Earlier this week me and the crew were just about asleep on the roof across the way from Matthewson when I sort of sat up and started vibing a little and had to come back home “to do work”; not sure what exactly I had in mind, but when I got to the house and my teeth were brushed and I was watching the sunrise from my own personal zone, I it meant that I started writing this update for my internet blog.

“Blogs: Neither an Email nor a Zine”

I read Coetzee “Youth” (totally relatable self-repulsion as empowerment and encouragement), David Lodge “British Museum is Falling Down” (guhhh) and Calvino “Cosmicomics” (I can’t remember if there were actually any fart jokes in this or not) since last time.

Music and movies are harder to keep up on.

I contributed ten items to Walker’s 100 10 Second Stories event at Building 16 earlier this month. There’s going to be a book documenting that.

Ospreys #10 came out a few days ago and can be found in the usual places, in person, or by sending me email with your address. I have about thirty of the hundred copies left.

I started a band with Jolly (gutter), Adam (bass) and Chris (drums) in which I am the vocalist and in which I totally intend to take my shirt off. We have a practice space at Mars that me and Adam sometimes go to after work to “unwind” and play awful/occasionally ruling techno jams until 5am.

I’m helping Ben with a writing project that will hopefully come together before long.

I’m working on a story that will be out in the streets next month, wherever fine flyers for upcoming events are given away.

I’m working on a video called “Night of the Living Wage” that will probably never get done, and a video called “Most Days” that will probably never get done either. The former is an exhausting stop motion/claustrophobia project about going into the horror-zone at work. It looks kind of like hell and I totally regret starting it because I have at least five more horrendous nights of work on it before it gets done. The latter is a Flash-driven project with like nine or ten painted backgrounds and hand-rendered animated characters. It looks good but I am like 7% done with it after probably 15 hours of work and am not feeling particularly encouraged, particularly re: I feel like I should be writing or doing almost anything else instead, blah blah blah.

Finally I feel like this isn’t the first time I’ve put this feeler out there, but mainly if anyone knows where Jeremiah Golden is or how to reach him I would appreciate it; postal address preferably. I want to send him a copy of pretty much everything I’ve made over the last four years but have no idea how to do that.

Major life themes/thought-streams lately have been on dignity (since/re: Work/Death at Bldg 16 when Reber used the word; come talk to me about dignity at the cable car b/w 3-11pm Tues, Wens, Fri or Sat if you want to, or call on the phone, 411 can give you the number), listing instances of shifting perception (initially spurred by thinking about the temporal moment when food from the trash begins to appear to be food, and not trash), decision-making and lifestyle choices (mainly re: confidence in their being the most productive ways to pursue very certain futures and desires from within an equally uncertain/unstable/unknowable present), continual explorations of male energy, petting cutest dogs in town Saba (see above!!!!!!) and new little buddy Coda when possible.

Anyway tonight I am stoked to see Door play at Mars. I mailed out a bunch of things to a bunch of people this week. I bought groceries today and had the most delicious french toast for breakfast. I think my car is dead. I am going to New York this weekend. I intend to visit Philadelphia at the end of June and to go on a Men’s Vacation with Mike during that time, and then to go to camp. How many emails do you think I can possibly send in the mean time? How many times do you think I can listen to White Light/White Heat?

Bonjour from inside of the holiday echo chamber, from which I wanted to post a short notice with December updates. If you live in Northeastern Pennsylvania and want to hang out, get at me, I usually get extremely bored around 10pm. If you don’t live here but might want to email with me for a day or two, my email address is still tom//at//dogchirp//com.

Work Work = I will work for you anywhere in the United States or abroad, get in touch if you have a full time salaried job.

Fun Work = I painted/embroidered two big clothing patches this month but forgot to photograph one of them (the other is above). I started brainstorming a new video yesterday that I may or may not decide to start working on next week, if for no other reason than to goof around animating and playing with the new Flash, which I haven’t used on any personal projects yet. I am in the middle stage of putting together a critical mass of text that I am going to edit into whatever I wind up using for January 15 application deadlines; this work will likely wind up abridged across Test Patterns #3 or No Such Thing as News #3, unless someone else winds up wanting to deal with it. I have a giant pile of sketches that are going to get scanned and may or may not appear on this blog, as well as in those aforementioned print projects, and I have a design for a painting that I’m hoping to do the week after christmas.

Schedule = Planning on going to Philly this weekend, but not totally sure what the deal with that will be, then back home. Will likely be around New England for New Years, and then hopefully moving soon after that pending work options.

Last week I was in New York. I stayed with Christi some nights and Leah others. I got to hang out with Kathryn, Aaron, Julio and Jeff, and I ran into Sarah. I rode my bike all over. I did some work with Emily and Corey and I had a great lunch with Dan. I got lost in the rain while I rode to Max’s house, where I watched Futurama and ate a burger. I ate delicious sweet potato quasadillas, but I didn’t sleep too well.

Arson in the new development

Patrick and Scout

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.

Past life

I added the Black Dove paintings to the site. Otherwise this is a boring blog marking time entry if there ever was one. Here’s what’s up.

Since last time: In Philly I went to Halloween and saw best band ANGELDUST, went to the World Series riot on Broad Street and saw many stupid and hilarious things, hung out in the dirt at FDR and near the oil cans, and saw cops disperse a crowd that gathered to watch a six story pinata get destroyed by a wrecking ball (actually true).

Where I am: I’m home now. Tomorrow I’m voting and then driving to VSC, where I’ll be until Saturday, and then heading to New York indefinitely with the next schedule consideration of any kind being Monday of Thanksgiving weekend, when my brother gets home, and thus the latest I plan to.

What I’m working on: A new blog, a complete overhaul of the Ospreys web documentation in which I plan to upload, catalogue, and explain everything I have pertaining to the band, and more ambiently (i.e. probably not much until next week), on Test Patterns #3 and my fake catalog with Bocksel. I’m also knee deep in mailout hell, the tormented place on earth where I have to organize and send out all of my Darcone-related packages to everywhere for eternity, while meanwhile I can’t find my stapler anywhere. I’m reading Toni Morrison “Jazz”.

I feel like I need to note before I close that I’m a little sick at being back on square one re: putting in serious hours writing, but that I don’t think I’m making excuses when I say that the total upheaval and temporariness of everything in my life has made it all but impossible to set specific times and places to go and make work. May I read this in January in Vermont and immediately turn to make what I need to.

Giant pinata

Some dog looking at Mikey

For the moment, this was an acceptable way to park

Totaled SEPTA stop, smashed out Robinson, riot cops

The current schedule is to update this every Tuesday with what I’m currently working on, where I am, and possibly a story about a thing that happened.

The above is from a collaboration I did with Loren Erdritch at VSC; she put down the color and I riffed on it. I did two others with her that came alright, and I gave her two color plates that she’s going to do the ink for. Similarly I did two pieces with Leah Wolff, and there are maybe two or three more pending. In all of them I put down one color layer and then she did the second. The two done ones are here:

I mentioned the hanging diamonds thing last month, made from scraps from my work exchange job in the office upstairs; in a similar vein was my drawing game Alpha Symbolia, which I did on thick paper plates that were the cropped edges of the invitations the development office printed out to send to the center’s donors for the big Tibetan flags art show last month. The principle was to see how far I could get without spending more than a few seconds on a given small drawing, with “no repeats or hesitations,” and with the entire body meant to appear as a single unit. That’s below.

I’m doing a table at the 215 Festival on the 25th where I’ll have like every zine I’ve ever made, hopefully the Darcone Triangle books that Mark Price is printing for us, a new Philly junk/joke book, and an old school “doing it the hard way”-style painting/ink book in a mega small edition where I am just going to make five or ten completely original copies and that’s going to be it.

While I’m in town I’m going to Don Simon’s thing at City Hall and me and Jenn Rockwell will be drawing. Me and my Men’s Group will be up to our typical no-good/not-much. I feel like I should reiterate that anyone who wants to collaborate should get started on something and then get it to me with directions.

Alpha Symbolia

The dust blows forward and the dust blows back

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

On tour once we were laying in a long sloping green grass field, freshly cut, full of huge moist chunks of clippings, like slabs of delicious green cake. I was allergic to them and sneezed.

On the bridge walking over from Maverick to my Wolf Kahn space, around eight thirty last night, I became aware that my shoes were wet. I was carrying my sleeping bag and pillow, moving to my new hole. I wondered how it can be that this is now my life, and how everything I’ve worked on for the past four years can all have suddenly become like a distant piece of weather. This thought in a good way, of course – I am writing now at 9am in my studio, after eating a legit breakfast, after making crap until 2am – but in a shocking way too. I spent much of yesterday wondering what else in my life can be remade as I like – my mobile sleep space, my work space, my schedule, my work itself, abandoned buildings, trains, roads – and all I could think of that remains without my explicit decision to hold onto it is my name.

Guiding handgame wisdom for all journeying motherfuckers with planless anarchy lives and shoes that are taking on water =
Concentration (clap clap clap)
Sixty Four (clap clap clap)
No Repeats (clap clap clap)
or Hesitations (clap clap clap)

I slept in Kahn last night with my head by the window. I woke up in a dream just before dawn and got halfway out of bed to start drawing before I realized what time it was. A ripping thunderstorm woke me just after dawn. I dreamed that Leah’s door was covered in strange notes, and that James came into my studio to hang out, and we hung out for a while, and then he left. I watched “The Valet” with him last night. It was pretty funny.

I don’t have much new to report since I’ve mostly been working, except that it looks like I’m going to send probably my Cocomo project and accompanying drawings(?) to <a href=”http://www.annawolf.com”>Anna Wolf</a> for this <a href=”http://www.untitled-a-magazine.com/”>magazine</a> she works on, for January 09 print, and that’s exciting. J Roc and I are also going to do a split art book, out December, but I don’t know any details of that. I’m doing a 40 panel drawing project re: my favorite Velvet Underground song “Some Kinda Love” that I’m sort of terrified to start because I’ll have to finish it, but it’s sketched out and ready to go, and now that I have an art studio instead of a writing studio (though I’m still here as a writer, and spending my majority of time writing), it might happen.

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

So yeah. I’ve just been out cruising the old roads, rolling around in my 1995, cruising hard with my hair blowing in my 2003, overdriving a pitched up White Album through some kid’s Peavey in Savannah while my friends think it’s funny to pretend to open the jar they keep their pet Black Widow in. This is a long one with pictures.

Dali king, Tufts Library

Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday

Yesterday while I was driving to work, local public radio baroness Marty Maas had local public radio mutt Dan Gottlieb on her show and she kept asking him if he was ready to die.

There’ve been oceans of blank these past three or four weeks. I’ve been whiskey-washed and soaked in beer five times over, straight wilin’ my way through the March. I shot beams straight through daylight savings time, ruptured the Internet, rearranged entire houses full of furniture with my mind and pretty much didn’t document any of it. I’m doing a horrible job of keeping a blog, but that I do keep one at all speaks, I think, to a need for me to mark time in the gray waste when there’s nothing going on more than to an impulse to document, keep track of, or explain the actual retarded goings on of my mid-20s “wild years.” It’s not like I don’t remember everything that happens anyway. (And double-anyway, I don’t know, who is this for anyway? My kids when they finally get up the guts to look up their old man on the internet wayback machine in the year of our wishing we covered our tracks 2028?)

Mike and I went to the Wissahickon and we drove back listening to that George Thoroughgood song everyone knows. I tell everyone that when I heard it for the first time on public radio when I was in fourth grade that it made me want to immediately go out honkey tonkin. This remains the case even now.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We drank a case of Mexican beer that Amber bought, two cases of yuengling and a case of delicious Magic Hat HI.P.A. before the wells ran dry. We’ve been godstorming in a more quality, less quantity way = Davey plays with us now, and Mark Price came and hung out the other night too. Susy calls this phenomenon Men’s Group. Meanwhile, dozens of 11×17 sheets get covered, I go into and out of the office, and life grinds on.

–+–

I had a long reverie the other day about an early argument I got into with my dad. I feel like I can figure out when it was to the year based on family vacation memories (maybe my mom will leave a comment and let me know) – it was the year of Altered Beast, when we went to the arcade every month, put a collective dollar fifty up in that machine, and rose from the grave to save Zeus’s daughter in two player mode. (Non-losers should maybe note that $1.50 is not a lot of money for two people to spend on a complete trip to an arcade, a fact I took weird pride in. We’d spend the rest of the $5 he changed to quarters on the skeeball, and I would buy plastic ninjas with the tickets. In the story that I told with them at home the black ninja with the two swords was the hero. He hid and watched the infighting between the reds and whites from on top of the ottoman and he swooped down on his grappling hook to finish them off when they’d worn each other down.) One Sunday that year, my cousins and I were playing Altered Beast in my gramma’s basement, and mimicking the wolf beast’s power, I did a lot of diving into the couches. When I got home, I said I could fly, and my dad told me it was impossible for a man to fly. I told him I had been doing it earlier in the afternoon. He got out an encyclopedia that showed a picture of a fish with wings (and I remember laughing and saying “Look at that fish with wings, that’s crazy” and immediately realizing that what I was claiming was, to him, exactly the same thing) and the text read “Man cannot fly.” We went back and forth and he eventually agreed to disagree. I asked him if he would read to me (we were reading this killer pink book of Norse mythology, with fucking Odin losing his eye to Mimir so he could know everything happening the previous week) and he said he wouldn’t because we’d wasted all of our time arguing.

Should I just scan my entire journal from 4th-8th grade, annotate it, and post it here? I feel like I should.

My brother emailed me earlier this month to let me know he was doing jumps from Australian cliffs. I miss him dearly and my wish is that he will run and take a leap and be surprised to find that he can carry himself up and disappear into the sun.

–+–

Kurt Vile

I went to see Kurt Vile + xNoBBQx a while ago. NoBBQ was horrible, Vile ruled. Going to see him with Sunburned and Davey tonight. Tomorrow I am working on my video all day. I think I am going to Assateague Island this Friday and then to my parents house for easter.

Mostly sure I mentioned already that Ospreys is touring with Davey or Tenspeed from the end of April through the beginning of May, our first tour in eleven(!) months, re: I went to camp, Mike bought a house and went on poster tour, etc. Massively stoked to lay down all manner of styles in all manner of territories. Definitely sure I mentioned that I’m working on a video. I was going to post a part of it here but seriously why would I do that when it isn’t done.

Dali spade, Tufts Library

Massachusetts

Me and Suzanne

Advice column

Wissahickon

Working on a video

Everything you can learn from yourself is already inside of you

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

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