I am learning to talk less and say more. Please be patient with me. I have been involved in the following 'professions' in close order: reader.writer.painter.sculptor.metalsmith.glassblower.faceter. shadetreemechanic.laborer.curator.guitarist.songwriter.singer. composer.pauper.representative.associate.designer.assistant. buyer.manager.salesman.consultant.owner.operator.driver. networker.booker.traveler.producer.engineer.actor.photographer. editor.videographer. And I still haven't found what I'm looking for. I have drank deeply, loved passionately, and been mistaken greatly. I climbed Lemon Mountain in Tucson Arizona, put XXX on Marie Laveau's grave in New Orleans and kissed lipstick on Oscar Wilde's in Paris. I have been in a snowstorm in 80 degree weather in the desert in summertime, hit with hailstones the size of a lemon in a Florida thunderstorm and one time checked into the fifth floor of a hotel a couple hours before the hurricane's eye passed overhead. I have been VIP in Las Vegas because of mistaken identity and thrown out of 3 clubs in Hollywood because they didn't like the look of me. I have been slipped poison in my whiskey at the Lexington Queen in Tokyo Japan, fought Edwin Mccain on a cruise ship (and lost), had my nose broken by a power line while running with an armfull of red bricks, and survived being chased by a pack of wild boars in the woods. After all this I still feel that what separates the civilized and uncivilized is mainly a pocket handkerchief and nice boots.
I have a heart on the mend and a 64' stingray in repair, both will be lovely when completed.
It really didn’t hurt much. It scared me more than anything. But it should have hurt. And now I am missing teeth and I have a mouthful of black dirt and Nat is nowhere to be seen. But I swear it didn’t hurt. Just turned around and it was a dull thud against my face, a short length of 2x4 and I was out cold.
Dirt doesn’t taste bad. Not like you think it would. It has a particular flavour, like eating spice and salt right out of the jar plain, with the consistency of brown sugar. It tastes like rich earth smells, the smell of gardening.
I get up off the ground and accidentally swallow some, and somehow walk around to the side of the old clapboard yellow house and put my face under the spigot. I turn the red flower shaped cast iron handle and city water comes gushing out in a sharp chemical spray, up my nose, and over my now stinging split lips. The taste of earth is now replaced with salty blood and two of my teeth did not come out evenly but instead one had busted through the gum at the back and was still sort of hanging on somehow, and my eyetooth was gone completely, somewhere in the sand or perhaps lodged in the length of pine that had met my face. After prodding it a few times with my tongue the other tooth just gave up and I spit it out into my hand.
I stood and watched the life trickle out of the little ivory chip and swirl into the water in my palm, turning it bright pink. I forgot where I was. I kept swallowing the blood because I just didn’t know what else to do with it. I remembered that these were baby teeth, or so I had been told when one of my other ones had recently started to wiggle and that I would have new teeth eventually. Nat’s big old redheaded Mom came out and saw me there, gulping mouth fulls of the tap water and my little white shirt covered in red and almost lost her mind, she forced me to give her my tooth, and she took me inside and wiped me down with a towel and took my little tooth and put it in a bag. My mother, well she was understandably furious with everyone.
And Nat, eventually he came home hungry and dirty, having slept underneath a neighbors’ house that night. The next day his old German father beat him senseless. He always did. Which is why I never got sore against Nat.
I take them out one by one and stare at them for a while. Tools. Several of them are rusty, they are all dirty and some have black grease on them. I put my hands in my back pants pockets and bite my bottom lip a bit. Days like today when nothing seems quite right, and it feels impossible to start anything, and everything is gray are the ones that I doubt. Rusty tools. The tape measure is broken, it won’t retract at all, I have 25 feet of yellow sharp edged rusted metal tape strewn about my feet.
What the hell will I do with all this stuff? Antique dinged and rotten gasoline cans, enough picture windows to make a glass house out of, a 55 chevy infested with spiders, 3 lawnmowers in various states of decay; all older than I am. There are three 5 gallon buckets filled with golf balls, a faded and cracked bocce set, a box full of stained glass chips, a 4 wheel drive transmission and rotten wooden logs and boat paddles. I find tin cans from the 70’s for beer that doesn’t exist anymore and glass longneck bottles for Mellow Yellow and Pepsi Free. What the hell am I supposed to do with all this stuff?
I chopped down the tangerine tree to get rid of the rats. The white shed in the corner is covered in lead paint I am sure and I really don’t want to mess with it. During storms I can hear from my house across the lot, the loose metal roof panels lifting up and smashing back down again. I sometimes imagine a big storm and tornadoes lifting it all away, the detritus of another persons life that I perpetually sift through whisked away to someone else’s lawn, or maybe into the ocean.
Now I am sitting on the Jaguar. Yes that car, the old red one that almost got me killed and now I just can’t seem to get rid of. The carport collapsed today under the weight of the water, I spent the early morning writing my column for the magazine, and the afternoon cleaning up broken florescent lamp glass, wet shop towels, and taking apart what was left of the frame work. Now I sit and stare at all the rusted tools. How the hell do people get to this? How could one person leave like that, just leave everything to rot and rust and idle and fall apart? This neighborhood has gone to hell since I was a kid. People don’t want to get their hands dirty anymore. Some one shot the window out on the back porch. I never fixed it. The roof is leaking like a siv. I bite my lip a bit more and look at the tools. Three truck loads, I think to myself…three truckloads, and then I could haul all that is left of him away with my own two hands.
Oct 05
(via yimmyayo) Brilliant. Now if only the cats could figure how to cut out the middleman.
Leave home at 11pm Get to Nashville at 3pm, Get an hour back, it’s 2pm Hotel has a dead sparrow in the stairwell. Went to Nashville to sing for a living, failed, and died in the stairwell. It is yellow. It’s eyes are closed and no ants have found it yet. Sleep for 2 hours. Get stirred from sleep by prostitutes in adjacent rooms loudly and enthusiastically working. Probably on the construction workers building the high rise next door. Shower. Shave. Whiskers in the sink. Wipe down the whiskers in the sink. They are black. Change pants and shirt. Load up the guitars.
Load up the band. Load into the club. Eat at the deli. Go to the Goldrush bar and try to watch the debates.
Get pissed off and start yelling at the telivision. Decide to leave before I start a fight. Wander the streets for an hour. Go to a coffee shop. Upstairs it is not a coffeeshop it is a bar with a little stage. Donate a $1 to the “artist performing” He stabs a wooden oak log with steak knives while beat poet narrating along to prerecorded music with lyrics about a failed travelling knife salesman who lost his life to a shotgun. I am the only one there that laughs after each song. Someone smells strongly of a lack of deodorant.It is a relatively nice place. Go back to the club. First band not playing yet. No one is there except for the first band. Go to the liquor store. Buy some congac. Don’t drink the congac. Pass the Acropolis replica. Don’t go look at the Acropolis replica. Someone on a station wagon has “START SHOOTING CEOS” spray pained on the back window. Chris takes a picture of it. A bum tells us he is from Alaska. The funeral home we pass smells of big death. Go back to the club. First band is playing. They are missing the pretty girl who is away somewhere. They are nice. Singer sounds like Mangum. We play. The bartender looks unhappy. She is very pretty and does not belong there. Soundman buys us alot of PBR. He is nice. He belongs on telivision. A comedy show perhaps. The last band plays. They are fun. Lots of girls dance without shoes on. We all go back to their pizza place and drink a dozen pints of beer. I don’t drink the cognac. Someone confesses something to me and writes my name on a piece of paper. It is spelled wrong but they claim that my name should be spelled that way. A girl from New Jersey is never going back there. Call me a cab please. Call me a cab please.
Another round. Time to go. Your cab is here. Cab driver laughs so hard he swerves. I tell him to be careful. I have missplaced my cognac. We wander the streets for a while. We want ice cream at two AM. Chris wants a milkshake.
No one will give a milkshake. Brett Michaels bus is parked on the main street and it is an insult to look at. I am convinced to stay away from it lest I accidentally throw a rock into the windows of it. Has a picture of him that covers up one side of the bus. His head looks like it is made out of rubber. Chris starts screaming about a milkshake. He really wants a milkshake.
I wake up in time to watch some short janitorial looking fellow putting away the breakfast buffett.
We never get the free continental breakfast buffett. We never get a damn breakfast buffett. I stop him from taking the orange juice. I stare at him as I drink two cups of orange juice. He is waiting on me to stop drinking orange juice. I drink another glass of orange juice. I ask him what time it is. He claims not to speak english. I point at the clock on the wall. I tell him that it is 9:55 AM. I tell him that the breakfast is suppost to be out until 10:00AM I tell him that I never get the damn continental breakfast.
He points to the ice cream vending machine by the bathroom. I tell him that there is a dead yellow sparrow in the hallway that he may want to see to. He tells me that picking up dead birds is not his job. I ask him who said anything about it being a bird. I let him think about that one as I go back to my room. I never get the damn continental breakfast.
When I lived in Manhattan I would take off my sneakers and leave them outside my door before I entered my apartment as to not dirty up my floors. I always assumed they would be safe.
Late on the night of October 5, 2003 my sneakers were stolen.
I was determined to track down the perpetrator. I got the security tapes from my landlord and found the person who stole my sneakers. I was able to determine exactly what time it happened. I asked my upstairs neighbor what restaurant he ordered his food from. I was hot on the trail.
I went to the restaurant and brought them a photo I printed out from the video. The owner refused to take any responsibility for what happened and even denied that the man in the photo worked for them. I couldn’t believe how he could so blatantly lie to me when I had such clear evidence in my hand, but at that point there was really nothing else I could do. My case went cold. I thought my sneakers would be gone forever, so I went and bought a new pair.
Two days later the delivery man from the video showed up at my door with my sneakers in his hands. I let him keep them.
He thanked me and then he cried.
View the video here. Check out the delivery guy holding my shoes here.
Noah is a brilliant photographer in his unassuming nature. He took a nice photo of me at SXSW.
The reason why I did not sign the video agreement paper and that it became an issue to begin with is because one of the staff…
Well honestly one of the staff at the ******, told me that I had to sign a piece of release form to allow the ****** to show our video for the music video Snow
To which I replied, well you pay BMI don’t you? That’s the people I am signed on with so, I shouldn’t have to sign anything, you have my permission, and I will never see any money from them so who gives a damn?! And then I laughed in a good natured way and went off to have another whiskey.
But the person (who remains nameless…) assured me just to cover their bases, and even though “the ****** had to go through all that crap with BMI…” I should just sign it anyhow, to make sure that everything was cool. I said, no problem, just let me know.. to which the employee replied.. “…well, we will just show that video at the end of the night, and I will make you sign afterwards… no big deal.”
10 minutes later, outside someone turned me around and handed a pen and a form. The form had nothing to do with the video for Snow. It had to do with video footage that a staff member, unbeknown to me was filming that night, and granted rights to use that to promote the ****** (venue).
Now, under normal situations that would not really be that big of a deal, but all things considered to have someone tell me one thing, and then hand me a sheet of paper and say, “oh here it is just sign that” and then be obviously stressed out when I read it and laugh, still with a reasonable sense of humor and say “what the fuck man…”
So, I refused to sign it. One person had a very bad attitude about it, and started yelling for not reason, when I said that I would sign nothing. I ignored that person, because I told them that I had never met them before and that I would prefer to deal with the person that owned the place rather than listen to someone with a bad attitude telling me that I “had to do it” that I had never met and didn’t know from Eve. Then I grabbed the initial person and pulled him aside, because it was very tacky to have all these people with ruffled feathers standing in front of your establishment being unreasonable arguing over nothing, and went for a walk and explained to this person that to tell someone that they had to sign something and then hand them a document that had completely different things on it and hand them a pen and say “sign this” when that person appears intoxicated (I wasn’t I was just putting on for show for the kids… and obviously made this fellow think I was too cocked up to try and explain things to) and then act upset when the person is offended that you want them to sign something that has nothing to do with what you said in a short pinch… well, that is just fucking out of line…completely out of line… and so out of line that if I had been intoxicated I would not have been responsible for my actions because I would have been insulted and angered beyond reason.
Now. All things considered I gave this person several opportunities to apologize. There were 5 people that witnessed this, and I was extremely calm and polite and explained to this person again and again why this was wrong. They kept citing that it was a “miss-communication”… well, if you call telling someone one thing and slipping them a complete other thing and pressuring them a miscommunication, so be it, but I had him admit that he was wrong and apologise in front of others, which is why I am not mentioning his name.
Regardless, I wanted to write you because, frankly I like you. I like what you are up to and you seem like a genuine and nice fellow that gives a damn about art in a sincere manner. As I consider myself a true artist despite my relations with the media statewide, I would prefer that your sort of fellow and my sort of fellow remain on friendly and up front terms as we have similar visions, albeit from a different perch, our perches are withing ear and eye shot of one another, and I would prefer if there was no adversity etc.
So, rather than have there be an issue, I wanted to let you know what happened, up front. If you have any doubts about this I will be more than happy to provide ample witnesses to it to make you feel better about what I have just told you. And regardless, I am not asking for anything but mutual respect. And, on principle I will not sign a damn thing. If it was handled honestly and truthfully and I was treated with respect at that time, I would have no problem with any of it, but given that situation and the attitudes of the people involved and the obvious incredulity; on principle I cannot support those persons actions with such misgivings and disregard towards my intelligence and actualization of self worth of creation, which I sincerely hope acted with complete disregard of your personal standards and principles as proprietor.
If you reply and I don’t answer for a few days, no worries, I leave for Nashville tomorrow.
Carpentry is not something that you would speak of with other people that wear tight pants or are bragging about cutting edge culture. But for the last couple weeks it has been all that interests me and I don’t really have much else to talk about. I left my makeshift shop at one a.m. on Sunday morning covered in pine dust and stain. It feels good to make something with your own two hands that is of a certain quality. My hands ache as of late, the bones and muscles in them feel to big for the skin, a sign that they are being put to work. That is why I respect compatriots of mine that build things. Ol’ Will who finally released the best music of his life and J.Cook and co. who perpetually crank out thirty odd pages of fine art and decent text ever month for a general public that just doesn’t understand. It is in no small part to my revelation about carpentry that I have decided to stop drinking until at least September. After all it is difficult to operate saws and planers without hurting yourself when you are sauced, and I may need at least 9 of my fingers in years to come. Jerry Meatyard, you have my undying respect and gratitude, to have accomplished so much with only 7.
Truth be told, anyone can build anything given enough time. I know, I should have sold the farm and left for the city a long long time ago. It’s pretty obvious now. There are many of us sorts leaving as I speak, headed for cities that end in vowels. What is there left to do besides create or go into politics? But we do not have all the time in the world to us, the world is indifferent and benevolent. Time is a resource, a commodity. Do you have enough time for me and I for you? How much time do we have?
Winter is coming. I can feel it. Still months away here in the steaming tropics, but mere weeks to other parts of the land. The sheer heat here does things to you, plays tricks on your conscience. Traps us in boxes with air conditioning. Makes the unfit pant and the destitute go naked. But we are not sweating together under the sheets.
I have fed myself on my own body and muscles before. I know what it is like to sweat for hours on end, to labor, to sleep soundly. Working with your hands makes everything else even more fake. How can you talk to a day laborer about linux programming and make him feel that his is not the real job, and not angry at fate? That is still a sore for some of us, we feel as if we are cheating, just as much as sleeping with pictures is pale to sleeping with bodies. This is not a new guilt for me. I know that some of us are olive skinned because we are not enough generations off of the farm to sleep soundly with clean hands.
I haven’t had a drink since June first. June first I wanted to fight everyone. I told a large room of 300 or so people a bunch of inane and insightful things through a microphone amplified at roughly 4000 watts, that really were mainly aimed to arouse and possibly insult, and I don’t remember any of it, not even breaking the guitar, or refusing my pay at the end of the night.
In any case I figured it would be time to dry out. Take a few months off and see what it is like to think clearly. Summer time is an awful time for any self-respecting individual to decide to go sober in any way. Summer is the hedonists solstice, time to bathe in pineapple juice and rum, wrestle with tanned skin bejeweled with sweat, breathe air thick with the whole world.
Doctors say that after about sixty days your brain starts to function about the same as it did previous to persistent intoxication. Another thirty days after that and your tendencies are broken and it’s all in your head from there on out. I don’t damn well know about any of that, but I can certainly say that if vision were a bell it rings loud and clear at the moment. Who keeps ringing that damn bell?
But a mother does not want to drink when pregnant, and now I have found for good or bad it has affected my child and I have given birth in my own way. Only other artists and mothers can possibly understand what it is like, and sometimes the process may kill you. Even Fellini didn’t make it out alive, and he was as in on the punchline as anyone could have been.
Do whispers travel from coast to coast? Does sin even matter anymore? Will anyone ever know that I never write fiction even though I say that I always do to keep a lawyer and agent at bay? I used to admire only the writers that thinly veil truth or bent it slightly, even changing the names of their friends just enough to keep in the black. Now I admire the artists that create from nothing at all, out of the black itself perhaps with only an ink well or a Corona 3 portable type or some coffee seeds to chew on and cognac, because I cannot do so. The last decade of my life has been spent living it and being it and doing it so I could feel like I had the authorship to create something that existed already, without need of me and without ever knowing that I take breath. I could have just had an imagination. I could have just drawn from scratch. But no.
I have now done things that I don’t even believe. Drive straight from New York City to Florida because you loose your temper over a parking ticket and a phone call not returned? Yes. Pick a fight you are certain to loose blood and good looks over with people bigger than you in a foreign country? Check. Get unintentionally but malevolently poisoned in one of the worst parts of town in one of the biggest cities in the world where no one speaks English and you loose consciousness and almost fall off 4th story stairs? Believe it. Drag your own love kicking and screaming away from fertile soil for the sake of whatever you think creation means? Of course.
What is next? Well. I suppose we follow the course all the way down ask W.C. for a good caddy, then take the path into the woods and see who comes out the other side, and in what shape we are all in, if any. I hope to see you there, wearing fresh cotton, with the light on your face.
