittsburgh, needs done. There’s a rap that goes “Don’t go against the grain, the grain!” that I keep not heeding in my work process. Like I keep trying to paint with a marker, when clearly all you can do with a marker is go and write on a train. Similarly I keep trying to convince myself that painting and writing on a train are different things, and that one is more valuable than the other, when in fact they are the same thing, and are equally worthless/equally, endlessly worth pursuing and unfolding like perfect fucking brain salad origami. So in writing, I have this marker in my brain, and I keep trying to use it to make a lame painting, when I need to use it to write enormous fucked up things on a train. I’ve always had this awareness in a vague way but in the last few days I feel like a root missing honesty is emerging in my stupid craft, or something, and I am stoked about it. Don’t go against the grain, the grain.

SO anyway yesterday I only wrote like two paragraphs, second shitty day in a row re: material productivity, but I think the slowing down is indicative of, I don’t know, an impending crew change?

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Green River reservoir with Lauren, Laurie and Devon, and it was 100% killer. I got green and swam further than I’ve ever swam before out to a distant island. Water was freezing and the wind slapped waves against me as I swam back. When we returned to the shore, Devon had brought champagne. I melted and panicked about the prospect of whether or not the day would ever be beatable by any other. When we got back we had seafood putanesca  with fresh cheese and bread for dinner, mixed berry pie for desert.

Friday style here was raucous but with a weird, semi-uneasy tone, that maybe I just felt, or maybe was actually there. Many bottles of wine and three cases of beer were transferred into about thirty peoples’ bodies, from 9pm through until about 3am. I convinced James, Cara and Georgia to go to the abandoned building by the covered bridge; when we got there, James and I crawled around inside for a while, and then we came back out. I’m going to take daytime pictures of the boring rubble and garbage inside later this week. On the way back to the fire, 2:30am, the team stopped to go swimming in the stream while I sat on the rocks and possibly napped. Back at the fire, Tenzing was naked, having burned his clothes, and he tried to tell me the drunken secrets of being. Georgia and I rang the gongs in the meditation room for about forty five minutes and then I went to sleep in my studio, somehow convinced that there was no way I could get back home. I used the fake mexican rug from Jed’s shed as my blanket, and my hoodie as my pillow. The carpets are hard and rough but I slept excellently.
I had a great interaction with this old townie Phil today, and I sipped his Hurricane because he kind of called me out on not drinking a beer with him (1:30pm), and I did a lot of writing this morning. I might go to Burlington later for art week or whatever, their local art festival, and then to The Long Trail, which as far as I can tell is the Johnson, VT Doobie’s.

Okay, I am going back to normal work.

PS: Seriously if you are reading this you should try to get someone to buy the painting I posted yesterday, because I am also facing a mounting hilarity re: where my checks are going to come from when I finish this action, and I would like to continue to be able to drink wine, beer and whiskey, and put gas in my car.

A view from breaking into a building to look at garbage

Sparkle rager

A view from breaking into a building to look at garbage

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 1:35 pm and is filed under abroad, morning, photos, vsc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.