Life on the road happens so fast that sometimes it seems like you’re never really where you are at all.
I’m on the Megabus heading out of Philly with everything I own crammed into the back by a young man who seems to take pride in his lack of professionalism. I have a fair share of obstacles standing between me and the completion of the task at hand which is to rendezvous with Combat Paper in some printing shop in Boston. My phone was cancelled promptly on the minute that my plan expired. I don’t believe there are such things as payphones anymore. Anxiety has left me feeling nauseated to the degree that I feel like a stomachless goblin who feeds on tension and stress. Coffee has made me jittery with a one inch fuse on my bladder. My shoulders feel broken and my back is bent from the weight of my duffel. I have a good distance to walk when I get into a city I’ve never been to before tonight.
If I do happen to make it to the university where Drew will be consuming drugs and printing I have the rare pleasure of a lucid printing experience that will likely go into the early hours of the morning with the master of unconventional print sciences, the one and only mad scientist of the CPP, Drew Matott. I am very excited to see him again.
Over the course of the summer he has sent me a number of post cards advertising a life that I thought that I was free of. I was living, or trying to make a living, in a college town in Michigan that I used to bum around in with my intellectual friends as we discussed the finer details of our ethical philosophies and personal drives for a life filled at the time with talk of art even though we never quite knew what that art would be. We all fancied ourselves writers. Anyways, during the summer I was living in a bedroom flop with a very anal older guy who had too many rules to be comfortable. I was working long hours down in a screen printing shop that wasn’t quite up to code. I was also making paper in a local paper making studio. His postcards would come in the mail like long distance hauntings making me regret my desire to live something like a normal life.
It had been years before this summer that I had lived in any one place or loved just one girl for longer than a month. I thought that since I had made it for three that I was finally out of the mess. It was not so. All of that fell apart due mostly to my drug usage and paranoia and I found myself wandering pointlessly through Chicago again wondering what I was going to do with myself now that I was realizing that I hadn’t exactly set myself up for success.
Then I remembered Drew’s postcards and soon after that he sent me an email asking me to join them again. And so I did, or at least that is what I am trying to do on this bus which took up the last of my money.
I have made a lot of promises to people over the last week about things that I want to do. They all looked skeptical because my friends have come to distrust me when I tell them things. Even simple, hard to fuck up things. I have a bad track record on follow through. I guess I am more of an “idea man.” As it turns out, activism is too full of idea men. It needs more people who are willing to be dedicated. I am hoping that I didn’t bite off more than I can chew.
One of the obligations I picked up is to revive our organization’s news letter which we all know fondly as SitRep which stands for Situational Report. It is a term, or a practice, in the military meant to give awareness to troops coming into a situation as to what that situation might look like. It is the report of the scouts or the advance party. This publication has lain dormant for far too long. It’s former editor became frazzled by the seemingly pointless black hole of personal energy that doing the kind of work we do invites into your mind and your soul. I do not blame him. This work is destructive.
All of the other functions which I hope to bring into or back into our organization are all in the field of writing, printing, and publication which are all things that I wish to focus on in my own life. I feel confident about being able to carry through this once because I’ve finally found a means to bridge my desire to work for positive social change and my desire to focus on my own talents and passions in a way that could be productive for our entire organization. This transition feels natural so I’m trying to foster it while it is in its primitive state.
There is a rather crushing deadline as our entire organization has just launched a campaign which has a pretty fast paced year ahead of it, all the while I will be traveling with CPP making paper and doing my thing with the gang.
I have my doubts that anyone is still reading all of this garbage which has been leaving my head to make a home amongst all the other self centered gibberish that narcissists fill the internet with. I wouldn’t read it. It doesn’t matter. If a person wants to be a writer they have to write. This is my only real goal over the coming year. Become a better writer. I feel like I am on my way, but my shortcomings are very embarrassing at this early juncture in my “career.” With any luck I’ll have these kinks worked out in the next three decades.
The Paper Trail 