At home with my dogs, February y.o.o.b.w.hz., 1808

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I saw Forrest Gump for the first time last night. Bonsky used to say “seat’s taken!” all the time and I never knew where this was from. The part where he runs across America over and over was a pleasant surprise.

I had a dream the other night that I was at my gramma’s house with my cousins, standing on the old plank back porch circa I don’t even know, early 90s, standing under the tin roof where me and Maria were when we saw the bolt of lightning strike a few yards away by the pool, and we were looking out into the field. The entire dream was just this: that the field was still there. Earlier when I went into our kitchen, my heart skipped a beat and I wondered suddenly where Robyn’s old cutting board and the old shelves with all of the pots and pans had gone. Last week at my gramma’s, even though the field has been gone since I got back from camp, my disgust was fresh at the fact that the paths are gone, gone, gone. When we were in the Wissahickon yesterday, we reached a sign that read “INDIAN ->”. Since it dictated that we turn right, we stepped over it and went forward. Eventually we arrived at the foot of the above statue, placed a little over a hundred years ago on its hill. Across the river is a sign that points up the hill toward it, and even reading it the statue is hard to spot. The sign says, “According to legend,” super absurd, I know, “the Lenape chief is watching his people move west.” I’m going to build a small statue to the naked indian when I next visit home, and hope, according to the legends, that I’ll find him in some western fields and finally get to ask him about all of the things that’ve been on my mind since last time.

What can I say? Sunday is the only day that works. I had a fine conversation with Brian this afternoon while I drank my coffee and had my fake sausage and cheesy eggs. I listened to all of the radio shows and did twenty five pages in CX Cult. I have less than 75 more to go before it’s done, which means I did between 250-300 in the first month of the project, which isn’t really bad by any means but less than half of what I had planned. When this book’s done, it’ll represent the first 17% of a proposed 2000 drawings for a video I’m doing for later this fall.

I also finished installing a new patch on my jacket fashioned from a sleeve of my favorite blue button down shirt, which I had worn in all seasons of the past six years. I got it at Bryn Mawr Hospital Thrift with Zach one January afternoon of my freshman year of college, and I decided one afternoon about a month ago that I needed to retire it. I think it was the only material relic from those days still surviving in its original form in my daily life. It may be the last shirt I bought for myself, which is incredible. Little scraps of it are around my bedroom floor.

Around five I convinced myself that I needed to go to a show tonight, to see Pippi Bone Dust’s band VVLTVRE and Jared’s band RAWAR (both in caps? I don’t know). I did these four discs beforehand re: trades/gives and realized a way better way to build the CD boxes themselves.

Private Idiot #8-11

Best part of the day by far was the total paralysis that overcame me as I tried to leave the house around 7:30pm. I had my coat on, my backpack completely packed, my pant leg rolled up, my bike rebuilt and the tires pumped, and as I started to go out the door I froze in my tracks for three minutes. I walked my bike back to its starting point at the wall, went into the kitchen and had a glass of water. I drank it on the couch and thought “Do I need to leave the house,” and I kept thinking “No of course not, I can stay home and work.” This kind of sudden overwhelming agoraphobic episode hasn’t happened in about three years. Sitting on the couch, I was able to summon the energy to leave by arguing to myself that I would not allow myself to work or enjoy myself if I stayed in, because I would continue to regret not going out despite the fact that I didn’t technically need to or even particularly want to.

The ride was nice. I took my bike apart when I went to Boston whenever and hadn’t yet put it back together, re: the weather has been terrible for two weeks/I have been too busy watching Forrest Gump. Traded Jared a disc for a Wet Cement disc; gave Pippi a disc and bought one of her shirts. I got back and wasted the rest of the night, but I didn’t feel too bad about it.

At home with my dogs, February y.o.o.h.v.a.s.v., 2008

Last Wednesday it was 70 degrees out and threatening rain so we went ahead and went to the Wissahickon anyway. Mike’s argument was the always compelling and strangely effective “it won’t rain if we don’t want it to.” After we ran through some hills, he pulled three ticks off of his pants, and I began to cough.

Little else happened this week. I had a fever, I drove to Boston with it, I languished there. On Sunday we went to Redbone’s after I finished coloring a shirt of Susy’s I started well over a year ago. I watched Karate Kid 3, Jurassic Park, part of Die Hard, Mysterious Skin and maybe two seasons of the Mighty Boosh on youtube.

While vibing out in my room last week, where the ground was completely covered in discarded clothes, dishes, assorted art refuse, towels, books and the rest, where the only light was from the harsh overheads or nothing, I dreamed that I went with a red tin can of gasoline to my cousin Michael’s house. He and his brother were inside lying on their stomachs watching TV while my Aunt Mary Pat and my Uncle Mike sat at the kitchen table reading the newspaper and eating salads. I threw the gasoline on the house’s white siding and threw the can under the tree in their back yard and set a match to it. The flame licked along under a panel until it burned in a straight line down the length of the house. I thought, I couldn’t not do this. I had to. But then I found a wet rag and went down along the line of flame, wiping it off of the house. I couldn’t do it with their garden hose because they would have heard from inside and come out, wondering why I would burn their house for nothing, with them inside, right in the afternoon. When I finished wiping out the fire I went inside to check on them and none of them looked up.

Normal readouts from the broken monitors at home: I stayed at Gray house last night and slept on the floor with Pumpkin, projects are moving along, playing music, planning a tour, the norm. At Amber’s school Nasir told me I was a good friend. This week I am catching up on many emails and tons of lost time both pretty much re: five days in the fever death bag, continuing to search for personal purpose in this stupid life, etc. I’m hoping to spend one night drinking red wine until I don’t want any more. I may visit my parents this weekend. Mike and I are meeting with Davey re: band tour.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

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.

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

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.

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.