independence day

We were supposed to drive down to London to drop off the car and then fly back up to Belfast but the sun was out and we thought those plans were stupid. We called Nick to tell him that we were going to keep the car and take the ferry across the ocean, spending the extra time in Scotland, a land we were not anxious to leave.

We found ourselves a bed and breakfast a few dozen miles from Glasgow. It was a charming farmhouse with a big kitchen. We walked around half naked in the sun drying the sheets that we still had with us. The sheets we had made in Scotland looked much better than the other sheets because we had pressed them by driving the car onto the top of the stack and leaving it there to press all the water out. I longed to have my banjo back at my side.Those days were made for a banjo.

I contacted Nina to confirm our plans to meet in Brighton. We were still on. She missed me. Her enthusiasm for our love had not faded. To be honest I had gotten pretty consumed by the good work and had not thought about it much. I didn’t forget her and I had no interest in other women, but I found it hard to focus on anything other than the task at hand. She was annoyed at my poor communication.

One day we took a long walk through the woods. It was the first time that I had not been swallowed in society since I got to Europe. It felt so clean and good. I didn’t want these days to end. But we had to leave for Glasgow when the time came.

Glasgow is a beat down city. The downtown was deserted and sparse. It felt strange to be back in this town again.

We spent our first night getting wasted in a bar in the north side of town. A few thugs had hassled us on the street and I’d almost taken them up on the fight until I turned to find three men who contributed to a grand total of something like one thousand pounds of drunken meat, so we just apologized for being “pansies” and continued on to the bar.

After a few drinks the scheming started. D.Bob was coming back from the sickness and he wanted to do what he did best: making crazy plans. By the time we were super drunk he’d covered every napkin and piece of journal paper at the table with the schematics of an imaginary paper making facility to be built on Gloomy Bear’s new property in New York. D.Cam was doodling and writing down the drunken sweet nothings being yelled across the bar. It was proven by now that Scottish people can drink.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I can’t even remember what we were doing in Glasgow. I don’t remember making any paper there. I only remember that after a drunken night we were down at the docks loading our car into the ferry.

It was a long and slow boat ride over the channel. D.Cam passed out in a seat. D.Bob was typing furiously on his computer, always connected with the future, making plans with people with money. I went outside to smoke weed on the deck. I watched England disappear and Ireland grow out of the gloom that surrounded it. Here we come Belfast.

When we landed we drove really slow around the town looking out at all the razor wire and massive piles of wooden crates and rubber tires that were going to be ceremoniously burned. It was as if we’d stumbled into a very bizarre apocalypse. The people looked like zombies from the window of the car.

Our hostel was smelly and again overly crowded.

We weren’t actually working in Belfast. We were actually working in Portadown which was just south of town.

When we showed up for our first day of paper making we found the city festooned with Brittish flags, I mean completely full of them. It turns out that all of the flag waving and tire burning was for a protestant independence day.

The complications began as soon as we walked in the door of the art museum when it was made abundantly clear by the thickness of the false accent of our American hostess that our mission, which we had apparently already accepted, was to set our little lady up on the front steps of the beautiful protestant church at the center of town which rests at the intersection of tree city streets.

There was a meeting with all of the council that had made our stay here possible happening in a few minutes. We were supposed to go up in front of what qualifies as Ireland’s uppity art world to talk about what we would be doing for the next week. Yes. Week. Multiple days they wanted this to occur.

The kicker of the story is a bag full of British flags. I forget who asked about them, but one of us said something and our hostess looked at us and confirmed that they did indeed intend for us to pulp the Queen’s flag. Here. On Independence day when there would be giant piles of tires and pallets burning in rebellion to her rule just a few miles away, but here we were obviously in the presence of proud English citizens.

D.Bob told her that we needed a minute to discuss and we all started walking away quickly. We immediately went to the church which was about 50 meters away. While we walked we all quickly agreed that we could not do this, there was simply no way.

Its hard sometimes to illuminate what Combat Paper is about, but it is easy to detail what it is NOT about. Combat Paper is about the liberation of the individual from the identities and the nationalities which divide people and if you’re not cutting up the fiber with the word freedom buzzing in your mind you are wasting your time. And ours. Wasting time is one thing, but to twist this narrative of liberation to make a snotty comment about another enemy destroys the beauty in what we do and wastes the whole idea of the thing. If they weren’t ready to give up being Irish then our work here was impossible.

When we actually got to the position we realized that there would also be a number of technical impossibilities. We would have to use extension cords to actually steal power from this Protestant church. We would have to carry dozens of buckets of water from the second floor of the museum to this location. There was a statue of an English soldier in the center of the area we would be working in.

The most important of all of our concerns was the high potential for violence against us. Just standing there people were eying us as if we were carrying assault rifles. Their stares burned my skin when I even began to think of how absolutely disrespectful we would look, not to mention be, destroying the flag as all these old veterans walked around. I could see one old man with pins on his hat sitting on a bench on the street smoking a cigarette. He could have been my Grandpa. He’d fought the war. Nobody could take that from him.

We agreed we couldn’t, we wouldn’t do it. The time that passed was the time it took to smoke one cigarette, then we were walking back into the museum. We walked right into the speech. We sat in the back as our hostess talked about what we would be doing and then she handed it over to us.

We all walked to the front. We each took turns talking about our concerns with the way this was set up. D.Bob hit them on the technical difficulties, D.Cam told them what CPP was really all about, and then I came in to weighed in with why I work with this group hoping that they would catch on that if they wanted to work with us they were going to have to get ready to cut up some Irish flags too. By the end we had laid out, fairly sternly, that we would be working inside and that we could only be facilitators in this project because we had no relation to the issue at hand.

The Hostess, and everyone else, seemed disappointed that we had stripped the confrontational element from the workshop, and now that it was just paper making they seemed bored with the idea. They wanted a fight. What they would likely have gotten if they had had their way was three severely beaten American artists filing lawsuits.

We began setting up our road show inside. The room was carpeted so the key was water control. I was getting good at this. I made a trap that would deposit runoff water into buckets. It proved mostly successful when we tested the system out that night.

We went out for a drink that night before heading back to Belfast. It was time to breath a sigh of relief at having dodged that bullet. I cursed Nick’s name for having gotten us into this mess. We made a battle plan for how the next few days would go and what our limits were as far as what the lady would be eating.