Part 1

Newborn mirror / Bonsky’s New York friend / Repeats

Stomach mirror, the mirror womb. The clearest after-birth. Reflection in red raw skin and joyous first screams.

Posting pattern: am I only interested in blogging when I am about to go on tour, thinking about it, or just getting back? We are leaving in five days.

Part 2

It’s Christmas Eve: we’re in Jonathan’s house in Durham. I’m listening to the Bon Matin recording and shivering. Head spinning nights. Early morning and we’re off tomorrow, roadsides we have slept on, rooms we have played in, mind eyes we didn’t see coming, doors opened, chains broken, all open and free in purple sky fades and blue-death dawns.

Echo-ear relentlessly Biggie relentlessly the Jigga man, Mainliner mornings, Harvey Milk mornings, a bag of trash from my car, a bag of trash in the mic, always feeling better, horse feet drumming on distant roads and skies of blue-death dawns.

Five seconds of Romeo and Juliet ballet tape-looped in 4531 attic 6AM, Baba O’Reilly intro never leading anywhere, what were the others I said I liked?

World war two woman with the muscles saying “We Do What We Want.”

Carlene’s dogs even now barking and biting and humping the air, the fox I saw bloody on the side of the road picking itself up and walking back to the woods sick of that game, the moon grinning.

Part 3 when I get home, possibly Part 4 too. Blah blah blog

Dude it’s 4AM on Christmas eve why am I up? I’m already done from having slept awfully last night and there was a time when this would be because I couldn’t wait for Christmas. It was just general anxiety. I dreamed a man was putting his thumb on my forehead and trying to impart all knowledge unto me through that finger, but he couldn’t do me this service unless I relaxed while he did. I tried to think of only the color Yellow but the yellow ideal wasn’t enough to chill me out and in dreams I shook and shook. He said if I didn’t loosen my mind his finger would go through my literal skull and I would die. A beautiful woman there cried and smiled and I cried and told her, When I finally achieve this state, I will go back to the past and find you there. Heavy bro—

It is 4AM and Christmas is underway. Midnight mass and the usual great aunts who I see only once a year.

My grandmother got my mom a hot dog roasting machine like you would see at a convenient mart.

Playing too many video games, feeling seasonally affected, blah blah. I always think I’ll get work done when I come up here but I get too put off of everything and end up awake at odd hours, red-eyeing same walls and ceilings, on the super sixteen regress through harsh Internet sunrise backed by techno drums of death. This time around I’m sleeping in the attic and that’s a welcome change but I’m still not getting anything serious done. Drew multiple pages for OSPREYS zines (big -> small joints, not eighth-sized, so actually a semi-accomplishment) but it’s all obsessive shit, tons of small lines vibrating.

I am hoping once Christmas is done I’ll settle. Saw in the mass book tonight that they call the weeks outside of Lent and Advent “Ordinary Time.” I had forgotten about that, “Ordinary Time.” See future thing about that too tired.

Tour planning is happening too. Can’t wait for Ordinary Time and driving back out. Shaping up to be a fine ride and a killer set of shows. More tomorrow live from opening my presents – got tons of work to do tomorrow afternoon after I wake up from what’s shaping up to be a long nap, will undoubtedly have more to say with a clear head.

Secret post from bleached hands and chapped lips! Wrote this yesterday morning when I rolled out of bed. Dreamed long-necked dreams about the river flooding and the dream bank. Last night I dreamed my computer was stolen from my bag while I was wearing it, and even though we could locate the thief by finding him on google maps, we couldn’t possibly get my machine back. I found a Playstation in a burned out schoolbus and decided to sell it on eBay to help pay for a new one. Life comes and goes.

Woke up at 10 fully rested. My alarm was blasting on the floor between a carpet and a pile of clothes. I thought, Fuck, I have to get out of this ridiculous loft bed to turn that off. When I got down to the floor I realized I wasn’t tired, and that I would only be going back to sleep to pass the time. Whut-oh. The other day I woke up at 1.30PM after staying up until 5AM in pursuit of nothing in particular and there we are again, the ultimate terror-regression, back to the days of the one o’clock rule with my bed collapsing around and into me.

Last November, at my most unemployed since graduating college, I told myself that only I could be my motivator. Yin and Yang: Last Christmas I passed out on the floor of my family room drawing OSPREYS #2 and listening to Ghosts from the Sun after working my way through a Sam Adams holiday mixed twelve pack. Now that I’m on the brink of not having a day job again (my last day at the hostel in a janitorial capacity is Wednesday, though I expect to return on a project, or even normal, friendly basis), this imperative is right there in bed with me and it’s on me to get up and make it happen because I want to and because I can, and for no other reasons, and because these things won’t happen any other way.

I started drawing for a painting yesterday, first time in almost a year. Doodled a thing when I got out of bed and here I am in a new room, freezing and listening to Liquid Swords while my pens run out.

We covered the open doorways here with u-haul blankets. It looks like hell and we have no decorations on our walls, but the space heaters do their jobs much better now. I’m going to try to work on this sunless cave aspect of my bizarro house for a while today too. For a while I thought I felt the cold doomed knell of my house on Locust in these high white cracked ceilings, but day by day this place becomes a home with cluttered walls and a complementary energy of its own. Outside Baltimore ave aluminum sound rattles on. I’m getting dressed and starting this day now.

PART 1

On Thanksgiving our ancestors look down with stern faces and pointed fingers and ask in deep Monty Python voices, “What are you thankful for?”

“For no longer having to carry records,” we reply.

END OF PART 1.

I am going back to Philadelphia tomorrow. I have been in Massachusetts for the last four days. Big “blog entry” or whatever when I get back. Word is bond.
Possibly a Metaphor as a Part of Ongoing Crypto-Blog (You Be the Judge): My brother said “Why don’t macs have right click, that shit is dumb,” and someone nearby immediately said “you just control-click, it is the same thing.” Computer nerds: Has there always been such pavlovian defens(iveness) of the correctness and flawlessness of apple design? I know when I got mine, I wondered this same thing, but then learned to deal without it.

So in the spirit of only posting when I’ve written something that I haven’t posted, let’s proceed.

1st Letter to Nobody in Many Long Weeks

It rained. Today I had wet feet in brown socks and blue shoes. At Susy’s house the dust on the shelves and the dust in the cabinets in the hostel combined and blew in high plumes. Eyes of fog. Everything the name of this blog’s less optimistic, previous incarnation.

Back eatin’ lotuses on the real. Mike and I are going on tour in a week or whatever and that shit isn’t totally planned. Reclined and nothing to show for it. A deprived month. It is raining and grey outside and I told a woman at a coffee shop, “I love a gray northern afternoon.”

There is a thing that happens when you work: you want to work more. I am feeling the sickening pull of a job. Meanwhile, time passes.

Heavy, right? Someone should start Bummer Blog, I would post there.

My roommates are that band Genghis Tron. They left for their tour of America and then England a few days ago. Susy and I saw them play and it was the first time I was in the church in months, maybe.

For Halloween, Blaine, Mike, Amber and Lorenzo were skeletons. I had a weird time and was tired and severely, overly stressed by what should have remained pedestrian problems that, ignored, would go away: internet, house stuff, last minute productivity, etc. Read about it in Bummer Blog.

I am looking forward very much to touring. It is only five days away. Tonight I am finishing and mailing my posters. Tomorrow I am finishing my Believe You Me zine and maybe getting to work on Ospreys 5 or 6 or whatever. Mike’s emulsion went off and that screwed us up a little. I have CDs to make too. We have a lot recorded and most of it sounds good.

Ooh la la la:

Wrote this ages ago:

Fall story pt. 2

First post ever in the truly abroad sense – from work while Todd is at the Wawa getting hotdogs or something and I have to watch the desk so the day use peeps don’t come in and steal our good luck charms or our phone or use our printer or something – and the first in ages in the non-waste. I didn’t tag the last one so even though it was, since I felt a little guilty about this becoming my ad hoc drunk blog. But who cares?

Lots of things are happening. Like I said, four jobs. What is the opposite of diminishing returns? A fall of boomerangs that return with such force that they carry you a ways when you catch them.

In bleach zone with plugged ears.

Man, I sure am bad at blogging. There was a time when I used to be able to do this twice or three times a week.

Major updates since last time include a new house at 49th and Baltimore with dudes I have passed in various hallways for the past few years without recognizing. We were fortunate enough to find each other through glorious craigslist and having done so I hope to avoid moving for a very long time. To solidify my room as My Room, I spent the first week constructing a bed that will never conceivably be able to pass through the door. My window has a ledge I can sit on. My back yard has a primrose path. At night, Baltimore sounds clang on into the early morning and my roommates are up late watching videos. The two-year upheaval that followed 4531 seems to be at an end and all is again right in the world.

I am going on tour with my band in about ten days. Does anyone read this blog that I rarely update? If you do, visit us in Providence, Portland, Worcester, Boston, Burlington, Montpelier and Poughkeepsie.

Two weeks ago, during our current, continuing internet outage, I looked at a book and thought “oh yeah, I guess I can read if I wanted to.” Maybe I will start reading again. I think I remember what it’s like to read.

Tonight I am hoping to put my desk and shelves in. Then I will get back to work.

Watch these cloven hooves stomp that dotted line, like so! I have four jobs now. I have four jobs now!

Very early in the year, maybe on the third of January or even on New Years night itself, Mike noted that all we need to do is reach out and the things we desire shall be ours. To my surprise and pleasure, this proves to be true over and over and over and over. Sometimes it seems difficult or impossible to make that reach, and lo, as soon as I do, the fruit is ripe and in my hands.

Foodblog: The other night we baked chocolate chip cookies like my mom does and they were perfect. For dinner we had mushroom quesadillas and the leftovers had me cleaning the hostel at inspirational speeds the next morning. Chicken parmigian a few days before and that malaysian chicken and that insane green vegetable curry, whenever that was. I always think as I am eating, I should take a picture of this, for my food blog.

I stapled the first fifteen of my new zine around 10.30PM at Kendra+Laris’s house a few days ago. For the next few days I’ve sworn that I will do nothing but read, but here I am, blowing out speakers with the jams and computer-eyes. At Kendra’s Geno and Alice fought when the food came out and my allergies got worked up. Back home, Id headbutts my door until he opens it and he crawls up into my bed.

I sent the first set of emails regarding November OSPREYS tour today. I absolutely cannot wait to get back out.

Tonight will be the third (or will it be the fourth?) night I sleep in Mike’s room.
My elbow blossomed into a fierce lump. I have been wasting time playing video games and it has been making me feel so terrible that I didn’t notice, but there it was, distended. Bonsky asked, “Does your elbow really look like that?”

My new zine is on the coffee table in scraps, with a hundred pages from a Korean GQ separated and hole-punched.

I lost my markers somewhere somehow and I’m going out of my mind trying to find them. Two years ago (and I am positive I have told this story on the internet before, but whatever) I got out of bed at 6AM after finally getting in, about to fall asleep. I had just undressed. I convinced myself that my car might be parked in front of a driveway, and that I’d be a fool to sleep without checking. I got out of bed and dressed and put on my coat and trudged two blocks through the snow. It was fine. I got back to my room and I still couldn’t sleep.

This afternoon I reclaimed and coated screens and then reclaimed and coated the RH bathroom’s sink and bathtub. Reader take note: this is one of many ways I will repay you for letting me live in your house.

In sapphire dreams I don’t recognize anyone and no one recognizes me. It’s awful. I say their names and they look at me with distant wonder.

Robyn’s cat Id is four years old. Susy’s cat Holly is fifteen.

Speck fears. What to tell you. Life comes and goes.

I wrote this last week:

“We recorded our new record. It is called “Every Light Makes a Sound.” There are three tracks totaling around 30 minutes. It’s natural, maybe, that I would move gradually away from playing my guitar until there are only two well-rehearsed riffs that I’m playing, with one of them toneless and fucked beyond recognition. We played at the Khyber here in the ‘delph and it was wonderful. We danced upstairs and my dad and everyone bought us beer. We played in New Brunswick and everything was terrible until the last song, where, frenzied, we took off into a cloud of sweat and thunder.

“I answered the same question three times this week. Most pointedly of them all, Todd asked, “So you’re playing music. Are you happy with that?” And the answer was “Yes, but it’s also hilariously frustrating,” because meanwhile, I haven’t finished anything else. The big drawing I started last month is no further along than it was two weeks ago. I haven’t finished a seriously big print project since March. I haven’t finished any of the disaster stories I’ve been working on – not this month’s, not the ones from the last two years. “I am writing every day” I said but then I missed a day and another day and another day. But! I toured twice! I put out a CD! I drew something for the covers! Guhh. Even the thing I was going to do this summer, printing and stapling up around, even that lost steam. And it seemed so easy!

“At least I’ve been swimming something like seven times already. Susy and I went to the public pool at 17th and Catherine and the water was fine fine fine.

“Parable: There are two of us always, a dragon and a little troll, and they always have to come to a compromise. The dragon wants to burn everything down. The little troll wants to sit in the trees. Sometimes one wins, sometimes the other.”

…but I didn’t post it because my computer’s logic board failed, as is apparently par for the G3 iBook course.

I am at my parents’ house right now even though National Guardsman in hummers and fatigues told me there was no way to get here.

More on everything once I get a new computer. Also my dad says I need a game plan, where can I get one of those? blhhhg

I am having a hard time being clear-headed enough for long enough to write anything or tell anyone anything in any kind of detail. There has been way too much input. When I get out of the car in a new place (we are in Minneapolis right now) it takes me an hour to change gears and go through the hyper-awareness familiarization routine once again. I can’t drive once we get close to a place. In Madison (Chicago?) my eyelid started twitching.

We’re at the apex of the tour arc. I think we drove 1400 miles. Tomorrow is the start of the return trip. When I get back, I will cook myself the most luxurious dinner, drink a gallon of water, take two back to back showers and sleep for thirty six hours with breaks in which I go to my job.

I am a housekeeper. On a normal day I clean four showers, eleven toilets and twelve sinks. I mop four different floors, take out around fifteen trashcans and wipe off four mirrors. Sometimes I vacuum. I usually make at least two beds but once it was something like thirty. I will do anything else anyone asks me to do. When I was in third grade I started doing all of these same things for my dad, for $2 an hour. I think I maxed out with him around $4.50 by the time I was in eighth.

At Version there was an art installation that you could go into, a back to the womb thing. It was a huge air-filled tyvec tent that you got into by crawling through fifteen feet of the most claustrophobic dirty plastic imaginable. Inside there were markers for writing on the walls and a couch. We spent all night in there.

I am mute and I can drink more whiskey and beer than anyone would ever believe. I can’t even begin talking about this shit until we get back.