Here’s a long song from the room where I keep my things, this for the week of Sunday the 24th of February of the year of our hoarse voices and saturated vision 2008.
At home with my dogs, February y.o.o.b.w.hz., 1808
Streaming fingers and rot for Sunday the 10th of February of the year of our diseased invincibility 2008.
On Sunday, December 23rd, Year of Our Lord 2007, I ate, did and thought the following things.
My eyes watered and my nose ran all through the Murfreesboro night. I woke up in the early morning in the dark, soundproofed band room – next to my amps and the beer I had spilled on them – to steal wireless and update websites for work. I was swimming with Patrick and Mike in the 3am Susquehanna two weeks earlier. It may have been that morning, after making a panic-stricken left into a Kentucky Waffle House, positive that the local sheriff several cars ahead was displeased with my pushing through a yellow light, that my mother called to tell me that someone had drowned. A ninth grader, she said, who was fishing with two friends off of the island, swept away by the river. I can’t stop thinking about that poor kid and how he couldn’t float. I think about him every time I jump.
I swam in a pool for the first time this summer. It was yesterday, in West Chester Pennsylvania. Late last night I swam in it again. The sky was clear and the moon bright and full.
Susy and I are driving south to Asheville tomorrow, by way of Richmond and back through Columbia and Savannah. With any luck, this will be the first year I see fireworks since 2001. With a reasonable amount of luck, an orchestra will be playing the 1812 Overture while they explode. With inspirational levels of world-bending outluck, an orchestra will be playing either Sister Ray or your choice of songs from Versatile Arab Chord Chart.
I had elevator dreams last night and another set of dreams from “the worried castle.” The elevator had no roof and no apparent suspension, like a floating ski lift chair with an open back. It flew diagonally through a room that slanted upward, somewhere between a nubby carpeted floor and an invisibly distant, black ceiling. Tall white windows, each hundreds of feet high, let in gray light that didn’t illuminate any more than the texture of the carpet. I could see from how high I was that the floor was shaped as if in a gigantic staircase, with each step at least twenty feet high or more. Four other people were in the elevator with me when it left, down a shaft that seemed like a bucket into a well, but there was only one with me in the room with high ceilings. I can’t remember who it was; we didn’t speak. I found a notebook from early 2005 while I was emptying my room on 49th Street and it had early references to The Reservoir. These new-fangled dreams have nothing on The Reservoir or the dream-locales of yesteryear. I hope I finish with this indoor crap and can get back to the waterways before I leave for camp.
Life.
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
…New year haze…
Year started with tinnitus and waves of Jersey sweat from shoving crushing shoulders and backs. The saddest $30 lesson: not 20 anymore. Couldn’t get drinks, couldn’t dance, they didn’t play Helter Skelter. There was a Nazareth video playing, which may have been a good sign.
Everything Is Always Getting Better Always. Where my year of the pig bros at?
Woke up from a dream with saliva running from my 3AM mouth. Earliest I’ve been to sleep in weeks and up from dreams before I’m usually done to begin with. I was in a bathroom of a giant hotel that was hosting Jesus Lizard and Butthole Surfers in the back by the pool. I took a break to get outside and had to wear a white sticker on my hand; I had lost the pink bracelet and my shirt. Walking out down the tiled mosaic floor behind an older man, totally drunk and wearing a ragged suit, walking very slowly. I went upstairs instead of outside. I thought the line upstairs would be shorter and it was empty. The doors were made of polished wood and the floors were clean, the toilets ivory and gold. I had diarrhea and a man looked over the top and I dove out on him, he said what’s wrong with checking to see if you needed extra toilet paper? I told him I had caught him checking to see if I had extra toilet paper earlier in a different bathroom too, and that he was following me. He said well what if I shoot you.
Earlier I had tried to throw tennis balls to my brother and my uncle waist deep in the river. I could only throw them a few feet and the tide kept carrying them back. Earlier I asked my brother if my grampa was in the mob and he said he couldn’t say I and cried. Earlier I walked on a wall past oldest trees at the furthest reaches and up through a cone mouth of wooden stakes that only opened one way, pulled myself up and was on the top of the hotel, out in the city night above everything, and a woman below said “This is all you get.”
OSPREYS tomorrow in Wilmington delaware at that jawn MOJO13. Playing with bad-weed and harshed mellows noise bro Wether, Pink Deserts doing that ugly swirl and Northern Valentine playing the “rock?” sounds.
Wilmington is only 10 minutes from south philly. You can stop to check out Jesus With the Eyes and still make it in 20. Show is at 9:30.
We jammed for an hour today – Bonsky told us to turn it down. New shit with the cello and new tricks is way nice. Incredibly psyched for tour, tell your far flung bros to check it out.
january 18 columbus cafe bourbon st
january 19-20 gambier oh kenyon college
january 21 ??? lexington area ??? anywhere between columbus and nashville – get in touch if you can help this happen
january 22 nashville chris cherry blossoms’ joint
january 23 ??? atl / athens region ??? same thing holler
january 24 columbia sc the whig with KGB graffiti bros + stoked to see k sheild after not returning his email
january 25 durham nc broad st cafe with temple of bon matin
january 26 charlottesville the tea bizarre with matthew playing drums, going to project shogun assassin and play three notes for the whole thing then fall on a sword.
All weirdness and heavy-headed… serious deja-vu in the club last night. We played a tough set, ragged by technical problems throughout, continuing curse of the p.a. = can’t get the right levels, can’t hear anything, bad feedback, emboldened by borrowed amps = falling on my face. Played an old-style guitar thing that didn’t work too well, couldn’t hear mike at all; second one was mic tricks, not bad, would’ve benefitted from the jug’s presence. Third one was key, cello on his side and I played the new march with crushed bass… in all it was nice to play and good to get difficulties sorted before heading out. Naturally we knew the dudes – recognized Wether from somewhere, knew Pink Deserts bros from the church. Jason and the Argonauts was playing on loop at the bar, saw the skeleton warriors rising up three times.
Couldn’t get out of bed this morning, woke up completely terror-domed. No food in the house but not too hungry… genghis dudes practicing new riffs downstairs all morning, probably laid in bed and listened for an hour before I finally got it together to climb down to the dirty floor. Toenails and paper room grit stuck to the bottoms of sweaty feet, a room feeding back. Dreamed I could just sleep through it all and not ever have to get out of bed, perfect stasis up there in the loft, nobody would come to check or bother, I’d never get hungry, just keep slipping in and out of sleep while the genghis dudes riff and the light comes and goes, distant smell of Clay breakfasts and drug cavern classic rock sound, carpet growing longer and thicker, buckling under my loft like a crushed caterpillar, a leech on an arm under squeezing fingers. Found Nutty Steph’s christmas pres while I was cleaning, was my late breakfast from far hills, and I was in that tower and the sun was setting again and again:
Spent the afternoon re-sorting it all, clean paper here, half-dones here, dones here. 2007 marches on and I am packing that ship. Tonight going to trade noise musics with Pink Ds, hopefully check out Jared’s band after missing it too many times. Recorded an hour yesterday, sent four emails, played and still went to bed thinking, What do I have to show for my day? Unbelievable.
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.