Category Archives: Combat Paper

From the loading dock of an abandoned warehouse whose insides are a strange open labyrinth of antiques which stares out at a gutted and destitute Cleveland which seems to always harbor some shrieking siren I was smoking a cigarette and contemplating how fitting DADA would be now in 2010, a time which is arguably more absurd than any time which has yet come to pass.

Dada was breathed into life by a Europe mad with war in the clamour and the gloom of a land gashed with muddy trenches filled with the viscera of thousands upon thousands of poor men who were sent to die by prospectors. DADA was man’s disgust with itself. It was man’s utter disappointment with the cards we were dealt in the Nature game, but more so it’s despair at how we chose to play those cards, how we cheated and lied and counted and rigged and killed  just steal all the chips in the end.

DADA never died and it never will. It changed as the people and the drugs and the culture and the art changed because it had to. DADA is a rejection of the prevailing cultural and artistic norms to its deepest, most distrustful degree. It became the Beats and it drove across the absurd face of the country spewing unedited poetry into the night in wanton futility. Then it became Rock and Roll which ranted and raved and snorted and fucked until it got lost. The eighties was a decade of purist DADAism when nothing made any sense at all and DADA was left to walk the streets in leather jackets with spikes and patches and hard faces with open, undisguised malice for the modern world, broken glass clenched in a bleeding fist. This was punk rock. DADA softened with depression in the nineties to the tune of ten-thousand strangely tuned guitars admitting that everything that could be said has been said and the only way to tell the world to stop was through the barrel of a shotgun. But now, in this last decade of the new millenium, post suicidal tendencies, DADA has forgotten it’s own name and it’s true purpose in a pharmaceutically dystopian nightmare future while it is coming to grips with the fact that through one-hundred years of life it has known only war and it has failed to stop it, or to learn to manifest it’s only message purely to be truly understood. Still DADA is an alien vagrant from space who cannot communicate with these anxious monkeys determined to self-destruct.

Oh Mother DADA, what is one to do? Journals, self-indulgent books, obscure paintings, angry, bitter music and all that you’ve produced. None of it was worth a damn. In what direction do we go now with your sacred message?

Maybe we should abandon the species and our hopes that they will learn to save themselves. Maybe we ought to take our time to look into the colors and to enjoy our personal spectacle here on the planet like a Beat poem, something written which can only allude to a moment that can never be recreated. Maybe we should learn to find God’s reflection in every mirror cascading around the activities of every atom of everything that has existed and be content. Maybe we should forget about the government and the wars and the politics, leaving them to make a Hell of their own lives. Maybe we should use our creative energies to form for ourselves a nouveau Garden of Eden to be kept forever pure of the hysteria of a world which even DADA in all of its grace through all of the madness of time corrupted even DADA in the end. Maybe we should take time to finally edit our unfinished artworks. Maybe some day some other creature, some other species which is more rational, will pick up our pieces and learn from the lessons that you, DADA, have carried inside your cleverly defended labyrinth which from the bird’s eye view reads as the history of man’s mistakes in all of his doings.

I love you DADA, because you never told me what the answer was. That was the answer. There are no answers. It is always this thing, and it is always wrong, and to make ammends with it one must learn a kind of flexibility and readiness for abandonment, one must craft a kind of celebratory spirit around the tragedy of the whole thing, which is such a difficult and exhausting task to keep up for the remainder of one’s life. But if you were easy, DADA, and you wore your message on your sleeve, we would not want you.

Just one more example of the absurdity which lies inside of our hearts and our minds which expresses itself in everything that we do as a species no matter how much time we invest in discussing the finer details of Ethical Philosophy.

Ah, to be one of the Cult of DADA, it is a heavy and loathesome burden, for there is no sure way to end up on the shores of this delusional island without at first passing through that which DADA was built to destroy, for DADA is transmitted to people, or rather people are transmitted to DADA, through War and War alone it seems. I was delivered to DADA with the keys to POW cages in my hands which was, comparatively, a rather easy entrance. Some come through blood and some through fire. They crawl across DADA’s threshold with a rifle in their hand and a brand new horrible memory of some terrible thing which could never be undone. Nobody leaves the DADA alive.

My ruminations are interrupted by a man hanging from the fence which surrounds this Bunker of Culture. His fingers push through the links in the fence in a way that reminds me of the detainees. He wants to ask me if I am a florist.

I want to tell him that there are no flowers in the DADA, because in the flower there is nothing against which one could rebel, but I chose instead to stare at him as if he has interupted me in the middle of something  very important.

“Yes. In a way. In a sort of a way. I guess that I am.”

I find it to be one of the most hilarious attributes of our species that we can dedicate so much time to the discussion of ethics but when left to our devices we seem to contradict our lofty words with unjustifiable actions on the regular. When we are engaged in activities such as, say, sex or war, we bare fangs which no amount of words could dull. We express a dark lust beyond the literary efforts of the finest minds. I find it hilarious because, if I were to see it in any other way, I would be forced to admit that we, as a species, are wholly insane.

I spent the morning sitting in on a discussion panel arranged around the question of Ethics during a time of war. I thought that this discussion would be more geared towards a dialogue about the role of the philosopher during war, or more broadly, about the application of philosophy to the activity of war.My anticipations were proven false almost immediately.

The panelists were wisely selected for their diversity, not only in the geographies which divided them but also in the fields in which they worked and the different degrees to which they performed in these fields. From left to right there was a French philosopher who taught at a military institute who appeared to be listening to the panelists as if he was their therapist. Next was a British man who looked like an old manager of mine. He was young. He hailed from England where he taught Ethics. Next was an Irishman with long white hair and a dapper bow-tie who spoke of the ethics of technological implementation in combat. He was a self-declared Technologist. Then there was a Rear Admiral from the Navy who works with the Joint Task Forces. She represented the calm intellectualism of the military at its most reasonable. She was followed  by an American professor who has taught Ethics in military academies for most of his life. Next to him was a man who taught ethics in Israel.The discussion was moderated by a woman we had met yesterday. She runs the Ethics department for the University. She spoke to us about pulping the uniform of a young man she knew who is now dead. He died in combat before the philosophers had finished discussing whether or not the war should be condemned.

They represented a broad spectrum of death and destruction, their pasts and their lineages collaborating to fulfill a nearly complete history of the Western worlds brutality. Their political opinions quite clearly spread the entire gamut of  relevant philosophies on the nature of war.

It is not in my power to represent word for word the proceedings of this discussion, but I would like to make an attempt to discuss some of its themes and the ideas which it has brought to the front of my mind.

The first important theme to present itself in a string of dialogue was the danger of the sense of removal that plagues society when war is waged more and more remotely. The Technologist emerged first on the scene with a rather unpopular opinion that higher death tolls are a greater deterrent to the waging of wars than low. He illustrated with his clever words a picture of a world in which humans didn’t have to suffer the damage done to the heart because the job could and was being done by machines which carry no trauma. This illustration was an obvious Dystopia intended as satire. The point that he was trying to drive home was that we need to feel the horror of war to limit our capacity to allow ourselves to engage in it.

I think that ten years ago his job would have seemed silly, but now that there are such fantastic obscenities in the sky, like “Project Vulture”, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) which can stay aloft for upwards of one month at a time, a vicious armory in the sky prepared to disgorge its deadly bowels on the homes and vehicles of any unruly citizens, one’s hand is almost forced. Since it has already come to pass, we must decide quickly whether we think things of this nature are good or bad. There is no time to dilly-dally.

It was almost ironic, though really just suiting, that the Israeli man took this opportunity to discuss his particular breed of dualism, for he prefers, apparently, to always have two ideas to discuss. This was a theme with him throughout the lecture. In one hand he wished to hold Reciprocity, and in the other the distinction between combatant and non-combatant. This is a problem that plagues his home land and a question which I am sure he toils on endlessly.

I found him difficult to deal with. He said the word “reciprocity” a dozen times, though I never knew exactly what he was talking about. I could only gather that he was alluding to the Palestinians with that dangerous vagueness of the Philosopher. He preened himself on the contemplation the Israeli state has put into Ethical engineering though as his words left his mouth with the weight of lead my mind was taken to the photos that I saw in newspapers of tangles of wire protruding from piles of rubble which used to be houses and I remember the rumor of death in those photos and I was forced to wonder how much this man’s talk was worth when artillery rounds have so much more impact than philosophical doctrines in today’s day and age.

Occasionally the American professor would chime in, always with relevance to the question at hand. He operated as the moderator, informing the audience how to look at the information they were being provided with and reminding us of the important questions.

The Rear Admiral lost her sharp military poise only once when she rolled her eyes in response to a remark made by the Technologist when he responded to a question about how peace would truly be reached by curtly stating that first people must stop killing one another. Her eyes rolled to the very back of her sockets with a look of such profound disgust that she was forced to launch into a crystal clear defense of the military.

In lieu of discussing the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan which seemed the most pressing strains on the military, she chose to discuss the militaries response to Haiti, which happened to be an armed response, though she ignored that part. Haiti led her to talking about Africa. She imparted on us that she hoped for peace as well, but while there are places where people are controlled by unlawful and undemocratic warlords there will always be a need for certain people to not be peaceful so that most people could be. It was a Utilitarian argument. She would have done well to quote Hume once or twice, but Hume does not factor into her Standard Operating Procedure.

She represented the kind of military that one can really believe in, but it was not the military that I saw. Her concept of the military does not allow reflection the racism and psychotic violence of her conscript warriors.

All the while the French man sat gloomily and all knowing at the end. When he spoke his words seemed to wither as they left his mouth and when he spoke of life, he said the word “life” with such resignation and withdrawal with a deep and sad look on his face as is the French way.

The British professor’s moment to shine came when asked if the nature of war had changed over the ages. He wisely delineated between the nature and the character of war. He said that the character of war must change to survive, but the nature of war is always the gruesome same. In this way war seems almost human, going through stages in development though maintaining the same fundamental principles. I was very charmed with the idea.

Where was all the Kant, the Adam’s, the Bacon, even the Nietzsche? In the case of the Technologist I felt I was missing Asimov’s robotic law.

These people have established the foundation of the ethical dilemma. Individually they laid claim to the major schools of thought which, when isolated, define where human’s draw their ethical motivations and how they ought to process ethical information. They have discussed the autonomy and the heteronomy of man and the importance of these two camps. Their words try to make sense out of what the duty of the individual, the citizen, truly is.

But nobody seemed interested in utilizing these themes here. None of these people seemed interested in talking about the moral responsibilities of the citizen. They were too busy condemning the actions of one group or political party (in every case the enemy of their home land, or in the case of the French man life itself or some vague form of God) while puffing with pride at all the hard work their home lands have invested into moral behavior despite the nastiness of all of those “thems.”

When all the words were said and the event was done, with the smokers twitching nervously in their seats, the questions formed up in a long line in front of the microphone. A shaky WWII veteran stood at the front of the line. He took his time to say that talk is all fine and good, but the words of people who have never actually known war about the subject of or the nature of war were all void of meaning. The audience applauded him. He wore a Veterans for Peace t-shirt.

The panelists were quick to throw out their wartime credentials, though none of them had actually ever engaged in combat. This one man had deflated the entire lecture.

Another man stood at the microphone. His name is Dr. Ed Tick. His turned out to be the final word. As time came to a close he said “moral trauma is at the heart of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.” His words were true in a way that I had hoped to hear this entire time.

PTSD is not a mental illness. It is a defensive reaction to participating in amoral behavior, in committing to actions which run contrary to one’s understanding of what is and what is not truly good.

This is the true moral judgement of war in it’s simplicity. There is something in us which knows that at its heart, no matter whether you look at it through the lens of Kantianism, Utilitarianism, or Divine Command Morality, is wrong. The justifications and the “buts” are like putting a dirty country boy in a fancy city suit. Its all a disguise.

I woke up today with a problem on my mind. This problem has been haunting me throughout the events I have experienced as a credentialed member of the G.I. Resistance. It is a problem that attacks my fragile sense of self when I am confronted with anyone viewing what we do from the outside. This problem is endemic to our culture and it will continue to be problematic as we extend the message of our rights and values.

This problem is a problem of agency.

When I first heard about “The Movement” and Combat Paper I was exhilarated because I felt as if I had found a group of individuals who were willing to claim the brand of Service as a point of pride and to utilize this position as a means to produce a valuable message about our plight in the heart of a corrupt world.

As the time has drifted onwards I have found that this movement has stagnated. Where at first there was a feeling that we were a strong and resilliant group of radical elements it seems that this status has been reduced to nursing broken equipment. There is a sense of mourning about our experiences that is often accompanied by pity. Instead of seeing us as disciplined and loyal to our cause our actions are interpreted as some extension of that ghastly acronym PTSD, a term which has apparently become synonymous with life as a veteran.

Therapists, healers, crafters and other breeds of witch doctors flock to our organizations and projects to extend an offer to fix us everywhere we present ourselves. They do this without understanding why this is offensive to our basic sense of individual worth. This sentiment has all but destroyed our capacity to make any real changte because we’ve been relegated to a barrens of worthless trauma driven self-pity.

I remember cutting up my uniforms with this fire inside of me that told me that I was taking command of my own life and excersizing my autonomy. There was a sense that being a veteran didn’t mean that I was doomed to be a fuck up, but rather that I had an ages old baton in my hand and the only challenge that faced me was doing the most with this baton before I passed it off to the coming ranks of veterans. This baton has been carried by innumberable generations before us who have done many amazing things with it. I am reminded most heavily of the absurdist revolution that occurred in Europe after the horrors of WWII which was frequented by many poets, painters, theorists and writers who had served their time gawking at the horror of war. There are the Abstract Expressionists which used their experiences with the war to undercut the value of human expression itself, making a point that our actions as humans are so absurd that no statement which we could make could possibly be true because we are the carriers of some terrible disorder.

I think that this cultural shift began to happen after Vietnam when the soldier was no longer a hero but a recovering mess who has done many horrible things and will never be right with the world again. During that decade the image of the soldier became inseparable from homelessness, drug addiction and crime. This is when the term veteran began to be used as if it were the classification of some disease which will never really go away.

Why is it us who are fucked up? We didn’t invent M-16’s, cluster bombs, interrogation booths, 50 caliber automatic rifles and tanks. We didn’t invent the Global War on Terror and the racism which made it possible. That was all you America. We did that together. Or at least we O,K.d the implementation of these terrible things. Why should we be any more broken than you? Maybe we are the only sane ones here because we know, and I mean really know, about the scale of the atrocities going on every day where you are still ignorant and too blissfully naive to confront your misconceptions.

Our sickness isn’t something that you can medicate away because the damage that was done to us was philosophical in nature. Well, at least the damage that happened to our heads. The ruptures in our world view is irreparable but it isn’t wrong. It is the rest of the world that is insane. It is the rest of the world which is in need of changing its views. Our work in that department is done.

I dream of a movement which accepts itself, which does not deny its right to the truth because we have bitter memories in our minds. These things make us more real. We need to own them to move forward.

You are not broken. I know that you may be suffering a great deal of pain. I have suffered that pain too. All I ask is that as a community we stop allowing crackpots and pharmaceutical spokespeople to be our voices. Take your life back. Put yourself together and pull yourself up so that you can be a part of the struggle to prove to the world that we aren’t the problem around here. The more we let these people capitalize off of our identities the further away we get from doing the history that we are now taking part in any justice. Take back that sense of agency in your life. You deserve it. You have proven that you can survive nightmarish obstacles with grace. You’ve proven that you can work harder than most people. You’ve proven that you know what it means to put yourself aside for the greater good. At some point you have probably exemplified all of the core values of the Armed Services.

Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity and Personal Courage. Put these things to use in your life, but do so in a way that is more accurate to the Dictionary’s definition of these terms than the loose interpretation that the military has instilled into them.

Fuck the quacks. Lets give them a little reality therapy by discontinuing the process of being whored out to various institutions for private gains. Haven’t you had enough of that shit already?

Jim is a graduate student at the Museum School of Fine Arts in the printing department. I don’t quite understand how he came to be part of the CPP but he is decidedly one of ours. He is a print nerd, much like myself, capable of geeking out for several hours over the finer details and manifold possibilities of printing. He is strange though in that he has chosen to dedicate himself to a field of printing which is almost contrary to the very nature of a printer’s obsession.

Printing, to me, has always been fascinating because it is a way to turn one idea into a lot of things which can be widely distributed for much cheaper than a solitary piece of art. Call it the socialist in me. I just want everyone to be able to have one. I was raised on comic books. I sharpened my eyes on the CYMK dot patterns. I see the world in print and plates. But monotype isn’t made for that kind of production. Each print is unique. There is no plate. A monoprint is essentially an ink painting transfer.

You start with a Plexiglas plate and whichever palette of oil based printing ink you prefer. I strongly suggest that you clear for yourself a very large space.

We started with red, yellow, blue and black. Pretty classic. Margie and Jim started smearing the colors together so that they could create a wash to fall in behind an image of two helicopters that were printed on linen paper.

Jim and Margie get the party started...

Drew and I put together a pile of money and started xeroxing it. Jim had told us that we could do xerox transfers. I didn’t understand how this would work but it was fun to use the copy machine.

When I finished the cut out copies that I wanted I went back to the gang. They were laying the ink out on the Plexiglass plates with rollers, just kind of slopping it on. Then They were washing away the ink from the places where the helicopters would be, using that space to introduce new colors.

"and then they came for me."

Each time they did this they would get two prints. One print with too much ink, then a second more desirable print which left only a ghost of the ink. I had been pacing around trying to find something to do before I realized that I just needed to get my hands in on this project.

I quickly realized that the mineral spirits opened a whole new world into splashes and strange drippy effects that would be nearly impossible to produce in any other way. Each drop made a pool which pushed the ink to the outside of that pool, then it dried leaving a residual hue in the inside so that it appeared to be a crater. I really enjoyed playing with flicking the mineral spirits and ink onto the plane of glass. I admired Jim’s idea of using aluminum foil to create a scratchy surface. I tried to render the same thing myself but found that I had used too much mineral spirits.

The next step is to load the Plexiglass into an etching press, load your paper onto the image, then roll it through the machine to press the ink into the paper.

Mineral spirits make the difference...

The end result is a one of a kind image that is perfect for backgrounds. Monoprints are easy to produce with about a ten minute turn over (though you could spend more time) to create a unique texture through all of the areas in a paper not occupied by image. Because it is translucent it doesn’t hide the value of the paper itself which is often a problem with Combat Paper. You don’t want to use too much of the space, but you don’t want to leave your canvas empty either. As it turns out this process leads to a perfect solution to an age old problem for me. I am very excited to continue to implement it in my work.

It was sad that the xerox transfers never happened because I would have liked to have wrapped my head around that process. Jim produced a few of them but the paper had been wet for too long and gone through too much so it started to fall apart. Luckily I will have the resources to screen print the rest of the designs on the top.

This was my first full day on tour and I left pretty pleased that I had ink stains on my hand already. This is a good sign.

D.Cam’s voice woke me up the other morning. I swore at him. Mornings are hectic things on the Paper Trail and I respond to them bitterly. There are some attributes of the military lifestyle which I hope never wash clean and one of them is a natural distaste for waking up.

Within an hour we were leaving Boston to the sound of Arcade Fire’s new album blasting in our new Rescue Chopper. She’s a giant van painted forest green. There is ample room for the whole gang and we can smoke inside which makes these long trips that cucial bit more tolerable.

Margie chit chatted, D.Cam played the sober face, Matotters giggled and blurted out important business information while I fixed a thousand mile stare on the eight bit fire burning up the New England forests and steadied my anxieties against their natural and plausible volatile reaction to the realities of another few months on the road. Hush little brain. Everything is going to be ok. Just look at the pretty colors.

Life is beautiful now, but soon everything here will be covered in snow and it will be painful days for all the poor people of the north. I must stay in the South. My bones feel tired to think about taking on the discomfort of another winter above the North/South divide. Operation Snowbird must be a success.

We stopped in some God forsaken New York town called Poughkeepsie to but a trailer for our mobile paper making command facility. It was a family operation of blatantly Italian decent. The guys that ran the joint were notably hostile despite the fact that we’d come to throw money at them in large quantities for a trailer. I felt like I had to apologize for being there on account of business. Apparently they haven’t heard about the recession. They kept insisting that we were in a band. They went as far as to tell us that we looked like bandits. I swelled with pride.

We finalized our deal with these gentleman and we were on our way with trailer in tow. It is a nice trailer.

D.Cam fretted the entire evening about the performance of the van, dead sure that the shimmy we felt above the speed of sixty was some deadliner fault. After all of his tuned in listening he came to the conclusion that the entire back end was fucked. I still think that he is crazy.

We stayed at a friend of the CPP. His name is Matty C. He went to school with JT back in the day. JT’s been through a lot in his life. I wonder what all of that stuff must have looked like from a friends perspective.

I had a crashing headache from smoking too many cigarettes and not drinking enough water so I passed out early . I didn’t wake up until noon today. Everyone was gone. I was alone in the house with the bottles of whiskey. I stayed in bed and stared at them with the blanket pulled up around my eyes. Go away ye devil.

They finally came home to save me from an early start but they only saved me for so long as it was pay day so my first act of business was to buy a gallon of Irish Cream to keep around the van.

Don’t judge me. I’m still functional.

The rest of the day was a silent blur of red fading into yellow and back again. My head was swallowed in the vibrance. The time and the miles passed by so quickly that I barely noticed them at all.

We’ve arrived at Tom’s place.

Tom is the wizard of the CPP who makes all of our internet things move. I have heard about him and his magics for years throughout all of the tours though I have never seen his face or spoken to him. We haven’t even met in the electronic domain. I am glad this has been remedied. He is every bit as pleasant as he was made out to be. His plants are wonderful and they bear evidence of having been loved and doted over which is a testament to the goodness of a person, or so I do believe. Margie is baking some fancy meal for us, a long cry from the usual meat and potatoes of our road routine. Normally I would have insisted on cooking but she is convinced that I am a misogynist so I am letting her cook dinner to add evidence to her claim. I like to stoke fires to further misdirect people when they’re trying to figure out who I am.

This week I’ll be screen printing at the local universities paper and print shop up here in Canton New York.

A word of warning to anyone who thinks that living with your life on your back is a good idea: humans were not built to be turtles. This is the lesson that is ringing in my spine today.

The sun woke me up from my bad dreams. There was a foul taste in my mouth as always. I could smell myself. It was not good. The memories of the night before and the last few days were barking at me from a dozen different directions. I’d been so angry last night. A real ball of frustration, fury and pain. I was prepared to fight the whole world in the cold.

Catching the last train to find out that Drew was not where he was supposed to be. No phone to find out where to go. The way those stoops looked like a reasonable place to sleep for a night. A borrowed phone call for Drew’s sleepy directions. Finding out that the cabby was from Haiti. Guilt. Drinking beers with Jim and Drew. Talking with Jim about anger. The calming fingers of M.Jane calming my hyperbolic tornado of emotions. All the anger coming out. Fuck these people and their cellphones and their pills and all of their endless bitching about how hard it is here in this veritable land of plenty. Fuck the calm, blissful stupidity of every one of us. Jim telling me about the boat that he was on during the invasion of Iraq. It was like an Apocalypse Now revision of the PT boat horror show. A soldier on the water is a soldier out of it’s element. Cigarettes and cigarettes and beer.

Let the tour begin.

Margie showed up in the mail this morning after I cut my hair on a lucid whim. We’re watching football deep into the whiskey. Jim is making some magnificent feast of Bratworst, apples, onions and other things delicious. The house is full of typewriters and musical instruments and hand-made paper prints. It is a familiar scenario which unfolds wherever the Rescue Chopper lands.

Sexual commercials with images of girls at war with nature to sell tampons and boys spraying themselves with bullshit to hide their true hideous nature lead to discussions about gender politics despite Jim’s efforts to keep football day a day of total rest.

There is a clinking of silverware and a rumbling in my belly. After the game we’re headed to the school to make some mono-prints for a few hours. Jim explained to me what a mono-print is last night. I look forward to detailing this process when the day is done.

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.

Statistics report that over 20% of the deployable forces of the United States Armed Forces have some form of mental trauma, be it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Military Sexual Trauma (MST) or Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). The individuals of this 20% are still deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan multiple times under the influence of pharmaceutical grade narcotics to patrol around with guns and bullets and bombs yet people still look confused when they hear about things like kill teams, stunningly high suicide rates and an epidemic of military rape. What did you think was going to happen?

We are the Iraq Veterans Against the War, and we’re not going to let this keep happening to our brothers and sisters. Trauma is a way of life for us, but it doesn’t have to be for them.

We had gathered in front of Walter Reid, the premier hospital of the Armed Forces, to lay down yellow roses for the unlucky casualties who were trapped inside this citadel of trauma where they were enduring a kind of hurt that we’ll probably never understand. This is the anniversary of one of the two wars that ruined these people’s bodies and/or minds and we’d decided to use our lucky bodies to carry a message for them.

STOP DEPLOYING TRAUMATIZED SOLDIERS!

This is the message of Operation Recovery. We are mobilizing the anti-war movement to help us save our friends.

We carried our message for six miles on signs that I’d spray painted the day before with a hastily made stencil.  With as few people as we had (we were 10 in number) we ran the risk of embarrassment because it is an awkward thing to walk amongst the cars in traffic with signs. I had been anticipating a kind of latent shame that would arise with being so austere as to take up a whole lane of traffic for any message, but that shame never manifested. I was finally carrying a sign for a message that I believed in. Not that I don’t believe in peace and love and all that other nonsense that I’ve seen on so many signs, it’s just that those things aren’t practical. This had a sliver of practicality to it.

When you think about it, if 20% of the fighting force is on psychotropic medication why don’t the powers that be open a door for them to exit their service so that they can heal from the wounds that they’ve incurred in the service of our country? Do they really need that 20%? Isn’t one deployment enough? I was part of that 20% and I can tell you that I didn’t do my unit one bit of good. None of us did. We got into fights and picked up drug problems and criminal records and STD’s while the bridges between our families, our friends and our sense of where home was and ourselves burned down. Some might say that is just the life of a soldier.

This 20% are not the kind of people that you want walking around foreign streets with a gun. You can’t predict what this 20% will do because they don’t know what they will do themselves until they break and then the only thing left to do is react. This 20% commits suicide, shoots civilians just for fun, nourishes addictions to various drugs, drinks too much and alienates friends because this war has made us 20%ers fucking crazy. We don’t want to do it anymore. We didn’t understand the terms of our contract. Let us out. If you’re going to win this war you need professionals, not cripples and lunatics.

The march was professionally organized with sandwich breaks and all. I was disgusted to find there was such a thing as a seafood sandwich sold in a plastic bag. Everything was going fine until a K9 unit pulled up and the dog lost its shit. There has always been a tension amongst our group about some of our hobbies and this wasn’t doing my side of the argument any good. I could feel the ire of our fearless leader burning from behind me.  Did I have some un-smoked joint? Surely not. Such a thing does not exist around me. Everybody swore they were clean in whispered voices. Three canine cars circled us with their enraged hounds drawing even more attention to the spectacle we provided for the second half of our march. Even bad press is good press they say.

We made it to our destination tired but happy somewhere around right on time. After a quick rest we were standing on the steps of the Russell Senate Building. The cops were tugging at their chains to lay the law down on us by now but our legal eagles managed to keep the cop with the biggest mustache whom I took to be the leader wrapped up in chit chat long enough for us to let our speakers finish  with Jason Hurd, with his magnificent mountain man beard and all, announcing that we were putting the  policy makers involved in the Senate Armed Services Committee on watch, meaning that we would be investigating all information and records that they have related to the deployment of soldiers after diagnosis with a serious mental condition derived from combat or military sexual trauma.

We ducked off just in time to avoid a trip in the paddy wagon much to the dismay of the police officers who had worked themselves up.

We finished the day by walking through the Senate offices delivering the notices to the aides of the senators in the SASC. We were filthy, sweaty, and not exactly reeking of military bearing. The stuffy people in the building gave us bewildered smiles. Who are these freaks? I had a banana jammed into the sleeve pocket of my ACU top. TJ was wearing coveralls. I stole candy and had a hard time censoring my obscene comments. Completely unprofessional.

We made a good time of it, taking turns delivering the messages. I did an abysmal job of shpealing the talking points when delivering a message to Carl Levin, the Senator from Michigan, the state where I was born and raised. The secretary looked disappointed that I was one of his. My friends looked the same way.

I got separated from my gang for a few minutes  after a bathroom break. In my weird, nervous and filthy state I was drawing too much attention without my gaggle of friends to provide some visual context to my outfit and demeanor. The anxiety made my skin prickle. The people stared at me like I was a lunatic. I was so relieved to find them sneaking around.

This is just the beginning of a campaign that the anti-war movement has been in desperate need of. This is a cause that we can come together on. Maybe we won’t end the war, but maybe we can end the war for the wounded so that they can come home to begin the long process of recovery. We need to find out who is responsible for these practices and put pressure on them to actually enact the Support the Troops mentality that has gotten so many of these people in their offices. We are the troops even if we’re broken. Support us by letting us heal. Please.

Hundreds of signs crowded the National Mall in Washington D.C. this Saturday spreading the message that Americans need jobs, good jobs, for the One Nation march sponsored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Federation of Labor – Confederation of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). The doomed mission for the day was to send a message to the policy makers that we were hurting and we really needed them to focus on jobs.

The politicians have been hitting on jobs on every media outlet for months now. It is, as the kids say, a hot item in today’s media. The facts are in. We’re out of work.

These are days when there is a demographic known as the 99ers composed of people whose unemployment ran out after 99 weeks and they are no longer counted in unemployment statistics. Then there are people like me who haven’t held a job long enough to collect unemployment for years. Of course this doesn’t count the non-citizens and those poor souls who are employed by the military who will find that there is no civilian equivalent for the positions that they formerly held.

I’d just left the anti-war movements tiny little feeder rally a few hundred yards away in another field. The scene was all too familiar: A handful of seventies and eighties era protesters gathered happily around a stage while people took turns announcing the desperate need for the wars to end because it was wasting billions of dollars that could have been used to save us from the crushing reality of debt and poverty. Blah blah blah. We’d all heard it before. This wasn’t new information to anyone out here. This was the activists open mic.

Nobody gives a fuck about these wars anymore. People don’t have time to dream about a world without them. They are too busy wringing their hands either praying that the ax doesn’t drop on them or trying to pick up the pieces after it does.

I walked away sleepily towards the reflecting pool where the real speeches were scheduled to occur. I was growing more and more bitter about my lowly status as a very poor, very homeless young veteran. The word JOBS haunted me virulently, forcing me to break out in a cold sweat.

I had become a casualty of the recession. My resume sat unopened in email boxes around the nation. There were rumors that employers were reporting that for every posted job opening they would receive hundreds of applicants. These aren’t specialty jobs we’re talking about here. These are service jobs as cashiers and restaurant hosts. People didn’t care about what kind of work. They just wanted a job.

I was just crossing my fingers and humming the mantra of the professionally desperate: Everything is going to be ok…

JOBS!JOBS!JOBS!

A preacher man was speaking all wild about how God was going to pull us through, then he handed the mic off to some kids who called everyone to attention for the Pledge of Allegiance. I swelled with pride when I realized that I no longer remembered the lyrics. Deconstruction complete. I had to stumble for the words while dodging the signs being carelessly waved about while people talked on their cell phones and milled around the porta potties that lined the entire length of the reflecting pool. “I pledge allegiance to the… flag? Really? Of the United States of America. One Nation under the power of an imaginary man who has been absentee for generations now. “Indivisible…” With the blacks over here and the whites over here and the Latinos selling ice cream from carts… “With libertization and justification for all…” no, that can’t  be right. People seemed unambitious, pleased with the pleasant sunny day that blessed the whole protest. Maybe I was the only one who was paranoid.

While a woman murdered the National Anthem I watched slack looking cops were lazily hold assault rifles as they fixed curious eyes on me. I was sticking out some with my old Army jacket that I’ve put the Sharpie to and my big eyes darting every which way to try to take in the scene with what I can only imagine to be a most disappointed look on my face. Any authority worth their salt could tell from a mile away that I had drugs written all over me even though, at this time, I was clean.

The speakers were mostly fiery wizened black men who put the mean spin on their words, speaking with that dramatic southern diction put to work best by the Baptists. It was hard to hear what the speakers said because people were talking amongst themselves everywhere I could see but from what I heard I gathered that this wasn’t a protest, it was church in the park.

This march was unlike other marches in one major way: there were black people here. There were a LOT of black people here. The ashy and grey old activists were thoroughly outnumbered. It came as such a relief to finally attend one march that wasn’t just a bunch of white people standing around looking like they’ve had too much time on their hands. I’d been to so many rallies and protests and this was the first sign I’d seen of the two communities coming together in such large doses. More of this kind of thing would be necessary if a real movement were to occur, but, as an old meth-head told me once in a cafe in Kalamazoo at a very early hour: “People are just to barrierized. We gotta Debarrierize em.”

“We came here today because we need jobs!” Cheering. “Good jobs!” More Cheering. Yada Yada Obama. “We believe in America!” Crowd goes wild. “We believe in US!” the cheering is drowned out by a low flying plane. Are you listening Mr. Obama? I doubt it. What could you do if you were?

This is the hanging of Barrack Obama on his cross because people had mistaken him for Jesus. They expected him to save us but there was so little that could be done. The jobs had been sold off long ago. Trades have been dead for years. He took office with a tidal wave of underemployed and unemployed people knocking down the doors of DHS centers around the nation. There were so few real positions for people in an outsourced and mechanized U.S. of A. that people were reduced to accepting the unbecoming slaves of the service industry while waves of fresh faced new applicants with degrees show up in the job market every semester while the prior generation learns the reality that now-a-days jobs demand degrees, something that had not been a reality when they were in their twenties. They had walked right out of high school into work.

I met back up with my friends from the Iraq Veterans Against the War. Three of us broke off to have a “safety briefing” off in the distance near some trees in a sparsely populated area of the park. We got lost talking about Gobs, a word whose etymology began that day when, upon hearing the words God and Jobs so frequently, we coined a new word. Gobs. Noun. Godly Jobs. Verb. To do a good Gob.

We were walking back with a few bad cases of the chuckles. One of us stopped to take a picture. I looked to see what had caught her eye and I saw that there were five cops in dress gear standing at an ice cream cone. I was touched by a moment that I thought to be very ironic, but J.Hurd, a veteran with beardly wisdom, pointed out to me that those cops were not buying ice cream, they were hassling this poor man for his papers. Five cops to hassle one ice cream cart guy not one mile from the location where millions of Americans are hustled out of billions of dollars every day by people much shadier than this pour sap. Apparently they just wanted to make a point that they had jobs.

Later that day a man came by our table. He was an older black guy with a grisly face. He had two wire hangers with small pieces of tape on them. He passed these over all of our materials while shaking his head. I didn’t have the heart to ask him what he was doing. I envied him. At least he had a clear shot at a disability claim. Later, when I told J.Hurd about him he informed me that he’d also seen this man and he had actually had the nerve to ask him what was up with the hangers. He told me that the guy just pointed at the sun and said “WHATS THAT?!” so J.Hurd goes “Its the Sun, man.” Then the guy repeats “Yeah, but what’s THAT, MAN?! That’s the sun and these just two wire hangers with some tape, man.” Then the old man just walked off he recollected.

There were more crazies here than usual. The table would clog up for dozens of minutes at a time as they poked and prodded us for answers about our experiences. “Have you ever killed anybody?” “Did you see any torture there?” “Boy, I bet that really fucked you up!” “What’s Guantanamo Bay?” I was short and kind of mean. I don’t like tabling. I don’t like talking to people. I don’t like people all that much either. I mean, they’re alright, but I’ve had my fill. Please just give me good friends and let me rattle off to do my Gob.

The march would have made more of a point if it had been scheduled on a weekday. The message would be painfully obvious. It would read:

Dear Government Officials,

We came down here on a Wednesday because we had nothing better to do. We don’t have to go to work so most of the time we just sit around worrying about things. Please create more work for us so that we don’t spend our days littering in the park.

Love,

The Unemployed Masses

As the people cleared away looking stoned from a day in the sun with little to no access to drinkable water the last irony of a day spent engaged in utter futility manifested itself as a carpet of printed material as far as the eye could see. Signs, handouts, socialist newspapers, pamphlets advising better lives. JOBS!JOBS!JOBS! I laughed to myself to think about the people who would have to do the job of cleaning all this shit up. Would they be happy that they were employed and that we had ensured their jobs for another day or would they be angry that a group of people came together for the glorious purpose of wasting hundreds of pounds of paper and plastic only to be ignored by the powers that be.

Why don’t you go get a Gob you fucking hippies.

I just got back from Boo Road where I often go to tell my wild plans to the two Marines who live out there on the side of I-94 in Northern Indiana to see if they are full of bullshit, because if there is even a little bullshit in those plans I know they will, with much excitement and yelling, tell me all about the nature of that bullshit.

This scene has played itself out many times over the years that I have been taking the train out of Chicago to seek this sagely advice in the comfort of their garage from which they do their dealings. Many times I ignored their advice only to come to realize, from the rubble of another broken scheme, that they had been precise in their predictions. This is because they know me as well as you can, I think.

I’d dropped the plan on the table for dissection as soon as I walked through the sliding door of the garage.

I’m leaving town on the paper trail again (code for a tour of paper making with the Combat Paper Project) come Friday and I don’t know when I’m coming back. I’m going to be a writer.

I was prepared for the worst. My eyes shot back and forth. Sergio, untamable raw force that he is, sat quietly and looked happy, shaking his head slowly while lighting a bowl. Vinny edged forward and said “fuck yeah man, fuckin’ do it brother!” And that was that. My plan had passed the test. I was free to go.

We spent the rest of the night shooting the shit about the state of the world. It always comes back to the same thing every time. The poor are stupid and weak, activists have their heads up their asses, the CEO’s are in desperate need of killing and the only way to live anymore is to accept as a given that everything is fucked and just keep going about your awesome way into the setting of our sun. Every time we get together this is the path of our speech. The only thing that varies is how much time it takes to get to the violent parts and whether or not we make it past our daydreams of sticking a pitchfork up the asses of the people who are responsible for letting things continue to go on the way that they are.

“PTSD man.”

Another trend in our conversations has started to come up over and over again now that the boys have girlfriends. Lately we’ve been finding ourselves talking more and more about how much whoring we’ve done and why we’ve done it. We are as honest as we are vulgar in our assessments. Vinny and I got into a little scuffle over whether it was worst to sleep with hundreds of women one night at a time or to take my preferred road of breaking hearts. We all decided that to even have such a conversation says too much about us.

We chain smoked cigarettes and the medicine late into the night.

Sergio brought me into town today. We were talking about life on a spaceship while he sped through Mordor, USA (Gary, In) towards Chicago.

We spent the morning in the VA. I nervously bound my fingers together while his girlfriend Morgan and I sat in the lobby, waiting for a filing cabinet to fly out of the door. Sometimes the boy Hulks out. This trip went by very calmly.

Now I’m back at Aaron’s place packing up my things into a duffel bag and a suitcase wondering at how now even this is normal. Once again I am leaving yet I feel nothing. What happened to the rush? Now that this is just a way of life I have grown to take advantage of its charms.

I am lost in the proverbial shit. Job loss bombshells explode right next to me and all around me the fires of unemployment in unprecedented scales are raging. The difficulty of just surviving has made this city mean. Meaner than she has ever been. We fight an invisible enemy on battlefields both outside and inside of ourselves. Our will to survive has made us hard.

But not me. I am as cowardly as ever, completely unwilling to deal with this battle. I never wanted to be a part of this war in the first place. I would rather be comfortable, employed, self-reliant and content. Instead I am forced by circumstance to be a nervous wreck constantly dreading the falling of some ax. It is an ax that has fallen on me thrice before because I never really got back from that other war that we occasionally hear about on the television.

I can hear, in the distance, the beating wings of my rescue chopper coming to save me. Beat, Beat, Beat they say and my heart whispers the words to itself. I picture the faces of its pilots serene and at peace with the task at hand. We will survive the battle, but the war, however, will likely consume us whole.

I have been on a lonely mission here for months. It is an important mission that came from the highest of command. It read: URGENT – WRITE BOOK! And so I have been. The task is almost complete, though the enemy closes in around me.

As of this very moment I am hiding in a laundramat while my uniforms tumble around in a dryer. I am stoned as hell and in a compromised position, outside of my doors in the land where money is spent. Money… When will it finally be destroyed?

They have caught on to me. They fired me from the job that I was holding. I guess they could tell that I was one of them. Maybe they could smell Resistance. Anyways, it woke me up quickly to the knowledge that they were on to me and I could not continue to try to act like one of them anymore. I took the last of that resource which they have an iron grip on and fled back to the safety of Brother Bird’s apartment to create an exit strategy.

As luck would have it, or rather as command saw fit, the Rescue Chopper was on its way, this time disguised as a van full of papermaking equipment and typewriters. I was to rejoin Alpha Squad. Directives are sparse, but it seems that we will be going South. Operation Snow Bird. I am to take the book with me like some magical key that will finally fit into its perfect place. I guess I will only know it when it happens.

I will perform my usual function with Alpha Squad. I am the Communications expert. I have undergone years of specialized training in not only this field, but also the field of Freak Paper Making on the run. I am what we call in the service a lean, mean, communicating and paper making machine.

I learned from the best.

There is no rank structure in Alpha Squad because we are all members of the E4 Mafia which takes no direction from anyone. Ever. In fact this is almost its only rule which in itself is a paradox.

There are only specialties.

D.Bob, for instance, is our resident weapons master. He is a mad scientist of all things paper making and printing. If it is a process he has already mastered it and the ability to teach others to use it. He is an idea man of the highest caliber who, when plied with booze, is capable of crafting an absolutely outlandish idea that just might work.

If we were the X-Men D.Cam would be our Cyclops. He is the essence of a leader. I know that this contradicts my earlier statement that there is no hierarchy in the E4 Mafia, but personality types will arise and the role of the leader is more of a job than a particular power.

Our beloved Medic , Dr. Wright (who, I should not, is not actually a doctor) has fixed us all when we were fucked up from the combination of many spinning sharp things and the drugs which always seem to be around us at all times, whether they be alcohol, marijuana or hallucinogens. We have had many casualties.

JT is our paranormal specialist who battles things in planes that we cannot see but which are no less relevant when it comes to personal safety.

There are many people who have worked with Alpha Squad during hectic missions. They are either lone operatives in the war against Money and War or part of some other elite group which gets missions sent to it from different sectors of Command.

What we do happens so fast that people often have no idea what has happened around them. We leave behind us a trail of paper and other artifacts of our profession. Most importantly our mission is to activate a self destruct sequence inside of the programming that the military industrial complex implanted in us as if we were lab rats.

It all starts with scissors and the simple act of cutting up a uniform that defined an identity. It is the identity that we wish most to destroy. This is the initial labor. It is not only the hardest part physically, but also mentally. There is a lot of anger inside of that fabric.

The fibers are then soaked with water, the most beautiful substance on the planet which lubricates all life and which is so often polluted. Then they are shredded to their most basic element in the Beater. The machine destroys what the Machine has made.

Finally the process is completed when the soldier makes something beautiful out of the waste of this process which has consumed their lives.

If we were successful in our mission the virus has been set in place and activated and it is only a matter of time and luck that it will destroy that program which makes it impossible to live and to love and to create because these are things that a machine cannot do, and the program that we are hoping to destroy, forever if we do our jobs right, has turned us all into machines.

And then we are gone, whisked away in the chopper to fight again another day.

(This was produced as an article for “The Veteran.”)

It is easy for a veteran to go homeless. All it takes is a few questionable decisions, or worst, mistakes, and suddenly one can find yourself very free of the normal economic bracket. I didn’t find it hard at all. The hard part comes when you fall out of the habit of paying rent, having a job and bills and organizing your life to suit the modern world’s demands and you still find yourself trapped in a system, but it is a much more strenuous and uncomfortable one.

In this way the rebellion of the homeless vet becomes allegorically intertwined with the story of Lucifer and his Fallen Angels who were thrown from the graces of God through a hole in the floor of heaven into a substrata of existence, Hell. After the rebellion the demons, under the leadership of Lucifer, found themselves again entangled in God’s all encompassing plan. Like a demon, the homeless vet soon finds that they are every bit as bound up in the economic plan as they ever were, but now at the high cost of damnation. Homeless Hell is a mile long line outside of the Salvation Army in the early fall sleet with a hand rolled cigarette dangling out of your mouth while you smoke and think about how you’ve got nowhere else to go and nobody left to care about you when you get there.

Worst, in this twisted metaphor, is that the homeless vet is left to prostrate themselves while still in the presence of the system that they left with all of its fancy expensive food and cups of coffee that take five minutes to order. It is as if Hell and Heaven all happened in the same place, yet the demons and the angels of this world barely even see each other, as if some inconquerable divide seperated them.

I don’t want to be homeless any more. I don’t want to rebel against the plan. I want to go back to the plan. I want a job and a house of my own. I want to be able to buy fancy food and smoke manufactured cigarettes fresh out of the pack, but once you go through that hole in the floor there is no turning back.

Its always some problem. Where you going to get the money? First month and security deposit. One thousand dollars. You need a job but you’ve got no dress clothes for the interview, you smell like stale smoke, dirty feet and infrequently washed clothing that has spent some time in some filthy places. There is dirt on you you can’t clean off. If you get the job you will still have that swagger, that attitude, because after all of that time being your own person out there where nobody cares about you probably changed into a much meaner, much more survival oriented version of your former self. And where in the Hell are you going to live while you work? What will you eat?

There are programs, which you will have figured out. Foodstamps, rent assistance, things like that. The food stamps are easy to get but hard to spend because you don’t have a kitchen to cook your food in but at least you can eat. You got to dance for the rent money, though. They want you to have a job, but they also want to see you in their office once a week so that you can fill out a stack of papers. If you’re homeless chances are you were never very good with papers to begin with. Then you have to find a land lord that also wants to fill out a bundle of papers and then wait for the VA to finally send them some money. I dropped out of the HUD/VASH program after all the ride requests destroyed my relationship with the woman who was letting me stay with her.

Long story short, it is an impossibly long road back from the streets and nobody from the MGMT is going to help you out. The independent will that forced you through the hole in Heavan’s floor in the first place continues to gnaw at your soul, making you angry and the constant need is making you crazy and that makes the chances of getting a job ever slimmer.

Everything is looking in my favor. I’ve got part of an education. I’m smart and young and my muscles still work. I am not addicted to any serious drugs or alcohol. I have a good record. No trouble with the law. Honorable Discharge. I’m not even all that dirty. I still have my friends and they don’t let me sleep on the street. They say that it takes eight years to burn our all of your bridges and I’ve only been at it for two so the fires have only barely begun. But I still can’t seem to figure it out.

I thought that it would be fun and that I would be free and that when I wanted to come back it would be easy. I thought it would just happen like magic and that I could be the person that I was before the Fall. I would tell all the other Fallen Angels who were riding on the many Greyhounds that carried us between our failures past and our failures to be that I was going to be a writer some day and they would tell me their pipe dreams but there was always this feeling in my stomach and presumably theirs that we will never make it out of this condition alive because we bear the mark of the malcontent.

There is no freedom here. Everything has been accounted for in “the Plan” and behind every alluring glimpse of autonomy is the crushing reality of heteronomy and for our fundamental lack of responsibility to the whole we are left to occupy the many layers of hell whose boundaries are marked only by paperwork and the refuse of our vices. We stare in rheumy eyed disbelief that the Makers of this Plan could have built us to rebel with such a bitter punishment as a “reward” for doing what we were made to do.

I saw the outline of my evil wife’s body from miles away. She is a horrible brick bitch who will tear your heart out and feed it to some yuppy skank for thirty dollars a plate while looking you in the eyes with a look that says “all your dreams are bullshit, go get a fucking job.”

Chicago. I hate you.

When you’re with her in the sun she holds your sweaty hand and she says “trust me… I am not crazy.” So you trust her and you make plans for her and before you know it she owns you. Then one day this cloud pulls in over your head as if an unworldly space ship is pulling into place just above the skyscrapers which look like they fell into place in a game of Tetris that the Gods were playing while they were ignoring their responsibility to make the world a place that is worth living in. A chill will pass by you then and that chill will cut through all of your clothes and you can be assured that your good times are over.

You keep your job in the hopes that one day the relationship will get better and for seven or eight months you sit under the weight of this fucking space ship and you think: if this shit doesn’t change I will have to leave, but you’re never going to leave.

To leave her one must amass an energy efficient enough to break her inertia and that task takes the giant engines of planes all working in unison. The bus won’t take you fast enough and the train leaves you linearly connected straight to the center of her heart and she will call and call until you come back, but when you come back, sun or not, she will never be the same again.

You can try to fix the love, but that shit is never going to come back.

I am in a cafe now listening to the idle chatter of hipsters, of which I have no shame in admitting that I am one. The bike rack out front is an ever rotating show of fixed gear force, at any one time bolstering upwards of five thousand dollars worth of bike. The machines make noise, the till opens again and again, and none of us are doing anything worth speaking about.

The best part of this relationship is that, in the absense of love one is left with a bizarre kind of loneliness which might be akin to the kind that John the Baptist felt though there are no trees to speak of here. There is only concrete and brick and unhappy people unhappily working to unhappily spend their money in dirty bars on cheap beer when they are done.

You can lose yourself here, and if your head is on right and you walk long enough you can get so lost that the whole place becomes a kind of spectacle unlike any other, especially when you factor in how medicated all of the people are and how antiquated any place of production is. This place was built to produce, but now it only consumes. In that way it is like the spirit of America.

It is like the spirit of America in more ways than that though. For instance: it is too busy for you, its plate is simply too full. It is built for utilitarian purposes but exploited as an object of luxury. It drips grease and oil and other contaminants without concern into every edge of “nature” that it touches. These are all purely American values.

I came here out of compulsion and need. There was little, if any, want in the decision.

I am holing up on the floor of Brother Bird’s apartment and I will not leave until my book is written because, to be frank, I am sick of my own voice constantly spewing all of this bullshit about something that I am not sure that I can do, so I will just do it to have it done.

I spent the day on the telephone calling every company I could stomach the idea of working for and I think that I found a position doing the exact same thing, in the exact same place, I was before I left on this crazy mission across the country to accrue stories.

Having completed that mission I spent the next two hours on the modern version of an international telephone talking to a girl who stole a feature role in my life whom I left waiting in Brighton with a list of apologies and a sweatshirt that smelled like me. It seems that she stopped waiting. I do not care. I will continue to build my nest for her because that has been my mission since I left her and I know that this is what I want to do because I am stubborn and cannot let something go until it is done.

I was a fool and I got lost. I thought she would always be there… but that is not the case.

Maybe she will come back… maybe she will ask me to come back to her. Whatever the condition of our reunion I will not stop living in this fever dream of the time that we spent with her, nurturing its every fledgling breath with dream food and nonsense because it is the best dream that I have ever had.

I renounce the normal world. I will devote my life to being a space car driver. I will live in a dream until the rational world kills me and in that way I will be a martyr for a cause that never mattered to anybody but me.

Long live the individual story and the hope for a world outside of the boring parameters of this concrete shithole that we find ourselves in day in and day out.

Some days you wake up, and you’re laying there, and the sun is shining and you know that everything is going to work out just fucking fine.

Yesterday afternoon the management at the paper studio sat me down and told me that they could get me enough money for rent, but that was it. They couldn’t take me on, they couldn’t pay me. My boss looks at me with this real frustrated look knowing damn well that I had no idea what I was going to do. His bizarre paper making elf that had just magiked into his shop had to pay bills like everyone else. I told him with eyes lowered, not really believing what has become my personal mantra, that everything will work out. It always does.

Otis has been on hard times before and I always said it was going to work out and it always worked out. But its a hard life always saying that things will work out, always making up for some unbeatable obstacle laying infuriatingly in my way.

I’d said it so many times the words didn’t make sense, they were just the sounds of me accepting the fucked up reality that surrounded my day dreams.

Everything is going to work out.

And then today. Fucking today.

Woke up late and started looking for places to stay knowing that if I didn’t get a place soon I was going to start burning my bridge to The Flower. By two we were smoking a joint outside of a two story house with a furnished room for rent. By two-thirty I was shaking hands with my new roomate.

Already the feeling of having a space of my own was boiling my blood. How many months have I been on the road with only my bag and my banjo to call my home with that constant nagging neurosis: but where will you live? Will you live in your bag forever?

I went to the bank to cash the check that I’d been given for a promise that I would make money for the Book Arts Center. I got nervous because the downtown Kalamazoo bums were eyeball fucking my new wad of money so I asked to speak to a desk person to extend my stay so that some of these mongrels might not patiently wait for me to leave the building to mug me and leave my pretty body all broken up in some bush with no money for an apartment.

So there I was with this brutal, imaginary, and kind of racist scene playing in my head and there is this smiling midwestern woman looking at me from the other side of a desk. She’s looking at my file and she whispers “Otis, Otis, Otis, what are we going to do with you? When are you going to settle down?” like some mystic reading a crystal ball. She knows I’m a no-good.

I ask her what she means and she turns the screen to me to show a history of transactions across the states and, for a few months, across the sea. She flips through my passport, my only form of ID. In this way I had gathered another mother to worry about me. This is probably the skill that comes easiest to me: inspiring the fear and anxiety of mother-hens.

She cleared my debt to the bank because she was the sweetest old lady that could be and sent me skipping happily out of the building.

I was walking in the sun, thinking about how good this day had gotten and then I smelled this smell. It was the smell of shirts cooking in a dryer. It was the smell of a screen printing operation. I walked a few steps onward and then turned around.

I walked into that building and I say I’m looking for a job. I tell the lady I’m a veteran. Then I’m talking to this old guy with a firm handshake and he’s asking me about my experience and I’m telling him about the schools and the paper and the printmaking and the making diy screen printing spaces. I tell him about the Army and how good of a worker I am.

He shook my hand.

An hour later I was on the phone with him and he says he wants me in tomorrow at 9:30.

I know that to have a job and an apartment are normal things and that there is no cause for joy to acquire these two things which modern people just ought to have, but this was something else to me. This was something decidedly more grand than just normal business to me.

Its been two years since I’ve worked and three since I’ve had my name signed on any contract. I’ve been, by choice or laziness or bad economy or by a combination of all of these factors, completely free of contracts and I feared them like a devil or an STD.

It had gotten to the point where I couldn’t be happy, couldn’t be proud, because I was always dependent on someone else’s pocket, someone else’s money. I wanted to be free from money but there is no such thing as free from money. My ideals lead me into a false narrative that I couldn’t escape from and my romantic dalliance with homelessness left me chronically unemployable.

But that has changed now. As of tomorrow I’m a working man of the getting paid variety which is so much more preferable than the kind of working man who does intangible work that is decidedly “good” in nature but which does not pay.

I am a part of your club now. I am like you. I am fulfilling the obligation that one must earn one’s daily bread like my old man taught me.

You don’t know what you have until you lose it is what they always say. Enjoy the comfort of your home and your job. You don’t know how scary it is out here without them.

“Never minded working hard, its who I’m working for” (Gillian Welch)

Where was the discipline? I don’t know. Lost temporarily I guess.

I think I found it again in my sleep. Somewhere in the happenings of that twelve hours which seemed busier than my day I must have remembered how to do things right.

When The Flower got home from work I was already up and I tried to scare her. I don’t know why the impulse struck me. She took it well. She said she could smell me. Then she suggested that we go play music with our tap-dancing friend and his friend.  So I got all my fingerpicks and my slide and my banjo and we got in the car and it was grey.

I rolled my first blunt this morning. It was easier than I had expected it to be.

After that the music just kind of happened.

Our tap-dancing friend played the drums and his friend played the keyboard and sang and I sat in my cowboy coat and played everything I’d been too scared to play before and it felt really good because I couldn’t even hear myself so it was just all about feeling my fingers on the strings and going for the most intuitive feel and it felt free and it felt good.

I played everybody the cadence song and they made it sound really good, especially with Two-Shoes on the drums.

Then The Flower dropped me off at the studio and I spent two hours separating middle-school kid’s sheets that were just smashed together in these cubes of pulp and I had to be so delicate just to not ruin these crazy, awkward sheets. Then I had to clean off all the shit that they used so that my studio doesn’t look like a bunch of kids work in here.

I’m a fucking professional. This shop is like my science lab. People look at this shop because its right there and if it looks fucked up, I look fucked up. I don’t want to look fucked up. So its really a matter of discipline. Push myself that extra mile to make sure that it looks like somebody who works in  here cares. Not only do I have to prove to my bosses that I am a competent paper maker, I’ve got to prove to myself that I can actually excel at at least one thing.

I need this place now. I don’t think that I could live without what it is giving to me. There is that feeling when I walk in and crank the top of the dryer stack open and I pull out all of yesterdays sheets and I’m just looking at them and I know that they are only there because I did everything it took to put them there, even though it often feels like I don’t do anything.

I’m not even getting paid for this. Its as if some crazy person walked in off the streets and just started working in this under utilized space and the owners just tolerate it.

At least I have proven that it is beneficial for them to tolerate it. By it I mean me. It is beneficial to tolerate me.

I painted their floors and triple caulked where the floor meets the wall so that we don’t flood our neighbors studio and I’ve made enough good sheets that they made two journals out of it and gave it to professional paper-makers.

Now I’m using this insane machine that the dead man who built this studio made to make giant sheets of pure white cotton paper.

The machine is a box mold and deckle that is suspended in water by ropes on pulleys which connect to a foot pedal which raises all four corners at the same time. Before you raise it you have to fill the box with water and then enough pulp to make a sheet. You stir the water with your hands, or “charge the vat” while the mold is submerged and then you stand up on the pedal and the whole thing comes up out of the water. The sheet of paper is sucked to the bottom. You gotta take the bottom out (don’t even want to try to explain this process) and then slide your new sheet out of this box with about a half an inch of clearance.

Keep in mind that this screen and sheet now weigh probably 25 pounds and your arms are spread out like a bird and you’re picking things up and moving shit and there is this dangling box that is only kept up by your foot that’s gonna smash down when you step away, and there you are with this giant dripping sheet.

Then you have to get that fucking thing unto the felt which has about a half an inch of play on either side before you spill over.

Then you cover that sheet with a felt and you do it all over again.

I got to be pretty good at it. It takes quite a while, but there are eight good sheets of that stuff drying a few feet away from me at this very moment. I had to stop because there aren’t any more drying felts. Those fucking kids got them all.

Tomorrow.

I did it all right today. Cleaned everything down. I left the space looking like it should look when somebody uses it. Its a good feeling to know, confidently, that you’ve proven yourself good at your word and done things by the books.

I did cheat a little. They want me to wash the felts before I hang them up which I would gladly do if I weren’t going to use them again tomorrow. But I am. So I just wash them when I use them. They have a point. They should be clean for other people to use, but I have felts all cleaned up for other people. These ones are my babies. I scrubbed em, I cut em, and they’ve worked for me fine.

Otis Mixon is a workin man.

Last night I went for a late night walk with a joint in my hand. I walked by the East Campus with its creepy old unused beauty and all of the nostalgia I have tied there, then ended up at the all night cafe purchasing a coffee with nickels and dimes at midnight. I felt paranoid and weird so I ran out, back into the streetlight color show that was going on all night.

The trees have just started blooming and there are flowers of all kinds around in multitudes so that a person, properly stoned, can occupy themselves quite nicely walking around with their head lifted to the few stars and the too intense to believe hue of a spring that has sprung.

Strange old black men asked me for cigarettes and chatted me up about why I was out on the streets by myself while they rolled my tobacco and I told them that I liked to walk and smoked my own cigarette.

I went back to the studio, just to look at it one more time. Make sure everything was right. I made sure the back door was locked.

I brought a stack of paper home and I sat on the couch for two hours staring into it trying to coerce it to tell me what it should be but nothing happened. No lights lit. Now the paper is laying on the floor, crumpled underneath my banjo carelessly laid on top of all those beautiful sheets.

The night was a weird night and I laid awake in bed alone and wondered what I was doing. Why do I always feel so strange, as if I couldn’t possibly hold things together for much longer? I was thinking about how I walked into this gas station and I felt like I feel a thousand times a day, this overwhelming feeling that I didn’t understand anything about this place and I felt prickly and like I just wanted to run out of the building. I wanted to be alone.

I always want to be alone.

That’s why I went out looking for studio apartments with The Flower today.

I found one. It is a tiny little room that looks out over a dirt parking lot with a small kitchen that looks like the kind of place a lonely old man would live. Its one room looks to be the old mud room. Its saving grace is a bookshelf nook and neat bathroom lights. I had a hard time imagining the space actually working in any aesthetic manner but its only 350 a month. Right?

The best part is that the place is only a few feet away from the all night cafe so I will be able to widdle away my wild hours in the absurdity of late night talks with methheads. One such methhead blew my mind with a long, beautiful manifesto for “debarrierization.” Simple. Oh meth.

I lived in a house across the street when I got back from my deployment. I spent a summer smoking cigarettes in a slow and meloncholly love affair with a southern belle named Jen. Jen the girl who was like a ghost, who never said a word. Every time I see that place I feel haunted by Jen and those months we spent together. We were so sad then.

Where has my head been?

I came into the shop waving around a cup of coffee that I’d been walking around with for the whole afternoon. One of my bosses was sticking stamps on mailouts. She looked at me with that look like there were uncomfortable things to talk about.

She spent the next hour parading me around my mistakes showing me how terrible the condition of the studio was. She was right. There was pulp all over this beautiful, handmade mould and deckel and pulp all over this weird machine that the man who’d built the studio had made. She showed me all of the places inside of the beater where she’d found pulp.

I was pissed. First at her for looking at this guy who’s been working in her studio for free for the last month for free, painting the floor, organizing the space, utilizing the space, making paper for their projects.

But then I was pissed at me. She was right. She had me. I was irresponsible. I should have done something better and I didn’t. “No Fucking Discipline!” quoth the Sergio.

I told her that I didn’t know what to say. I told her I would fix it. I’d do it better.

I felt this tingling anger/anxiety that I get any time anybody tries to correct me. I’m a very defensive animal. I felt stupid and scolded. But that old military thing that I learned, that thing that happens and I know that there’s no sense being all sensitive, just correct the behavior and move on, that happened.

I can keep the shop clean.

I told her my head has been in a cloud just trying to get the pulp mixtures and sheet formation to turn out right and I hadn’t even really stopped to think about these things.

I felt so gross.

I helped her finish her stamp project and then I cleaned everything up and walked out into the grey humidity of the valley fondling the hope that some day soon I might have a place to call my own for the first time in a long time. Imagining all the things that I could put on the wall. Lamps. Where will I get a good lamp? Where am i going to get a bed?

Rebuilding my nest after two years is a bigger task than I had imagined it to be. Now I see myself sleeping on a cot like some kind of neuvo hobo buddha with whatever food I could buy with my foodstamps but no pots or pans with which to cook it.

All I need is a place to put my body.

I put it in this town. I love this town.

I think that at the heart of all sentimentality is a fear of insensitivity, that lingering fear that we might not be feeling things like we should. Maybe our feelings are broken?

There were times in my life when I knew I should be feeling something, something more than what I felt, which felt like nothing at the time, and I was scared, but those were hard times for everyone I could see.

The world was such a hard place then.

Sentimentality only made those awful days longer. So I shut it off. I zoned out. And now I fear that maybe I cannot feel. Maybe I am a sociopath. I can’t turn it on, I can’t zone in.

So I reconstruct the ingrained sentiment that got burned into every fiber of that suit that I wore which was there every day, impartially soaking up the morbid sun and all of those prayers which wavered out to sea, addressed to a God who still has yet to come. The green suit. The orange suit. We were at war.

The fiber was as much a slave as I was. It was only there because I had gotten us into this mess with my hasty contract signing. The fiber was the most virtuous in our twisted war story.

To liberate the rag and that sentiment, those feelings which ought to have been felt, which are there by way of infusion, that is my goal. I will accomplish it with scissors and water and my hands.

Destroy it, and as it turns to pieces, smell the sun and the cigarettes and the racist jokes and the homophobia and the cordite and the prayer oil and the oc spray and all those hot nights alone staring out over what can happen here because we are insane and thinking blankly that surely this is all absurd.

Reconstruct the sentimental fibers into paper, in the shape of my story, as a vessel for it’s own story.

The stories, the paper, floats out over the ocean like a prayer or a styrafoam cup or a passengerless airplane, a mute gesture made in vain towards a cruelly fair universe in which we’ve created our own hell. The gesture reads: “I can see that you’ve given me these lemons… well…”

It is a story that only me and my uniform know, and the uniform is the only one of us that isn’t a liar.

SPC Mixon

I was a twister of anxiety and the medicine on Friday morning, standing at the Greyhound terminal with no confirmation code and a half ounce of the same medicine I was twisted on stowed in my banjo case wearing my linen jacket, looking too damn fancy to be a drug dealer. Chicago bound.

It took cell phones and email accounts and all kinds of business to get that code but finally I was sitting on the bus, bolt upright, staring out the window at how much Michigan has grown since the last time I was on that nasty 94, eating pieces of lunch meat and thinking.

The bus disgorged chaotically as always on Harrison and I walked the short leg over to Greek Town where I was checking in to the hostel for the IVAW midwest strategy retreat. Brother Bird was parked in the middle of the road when I got there. Some biker and a big macho greek dude were fighting. It was sticky hot. Brother Bird and I unloaded all our shit unto the side walk.

This was it. We were ready. Another weekend of PTSD. Bring it on.

We checked in and got our big luxurious room. I took my medicine on the roof looking towards downtown. Over the next twelve hours a continuous train of Midwestern veterans came through the door. A mellow, lanky fellow name of Will was the first to show. Got in on the train from Kansas. Sergio burst through the door a little after Will so we started to drinking and smoking.

A couple of dirty hippies drove up in a car and came in, said they were from Arkansas. They proceeded to get into the shower together, all three of them. Said it’d been a long trip. Couldn’t help but notice that the gentleman had brought another banjo.

When they got out of the shower we got to playing the banjo and then this crazy laid back dude from Columbus comes in and says his names Ash and he’s got a banjo too so the three of us are sitting there pickin and grinnin and the hippy girls are dancing around and we’re all so full of medicine and booze that that night was pretty near perfect.

I stayed up drinking and talking to Nate about making paper until about six oclock in the morning. I was going to pull an  all nighter. I kept reminding everyone that I had promised to feed my friends cats. I was going to take the train and feed them before breakfast… but that never happened. I passed out after smoking a joint in the sunrise.

The next day we woke up and cooked breakfast together. My stomach was too crazy from the night before. The whole day I was drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and that was pretty much it.

We sat in the grass and we talked about what it was we were trying to do here in the Midwest as veterans and anti-war organizers and we filled a bunch of really big pieces of paper with our ideas and our hopes and we talked about things like strategy and history. I got pretty bored so I wandered back to my banjo and the half eaten kiesh that was in the fridge in the room.

Everybody rolled into the apartment a few hours later and there was the beer and the medicine and all of that chatter. We were all having a good time. I talked with some guy, can’t remember his name now, for a long time about religion. I love talking about Christianity. I like the stories, I like the characters, I like Lucifer the best.

The next day we were all stone cold whooped. We wrote some poetry on the campus and at one time I looked down and my clumsy ass had left half an ounce of weed sitting right out on the grass. Careless.

I led a roadmarch down to the bean in Milllenium Park which gave me a seething acid hole in my stomach from all of the planning and the changes and the stress of leadership but then, by 3, there we were, down by the bean with cigarettes and food and the sun and this little old man who told us not to sit on the table but Mikey Apples wanted to sit on the bench anyway.

We split again and met back up in Wicker Park and then all of those goodbyes, waiting like band-aids, just got ripped off all at the same time and we were all individuals again. I was heading to Indiana in a car with Vinny because I’d lost my return ticket in the haze. We had to turn around because I forgot the M-16 as well.

When we got to the outlaw shack we smoked until we were stupid. That weekend had been about as crazy as they get and Vinny said that when he got there he could tell by the crazy look in my eye that it had been wild and when he saw everybody else he knew that he’d missed most of a real spectacle. We pushed this this to it’s limits on booze and grass and caffiene, soaking as much comfort out of our community as we could before we all went back to being islands in this culture desert where the apocolypse is growing inside of an egg in Detroit.

The next day was our beloved holiday, the twentieth of April, and how we celebrated. Vinny and I went antique shopping. Vinny found what was obviously some dopers drug box and took great joy in opening it’s lid and pointing at the mirror to me. He meant to indicate that we could do blow off of it. He looked at me like he wondered if I got it. Of course I got it. So did the lady who was ringing us up who now stared at us like we were sticking her up. I laughed. We were too stoned to do anything.

WDF came down and we all had a nice time making a big meaty dinner and eating it. By the end of the night I was on my haunches on the kitchen floor, ravenously eating a rib like some feral and insane monkey.

We took off the next morning and The Flower did all the driving all the way back up to the zoo. I went down to the paper studio as soon as we got in and started making sheets. My first batch was as fucked up and useless as my brain had become over the weekend. I could see that I’d have to rebuild my studio mentality.

Went back to it today and I made some beautiful, huge sheets.

There’s a lot of unwinding that I need to do.

-Otis

They told me that they wanted the sheets thinner, the pulp finer, the edges more consistent. We stood, all three of us, looking over the sheets that I had made the week prior shaking our heads. None of us believed that I could do what I told them I had come here to do.

I called myself a paper maker, but this cardboard in front of us was not the work of an artist. It was the work of a sloppy, speedy amateur. And we all knew it. What a drag, standing there with no excuses.

Today, for whatever reason, it all clicked into place. The fibers were finer. There were no clumps. The edges on the sheets were crisp and I took the time to rub the extra pulp from the sides. In a few sheets I figured out the way to couch the sheets unto the felts (which were nice and clean because I’d washed them) and I felt very satisfied because all of the sheets were the same, yet each had it’s own quirk, it’s own window into my impatience. Paper Makers Tears they call them.

I took my time but eventually the trashcan that was full of pulp when I started was empty and I had a stack of sixty sheets of paper and I was sure that they were the best paper I’d ever made.

When I got them out of the press, while I picked their fragile bodies up to place them lovingly but efficiently in the stack drier, I could see and I could feel that I had learned something very important today. The sheets were so thin that they were warping rather severely in this last stage of the process but I didn’t care. I’ll make them thicker next time. Beat the pulp less long so that the fibers are longer. (The fibers were so short today that there is a chance that I have made the fanciest batch of handmade paper towels ever)

Learning.

I must discipline the muscle and the mind until perfection is in the memory of my finger tips. Same as banjo picking and drawing and writing and bike riding. Same as everything. You can learn how to do anything, you just have to watch what you’re doing and understand what you’re trying to do and learn to adjust your habits until they are the right habits and then you force your body to learn those habits like instinct. Then you’ve mastered some shit.

The Drews tell me that paper making has a short learning curve with a cap. In other words, it is something that you learn quickly but which has a finite limit to what there is to know.

That is only in the matter of technique of course. In the matter of sentiment, there is as much room in a sheet of paper for infinite values as any other medium of art.

It depends upon the fiber that you use.

If you want to make perfect paper, you have to find the perfect fibers.

I came home and cleaned the beautiful studio apartment where I’m staying with the well defended flower and for a few minutes while I washed the dishes with the sun pouring into the sink on my hands and my face, barefoot with pulp in my bike chain bracelet, my banjo sunning itself lazily in the living room after our afternoon delight i could swear that i was a happy man.

Fuck all that city noise and all those city people. Who needs them. I want a quiet place where I can live lazily and comfortable, where I can make things and play my banjo in the sun and walk to the all night coffee shop down the road with a joint in my hand, reviewing some facet of my life story for the thousandth time.

I’ll be taking the dirty dog into the city again to meet with dozens of veteran dissenters, swimming hazily in cigarette smoke while my brain chokes on the horrible gravity of war as seen in the trembling fingers of those destroyed few who fought it and lost something inside of themselves, now illuminated in philosophical babble we drift together and our independent ptsd’s snap and snarl at the ptsds of others.

We almost always make music during these affairs. My banjo and I have needed some time to cut loose with a few others. Our solo career is drawing towards the boring side.

WDF came home for a while and I was all weird and distant. We danced around each other in the clean kitchen for a while and neither of us knew why I couldn’t look her in the eyes. It’s just because I’m sick we both say to ourselves.

She doesn’t fuck around, that girl. She tells it how she sees it, which is almost never in my favor, she’s so good at seeing what I’m doing wrong. It works. It feels like it works. I don’t know. I’ve had dreams and fantasies before but I know how they all worked out in the end.

Maybe they just weren’t the right stories, or they were right for the time. There are so many different ways of looking at things it all just becomes a matter of spin really.

No word from the VA. When, dearest phone, will you ring with that one call that I need so desperately. I still have nothing, no money, no job, no plan but for that one ridiculous plan that I always have. Just me and my banjo and a love story and a bunch of handmade paper.

The sickest part is that I don’t give a damn. It’s been two years since I’ve had a penny to my name that I didn’t have to bum from a friend. I made it through Europe for six months and I left with 100 dollars in my pocket. I’m going to make it through just fine.

I always do.

Otis Mixon out.