Muffy Brandt (Dreamhouse, Ergot Rot, Jazz Hand Job, Attitude Problem, R. Tsarcasm, Daily Life): Drum, tapes, microphone.

Tom Bubul (Ospreys, Distortion Phaser Diary, Hallucinating Fruit Jar Drinkers): Guitar, electronics, microphone.

Enacting the live transformation of our bodies and spirits.
“Conjure something else.”
On tour January 2010 across the USA.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84RWoupBLoU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUjhQLB0hXY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB7skYEv_EM

Sun 3rd = Philadelphia at Int’l Waters w/ Nervous Sex, Drums Like Machine Guns, Awesome Omen
Mon 4th = Baltimore at Zodiac w/ Twig Harper, Lexie Mountain, DJ Dog Dick
Tues 5th = Asheville house show w/ tba
Wed 6th = Nashville at Betty’s Bar w/ Lazy Magnet, Diary of Lisa Frank, My Left Uterus
Thr 7th = tba (Memphis, Little Rock, St Louis)
Fri 8th = tba (Little Rock, St Louis, OK City)
Sat 9th = tba (OK City or Santa Fe)
Sun 10th = Taos at kate’s wolf sanctuary
Mon 11th = Santa Fe at annabeth’s house
Tue 12th = Camping in Flagstaff
Wed 13th = tba (LA)
Thr 14th = tba (LA)
Fri 15th = San Francisco on the bus
Sat 16th = Oakland at revolution cafe w/ Moment Trigger
Sun 17th = tba (SLC)
Mon 18th = tba (Denver)
Tues 19th = tba (Kansas City)
Wed 20th = Iowa City
Thrs 21st = tba (Chicago)
Fri 22nd = tba (Chicago)
Sat 23rd = Columbus at Skylab w/ R. Tsarlag, PAK, Mark Lord
Sun 24th = tba (Pittsburgh)
Tues 26th = New York at Kathryn’s house
Wed 26th = Providence

Ultimate slow/fast week. I’ll post my good Obama being president joke later. As of right now, it sure looks like I’m moving to New York. If you have a job lead for me, get in touch.

Let the eternal record of my blog reflect that there was a time when Sierra and Zelda and I went to the Lincoln Inn in Essex Vermont, where Sierra showed me how to box step while grizzled country/rockabilly dudes played hard and whiskey sweaty, and middle aged guys with tucked in shirts and blonde girlfriends much taller whisked briskly around the floor. I ate a burger and we talked about 2nd Life and whether Barack Obama puts his hand on his heart when he pledges allegience for the entire night. Zelda said, “George, this is Melinda.” “I’m Tom,” I said. “I’m Rachel,” she said. Later, I walked around the mountain in Johnson, the sun set black-eye blue on the mountains, and we trekked past lit trailers, through the mud of vinegar and shit-smelling cow pastures, and back down across the dilapidated bridge. At a bonfire I took off my sweaters and sat in my tshirt with dry lips and the rims of my glasses getting hot. The smoke blew up and high away from stacked palettes to fierce orange black, and beyond the streetlights on School Ave was the silver sky. On Saturday morning Leah and I left and we stopped at Father’s Restaurant, where I ate delicious fried fish and mixed berry pie in Norman Rockwell desolate green interior/gray deathmask belltoll drizzle outside, old couple sitting in another booth and not talking, and I chewed with the full, terrible awareness that I am not going to drive back up I-89 for a long time.

Now I’m in Brooklyn, where it looks like I’ll live. I watched Hackers with Cory, went for drinks with Katie and Alex, ate burgers and played dominos with Julio and his totally good men’s group, partied with Allen, Kathryn and that extended team, went to Dinner Group where I talked to Justin bald and bearded about the trains and had a staring contest with Alfe and team, and pursued employment and made burritos and yucked it up with Leah almost full time since we got here. I’ve moved my car at least four or five times. In all, it’s been such a fun and fast-moving time that I got over feeling disappointed and insane by the time I had even officially heard the status of my work in Vermont.

They’re hard steps out of the gray area and they ring out loud across many months. BOOM here’s the job I wind up with, BOOM here’s the house I live in, BOOM, it’s 2009, where am I, who am I, what am I doing, BOOM, life sucks, but amazingly, resiliently, it still somehow rules way more.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Kites INC 2006

The biggest update is that after like six years off I listen to dance music again!

Short news this time around =

I am in Gray House Philadelphia working on a pair of projects for Saturday’s <a href=”http://www.215festival.com”>215 Festival</a>. One is a two-sided 8.5×11 – the three-years-coming sequel to my fake newspaper, “There Is No Such Thing as News” that compiles the normal inside jokes and bullshit in a disposable three column format – while the other is way more involved. I decided to do a five page comic in an edition of 10 where every page is completely done by hand. Each page is 5×7 and fully watercolored and inked. I’m stoked on the results so far and am about 60% done. <a href=”http://www.markpriceisafactory.com”>Mark Price</a> is going to have Darcone Triangle printed by Friday so I’ll have that too.

We played Ospreys swoop maybe four times since I’ve been here. Jams have been excursions into new territory for sure. It’s fun and weird to rejoin after long periods of doing our own things into the old duo format and find as ever that there’s still so much ground left to cover. I’m hoping we get to play out before I leave but if not at least we’re recording.

I’ve been sleeping in my sleeping bag upstairs in the office. In the morning, Pumpkin comes up and licks my face. For the first few days Molly my favorite dog alive has been here too, and she was coming up and getting in my area too. Some mornings they’d both lay back down with me for an hour, one on each side. The bum deal is that I’ve been having horrendous stress nightmares (camp failure, haunted house, empty labyrinthine farm, overgrown everything), but I can only hope that has as much to do with all that’s on the actual up that I’m spending so much energy on as all that’s up in the air that I’m so actually worried about.

Mike and Allen and Justin and I went to the Y the other night and looked at the Tropicana Juice train as it rolled on by. Before that, Mike and I went to South Philly and looked at trash trains. $1 covers a lot of ground. Men’s Group. Sorry for being vague about this, because it’s really no big deal, but you don’t know who with how much time is googling what about whom.

Current plans are to stay here until Halloween because I am extremely stoked to see top five Philly band ever ANGELDUST, who so succinctly and horrendously conjure everything I love and hate about this place in the most perfect sweaty baby’s fist full of drugs and razorblades imaginable/possible.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Then I’m going home, vote, go to Vermont, and then either head to Salt Lake or lurk in the northeast for a while. As ever I’m open to suggestions.

I’m in West Pittston, I’m in my parents’ basement.

Trying to relate everything that happens day after day is like drinking, where you can drink a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth drink, a tenth, a twelfth, but then you begin to throw up, and you can’t relate anymore, and you can’t possibly explain what the hell you’ve been doing, or how you’ve got to where you are. I ate a giant meatball sub and watched some dudes eat cinnamon and laughed a ton. I trespassed in a hundred buildings. I watched Simon & Simon, got out of bed to build puzzles and play boggle, drank so much fucking whiskey, had work group, painted, drew, wrote, finished things.

I drove eight gray hours down from Johnson. I talked to Susy, I talked to Cassie, Patrick, everyone. I have a provisional studio setup in my dad’s gardening room. I’m painting, I’m writing, I’m sending out mail, I’m having very rich dreams.

I redesigned dogchirp.com while I was in Church Studio and posted a lot of stuff on there. The plan is to keep posting my blah blah blah projects on here and to post my more finished crap there in the official archive.

The next few days are pregnant with things to get done, pregnant like Sigourney Weaver in Alien, where I’m trying to keep all of the things I have to get done from exploding out of my guts and making a huge mess everywhere. More as I do them. I’ll be in New York on Friday or Saturday; holler if you want to hang out.

My time in Vermont was a massive success. I don’t want to write specifically about things I’m working on as a result for fear of jinxing them. More as the arrows start to come down.

My new studio is in this building, Church

I wrote this entry yesterday around 6pm. I stayed awake almost all night. I don’t have easy access to the internet anymore and am posting this now from the laundromat. Open studios are tonight and I’m finishing up here in a second to go back and do some revising.

James and Cara and Leah and I stayed up last night and drank whiskey and played drawing games. I dreamed I was handing James a beer and my hand squeezed my leg and I was startled and woke up, thinking an animal was on me. I sent in an application and drafted a few other ones. I had a great conversation with Howie about how to be a writer. I bought art supplies. I went to slide night tonight. Dinner was delicious chicken pot pie.

I listened to the recent Kites record a lot of times. I wrote a huge thing about it just now that I’m not going to post because frankly it touches way too many of my own personal raw nerves for this, my internet blog.

AJW always says he makes art, and he talks about his art and calls it that. “My art,” or “I make art,” he says. I think in part he says it because it’s over the top and funny, but in part because that’s also what he fucking makes, and that’s the word for it. A lot of people here call the process of doing stuff “making work” or “creating work.” “My work.” Andrew doesn’t drink, and neither do Ben or Christopher. Howie told me he started to have life figured out when he was 30. I am 25. I don’t have a home or a plan. I’m trying to make art. At the very least I make a lot of work.
I don’t have much more to say here today; it’s all going into other things, and I think that’s the best possible report I can give.

Cara

James, Leah

Wolf Kahn state of mind

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

The Elementary School

Yesterday’s tales and worker’s thought after the dramm.

Yesterday I didn’t manage much beyond a few paragraphs in the studio and a good rap with Zelda in the office. I sent emails to people, hung diamonds, saw Harriet Mullen read, partied with James, Howie and Cara at a twelve pack bonfire, walked around and around, went to the meditation gongers’ club, and listened to music in my studio while thick blood dripped down the walls until about 2am. When I woke up this morning everything I had written while I was asleep was gone. Burning piles of cured plywood scrap won’t summon wise ghosts, just cancerous silver smoke.

I’m in a way better mood today after sleeping well and having a fairly productive morning – lots of concept jamming re: outlining and mapping characters in time for the major project. I had a thing at camp with Andrew about designing before producing, and how that’s a thing I never really am good at. I never do a pencil sketch, I never do an outline, and I always have to start over because I skipped those steps. I talked to Hildred about how doing this foundational brain work never seems like its productive, because there’s no correlative output in written text to the X hours one might spend figuring out how to frame the text to come, but it is, because that text can’t happen without it. This problem causes my material-results-driven brain to boil, because I feel like I’m not doing anything when I’m planning, and I can’t produce when I don’t. Anyway this is all by way of observation, not complaint. Since this issue has revealed itself to me in this explicit way, I’ve begun to work around it.

I started dreaming again two nights ago, after a solid two month blackout.

I drew on the lawn this morning for an hour and will likely continue when I get back from swimming. I’m going with Lauren and possibly James and others to a reservoir in a little while. It’s 90 degrees out in northern Vermont in September. It’s after the end of the world; don’t you know that yet?

We got sick of Naples, Florida, so we burned it down.

Masonic temple

Normal bullshit for day three on this weird compound. What a sad and perfect life we lead.

I spent this morning corresponding with various real life team members. I’m working on my critical response to camp and my normal love poems to everything else. I dropped two and a half of the five pages I want to on a normal studio run. Up from yesterday, but still not yet at the point.

I do a work exchange in the development office. Today, I printed out a thousand color copies of an invitation to an opening in support of two Tibetan residents of the studio center, a show with work featuring 100 flags made by new yerk artists. During the painstaking print job I drew 40 copies of my moon lunger against a four color highlighter background with a reverse side reading “How can I hand you a diamond?” thinking that if there’s nothing here I can tag with paint markers, then at least I can literally hang tags on trees or hydrants or whatever. Eleven of the forty are up and I’ve already seen Joy say “Oh what is this a teabag in this tree? Wait it’s a note?” I’m hoping to bomb the rest in the morning and be done with it.

Zelda’s novel was looked at by a serious agent today. She’s been working on it for fifteen years. I felt like this was a good omen.

I swam in the creek with Jessica and then near the covered bridge with Leah and Cara too. The water was cool and the current fast. Twelve and thirteen year olds called each other douchebags in the warm September afternoon sun as we left the first spot. The clouds piled up and thunder rolled.

Five artists showed slides in the church. Camie’s sculpture and Don’s pencil work were both A+.

Magic Hat’s Jinx is in sesh and when I drink it I want to act like an idiot. It tastes like surfin USA. It tastes like I want to pick you up.

My room is third from the right

Tagged

Tagged

The red mill

I rode my bike to the top of the hill to Johnson State College yesterday afternoon and my ass was totally kicked. I walked back down with Genevieve; she was getting Haryette Mullen’s book Sleeping with the Dictionary from the library. I have it now and am going to read it when I get back tonight. I’m about to go to the bar with James.

Nothing terribly exciting to follow, just a quick recounting of the day’s grind.

This afternoon I slept on the floor in my studio for forty five minutes. The sound of the creek outside my window is a serious husher of a shh and I had to lay down and get into it. On a related note, I think I can’t listen to music while I work anymore, which is a 180 from having to listen to music while I draw or paint. Even Strumming Music or that Wada piece were too much for me, and I kept going on soulseek to try to find something calmer – lots of wasted time.

On a related-related note, it’s also been interesting to work on definitively realizing whether I work better at night or during the day. I’ve been doing my project work between 9am and noon and then for two more hours in the afternoon, and each time slot has its unique distractions and advantages, as does working at night. I’m hoping to have my schedule totally perfected by Friday.

Re: actual work/productivity, I put down something like two pages (target is five/day, aiming for about 45,000 words over the course of the month) and a lot of notes for a continuation of the piece I started in May for my application, and yesterday I put down two shorter things that I might continue with. I’m calling that latter project Tales from Cocomo re: my conversation with Allen earlier this summer; it’s a collection of dirt zone boring episodes from real life. I might post them here when I leave if I don’t do anything else with them.

I had a few interesting conversations with people about their processes and about their situations in real life, and how they relate their creative zones to the necessary moves they need to make to make a dollar bill materialize. I also had several good talks with staff people about how they wound up here. More on these things as they develop.

I watched slides with about ten sculptors and painters last night and drank wine and beer. It was a thrill to see that they all do good work, and some of them totally killer. Tomorrow is the first above-ground slide night, and I’m stoked for it. Tomorrow during the day, I’m going swimming in the creek at the spot they took me to after dinner just now, and trying harder at hitting the daily 1500 goal on the main project. It seems to be within reach.

My room

The creek from above

I’m in residency at Vermont Studio Center right now, where I’m going to try to complete a work I started in March, so that I might have a novel to sell as merch on our next band tour, per the joke I have with Mike about that. It is currently my intention to use this blog as a self-awareness check while I’m here, until the end of September.

I just got back from camp. My beautiful soul brother Travis Iurato and I made “Darcone Triangle” and “Forty Useless Prehistoric Computers,” books that are respectively CX #3 and CX #4, CX now being in my brain what my work with Travis is, though we haven’t discussed it. We intend to print Darcone in book format and I expect I’ll be posting Useless Computers here later this week. I also got CX Styles back from him and it has progressed incredibly. David Mahfouda and I wrote letters to each other, Jessica Findley and I made this one morning,

Click here to view the embedded video.

I helped her with this,

Click here to view the embedded video.

And my kids made this.

Click here to view the embedded video.

More video (including Allen’s tableaux vivant and yeti video) at youtube.com/beamcamp. My kids also screenprinted wallpaper, made fake bands and did exquisite sharpie tshirts.

Christi Byrd and I stayed in Brattleboro at Tinderbox and at Hawthorne Valley Farm on the way back down to the city. In Philadelphia I godstormed and watched the trains. Davey bought me a falafel, Ben and I ate crappy cheeseburgers, I bought Mike samosas and myself a tofu hoagie and some oranges, I talked to Blaine but didn’t get to see her, I drank a beer with Kendra and Shanta and high fived Laris, road bikes with Ellen. Amber and Mike hosted; Allen was present for much of it. Jen Rockwell and Bonsky and I hugged. Tony invited me to stay with him in Texas during my travels.

At home before I came here my grampa told me a funny story about a professor he once fired; “Fuckin guy,” he said, “He kept saying he believed in ‘freedom of the mind.’ ‘Freedom of the mind.’” Not much else happened. I slept in the dining room.

This morning at 8am I bought shaving cream, soap, shavers, shampoo and a bottle of wine from the grocery store. Cocomo was playing.

My street (7am)

My house

My street

In the morning I woke up with a triple dream, 1/3 in the ancient city, 1/3 in the underground complex, 1/3 fresh weird allegory/film digestion in a tar pit. Two of my favorite three things, I volunteered to an old classmate of mine, are “fresh garlic” and “Enya.” Full disclosure in the zine I’m putting together for the two shows on the 5th, art/sabbath thing at dgl, and apparently an ospreys show in Lancaster – reunion jammer with our buddies Wether + P Des that I thought wasn’t happening until a wake later. Whoops.

I had breakfast at my gramma’s at 1pm after writing all of this down. I ate fried chicken, green beans, sweet potatoes and perfect gnocchi. I had no dessert but drank black coffee from my grampa’s new coffee machine (replacing his ancient Mr. C that took like 55 minutes to brew a pot and made the most terrible/perfect sunday buzz sludge ever – new Cuisinart pot or whatever brand makes the same brew [the flavor is based on his coffee making style of filling the filter to the absolute max with grind regardless of the amount of brew he plans to make] but in 10 minutes instead) while soundly defeating a challenge from my brother to beat original Contra without the ++– code. I died three times against the belly dancer (boss of energy zone = one general sloppy style, one because I forgot you jump over him, one because I forgot you can’t blow up the spikes he throws at you) and once at the end boss (just sloppy). All of my cousins watched me do this and laughed as I recalled to them the Contra styles our neighbors once espoused (machine gun against the waterfall boss, laser against the snowfield boss, etc.) while ruining all with what I believe to be the perfect unbeatable style for this game, S + R.

I am thankful every day that I do not play video games anymore.

At my grandmother’s house I had a glass of port and a bite of a ham sandwich. I have always had the feeling that she makes sandwiches only once per year, and that time being when we come over. (Or, perhaps I am being unfair because I eat most of my meals between two slices of bread, and I have become especially particular when served in this way.) When we left her house we moved logs up the river bank and my hair came out of its bun. The thinking was that if we didn’t move them up, the river might rise and take them. It was 60 degrees out and I didn’t wear a coat and my hair blew in my face. My sleeves were wet with the water from the muddy ground’s melted snow. I rubbed a piece of ice in my hands to clean them when I finished, and wiped them off on my pants when I sat in the car and closed the door.

At home my dad asked me if I knew any of the comics in the best comics 2007 collection re: his reading the times, and one of Ben’s was one of the images associated with the article.

I ate four chicken wings for dinner and drank a glass of wine from a homemade bottle. It was sweet and very mild. I moved onto the beaujolais nouveau and tried unsuccessfully for two hours to get work done. I organized drawings but didn’t produce. I ate three cookies and then two more later. I played chess against my dad with a chess clock and the game lasted for slightly less than the length of the Sun Balance side of VCO “Sun Balance / Open Knot.” I checkmated him as white in a wild rush after sacrificing a knight to gain space and one move’s time, but really it was a dumb luck gambit in a red wine crazy game. I finished the wine and drifted in and out of sleep listening to “Versatile Arab Chord Chart.”

I watched “The Limey.” Last night I watched “300.” Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.

2008 = Whatever, Go Even Bigger

January = build tall couches, allen coming over on the 2nd, show on the fifth
March = band tour with stallions
June = MDBTR project is finished
July/August = camp
Late September/Early October = traveling with my mom

Sunday Dec 16th year of our lawd 2007 I spent in Boston. I ate Trader Joe’s raviolis, a chicken sandwich with sauce and cheese for lunch, and toast with butter and jam for breakfast. I ate a box of “Men’s Pocky” during snack. I watched Ace Ventura Pet Detective, a special about Charles Manson, a special about Jeffrey Dahmer and a hundred and fifty thousand youtube videos, and the new movie Juno. I enjoyed several of the youtube videos. I don’t think Manson poses much of a threat to anyone, and watching him, was reminded chiefly of Stinky Steve. Dahmer inspired pity. Juno was shrill, in part because I am not nostalgic for the 1990s.

Jen may or may not have moved into the Random House today. When I get back, I’m building a tall couch in the middle room and harvesting furniture.

I am working on a gigantic pile of stuff for a show on January 5th in South Philly, joined by Heather’s Black Sabbath band and some others. Ospreys is playing on the 30th at Katrina’s house and in Lancaster at KPPL on the 12th. Allen is hopefully coming to Philly on the 2nd and staying for a while. Travis is working on copying our zine. I’m sketching for a final version of MDBT-R.com and hoping to launch that by end-of-year. My Christmas work party was amazing and mind-blowing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

My mom and I went to dinner tonight at a restaurant near Scranton. My mom asked me if found the music offensive. I didn’t, but the low lighting was somewhat unpleasant. This was remarkable because, taken as a general, what happened was this: A person thought a thing I cannot control that I hadn’t noticed was upsetting me, but it was in fact a different thing that I cannot control that they hadn’t noticed that was upsetting me. The key philosophical questions that arise are A) What does a person’s misreading of what in your shared environment is bothering you tell you about how that person conceptualizes you; B) [How] does this simple miscommunication affect other conversation; C) Is there ultimately a difference between being distracted by one thing or another in this way (minor and ambient), except in the difference between a second person’s perception or misperception of your distraction and how that plays out as in question A.

At dinner I had a gin and tonic. It was Gordon’s Gin and I tried to tell my mom some “tales of the unbreakable bottle” but she doesn’t like to talk about my drinking. Earlier in the day we had a hilarious car ride back from the mall, where we went to buy shirts for business breakfasts but instead ended up buying paint pens, during which she was appalled at the thought of using paint pens to write graffiti.

Also, let it be known that none of the above is a metaphor for or pointer to anything else in my life, nor is any of it a rhetorical secret internet message. However there are secret internet messages elsewhere in this entry.

I’m going to sleep now, back on a normal schedule. Tomorrow I’m going home and hopefully out to Lancaster and Monday I’m going to New York and Tuesday we’re playing a show and Wednesday I think I’m going to Boston.

I slept in my childhood bedroom last night for the first time in a few years and tonight – though I was planning to go back – I’m sleeping in my room in the attic. I walked up the night steps at 6am after drinking a bottle of wine and I turned off all the lights and looked out at the 1996 streets from behind my old curtains.

Beach Blurts:

• Early report from abroad circa three days ago

We’ve been stuck in North Carolina for a week. We have been camped out at Nathan’s house in Leland for three days.

Today I watched Die Hard, Die Hard with a Vengeance and Transformers. Yesterday I watched Pan’s Labyrinth. Both days I went swimming in the ocean.

Previously, in Asheville, I was too tired to have fun. We went to an amazing swimming hole in Transylvania County but I had no energy left to swim. All I could do was sweat amazing negativity into the ground

• Late report from the anti-universe circa two weeks ago

Windmuth as saying, the birth of Bird is a lagnoll, my lagnoll: Once in a tooth she germinated and she was born. A lagnoll, my lagnoll:

The sound from a tooth. The ringing from the flesh of a bone split and exposed in an open mouth. The bone sings and the mother-mouth is in rapture of the glorious sound of its child lagnoll. Her mouth a perfect theater ringing with bird’s song and its private glorious pain. A lagnoll, my lagnoll:

She cracked her bone egg and cried for a year from her cradle. Her cries were mistaken for vision and the open mouth, electric with suffering, couldn’t protest.

At first only family and neighbors knew what had appeared in their old friend’s mouth, but the word spread. By the tenth month her eyes shone like emeralds from his rotted gums, but the crowds that had gathered to hear her infant wail neither wanted nor needed to get so close. Blood and spit dripped from their old friend’s lower lip and for days at a time tears flowed freely from his eyes. They cleaned his wrinkles and his growing beard and his face looked holy after his many months of loving pained concentration. None came near for fear of disturbing or interrupting the bell in his mouth, the calls of the newborn baby Bird, my lagnoll, who answered all questions and comforted all worries in soft, clear tones.

I I thought the mountaintop was solid ground
I thought the sea the swamp

• Right now I am listening to rap music at the beach, doing my work. I’m fixing my phone today. If I owe you an email or a call it’s coming.
• Killer dreams last night.