Category Archives: Provisional Relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our hostel was smelly and again overly crowded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We were standing around a rental car outside of Nick’s apartment near the Circus. The noise was incredible. I took long, hungry drags on my cigarette while D.Cam and I poured over the map of England. This was going to be crazy.

We had to go all the way north to Scotland. North Scotland. Then Glasgow. Then Belfast. The driver’s seat was on the wrong side of the car. The car was too full of shit. D.Bob was too sick to be in an enclosed space with. Too many factors.

Nick finished the last of his worrying and before I knew it London was thinning out into field land as my hand cruised the wind like an airplane out of the window. Off we go.

the UK, from top to bottom, is really only about as large as Michigan, maybe a little bigger. The drive seemed intimidating because we were crossing the whole country in one sitting, but  I am an expert navigator and D.Cam is a race car driver. We made good time.

Along the ride D.Bob got a text message on our only phone. He read it out loud. It said “Fuck you. You’re just another whore. Nina” I was pretty confused. I was the only boy with a Nina and yes she did have the number. What had I done? Then in a gas station, after a long joking period, D.Bob reread the message and realized that it was from Ina who was HIS girlfriend. I laughed so hard. D.Bob did too. We’d both been whores, it was true, and we both had it coming, so when it did come for either of us it was only fair to laugh and learn lessons.

Don’t ever trust an artist on the run.

We got to our little town in Scotland, somewhere north of Edinburgh. We got lost trying to find the driveway to our accommodations for the evening. We finally found our place. I was, again, completely unprepared for what I saw.

In the middle of a picturesque forest there was a vast trailer park, all of the trailers new and shiny, and in the middle of this park there was a castle. Not knowing where else to go we headed towards the castle as it was safe to assume that that was where the management of this facility would be found. I was very excited that we’d be staying in a trailer. When we walked into the castle we found a grumpy old butler type who told us that we were very late. He handed us a set of keys and some towels and told us that our room was upstairs. What? We get to stay in the castle? I was too pleased.

I raced up the stairs like a little kid. The room was huge and well equipped. It looked like a very fancy persons home. I sat down and immediately began to type on the typer in the living room which had an archer’s perch for a window. The Drews went down to the bar on the first floor.

I came down a little later to find D.Cam at the center of a small riot while D.Bob shuffled up to bed. I went out to the patio to see what the score was. D.Cam had found a whole gaggle of old people who live here. Their accents were thick and sloppy and there were all kinds of glasses and bottles on the table. D.Cam was drinking whiskey. I was offered a drink. From there things get hazy.

We ended up going to a few of the trailers, drinking something that burned severely in one trailer, only to end up in another which had a five gallon container of vodka with a novelty pump like the kind that dispenses ketchup. There were about ten of us in this trailer and we were being a little rowdy. The owner of the home sat at the pump all night just pumping away. There were vodka drinks of all kinds going around.

Time passed in a blur, we were having a real good time. I was playing the guitar and we were all singing “Dirty Old Town” over and over again when the sun started coming up. D.Cam and I decided to retire to our castle.

We got to the giant wooden double doors and we realized that we didn’t have the keys. Goddamnit. My first and only night to sleep in a castle and I got locked out. I couldn’t believe it. We started throwing rocks at the windows and yelling with whispered voices for D.Bob. I couldn’t stop laughing. D.Cam was just beginning to try to scale the wall while I doubled over at the sight of his drunk ass climbing the side of a castle in Scotland when the doors opened and D.Bob was standing there in his underwear with his arms wrapped around his gaunt body looking at us like we were door to door salesmen.

We were beating up fiber and making paper on like hung over rock stars the next day, bright and early on the sidewalk outside of the local library. Professionalism is key in this industry. We were all wearing our sunglasses. It was a tiny gig and people seemed to be confused by us. Nobody stopped to talk. I found it impossible to even initiate conversation. It seemed like we had just come all the way up here to get drunk and make paper for a day outside.

D.Cam taught me how to bind a book for the first time, so I started putting together a compilation of all of the prints that I had done on the different kinds of paper I had made along the way.

We stayed in the castle one last night and then we were driving off away from the rising sun the next morning.

One month of bad art for the wrong reasons made this month of good art with sincere reasons that much sweeter. Oh the joy of putting the hands to work in a meaningful way. So far I had come to rue the persistent cultural belief that without a job that pays one is not really doing any work. I say fuck that. My friends and I all do good work and we do it for free. We do it because it needs to be done and it is just easier to do it without payment than to involve all that complicated money.

I was reflecting on this sentiment when the Drews finally came home. D.Bob flopped into the bed. It looked like some invisible hand threw a rubber chicken with a hippy wig on. Sheets of paper were drying all over the room, stuck to every flat surface that we could find. We had a day to rest and recover, but that day was it. After that we would be going up north on the train for another workshop in some remote location. Get well soon D.Bob.

D.Cam and I bummed around our new neighborhood, walking real slow and taking it all in. I wanted to tell him how good it felt to be around a real friend again. Somebody old that I already knew. Somebody I already had stories with. Maybe I did tell him, maybe I didn’t. I don’t remember. I am often guarded about emotions around other boys lest they get any suspicions as they so often did around me. I grew up in the country. I knew what time it was. In a lot of the world emotions are gay. But who wouldn’t be a little gay for D.Cam, the soldier savant with the golden idea. Anyways, we drank coffee somewhere eventually. I drew pictures. He wrote letters. The day passed slowly. It felt nice to not have anywhere to be. It was the first day of its kind in quite some time.

When we opened the door to the hostel the air that greeted us smelled like disease. D.Bob was shirtless in the room, immaciated and sickly, pouring yogurt down his swollen throat. I was, for just a moment, completely disturbed by the scene.

That night I had to share the bottom bunk with D.Bob. I didn’t sleep much as I  tried to focus my jedi mind powers entirely on my immune system. White blood cells, I know I have asked a lot of you in my life, especially this last year, but if you’ve ever saved us from anything before, and I know you have because we’ve been through the worst, please spare us from this one. I think that they actually heard the message.

The next day we woke up at the crack of dawn. I hardened myself against the coming of a day that felt as difficult as even the worst basic training morning when I didn’t know how to reconcile my bodies laziness with the task at hand which would take amazing amounts of energy and momentum. I just knew that we would make it.

D.Bob forced himself to come, though we begged him not to. He’s a trooper.

An hour later we were in the train station with our agent Nicholas. D.Bob couldn’t carry anything so we gave him one of the suitcases. I took the hit on carrying our plastic bins which were full of fiber, molding felts and half damp paper, all held in by two large boards ratchet strapped on. There was no fun way to hold this thing and pull around a suitcase at the same time. I knew this would amount to a very uncomfortable day.

The LZ was a veterans rehabilitation live-in center a few towns north of London. We’d be out there all day, then that night we had to come back to London. D.Bob was popping anti-biotics like tictacs and sipping off a hidden bottle of whiskey on the train. Nicholas spoke very dryly. He had an aristocrats swagger and it rankled my sensibilities. I stared at him suspiciously while I pushed a packaged sandwich into my mouth, chewing slowly as he talked with D.Cam and the English countryside whizzed by. He liked to talk about fancy things. And as most of my time was spent making fun of fancy people and their silly shit it seemed obvious from the very get go that our relationship would be touch and go.

I had expected this center to be some institutional building with terrible flourescent lighting and patronizing staff which baby the veterans as if they were invalids. I don’t know why I expected this. I was just prepared for a mental institution. As prepared as you can be for something like a mental institution. I did not, however, expect the acres of beautiful rolling land complete with willow trees and a little spring, with all kinds of neat areas to sit around and think about things, but nobody was out thinking about things. They were all waiting inside like puppies excited to be let out to go pee. They were very happy to see us, those old timers.

When I say old timers I imply all due respect. These are our fellow veterans who have been at this for years, dealing with the fucked up social status of being a freak, a fallen angel. We’re all family, and they’re our elders. Sure we weren’t from the same country, and to be honest I didn’t even know about the wars that these guys had fought in. But not a G.W.o.T. vet in sight.

Our POC told us that they were around. She suggested that they were probably just hiding. I imagined them peeping out from the slats in windows trying to figure us out. Truth of the matter was they just didn’t give a shit. Just another craft project coming to try to patch up those old head traumas with a few pounds of clay or construction paper and markers.

We wheeled our operation out to the back yard where we could work in the sun. D.Bob laid down in the grass while D.Cam and me set up shop in a quickness. In an hour we had her chomping down on that fiber while people milled around looking at our little lady do her work. They were interested now. Machines. Simple machines working simply and doing beautiful things. I believe that it is an innately beautiful thing.

They got to work pulling sheets immediately. They were very excited to learn this and they picked it up a lot faster than the kids we had dealt with at the museum to whom paper-making might just as well have been Evolutionary Biology. They’re dumb, they don’t know what they’re doing. Maybe it was just those kids.

I didn’t really know how to do it myself yet. I was still pulling fat, inconsistent sheets that looked like egg carton material, so we were all learning together. D.Cam tried to show me a few times but I only learn by failing a thousand times until I finally get it right once and then I know it. That day wouldn’t come for a long time with paper-making.

One of the guys got really creative and decided to put cigarette butts into the beater. His defense for this was that the butts were symbols of PTSD’s oppression. I liked it. Unfortunately we never got the smell of cigarette butts out of her, but it was worth it.

D.Bob was still passed out in the grass. He had occasionally gotten up throughout the day to oversee things but it was a scary sight. He looked like a zombie and he was so obviously contagious with something awful that he had to be avoided like a bringer of plague.

It was really great to see these guys getting into the paper so thoroughly. It can be awkward when people are not into it and they just stare at you bored and anxious to go, but here they could smoke and laugh and they were really plugged into the idea of the thing. That’s the important part with Combat Paper. It is so much more than just craft. Its a chance to take license over your own story even if for just that one afternoon, but hopefully that will stick in you like a seed, like it did with me. It gives those of us who have given ourselves, our individuality, up to take it back, to claim responsibility for your own history and to take agency over your own future. Or maybe that only happened to a few of us. At least they got a cool journal at the end.

This was a kind of test run for the program here. England’s version of the VA ran this project out here and they were showing interest in contracting Combat Paper to facilitate workshops here semi-permanently or at least repeatedly. Or at least that is what I picked up from the adult talk.

I was kept out of all of the business matters because I’m kind of a flake, as you may have already gathered. People can tell from a mile away that business and me do not go hand in hand, and D.Cam did the good deed of sparing us both the awkwardness of involving me, though it was also a disappointing reminder of my weakness in character.

While cleaning up I forgot that our motor was electric and just totally hosed it down. D.Cam came up to me and very calmly kinked the hose and said in his somber, pacifist calm “whatchu doin dude? Gotta pay attention homie.” and he pointed to his eyes coyly to indicate that I needed to smoke less weed and pay more attention. His advice was totally fair. At least the motor still worked. When we had her all taken apart and put away we peeled Drew off the ground and carried him to the taxi, then the train, then the bus. We lost Nick in the train station because he was going in a different direction so the burden of the beater and our fallen comrade was shared between D.Cam and I. It was a most tiresome endeavor.

I stood dazzled in the foyer underneath suspended planes of war and amongst two centuries of guns with my sunglasses on, spinning in circles. D.Cam lit from sign to sign taking in as much information as could be stolen from them. D.Bob was whispering about how weird everybody was inside this museum of death.

We set up shop in a little classroom that was out of sight on the second floor. The suitcases opened to reveal the many pieces of our beloved beater. D.Cam walked me through the assembly process. He took a Sergeants care in pointing out the different pieces and illuminating the process of how they came to be this working thing.  Soon she was ready.

The boys had brought fiber with them because this was not a full workshop. We didn’t have participants that could bring things in. We were merely exhibiting the process. Soon the room was obnoxiously loud with the sound of our lady consuming her feast, her metal teeth clanging together abrasively. She was an infinite loop of consumption.

While she processed her lunch I set a card table up on the balcony that was under the WWII plane mobiles, right next to the cockpit of a bomber. I remembered the time that Laura and I had sex in the show bomber outside of a VFW in Wisconsin. It made me smile. Then I remembered the rest of Laura and I’s story and the smile faded. I grabbed D.Bob’s typewriter and began to type.

It has has been a long standing tradition of ours to constantly create and shed work in every place that we go so that we leave behind us an archive of whimsical writings, doodlings, prints, photo’s, stolen goods, etc. etc… Everything that was typed during this week here was set to float out into the world, as free as its author.

I had never actually pulled a sheet of paper before. I had cut the tip of my finger off the last and first time that I had the chance and because pulling sheets of paper entails dipping your hands into tubs of water and pulp over and over again I could not participate in the fun on account of how I would get blood in the water.

I found it fitting that I pull my first sheet of paper this place. Nothing like getting over the memories of war while inside a house built to detain the steel archive of the things that we have made to kill each other.

In a tiny room on the top floor there was a tiny wing dedicated to the art that had blossomed around war. I was disappointed to find that there were only paintings and drawings and sometimes photographs of people dieing in the field. I wanted Abstract Expressionism or Dada or something at all that called to mind the absurdity of our species manifested so poignantly in our addiction to armed combat. This stuff was boring. D.Cam was soaking it all in with his usual vigor. D.Bob was making fun of our hosts and giggling at the random things which shouldn’t seem funny. No matter how serious the subject, D.Bob will always find something to laugh about.

You have to keep yourself light at heart with work like this. It gets real heavy real fast when you’re hanging out with vets.

After our first day in the museum we decided that we couldn’t stay in the Circus for another day. D.Bob was getting sicker by the hour. He was coughing and looking miserable and he kept saying that it felt like his neck was swelling. We went out that afternoon to find another place to stay. The search took us hours but we finally found a smaller hostel a few miles away where we could have a room of our own.

The new digs were sublime compared to the clamor of the Circus. On our first night we went out for a walk. Comedy ensued when I tried, for the second time, to buy some weed from kids on the street and got burned. As soon as I had put my money in the one kids hand everybody disappeared. I was left standing there like a fool while the Drews laughed at me from across the street. I changed my mind on vices and decided that while I was in the UK it was much easier to be a drunk than a stoner.

D.Bob went back to the hostel because he wasn’t feeling well. D.Cam and I went for another epic walkabout. We got a few bottles of wine and stumbled around town talking about the history of veteran artists and the sentiment of their work, trying to complete the bridge between them and us. Were we the new breed of philosophical resistance to the horror of war?

Back at the Museum we were introduced toa few old men. I met one of them outside while he chain smoked unfiltered cigarettes. He was in his eighties. He was still lean and intimidating. He glowered out at the world from the steps that led to the Museum’s piece of the Berlin wall and an enormous canon which had been on a  Royal Navy war ship. He had fought in WWII. He was wearing a suit.

In a rare moment of camaraderie he told me that it made him sick to see how the world turned out. He told me that he never would have sacrificed as much as he did if he knew this was the way things were going. He hated the banks and the coffee shops and the way the money was being spent. He told me about his struggle to make ends meet after the war and how this struggle had continued until the death of his wife. From his cloud of smoke I could see his resignation. He was just waiting for the end.

Inside he sat down in front of a small audience with a few other veterans to tell war stories. They did this every week as an attempt to keep an oral history of Her Majesty’s wars alive. The old man that I had been speaking with detailed gruesome stories about running through vines in Italy with his bayonet equipped and how, for the first and only time, he had to use his bayonet. He seemed removed from the moment as if it had happened to someone else. He talked about the man he had killed in the same tone that one would talk about an old friend who had passed away years ago. I drew a picture of him from the balcony.It floated away. Just another leaf in the Fall.

Inside of our paper laboratory we were finishing making our last batch of paper. We had to stand on the stack of sheets to press the water out of it. Usually there is a mechanical press to do this job better than a few humans holding a trash can, but we were short on resources. Later we would discover a better technique. The excess pulp proved to be a problem. When the room was empty D.Bob and I poured it down the sink. Of course it clogged almost immediately so we took turns standing over it to keep people from seeing the damage that we had done until the nasty scene was over. We’re kind of punk like that.

Over the course of that day D.Bob’s sickness took hold of him completely. His neck swelled so extensively that he looked like a loon or some other kind of fish eating bird which has a huge gullet. His face was puffy and he could barely speak. He coughed a lot and it obviously caused him a great deal of pain. The city had been plagued with fear about the latest epidemic: Swine Flu. It was hard not to suggest that maybe Drew had a case of it himself. It didn’t need to be said.

It got so bad that he had to go to the hospital. I was out looking for weed. I came back successful only to find a short note on the table that told me that they were going to the emergency room. I spent the rest of the night putting lino prints on the wet paper which turned out to be ideal for the job because the water soaked the water based ink right up. The boys didn’t get back until early in the morning.

Seeing him like he was was like standing on a firing line. Both D.Cam and I knew that this horrible bug would come for us. The only thing to do was drink whiskey and prepare ourselves.

In lieu of starting this story with “It was a cold and rainy night” I will just have you assume cold and rain as preconditions of everything that happened while I was in London. It will be too exhausting to continue to draw attention to the miserable conditions of that town which has been described by so many writers for centuries. Gloominess is a way of life in London.

Out of this gloom walked the Mad Scientist who’s grand design it was in the first place to liberate the things we carry in fibers, the one and only D.Bob. His hair was wild and long and he was dressed like a carny, rag tag scraps of fabric that had survived the liberation process fastened around him at strange angles. He carried only a small leather bad with him. This had been what he had lived out of as he had traveled far and wide over Europe. It turns out that most of his traveling was spent posted on a beach in Spain getting fabulously drunk on cheap booze. My man.

He was tired and showing the first signs of an illness that was slowly beginning to conquer his entire body though we didn’t know it at the time. It was just a little cough, he said.

The hostel was a disaster show. Semesters everywhere had come to a close and the traveling circuits were crowded with college kids covered in expensive traveling gear that would likely see little use after this season. The room we were staying in was crowded and smelly. There was a large Asian guy who slept all day. He snored asthmatically to the extent that we thought that he was ill and could possibly die at any moment.

The day that D.Cam got into town the transportation workers were all on strike. He had to take a cab. This didn’t set him off from his normal serenity, always at peace with the world. He was the most conservatively dressed of any of us, but he still looked like a young artist wearing the faded Eighties era military wear. He looked like a restrained Hunter S. Thompson.

D.Cam and I left D.Bob to battle his sickness alone in the hostel while we walked around London looking for a good strip club. D.Cam is something of an aficionado of these establishments and he had a hunger to visit one in a foreign country. We walked for hours in no particular direction. We didn’t reach anything resembling a seedy neighborhood until well into the night after we’d discussed just about everything there is to discuss about the state of our art.

We never made it into a strip club, but we managed to get pretty fucked up on whiskey. It was strange to be walking around a city that I was already bored with while Drew’s eyes were sharp and open to the newness. I was a little jealous.

That was really the only day that we had to explore the town. There was business to do.

The Drews had brought separate portions of the world’s first portable Hollander beater across the ocean in suitcases. This was that beater’s inaugural run. We’d be hauling it all over the UK in those suitcases, making paper in places where it had previously been impossible.

Beaters are very expensive instruments and not a lot of people have the money to commit to them because they don’t make a whole lot of money back. The market for handmade paper is pretty slim these days.

A beater is a glorified fabric grinder. A circuit of water conveys the fibers through a roll which has teeth designed to cut the fibers down to their most basic elements, or pulp. When that process is finished the pulp is drained into a bucket and then sheets can be pulled.

Our first scheduled appearance was at the Imperial War Museum.

Life during the Global War on Terror was proving to be positively full of terrors. There were so many terrors for me at this time that I left claw marks in the hand holds of the plane. Flying, for me, is cause for quite a bit of terror in and of itself. If I survived the flight I’d have to do the immigrations shake down again. Every time I had to do this I risked detention, deportation, or worst I could find myself in one of those cells I used to guard. Or one like it in some other place. This was mom’s greatest fear. I had been casually blowing it off. Don’t worry mom, it is totally O.K. to disregard Non-Disclosure paperwork with the military because they are all about disregarding paperwork. It is something of a hobby for them and surely they harbor no ill will for other enthusiasts.

The plane managed to not explode the whole way. I found myself standing in the fluorescence of the same room where I’d been detained five months ago. Here we go again.

I’ll make a long story short here because you all know the scene, you understand the automatons that operate this place, you know the terror tinted glasses that they wear that makes everyone deemed unsociable (or normal and white) and you already know how bad I am at situations like these. I’ll skip right to the interrogation this time.

It occurred eight hours after I first walked in. This time the suspicion had arisen over a stamp in my passport that I couldn’t read. It was for official eyes only. It was the mark from my first pass through. I don’t know why it didn’t stop me in Edinburgh before. Lazy people I guess. Anyway, nothing passed these super employees up. These people were on the fucking ball.

They had my file which let them know enough about me to speak to me on familiar terms. They even knew that I’d been picked up on the highway. They knew that I had promised to not do things like walk on the highway very specifically. They were not happy that I was still here and they desperately wanted to know why I had stayed.

I was sure that the jig was up. I cut it to them honest hoping to at least get some sympathy from them. Maybe I could talk myself into a free flight home and then it was just a few apologies to the Drew’s and I was back on my feet in the land of the free where I could get food stamps again. I was kind of hoping that was how this would go. But it turns out they just wanted to waste some more of my time by jerking me around. With little to no excuse they let me wander off into the night well after the last trains had left. I slept in the airport after smoking down a pack of cigarettes while cursing under my breath. I had just about fucking had it with Heathrow Airport. We still had one last little dance though, but that comes later.

The next day I was tubed to London. I checked into the hostel where we were going to stay. I had some monies that Nina had given to me. I bought myself a few nights until D.Bob would be in town. I put my bags out then hit the town. I worked my way out from Piccadilly Circus, which earns its name and then some, asking every shady person I could see if they knew where to open air weed market was. Nobody seemed to know.

Two hours into my search, when it was getting dark, I picked up a pint of whiskey to take the chill out of the air.

The next hour found me in some strange land where everybody looked like a hustler. These streets were obviously seedy in a very Baroque way. There was a fast talking homeless punk who very politely informed me that helping people find the right deal was his job. He took me to a hole in the wall of an abandoned building. He stuck his head in the hole in the concrete and said something like “ey Mista Troll, I gotchyeah a customa, yeah?” like a question. Then there was a grisly mans face in the window and he says “whatchu need boy?” I felt like I was in a David Lynch film. Weed, man. I need weed. “No heroine?” No sir, I’ll just be having the weed thanks. Everyone seemed disappointed that I wasn’t a real drug addict. What a fucking phony, right? It cost too much, but it was good hash.

The punk took to me and he started in with his life story while I rolled in the park. He drank some of my whiskey. Didn’t smoke, he says. Had a hard time with heroine and really ruined his whole life. Now he sleeps in an abandoned industrial neighborhood in town. His home is an old loading dock. He said he’d come to terms with his addiction because he just accepted that he had it and it would never go away and he’d found a way to make his life sustainable. He reinforced that his job really was to help people find drugs, and when he does the dealer gives him a cut. He was an agent that picked up people like me and took them to the right place. I guess I had earned him enough heroin to keep him happy for the night.

It was really cool to have somebody who lived in this underworld explain to me how things worked around here. He told me about the rich kids that come for blow and the poor kids that come for heroin and the college kids that come for pills. Everybody wants to get fucked up, and if you’re looking to get fucked up and you don’t know where to be, you’ll end up here. I was a testament to the reality of this. Maybe it had called out to something in my blood, that addicts twinge that Sputnik, with all of his years of meth addiction, left me. Thanks dad.

We walked from there down to the river. It was a hell of a walk. I don’t know why I felt compelled to keep walking with him. He might very well have robbed me, but he didn’t. He just needed the time to tell his story and it turns out that it was a really long story and it coincided well with the London night so I kept listening.

His mom had been a hooker and he’d been on these streets his whole life. He had moments everywhere we walked by.

We parted ways at the London Bridge. I promptly got lost afterward and ended up in a dicey part of town on the wrong side of the river, pretty drunk and very stoned. It was a bad hour to be in these kinds of circumstances.

I did find my way back and I was not mugged. The Circus was just coming to life under the morning sun when I got back and slept for the rest of the day until the Rescue Chopper got to town that evening.

you were right alex

My passport raised eyebrows in Edinburgh but I had finally learned a lesson about dealing with Customs Officials and I was permitted entrance to the UK as soon as I could convince them that the box of Combat Paper in my possession was not a bomb.

I was on the bus from the airport to downtown when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I was in solo traveling mode, ready to pounce. I turned aggressively to find the pale, peaceful face of my friend John from Chicago. Johns an anarchist of the new school, D.I.Y. til he dies. He is lanky and only awkward to people not familiar with Chicago gender politics. His Scottish blood endowed him with reddish blond hair which hung around his face, as silly as my own haircut.

The serendipity was too much to handle. We jabbered non-stop until, well after we had gotten off the bus, we had to part ways with the hope that we would see each other again in Europe.

Then I found my way to the church where Donald “worked” to have a cup of tea. He is a proper Scottish fellow though he happened to be gay. He fretted over my weight (I had lost some) and my face (which looked tired and sickly) like a mom. His concern was palpable. While out on  walk he stopped at an ATM and got out a wad of money and put it in my hand. I almost cried. Maybe I even did a little. The kindness of the people I had chanced to meet had been overwhelming and I felt entirely undeserving.

Soon I was on a train bound for Newcastle.

Vane was working the night that I got in. I sat in the living room kicking it with the ladies. Again I felt too full of story to tell them what I had been through. I told them all about Hans and the offer to go to Vienna. They all looked very disapproving. Laura told me that he was a vulture just trying to prey on the good work that I had done. She warned me that my integrity was at stake so I had better not take this decision as flippantly as I did the others. I agreed with their analysis but a part of me had already made its mind up. I’ve been with my mind for years and I know its habits. When I am this far in it is impossible to turn around.

That night I stood at the monument where I usually met Vanessa. I smoked dozens of cigarettes as the hour grew later. I paced around the circle to try to count out the time. I figured that she was at least an hour late. I walked to her bar which she had, strangely, expressly forbidden me to do. She was in a booth talking to some guy that she worked with. What the fuck? I didn’t expect a homecoming parade, but I also expected a little bit more than being blown off for an hour in the cold while she chatted up some other dude. I knocked on the window and she looked up at me like a criminal. I tried to hide my jealousy and anger. I didn’t do such a good job.

The walk back was painful. The conversation seemed stilted and awkward like we didn’t know each other. I wondered if we had ever really talked like Alexandra and I had. Was it just a pretty pair of eyes that had lured me in?

Over the next few days our situation deteriorated rapidly.

I had moved into Hannah’s house down the road, closer to Fay, CJ, and Katerina. Occasionally I had a roomate named Joe who was a born and raised here. His accent was as thick as air and the feeling of this dirty old town. He was a sweet older guy who looked a little homeless. He had been in Fenhem for many iterations of young punks and activists. In a way he was one of the only stable elements except the houses which remained here through all of the transitions.

I spent all of my time writing a manuscript which would eventually be deposited in the trash because it was a piece of shit. I typed thousands of words each day in the apartment by myself with infrequent visits from the locals. When I wanted company I would go to Fay’s place. Vane and I were like strangers. I had become more and more jealous of her relationship with her ex-boyfriend who had the advantage of history and shared language over me. Maybe I was less jealous and more aware of how flimsy our relationship really was. She was aware that I had been writing emails, love letters really, to girls (intentionally plural) in the states. Danielle, Emily, Sara… I had forgotten how many times I had thought that she was the one.

Sex had become more and more complicated between us on two counts. A.) She was a hard-core feminist and she was highly distrusting of men which made me feel shady and very uncomfortable with my own advances. Once, after we had slept together and it had not been such a beautiful experience, I walked up to her as she was staring out the window to put my hand on her hip. When I did so she turned to me and lashed out. “I don’t like to be touched now, especially by mens.” B.) She wanted a baby. This came as a surprise to me and likely anybody who knew her. It was a secret agenda. At first she didn’t tell me. She tricked me once or twice. Then when confronted about these tricks she admitted that she wanted to have my child on the condition that I not help raise it. She was going to take it to some Mediterranean island where she would raise it with a gaggle of females.

Now coming from as many fathers as I do I find myself unusually anxious about the potential of becoming one myself. To even think about having a child that I could not raise made me sick to my stomach, bringing back all of the emotions that used to pass through my head when my mom would tell me that I was just like Sputnik Mixon, my biological father.

I had transitioned to being much closer to the rest of the community.

We went out one night to wheat paste big signs bringing attention to the CCTV cameras on every corner. We worked in the dead of night but the street was still very busy and once a cop passed right by us as we acted like we were just waiting for a bus. The signs didn’t stick quite like they should have which was my fault as I had suggested a faulty method of coating them as well as having done a half ass job of putting them up, also my fault because that was my job as the tallest.

We began work on an exposure unit for the theater, too. Exposure units are light tables that burn the photosensitive emulsion that are coated on high mesh screens for screen printing. The theater was well equipped for the rest of the job other than the inks and other supplies, it only lacked this one thing, so we all got together and built it. It had been my idea to do so because I had seen and used the table at Flight 64 in Portland but the task was quickly taken out of my hands by the girls who were much more proficient at getting things done than my lazy ass. I “helped” but really only to lift things.

It helped my head to have projects during this time. I was relatively stress free and, more importantly, self-reliant as I had a place to myself that wasn’t bothering anybody and money to spend, albeit very little money. My budget was working out famously. Every time that I received a small donation or sold a piece of Combat Paper or a zine I found myself with a few more days of Europe.

Despite all of the advice to turn down the offer I opted to accept Hans’ invitation. There was nothing for me to do here and I didn’t want to whittle away a huge chunk of my tour experiencing the same things over and over. I love that city and I could stay there for years but I hadn’t come over to England just to sit in a house and write and do things that I could do anywhere.

I still had Grandma’s hundred dollar bill. I was using it as a rolling machine to roll both cigarettes and joints. As the weeks went on I became more and more proud of that bill to the extent that it lost its function as a measurement of money and became just one more utilitarian item to be packed away into my traveling kit.

Come the end of April I’d already made my deal with Very Morning and I was on a bus out of Newcastle with Katerina who was going to Spain. As I left the city I found a Brontosaurus spray painted on the sidewalk. Vanessa told me that Fay had painted it for me. I had gotten too close to this group. It hurt to much to leave, and rule number one when you are traveling is that there are too many goodbyes to get that close to people. Keep a distance.

Kind of like how we treated the detainees. Keep a distance.

F U B A R

I’d avoided one question the entire time I had been traveling. Not once had I had to deal with what might happen if everything didn’t just turn out fine. What happened if everything got all fucked up? This question defined the next chapter of my life.

It all started at in London. I had stayed the night at Jo’s place. I left with what I thought would be ample time, though severely short on funds. I was wrong.

My plane to Vienna boarded at 11:45. I didn’t get to the ticket counter until five minutes after the last call happened one hour before the flight. A short, mean little shit of a man looked away casually while telling me I had missed the gate time. Please step to the other counter. “But!” “Please step to the other counter, sir.”

So I got in line over there, time ticking on that one flight out for the day. When I got to the counter I immediately began to lose it. The plane was going to leave in twenty minutes and I could still make it on if they would just stop dicking me around. The little nerd at the counter kept staring only into his screen while shaking his head. “I’m sorry sir, the computer just won’t let me.”

“Fuck your Goddamn computer!” Now the guards came. I heard the engines of my plane warm up and disappear into the sky as I argued with the same little shit who had fucked my day to begin with. As it turns out he was the manager as well. He kept telling me that I had told him a different plane and that I could have gotten on if I had come at the time that I told him I had arrived.

He told me that another plane would leave tomorrow if I just paid a thirty pound fee for my indiscretion. I could have killed him if I hadn’t just earned the trust of the guards enough to be released. I don’t have thirty pounds and I couldn’t wait until tomorrow because I have nowhere to say.

In an act of desperation I pulled the vet card which almost never fails but it didn’t phase him in the least.

I was so angry I couldn’t think. I went outside for a smoke. Before I knew it I was walking down the highway with my thumb up, dead set and determined to hitch to Vienna. I even found two loaves of bread in the gas station outside of the airport.

A bus veered off the highway and stopped about a half mile down the road. I ran the rest of the way to it so excited to have actually pulled a ride. The driver was furious. He called me a stupid fuck! “Do you know how dangerous that is?”

I begged him to take me to the truck stop down the road but he was only going to take me to the next exit which was still two miles from there. He dropped me off in a completely inaccessible  country road and then drove off. Nobody would be getting on the highway here.

It was hard to figure out how to get down to the highway. There was a bridge over it which led to a suburb. I decided to walk through the suburb to the other side and then cross over to the truck stop. There was a cool little path that skirted the large fence that separated the houses from the highway. Little did I know that this fence would prove to be the doom of my plan.

When I got to the other side I figured out that this fence went all the way around. I scanned the backyards of these homes for some weakness in the defenses. Finally I found a small hole under one of them, likely carved out by some dog or kids.

I ran over, threw my rucksack under and then crawled through only to find that on the other side was a thicket of thorns, beyond them the high speed rail lines that were probably electric. No way. No fucking way. The bottom of the hole i was in was all mud. I was filthy.

I crawled back out and sat down on a curb in desperation. Then it started getting cold. A mailman drove by. He stopped to tell me that it was going to rain. I thanked him sarcastically.

I retraced my steps, ran over the highway (it was way more dangerous that I had imagined) and then set myself to walking the two miles that I had already done twice over down the road.

Right when I set my foot down on the onramp there was this enormous noise behind me. It was a scary sound. It was a cop siren. They actually picked me up and ran my file in the parking log. Eventually they let me off the hook.

I made a sign and positioned myself across the truck drivers, staring at them balefully for hours to no avail. It was getting really cold. The rain clouds were coming. A woman stopped and offered to drive me to the town. I accepted her offer.

I was shocked and pissed off to learn that I didn’t need to deal with the highway at all. The airport was connected to this town. Damnit.

She dropped me off in the center of town. I had a five mile walk to the airport with my tail between my legs to figure out what the fuck I was going to do.

When I walked in, covered in mud and sweat, coughing and starving, I went directly to the computers and emailed Drew from Combat Paper. The Rescue Chopper. I begged him to help me. He bought me a ticket.

I spent the night sleeping outside in a little park.

The next morning I was sitting next to a portly Canadian who had been staying in Scotland. He was noticeably disgruntled about my personal hygiene. I was so tired and angry that day that I did not make for very good company.

WHORE

The plane snuck under the clouds over miles of pristine green land. There was a moment of peace.

That peace was ruined inside of the airport when I shuffled out of the door with my bags to see those wide, skeevy eyes. Hans.

He didn’t waste much time getting down to the nitty gritty of his strategy.

“Guantanamo is HOT right now. We need to strike while the iron is hot and make as much money off of this thing as we can!” he blubbered arrogantly as the bus took us downtown.

I didn’t respond to his disturbing comments, I just looked out the window. Hans took to telling me about the raves that had occurred inside of all of the industrial buildings we passed which I had not seen from the plane.

Hans took me to his apartment where I would be staying with his family. The word family came as some surprise. He lived here with his wife Liz and their two girls. The apartment was large by any city standards, but not large enough to convince me that this wasn’t a very strange arrangement. Why so much interest in me? Why put themselves out like this?

The answer was clear but I was ignoring it. “Shut up!” My brain protested. “Just take the fucking money!”

I sat my bags down in the room that I was going to stay in indefinitely. The room had been wholly consumed by one bed which went from wall to wall to wall. It was enormous and eerie. Nobody should have such a large bed.

They took me out to sushi that night. The whole family was there. While the girls threw temper tantrums Hans and Liz took turns talking circles around the basic premises of the SuperEnhanced project. I still had no idea what they were looking for.

They told me that I needed to come up with an amount of money that I thought was fair for payment. I didn’t think that this was part of the job. Shouldn’t they tell me how much they would pay me? How much were my services worth? I had never been paid for them directly and I had no created a scale.

I counted up my predicted expenses and then meekly told them that I thought 700 Euros seemed like enough to cover all of my costs. They just looked at me like the number that I told them was either way too high or way too low, but they did not indicate which. Liz told me to be serious.

A few days passed us by. I spent my time walking around the city thinking about how I could provide something to this project. All of my experience was in traditional based techniques and processes: printing, paper-making and writing, not digital art.

In another meeting a few days later the duo presented me with a schedule of things that they expected of me. I was glad for the meeting because the ambiguity was driving me insane.

Their desires were three tiered: they wanted A.) for me to work a festival that they already had a booth in called the Subversive Messe which was an international subversive art fair in Lindz. B.) One lecture, the date of which would be set later. C.) Photographs. I suggested that we could take pictures of me hustling for money in different parts of this city. The pair seemed disinterested in my idea but they didn’t say anything in particular about it.

I agreed. Nothing was said about money and I was too scared to piss them off to ask.

The Subversive Messa was scheduled for a few days down the line. Until that time came I appeared to be free to do what I wanted.

Hans introduced me to his friend Suzanna. She’s a Vienna based installation artist. She had a very wise and calm face with short cropped hair, a strong build and a beautifully dark voice. She felt like a haunted attic.

She took me out one day on a mini tour. At least that was her excuse. Really she wanted to take the time to warn me about what I had gotten myself into. She seemed scared for what Hans and Liz were going to do to me. She told me that they didn’t have the best record in town and that I should stay close to her and her group of friends. They would take care of me. I brushed her advice off.

We walked around the museum amidst all kinds of awesomely disturbing paintings harnessing the sick guilt and anxiety of sexuality at war. This was my introduction to the Viennese flare for morbid and guilt ridden art.

When we were leaving I hinted to her that I was a dope fiend and she took the bait hook line and sinker. Soon we were standing in the street as she yelled up to an open third floor window. “TIMMY! TIMMY! LET US IN!” A man’s head poked out of the window, then his hand waved us in.

When the door to his apartment was open we were face to face with a slender, 40 something man with graying hair. He was very quiet and stern. He walked us into the other room.

This room hit me like a semi-truck. The walls were filled from corner to corner and to the heights of the vaulted ceilings with comic books. As I walked around like a new transplant to heaven he told me that this was the entire history of European comic publishing. He had meticulously collected every comic that had been produced on this side of the ocean. This was his life’s work.

I had forgotten what we came here for, but when I turned around from my reverie Timmy was holding out a bag of grass. He told me it was on the house. He looked at me very seriously and told me that he was my guy. I took to him with absolute loyalty.

When we were splitting ways Suzanna told me that she would set up another place for me to stay when I got back from the Messe. I didn’t know at the time how invaluable this assistance would be.

messe indeed…

I took the train to Lindz separate from Very Morning. I had become accustomed to forgetting about them entirely when I was not actually dealing with them which had been pleasantly infrequent. They seemed disinterested with how I spent my time and they had so little of their own to give me any guidance on what they would like me to be doing. Hans had been mostly occupied with walking around in his underwear and sitting at his computer in the room that I came to call his Masturbatorium. Liz was absent almost always inexplicably.

The train pulled into station and I reported to the docks where the show was taking place. On a concrete slab the city had constructed what appeared to be a giant plywood fishing shanty around which many freaks had gathered. There were freak bikes and punk clowns juggling and as I got drew nearer to the cloud of smoke wafting off of these people I could smell that we shared hobbies.

I reported to the first person in uniform I could find. Her name was Michaela. She was drinking directly out of a bottle of vodka. She looked at me with half lidded sanguine eyes, her blond hair hanging short around her face. She spoke a melancholic English. She showed me to the booth and then promptly sat down in one of the couches we had been allotted. Soon there was a gaggle of females who were all looking for the bottle of vodka. A fight ensued in German, then there was giggling. The vodka was going fast.

They ignored me for the most part as I unpacked the suitcases I had been put in charge of. The table quickly filled with an odd assortment of things: Handcuffs and chain, eye-bolts, padlocks and a toy pistol which looked quite real. The girls were staring at me. I looked up embarrassed. We were all wondering what the point in these implements were.

I made friends with them and soon I had floated far away from the booth and all of those uncomfortable things. I met with the other booth occupants. There was a freak bike building crew from Vienna, a screen-printing collective from Hamburg, two Americans that built tiny little sheds for the homeless in Atlanta, a woman who supervised a booth where people would throw perfectly good tomatoes at her (it turned out that the message was waste. She would goad the onlookers into throwing these tomatoes at her, but the real point was to get them to stop and think about how stupid it was to waste a tomato. Nobody really got the point.) there was a faux neighborhood watch group from Vienna complete with a guy dressed as a cop, freak clowns who were tremendously awkward when not in costume, two guys who had brought a bird that said political things but unfortunately the bird had died in transit so they were just two guys with a dead bird (even better than the original idea I reckon) and a hodge-podge of people who dressed very sharply and talked officially as if they were representing real government programs though these programs were, of course, fake.

Everyone was very nice and open and welcoming to discussion, mostly over a long European spliff or two or five. Michaela and I were proximally bound.

I fit in best with the screen printers who liked everything I did except what I was doing with Hans and Liz. They seemed completely repulsed by the idea of our booth. We shared the feeling but they understood what a person had to do to make ends meet in situations like the one I was in.

The big hit of our booth turned out to be Combat Paper which people loved. My heart melted to remember that project that had shown me what real, good work was and I rued the circumstances that had led me into this phony, bullshit art group that I was working with now. Oh Rescue Chopper, how I missed you.

Hans and Liz finally showed up and they brought with them the bad news of what the handcuffs were intended for. They wanted to short shackle someone to the ground while interrogating them with the automated interrogation software which was the real meat and potatoes of the SuperEnhanced project. They wanted to interrogate me. My stomach turned.

Soon I found myself shackled by my hands and my feet to the floor. It was a very uncomfortable position. There were many people behind me but I could not turn to see them, nor did I want them to see my face which was broken with anger and embarrassment. Hans sat at the computer doing his best to sound authoritarian but failing to be anything other than a snobby, petulant dick, like usual.

The program was mind-numbingly simple and broken. There were only a handful of questions which would loop over and over again until the “subject” gave the right answer which was to admit to involvement in terrorist activity. I beat the game in very few minutes. When it was over I begged to be released but they would not let me go. They kept playing the part of the cruel interrogator. Liz was taking particular interest in the role. Suddenly I  understood that this was meant to be some kind of BDSM parlor trick. They wanted this to be sexual.

They left me in the handcuffs. As soon as they were gone the screen printers freed me and took me out back to smoke. I was completely broken. I was disgusted. There was no way that I could continue to work with this project though I didn’t know what else to do. The printers were very good to me.

Michaela took me out to one of the docks. We sat by the water kicking our feet. She told me that her child had died at a very young age. Her eyes were much more haunted than they ever were. She was trying to convey a message of camaraderie. She wanted me to know that she was part of the “Bad Memory” club and that she understood what it was like to have the kind of thoughts that I was having.

We slept together in her trailer that night with about five other people. I had a hotel to myself but we both wanted to be with someone else. We didn’t have sex, nor would we ever, but we were bonded in a way that was almost more than the bond of sex. Misery had made lovers out of us.

After three days the convention came to a close. I had fifty new friends living in a dozen different cities which is a good haul for the kind of work that I do.

Michaela told me that I was privately contracted from the event and that, though they did not have the money to give me now, I would receive 300 Euros for working the booth. I was elated.

I had to go back to Vienna earlier than the rest of the group. Hans gave me 20 Euros and told me that he would collect my money, deducting the 20 from the sum. I was annoyed that he was going to nickel and dime me but it would take more words than I wanted to have with him to work the issue out. There was no way that I could say all those words without physically attacking him.

I told him that I was going to stay with Suzanna’s friend for a while to watch her house while she worked in Berlin. I didn’t care if he could read the subtext that I was trying to move away from them and our un-contracted deal.

I was enduring a PTSD episode unlike any other that I had ever had. My mind was furiously gnashing and the obsessive desire to kill myself had come back unlike it had ever been before. When these intrusive thoughts plagued me before they would go as quickly as they had come leaving me ashamed that I had them, but now there was a constant imaginary gun in my mouth and I couldn’t make it go away.

What did you do to me?

habits die hard

Nina, Suzanna’s friend who had offered her apartment, invited me to come over when I touched down in Vienna. I cleared the needed items of of the enormous bed, stuffed them in a day pack and headed to her end of town.

I had expected Nina to be an older woman but as it turned out she was the same age as I was. She had the same somber wisdom as Suzanna, which appeared to be a Viennese hallmark. She invited me in.

Her apartment was a beautiful studio, minimally furnished, completely filled with books on arts and boxes full of journals, collections of photographs and other assorted works of art like a rocking chair that wobbled from side to side.

Nina was soft spoken and gentle. She suggested that we go out for a walk. We found ourselves talking about what we were looking for in relationships, a common subject between two people that were likely to sleep together. My mind was a war zone and I knew that now was not the time to be making these kinds of arrangements but my habit of fleeing life’s many problems in the sheets of a woman’s bed was present and accounted for.

We sat in a tree house in a park while I rolled a spliff for us before we went to an art opening. The night was dreamy, the moment perfect in its turbulence.

The art exhibit was filled with the normal art student nonsense. Stylishly vague photographs and paintings filled the walls. There were a few artifacts of Vienna’s proud lineage of unsellable installation pieces that had been created by people that knew that in Vienna, a land where the government pays artists to work no matter how ludicrous their project may be, one could do whatever they wanted. This often represented itself in the form of frustratingly layered pieces at the heart of which there was no true message other than a subtle warning to the government that they had better be wiser in the spending of their precious money.

It rained that night. We ran back to her place in our bare feet. We stood awkwardly in her living-room while she explained that I could sleep on the floor “or…”

The bed it was.

The next morning she was gone and she would stay that way for more than a week.

Sam, from Portland, had emailed me to inform me that his friends Dan Wang and Amos Kennedy would be in Vienna participating in a two week art exhibition/performance piece. He thought I should work with them since the timing seemed so perfect. I agreed whole heartedly.

The festival was called SoHo and the theme of it for the year was “To Work Or Not To Work.” What better a place to apply myself to than this.

On the first day I walked down to meet the people that I would be working with.

Dan is a high-strung Asian man who had worked with Sam extensively in the past. He was a specialist in D.I.Y. production. He was another floating artist who worked for the extension of our utilization of space and productivity. The copy machine was his tool of choice. There was one old, dusty copier in the room.

On the other side of the room was a Letterpress machine and stacks of wooden type. A grumpy looking black man was arranging the letters on the printer. This was Amos Kennedy. I learned through Dan that Amos represented a kind of call back to the olden days of printing and cheap production. He made prints that sold for bottom dollar which was a critique of the high dollar market of the art world. In the states he worked in Alabama.

Stephan was an ashy Austrian who had worked with Very Tomorrow before. He was tall and skinny, his mind seemed perpetually lost in programming and other technical affairs. He often seemed to be struggling to convey what he meant because first he must translate his thoughts from programmers code to German and then to English. Over the course of our time together he would detail his own horror story of working with Hans which involved payments which never manifested and complicated litigation.

Dan and Stephan and I formed a gang of three. We toiled in the room every day trying to create some synthesis of our narratives which could be produced on the copier. I nearly broke our machine running Combat Paper through it. It worked, but the fibers rubbed off everywhere demanding thorough cleaning after every print. We were all very active stoners and I shared the wealth of my relationship with Timmy. This really helped the productivity go along.

Amos worked by himself at the other side of the room and rarely communicated with us. It seemed that we were two separate projects running alongside one another.

Hans and Liz had made it back to the city. The only contact I had from them was a phone call to tell me that I would not be getting the rest of the money from the Messe yet because there were some complications. Whatever.

I was happy to be working with real artists who focused on positive art again. It was slowly mending the anger of working for these two capitalists.

One night Stephan told me the real deal while we were walking around town. Hans had pulled a 6,000 Euro grant for this project. He told me that if they likely would not give me any of this money which is what happened to him. I became sick to my stomach. I was only here to add a glimmer of validity to a large welfare check that these two had cashed in on and they were destroying my mind in the process of enacting this stupid project with all of their sickly agendas.

I am an art puritan. Art is my Quran, or my Bible, or my own personal God. I saw art as a means for building a world that I wanted to see and I didn’t see that world being built by Hans and Liz. What I saw from them was a desire to capitalize on the dark reality of ruined lives. I knew that there was no way that we could recreate the horror of an actual interrogation. You can’t do that in a few minutes. To recreate that horror we would have to take people away from their families for years, torture them with interrogations day after day, occasionally physically abuse them, and in between the abuse and interrogations leave them to pray in a tiny space exposed to the elements for days without end.

In short, fuck Hans and Liz.

September 24, 2010

a storm this way comes

I had come to Vienna with a few bags and the goal to leave this city an artist. I had seen the lines outside of the Salvation Army in Portland and I had known instantly that that was not the kind of freedom that I sought. I was looking for the freedom of voice, the freedom to create something that I wanted to see through art. But what was my art? This question hid in every crevice and shadow and it nagged me endlessly.

I walked around town, my eyes agape as they took in the beauty of this town, trying to figure this question out. If I were to leave town successful I will have had to have answered it.

When I was not at SoHo I was in Timmy’s archive either looking through his library or drawing while he watched over my shoulder criticizing my sloppy lines. He had another student named Johan who came for the pleasure and the pain of his critique.

Timmy was an expert. His work featured a space man in science fiction settings. It was all cover art of the highest caliber, each piece alluding to dozens of hours of labor and love, each line a testament to his mastery of personal discipline. Not a flaw could be found in the extensive catalogue of his work to any eye except his own which saw shortcomings that no other human eye could discover.

When I was at SoHo I was madly running clippings of sketches and military paperwork through the xerox machine. The paperwork had come from the psychologist who had diagnosed me with a myriad of disorders along with suggesting that I not be deployed. My eager Captain saw fit to belay her orders. These papers have calmed my more nightmarish episodes when I remember how hard I fought to not have to do what I did, even though I lost that fight in the end.

I wonder what would have happened if my plan had worked and I didn’t deploy. Would I be living a dream in Vienna with a list of friends that went on for ages? Or would I just have another state school degree and, if I was lucky, working a job that had no loyalty to me like all of my friends in the states?

There is no finding out with questions like these.

Nina came back to Vienna to an empty apartment and a letter on the stove that thanked her for her kindness. It was curt but I didn’t want to hash out the politics of love with another person. I had already made a mess out of things by establishing something like a relationship with Michaela who also lived in Vienna and insisted that we continue to see each other. This kind of behavior was totally typical for me and I was growing sick of it. I felt like a junky with a serious habit. I didn’t even know what I was doing. I just ended up in bed with woman after woman saying all kinds of pretty things to keep myself there, expressing emotions that existed, but I knew they only existed for so long. I was beginning to worry that this was my only real art. Would I have to start saying “fucking around with wounded hearts” when people asked me what my art was?

I moved my stuff over to Michaela’s. We sullenly smoked cigarettes off the balcony. Then we laid in bed, again not touching each other, just laying there being sad together which actually felt way better than any sex at the time.

We continued like this for days until one night while we were out at a bar after I had been pickpocketed. We were sitting on some benches on the sidewalk watching a nasty storm roll in while we chatted to four black dudes with island accents who were telling us about Ja and the way of Rasta while cheefing down blunts. They said some vulgar thing about women and Michaela got irate in a hurry. Soon they were arguing. I tried to stop them nervously but my only success was in having Michaela turn her rage on me because I was being such a wimp in not confronting them as well. All of a sudden she said “you’re probably just some other hustler with a woman in every town” and my eyes made the mistake of dropping which ratted me out. She lit up like a bomb. It was true. Then she asked the one question I had so artfully dodged for the last few weeks. Did I have a girlfriend? I thought about lying, but that time spent thinking blew my cover anyway. She stood up, now totally angry. How serious was it, she wanted to know. I meekly began to explain my situation with Vane who still sent me letters in the mail because I hadn’t told her yet that our love was over. Probably because I’m a terrible person. Weak and undisciplined.

Right when Michaela’s fury hit its peak the storm that we had ten minutes ago been watching come to accompany the rainy cloud that was hanging over us finally made its appearance. The wind went from calm to tropical storm in seconds. Lightning split the air. Rain drops fell like buckshot from the sky. I watched Michaela walk away like a man who just watched a tornado tear apart his mobile home only to tear off across a field, leaving me there with the wreckage of something that was already a wreck.

Dazed, soaking wet and very confused I found myself under Timmy’s window hollering like Suzanna had on the first day that I had found this amazing place. He opened the window to see that it was me and then that same hand wave let me know that I was to come upstairs.

I stayed inside of the library for a few days. They were the best days of my entire trip. I felt like Borges in some secret archive of magic scripts. I lost myself in the comics for a few days while my mind reeled at the mess my penis had made for my whole body.

ghost town

I walked until the bones of my feet felt broken and I could walk no more. There were so many things inside of my head. Walking provided the only space I had to deal with them.

There is no better city than Vienna for walking therapy. The cold laced itself around my lungs, sharpening the reflexes of my mind. All around me were the remnants of wars past.

Vienna has been a hotly contested inland trading port for centuries. It stood as a gateway between the Middle East and the West and all goods between the two passed through it. The taxation of this process made the place wealthy enough to keep its poor quiet.

They walked through their own streets like guilt ridden ghosts. Never had I seen so many wizened and tired eyes.

Above our heads loomed concrete obelisks as tall as sky scrapers. These were bomb shelters that had been built by the Nazis during WWII. There was one in every neighborhood. They were built to be so strong that there was no way to dismantle them without blowing up the whole district that it rested in. I imagined that all of these ghostly citizens lived inside of these tombs, filtering out during the day to go about their ethereal business, forever in repentance for the collective sins that they were paying back like family loans that had been accrued during the war.

Not only had Hitler been born in Lindz and raised himself into the insane madman that he was here, but when the war came Vienna greeted the German Army with welcome arms. Their grandpas and dads and husbands and sons had been Nazis.

During all of the conversations I had about the gruesomeness of war with old men inside of cafe’s here did I hear one word about that generation. It was as if they had disappeared off of the map. It annoyed me greatly. Forcing oneself to forget things like this will only serve to mythologize that which actually happened. How are we to learn from that? In refusing the labor of acceptance the Viennese accepted an eternity of guilt.

It seemed like the perfect place to deal with my own guilt. I blended in gracefully with the citizens in their shuffling and baring of their historical chains. We all haunted the streets together.

One night while I was out haunting the streets I heard a girl’s voice call out my name. I turned to see someone I didn’t recognize. Her hair was brushy and she wore thick glasses. She was pretty. She fixed strange eyes on me, as if I had died and it were impossible that she could be seeing me. She told me, in a Scottish accent, that she had seen me speak in Edinburgh. It is a small world.

I told her that I was just out walking. She suggested that she join me. I begrudged the intrusion but it would be too impolite to insist that I must continue on to nowhere in particular by myself. As we walked she began an exhausting dialogue in how crazy she has felt lately.

I don’t know why people feel so free to treat me like their psychologist. It just happens. I meet someone, then five minutes later they’re telling me all about their childhood traumas and neurosis, every once in a while taking breaks to both breath and thank me for letting them be so open and honest. Its not like I start these conversations by saying “hey, look, I really prefer to talk about things that you don’t want to talk to anybody else about, so why don’t you just start telling me about your relationship with your mom.” It doesn’t bother me, though sometimes I feel like I really ought to suggest that they pay me. It just makes me wonder what it is about myself that makes these people feel so free to discuss these things.

This went on all night, all the way through the dinner that we shared at a restaurant that worked like a soup kitchen. We ended up on her roof. She was finishing off detailing why her anxiety made it difficult for her to relate to anyone while I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. At the time I was “between living arrangements” so she let me stay the night at her place. We slept in different rooms which was fine because I had no interest in manifesting sexual tension along with the emotional tension that had already make me feel spiritually broken. She kept coming in to offer me things, or sometimes to make awkward comments about how she has to sleep alone because she doesn’t really trust people. I just slept through.

In the morning she gave me a sweater and I was on my way, back into the haunting streets.

there are two sides of me. there is the one you do, and the one you do not see.

Always, in every extension of the the universe manifested here, there is more than one story. To those lucky few with truly clever vision there is an infinite unraveling of stories in everything. But for me there were only two. I attribute this mostly to a manic dualism which manifests itself in me as the disorder known commonly as Bipolar disorder. I fluctuate haphazardly between two emotional poles at all times, each pole with its own story.

The two stories of my life now were absolutely at odds.

One story was the story of a boy who was lost, very tired, poor, mentally unwell, malnourished and over-stimulated, stranded in a world which never felt comfortable, in which I was always an outsider. This was why it was so easy to leave every situation I was in. It was like I was never there in the first place. Maybe that is why I thought nobody would notice my bathroom breaks on all those stages.

The other story was a ballad of freedom, luck, faith and, most importantly, beauty. It was the story of why it was still worth it to believe in something in a day and age when nothing seems worth believing because the airwaves are so constantly crowded with lies.

Between the two I was torn. They were both true.

While we were in Cuba Rooster had had a version of this debate that lasted from the drizzly day on the rifle range when we first met each other and banded together to form MotorCycle Awesome, the worlds premier imaginary bike gang, all the way through the gnat infested bitchings of Cuba up until the day he walked out of the armory with his bags. A free man. I didn’t get to do that for two more years. I hated him so much during those two years.

He always insisted that there was a silver lining to everything, enforcing the conclusion that I was just being a “bitch” for my belief that things were wretchedly fucked and that nothing meant anything any more.We were both right. Places like Gitmo happen. It sucks, but its a fact of life. Sentimentality was a waste of emotion, but to me nothing means anything without the emotion. If it is to be an emotionless world I want out of it.

Every one of those detainees knew the way out. I did too. That’s why they keep the safety scissors in the booth.

The truth of the matter is that it is a beautiful and fucked up world. Between those two things there is nothing. No gray area. At least not to me.

Standing there in Vienna, in the cold, about to do another speech about how people think about torture, in my tattered army coat over a white t-shirt that I had written “MAGNETO WAS RIGHT” on with a Sharpie marker, freshly shaven mohawk, eyes pink around the edges, black crescents under my eyes, sallow cheek bones, tight black pants in my Army boots with two stories in my head, standing on ground that had seen centuries of the white man’s horror show, waiting for a repulsive man to come guide me to where I was to complete the second tenement of our contract which never manifested all because of money and a hunger for recognition I realized that when it all came down to it, I really didn’t give a fuck.

That’s when I realized what it was the Army had done to me. The special power it had given me. It gave me the power to say Fuck It. Whatever happens happens. I didn’t need to stress out any more. I had Fuck It on my side.

I called Hans on the payphone in the center of town. I felt like I was in a movie, leaning against this thing with a cigarette in my hand, counting out the last of my change for this one last call that needed to go through. He picked up the phone frantic. Where the fuck had I been? Who was I with? Would I be on time for the event? I tried to quiet his blubberings. I only had so much time on the payphone. I said “Hans, I’m at the town center at the front door of the church. I don’t know where to go. Come pick me up.” Then a polite German woman was saying something I didn’t understand.

Only one thing to do. I rolled a cigarette and waited in the gloomy mist for my fat man to come.

He did make it after a while, red in the face with his big fat fury. We hustled along to a place I had already been to and really should have remembered the location of but, to be honest, smoking all that weed was taking a real toll on me. Yeah. Its like that.

We walked in the door of a little bar with a patio on the second floor of a nondescript building. I didn’t say much of anything to my hosts. They were trying to tell me that I should focus on the really dark shit because people like stuff like that here. I had already made up my mind on the matter however. This was to be my last talk of any kind about this subject. I was done with Guantanamo. As of this afternoon I was really ready to put it behind me.

People filtered in, got drinks, shmoozed. People ignored me for the most part. Hans and Liz bustled about like they were the coolest kids in town. Everyone was dressed in black and they stared down the barrel of their noses at everything with shrewdish suspicion. They were caricatures of the European artist type. I found it pretty hilarious.

Suddenly there was silence and I found that a space had been cleared around me, leaving me in the middle of dozens of skeptical eyes beaming from emotionless faces. Awkward barely begins to explain things. Hans’ said a few words in German then said my name and pointed to me. Go!

So I talked. The one thing I can do at any moment of the day on command. I took this opportunity to say it how I’d always wanted to say it.

I told them about my fears that this really was fascism and that I had been a part of something worst that the Nazi’s had ever been. Where before the was the Third Reich now there is the World Bank. The transition was flawless. It had only come to be this way because the good people of the military industrial complex had learned a lot of lessons from Hitler’s failures. Now here we were in a world that was twice as terrifying as the ones that generations of science fiction writers had toiled in their basements to create. Our leaders were even good enough to afford us a taste of irony in declaring a war on terror, which is a natural reaction to waking up into a world in which millions of people are being killed in occupations on account of a disagreement over beliefs. I made sure to tell them that we were fucked as a species and that we didn’t deserve to be saved. We do horrible things and we have it coming.

Then it was just over. Dismissed. I took my beer and my cigarettes outside to sulk alone but some guy thought that it was chit chat time. He wanted to let me know that he thought that I couldn’t just come here to make some banal form of apology and think that I could get away with war crimes. I didn’t even have the energy to discuss this with him. Luckily I was spared by a beautiful accident.

There was a cocktail waitress nearby who had heard the whole discussion and she decided to step in on my behalf. She told the man something sharp in a singsong German and then looked down nervously and walked away. The man turned to me and apologized for being rude and then he too walked away. Then Nina came up wearing a raincoat and boots, her short cropped hair fuzzy, she was wearing that same obvious declaration of distance that I had seen more than once from girls who were done with me. She just wanted to say hi and then she had to go. Hi. And then she went. I couldn’t tell what her emotions were then, but that was the story of all of my Viennese interactions. Those people are hard to read.

Inside a girl who looked like a boy was looking over my Combat Paper. She was punked out so I knew she didn’t have any money but I always sell for cheap to my punk people because sharing is caring. She picked one that had my whole record xeroxed on it and before I could tell her the price she handed me fifty Euros and punched me on the arm. Then she told me that this stuff had great fetish value. Then she took off. I was touched.

Outside the cocktail waitress was smoking a cigarette. She was picture perfect. Long legs elegantly crossed, beautiful eyes calmly fixed a thousand miles off, dyed blond hair and thick mascara, that perfect punk beauty queen taste with a take back to historical elegance. I was staring at her. I realized it before she did luckily or it might have been creepy. I walked up to her to thank her. Her name was Nina, too.

She apologized for the man. I told her not to worry about it. We smoked for a while. I saw that Nina, the first Nina, was still inside. I decided to go. I could feel trouble brewing.

I stayed out all night that night, spending most of my money on whiskey. I stumbled into Hans’ shitfaced in the early morning.

September 25, 2010

belle nina

The night after the speech I was walking by the museums. I took a turn around an ally and soon I heard the sound of a gathering of people and a distant thumping. I followed the sound until I was standing before the enormous wooden doors of an old building that looked like a castle. The person at the counter looked at me with familiarity and asked me what my name was. When I told her she told me that I was on the list. Some hidden kindness of my captors I assumed.

I walked in and there in the first room was Nina shrouded in her charms. Beyond her a rave of sorts was raging, complete with a spectacle of lighting like I had never seen. My blood began to boil with the likelihood of heavy duty hallucinogens.

I had been thinking about her all day, kicking myself for not at least getting her number or making an attempt, and then kicking myself again for even thinking about dragging another girl into a scene that had just recently been evacuated by all other participants on account of how fucked up I was capable of being.

We talked briefly but it was too loud so we just stood next to each other sneaking glances. We never did go inside the dance.

We left the party with her friend Daniel who I took to be her boyfriend even though she showed no interest in returning the longing glances that he gave her. We went to a cafe where we talked for a long time, though I can’t remember what we talked about. Then we were in some lavish club that was covered from wall to wall with golden things, everything shining. I couldn’t afford a drink here. We talked all night. When we left that place the sun was just starting to come up. Daniel was getting on his motorcycle, I was smoking a cigarette, Nina was saying goodbye. When he was gone she told me that I could stay at her place. I realized that I really didn’t have any other options other than going back to Hans’. It was too late/early to show up at Timmy’s. He’d be pissed. I considered sleeping in a park for the morning but then I realized that that was a stupid idea when a beautiful girl was offering you a place in her home.

When we got to her place she told me I could either sleep on the stiff, uncomfortable couch or in bed with her. The question seemed decided already. From that moment on the only time that I left that apartment was with her.

We started the clock with eleven days. We spent those days as if we had been in love forever.

We spent hours in her huge, beautiful bathroom floating in the tub every day. She rolled us spliffs with her nimble fingers while her voice sang out sweetly to me, calming every anxious nerve in my body. Her beauty was manifold. Her virtues beautiful. She was had the sweetest heart I had come across.

She loved me because I was free. She had never met anyone who lived like I did. I felt awkward receiving this love because I knew that in a way this wasn’t really me. I had always had a job before this journey. I’d always been in the same place doing the same thing with the same people which was the life that she was hoping to escape. She had her own American Dream, and like so many dreaming girls before her she rested those dreams on my story and my face which never grew older past my teenage years. I was Peter Pan. A myth of a life she wanted to live.

Thats not entirely fair because when she told me she loved me I believed it more than when it had come from others. She saw something in me that I couldn’t see and she loved that part of me, and in her love I could love it too. When I apologized to her she stopped me, forcing me to understand that there was nothing to apologize for. This made me begin to question why I apologized so much. Were the things that I said or did which I thought to be disasters really not that big a deal?

I began to write these apologies down. We called it our Apology Garden. This is the list:

– I’m sorry I’m so gross.

– I’m sorry I’ve only been here for two days and I’ve moved all of my shit all over your room.

– I’m sorry I can’t stop touching you.

– I’m sorry I talk about myself so much.

– Sorry I never see these things.

– I’m sorry I’m stoned and I can’t find my bearings in this place.

– Sorry I am from the future.

– Sorry I talk funny.

– Sorry I’m so simple sometimes.

– Wow, sorry. Super downer.

– I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.

– I’m sorry but you have to.

– Sorry I didn’t go with you guys to the hospital yesterday.

– Sorry. I should have saved it for you.

– Sorry that I said no drinks and then I got myself a drink.

– We stole your seats, sorry.

– Sorry I’m a business man about these things.

– I’m sorry my friends are all crazy.

– Ugh…. whatever, sorry.

– Sorry, its kind of wierd.

– Its almost over. Sorry.

– I was the only person here to dance with. I’m sorry.

– Sorry I am kind of a mess.

– Social butterfly, sorry.

– Don’t you like dangerous games? No, not really, sorry if I looked like I did.

For every apology she took a photograph with her Polaroid camera.

Her eyes were beautiful and you could see her taking the moments in, appreciating them for their aesthetic merits. When I was with her there were no politics or massive emotional conversations to have. There was just holding hands and keeping our eyes open so we didn’t miss one moment of this time. Everything was precious. The clock sped up despite our efforts to make it stop.

I finally had someone to share this town with, somebody to fill the hole that I felt alongside of me every day as I walked around in a beautiful place that became worthless without the values of a shared experience. Our bond became complete in very few days.

I forgot about the rest of the world because we had our own world. I didn’t want to leave it, nor did she want me to go. Goddamn the hands that move the hands of clocks and all the things they take away which will never be returned after they are gone!

From the living room we could often here Mimu, her roommate playing her bizarrely beautiful music on an accordion which added to the surreality of our dream.

These were the most beautiful eleven days of my life. I treasure the memory of them more than anything else that I have in my possession. I will keep them locked inside of a safe inside my brain and guard them for eternity from the rest of the world.

You can take everything else, but you will never take my photographs of Nina.

fuck you and your money.

There was only one thing left to do in this city. The photographs.

I had thought, as was the original plan, that this would be the most painless of my promises three to the Wicked Witch of the Welfare State, but I was painfully wrong.

I made a call to Hans from Nina’s phone. Again he was furious with me for absenteeism but I didn’t give a fuck. As I said earlier, fuck Hans and Liz. The month was almost over and I couldn’t care less about my commitments to them. So far they had only given me a sprinkling of money and put me up for less time than all of the much truer artists that I had met who asked me for nothing.

He had arranged a photographer and a location. I was to meet them at the apartment two days before my flight back to England where I would connect with the Drews from Combat Paper for a dangerous month long mission.

Nina and I were smoking cigarettes outside the front door that morning with our sunglasses on looking too cool to be true. Hans came down and ushered us off to an Army Navy Surplus store down the road. He was disappointed that they didn’t have any Nazi uniforms and my hairs bristled. What did he want with those. I asked him what kind of photos he had in mind. He said he wanted pictures of me in a uniform. We settled on a pair of fatigues that were of an unfamiliar camo pattern, probably from some Eastern European rag tag military.

We took the train out to the farthest reaches of town and walked for a ways until we came to what appeared to be the edge of the apocalypse. Broken down buildings, empty lots, broken glass, remnants of large machines as far as the eye could see. We set our things down inside one of the buildings which looked like it used to be some kind of shipping dock. It had no roof and there was spray paint everywhere. While we waited for the photographer Hans finally informed me that what he really wanted of me was to get pictures of me in a uniform which would be super imposed over pictures of me naked in shackles. He brought the three piece suit they had detained me in while we were in Lindz out. My mouth dropped. I pushed my glasses to the top of my head so he could see the full scale of fury in my eyes.

I was unleashed. How the fuck did he think that this was art? You can’t make bondage porn out of a humanitarian crisis that had swallowed the lives of so many people. How was I to let these pictures eventually wander into the hands of Moazzam and Omar and Jarallah who would be disgusted with me for participating in such a disturbing display of vulgarity. This was fucking sick.

Nina was standing at my side with her hand on me, the only restraint I had from physically venting the anger that was destroying my insides. I absolutely refused.

Hans jumped up and down and twisted about like a petulant child that hasn’t gotten what it wanted, switching between whining and this extremely scary face that was the last piece in the puzzle that I was putting together about Hans’ true psyche. I couldn’t tell if he was a serial killer or a pedophile or both, but he was something that was absolutely fucking twisted and my dealings with him were done.

The photographer showed up finally in a fancy SUV. The scene confused him thoroughly. He joined into the debate, letting us know that he drives a fly ride and that the rest of his clients were important people and he had no time to be sitting here for this.

I needed the money. I put the uniform on and snatched the shackles out of Hans’ hands, controlling the urge to beat him to death with them. That would make for some pretty fucking awesome pictures I think. For the next few hours the photographer and I worked together while Liz kept Hans under control.

We pretended that this broken down building was a block and I walked up and down it as if I were on duty, every five meters stopping to talk with one of the imaginary detainees. I was comfortable with this because in a way this scene represented something like the twisted fragment of a nightmare that those blocks had left in my brain. It was not good art and there was no value in it for them but I was accomplishing my mission.

If Nina had not been there I think that situation would have broken me, but with her I didn’t care. I didn’t need them any more.

The photo shoot came to an end. They told me I could come pick my money up the next day. My last day in Vienna. I wanted it now because I did not want to see them again.

Nina and I went back to our dream.

The next day we were standing in their apartment for the last time. Hans was, as always, in his underwear. It seems that we caught him in the act. He started to tell me that I was a big disappointment to them but I told him to shut his fucking mouth. I focused on Liz. I asked her where the money was. I wanted my pay from the Subversive Messe and whatever it was they saw fit to give me for the completion of our contract. Liz presented me with a payroll log which listed the 200 Euros they were going to give me with all of the deductions for the small increments they had given me, many of them false. The balance was 70 Euros.

Again I lost it. The money they had given to me had been a very small and infrequent per diem. On top of that they were completely ignoring the 300 Euros which was owed to me directly from the Messe. They told me that I wasn’t entitled to that money because it was their project which was on display there. She looked shocked to find that I knew the size of the grant that they had received and that I had a list of my own. The list was the expenses that they had invested into this project which amounted to less than 500 Euros which meant that they were sitting on a 5,500 Euro profit for a project for which I was the only claim to legitimacy they had and they were going to hand me 70 Euros? Absolutely not.

Liz changed her offer to 200 which was still not enough to calm my fury. I wanted at the very least the 300 that they had outright stolen from me. I didn’t give a fuck about their money. I didn’t want their money. I wanted my money.

Liz left the apartment to get the 200 Euros from an ATM (no, she didn’t even have that bullshit sum prepared) and so Nina and I were faced with Hans in all of his grotesqueness. He began to yell obscenities from his computer chair, too fat to get out of it and to face me like any kind of a man. He began a very bizarre tangent. He started listing off things that I have sucked. Dicks, people, art, Moazzam, etc. etc…

This was too much. I looked at Nina. Her eyes were like two pools of comfort. I decided I didn’t need this. I grabbed her hand and we began to leave. When we got out to the sidewalk Hans had continued his ranting out of the window. Liz was walking to the door with the money in her hand. She handed it to me. I slapped it out of her hand and told her to fuck herself.

We walked out of a cloud of bills holding hands, poor but proud and, most importantly, together.

The next day the plane came to take me away. Inside the airport at the electric gate which would separate us we kissed one last time in Vienna and she whispered in my ear that she would see me in Brighton. I smiled. The sunglasses were hiding a few tears. That was the hardest departure I’ve ever made.

The ticket had been acquired by a friend of Liz who worked for the airline. She was a stewardess. She asked me if I had the money for the ticket. I told her that Hans and Liz had sworn that they would cover it.

Goodbye, Wein. You showed me the best and the worst of yourself.

you can run…

As the train rolled through the countryside I was reminded of one month that had become an era of its own in my life while Vanessa slept on my shoulder, her curly black hair like brambles on the edges of my field of vision. Her eyes were closed peacefully in sleep. She was not worried about what it was that train was taking us towards. She didn’t care about the baggage that I’d be bringing into her colorful little room which rested one story above the ground and ten feet below the clouds which never leave. I envied her calm.

Inside of me there was a war raging. One one side of a dangerous no man’s land was the little boy in me, innocently adrift in a dream, and on the other was the dog toothed soldier that had been raised hard by a cold and awful world. They fought a war over the value of sentimentality during the age of machines.

Both sides of me were now stranded on the other side of an ocean with very little money and no ticket home, so in a way their conflict was made banal by the magnitude of this most recent snap decision.

Traveling had taught me one thing about the decision making process. When you decide to do something on the road that is what you must commit yourself to doing. There is no room for regret and self doubt. Your attention must constantly be entirely directed towards survival, so you are left with no free time to ponder all of the things you could have done differently.

Vanessa was waking up while the train was pulling into Newcastle and I had come to a resolution with myself. I’d made my choices and there would be no whining and complaining. I would use Grandma’s hundred dollar bill as the canary in the coalmine. When I broke that bill the love story was over and I had to go back to the Golden Fields of Plenty, back where I knew people.

It was a sunny day. The sun cast a clean light down on every brick as the ocean wind washed over us while we carried my bags up the hill that leads to Fenhem. Everything was going to be o.k.

Later that night I was in a car going north to Edinburgh. Vanessa was working all weekend and the house would be empty. Her housemates were heading up north for a zine symposium so I went with them. I was with Laura, Mike and Pete.

We stopped on the way to go to the bathroom. There was a gloomy brick tower that split the crisp night. Nested obscenely in the bottom of this ancient heirloom of English culture was a Burger Kind drive through. Off the side of this modern marvel was a mini-mall. The whole thing was such a disgusting juxtaposition and simultaneous marriage of two vastly different times that we just had to stand there for quite a few minutes silently taking the whole scene in. What a phenomenal testament to the passage of time.

The weekend was a D.I.Y. extraveganza. We squatted on the crowded floors of migrated Newcastle political activists. There was lino printing and book binding and shop talking about the future plans of different radical political groups which mostly focused on the cheap or free production of entertainment or radical goods. It was cold and wet. Every moment had that sickly mustiness that always seemed so well conveyed by Joyce. We ran around the streets trying to find as many government surveillance cameras as we could like we were kids on an easter egg hunt.

I met a lot of people there and my enthusiasm for the possibility of keeping my productivity levels high during this stay was greatly increased. Everyone was so excited about a project, and with no other project save for this fledgling love to speak of I became anxious and fidgety. Of course there was always “the project.” This book. This story. But that was not something in and of itself. This was only a story worth telling if I was engaged in the exploits of our freak rebellion, with my hands in the work, producing some artifact of dissent. Without that I would be just another lazy writer in love with love itself. At least that is how it felt at the time.

I couldn’t stand to be away from Vanessa and that scared me most dramatically.

On our final morning in Edinburgh we were waking up in our sleeping bags. I’d been awake all night. Breakfast was cooking. The air was sharp and mean. I felt sick. I wanted to be home but I didn’t know what that word meant anymore. The weight of the last month was finally catching up to me.

We got back to Newcastle late that night after a winding drive through the snowy northern hills. Vanessa got home later. Again her soft voice and her eyes calmed some raging thing inside of me.

Some veterans drink and some shoot dope or gamble or swallow handfulls of pills and some do all of the above, but my drug of choice has always been love. There is no addiction in this world that can keep my mind as busy as the insanity that comes as a byproduct of romance. There are probably a lot of different reasons for this behavior, but they would all read as excuses, so I won’t bother. Like any good addict I’ve just come to accept my addiction and coddle it in moderation. But I’ve never been known to be particularly moderate.

I was well on my way to losing myself in another relationship because I didn’t want to deal with all of the boxes that I had thoroughly packed away after my deployment, the contents of which were now strewn about the floor of the house inside of my brain where I live inside of myself, as scared as ever about who these wretched memories had made me to be.

why i failed ethical philosophy: an essay

There was a phone in my possession that I was eager to ignore. Occasionally when it was on it would ring. One of two names would be on the screen. I just sat and stared at it. I was a liar and it was setting in.

The only thing I could seem to formulate were “buts” and excuses. They were all bullshit, but that is the way of things with things like “buts” and excuses.

But I am in love. But I’m scared to go home. But I don’t have a home. But I need some time to think.

But I had betrayed the trust of a man with whom I had shared a sacred history. I promised him I would go home, but that is not what I did.

I wrote it off easily at first because I figured that nobody would be hurt by this. I had forgotten very important details of history because they had presented themselves while I was in an emotional blur, some kind of pastiche of life while enshrined in a dream cacoon. I had forgotten that some very important people had vouched for me, promising Her Majesty the Queen that I would not pull such elaborate hyjinx as the very business I was involved with. These are very proper people we’re talking about here.

There were a lot of questions about where I was because my facebook page had suddenly become impossible so my friends and family were trying to put together what was happening, including my mom and the lawyer and the Member of Parliament who had protested my detention. What I had pulled was a giant social faux paux. Just like when I was sneaking off the stage in front of all of those people hoping that nobody noticed. Nope. People noticed.

Moazzam had to answer for all of it. And I was not answering my calls. Things were very vague. I didn’t know what I was going to do and I didn’t know why, I mean really why, I had made the choices I had made. I didn’t know how to tell him how I had managed to look him in the face and tell him lies… for weeks when the only thing that made what we were doing genuine, I mean truly legit, was honesty. I don’t know how I did it. I just did.

Needless to say I was very ashamed of myself. This shame would allow me no peace and no break to enjoy this new love though there were so many moments that sparkled with with these elements. I was disenchanted with the allure of beauty because at the heart of every moment was a reasonable degree of contempt of myself.

I think it goes without mention that I was falling apart in front of Vanessa and all of her roomates.

Luckily enough for me there is no group of people better than the people of Fenham to fall apart amongst.

It seemed like a place that I had only dreamed of. Rows of quaint, old houses painted a variety of muted colors. Inside of each house was a close knit cell of predominately girls. Their houses were beautiful and well maintained. All of these cells operated together to operate the Star and Shadow Lounge which provided a home for every project of a radical nature in town. The community was friendly and completely lacking any evidence of a hierarchical structure. Meetings were a daily occurrence. They were much more casual and concerned with the emotional responses of the other discussion participants so people didn’t dread them. There were a few males who acted just like everyone else.

Our house was the think tank. That is mostly because Laura lived there. Laura is half Greek and half British and somehow I think this almost explains her perfectly. She has this high energy gesticulation combined with the English wit. It is a very pleasant mixture. She was dating Mike. Mike lived in another house. He was a Historian zinester. He’s skeptical of almost everything because he knows that most of everything is bullshit. There was Tamzin. She had the best kind of English accent that the world can offer and she used it to keep the often wandering conversations from getting too far from the bottom line with a sense of humor that was more charming than any one person had a right to. And Flo who adds to every room she is in a kind of elegant class that people have let go. She is a relic of the twenties, her hair always curled into some kind of science fiction adaptation of a smoking woman from a Mucca illustration. Keith would come and go. He was always a pleasant surprise in the den of constant political chatter.

These girls were hyper social. Every day all day, if you wanted to talk there was someone who was interested in the same thing.

Down the street was the Fenham version of my darling Alpha Squad. This was Fay, the most sensual human being on the face of the Earth. CJ, the vision of the young folk punk hero equipped with all the talent and the political savvy starting to make his way. And there was Katerina Ballerina who never, ever stops smiling. This was where we drank and smoked and didn’t get much done in the way of organizing but definitely got a lot of spare anxiety off our chests by way of emoting pationately to the beat of Fay’s raw musical energy.

And then of course there was Vanessa who appeared to me to be bathed in some kind of unnatural light which was making me blind. She’s definitely not a fan of men. She wanted to be a journalist at the time. She was learning in English though to hear her speak Italian one knows that those words must flow so beautifully on a page despite that I only knew what they meant by the tone of her eyes which communicated far more than words in a way that I could never replicate with words and she didn’t know how to control.

I was having the same problem at the time. My eyes were ratting out my inner dilemma, though my mouth was holding out on the subject.

How the Sentimental Brontosaurus Got Its Color

The month was ending and everybody knew it. I worked to build some kind of plan that would allow me to keep all of these stories that I wasn’t ready to leave, but there was no two ways about the thing. I had to go. I could not abandon this project for anything.

The month ended on the train platform. I was going to hitchhike into Europe. We were going to meet in a few months at the rally in Calais where we would protest injustice together. As we kissed the moment froze in the way that perfect moments do. It became a treasured memory.

Sylvanna was coming with me. She was one of Vane’s stuffed friends.

The train left.

It took me down to London. I caught another train down to Edinbridge. Danny was living there with his parents again. We were going to finish the Sentimental Brontosaurus.

The trip was funded by a photographer who wanted to take pictures of me for a photojournalism project she was working on.

A few hours later Jo, the photo-journalist, and I were walking in the brambles around Danny’s folks’ swank neighborhood. She was asking me questions and taking pictures of me. She worked with a very peculiar camera which needed a lot of precision so the poses had to be kept for long periods of time. I don’t like posing.

Danny and I tom catted around his home town that night. Two tired road junkies commiserating about the itch over some beers. That night he filled in the color of my brontosaurus while we sat on the floor, occasionally going out to the back yard to smoke and process our crazy plans.

He desperately wanted to be back in Portland with the girl that he had fallen in love with, back with the bike freaks and the big hills and the ocean coast not so far away so that he could feel at home between the cliffs and the ocean of grain.

When everything was said and done I laid in bed, completely unsure of everything I was doing. This happened:

Veteran. Manic Depressive. Student. Sort of comic book nerd. White-trash. Hipster. Homeless. Self-absorbed. Tramp.

Simple narratives for an inexplicable self.

I’m in a trap and I need to get out of it. I only realized it when I got the email from Ben tonight.

I’m describing an absurd subjective narrative to myself based on a pattern of fluctuating emotions which I perpetuate and sensationalize in order to make my life make sense. It stopped being true somewhere in this sentence.

I know what it is. So I’ll write it down.

I put myself in situations and act on impulses, mostly lingual, to make my story more…….. FUCK!

OK. Why am I trying to describe myself to myself? I read an email from a friend and I realized that my writing constrained me into a sensationalized narrative of my life which made me feel unsettled and a little bit like a drama queen. I am confused because it is true that I have experienced unpleasant situations in the past, but as Ben reminded me, my past honestly reflects some moments in which I was happy and sometimes sad…… I have to stop this. It all needs breaking down.

I have pidgeon-holed myself into a situation where I’m writing off whole chunks of time based on how I feel I am expected to react to some events and happenings.

I was worried that if I didn’t say that it made everything horrible for me they would hate me because I would stand rightfully  accused of being a sociopath. But now I’ve over amplified my own projections, typically, into something more grandiose with words than it actually is based on a passing trend or fad. I’ve made some rhetorical monster of this thing but… FUCK THIS THING! DAMN! How do I escape Guantanamo? How do I clean myself of this? Iwant to wash it off me but it won’t let me go. More likely visa versa. It is consuming a beautiful history, infecting memories with places I wish I could keep it out of. I just want it gone.

But I keep forcing myself into it, knowing damn well my motivations are selfish and capitalistic and a shameless rendition of self as I would like my self to be seen, not as a true identity. I have all these flaws that I keep finding everywhere and these things have nothing to do with Gitmo. Is this even still about Gitmo?

None of this makes any sense.

I guess accomplishing my mission.

Watch as another veteran slips into mental illness. Driving myself fucking crazy going around in circles about shit I wish I’d just shut the fuck up about. Always bitching about everything, watching nothing and listening exclusively to the one voice I need to hear less of: my own. This is exactly how you were in Cuba. This is you: self-centered. You lived in a place where men were kept in cages and the only person you really cared about was you. Yup. That’s the thorn. Fucked up, selfish, head-tripping, young garbage. I knew it was fucked up. I felt it for a while. But then it all bled away, behind my always fucking talk talk talking brain who demands attention rambling on about some contrived anxiety to keep myself busy, maintaining and trying to hone the act of presentation of self. I’ve blamed everybody else but me. And now I’m feeling sorry for myself.

Every corridor is some bleak extension of the labyrinth with its absolute insolubility.

I don’t know any truth about myself. I don’t think there is one. That is what pisses me off.

I hope beyond anything else that I’m not just doing this for pity.

Stop doing this to yourself.

Expressing yourself doesn’t have to  be an exhibition of despair and anxiety. I’m happy too, but you never write on those days. Not just happy, but I’m blowing this out of proportion. That was Ben’s point and he was right. Now be a better writer and drop all of this nihilistic, repetitive and meaningless chatter about your insecurities and work harder at writing the truth.

This isn’t a fucking emo song.

In the morning he drove me to a truck stop on the road to Dover. His mom had packed me a lunch. We said our goodbyes like brothers. We are brothers of the itch.

when you get what you always wanted

Not too long after he left I found myself in a car with two mid-thirties professionals who were on their way to France for a romantic weekend. They were very excited to have me along for part of the ride. I wondered which one of them was married. They were too happy to be husband and wifeand they had too much charisma to be the product of an internet dating site.

We drove onto the ferry and parted ways. I sat in the back and watched the white cliffs of Dover recede into the misty haze of the sea.

When we touched down on the other side I just started walking down the road with my thumb up. Dozens of trucks had been loaded into the belly of this ferry and I desperately needed to catch one.

I didn’t have a traveling partner this time, so there was no fun to be had on this hitch. This was just survival and need.

A round and friendly guy named Pierre picked me up in his truck full of bananas. We talked about how the economy was crashing and he nervously told me about all of the cutbacks that his company was going through. He was the next to go and he knew it. He was 24 with no other vocational abilities. Times were grim.

As we left Calais I saw from the copilots seat the ramshackle squats that I had been talking about for ages. Pierre said he was worried about me when he saw me because the docks have been very violent places. The refugees were piled up here and when they were riled up they would attack the trucks. He told me stories that were funny in his trade about men who had cut holes in the tops of trucks to ride in the cargo area on the ferry. I wondered if I would have the grit to do something that tenacious.

Pierre let me off just north of Paris at a tiny little gas station that saw little traffic because it was on an unpopular route that circumnavigates the city. It was cold and there were rain clouds that were only a few hundred meters away. They caught up with me quickly. I put my bag in the telephone booth and sat outside smoking cigarettes in the rain. It was gloomy but also hilarious.

A man pulled up at a strange angle that indicated that he wanted to pick me up but he made no further gesture so I just looked at the car with rheumy eyes.

He poked his hand out of the window and waved me closer. I came up to the window. He told me to get in.

While he drove me to the junction with the road that would go straight east to Strasbourg he told me about his job. His job was to produce avant garde circuses. He talked the entire time about how disenchanted he had become by the government and how he dreamt of a better world but couldn’t see one coming. I could not get a read on his class status. He could have been a very classy starving artist or a very casual rich guy.

It was pouring.

He was hesitant when he was leaving me at the truck stop. He made note of the fact that there was no cover here. I brushed it off. Everything is going to work out just fine I said.

I got some bread and some cheese and climbed up a slick, muddy hill. I was directing myself towards a shrubbery that was just slightly smaller than a bush, but nowhere near tree status. I accepted the reality of my situation and tried to not sulk. I would need to save my energy for beating pneumonia in the morning.

So I slept there in the mud and the rain. It stopped raining eventually though.

When I woke up I was disgusting. The people inside of the truck stop looked at me like I was a mud monster. The clerk was babbling soft tongued French at me and pointing at the muddy food prints I was leaving all over the store. I nervously bowed away from the situation after feigning an attempt to wipe up my mess. I got a coffee from a vending machine and reported to the side of the road.

The rain had picked up again. I was singing songs to myself. I was coughing. I felt very, very ill. I stood there like a zombie for three hours. Then a sports car raced up to my feet. The door popped open to reveal a surly looking young metal dude.

We didn’t talk much at all. He told me that he worked in a factory. I tried to ask him if he had any weed. He looked confused and disapproving. So we drove along in silence. France was untheatrically boring. I could only think about all of the men who had slept in the mud out here over the last century while they were occupied with occupations, advances, bulges, and of course all of those bullets. It made me think that back then maybe blowing up seemed easier than years of mud sleep. One night had been more than enough for me.

My grandfather’s generation definitely had something that seems lacking in mine.

He went as far as Metz, passing it just a little way to drop me off at the next rest area down the road. I was getting really nickel and dimed on the rides, but if I could catch one more ride I would be in Strasbourg where Chris, a resident member of the IVAW, was going to pick me up the following day.

Nobody seemed interested In me, so after an hour I just approached a car and asked the driver where he was going. He said Freiburg. That was definitely on my way. I asked if he could… of course he said yes.

He was a developer of green transportation solutions. He was the author of a book. He cheerily announced that he was ready for the arrival of an apocalypse type situation, but from his fancy car I had a hard time imagining him roughing it.

He bought me a huge meal, probing me about my aspirations. He was a very nice guy.

He dropped me off in Strasbourg in the afternoon when the sun was at its best. I walked free underneath the weight of my bag into a city that has no shortage of European charm.

My first order of business was finding a place to stay because I was in no shape to spend another night outside.

Never in all of my mental preparation geared towards preparing myself to play the rold of a homeless veteran did I intend to actually sleep on the streets or stay in a shelter. You can call me prissy. Its fine.

While I searched for a place to stay the cold and the sick from the night before were finally starting to set in. I slipped into a dark undercurrent and was washed away in self pity.

I’ve been trying a new tact on the telling people that I am a veteran thing. I’m not doing it. I want to see their reactions, but my problems with exploiting myself as this thing bug me way too much now. I was beginning to get worried that I had no identity left beyond my inescapable veteraness. Plus I don’t have the words to define myself now anyway and I can’t open up that discourse without coming up short. What would the classically anti-American French care about an American soldier trying to figure himself out? Maybe that is exactly what would make their reaction enjoyable and new.

In other news the brontosaurus is now finished and beautiful. A perfect part of the crew. Vanessa is the only person who has catalogued and named all of the entire cast of characters. I really miss how she looked at me.

One thing is for sure. I need to stop this fucked up, possessive head trip that I am on about her. It will poison the whole thing. I am clinging to the idea of her because it is some important characteristic of self to be in love. In the midst of this blank and unhappy labyrinth of crisis of self, in a time when my identity has become a wash amidst the turmoil and madness of our world so as I feel like I am only a creature of madness. A reflection of its irrationality. To be in love, to be loved, to have loved, these things, for some fucked up reason, add a unique necessity of self. It makes me feel like I do exist and it is worth something to have done so. To love and to be loved. But enough is enough.

If love is going to be some thorn in my psyche to keep me occupied in times of idleness, some drama to, for good or bad, inspire a feeling of value about who I am now, then I need to reconfigure. I need to know that this too isn’t just some escape from my island of self in an ocean of selflessness.

Am I always going to have some obscene, obsessive fascination with the few tabloid issues in my life in order to give some structure to this constant dialectical deconstruction that I’ve become? Veteran, lover, activist, artist, they all become a medium for my manic dualism. In all of them I draw the same conclusions. I am both the pig and the wolf that are tattood on my arm. An evil destroyer and an innocent beggar. Villain/hero. Michael/Lucifer. Happy/sad. In love/incapable of love. Lazy stoner/brave adventurer. Brain/body. Like Tekken, they’re all squaring off, but all the matches are tied. Perpetual conflict fleshed out in the noteworthy circumstances of my life.

In the case of Brain vs. Body the two sides are not simultaneous victors. In the winter my brain, sick of the tyranny of the bodies summer triste, seizes control and exerts its dominion by refusing the drugs that I need. My body goes limp when the brain plays these games. An awkward complication of bones and oily skin. It doesn’t dance or sing, it really doesn’t like anything, and the brain makes it move. Eventually the sun magics my body into some mad voodoo passion and my mind passively sits and refuses to say anything. Two lovers refusing union. The sum of their love is me.

The war rages on.

I just looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. It was not a good sight. There are rings under my eyes that I wish everyone who has ever said that they envy my traveling spirit could see. In their admiration there is a refusal to acknowledge the difficulties of the lifestyle. They will never wake up in the mud. They will never sleep in the rain. Or watch people walk past you while you hold a sign begging for money. They will never sacrifice precious dignity into a fire of need. They couldn’t laugh as it burned. They will never walk by restaurants where people eat food on platters that cost sixty dollars a piece while you just stole a handfull of peanuts from a grocery store to survive. They will never say goodbye to the woman who loves them with the comfortable bed to do all of these things. They will never know how tired and uncertain I am right now.

They will live with the dream I’d had before I chose reality. And I envy them.

They do the same, think the same about veterans. Men who dream of pulling triggers think we are kings for having done so. They don’t know the weight of that actual moment and they don’t know the identityless void of existence, and they don’t know about all of the nights falling asleep in the rain and waking up in the mud. They prefer the dream. The virtual and shameless inspiration without commitment to ugly action. Then they ask us if we’ve ever killed anybody.

My sense of self worth has bottomed out. It is a sunken ship on the floor of an unforgiving ocean. I have begged and pleaded and finally cursed when I didn’t get what I wanted. Now I have my cup out again.

Please help a homeless vet. Please, God. Anybody. Help me. Please. But there is never enough help. The people who give it begrudge you the intrusion. The help they offer is a fix, only big enough to keep you from the sickness. We are the addicts of the system dieing from withdrawal.

So we do it on our own. Pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, or so they say. We discontinue our self pity and we thrust out the cup. Our bodies become a prison cell of hellish repentance. The damned, self persecuted, self destructed, souls of the streets. Our eyes are glass windows of closed down shops. Our hopes the trash left by the previous owner. And we are right next door to a four star restaurant.

Our hearts are frigid places. Angry places that have leapt and come down at too many alluring disappointments. When we taste success it is the one good minute in months of hell.

Hard times have made us like the Bedouins. Patiently and dispassionately we wait for nothing because we know that no real cure will ever come.

When I looked in the mirror tonight I saw, for the first time, a real live homeless veteran. I didn’t feel sorry for him. He made his own choices. I didn’t care what he had seen or what effect this had had on his mind and heart. His was just another face I was trained to ignore. I wished to just walk past him, but I was tied to his eyes. We were shadows of the same body. It made me sick to look at him and feel nothing at all.

At the very end of my stay in the cafe I finally got in contact with a woman who lived in this town. She would let me stay at her place. I packed up my things and began to walk.

A little while later I was in a shower watching everything wash away.

in safe hands

A gloomy ambience rolled in through the balcony door as my eyes fluttered open on my first comfortable morning in Europe. I had made it. My dream was coming true.

The girl I was staying with had already left, leaving a nice note on the table informing me that there was coffee and food and that I was to lock the door on my way out. Bon Chance!

The air was wet and grey. My huge rucksack threatened to snap my shoulders off of my body as I tumbled around the town hacking up pieces of my poor lungs. Later that afternoon I was to be at the train station to meet a veteran who had fled the United States in lieu of deploying again. I picked up a few random food items and then spent the rest of my five euro daily limit on tobacco and papers. I smoked that gloomy morning away while I imagined the stories of the lean Europeans that bustled in and out of the train station.

For a moment I considered finding some cardboard and begging for a little money on the veteran ticket but I came to an impasse in the logic. Why would I hold these people accountable for the disease that America gave me. They hadn’t tyrannized the dessert people since the Crusades, if this was truly not just another campaign in that seemingly endless epic. Sure they enacted a racist immigration policy and they hadn’t done anything to denounce the war or stop America from storming through another, weaker country in an occupation which had a goal of spreading a political and social philosophy even though when this happened to them sixty years ago they made a big to do about the whole thing. And sure they had even dedicated a few troops. And sure a lot of their wealthy elite were also making out like bandits in the rampant military industrialism that this war was creating around itself.

Now that I think about it more I really should have taken them for everything I could get.

Chris’ train came in. I was worried I wouldn’t know who he was, but when the train doors opened I could immediately tell that this tall, stiff walking to a sharp inner cadence was the guy that I was looking for. He also pinned me immediately. I was pretty obvious with the bag and ridiculous outfit. I was wearing a sweatshirt that I had hand painted IRAQ VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR on. My presence at the time was fairly loud.

He lived in Frankfurt, Germany. We had a long day of train hopping ahead of us. We were headed up to his place for a few days before the event.

He had invited me to Germany to speak in the European recreation of the Winter Soldier Testimonies. It would be my third official Winter Soldier. It would happen on the one year anniversary of the day that changed my life for the weirder when I announced to the world that I would be happy to be the poster child for the media circus surrounding Guantanamo Bay, the well lit spectacle at the heart of the Detentions Program and the entire Global War on Terror.

The train windows were a film reel. Still by still we passed through a landscape narrative of the history of Germany as hillside became some old town and then subtly became hillside again. This happened over and over again until we finally started to make our descent into the industrial outline of Frankfurt.

Chris lived in a small apartment with his wife Meike and her kid, Leon. The place was filled to the brim with the ephemera of activism, its quaint. For the majority of that week I convalesced while Meike and Chris told me about the rich history of gypsy communes and squatting that thrived for a long time in Germany but was now, for the first time in decades, coming under attack from the German government more and more militantly.

My mind wandered through a possible future of getting involved with some band of gypsies in rural Germany, getting lost for years in some ballad of freedom, dirty but happy. Ah, to dream.

One night we went to a giant squat in the far off industrial neighborhood for a night of free food. The place was immaculate and well decorated with moody lighting in every room. Its many stylish rooms were tucked into the walls of the factory that this building had been in a former life. The people were a little gloomy because the law was coming for them. This building was to be destroyed. Meike had lived here. She was obviously and understandably destroyed by the outlook of losing this important piece of her shared history.

Later that week two Englishmen showed up at the door. One was complaining about the size that his balls had swelled to after a recent vasectomy. Their names were Martin and Lee and they had served in the war as well. Much like Vinny and Sergio back home their eyes told of violence in scales that my mind could not fathom.

We loaded into a van and started to drive towards Freiburg. On our way we picked up a young guy who was very quiet. His face was serious and his eyes defensive. In a few minutes we were all laughing about Martin’s testicles in the van on our way to break another record in an attempt to even the score with the powers that be.

I felt like I was home. It was not the place. It was the people. My people. The Fallen Angels. The refuse of war. Adrift in a nightmare but together like a lost platoon, a band of brothers.

a deal with the devil

We crash landed the van into a scene that was becoming eerily familiar. A dozen seventies era activists gathered in a room drowning in coffee, the mood is tense and people are unusually serious faced as if we were going into battle armed only with a desperate amount of hope. Their faces are ashy and tired for they have known only work for years. For this type there is no rest because they will always fight something that will always be there. So this was just one more battle with an unconquerable foe.

While trying to plug in a coffee maker I managed to spill water all over a stack of important documents and ancient out of print newspapers. Leon helped me clean it up. Nobody ever noticed. Thanks Leon.

It was late. The party broke up and we went to the hostel where a snippy German hippy told us that he didn’t understand why we were here because we were wrong for joining the military. This was my first introduction to an interesting perspective on the role of the soldier in the Global War on Terror that was unique to Germany. I would become very familiar with it over the next few months.

The next day started peacefully with a long, cold walk but that peace was quickly destroyed by 200 over caffeinated activists crammed into a small cafe.

The speakers paced around in circles on the balcony smoking cigarettes. I was trying to hustle a few lino prints on combat paper for five Euro a piece from a table in the smoking section where I usually reside anyway. People were very interested but I only sold a few of them, but every one was one more day in Europe. That’s how I pitched it to them. I wanted my incentive to be declared. Radical honesty.

Eddy Falcone came in from Spain where he’d been studying. We had met each other in St. Paul one night during a safety briefing with the Muskrat. Eddy is an ethical gangster, his weapons of choice are humor and political savvy and he carries them on his hip. He takes everything with the same kind of cool. He was another improbable character in the veteran community and we kind of bonded on it. We were the people that don’t seem like we would have, or could have, ever been in the military. I appreciate it in others because I know how difficult it is to get through the military with any kind of style. It is a graceless and boring life.

Then Alex showed up. I knew she was in Germany. She had called to tell me as much. I’d met her in Portland when we were doing the Winter Soldier there. She was a member of the ISO. I needed help trying to put the chapter together. We hung out one night to talk about how this could be done but the only thing we managed to put together was a very attractively consensual agreement on why it was a good idea to sleep together. She’s smart and funny and excessively candid. Her concept of politics at the time was slightly less playful than my own. After that night I never called her. I knew I would be leaving and there was only one direction that these relationships go so I just avoided going there at all costs. She didn’t appear to be bitter. She just laughed off my apology to let me know it was fine.

We bullshitted for most of the morning until it came time for our panel.

It was a long day of testimonies. We tried to keep things light, politically relevant and sometimes humorous, but there was no way that we could do it without also having it be a gruesome and frustrating story because you cannot tell a war story without the horror. Not if it is to be true.

While I was babbling about the subject of detentions again I noticed a fat man whose thick lens’ made his eyes so comically enormous that I could not help but laugh at his ridiculous appearance as he stared at me, though the comedy was laced with fear because I also found his presence creepy.

After everything was said and done and I was standing outside smoking a cigarette again the fat man approached me at the table. He shook my hand eagerly with a large smile on his face. He told me his name was Hans and that he had come all the way from Vienna to speak with me. He continued on to tell me that he worked as an artist under the name Very Morning. He gave me a book of his work. It was a very expensive looking book with amazing printing quality and design. The work was all digital in nature. As I flipped through it I couldn’t understand what his interest in me was. Finally I got to some pages in the book that seemed relevant, though I did not like the relevance.

The pictures were of children in orange detainee suits with hoods on their heads and flexicuffs on their hands. My stomach turned. What did this man intend to expose by this? I looked up and my eyes were arrested by a few bills that I didn’t think I would ever see again. He put them in my hand. He told me that if I wanted to come to Vienna to do a printing project he would fund the trip and I could stay at his place where he had an extra room. Ewwwww.

I felt slimy. I didn’t like him and I didn’t like his art which was centered on technology whereas my own art relies on tradition and craft. The money was needed and it would allow me weeks of travel at the rate that I was going, but a part of me knew that I would regret taking his offer. I told him that I had plans for the next month but I would like to continue talking with him about the possibility. He left me the book and took off with a disappointed look as if he had expected me to go along with him that very day.

After that was over I met a documentary filmmaker who lived in Freiburg. His name was Luciano. He was a very sweet guy and he offered to let me stay in his film studio for a while upon hearing about my travels. Sometimes it seemed that I was the luckiest tramp in the world.

We walked all over that town that night drinking and smoking and yelling things into the night air. We were guided along a pair of railroad tracks and over a river to an old brick building that they called the KTS which was the home of the Freiburg Autonoma, the headquarters of the anarchist community in this city.

the circulatory system of the G.W.o.T.

Everyone left the next morning, but not me. That afternoon I moved into Luciano’s production office complete with huge bed, kitchen, dreamy balcony over the park and a small shower (which was located in the kitchen) because I am the luckiest person on the planet.

It wasn’t all luck. It was the strength of the community mostly.

I had decided to course through the rapids of the anti-war communities many veins. It was an experiment to see the breadth of our movement. It was an attempt to get some idea of the shape of the forest that I was lost in. What are we? Where are we? Who are we? Why are we? and How are we? These are the questions that I wanted to know. I was quickly finding out the “where” as I realized that we were everywhere. I felt like I understood the “who” more and more as I met more and more familiar characters. The why was the easiest of them all. We do it because there is something which must be stopped. I had seen people figure out the “how” in every city I had been to and it was always different. The “how” comes to you as things happen. The only thing I couldn’t figure out was the “what” and that was mostly because when I tried to think about it my mind kept repeating the word “doomed.”

This room was a testament that the community, much to my surprise and good fortune, happened to be very strong and further reaching than my wildest imagination.

Moazzam had told me several times about the Islamic tradition of housing people who are on any kind of journey in the name of God and in some way it made me very happy that this attribute of the anti-war community fulfilled this major Islamic virtue.

It would be a disservice to my host, though, to rule out the individual’s role in this. This act of kindness was not just the product of some cult of “We.” It was the generosity of one person who believed in what I was saying I wanted to do. Over the course of the weeks that I stayed in this apartment my laziness (which I have long considered an energy saving feature) withered his approval, but I was listening to the things that he was telling me because he was rich in the many virtues of our tribe. He had been with it for a long time.

Every day he went to work on audio and film in one of the most magnificent complexes I have ever had the good fortune to see. This place was some kind of scenic apartment complex at the end of a pretty little road. The buildings ran along both sides. They were two stories and made of yellow bricks. They housed various art and community projects to include a fully operation offset printing operation, a beautiful, very European cafe where it has been deemed legal (and socially necessary) to smoke marijuana and the very studio that Luciano worked at.

I would follow him to work every day and sit outside of the cafe nursing my coffee and speaking with as many people as I could. I came to know many interesting personalities over the course of that time.

There was a contradiction of a boy who dressed like a French aviator from the twenties who spoke arrogantly about the virtual revolution.

There was a programmer who believed that human behavior was just another program to be altered analytically.

There was a tough feminist who glowered at everyone beautifully.

There was a Suffi man who’s only job appeared to be to roll spliffs while debating the schematics of God’s plan, or so I assume because his conversation was so German heavy.

There were so many people that I almost felt I had met before, though they were all wild offshoots from any kind of archetype. They were all dedicated anarchists. The KTS was their home. Without understanding what they were saying they appeared to me to be a bunch of kids in twenty somethings bodies running around an abandoned building acting like pirates and I loved it. I loved them. All of them.

One gentleman gave me weed that he had grown on his organic farm. Not that I needed it. It seemed that the only air that I was breathing there was the dark chocolaty fumes of tobacco and weed.

There were frequent meetings. Obama was scheduled to speak in front of NATO in Strasbourg which was just down the road. The KTS was preparing to be a launching pad for migrant activists as they found their way to the protest and all of the Autonoma were scrambling around the halls to put the place together in time as well as meeting to organize the logistics. Again that sickly feeling that came on me when we were “preparing for war” before the DNC found its way into my stomach and into my head.

When they were talking in English they were talking about violence and the right to use violence. There was almost an ambition towards violence. There was hope. It confused me.

Everyone was telling their war stories and I could see the eagerness in the eyes of the violence virgins and it was all too familiar.

Meanwhile, though they accepted me as an anarchist, they were very confrontational about my military service. Unlike the excessive praise of the activists in the states, these German’s definitely resented my personal history. Once while I sat at a table with a group that was speaking mostly English a girl came up to the table and sat down. She didn’t introduce herself so she didn’t have time to find out that I was an American which might have saved us some embarrassment in the future. She apparently picked up that it was English speaking time however and began to talk about how she had heard about the Winter Soldier Testimonies. She said that it was bullshit to think that these assholes could just come and say a few “I’m sorries” and then think that you are absolved of your sins when really all they were doing was just telling war stories and trying to collect pity. If for just one moment she had registered the look on anyone’s face I’m sure she would have understood what had just happened, but she had other things on her mind than her audience it seemed.

Nobody said a word for a few seconds and it began to dawn on her right when I started to tell her that I had always had the same critique of the Winter Soldier platform myself. I was going to go on to say “but we really think it is worth your time to hear these stories” but she had fully realized by now and she appeared completely stone faced. I wouldn’t say unaffected, but she certainly was not going to apologize. Nor did anyone ever speak of the incident again. I think that was for the best.

Situations like this happened every day while I hung out with them. I didn’t get upset. I saw it as the one job that I was actually performing in the community. I was acclimating them to a world that they didn’t understand.

Of course they didn’t understand what I had been through. There aren’t trailer parks in Europe and recruiters don’t go into poor people’s homes and promise their children free educations because in Europe education is already free. None of these kids had even ever had a fucking job. We had come from two different worlds and their judgment was not fair. Sure, they’re right, it is totally insane for a man to bare arms against another man but kids who had American grandpas learned that sometimes you just have to, while kids with German grandpas learned all about shame. Not to mention that they could thank my proud American military heritage for not having to goose step around in a bookless and Jew-less nightmare.

Maybe I was a little resentful.

“you say you want a revolution”

One of the innumerable iterations of Socialist organizations extended to me an offer to speak at an event. I puffed up with a new sense of determination. Traveling around Europe was proving much easier than I had prepared myself for. It seemed like they were just giving it away.

A few days before the hitch hikers would begin to arrive in droves I boarded a train headed North. Within hours I was fully sated on sunny German countryside and standing bewildered in a very large train station with a piece of paper with a number written on it that I was to call. I only had so much money to make this call and nobody was picking up the phone on the other end.

After a few minutes of chain smoking away the pins and needles of my anxiety I was finally able to get through to my hosts. A ride was dispatched. I met up with another speaker from London. He was a student. Apparently he was very well respected in his circles. He poked and prodded about my politics. I evaded his questions professionally which made it clear that I was not on of the tribe. He didn’t seem to mind much because he invited me out for a hookah before the show. It was delightful.

While we were on stage we found the English barrier to be a huge issue. We were each assigned a translator. Mine was a grave looking large twenty something with thick glasses. His voice didn’t modulate from his standard pitch at all which I could only assume cut out any chance for my humor to be received, though by the end of ten minutes I figured out how to use him well enough to convey some sense of humor. My message probably seemed dry and staccato. The Iraq Veterans Against the War support you in your cause! March forward brave soldiers. Nonsense.

He had a good time flirting with his translator and laying down the party line on the anti-war movement.

The entire time the people in the audience just stared at us as if we were two cadavers suspended over the floor by wires dancing about like puppets.

After the speech we drank and we dined in the attached cafe. It was expensive. I drank a lot of water. For hours they talked and talked about the worker’s movement but underneath their words was the same thing any two drunk humans of mutually prefferable sexes hide in the subtext of debate: sex. It turned out to be a stale evening.

Back at the apartment I was staying at I was packing up my things and preparing to get on the train the next day. One of the flat mates was in and he said that they were leaving to go to Berlin for a conference on the subject of political prisoners. He invited me along. My journalistic intent drove me forward. How could I pass this opportunity up? We’d be back before the NATO war and I will have given Luciano a break so that maybe my clock might reset a little bit. If not there was always the KTS which would prove exciting. Anyway, fuck it. Anywhere I went would be the same as long as I stuck to my budget.

After a few stressful hours of traffic and waiting for people to put themselves together we were crammed in a car bound for Berlin. My fellow passengers were speaking almost only German because two of the three knew minimal English. AnnKat was the English speaker. She would turn to me occasionally to give me updates and ask me questions about who I was. The two boys were Stephan, a lanky computer nerd, and Martin, a severely stern type of person who seemed to hold on to Marxism with the stoicism of a saint.

I drifted in and out of sleep along the ride. I had no idea where we were or where we were going. The trip extended well beyond the time that we thought it would take. Once I woke up to find that we had driven hours out of our way and were now only beginning to repair the damage. I fell back to sleep. The sun woke me up and I lifted my head to see a beautifully beaten down city steaming in the cold of the winter morning. There were only a few clouds but they dispensed huge snowflakes that danced to the ground. I was immediately smitten by this city.

Driving through its streets was cinematic. Berlin, I love you.

We found where we were to stay quickly and soon we were standing in a small one bedroom apartment in front of a man who appeared to be only a few days removed from the bushes of the Cuban Revolution. He silently pointed out all of the pillows and blankets on the ground and went to sleep in a hammock. We passed out instantly.

We woke in a few hours and walked to the rally.

There were more cops than punks at the starting point that morning and I cringed when I realized that I still had a good deal of grass in my bag. They were shaking kids down left and right. If they found me with the grass I’d probably be in a real bind, or at the very least on a plane back home. I had to be cool about my veerings because there were so few of us that I had no anonymity. Especially with a sweatshirt that is both visually bold and written in English.

All of the usual groups were in attendance carrying signs and handing out information about their causes. I was representing my own cause by looking at all of the pretty buildings and thinking about life because I am an existentialist who prefers introspection to revolution.

At the lecture hall the speakers spoke monotonously about something that they seemed entirely bored by. The only exciting moment was when somebody said something that sounded haltingly Hitler-ish to my sensitive ears directly after which everybody stood up sharply and raised their fists in the air. I wondered if anyone else in the room was as surprised as I was about this ritual or more so by how apparently nobody has ever told them that this habit resembles something which ought not be resembled by any group, but especially not one that strives for a better existence.

I left after making hasty plans with the rest of the crew. I contacted Alex who was now living in Berlin and I started walking in her direction.

friends make the best lovers

We met under the train but soon found ourselves walking through a graveyard laden with snow. Alexandra was telling me that she had moved away from the ISO for all of the reasons that we had discussed on several occasions. Mostly because she was resentful that she had been trained only to argue and not to listen. We discussed why everyone is a racist and a sexist and all of the “ists” because we had been raised that way and it was naive and arrogant to act like you’ve conquered generations of cultural training. In the end this mentality, we decided, could make it more difficult to conquer these issues within our society not less.

It was so good to see her and to engage in uninhibited discourse with someone with a sense of humor. The dry professionalism of the German kids was really wearing me down.

She showed me her huge apartment which looked like a partitioned section of a mansion. It was all white and had a kind of snowy beauty all to its own.

It turns out that she had never gone on an extended walk about of her town and I strongly suggested that now was the time. I rolled us a few joints for the walk and we were soon on our way. We walked for ages until we were finally outside of the region that she was familiar with. We soon found ourselves downtown. We walked through a mall underneath an impossible dome of steel latticework with buildings running along it. It looked like a science fiction auditorium. We pretended to give speeches from the center.

There was a park nearby where, for just a few moments, we were both overcome with a kind of literary nostalgia that heralded us back to a pre-war Germany that we were both familiar with only through the emotional pastiches that writers long past had left us with for our dedication to reading old literature. We walked through fields of statues until we were standing at the feet of this austere statue of a soldier who could have been out of a comic book. He was flanked on either side by large tanks. Beyond his ominous and violent presence there was a field and a building which came back to me in a series of flashbacks and black and white photographs. We all knew this place. This was the place where a horrible thing was launched.

This was the field where Hitler had delivered a famous speech in front of the building which housed the Third Reich. This is where it had all begun. To stand in the middle of that field gave me a disturbing. It was unfortunately familiar. It was the realization that the fear that I experienced here was for something that had already come to pass and continued to exist but in a much more terrifying way than even Hitler had created. It was the fear that we had become what he had always dreamed of, though we shifted our religious and economic  burden from the Jews who Hitler believed controlled the money to the Arabs who George Bush believed controlled the oil. Now we were killing them in an occupation of their country, exterminating the ones that we consider to be undesirable to our goals.

This was where the head of what proved to be a hydra was cut off. This is our legacy. It is not only the German’s to carry.

Needless to say I was lost in though. Alexandra was tugging on my arm. I looked at her face pink against the snow. It is a strange world that we live in.

We walked into a hip neighborhood where there were abundant signs of counter cultural behavior. I soaked in the Bohemian vibe that was dominating the frequencies. We bought some books and then sat in a coffee shop for a little while reading them. I had purchased a collection of essays by Adorno. It was perfect for the day. Later we visited some friends that she had stayed with when she first came to town but we both had the impression that we were interlopers so we left to find some food.

We had avoided the subject of “us” the entire day because the scenery had been enough to keep us occupied and there was so much else to discuss, but while we devoured pizza Alex looked at me with bedroom eyes. She asked me why I had not touched her. I meekly explained my situation with Vanessa and then began nervously talking around in circles until she was thoroughly offended. We stormed back home. The mood lightened. She plied me with booze. We sat up all night talking. Towards the end of the night she stood out of her door like the she had the night that we had slept together. She repeated the words she said then: “So, uh, I feel like we’ve got things pretty well figured out so why don’t you quit playing hard to get and come in here.” But this time I did not and could not. She told me that I was a fool. I was only trying to prove to myself that I could stay with one person and I was blowing a chance to have something real.

We both knew that it would work because when we were together we were as good a couple as you can find but, like usual, I had myself tied into something else and I could not just throw that away. I don’t know why I chose to exercise one of my only moments of sexual integrity during such a perfect moment at the end of a such a perfect day. All I could think about was the guilt that I had been left with when I had cheated on Jamie during that first harvest and I felt sick of myself and the things that I had done, even if I did them naively and had excuses.

When I woke up the next morning she was gone. There was a letter on the table. She had left me money and reminded me that I could eat whatever I wanted to. I have not seen her since.

It was a long car ride back to Stutgard. By the end of it I had desperately decided that I was going to fly back to Newcastle.

oh no! what if…?

I went straight to the KTS as soon as I got into Freiburg. I knew everyone would be there making dinner. There was a trashcan fire outside of the front door. Several small groups of punks were huddled around it, some of them cleaner than others. It was cold and wet. Word was that the fields that people were going to sleep on in Strasbourg were flooded and muddy. This information had made everyone very sad faced and gray. There was the ominous threat of illness for everyone involved. Muscles visibly tightened when there was another raspy cough.

This protest was doomed to failure. These kids were protesting the president who had come onto the scene like the rebirth of Jesus Christ himself who, as far as most of the Europeans I had talked to, shit golden eggs before long days of fixing every problem that mankind faced. They wanted to convey to him, and to the rest of the leaders of the U.N. that they were irate at the proposal to send more European troops to fight, and possibly die, in America’s war but the whole nation was against them, right and left alike.

I’m not entirely sure they knew what the hell they were protesting themselves. They were so excited for an action packed summer that they seemed to not even be interested in the war. They certainly didn’t want to discuss it with me. Maybe that was German politeness.

I kept my agenda mostly to myself. Things were so chaotic here that I felt like I could slide away at any moment that I chose to. I was not under any particular person’s care here and nobody seemed particularly invested in me. A part of me was sighing relief that I wouldn’t end up sharing a tent with ten other dirty kids outside in the mud in a town that I had already danced with.

On my last night I walked with Luciano and Sara, his girlfriend, through this town which had been spared during the war for the most part. We climbed a tall hill and then a lookout tower and as the sun was setting we stared out over this town which was so sleepy yet so riotous at the same time. The calm of the whole thing was offsetting knowing that the KTS was still swarming with black blockers. It was offsetting to know that there was still a war somewhere. It was also offsetting to see how disappointed Luciano looked.

He told me that I needed to decide whether or not I was actually going to do something for the world or just continue about my selfish way gathering stories and never truly committing to anything, occupying my time mostly with relationship drama and the hunt for more weed. I’d heard this criticism before. I can’t deny that the accusation cut me deep, but it was nonetheless true.

I didn’t want to make excuses for myself but I quickly found myself doing it anyway. I tried to remind him that I was working on a book and that every moment we had shared was spent trying to figure out what this story was. I reminded him that I had remained true and committed to that goad, that ridiculous ambition of mine. He looked at me sadly and in his eyes I read the question before he even asked it. “Have you really?” He asked.

Had I? Is this really the homeless experience? Living in a studio by myself in Germany eating cheese and drinking coffee? This didn’t sound like the story that I had set out to tell. It looked more like that dream that I had had in my little white room. This wasn’t the story of a homeless vet, even though it kind of was, this had become the story of the things that I had dreamed of while I was living in Hell. What value was that to anyone?

His words set in like a virus. Soon I found myself pacing and chain smoking while my brain was lit up like firecracker with panic. What was I doing? Why was I going back to Vane? Why was I so obsessed with Vane and why was that making me so crazy? The rest of my time there was dark.

Luciano bought me a ticket and I escaped from town the next day. It took me all day to get out to the Hahn International Airport outside of Frankfurt. My flight didn’t leave until the next day but I couldn’t stay in Frankfurt because it would take too long to get here in the morning. I went for a walk to smoke the rest of my weed and try to calm this furious demon of failure inside of myself with the last of my weed smoke. I stumbled on an old barracks that looked like the rickety shits that we had lived in in Camp Grayling. I decided to sleep there for the night. I laid there staring up at the scars all night and talking to myself into my recorder.

It was hard to be there alone inside of a moment which felt so beautiful but can never be shared. And with so many thoughts inside of my head.

Two Sides:

One Story

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August 29, 2010 at 5:37 am (Chapter Three – Two Sides:One Story) · Edit

True to my word this whole thing was shaping up to be very similar to my tour. It was a few months in and I was returning to my beginning place with this entire new way of being to make a few empty lip gestures to friends about what it was that I was learning before I returned back to the lifestyle that kept me away from them in so alien a place.

When I had come back on leave before I got as high as I could with Nicole who had sent me snowflakes in an envelope to that place that was so much like Hell. We had sex in her dormroom under the poster of the nuclear explosion. I got the rocket bird and the heart and the crow tattoos with the money that I had. I spent a few days at home watching my mom fall apart until she took me to the airport a complete wreck with the waterworks flowing.

This time the bus fiasco had cut me short on time. I had to race to drink at the Hideout and write in a coffee shop and smoke weed on a frozen street alone in the snow. All of my friends gathered together in the apartment I had shared with Brad and Magnum (the giant dog that looks like a mountain lion with the face of a gorilla, as mopey as her father, Brad) to say hello and goodbye to me. I spun around in circles saying strange things to familiar faces that I didn’t think really knew me any more looking constantly towards Emily on the arm of Drew who was looking mournfully at me in remembrance of how close we had come. Then it was time for everyone to go. I walked her out to her car as our feet squished through the black shit that covers Chicago in the winter, our breath freezing as it curled around us, her slow southern draw and huge, disbelieving and beautiful eyes. She told me she loved me and I looked at her with the same look I always gave her when that undiscussed thing was so near to being out in the air, the look that reminded her that I was not a good boy when the behavior was analyzed, we kissed. The moment froze, her car pulled away, and I was left stoned in the middle of the intersection at Evergreen and Hoyne where I had left from with a bag and a banjo a few months ago and I was frozen from all of the things that I desperately needed to think about but there just seemed to be no time.

The next morning Vinny drove me to Michigan. He dropped me off at the Cracker Barrel where my family was waiting for me. We were hours late. My mom was forgiving. Tim, her husband drove us back to their trailer park. I went out that night and bought whiskey and drank it while walking on the railroad tracks nursing the heaviness in my chest.

I wrote this:

Home is a word which unravels as life winds on. It is a term of layers which, for me, has become a way to define, at the most concise, the region in which I was born, but more nebulously the entirety of my social network and everything that makes me feel comfortable. For the time being home is my mom’s trailer park in Charlotte, Michigan.

Mom’s place is always freakishly clean. Every time I come home she grabs my clothes from me immediately and begins washing my laundry no matter how hard I fight her on the point that I am a grown man and I do my own laundry now. I do not understand what psychological fit drives her to do this but after having had a handful of comments on my undesirable smell I was happy for her obsession. Just this once.

My family operates mostly be flashing randomized emotions at irregular intervals while engaging in non-stop chatter. I’ve only been able to tolerate this trait since mom and her husband TJ have started smoking grass. These manic emotional frequencies were virtually impossible when mom was going through her last phase of hyper Christianity. I don’t understand what makes us like this. We just seem to, as a family, revel in our abilities to experience every emotion in a symphony of dischordant notes with little idea of tempo. I ma endeared to the lifestyle by force of habit.

For the first few hours around the house we smoked pot and tried to figure each other out. For the first time since I can remember the TV was not on. We stonedly gave embittered diatribes against the government, society, commercials, consumerism, and my personal favorite: the way the nation has let Michigan die despite its almost continuous production of our nations most valuable resource for nearly a century.

It is decidedly unreal and sick that after having spawned and maintained the domestic automotive industry which is, I believe, the leading contributing factor to our economic, war time, and lifestyle successes as a nation, this is now degenerating and rusting in the factories, its workers displaced to a barrens of worklessness and frustration. A generation of people trained by legions previous generations to produce, to work, all day every day are now binding their strong fingers and wondering if this system is really going to let them starve and going mad for lack of something better to do with their hands. We are not comfortable without work. It is not out of laziness that a midwesterner will be found idle. It is misuse.

I’m sitting in another coffee shop in the town I lived in when I first got back from Cuba. My mom brought me to work today so I’m trying to kill some time. It always weirds me out being here. I got so bored and I can never remember what I used to do to get over this restlessness.

I do remember now that I think of it. I got lost in my hopes for love and the future. What a mistake.

So I’ve been pleasantly whittling away my time here in the heart of the spreading economic depression, wrapped in a blanket on the couch, eating macaroni and cheese and talking with my family about the dangers of industrialism and smoking pot which we hide when Grandma comes over.

My sister, Jessica, is very pregnant right now which makes me feel guilty for some reason. Something about this new fetus makes me feel selfish and childish. It makes me feel like I’ve been swept up in some fantasy that has made it so that I don’t understand responsibility. And I guess that it is true. She will very soon be living a life which is entirely more “real” than mine in the sense that she will have at least one thing in her life that she cannot just up and leave. That’s it. It makes me feel uncertain about my restlessness. That thing that makes me perpetually leaving. Well, needless to say, she isn’t going anywhere for a while.

The thing I look forward to the least on any “leave” home is the goodbyes. Especially the goodbyes I have to give to mom. She has got a realy way of breaking my heart like nobodies business.

When I left her behind me at the Grand Rapids Airport when I was going back for the rest of my tour to Cuba I could hear her crying for the majority of the terminal walkway. She has cried every goodbye since. It makes me feel heavy and wrong. Why do the things that I feel like I need to accomplish hurt her so much? Its as if the thing which is almost my definitive character quirk of exploration and leaving is the one thing that causes her the greatest amount of anguish. It makes me not want to come home at all, but I know that would hurt her more. But this is not my home any more. These streets, though they nurtured me while whatever virus I have which makes me impermanent was settling in, transforming me from a trailer park dreamer into a lean explorer, are not familiar to me any more.

They no longer tell me anything about the life I want to live. They are like fallow fields that I overharvested so they will never produce again. I have used them for what they were worth and abandoned them. Cities, women, books, bikes and packs of cigarettes are all alike in this fashion for me. And I’m not saying that is good, or even not horrible. I’m just saying that is how it is. When I’ve depleted the resources of one provisional relationship, long before that even, I start to look around for another fix. Some crop which has yet to be harvested. And even though I will always remember everything save for the cigarettes fondly, I have not found a way to return to any of these things in a way which is not laced and tangled with apologies and despair.

This is the town where I learned that I could still love after Cuba, even though it was a sick love. But now my friends are gone like pollen on the wind. We’ve all left this place to roost in lands more fertile.

This is the way of things in Michigan.

My old comic book shop is above this coffee shop and the parlor where I got a majority of my tattoos is right next to it. I spent a lot of time here thinking about what I wanted to be. Now, more than ever before, I feel like I am what I wanted to be, but I don’t think I ever imagined that it would feel like this. Whatever this feeling is.

Time to meet mom for lunch.

And then it was time to go again. The whole family loaded into the car and we drove to Chicago. They let me off at the office up on Diversey. Mom did her best and failed. Grandma gave me 150 dollars. The van pulled away. I got drunk with some friends and then I took a train to O’Hare.

And then I was flying away to England. Some said I would never return.

“did you ever see any torture?”

September 1, 2010 at 5:58 am (Chapter Three – Two Sides:One Story) · Edit

I watched the streetlights curl over the windows of the sleek car that Asim was driving me towards my greatest fear in. Asim was sharp and proper, well dressed and spoken. He was telling me about the strings that had been pulled to get me admitted into the country but from my seat on the wrong side of the car I heard nothing except the hissing of my brain going off like a sparkler on my first crisp night over the ocean.

Then there were the lights of the hotel lobby. I was spinning around trying to take everything in until my spinning stopped any my eyes focused on two smoldering shadows from which two keen obsidian eyes glared out analytically, all of this occurring on the dark, bearded face of a short man, both tense and easy in his movement. He spoke to me in the Queen’s English.

This was Moazzam Begg. He was the first of the alleged terrorists and former detainees that I would meet. By shaking his hand I was introduced to a scenario that I had dreaded from my cot in TK22. I was meeting a man who knew what we had done. There was no obscuring the truth with him, and from one glimpse into his eyes I knew that nothing had been forgotten.

It was something like two in the morning. We went out for Indian food. Moazzam sat across from me, my nervous and tired eyes completely blank, overwhelmed by the stimulus. He told me that he harbored no resentment. He had told me this before in emails when he had introduced himself to me electronically after I testified about my experiences, the first guard to ever attempt such a silly thing after we had all signed papers that expressly prohibited such behavior.

He understood how things like the military and war work, and he knew that all of us lost and confused young men and women were just trying to make good by our obligations. It was at this point that I wanted to correct him. We weren’t just honorable citizens. We brought a lot of excessive anger and resentment down with us and we made damn sure that whoever was in those cages knew that we were very upset about how things had happened.

We did that of our own free will, well beyond the guidelines of the Standard Operating Proceedure, and to hear him talk as if we had all gone down there as good natured people of honor and duty made me feel terrible. There was no need to write off all the harm that had been done because it was more the fault of the tyrants and CEO’s who ran our country than ours.

We still played our part. I had certainly done mine.

I had been moved to the office after a few months on the blocks due to a combination of being completely unqualified to behave in the way that they needed me to while working with the “worst of the worst” (a condition I had tried to make clear to them before the deployment) and computer skills which are a valuable commodity when you have a prison camp that is run electronically via computer.

One of my tasks in the DOC (Detentions Operations Center) was to monitor the notes of the day. These were notes that guards made about detainees behavior. Most detainees only had a few notes that documented only the most radical behavior, but for two years ISN 552 (Mr. Begg) had been the single occupant of an isolation cell with a pair of guards all to himself. These guards rigorously documented his behavior as if they were putting together a documentary film on some bizarre creature. I had been an avid reader of his notes. I shared his temper tantrums and his fits, his pleasant quips even down to his work out routine. Now that I wasn’t seeing any detainees, I was just reading their stories. 800 stories as written by the men and women of the Joint Task Force.

Could I tell him this? Certainly not at dinner. I would wait, I decided. For now I decided to focus on how lucky I was. Not many people get to meet face to face with their greatest fear, their most virulently barking dog. They have their nemesis tucked away in some vague and non-material thing, but here I was face to face with mine having dinner, soaking in the moment and all of the complicated feelings which left me feeling paradoxically numb. So this is how it feels like to meet a man you detained.

We went back to the hotel. I was shown my room and then I was swallowed in an oblivion of sleep.

There was an urgent knocking disturbing my disturbed dreams. Half asleep I answered the door and there was a piebald wizard standing there in a tailored suit. His eyes were blazing madly and his wild beard was long. He took my hand in his and shook it. Then he invited me down to breakfast, his words put together with a familiar syntax, the way English sounds when you learn it from a prison cell picking up words from your nasty little guards.

As he was leaving he reared his wizards aura around on me again and told me that his name was Jarallah. Jarallah Al Marri.

Over a continental breakfast Jarallah dismissed any attempt of mine to ask him about where he had come from. He had more important things on his mind. He wanted me to know about his brother who is still to this day kept as a political prisoner on US soil without formal charge for reasons probably everb it as untrue as the reasons that Jarallah had wound up where he was.

Two boys from the same family detained by the same unlawful roundup. Their mother must have lost her mind.

Jarallah begged me to call the might of the American peace movement in on this case. I just sagged against the back of my chair with failure on my face. Now that I was here I knew very well that no kind of activism or people’s movement will stop these things from happening. Until war becomes unprofitable these kinds of stories will continue to happen. But how do you tell that to a man who wants you to help save his brother?

I promised him I would tell people about his brother and see if we might be able to start a stateside campaign but I was not feeling particularly optimistic.

So here was my second detainee who had been detained for reasons unknown and eventually released without charge to go back to his normal life after seven years which showed on his skin in the form of mottled patches where no pigment grew, a condition that came about as a result of swallowing so much frustration and OC spray.

He finally told me that he had been kept in Camp Five.

Camp Five was a more permanent kind of prison than the open air cages of Camp Delta. It was built to house the long term residents of Guantanamo. They had finished building it in the middle of our deployment somewhere around the summer of 2004. My unit was the first unit to work those blocks. My roommate was one of the first to be a part of that special mission.

I had found out in my own way how violent my roommate, Shaw, could be when he came home loaded one night, crawled on top of me and started beating me in my sleep. This scene ended a few minutes later with Shaw and Hiccox wrestling around in our room knocking everything over while I stood outside in my underwear and my blood yelling for authority of some kind.

I wondered how much of this Jarallah had seen. I assumed quite a bit by the sounds of the stories Shaw used to tell.

Meth did terrible things to his brain.

Then Sara was there at the hotel. There was no time for sentiment or really even a proper introduction because we had to be hurrying along to the BBC for our first interview.

So Sara and me are sitting across from these two men in the  back seat of an English cab on a frozen morning when all Jarallah was wearing was his suit which I would come to find out were the only clothes that he had brought to wear because at home he wears a white robe and Moazzam was staring at Sara in disbelief that I had invited my girlfriend and Sara was writing in her journal, taking notes and all I could seem to do was stare out the window at all of the people moving around the streets at the bottom of these old buildings separated by such small and hectic streets.

I turned around to the group and I started talking about how everything is so much bigger in the good old U S of A and then I stopped and waited and then said: “except our cells of course.” I flicked a nervous eye to Moazzam’s stern face to see if it had broken but It had not. Then I started apologizing which is my expertise.

“Is it ok to make jokes?” I hazarded.

Moazzam started to laugh a deep belly laugh and he didn’t even need to say that it was even though he did. I just knew that it was.

It is not always the case. Often times humor seems like the only response that won’t lead to madness. Rooster taught me that. It’s a good lesson. But some situations are too heavy for even humor. I didn’t want this to be one of them.

I hadn’t brought any nice clothes with me. I brought what I had. I was wearing an old Army jacket with a blue hoodie that I had stolen and painted Iraq Veterans Against the War on. I had a few dingy pairs of pants and some combat boots. I didn’t do it out of malice or any such thing, I just didn’t have any other clothes so I figured it was the message that was important.

We got to the studio and our crazy crew was led through a labyrinth of corridors and sound proof rooms, vending machines and waiting rooms until at last we were deposited in a room that looked like a storage area for excess wires. There were so many wires plugged in to so many things.

A very trim TV man came into the room with a few people who started putting things on me and then I was in a chair and the camera was on and this guy was asking me questions. We talked for a long time. I was too long winded and used way too many long explanations to convey a few simple points. He kept pushing for the torture. He wanted the torture stories. He wanted the electric bed frames in rickety shacks, water boarding in blacked out trailers. I knew that was what they all wanted.  They would settle for nothing less. But none of that happened in Gitmo.

What did happen there was that under trained, non-MOS qualified personnel were left to interpret the Standard Operating Proceedures as they would on a case by case basis even though this frequently unread document was rarely upheld anyway with little to zero supervision by any ranking authority. The sally port system worked out great for Camp Delta in this way: if any commanding authority does decide to slide out of the airconditioned office buildings to go check out what is going on in the camp, everybody working the blocks has received advanced warning that there is brass on the court so get your shit together.  Most of the time the highest ranking person around was an E7 watching a dozen or so E5’s herd together the E4 mafia. This left a lot of time for whack behavior.  And some of us acted a fool.

I had meant to say that some of us had completely lost our minds and sense of human decency and took out large personal grievances out on people we were merely supposed to feed and move. I didn’t mean to say everyone. I didn’t mean to indict everyone I knew there. All of the good guys who just did their jobs and never did anything wrong. There were a lot of those guys. And girls. I was one of them. But the job took a kind of psychosis to do. In a way we all became psychotics because when the violence happened I don’t think any of us felt anything and some of us experience pleasure while others were absolutely disgusted but we were all there and we all saw it and we all knew that maybe some of these people weren’t guilty of what they told us they were. For that matter, they didn’t even tell us what they were there for.

I rambled for far too long. I said a lot of things. I gave them a lot of words. I hadn’t met an editing room yet and I was still naïve and believed that nobody would use me because I was trying to do a good thing.

I can believe anything I want to really.

There were three more interviews that day and onward throughout the week until we left to do the speaking tour. I knew that this would be an intense schedule and I had agreed to it fully but the pace really freaked me out. Everybody wanted to know how I felt and all I wanted to say was that it is pretty hard to process how you feel about meeting people that have occupied your nightmares for years while I took my guilt out on myself and my loved ones when you have a camera in your face all fucking day asking you how you felt.

Moazzam was taking it all in stride, always clean and sharp and ready to do a spot on interview, guiding the conversation directly to where he wants it, keeping it there and keeping it cool. Jarallah took his interviews the way he took everything. If he didn’t like the question, and he often didn’t, he started slamming down a puritanical belief that an injustice happening anywhere taints the value of every moment.

Al Jazeera. CNN. BBC Radio, all kinds of smaller alternative press. Hour after hour, jamming packaged sandwiches into our mouths between interviews, rushing to get us all in front of as many cameras as possible so that the whole world could see what it looked like when there wasn’t razor wire, shackles and uniforms involved in the scene.

Every day was followed  by its night starting at four or five o’clock.

Those nights all blend together now like dreams, rapid and surreal, people and environments shifting to a strange rhythm of logic. There was the night that I was taken to a Mosque and I stood there in my socks, my combat boots amongst the elegant shoes designed to be taken off frequently.

They got down on their knees and they prayed to their God and they sang that song that they had sang for years and for one minute I was back on Mike block at the tail end of a night shift that I’d spent on the back stairwell reading Vangogh’s letters to his brother and the sun was coming up over the sea, slowly softening the science fiction florescence of the nighttime lights that reminded me of the strange greenish blue glare of gas stations and then all of these men who’d been sleeping on metal slabs got up, washed their feet and their faces and their noses and they pointed themselves in one direction and they began to sing and the song they sang was so beautiful but so hopelessly lost on the ocean breezes that I began to truly hate their God who was also my mother’s God and at one point in time my own. Every God who had ever been the thing to which people sent their dreams when there was no hope. So many people had been killed for that word.

From the vantage point of that moment I could only think that if there was a God it had done a terrible job.

But now I was older and less angry and I could see that this God had been the only thing holding these two men together. It was these beautiful gestures sent out to be lost in the wind that had kept these men sane because you either put your faith in Allah or you lose your fucking mind. Those are your options in Guantanamo Bay.

There was a mixture of humble respect and cultural alienation happening inside of me. Inside of this place gawking in on this scene and having a PTSD episode in the middle of a mosque. The feeling was too familiar.

The prayer ended and it was time to eat.

We walked to the restaurant across the street. I lagged behind and used a cigarette as an excuse to collect myself and calm my nerves which were ringing like beloved banjo strings.

And then I walked into the restaurant. I had been warned about the situation but I didn’t know what to do with the information so I ignored it but now it was happening.

In the lobby were about ten people. All of them were familiar.  There was a very large man with a happy face that I remembered instantly. I had seen him in camp one and I remember reflecting on his sense of calm when I was freaking out with a ticket home scheduled.

Then there was a panther dressed as a man, muscles coiled just like they were when he was pacing silently and slow in his cell staring out with a threatening mystique with anger set into his rigid features. He had worked out all of the time and people talked about him like a tiger. Only a select few wanted to be on any IRF team outside of his cell. There were horror stories of him handing a handful of guards their asses when they tried to get him out.

There was a man with a long nose who did not seem so familiar though he was the most talkative one of the bunch who most readily began to chat with me.

There were the three amigos who had played the role of MotorCycle Awesome from inside the wire. They had been detained on a wedding trip gone wrong and ended up in a three year honeymoon in Guantanamo. They had joked and hustled their way through their entire stay. They were well liked and working their block was seen as a pleasant way to spend your day. I never worked their block.

There was a tall lanky black man who appeared very serious and slightly detached from this group though he was undoubtedly a part of it and would be for the rest of his life.

We got our table. I believe the final count was fifteen. We ordered an amazingly complicated array of dishes which came out throughout the evening and just continued to pile up. Everyone was so happy to see each other. They looked so free. They laughed and they told jokes about funny things the guards had done. Often they were speaking in Arabic so I would just listen to the sounds and watch the movement. It was like a giant family. I was made to feel completely welcome. I caught a few suspicious glances and I could understand why. They wanted to know if I was for real but they could tell that I wasn’t the type to fuck any of them over so there wasn’t much to forgive that I hadn’t already apologized enough for while I was there.

I issued so many apologies that year. I wish I’d written them all down.

I made it a point not to apologize at the dinner table.

A few nights later there was a lecture at the Friends Hall. I was smoking a cigarette on the front stoop, dancing to heat up. Off to my right this guy is standing there and he’s looking at me and then I knew exactly who he was and I had to act cool as my mind went haywire.

Oscar 12. You were the only person I ever worried about seeing again. I was so sure you wanted to kill me once.

Not Oscar 12 anymore. His name is Tarek.

We had met first on my first day on the blocks. As some kind of joke I spent my first day in Camp Delta on Oscar Block. If these men truly were the worst of the worst, then these people were the worst of the worst of the worst. They sat inside of solid steel boxes in a giant enclosed chicken coup with one small ventilating fan and a portal into the causeway where, as a guard, you are to walk.

The place was unbelievably hot and the OC hung in the air and tingled sensitive skin, igniting a small fire around my eyes as I walked from cell to cell staring in at these specimens of the alleged Al Qaida. Oscar Block was after all intended to keep people who were especially uncooperative on the regular blocks but probably more likely used as a way of isolating certain persons of interest.

In every window I saw a different way to go crazy in every different pair of eyes which flashed around wildly, some of them soaking every bit of visual information they could get out of the hole where my face was and some of them just lay catatonically on their bare metal slab while some others pace the few paces they can, constantly turning inside of their cells talking to themselves.

Oscar 12 wanted things. He yelled down the causeway “MP MP MP” until I showed up in his hole. He told me he needed some toilet paper. I told him that I would have to ask my sergeant if it was ok. He got very angry very quickly, annoyed with my inability to command enough authority to go out to the back and get a few sheets of toilet paper. I tried to explain to him that the SOP says that detainees on Oscar Block were only allowed toilet paper at certain hours and in certain quantities. He became irate.

He started screaming and swearing in his hood English. He called me a bitch in several different ways and told me that he would kill me if he could get out of the cell. I was pretty nervous. I kept shifting my eyes to the other end of the block where my trainers were smoking cigarettes in the air-conditioned booth. I finally decided that I would break the rules and just get the toilet paper because I’d look like a total fucking douche showing up in the guard shack asking if it was ok to do this.

I went out to the back and counted out eight sheets of toilet paper as per regulations and I walked back to the cell and I handed Oscar 12 his regulation amount of toilet paper with a snotty little attitude. He goes “what the fuck is this shit?” so I say “this is your fucking toilet paper man!” and he says “I can’t be wiping me fuckin ass with that shite!” “But this is how much you’re supposed to get! That’s what the SOP says man!” And he “nobody follows that fucking piece of shite around here.”

Then I told him that if I gave him any more he could make a knife out of the toilet paper. He called me a stupid asshole. I went back out and got him a whole ball of toilet paper, jamming it through his beanhole, my arm well inside of the cell. It was right about when he grabbed my hand with his one arm and twisted it while dropping down to the floor that I remembered that you shouldn’t put your arm into the beanhole. Then I was in the beanhole as far as my shoulder and head would allow.

I managed to wrestle my arm back. I snuck one last look at the hatred in his eyes through that little window and it was one look too many because I will never forget that face. I turned around and started walking towards my comrades ready to write up my first report but as I walked I realized that writing down that I had gotten my ass kicked by a one armed man who was trapped inside of a solid cell would not help my reputation any.

Now here he was again and there was no cage and he still only had one arm but something was different about his face. The anger was gone. His storm was over. At least for now.

After the speech that night he drove me to the restaurant where we were told to meet all of the big movers and shakers of this tour. He drove like a race car driver while steering with his knees, talking on the phone and shifting with his one good hand at all times, occasionally looking over to me to ask me questions about my impressions of Islam.

At dinner I sat across from him gawking, still not having the courage to tell him about the moment we had shared. Then he said: “I remember you.” To which I replied: “I remember you, too.” And then we were friends and we talked about how boring these people were and how ready we were for something different than lectures and talks about things.

He told me he appreciated what I was doing but I felt kind of stupid. What I was doing was nothing. The anger that he had to overcome is something bigger and more frightening than I could ever come to understand.

He had to take off eventually. One of the lawyer types who also chainsmoked cigarettes in spite of the reprimanding tone of the Muslims who allowed no booze or cigarettes took me out for a few drinks. He knew damn well where I was at and he knew that a little whiskey would do me some good. He was right.

I left Sara stranded amongst the activists. She was pretty pissed off when I got back from the bar smelling of booze.

When we got back to the hotel that night we sat down in bed as if we were dismounting a rocket ship.

The London part of the tour was over. The BBC had broadcast its clip. The only words that they had chosen to cut out of our talk were “Guantanamo Guard calls coworkers ‘Genuinely Psychotic.’” And my little bubble was shattered. Almost immediately I got a message from Or on Facebook. He told me that I was disgrace and he hoped that I would finally get it over with and kill myself. He posted this on my wall for all of my friends to see.

I was torn in two. Did I mean that? Really? No. Of course not. Not how it would be read by the men from my unit… Charlie Battery. Sergeant Johnson would read these words and he would think that I had meant him when really he was one of the best people I knew and there were other guys like Sergeant J. Jesus Christ, what had I done?

Bark, bark, bark go those mean old dogs.

something was missing

September 3, 2010 at 7:25 pm (Chapter Three – Two Sides:One Story) · Edit

Finally the day came for us to load ourselves into the car to begin the tour to the rest of the U.K. that wasn’t London. It was January 11^th.

Our first stop was Brighton.

All of a sudden we just weren’t in the city. The skies were cloudy and pink. Jarallah was in the back seat yelling into two cell phones at once in Arabic on one side of me and on the other Sara had her computer out typing away while asking Moazzam questions. He was busy fussing with the navigational unit to be bothered. Our driver was a tough young Muslim kid with a sharp attitude who worked as the hired muscle for CagedPrisoners. His family was from Afghanistan. I’ll call him Charlie because he never liked his name  being used.

We parked our car in front of a skinny building smashed between other skinny buildings on a block on a hill that looked like a colorful set of piano keys sloping off into the ocean at the end of the street. This was a bed and breakfast.

The people who ran the joint were praying when we walked in. We waited for them to finish in the hallway. When they were done they made a big show of joy to see Moazzam again and then they showed us to our rooms, eyeing Sara and I suspiciously. They gave us a room with two small beds. It was the smallest studio apartment ever and it was full of English charm.

We stepped out to see the town before the speech that night.

We walked all over the lanes and up and down the rocky ocean. Sara bought me a eukele so I started playing that pretty obsessively, weeping at heart for my banjo though I was. I just needed to make some kind of music.

I was stressed. I was crazy. There was a dark cloud over my head that was manifested in that eternal dark cloud over England that I was only now getting used to. I must be the only guy in the world with enough nerve to mope while on a free trip over seas. But I couldn’t stop thinking of my last free trip over seas. And I couldn’t stop talking about it in front of groups of people that I didn’t know for the next month. Babbling my way through this moment that ought to be so beautiful but here I was all fucked up and depressed with a beautiful woman trying to figure out what was wrong with me on foreign soil with a eukele while the sun was setting over water that I desperately wanted to cross and Sara took pictures and I forgot…

And then I was in front of more people with a microphone in my face. I looked at Jarallah’s face as he spoke. This would be the last time I would hear him forcefully construct English sentences, concise and emphatic, commanding an ethical dilemma with his eyes alone.

There was a new face. Omar’s face. Peaceful and positive and happy. He spoke next. He told very grim stories of things that had happened to his friends in a very humble way as if implying an apology for taking the time to tell you these stories. Like how ISN 727 had his eye poked out by a soldier in Guantanamo.

I think I spoke next. It was all doom and gloom.

Moazzam tied it all together at the end as per usual.

People asked questions. I needed to be alone.

When the show was over I said goodbye to Jarallah with what little he had left in the trunk of a cab that would take him to the train and eventually he’d be on a plane back to Qatar. Then  I disappeared into the streets. I got a few beers and walked around drinking and trying to figure out if what was happening in my life was really real.

The next stop was Bristol. It was just Sara and Moazzam and Charlie and me in the car. It was so much more comfortable. I slept in the car most of the way.

The crowd here was dingier, less religious. There were a few punks. I instantly began to sort through which of them were potential drug friends. There were a few likely suspects.

Moazzam and I decided to do our speech in the format of a discussion between ourselves. This proved to be an effective way for him to help me coax out of myself what it was the audience was looking for. He was picking up my stories and he knew which ones would work best. In the last few speeches I had been a disaster, taking flight on long winded and nearly insane diatribes about the most vague elements of the detentions system.

The questions after the show were brutal. I remember being angry. Really angry. Somebody had said something unfair. But I forgot what it was.

After the talk I hid in a nook smoking cigarettes one after the other until I saw the opportunity to pounce on a detached group of likely stoners. I introduced myself. My guess was not off.

Half an hour later Sara and I were standing in a crazy punk squat full of bikes and copy machines. Anarchists were talking about action. A laid back fellow was tying me off my bag. I had taken some hits off of the huge spliffs that were slowly meandering around the party like zeppelins.

That was what was missing.

I did my nervous little dance that I do when I know I have to leave to go walk around.

It was a long walk back to the hotel. I had that pleasant tingle that I had missed so much.

My  brain is like a dog. It does not know how to relax without being told, and for years I had trained it to focus on processing its business when I smoked. In this way, despite what some say, I am addicted to marijuana. But it isn’t such an unpleasant addiction though. I don’t smoke much. I usually just mix a tiny amount with some tobacco. Just enough to take the edge off and speed my mind up a bit. I smoke it all day though.

I knew that Moazzam would disapprove. There is no room in the Quran for smoking weed. But I wasn’t a Muslim and I didn’t think that it was wrong. I decided that I’d just have to keep it on the down low. I also decided only to smoke after the days work was done. I owed it to Moazzam to take these obligations seriously even though I was dressed like a freak.

Act professional.

I did a fairly good job of that.

preacher, preacher: the torture teachers

September 6, 2010 at 7:45 pm (Chapter Three – Two Sides:One Story) · Edit

The events were all strangely similar. Some were in ornate churches, others in Mosques. Some were in dingy community centers, some were in high dollar universities. All of them were full of people who stared at us while we talked to one another at a table. People wanted the stories but we almost always focused on the politics. We tried to emphasize the reality that all they needed to know was that the detentions system enacted by the U S of A during this bizarre and twisted war has lost any sense of legitimacy through the massive mistakes it made which lead to so much pain for so many families and people, which did us all an injustice and made it so that we should be ashamed of ourselves because in our fervor to fill cages with people that we could point our fingers at to blame for the atrocities that took place on that one bleak, national day when we were something together again because we all hated. These mistakes were evident in the numbers. I had taken on the responsibility of guarding 800 detainees. There were about 600 when I left. There were 237 men rotting in those cages during our speeches. Most of those people left there were only there because they would be killed if they weren’t sent back to the countries they had been rounded up in. For example, the Chinese Weegers who were handed over to the states by China because they are Muslims and we took them as political prisoners and put them in Guantanamo Bay as if they had been responsible for the attacks that happened on 9/11. Now they could not go back, like baby birds who have been in human hands, they will get pushed out of the nest by Mama Bird. It was all clear in the numbers and the facts and the laws. The laws were important. The Supreme Court had made three protests against JTF-GTMO which all went neglected.

But most importantly we tried to impress that GTMO was only the fucked up poster child of Bush and Cheney’s sick head fuck horror show. This was the camp they wanted you to see. They wanted you to know that we got them. We rounded them all up. Feel safe America. Go back to spending now please.

But as you drift off  back to this electric consumer sleep, in some distant place, there is some horrible building where there are men who operate beyond the law doing horrible things to people who may or may not have had anything to do with this Al Qaeda business.

There is a tiered system of hell that one goes through to get to where we were talking about. First one must be detained on the battlefield. Now that all of Iraq and Afghanistan are “the battlefield” every citizen of those countries is now a possible enemy combatant. Maybe your door is kicked in and some dirty corn fed American boys with nothing but their faces showing from under all the gear and then you’re sitting with a bag over your head and flexy cuffs around your wrists.

Then you’re in some little shack and you’re talking to some young, snotty American kid asking you a list of questions and if that American kid doesn’t like you you’re wearing the bag again. Then you’re in a bigger place like Kandahar or Bagram or Abu Gharaib. There are large pens of general population, low interest people doing two week stints in the cage, or maybe you’re in a filthy cage of your own shackled to a wall with a man in the cell next to you that they call “The Animal” and he won’t stop talking to himself and there is a woman down the hall who screams violently and still you’re in these chains.

Then more bags and more flexy cuffs and one of these American kids is kicking you in the ribs while you pray, chained to the floor of some big, loud, cold airplane. You keep praying to your God, hoping that some day you will be rewarded.

You get off the plane and it’s hot as it can be. They take the bag off, take pictures, run you through the whole poking and prodding routine that the military loves to administer and then you find yourself sitting in this 5×8 cell. Now your interrogator wears a Hawaiian shirt and he doesn’t believe a word you say no matter how many times you try to tell him that you were just a regular person until the bombs came.

That’s what you need to know about Guantanamo and the renditions program. The torture is time and knowing that psychopaths run the world and they can do whatever they want to you when they’ve got a whole country so filled with fear that they won’t even do what they were trained to do anymore. They won’t even spend their money. So if you want to know if I saw torture while I was there, the answer is yes. I saw only torture all of the time as if I were in hell. I watched people torture themselves with anger and I saw torture in the eyes of the broken detainees limp against their cells learning new ways to overcome the hate as the time passes slowly. I handed out the shackles with specific instructions to put people in uncomfortable positions and I watched their ticket as their time in the booth turned into hours. And I tortured myself with guilt. In a place like that you either a demon or the damned and only the truly sick do not feel the reality of the pain.

Then outside into the cold nights with a dozen cigarettes hanging out of my mouth one after the other while the people filter past and said the same things outside of every one. They wanted me to know that I was very brave. I didn’t feel very brave. It is easy to talk a lot of shit about something. Real bravery would have been speaking up at times when I knew that nobody was going to say that something that was happening was wrong if I didn’t do it and I still didn’t do it. The days for me to be a brave man are over. It only makes me feel like a liar to be called brave now.

Finally we would end up at the Ibis. Sara and I could now navigate them in the dark, they were all so similar. Several nights we didn’t turn the lights on at all. We just found the places where we both habitually laid our shit and sat it down. In this way it was as if we slept in the same place every night. It was only the days that changed. Time was a very bizarre labyrinth during these days. There were no mile markers and the moments were so explosively perfect that I just wanted to be plugged in for all of them.

Between each city we drove. We were driving around in Moazzam’s family van with all of our gear loaded into the back. We sat in the car and processed what had happened at the last stop. We were like bank robbers always fleeing the scene day after day and trying to replay the story off of each other, working through our emotions on the characters that we were meeting and how things were handled and how we thought audiences were reacting to our talks.

Along the way we stopped several times.

Once we stopped in the Pennines. We walked along a ridge in the rocky hills amongst the purple brush that sat low on the ground as far as the eye could see. We walked out for a ways, a line of Muslim men dressed sharply and one bony hipster following behind. Omar tripped and fell in the mud. I laughed. I felt bad about laughing… but it was just one of those moments. He was pretty angry when he got up. He didn’t have any other clothes and he’d be giving the speech in these clothes later that night. We were all laughing now. Then he cheered up.

There was a small creek. The boys washed themselves and then they knelt to pray in a small clearing in the mid-afternoon glumness of an English countryside and again I wished that my eyes were cameras. When they stood up Omar told me that a man is rewarded for praying in more difficult places. I wanted to remind him that he had probably earned enough praying in difficult places cred but thought better of it. The moment was just too beautiful.

specialist pee pee

September 9, 2010 at 4:46 am (Chapter Three – Two Sides:One Story) · Edit

I have what you might call a skittish bladder. I’m not proud. It is just how I am. I’m a very nervous boy.

This bladder has caused me endless amounts of stress.

When they had me sign off on every shackle key in Camp Delta back in the Detention Block Blues days I used to dance for hours waiting for a lull in the stress so that I might skirt off to the bathroom which was on the other side of the trailer wall (yes, we worked from a trailer.) I had already given up lunches. I was too scared to lose track of those keys. One minutes lapse in attention to detail and I would be toeing the line with the Sergeant Major who was a scary man explaining how I’d come to lose one of the camp’s most sensitive items, those goddamn keys which were the same color as the sand. So I just did the dance.

People let it slide. Just one more quirk for the town queer.

But then one day…

We were in a convoy of humvees and we were driving from Battle Creek to Grayling for a weekend of fun, travel and adventure. I was driving. Chief Patrick was riding B side. A few minutes into the drive I realized that I had to pee. This condition careened out of control quickly. Within half an hour I was sweating bullets and we were nowhere near ready to stop. Chief was telling me to chill the fuck out. He suggested I pee in a bottle. I’m too classy for some things. I mean, I was committed to the Army, but only so much. Finally I could not take it for one minute more. I grabbed the radio. I told the whole convoy which included all of our Dogs and Ponies that I needed an emergency stop.

At the next exit we pulled this whole convoy off the side of the road. As soon as the HumV was parked I dismounted and sprinted for the shoulder where I proceeded to piss, in uniform, in broad daylight, in front of all of my leadership and half the village of Potterville, a town that lay about 10 miles away from my home town.

When I was done I turned around to find the disbelieving eyes of nearly fifty men staring at me as if I had completely lost my mind. Chief Patrick calmed the moment by getting on the radio and saying “it looks like SPC pee pee is done so we might as well move on.” Oh the laughter.

From that day on I had one name. Can you guess what it was?

But even after my service was over and now I was enlisted in fighting that which I’d been a part of I still found this bladder problematic.

Whenever a scene gets too much for me my bodies first reaction is to flush as much water out of itself as possible. Some people are just born lucky.

Since then I had made Sandy pull his whole rig full of pills over, wasting all that gas and time, so that I could do my thing a few miles into that barren Nebraska yellow. His reaction was similar to my step dad’s when I’d done this to him when we were trying to bond in his cab.

Dave was terrified when I freaked out while we were driving back up to Seattle once when I was hysterical to the point that I jumped  out of the car as he was still moving down the on ramp because I couldn’t even wait until the end.

But none of this could compare with the shame of having this issue rear its nasty little face when I was sitting in lecture halls giving speeches to people who had paid money to see me speak.

One night I even had to excuse myself in the middle of my own speech. The audience, packed into the aisles and standing in the doors, well over three hundred in number, found this behavior very funny. I handled it with a nerdish grace.

I believe that was Manchester.

Now, when I watch some of the videos I just laugh when I see myself look around nervously for a few minutes, waiting for things to come to a lull, and when that moment comes I pounce on the opportunity. I get up and leave. Right in front of all of these people and I have the nerve to act like I’m pulling it off. Like nobody is noticing.

Then I return a few moments later. Moazzam was usually telling stories about my condition which would be a soft entrance for me to come back in to play the role of friendly and informative neurotic.

Between each city it was fifty/fifty if we were going to have to stop three or four times. Moazzam occasionally lost his patience during these times.  Charlie would turn around and cut me with his white hot Birmingham street wit. Omar would be telling me not to worry.

Part of the problem is that I drink a lot of water. And a lot of coffee. And in between those things I smoke like a chimney. This is not healthy behavior and it definitely contributed to all of the awkward dilemmas that I have detailed above.

But mostly it is my twitchy, nervous body coupled with my complete lack of self control and the oftentimes overwhelmingly anxious chatter of my brain.

Now its just another part of my VA disability claim which reads:

Dear the Army,

I tried to tell you a long time ago that I was crazy and that you should not send me to crazy places because it would probably ruin my life. But you just couldn’t live without me.

Now I pee when I’m nervous and I’m nervous all the time because life feels meaningless ever since you ruined everything for me and a lot of other people so now I’m having trouble having the right kinds of feelings and I keep getting fired because I can’t seem to get my shit together.

Also I have migraines and ringing in the ears. Unless you’ve come up with a means to test for those too, in which case I’ll just take the check for the PTSD.

I don’t know where you could send the check because I am homeless.

Love,

SPC PEE PEE

Unfortunately my claim was recently denied.

I have to go to the bathroom.

a change of heart

September 12, 2010 at 6:09 pm (Chapter Three – Two Sides:One Story) · Edit

Now it gets more difficult.

Sara’s stay in the UK had come to an end. She had been with us for two weeks. We had confided every emotion that had crossed our paths in this time that had been mutually insane and we had become very endeared to one another. I had shared one of my life’s biggest experiences with her. We were the best of friends, but our love had fallen apart. How could it not have? That time was too much.

While we were in a hotel in Birmingham waiting out a winter storm right before she was to go I wrote:

Slept all day today. Had those dreams that only come late in the morning after I’ve already woken up. I know they’re not right but I like them. Things getting fixed. Sorted out. Put in the right place.

Why not? Free stream of concious drug show. Got nowhere else to go anyway. Just keep going. Keep sleeping. Nothing out there.

They are dark. Weird. Dreamt of my old, dead cat. Why? What’s she got to do with any of this? Somebody talking, don’t know who though. Or what they were talking about.

This could go on all day. Done that before. Plenty of times. So I just open up my eyes and the sun was preaching because the clouds were gone. Sara was typing on the floor. Infinite soft clicks pecking off my dreaming. Roll over. One more time.

Then I’m really awake. Sara’s going out. Downtown. Protest today. Too tired of politics. Too tired of moving, talking, explaining, smoking, thinking, all the goddamn time. Staying in today. Maybe read a book. Sara leaves.

She’s been upset lately. Guess I’ve been removed. Distant. Depressed. It happens a lot. Don’t think she can take it. Can’t keep just getting away with “I’m sorry.” Never know what to say, so I try not saying and that doesn’t work either.

Thinking and staring at the hotel wall. Wonder why I act like this? Probably some better way to be.

Stare at the wall a long time then walk around picking things up, seeing what makes me happy but nothing does. So I grab a book without hope that its going to make anything better.

Read for twenty minutes about a fake country and a fake planet made, it is eventually discovered, by people trying to make a stand to God. Fall asleep again. No dreams. Wake up and read more.

Sara knocks on the door. We dance with each other for a few minutes. She asks and I dodge. She looks and I look away. She touches and I flinch away. Leave to get some food. Walk past a bunch of places that would be fine. Need to be alone right now.

All the signs are showing, to me and to her. We both know what’s going on. That’s what makes it hard. Finally find some cheap fish and start walking back to the hotel room with Sara in it.

Eat my fish and watch TV. Eventually roll a spliff and walk downstairs to smoke. When I come back we talk about politics, but its not what I’m thinking about.

Worst part of the year. Every year. Need space but she needs affection. We’re trapped in close quarters, insecure and going crazier together. Every year. Every time.

And then one morning she was gone. That day we visited a WWII POW camp that had been turned into a museum about the history of military detentions. It was cold. I had a styrofoam cup of coffee trembling in my hands. Moazzam and Omar both sympathized with the German soldiers who had been kept here. They didn’t care about national or political affiliation, they bonded on the subject of imprisonment.

That night we drove into Newcastle. We got there really late.

There was a gypsy girl in the audience with magic in her eyes. I had trouble focusing. After the show I was smoking cigarettes as per usual. There were two girls in front of me. One had her back to me. She was talking about the lecture. Her friend kept looking at me nervously. Then she said that she thought I was hot and her friend almost fainted. The girl who was talking figured everything out and turned around. She did a wonderful job of making light of the situation. I was barely uncomfortable.

We talked for a little while and while we were talking I watched the gypsy girl look around for one second only to see me talking to two well dressed college girls. She walked away. I sighed inside of myself. The college girls were asking me if I wanted to drink. Oh, God did I.

I told Moazzam that I was going out for a drink because I hadn’t had one since I’d gotten to England. He looked disapproving because he knew that I would be spending his organizations money on whiskey but I begged him for just this once and he said OK. As long as I was at the hotel and ready to go by ten the next morning so that we could drive to Glasgow.

A few hours later I was in some eighties style loft party watching the girls and the guys split off into two groups to drink themselves stupid before figuring out who was goind to bang who tonight. Before the action started I snuck downstairs to have a cigarette and hopefully leave to find a bar. I didn’t want to see this go down. I accidentally set the alarm off so soon I had a whole group of friends again and we were all smoking. They wanted to leave to go to a bar so I went with them. Some of them had paired off already.

Charlie had warned me when I came to this town. He told me that the women were floozies and that they walk around in miniskirts in the winter. I think he thought that his words would act as a deterrent.

And then there in the streetlights was the gypsy. She was standing with a girl with sharp red hair. They were smoking cigarettes filmishly in the amber of the streetlights. They both lit up to see me. The punk grabbed my arm and said “MALAKA! You were fucking great!” She was Greek and could not hide it. She told me that they had been talking about me and then I came so it must be some kind of fate. I smiled and said that it was ordained under my breath but they didn’t get the joke.

When Vanessa spoke she had a soft voice with a thoroughly entrenched Italian accent. She looked nervous about how she spoke English. Her soft words were strong and well chosen so that she pieced together very poetically intense phrases in a foreign syntax.

Inside of the bar was a large group of people who all looked familiar. Not because I had seen them before, but because they felt like a group of people that I knew or wanted to know.

As it turned out this was the local D.I.Y. crew. In a few moments we were fully bonded over a shared distaste for political movements that didn’t do anything. That is what I love about D.I.Y. It basically says shut the fuck up and DO something. Funny thing to love about it for a guy who talks so much.

They gave me a planner that they had made themselves with an old one color printer. They talked about the movie theatre and cafe that they had built themselves and how they wanted someone to help them build a screen printing studio there because they had some of the equipment already. All the while Vanessa, the gypsy, sat across from me and when our eyes connected it felt like an explosion. I was already in love with her.

We went to another bar. There was a band playing American rock music. We danced. It was Fay, the Greek, CJ, Vanessa and me. When the show was over they told me that I should stay with them because hotels were boring. I couldn’t agree more. Whatever was happening between Vanessa and I seemed to be something that was obvious for everyone except for me who acted like I didn’t understand what was happening. But I did.

She lived in a house typical of the area but totally new to me. It had a woman’s touch, something I had not seen for a long time.

We stayed up together all night. By the time morning came to rip us apart we had a plan. It was a crazy plan, but it was a plan none the less and that is all I need to make as many crazy decisions as possible. We snuck a few last kisses behind a monument across from the hotel and at ten I was walking through the door in a different hoody looking very fucked up. Moazzam was already in the lobby staring at me in complete disbelief. I gave him one apologetic look, went upstairs and brushed my teeth and within the next fifteen minutes we were in the car heading towards Edinburgh.

expatriate

September 12, 2010 at 7:49 pm (Chapter Three – Two Sides:One Story) · Edit

We stopped at Hadrian’s Wall when we crossed into Scotland. The four of us stood around on this thing which divides with all of the clever divides between ourselves. It was timeless because it was made out of stone. It separates one of the greatest Us and Them dramas of the Western World.

I realized that I kept putting myself on the opposite side of this wall from Moazzam and Omar and it hit me for a minute that in a lot of ways there would always be some kind of fence between us. Above us there were only snarling clouds and grimness and I wondered at how horrible it must have been to die here for whatever reason they had given themselves to do so.

We didn’t talk to one another. We just sat in the whipping wind and absorbed the conflict.

I was distracted during the speech that night. My new love story was blotting out the job at hand. I felt disingenuous in front of these people. They came for something that I didn’t think that I could give them and I was ashamed that again I was in the midst of something so big and so important and I was choosing to lose myself in the same labyrinth that I always ran to when things get heavy: love.

I was also sick of divulging myself in front of all of these people. We had done so many speaking events and it was killing me to cut myself down into this soundbite version of myself for countless people, always answering for this thing that only wanted to escape. But then I already knew that there is no escape from that place.

After the show that night I knew that I needed some time to myself. I rolled a few spliffs and went for a long walkabout. I soaked in the age of the city and the madness of its construction. I tried to process the things that were going on with me. I realized that since the walk to the fish shop in Birmingham this had been the first few hours I had had to myself. It felt so good to not have to explain myself to someone for just a few minutes. My body slacked with relaxation and I knew exactly what I was going to do and I came to peace with my situation.

The next morning we were having breakfast with the Dhalai Llama’s ambassador in the ground level flat of the priest who had organized the speech the day before. He was telling us about the current plight of his people. I felt like a child at the table. The men around me were completely invested in the Humanitarian cause but I couldn’t seem to get past my self. I kept my mouth shut and I listened. There was so much to take in on this road.

That night we were in Glasgow. I only remember people standing very close to me and excitedly asking me if I had ever tried a fried Mars bar.

Then for some reason we went back to Birmingham for a few days. I lived by myself in the Ibis hotel that Sara and I used to share. I spent a lot of time sleeping. Some Scandanavian fellow wanted to do an interview with me so I told him to come to the hotel. He showed up and we talked for a while. He was genuinely interested in talking about the tour itself, not Guantanamo Bay. We went for a walk in the snow through the canals. I have never been able to read the article that came out.

Moazzam invited me over to his home for an evening with his family. We sat around and talked for a long time. He seemed to emphasize that there was a plane ticket scheduled for me to leave and I promised him that I would leave while I was looking him square in the eye. We both lost respect for me then because we both knew that I was lying.

That night we watched a movie about the spread of Islam. I knew that Moazzam saw it as a obligation to convert me to Islam and for what it was worth he did, but only in so far as that I can see as much good and as much bad about it as any other religion. I believed that when everything was said and done we both believed in the same thing. We both had ethical codes of conduct though mine was nowhere near as rigid and disciplined as his. I didn’t see why I needed to be a part of the group if I was already being a pretty good Muslim without even trying or calling myself one.

I had even prayed with him and Omar one night in a small Mosque and I heard for the first time the whole thing and a kind of electric shock happened in me. But when the time came to say that there was only one true God and Mohammed was his prophet I said nothing and the spell was broken and Moazzam and Omar both looked disappointed. I had failed the test.

We flew up to Northern Ireland. We were picked up by two big guys. They took us on a tour of all of the murals and places where people had been killed in the struggle for independence here. There were so many conflicts in the world. These men seemed so proud of this conflict. They were historians. Moazzam drew allegories between their wars, especially when we came to the prison camps where IRA members had been kept. We all laughed at the stories of impossible escapes, especially the one where they stole a helicopter, landed it in the prison yard and flew away with a group of IRA big wigs. That deserves a pat on the back.

It was easy to tailor a speech to them that night because they only wanted to hear about anything that would give one more ounce of credibility to their hatred for England and authority in general. And as I said, there was no shortage of parallels.

Then we were back in England and we were heading out to the last speech we would give together. It was in Wales.

There were more than one thousand people there that night. They were mostly students. By now I was so bored of all of the stories that we would tell and the points that we would hit that I didn’t even feel like I was there. I was acting the robot even here in front of all of these people. It went fine. I am a good robot.

Omar began to speak and he told the story about 727 and the lost eyeball and he admitted that he had been detainee 727 and it had been his eye that had been destroyed by the guards during an IRF and so many things that I should have realized before clicked into place. Had this happened in front of me? Did I video tape this, or not video tape this for that matter? Somebody had. Somebody that did the same job I had done. I felt sick.

The questions began. A man came to the microphone. He nervously asked us where we got all of our money from, making a clear indication that it was wrong to profit off of Gitmo. I lost it.

I politely indicated that I would field the question and then sharply told him that I steal food and eat of dumpsters and live out of a bag to do this. I am certainly not a rich man. I told him that if we were rockstars who had come here to give you a different kind of service we would have walked away with thousands and nobody would try to make us feel guilty about it. We barely made enough from this tour just to sponsor it.That is when Moazzam jumped in and told him that his family lived off of the sales of his book which he had to buy from his publisher at half price and then sell to make a profit.

The audience was clapping and cheering. It seemed that they wanted to tear this guy to shreds.

That night we had out last dinner together at a middle eastern restaurant that stayed open for us. We were the only diners. Moazzam caught me smoking a spliff in the deserted back patio. He didn’t make a scene about it, but as always it registered as a great disappointment in his wise eyes.

But the work was done.

I woke up the next morning in a panic. I realized that I didn’t have Vanessa’s number. My train to London was scheduled to leave in a few hours. There was no internet terminal in the hotel so I had to sprint to a hotel a few blocks away, pay them too much money, find the email that she had sent with it, write it down and then rush back to pack up my things and say goodbye to these men who were now a kind of family to me. It was time to find out what happens after this. The next question mark.

It was a strange kind of goodbye. Moazzam and I shook hands and stared into each others eyes and even with the lie there there was still so much respect. Goodbye, my mentor. Until we meet again.

Omar gave me a bear hug and I nearly teared up. He knew where I was going and he had already told me to enjoy myself. He understood.

Charlie also knew. We’d talked about it the night before. He promised me he would not tell Moazzam.

My train left.

A few hours later I was standing on the second floor of the train King’s Cross train station looking for that beautiful pair of eyes and then I saw them and nothing felt crazy any more. We stayed in the Ibis that night and the following morning there was one empty plane seat on its way back to Chicago and two lovers swathed in strange folds of garments, her sleeping on my shoulder, me staring out at the countryside as we passed it by on our way to Newcastle where we were going to be in love.

Tramp

the west coast dream

August 16, 2010 at 11:29 pm (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit

There was a cigarette dangling out of my mouth every minute of the trip west, my nervous hands flicking inside and outside of Ruck’s new car. He was asleep in the back.

I drove, without a license, through silent black of Nebraska on a moonless night with only my paranoia to keep me company as the boys dozed peacefully around me. I turned the radio to surreal and phased out of existence, reminded only of my spatial reality by a slow progression of numbers. In that kind of darkness it was as if I were driving through the two-dimensional plane of the Flatland universe. I wanted to talk to the line.

When Sergio woke up we were halfway across the country and I was a raving psychotic, armed with coffee and nicotine, boiling at the blood. He relieved me from my duties on the grounds that I was no longer sane.

We ate breakfast at a hotel for free a la Ruck’s fail safe survivalists knowledge.

Sergio is a character of special import to my story.

He is of Ukranian descent with no shortage of an accent. He is built like a brick shit house, as they say, a testament to the Marine Corps training regime. His energy is explosive to the degree of being nuclear. In bad times he is the best of company, and in bar fight situations there is not another person on this whole planet that I would rather have around. In his eyes is a kind of fire that I have never seen the likes of before, and in them you can see the shadows of his beasts roaming, dark and scary memories which one can only guess at. He was a sniper in Iraq. My guesses as to the nature of those beastial memories are traumatizing enough. I have never asked him for details in all of the years that I have known him and he has only given me a few hints.

Once, on another trip in a different time he told me about the importance of the number thirteen in his life with a grim look and posture and I could only guess the implication.

Sergio drove most of that day. I do not remember what we talked about or did. I was thinking about other things. I was thinking about Portland. I was thinking about love. I was thinking most, though, about where the fuck I was going to get enough money to survive this trip that seemed absolutely outlandish to me at this juncture.

That night we reached Idaho and stopped to sleep in a small park. We had picked up a bundle of wood and a case of beer and some liquor. We stayed up most of the night burning the wood and drinking the booze. We stayed silent for the most part, soaking in the tongues of flame which licked at our cold bodies, stale from over exertion and the intensity of time.

I woke the next morning to a boot softly digging into my ribs. The boot was on the foot of a park attendant who wanted to inform me that we had not paid the fee and that we were obligated to do so or he would call the cops. Sergio was already packing up the things into the car with the speed of a high speed Marine. Dave was PMCSing the vehicle. I told the ranger that we’d be over to the booth in five minutes to pay him the fee.

I tried to hand him two dollars as we drove by his booth at 50 miles an hour, but we were simply moving too fast. Fucking bandits.

After the dead northern planes the rolling hills of the Northwest were an absolute delight.  The colors were sharp and unreal, elevated in stature by the drugs in our bodies.

We were drawing near to our destination. We stopped on a dam a few hundred miles away from Portland and I made a call to my friend Patrick.

patrick, the man/the legend

August 16, 2010 at 11:59 pm (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit

I had met Patrick the year prior when, after a season long fit of hysteria descended on my head that was so fierce that every morning I woke to the screaming of my mind which didn’t stop its screaming until I went to sleep only to dream of more screaming, I decided that I needed to make a change in my life.

My friend Jan had set me up with a job in the Willamette Valley working as a harvest intern for the crush season at a vineyard. When August came around that year I packed my bags and left my girlfriend Jamie at Union Station due west for Portland.

I didn’t know anyone in Portland. Jan had given me the number of a guy she said she had gone out drinking with a few times by the name of Patrick. I had written it on a napkin.

As the train approached Portland I called the number. A scraggly voice answered the phone. It was 11 Am. The man who answered confirmed that he was indeed Patrick Bruce and he told me that he had been expecting me. He told me the whereabouts of his home and said, cryptically, that they were still up.

Still up?

I promptly got very lost upon exiting the train and spent a very tiring two hours wandering around downtown entirely off track. In the end I had to hail a cab and spend my last few dollars on fare out to his place which was in the north east side of town.

The door to his apartment was wide open. I peered inside of it before I knocked on the door. The place was a bachelors pad galore complete with guitars of all shapes and sizes and wires running every which way to his many media devices strewn about without a piece of furniture in sight save for a bar stool in the center of the room.

A short Irish looking man with sandy blond hair and a red face came to the door with a smile that went from one ear to the next. He told me his name was Patrick and he invited me inside of his house.

He got to work cutting off a line of blow for me on the table after which he poured me a 16 oz glass of whiskey with a few icecubes and began packing a bowl. He informed me that he had been playing music with the tall, skinny, silent fellow who was currently fooling around with the wah wah peddle and a very nice guitar.

I did the coke and drank the whiskey and smoked the grass and said thank you for all of it. I really wanted to go see Portland and I felt like I was in the perfect mood to do so now. Patrick happily sent me off saying that it was bedtime. He gave me a key. And so I wandered off.

I stayed with him until the harvest season began which was more than two weeks away. I had been overexcited in my desire to escape the city.

He took me out several times for amazing dinners at top notch restaurants where he knew everybody. He would wear sweat pants and baseball hats while drinking the finest wine as if it were water and devouring fish cooked in the French style. He is one of the most amazingly generous people that has ever walked this fair Earth.

I told him about my plans and he became one of my biggest supporters. He made me promise him that I would become a writer, telling me that if my words came out like my talking did that the world needed to hear what I had to say. I felt as if this might have been slightly hyperbolic, but it is certainly nice to hear.

One of my favorite pasttimes with Patrick was to go to the strip club with him and his friend Kenny who is the manager for Tom Morello’s solo act. Not only are Portland strip clubs some of the finest establishments in this who goddamn U S of A, but it is a rare pleasure to watch those boys throw bills around in clouds with smiles on their faces. It was the best of times.

Eventually Patrick’s lifestyle began to give me reason for concern. His all night coke parties were hard to endure, even though I was an impoverished floor crasher (as I said, there was no furniture to speak of, and one cannot sleep on a bar stool) I found it difficult to keep up with the pace of conversation that people on the drug prefer to keep and after my first day I discontinued usage because amphetamines have taken a heavy toll in my family and I have danced with that dragon before and understand its nearly elemental control over the fundamental properties of my genetic makeup.

I was worried about him in a very serious way. I was wondering what he was trying to fill and I saw in him the same kind of continuous destruction of the value of any moment in the pursuit of a greater high that I recognized in myself and I was genuinely afraid.

It is not that I did not want to become like him because he is a wonderful person about whom nobody could say a bad word without one of his friends cutting them from stem to sternum. It was more that I wanted to be able to enjoy himself as much as everyone else did, does, without thinking that he had to be lit up like a Christmas parade to entertain people that probably weren’t worth his time.

If you are out there Patrick, I am doing what you asked of me and I think about you every day and I make prayers of my own kind that you will find peace some day.

turbulent landings

August 18, 2010 at 5:39 am (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit

We took one last breath of fresh, slow air at the bottom of the waterfall outside of Portland. We peacefully loaded into the car and descended into madness.

Patrick welcomed us into his home with a child’s joy because making new friends is his favorite thing in the world. Him and Sergio bonded instantaneously. Patrick had to go to work. He left us an assortment of drugs and told us to enjoy ourselves. So we did.

I called Katie.

I met her on my 21st birthday, three months removed from my deployment. She was a strong and proud Michigan feminist who wasn’t going to take any shit and she hated men as much as I did. We spent a cold winter being cute in the snow sometimes, but at other times we were as angry and sad as we could be and we took it out on each other in a  big way.

She had moved to Portland as she always said she would. We ran into each other again in Stumptown the year before when I was in town to make wine for the first time.

I was anxious to hang out with her again because I was already pining for familiarity and she carried within her past a substantial truth about who I was that led into who I had  become and I wanted that truth from her.

Rucks, Sergio, Katie and I end up down in the riverside park drinking PBR out of cans. Katie wandered off to go to the bathroom.

We’d been smoking grass the entire evening and I currently had the bag sitting right next to me because I am a very irresponsible person.  All of a sudden there is a bike cop standing next to us with his little light shining down on us.

I had the weed underneath my shoe now. When the officer walked around the light we saw that he was a little, white haired man with a very pleasant demeanor. He saw our cans, obviously, and in the nicest way ever began to write us a warning for drinking in the park, informing us that we would be expelled for thirty days, apologizing for the inconvenience, explaining that he felt really bad about it but he had to. He even told us that we could continue to hang out in the park for the night if we wanted to as long as we threw our beer out. Then he rode off into the night.

On my first night in Portland I was kicked out of my favorite place.

Then time dilates and we wake up on the floor three days later in a cigarette smoke gas chamber and piles of empty beer bottles. We’re as strewn about the floor as the assorted trash of the evenings that passed… the afternoons too. Guitars everywhere. Sergio lifts off the floor and looks at Rucks and me as serious as could be and he says “I’m going to India.”

That was that. We went down to Powell’s and he bought himself some books on Indian culture and three days later he was on a plane to India that he had purchased with his VA disability money.

Gone, just like that. That’s how these crazy veterans operate sometimes. They get some mission in their heads and they just have to go.

the manifested manifesto

August 20, 2010 at 5:28 am (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit

The Rucks and I were left without a barbarian to hobo as we pleased without being yelled at about discipline and our fundamental lack of this virtue. We chose to spend our time busking.

Rucks got himself a washboard and I had my banjo (the M-16) and we made a sign for ourselves. We labored over making a sign. It was a good sign. We didn’t make any money to speak of (over the course of several days we made seven dollars which we spent on pizza) but we were given one giant joint by an elderly woman, however.

We smoked our joint in the cemetery before heading over to an open mic in the Hawthorne neighborhood.

The open mic was littered with jobless vagabonds new and old to the city trading tips on good dumpsters and ideal places to sleep outdoors. Though it was comforting to be amongst “our people” we were both slightly weary of the hippy demographic we had so thoroughly indoctrinated ourselves into.

Rucks began to swoon for a space-cadet by the name of Tabitha who seemed to have no interest in anything at all other than playing long, crooning songs about that subject which has always seemed so appealing to hippies and singer/songwriter types: love.

After playing our set, a few off tempo and poorly constructs songs made out of old cadences we couldn’t remember properly, Rucks wandered off with Tabitha to talk to her friends who were sitting outside of the special-ed bus that had been converted into a home of sorts.

The bus had a name, of course, and that name was Gloria. Gloria was a foul smelling cesspool of rotting organic waste, haphazardly filled to the brim with things that looked like the things that people needed to live: a full mattress, crates full of cooking equipment, glass jars etc etc… but none of these things were in any order to actually use.

Somehow a crazy plan was concocted. It was decided that we would leave with this crew to drive up to Olympia to spend a few days. The hearts exploding over Rucks’ head were enough to convince me that, like always, any plan was better than no plan, and in a matter of hours we were heading north out of the city to a whole new city with a group of people we had not known that afternoon.

The hippies that owned and operate Gloria went by the name of Moonflower and Kale (Dave immediately renamed him Seaweed) and they began to proudly tell us about the tenements of being a Freegan.

Freeganism is a lonely, irrational road, it would seem. These two were so unlikable and so lost in the sauce of idealism that they made me want to be a banker. To hear them talking about a life where nobody would pay for food made all of the ideals that I held dear seem poisonously unbelievable to me. They were both emaciated so horribly that one would believe that they should have been crippled to look at them. Their faces were hollow and incapable of registering any emotion beyond confusion.

Seaweed told us that he was going to move out to the woods in Alaska to trap small animals. Why not? That lifestyle had proven wildly successful for the young man that had recently been the subject of the movie “Into the Wild” which had charmed audiences across the states. Moonflower was more practical, adhering to a religion of dumpstered goods.

They bickered between each other incessantly. Seaweed seemed to have already driven Moonflower crazy, or maybe it was the lack of proper vitamins.

When we stopped for gas I stole a bag of peanuts and when I tried to share my peanuts I was told that I was going to go to hell. That is when I noticed, for the first time, that Gloria was covered from wall to wall, inside and out, with crosses and bible versus and assorted hippy-isms about the grace of God. What in the fuck was I thinking?

Half-way up to Olympia I realized that there was another person sleeping in the back of the bus on the side of the mattress which stood on its sides. Moonflower told me that we were delivering her to a resort on the way.

That night we slept on the side of the road in a small recessed area that was only a few feet from where the large semi-trucks hauling logs were blowing past, flinging rocks at our unguarded bodies. I did not sleep well that night.

We started the next day off with rotten apples.

We dropped our quiet little package off at her resort and went to a general store in the town, picking up eggs and pancake mix so that we could make breakfast in the mountain’s glorious park. Dave stole some cheese. He was equally berated for his thievery and when it was done I elbowed his ribs and asked him why the fuck he told them he had stolen it after I had been so thoroughly chastised the night before. He seemed dopishly innocent. He had no idea that the exact same scene had played itself out a few hours prior.

We pulled our misfit bus into the park and it only took us two hours to get a horrible breakfast out of the pan. More than half of that time was spent arguing with Moonflower who was at first mad because I wanted to cook the breakfast. She said it was “patriarchal.” Then, when she started to cook she threw a tantrum because to make a woman cook is misogynist.

What a bitch.

Tabitha was off on some super secret space mission on a distant star with her white guitar with guilded golden crosses on it making dischordant hippy sounds from a felled tree not too far away. Moonflower walked into the woods and was not seen again for hours. Seaweed fell asleep in the dirt next to the bus.

I went down to the river to take a bath. It was secluded so I decided to masturbate for the first time in days and it was a holy experience, standing there in the river.

When I came back up to the bus Rucks and I unloaded the entire bus and reorganized the whole thing, laying the bed down where it ought to be, cleaning all of the disgusting dishes and organizing the many crates of silly bullshit these people carried with them in a reasonable way. When we were finishing Moonflower emerged from the shrubbery looking like some crazed John the Baptist. She immediately crawled into the bed and went to sleep. Tabitha, much to Rucks’ disappointment, crawled into bed with her and embraced her in a lovers way and everything made more sense then. We could not wake Seaweed up. We assumed that he was dead so we lifted him into the bed as well and began to drive towards Seattle.

Rucks was waiting for a call from a winemaker that Patrick had connected him to where he might be able to get a job during the harvest season. He was very impatient to get to a place where he could get reception on his phone.

It turns out that Gloria handled just like a humvee. I thought that it might have been broken because the ride had been sickening while Moonflower drove. I guess she was just a horrible driver. Maybe it was her uterus and ovaries which made it so difficult. One simply had to imagine that the wheel was like the wheel of a pirate ship, you just had to constantly counter steer. Easy. I still didn’t have a license.

The hippies woke up once along the road to tell us that occasionally Gloria catches fire. We laughed the laugh of insanity, both of us dreaming up a scene of a flaming Christian bus rolling down the road as we jumped out leaving these freaks to whatever destiny their God had planned for them.

Along the course of the trip they had made frequent usage of the term “manifested.” Any time that something happened which seemed out of the ordinary they said that God had manifested the scenario, when really it was just a bunch of stoners making silly decisions on the fly. It reminded us of Greg who had said that everything, including picking us up off the side of the road, was “ordained.”

People love to put responsibility on anybody but themselves. Especially God.

After a brief and desperately unsuccessful attempt to dumpster some pizza we made it to Olympia where we left the hippies in a parking lot, running in the opposite direction while waving and laughing, telling them that we really had to be going. They were too dazed to understand what was happening. We didn’t stop until we could no longer hear Tabitha’s awful crooning.

We sat in a park and laughed and laughed while smoking some weed. I was on the phone with another member of the IVAW named Josh who lived in Olympia. I explained our situation to him and he invited us to stay at his place.

That night we ate ramen with him in his apartment that smelled like cat pee, the walls covered in 80′s X-Men comics which I promptly “got a boner” for as the kids say these days.

Josh is a hyper-intellectual of the anarchist bent who is studying some kind of political philosophy at Evergreen. He had been in the intelligence branch of the Army before going AWOL after a deployment. He told us that he had been living off the radar since then in fear of being hassled by the military.

He was gone in the morning after we woke up. I made another call to another member who told us that we should head to Vashan Island where he was staying in a place that was “totally off the radar,” which he said as if he were insinuating something radical. I hoped that it was a pot farm. We cleaned the dishes and walked for the bus station.

We passed a fancy brunch cafe on our way. A few of the tables had just lifted and left half full cups of coffee and pancakes on the tables. Rucks and I bussed that shit up with a quickness, walking away in a few moments with our hands and mouths full of sticky deliciousness while the servers stared at us as if we’d just held the joint up. Strike fast and take no prisoners.

We were on a bus headed to Tacoma where we would catch a ferry to the island within an hour.

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keep your wits about you

August 20, 2010 at 7:07 am (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit

The wind swept across us as we were ferried over the bay to the island soaking in a view that I had only dreamed of from the trailer I grew up in as a young dreamer, predicting before their time the sunsets that I would someday see.

The ferry settled in at shore and we disgorged and walked to the road only to find that it went two ways, neither of them the way that we wanted to go.

The veteran that had invited us to stay with him goes by the name of Mike. I had met him first at the RNC. He was a slender fellow who sported a mustached just this side of dapper. He exuded a artistic cunning that made him seem an alien from the rest of the pragmatic political types. When I had talked to him on the phone he told me that we needed to get to the center of the island.

The two roads we were presented with seemed to want to skirt around the island. Not desirable.

I called him again from atop a hill. He picked up at the last minute. He told us that we would need to get to the hostel. He informed me that we should take the road that veered to the left, follow it until it came to a “T” and then turn right and we would arrive at the hostel. His last words to me were “keep your wits about you on this mission…” and then he hung up the phone with the sound of a girl giggling in the background.

We started to follow his directions.

Several hours later, long after the sun had set, a serious question began to plague our minds: do bears live here?

The night was black as coal and there was no sign of life. This was good when one is thinking about bears, but where were all the humans?

We found ourselves at the bottom of a stop sign. I was staring up at the names of the roads, then down again at Rucks’ cellphone which had not had service since we left the hill. And repeat.

A woman pulled up in an SUV. She stared at us. We stared at her. It went on like this for quite some time. Eventually she rolled down her window and asked us what it was that we thought we were doing.

After telling her about our needs she invited us into her car. She drove us to the hostel, but the route she took was nothing like the route that Mike had told us of. There were many turns, some of them rights, some of them lefts, and the trip was nothing short of twenty miles.

When we got to the hostel we thanked her and walked off. Our only means of contacting Mike was to yell. Surprisingly he responded to us very quickly and soon we were on the front porch of a tiny shack, rickety and splintered.

There was a girl there who refused to tell us her name. She grabbed my banjo from me and began to play it telling us that she had never played before. She played the most eerie notes for the rest of the evening.

We ate and we smoked and we laughed all night. All four of us passed out in the only bed which occupied at least a third of the entire house. I could get water from the sink from my position in the bed.

We woke up the next morning and dispersed to meditate individually. I walked away from the house and eventually found a clearing in the woods where I did a few yoga moves that I could remember and a brief calisthenics routine that I had held on to from those informative mornings during Basic.

We sat around getting splinters on the porch talking about daddy issues which we all had, go figure.

Banjo, or so we had named her, took off on her bike to catch the ferry back to Seattle where she and Mike really lived. Mike was only house sitting for a friend. We hung around for a few more lingering moments drinking coffee and then we too set off for the ferry to Seattle because it seemed a reasonable enough place to be.

We caught a ride with a woman in a truck who had a raft in the bed. We sat inside the raft and acted like we were piloting it as she drove us the few miles to the island’s other ferry.

When we arrived we met up with Banjo again. The ferry came. We all got on.

We dined on peanut butter sandwhiches with honey and instant coffee (a specialty that I am proud to have created) as we moped our way toward the cranes that heralded a whole new town with all of its promise and potential.

Banjo took off as soon as we landed and Rucks and I went the other way to the market where we found a dumpster full of flowers. Rucks picked out armloads of them so we laid them around us while we busked by the pier until the security guards told us that we were being a nuisance and asked us to leave. We walked up the hill into the first of the many streets lined with fancy, large buildings.

A wise old hobo gave me a hand selected piece of cardboard to make our sign on when I walked up to the dumpster that he was the sentry to.

This ordained sign proved of no use to us. We put a message on it that read “please buy two homeless vets an ice cream cone” but nobody seemed particularly ready to support the troops that day. I got pissed and said a few things and eventually we were asked to leave that area too.

We started the long walk up a very steep hill and both of us were wondering why people ever went down to the bottom of it, no matter how beautiful the ocean might be.

on capital hill

August 20, 2010 at 5:57 pm (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit

The hill, it turns out, was Capital Hill, from whose lofty top the fixed gear army of hipsters rode around as they do in every city.

We positioned ourselves outside of a coffee shop and began to play music with no hope of making any money. It wasn’t long before a monster of a man wearing fishing boots and overalls walked up to us. In one ham fist he held an accordian and in the other a brown bagged bottle of whiskey. His voice was raspy and he smelled of the sea and booze. He told us that he was a vet as well. He had been a tanker.

To imagine his massive frame filling out the incredibly small space of an Abrams was hilariously tragic. He must have been the most unliked man on the gun line. If those things are built anything like a Howitzer then they are not built to accommodate the larger of our species.

He told us that he had been working on a fishing ship off the coast for the last season and now he was living out of his truck which had been converted into a home and heading down the west coast to San Diego where he would work the squid harvest. He showed us his mobile home. It was a tin shack screwed into the bed of a small truck. It was the kind of thing that only someone who had lived inside of a tank could live in.

He played us fisherman’s songs until our friend Chanan from IVAW called the phone and invited us out for a drink.

Chanan was/is a gay, socialist, ex-seaman who had been attached to the Marines as a medic. Some people are so good at being part of marginalized demographics. He wined us and dined us all evening before taking us to his apartment where we were to spend the night.

We casually avoided the subject of my political fiasco in St. Paul for a majority of the evening, but eventually it came to the front.

Chanan rolls deep with the ISO and has for a very long time. I knew that he knew about what I had said. He was the first to breach the silence. I thought that he would kick us out.

I explained to him in great detail that I had not meant to isolate the ISO and I had said nothing to do so, but rather that my words were inappropriately used to out an age old debate and now everybody wanted to either praise or condemn me for having done so. It took a lot of fancy foot work but eventually he saw where I was coming from and he promised that he would do what he could to set the record straight with all of his socialist buddies.

The night wound down to a close and when the morning came it was time to move on, find a new place to drop our bags and collect stories with other veterans.

My friend from Chicago gave me the number of a veteran who had helped form the IVAW though he was no longer active with the organization. His name was Josh.

Josh lived a few miles outside of the city. We started roadmarching towards his home after eating some tuna fish sandwiches.

Unfortunately those sandwiches didn’t sit well with Rucks and a few minutes after consuming them we were standing on the side of the road while he vomited. It was hard not to laugh because he was laughing. He really has always been the best in hard times.

After fifteen minutes of purging his demons we charged on, occasionally stopping for him to mini-puke. He was spitting out “stuff” the entire trip.

We finally made it to Josh’s place and settled in for the night.

Josh was that kind of gung ho super trooper that one does not expect to find in an organization like ours. He had been in the infantry in the Army. He was squared away NCO material. He objected to the war because it meant that his buddies, his soldiers, would die, were dieing, and he was smart enough to know that it was for no reason.

He was a mans man. A sports loving, hard working no bullshit type. He was a breath of fresh air in the midst of all of the hippy philanthropists we’d spent so much time with.

He made us an awesome dinner and then we kicked it on the porch with some beer and shot the shit about why the IVAW wasn’t working. This is one of my favorite discussions that I find myself having with people often. It seems that people feel open to talk about these kind of things with me. I do not understand why.

That night Dave and I went out dancing with Banjo and she ended up coming back to Josh’s place with us. I got my first taste of love on the run in Josh’s bathroom (classically obscene) and when I woke up in the morning she was gone and Josh had that “what was all that noise about last night?” look on his face, but he had lived in barracks before so he only smiled coyly.

Rucks was less easy to please. He was a little hurt that I could do this to Mike even though I protested that she had told me that her and Mike were not a thing. Rucks just looked at me like I was a criminal and I knew that thing or not the way that Mike looked at her had left no room for this kid of behavior. Just like that my fun was over. Once again my desires had gotten the best of me and I’d fucked another friend over. I wish that this were the last story of this kind that you will eventually read about here, reader, but it has only just begun.

We walked down to the bus station.

While we waited for the bus to Tacoma we were witness to a scene that I could not believe.

There was a homeless shelter across the street as usual. A bum walked out of the door with his bags in hand and he was yelling about three towels that he felt belonged to him. A woman stumbled out after him. He was yelling about these towels and banging on the glass windows. She was yelling at him that the cops would be coming soon. The woman next to us had her hands over her child’s ears. The bum continued to bang on the glass, cussing up a fit about these towels. His woman bolted around the corner.

A man came out of the shelter, I assume he was the security guard. They exchanged words. Then the security guard was laying a whoopin on this bum which ended with the bum being thrown against the sheet glass window of the shelter which I was sure would explode. It did not. The security guard walked back inside, the bum laid on the ground for a long time.

Eventually he got up, furious. There were some thugs standing on the sidewalk by him. The bum walked up to the thugs and spit on them. They were just about ready to kill him by bludgeoning when the cops, and our bus, pulled up at the same time.

I shivered a deep, spinal shiver. This was just one more violent fight that I should have broken up but did nothing instead. Just like Cuba when I was a little boy with a tape recorder watching all of that hatred being exerted in a way that was well beyond the standard operating proceedure and I knew that I should say something but I never did and now I can barely stand the sight of my own face in the mirror.

Just like Cuba.

blackberries for breakfast, lunch and dinner

August 21, 2010 at 6:30 pm (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit

I had never seen a bum fight before. I had a fairly long bus ride to think about it. When we got to Tacoma we walked up front to tell the bus driver that we didn’t have money for the fare but it seemed like he heard that kind of thing all the time. He just let us get off.

We were standing on the corner waiting for Seth (another veteran) to pick us up when we heard a commotion.

Two girls were arguing in the street. Then one girl was laying an open handed beat down on the other girl. Then she was smashing her face into the street. Then she was leaving.

The crumpled body of the girl was still in the middle of an intersection. There was a yuppy woman screaming from her car. She insisted that somebody needed to do something so I looked into her window and said “look you yuppy bitch, why don’t YOU do something like call the fucking police!” so she shut up and did that while Rucks and I tried to drag this knocked out girl to the sidewalk.

She was actually pretty OK which came as a surprise to me.

Seth showed up before the cops so we fled the scene.

Seth works in a pay by the week squat hotel for miscreants and never-do-wells. He was the nighttime security guard. He walked us around the premises fingering the place where is gun usually is but he hadn’t brought it along tonight. He told us stories of hookers who had to suck seven dicks a day just to earn enough to support their heroin habits and crack dealers with murder raps. In the dark night amidst all of that seediness Seth seemed to be some kind of modern Batman who was less ashamed of his own identity.

He opened a room to us but we both felt uncomfortable touching anything inside of the room so we spent the whole night drinking whiskey with Seth on the curb across the street where he could watch the building from the outside as if he only needed to bother himself if the entire place was being destroyed.

When his shift was over he took us outside of Tacoma and dropped us off along the highway where we thought we would be able to hitch in the morning.

We walked off into a construction area looking for a place to sleep. We came to some weeds and we just kept walking through them. The ground was soggy under our feet. I looked over once and Rucks was there smiling, but when I looked back again he was nowhere to be seen, and then when I looked back a third time there was a mud monster that had probably consumed Rucks while I wasn’t paying attention.

As things turned out it wasn’t a mud monster. It was Rucks covered in mud. He had fallen into some kind of swamp. Again I laughed at him but this time he didn’t find the situation any kind of funny.

We passed out in a clearing on top of our tarps. We woke up the next day to the sound of a bulldozer which was all of ten feet away from us and we quickly realized that we were two well camouflaged freaks in some weeds that were fixin to get bulldozed so we took off with all of the speed that our bodies would allow us.

There was a hotel nearby so we did our little breakfast thing, smoked the rest of our grass and picked blackberries from the bushes that surrounded the area.

We often found ourselves in the wooded areas around the commercial areas where auto drivers frequent. These places had become our home. Many of them, especially up here, had blackberry bushes packed densely inside of them. We had grow hobo fat off these berries that summer.

That area was a total bust for hitching.

We got on a bus that would take us to the furthest outpost of the whole Seattle/Tacoma/Olympia tri-city area.

We caught a ride with a hippy coming back from the same trade fair that the owner/operators of Gloria had gone to. He drove us all the way to Portland.

That night was our last night as a traveling duo. Rucks was off to work in the vineyards South of town and I was going to work in a winery in town.

We smoked as much as we could and laughed about the good old times. We were both so tired from the road, so exhausted by the rapid pace of stories that was assaulting us on a daily basis. We were ready to be alone, I think, and to have some structure to our lives.

Rucks took one more solo trip up to his Grandparent’s place where he was going to drop some acid while walking on the ocean shore and I settled in to trying to make Portland work for me in a way that was more substantial than just drifting through town on my friends’ couches.

our spirits were crushed

August 22, 2010 at 5:36 am (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit

So I didn’t have a plan. At least not a sustainable one. What I had was more like a dream. There wasn’t much about it that was all that realistic.

I was sleeping on Patrick’s floor again, mooching off his generosity. The money was gone. The nights were getting colder. Patrick was getting more and more worn out by my chit chat and random hours and addictions that he knew he’d have to cover. The answer to this was more simple than it seemed. I needed a j-o-b because money doesn’t grow on trees.

It was harvest season in the Northwest and the greyhound could take me anywhere I needed to be and I had my bags all packed and a Cricket that Patrick bought me and a phone book with every winemaker in town and out… but I didn’t need to go that far because Telina was looking out for my silly ass, waiting for the ball to drop.

Telina was a friend of Jan’s who had become a friend of mine over the course of many stories which will be told at different times. She and Dan were tramps, skipping from town to town in an RV they had purchased. They were friends of Patrick’s as well. They were Chicago satelittes, tethered to but away from that city so prolific.

She had it all covered. She had a job lined up for me at an avant garde winery opening up in the industrial neighborhood called Boedecker Cellars which is the product of Athena and Stuart. I reported to work on a bicycle. I introduced myself and I was pointed towards the work so I began to work.

Starting a harvest season is a thing that you have to break into fast because you don’t really want to think about all of the work that you are going to have to do. When those grapes start coming down the line it is as if they will never stop and your eyes grow so tired of the colorful nuances of pinot noir grapes… infinite grapes forever… in your dreams: grapes and then you’re awake but it is still grapes… hoses…nozzles.. water. citric acid. caustic. ozone. Because there can be no contaminants. They will ruin the wine.

Wine had made a tramp out of me the year before when I had come out looking to get my mind off of things… like the Army. Back when I skipped town on those last three drills because in my heart and in my mind I was so done and needed to be free so I went out there looking for freedom. I thought I’d found it when Danielle and I were driving out there listening to the Mountain Goats and relishing those last few moments of a beautiful story that was about to drive away East the next day but that car never went any further East than the winery she got a job at a few miles on the other side of town after she moved in to the little farmhouse on the vineyard with its perfect golden sun and sorrowful tree swing and the door that hangs open all day that led into the kitchen where we danced to some music that said it all best. The banjo was something we shared, like the books and the bed and the silence that never stops. And then the grapes came… and then my girlfriend came to town. And then my web of deceit got me tangled up so that there was no freedom except that kind that I could find staring into the grapes all day.

Boedecker was a whole different kind of vineyard though.

Unlike Yamhill Valley Vineyards which produced a yield of 350 tons of grapes the year that I worked there, Boedecker processed much less much more meticulously. We were expecting 50 tons I think.

The first order of business was to clean all of the bins that would store the wine while it fermented. Bins are giant, heavy duty Tupeware containers. There is no way to clean these silly things that will not lead to utter wetness. Better yet: chemical wetness. This process takes days. We had something like 100 at Yamhill along with 8-10 very large steel silos. At Boedecker there were 50 bins and that was it.

When you’re dealing with this much water irrigation becomes your biggest concern. Boedecker cellars was operating out of a brand new commercial space in an industrial area. When I started working the electricians were still putting in the wiring while I sprayed the hose around. The floor drains formed hills which only recessed in some areas. The topography of that floor became far too familiar to me as I measured it like a prisoner squeegeeing the floor.

During these pre-grape cleaning days I was living at a hostel that Patrick was paying for so that he could have some space until I got my first check. I felt super bad about the whole thing but I was getting my act together and taking as many hours as I could get and I was putting my ass into it.

So was another intern, my only other coworker who was also named Danielle who worked much harder than I did or could. Her and I split the shifts like Stuart and Athena did so that there would be nearly continuous surveillance of our babies when they came in.

Athena fronted me a check and I went out looking for a more permanent place to stay. I looked around on the internet.

And that is how I came to live in Fang House.

filling up the time

August 24, 2010 at 7:06 pm (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit

Fang House was the unofficial working title for a house in the Southwest corner of town where the members of a local punk band called White Fang lived with a varying host of their friends and a few non-native drifters. It existed in a state of constant disrepair and untidyness as best suits the mood for people of our demographical bracket.

I pulled an old, dusty mattress down from the attic where it had been stationed to be the sex bed for everybody who did not have a room of their own. After beating out some of the dust I positioned it in the art room against the wall, surrounded it with my bags and assorted hobo things and began making an emo nest of dirty clothes and half finished drawings.

The location of my nest was fairly central to where the socializing happened, but everything seemed central to the socializing. I would drag myself back to this bed after long days in the winery to pass out to the sound of ten-fifty late-teens getting uproariously fucked up around me, sometimes deciding to jump off the roof or have non-stop jam sessions ten feet from my head. I didn’t mind one little bit. I had a roof!

One day while I was downtown eating five dollar Thai food at the “Roach Coaches” I heard a British guy talking about how he was trapped in the same hostel I had stayed in. He was talking about a West Coast bike ride that he had started but his leg had gone bum so now he was stuck here. He was talking with another hostel resident. I finished my food and then walked over to where they were sitting. I told the British guy about Fang House and I invited him to come over with me after my shift at the winery.

After work that day I called him and we walked over to Fang House. He told me that he had traveled in Thailand and India, spending six months on the beach in Thailand learning how to administer Thai style tattoos. In my head I was overjoyed at what a serendipitous find this was for both of us. His name was Danny and he fit in with Fang House perfectly.

After spending a few days investigating the local printing scene I found the Independent Printing Resource Center. I walked downtown to look into it, hoping to find a safe haven where I could pursue my long lost love, that trade which is no more, printing.

The IPRC didn’t have the offset presses I had hoped for, or Screen Printing equipment. What they did have were two giant copy machines, guillatine cutters, binding equipment, a letterpress studio and a small army of well equipped computers. I talked my way into a membership and began working on a zine that day.

I had never made a zine before, but I needed a project to put my hands to in the idle hours between the grapes, something that I could ferment and share. I had all the fixings: sketches I’d drawn and a story worth sharing.

I called it Paper Birds:Styrofoam Flowers. I doted over it as obsessively as I now dote over the telling of this story.

When you live inside of a head like mine productivity and creativity are not hobbies, they are a means to an end. If I am not doing something then my mind busies itself with its many emotional and existential crises.

The zine was not enough, though. Nothing is ever enough.

Brother Bird had secured for me a thousand dollar grant from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and although this money only came with the expectation that I write for them one article, I felt a deeper debt to them than that. Brother Bird had given me the number of a friend of his who he had worked with in the past to formulate a kind of creative meeting grounds for veterans and civilians. I called that number late one night while I was walking  back from the bar. The guy’s name was Sam.

Sam and I met a few times over the course of the next couple of weeks. He helped me gather my thoughts on how to make a productive chapter of the IVAW here in Portland which would have art as its premises. I rambled out my thoughts and Sam sat back in many cafe and bar chairs helping me to clear the rubble and build something useful.

After a few days I had gathered enough momentum to call together a meeting of the few veterans who lived in the area. The meeting took place on the cement slab behind my house.

Benji Lewis showed up at the door in a bathrobe, Mike Ortiz came with armloads of cookies and Chris came with his bike.  Danny also sat in.

The boys were all about making a chapter, so that was that. We were now a team. An anti-war veteran team. I had finally made my own.

I’d been brought into the game by Brother Bird and Roberto in Chicago and I had learned everything I could from them even though we always seemed to differ on some very critical points. Brother Bird had built the Chicago chapter with raw intensity and a gravity of importance. I had always looked up to him for this and I had greatly aspired to build something like this myself, to create a chapter and to bring a crew of people into it and to give to them what it was that Brother Bird had given to me: a community and a voice.

Chris and Danny bonded on building freak bikes. Danny had quickly found a Portland nitche for himself with the bike builders after attending a weekly festivity called the ZooBomb where dozens of the local bike nerds take the lift to zoo at the top of a giant hill so they could ride their weird bikes down it as fast as they could. A few days after Danny moved into the house he showed up with a few small bikes, then a few days later he showed up with one bike that was composed of those smaller bikes all welded together. It was a long, dangerous looking thing that hugged the ground. It looked like a low riding motorcycle and upon it he looked like a total badass. Chris got to work building his bike immediately.

Mike made a website for us to use to share news about local activity. I started to use it as a blog.

Benji was a one man activist show who was operating out of another town to the south.

Between days at the winery, evenings at the IPRC, mandatory whiskey hour at the bar with the cute waitress and all the phone chatter associated with activism work I quickly found myself with no time left in my day and in this way I finally felt like I was actually putting that money that had been so generously awarded me to use.

the grapes moved in on us with a suitcase

August 24, 2010 at 8:49 pm (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit

The grapes finally arrived by the truckload. It started with one truck in the foggy, wet October morning. Then they just never stopped coming.

We mounted the elevated conveyor belt from whose heights we would sort these fifty tons of grapes. Stuart hit the power switch and the entire thing started to shake. It shook so vividly that after a few hours my bones were completely disassociated from one another, my brain was bruised and my eyes, when I finally stepped off this brutal device, could not focus.

The Pinot Noir grape snake slithered eternally before my eyes while I picked from its skin leaves and other debris. Silverfish crawled around and over and through my body as if I were a corpse being consumed. At the end of the line the snake piled into the bins which were now spotless and those bins spread out and filled the warehouse floor.

When we were done sorting the grapes every day the wine had to be “punched down”. Punch Downs are process of pushing the grapes which rise to the top during the fermentation process back down to the bottom of the bin so that the flavors can seep in to the wine. The grapes form a rock hard surface on the top during the first few days of the process because all of the reactions happening inside are so dramatic, but slowly this surface becomes easier to push down. When that is done the wine must be pumped from the bottom to the top so that it is properly circulated. This work takes hours. It is very difficult.

Every day I would walk home from work smoking a little weed and allowing my mind time to unravel its nefarious plot against itself. This is time that my mind demands and it will not take no for an answer. Halfway through the walk I would stop in at a small whiskey bar to get myself a glass of that sweet poison and flirt with the cute bartender.

On one such evening I was writing at the bar when I felt something on my neck. I moved my hand to the location of the issue only to find another earwig. I had something akin to a freak out and threw the bug across the room telling it loudly to keep itself and its friends away from me while I was off the clock. The bartender was staring at me as if I had asked her to hand over the till. She asked me to leave. I started to explain myself but I was stammering and sounding more crazy than ever. I resigned, kicked back the rest of the whiskey and left all huffy never to return.

I was acutely defensive of my mental illness which seemed to be growing out of control like an unweeded garden. There was the disappointment in finding myself doing work I’d made promises to my self and my friends that I would never do again. There was also living in a city that had no real interest to me.

Portland is a fine place to be as a twenty something in the modern age. Pretty people abound to your left and your right and everyone seems more than happy to dedicate themselves to having a good time. The nights are drunken and spent in company of people who are all proudly well to the left of center, so much so that it seems that Portland has politics all figured out.

This lackadaisical attitude seemed unjust to me, however. The people of Portland were all white and they lived in a kind of dystopia. For many of them it took a regimen of high powered pharmaceuticals to stave off the reality that war, poverty, hunger and sickness still thrived just outside of the city limits. It was just easier to ignore these issues while swathed in the blissful easiness of this town.

People didn’t want to talk about the war here because none of them had voted for Bush. They all considered themselves green to the extent that even the electronic doors of the Starbucks had low-energy signs on them despite the fact that it would be even less energy to just push the door open with your muscles, leaving the job off the electric grid which still relied on coal and oil. Nobody considered themselves racist because they were all beyond it even though there were only a very few black people who were all very poor and living in a highly segregated neighborhood to the North.

I still believed firmly that the spending of money was the only true vote that an American citizen could cast. This is, after all, a capitalist society and no matter who our president might be we are all, without a shadow of a doubt, firmly under the control of the handful of corporations which own our mediated lives be it through media, gas consumption, food, banking or the distribution of appliances which even the lefties fill their houses with.

People still spend money like capitalists in Portland. They buy cases of beer and handles of whiskey, many of them still drive, they like fancy food and living lives of excess. To think that they were not participating in the system seemed European of them. They blamed all of the wrongs of the Western world on the “others” from whom they were estranged and allowed themselves the freedom to think  that their lofty opinions purchased a get out of guilt free card. To me it did not.

In this way Portlanders are more confused than your average Middle American citizen. At least the trailer park residents and American flag fliers with the big trucks own what it is that they do and they don’t try to hide that they are what they are. To see the seedy intellectualism of an over-educated and underemployed population hard at work dismissing any responsibility for the evils of the world made my skin crawl.

I could not work in this environment. There was nothing I could tell these hipsters that they didn’t already know. When I told them about my work affirming the sickness of Guantanamo Bay and the rest of the rotten Global War on Terror they gave me that $100,000 dollar in tuition “I know” look. Why would I bother to convince them that there were nuances that they didn’t know, and if they knew it all so damn well why weren’t they out in the rest of the world trying to share what they knew with people who didn’t know instead of surrounding themselves with other people who had it all figured out?

My romance with Portland was over, needless to say, and the calender became yet another obstacle between me and being somewhere where I felt like I could belong again.

My bags were already packed in the metaphorical sense and I had one metaphorical foot out of the door. It was just a matter of finishing what it was I had come to do.

a tattoo of a memory of a place made out of sand

August 29, 2010 at 3:28 am (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit

I was all sour grapes and rotten moods. The grey clouds had moved in over head and even the bus reminded me that I wasn’t sane, my neurosis so loud to me that even in the silence of the streets when I was alone at night too afraid of the people on the bus, my mind snapped at itself with virulent disappointment.

My heart crooned for my friends and a room of my own and money that I had earned to spend. In Portland I was an island of me trapped with the broken pieces of the shitty plane I had flown in on that was carrying my preposterous dream.

At times I thought that Katy was right when she said that I was only privileged, excersizing my privilege to play out of the fantasy of being a homeless veteran. That’s how it seemed at the time. If only she knew how things would work out for me then maybe she would have been a little kinder.

I wasn’t really homeless because I could still work. I was a tramp. Incapable of staying in any one place for too long, hustling from job to job because I could still work. Not every homeless vet is a bum. But people don’t have time for these kind of semantics in today’s market.

Stuart and Athena probably would have fired me if the season had been any longer. I was a complete mess, spread so thin between a dozen different things I wasn’t doing well, one of them their precious baby business. Attempting to work a harvest while being surrounded in the hustle and bustle of a city is completely impossible for a boy like me. When I should be home sleeping and eating well I am out galavanting about with as many weirdos as I can find living on city time. Setting up meetings and printing out zines and all of the walking in between. It starts to add up after a while.

But then the grapes stopped coming and the skies cleared and there were a few beautiful fall days when all I had to do were a few punchdowns while we were waiting for our wine to be done with this stage. The few days pass and its time to suck all the juice out of the bins so that we can put the wine into barrels and store it. We press the old skins and dump them all out in the trash and wash out all of the bins so that they are fairly clean for next fall and then it was just over and there was peace. As fast as it had started.

There was a party at the winery to celebrate the completion of the harvest. We all walked around stunned. I walked out back to the train tracks that I balanced on every day while I smoked my cigarettes and talked to myself. I smoked a spliff by myself in the back, breathing in the cold air of the night and accepting that I had done it again. Davey Rucksacks showed up because his season was over too.

We got super drunk on all of the wine we had been given, smoking grass like it was nothing because we were harvest time rich and we traded our best falling in the bins stories. Rucks contracted Danny to do a tattoo of the Zigarat of Ur on his back under his tattoo of the sun. Danny agreed and got to work drawing it out.

Back when his name was Mann he had stood in the sand and watched with amazement as his peers desecrated this supposed birthplace of Abraham with cigarette butts and filthy jokes, tearing the bricks apart without even the slightest glimmer of awareness that we had marched in a Christian horde and now we defile those places that ought to be sacred to us. The sun burned this scene into his eyes and in a way it explained everything about what that war did to him and why now he was getting that memory engraved on his back forever. The Zigarat was to be whole again, not the ruins that we left behind us, but the way it was meant to be before we came and destroyed our own sand castle.

When the time came to commit his skin to this idea he was smiling as always. Danny laid out his beautiful rendering of this place under the sun that Rucks already had on his back and then he got to work. A few minutes into this proceedure there was a knock at the door. It turned out to be two, young Mormon missionaries, called to the scene by some divine fate.

Rucks’ face lit up and he looked to me with a child’s delight and he exclaimed: “Its Ordained!” and he laughed.

The mormons came in and sat down and Rucks got down and dirty with the quiz, seeing if these young men had been properly indoctrinated by the Mormon faith as he had been something of an eager young go getter from a good Mormon family when he was growing up. The whole time he’s talking to these kids Danny is still just silently tapping away, almost forgotten in the moment. The poor guys seemed completely uncomfortable. Maybe it was the obnoxious pile of weed that we’d all purchased with our harvest money or maybe it was the futon style tattoo session or possibly just the sheer energy of Fang House that was getting to them, but they were taking it all in stride.

By the time they left they knew that none of us would ever be a Mormon, again in one case, but we knew damn well that they would never join the Army. It’ll make a freak out of you.

The tattoo was finished and Rucks’ mission was accomplished. He loaded himself up with the kitten he’d picked up out at the vineyard and drove home for the first time in a long time to lay his bags down and go back to being David Mann. Let Davey Rucksacks retire. He drove off the next morning and I didn’t know when I’d see him again. I became very sad. We had shared a lot of beautiful memories and he had taught me everything I needed to know to travel and survive. He prepared me for Europe by telling me tales of his travels there and he passed the baton to my shaky hands so that I could keep the life alive for a few more beautiful moments.

I drew Danny a simple picture of a brontosaurus with wings and a halo. He fixed it to make it right. A few nights later we were upstairs in my room and he was tattooing this angel brontosaurus onto my forearm, lit up like trailer parks in christmas time. Danny waited until he was almost done to ask me what it meant. I had to think about it for a while… it had come as a whim like all of my tattoos.

I decided finally that it seemed like it pointed both to the eternal awesomeness of the dinosaurs which are now extinct and also the death  of my childhood which had happened some time ago. But it was more than all of that too… it was this story, this time, this tour. It is a mile-marker on my skin from a time when there was something that I didn’t want to forget.

It is on the war arm with the others: the two love birds together in the cockpit of a rocket bird, a man who is falling, a robot who is playing a bass guitar next to a stack of  books and the broken heart with a crown (I’d gotten these when I came home on leave) then later the big  bad wolf blowing down the little pigs wooden house (an ode to self destruction that I found in Craig Thompson’s “Blankets” which had given me something to fall into while I was deployed.) There was the Brer Rabbit who was born and raised in the briar patch and an angel with pretty hair. I do not often explain what they mean because they all mean different things and to me they remind me of moments that I wouldn’t know how to begin to share because they were so filled with my own brand of sentimentality.

Now there was the outline of the Sentimental Brontosaurus. Coming back from war: an ode to time and the adventurers spirit.

Patience

August 10, 2010 at 7:16 pm (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit

(This was written in the Record Book while I was living in Fang House)

I have been waiting impatiently for revolutions.

Tides of incomprehendable changes which I dream of overcoming me and everybody else in it.

It is as if I have been standing on a train platform my whole life staring at the point where I can’t tell the difference in the two sides of the railroad tracks. And my train never comes so that my reality is an unsatisfactory waiting period, and it is only the perpetual revolutions of time which pass, yet are never noticed.

Many things have changed. I have woken up in many different rooms in many different cities. I have woken up with different women and different stacks of books at  my feet, defining eras in my personal history. There have been different clothes on my floor and different bikes in the livingrooms of my different apartments. Different thoughts, emotions, addictions, jobs, friends, commitments and memories, but there has never been a different me.

My habits of thought and perception have consistently plagued me, leaving me wondering if I was ever truly seeing things properly. Seeing things as they really were. Does that effect the truths that I have accumulated to tether myself to the now?

I can look back on my history and see through a nostalgic for to ways in which my beliefs had led me astray, towards making decisions that irrevocably altered my future. I can see mistakes, like a carpenter sees cracks in the foundations of old houses; indications of inevitable future failures. But I can’t even know if these are true. So I am forced to disavow my paranoia.

Paranoia, anxiety, depression, fear. I’ve woken to the chimes of these bells on so many grey afternoons that I have become very graceful in my means of dealing with them. I can dismiss or dismantle, evaluate and discourage even the most poisonous episodes. I am to these undesirable traits a professional athlete. But I don’t mean to brag.

It is just that the very act of being, the continuous endurance of wakeups and conciousness is such a rigorous and gruelling never-ending thing that one must either learn to ride the daily revolutions or lose their mind. Because this art of existing is hard.

And it is an art form which takes admirable grace to weather the fundamental turbulence of existence. At least to do so beautifully.

To learn to play ones life like an instrument, experimentally and bizarre, exploring the nuances while still understanding the whole, the movement, that to me is the goal. But by setting the goal I find an inherent dichotomy: that of freedom and control.

I do not wish to control my life as I expressed earlier because I know that it is foolish to believe that I can control any aspect of the universe which in its momentum is so much more capable of control than I and certainly has its hand on the ball currently. I know that life plays my body like an instrument, expressing itself through the organism that I call myself, but it is impossible for me to not at least wrestle for the reigns. To for a few moments express something in my very being which is not property of the magnificent everythingness of our universe. Maybe only out of a spirit of rebellion do I try to control myself. I ‘m so lost in this thought that I might never return.

A resolution, perhaps, to this ridiculous cunundrum. Life and I resolve to live together in holy matrimony. I am left to celebrate autonomy with individualistic exhaltations and the universe will be the donor of the spectacle, all its parts and pieces. Agreed, if only to finally move on.

I suppose, realistically, I must admit to a certain level of control over my life and its circumstances though I could argue against it. The perpetual forward motion of my body through time has forced out of me choices, statements, exclamations, actions. Deeds. I do not deny that I am solely responsible for them and have exclusive rights to be proud for those things or to feel guilt. If life is to be a court, which many other nervous monkies seem to think it ought to be, so that we are individually suspended before our misdeeds in judgement for the duration of our existences. I would beg of these confused sould to be kind to their own plea. Navigation of this vessel without proper training for long periods of time is bound to result in choices that should have been chosen differently, actions that had undesirable reprecussions or a statement uttered that is proven untrue by time.

We can only choose to live beautifully. To discourage disharmonious action because of its aesthetic unpleasantness to ourselves and  continue on with our spectacle of endurance through the surreal passage of our lives.

I do not know what is right and wrong. I can only see that which I find attractive and that which I find repulsive.

Why am I writing this? Why do I choose this discourse? I feel like I am caught in a limbo between feeling a necessity to explain myself and my frustration at my obsession with my own head.

To answer my own question, me, you’re/we’re/I’m writing this because you/we/I wanted to write. I assume that is because you/we/I were feeling a little crazy and this always seems to help. So relax.

Ahem. Maybe I should go on about how good at dealing with crazy bits again.

Sometimes it feels like I’m becoming more skilled at emotion management but at others it seems as if the swings are getting longer and more intense and I’m just getting more tired. So even in this there is some dichotomization of pride and humbleness.

To be honest I am only now realizing that I have been at war with myself for so long now that I can not even remember what time was like before the conflict, if there was a time before. standing in the no-mans-land of my mind my whole life between my two polar halves squaring off with one another while I beg for peace. Sometimes I am placated by vacations in the violence, but I am always eventually reminded of the realities of my war.

In this am I not just acting out in my introspective fashion the same war that all humans have been waging for time immemorial? The war of hubris and hope. And we’re all just binding our fingers waiting for our nemesis.

Or less metaphorically our never ending psychotic physical violence against ourselves in our obviously insane ritual of armed combat. Or the equally psychotic and equally intrinsic lack of balance in power and class abuse, slavery and rebellion.

Should I find it more or less comforting to see these fears exhibited so loudly through our collective past, a universal characteristic of the overly-intelligent monkey who freaks itself out? At the very least this realization allows me to feel free of any judgement for inner turmoil. Nobody seems to have found the solution for it, so I can take some relief in our collective floundering. Whew.

I don’t know how this began and it certainly never had any point, but I do feel much better. It was a long day inside of my mind which didn’t stop while I was sleeping which isn’t fair but is usually the case. It is always hardest at night. In the hours before bed while I gradually give up on reasons to stay awake for longer and it never seems that I get any positive work done when I am like that. I just stare at walls and assure myself that there really is nothing I would rather be doing. And the really fucked up shit is that I know it is true so I just shut my eyes and my brain goes into that place where a confusing babble of current events tangles itself into my visual and linguistic centers which rambles out some bizarre animation of all of my neglected anxieties which stack on top of one another like legos until I have plastic fortresses of madness in my sleep. But it is better than being awake where I’m worried that nobody loves me, which I know isn’t true, but leads into the understanding that people do love me but I don’t love myself so I can’t accept that and just be happy. Instead I become a black hole of affection, preying on the love of others in an unfulfilling quest for fulfillment which I know I will never reach until I overcome my way of thinking but I don’t know how to do that so I feel stuck and frustrated and although there is progress there is also degeneration and the progress doesn’t seem to be happening fast enough.

I am both glad and terrified that I am not in a relationship right now, and I’m not certain I’m going to to be mentally secure in one for quite some time but I am extraordinarily lonesome.

All in all, I’m still, apparently, just waiting for revolutions.

Oh, note to future self who might be morbidly looking back on old writings to judge how much worst you’ve gotten: this is how you write when you are stoned. FYI.

the unexpected winter

August 29, 2010 at 4:34 am (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit

The end of this portion of my tour was drawing near.

The zine was nearly done, the harvest over, November was well on its way. I had only the zine release party at Igloo and an interview to do.

One morning a woman showed up at the front door of Fang House. She was let in and she found me sleeping in my emo pile. I was kicked awake and introduced to Justine Sharrock. Justine was a writer who lived in San Francisco was was writing a book about the effect that the war had had on the lives of four people who had worked inside of the detentions system during its glory days. She was traveling up here for a week to do an interview with me about what I had seen and take in a kind of snapshot about how my life was going.

We spent a lot of time sitting in the back yard while I smoked and answered her questions which never seemed to stop. This went on for days. Sometimes she followed me to the IPRC and sometimes out to the bar, like the night that her and Danny and I went way up north on our bikes to meet this girl named Amy that I had a date with. Later that night we went to the bar after Justine left and a guy came up to us and asked us if we believed in magic. Then he put his cigarette out in his hand.

I was in a pretty dismal place and I didn’t paint a very pretty picture of myself. I didn’t want to paint a pretty picture of myself. None of us did anything pretty down there. I was sick of people feeling sorry for me because I had seen some gross things. I wanted to be put down on record as the self-centered lazy person that I knew that I had been that allowed and even participated in more than one totally uncalled for circus  of violence. I treated her like my personal therapist, telling her every rotten detail of the few things that I could remember.

She stayed an extra week. I met her friends, all of them artists, all of them very sorted out people.

She left the morning after she hung out with Katy and I while we gave both sides of the story of how we had happened and what had happened to us while we were staring daggers at each other in a loving way.

Then one night I went out dancing with this beautiful, tall, nerdy girl named Sara whom I had met at the IPRC. She came back to Fang House with me. When we woke up in the morning the world was covered in snow. It was beautiful and clean. The perfect kind of snow to hold hands in. We joked about how many one night stands had turned into love affairs with the coming of this unprecedented phenomenon that ground the city to a halt. We walked through the virgin snow to the grocery store a mile or so away and bought groceries with my new food stamp card and walked back. Somewhere in that walk I think we fell in love with each other.

While we were eating lunch one day at the Sushi go-round she suggested that she could buy a ticket so that she could come with me on this trip to help document the stories. I agreed making her promise that she understood that I couldn’t help her with the money at all. In this way we made a totally insane plan.

She would meet me in London.

We stayed in love for the next few days. There was a lot of cooking and cozy hanging out with her roomates. Then she left for California and the next time I would see her would be across the ocean.

The zine release and screen printing party finally came around. I had a greyhound ticket for the very next morning. I covered the walls with my assorted sketches and random writings, paper birds made out of combat paper and old Sears Robbuck advertisements. One corner of the room was designated as the paper-bird folding party. The screen printing was a disaster because I had no idea what I was doing and I had come completely underprepared but people were gracious and forgiving and everybody talked amongst themselves and it was very nice to see people pulled together under the auspices of art and war talking about projects that could happen. People were reading the zines. I had hand produced about 150 of them at a cost of something like one hundred dollars and by the end of the night I had about thirty of them left with only one lonely dollar in the ammo can I had bought to keep the funds in. They weren’t supposed to be free.

I walked away that night with a huge sore on my lip because I had an infection in my mouth. I walked through the snow all the way back to Fang House with the screens I had borrowed. When I got back I finished packing my bags and saying goodbye to the things I would not be taking and I went to bed.

The next morning I woke up early, gathered my things, said goodbye to Danny who was up and drinking coffee and I left the house. I took the bus down to the Greyhound station. There was a long line of people waiting to get out of Portland and they were looking very grumpy. i had a feeling in my stomach. Somebody told me the busses were not running until the mountain passes were clear.

Those busses didn’t move for eight more days. I spent Christmas day at Patrick’s place, drunk by noon while this guy Jim took some photos of me that he’d been begging for for a long time. Dinner was chili but I was still a vegetarian. I was so sick and exhausted and ready to be gone but it just wouldn’t end.

Then finally the snow cleared and I got on that bus in the morning and by the 28th, after 60 hours of being in those damned seats, we finally pulled into that iron monstrosity that I could never get out of my mind. Fucking Chicago.

Home Free – Chicaco, Denver, St. Paul, Minneapolis – August-September 2008)

Welcome home, soldier. That’s what they all say now. Welcome home.

But what happens when you never came home really. What if your home got destroyed in the war when you realized that nothing about it was true anymore, nothing that you had believed in was left of it? It had all been a lie gone violently insane. What if you just kept running because the American Dream that you had left with had turned into some kind of day time nightmare where the only reason is the unreason of the USD and you knew you could never go home because you didn’t have one anymore.

What happens is that the only home you have left is the American Dream that you nurtured in your bunk with every thought of green grass and endless roads and beautiful free people. So you keep that inside of you and you live like a turtle.

When I  came back my dream was ruined when I saw that my home had become some kind of science fiction dystopia. Everyone was on pills because consumer culture had made this place so fucking intolerably boring that folks didn’t even want to get through their days anymore. Hitler would have had a hard-on for the kind of loyalty that pharmaceutical companies commanded. Part of the reason people went to the pills was because the world seemed so loud and obnoxious, filled to the brim with bullshit and opinions. The TV presented our culture like a circus spectacle with our very President suspended on a rhetorical high wire that spread from here to Pakistan. The people were out waving the flag while losing their jobs by the thousands because their precious America no longer gave a fuck about them. Hundreds of billions of their hard earned dollars were traded from public to private hands in a Rube Goldberg scheme and still those fucking flags were flying.

A great disenchantment settled in on me. This wasn’t what I had fought for, it isn’t what my Grandpa had fought for. This America was a disgusting perversion of what we had intended it to be. Complacency had turned us all into executioner’s wives. Our money was soaked in the blood of thousands upon thousands of civilian casualties yet still all we could seem to do was buy, buy, buy.

I had joined the military so that I could feel like a WWII hero but when I got home I felt much more like a Nazi who had done something that he was decidedly unsure of.

Sure it sounds melodramatic but I was also twenty-one and fresh out of working in the premier Detention Facility of the Global War on Terror and here I am returned to an industrial wasteland in Michigan with all the doom and gloom of joblessness and home foreclosures while the TV keeps telling me and everybody else that the banks and the oil companies and the other war profiteers are making out like gangsters and all the while you’ve got nineteen year old kids with assault rifles off fighting a holy war with people they can’t talk to and don’t understand, kicking in doors and taking people away in the middle of the night to spread freedom and peace via Democracy to a country that never wanted it. The only windows into this war are fifteen second night vision shots of streets exploding in the night or some boy rushing up to the corner of some building, slamming against it and then shooting wildly down the corridor. Then there are commercials for pills to fight depression, give you longer lasting erections or a detergent with one thousand times the cleaning power of any other detergent. People just don’t give a fuck about our war anymore. They just want to forget it… and us. They wanted to be part of this new cultural fascism that was spreading over our country. It was a dream of a lazier, greedier life where we had more things and had to work less hard no matter how many millions of people had to die around the globe for it. Everything was all fucked up.

I was nervous and paranoid all of the time, self conscious of every neurotic twitch of my brain. I thought it was all my fault. I thought I had fucked it all up. But I hadn’t. We all had.

We had made it this way over a torturous parade of time spent working against ourselves and forgetting every important lesson we were given. This fucked up modern world is our birthright passed down from a strong lineage of war survivors and lunatics. Still we blame God, we say it was all his fucked up design, but it was just us being crazy and violent stranded on some rock.

God didn’t build Guantanamo Bay. God didn’t write a Standard Operating Prceedure. God didn’t invent the G.W.o.T. God didn’t steal men without reason and stick them in cages for years. God didn’t build M16s and Howitzers and bombs and the whole military industrial complex. We did it. We did it all by ourselves. God didn’t have a damn thing to do with any of it.

But we didn’t do it for God. We did it for Money. We did it so that we could get a little bit for ourselves and all of the rest of the white world could keep spending it because it is and has always been more powerful than God in the psyche of mankind which may be the only place that God truly exists.

I had a dream

This dream was my own American Dream. It was conceived in the punk rock of my disenfranchised youth. It was full of travel, foreign women, friends, stolen time and impossible stories shared. It was full of things that I had read in the books that were stuffed underneath my bunk. Moments that I wanted to feel when at last this short stay in hell was over.

I kept it all throughout the war and all the terror of deployments. I kept it throughout the meaningless jobs. I kept it during all those hours of school when I was studying ethical philosophy to ensure that I never got a job. I kept it when the military told me that I wouldn’t be getting the benefits they had promised me for school and all throughout the anger that ensued when I thought of all of the things that I had done to honor this contract, this precious obligation that they never let me out of no matter how much I protested only to find out that the government would not meet its end of our bargain.

I don’t mind making deals with the Devil as long as the Devil keeps his word.

My name is Otis. I am the son of Sputnik Mixon who wanted to be a pilot or an astronaut but failed and so he became a truck driver instead.

This is my American Dream.

On How To Leave Your Home…

There came a hot and sweaty summer in Chicago in 2008. I’d been living there for a few years while I sweated out my last few years of enlistment.

A few months earlier I had sought the company of veterans as a last resort to save the relationship that I had worked so hard to destroy. One winter day I walked into the office on Diversey Street. There was a smily punk kid there named Robert and a tall, wild eyed dude who was pacing back in forth in the other room while on the phone. I would come to find out that this was Aaron Hughes and he had built this group here in Chicago. The name of the group was Iraq Veterans Against the War.

The following Spring Jamie and I loaded into a bus with about thirty other veterans. An older vet walked up and down the halls of the bus handing out pot bread. Soon we were all best friends and that bond would never break.

That weekend we went in front of the cameras and we spoke our piece. We added our little fragment of experience to the collective history of this war. We detailed the atrocities that we had seen.

I spoke about my experience as a prison guard in Guantanamo Bay. I had signed contracts with the government that I would never do this. I was willing to take the risk. It was time that I said something.

A few months later I was standing in the office again. Aaron had just finished a session of pacing. He stopped and asked me if I wanted to go to Martha’s Vineyard to make paper out of my uniforms with a handful of other vets that I knew. And I thought: Why the fuck not?

July came and I packed my shit into a duffel bag and I took a mind-fuck chain of busses and planes and trains and eventually a ferry until I was disgorged on the shore of Martha’s vineyard with a lingering rumor of shark attacks floating in the sea air. I hadn’t felt sea air since Cuba.

Oh Cuba.

I walked up and I see the whole crew, all these beautiful warrior faces, gathered around the ashtrays at a cafe. There was a microphone and if there’s one thing Otis Mixon likes best its to hear himself talk on a microphone so I played the people a song. A love song. Or a song about how love is broken. Its a Mountain Goats song so its hard to tell. I read a little story. Brother Bird was smiling something fierce.

Nobody had any grass so I got to work on networking like a professional. Back in Chicago I was one kind of.

People say that I never do any real organizing, but they don’t understand the rigors of organizing supplies for a proper week of fun. These are veterans we’re talking about. We have needs.

Not one half hour later I was in a car with Fancy Pants Phil with his big eighties, coke addict glasses and the only outfit he brought for that whole week and this guy by the name of Mike who was a veteran who just so happened to live on a little house boat there off the shore of the island. He pointed his house-boat out to us.

Crazy veterans. Its like there isn’t enough freedom in the whole world for them.

Mike was driving us out to his friends house where he guaranteed us he knew he could get us some grass. Well we drove for about a half hour in the pitch black and eventually we pull into this little two track that connects to this little island, water on both sides of us. Mike pulls us into this strange little busted shanty and hops out of the car and sprints off into the woods.

Fancy Pants turns around to me and says “I think this guy is going to try to kill us man. I think we’re going to have to fight this dude, man!” He’s all worked up.

I agreed soberly. “I agree,” I said.

So we’re both all worked up. Mike finally comes back into the headlights and we’re damn near in a frenzy because we’re sure we’re going to be serial killed and Mikes got a plastic bag. He creeps into the car and throws this bag in the back and he looks us both right in the eye with the look of a dog that has brought something really sweet back to the old master.

In that bag was a peanut butter jar, and in that jar was another bag, and in that bag a baggy, and in that baggy about an ounce of some crazy dirt weed. That shit was magical.

We drove back to the cafe just in time to catch a ride with everyone heading out to our house, the former homestead of a one James Cagney. I caught a ride in the back of a truck with some of the guys. We stood up most of the way with the bugs smashing into our faces in the swampy hot night. We pulled into the plot of land that would change my life forever. It looked like that famous painting with a girl at the bottom of the painting crawling through a wheat field to get to some bland and ghostly home.

We dismounted and I was overwhelmed with ghosts.

It is hard to explain the happenings of that week. To try to explain how time worked there would take too utter a deconstruction of the fundamentals of time itself to an almost entirely subjective thing.

Every night we stayed up drinking, lighting cigarettes with burning flags, playing music on the porch. I don’t mean on the porch like we were sitting on the porch quietly picking and grinning. I mean that people were playing the porch itself. That and the propane tank and all of the empty bottles. Robynn played the potato chip bag accordian.

The beach, I mean the ocean beach, was a beautiful 30 minute walk. I spent almost every sunrise there.

We cut our uniforms together while sharing our stories and we blended all of our fibers together. I accidentally cut the tip of my finger off so we put that in the paper too. Blood, sweat and tears.

The emotional energy of the week was so fucking pure, like doing cocaine in Columbia, that I was frayed around the edges but I felt fine. I slept on the wooden floor right next to the door a few hours every night after everyone else went to bed and I woke up as soon as the first people started cooking.

Sitting in the grass with JT and Eli and Davey Rucksacks playing with the snapping turtle that lived in the pond that we had named Old Face we were talking about living the hobo dream.

The three of them had lived on the road for the last few years. Dave had carried his rucksack across Europe and the states and thats how he got his name. Eli had lived out of his car and been everywhere you could be. JT lived out of VW bus with his dog Sadie.

All three of em, they teamed up on me. The argued. They convinced. By the time they were done I knew I was going to quit my job and travel around the states living the dream.

Why the fuck not?

I wanted the feeling I was feeling then every day forever. I’m a drug addict.

On our last day all of us walked to the beach to catch the sunrise. There was a guy walking around the trails. He had a knife. We were all like “what’s up with the knife, dude?” and he was drunk and incoherent so we all moved on a little dazed. I still wonder what he was up to.

When it came time to catch my ferry I was crying like a baby. I didn’t want to go back.

We all made promises that we’d see each other in Denver.

I got on the ferry, then a bus, then a train and then a plane and I came back to Chicago. I went straight to work that day on my bicycle and I quit my job and I bought a rucksack.

Dave said it best: “Its not home-less dude. Its home-free.”

Otis Mixon has always been a sucker for freedom.

Black Ribbons

I pieced together a loose sense of purpose about my decisions by listening to the shit that I said to people as I was explaining what I wanted to do as I packed up my things and got ready to leave that peculiar city Chicago. It just happened that I began to tell people that I was going to do a 15 month “Tour of Duty” meant to mimic a kind of stateside deployment of the freak kind in which I would interview homeless veterans by sorting out a homeless veteran lifestyle for myself.

I made a few phone calls to find friends who were interested and a few days later Davey Rucksacks comes in on the Greyhound. We were talking to Bad Larry on the Lake Michigan shore, bullshitting about the costs of yachts.

Rucksacks became my hitchhiking Virgil as he had all of the relevant prerequisites: he had done it before.

I set up a ride out of town with my friend who is a clown. We had to meet him at one of his gigs. First we stopped to pick up the medicine that was kindly donated to our cause by the nicest pharmacist that has ever walked the planet. Then we walked extra smiley to pick up our ride.

Douglas, the clown, finally gets us in the car and he keeps turning around to us with his awesome story telling face and his makeup on and he starts telling us all these folk-isms about riding the black ribbons which tangle together infinitely across our beautiful country until finally he just up and leaves us in Joliette.

And so there we are in the tall grasses that mark the beginnings of the plains, Dave stationed at the corner with the sign telling me to put my banjo away. I drew a picture of him and the clouds. This was it. This was the start of the great American hunt for a sense of reason inside the skeleton of the American Dream who’s obituary has been written already by greater men than Otis.

A car pulled up after a few minutes and this nice, plain blond woman hustled out and helped us put our bags in the car while her husband sat white knuckled at the wheel. We took off down the road. She did all the talking.

It turns out that her husband was a veteran. What luck. And how! He was a Navy Seal and he had a very intimidating scar on his face and he stared a long ways down the road the whole time and he didn’t say much. I tried by way of thought or vocal inflection to tip my hat to him in some sense. Compared to whatever this man had seen, Dave and I had been on a sort of vacation.

We left them arguing about lost checkbooks ten miles down the road and started walking to a field where we assumed we would sleep for the night but while we were on our way a willowy kid with 90′s hair came up to us and asked us if we needed a ride.

Fuck yeah we needed a ride.

He took us back to his ride. There was a grey, toothless woman smoking a long menthol cigarette out of the window of a rusted red conversion van and she didn’t say a word and Drew, our new friend, didn’t say a word to her. We just smoked cigarettes by the side of this van until the kind of guy you see on COPS comes walking up to us with a sleeveless black shirt with a spiky skull on it and two handfulls of change and assorted shiny truckstop shit. His smile exposed the most marvelous set of sharklike methteeth that I’ve ever seen in my life. And I grew up in Michigan.

He invited us into his van and we get along on our way and we’re just cruising right along. He’s leaning over his seat bursting at the britches to tell us the story of his glory days when “a motherfucker could walk up to any nigger in Detroit and buy a motherfuckin boulder for TEN DOLLARS” at which point he’s looking me right in the eye, trying to sort me out with his porous meth brain. I was so fucking uncomfortable.

“What’s a boulder?” I managed to ask, instead of frankly suggesting to our benevolent ride giver that he adopt a new turn of phrase for referring to African Americans. Dave was pinching my leg with a pinch that said “now is not the time to be the p.c. police.”

“Fucking Crack Cocaine, mother fucker!” he said with that special fire in his eyes.

So there we were with crack/meth heads in a van heading for Davenport, sitting on top of a fan and their dirty clothes. We turned our attention to each other.

It turns out that Drew was also going to protest the Democratic National Convention and he was very excited to learn that he was in a vehicle with two of the vets from the group for whom Rage Against the Machine was playing that week.

The three of us slept in the grasses across the street from the truckstop where the lightbulb burners were doing their thing in their home. We got a few beers and brought Bad Larry out for a late night babble session and we fell asleep under the enormous crackling flag of the car dealer parking lot that was a few hundred feet away from our sugar plum fantasies of what would happen when our happy feet touched ground in Denver.

My first night on the road. The stars were there. We had a ride for the next morning sitting across the street and we’d already made great time across Illinois.

Time has a funny way of going about its business when you’re hitching. It is just not the same.

hey dad, you’ll never guess where i’m calling you from

When we woke up I ditched some of my clothes because my bag was ridiculous. Drew gave me a spare knife that he had on him. The name “Brian” was inscribed on its side. Brian the knife.

Our drivers stumbled out of a velveteen menthol Marlboro cloud down into the sun like reformed vampires testing their boundaries. The skull shirted fellow stretched his arms and said “gotta get to Butte!”

All three of us stopped. “We thought you said Davenport man!” one of us said, I can’t remember which.

“Fuck Davenport. Can’t hustle for shit in Davenport. Gotta get to Butte. I’ll make fine hustlers out of all of ya’ll.”

Well thats fucking fantastic. I was freaking out without even thinking about where Butte was. Turns out they would still be going our way but further.

When we pulled into the worlds largest truckstop in Davenport we all quickly said awkward goodbyes as Skull Shirt sadly told us how great he thought it would be in Butte. I could have cried. But I didn’t.

The worlds largest truckstop, huh? The Mecca of my bloodline.

All of the dads I’ve ever had have been truck drivers. Mom had a thing for guys who left I guess. Funny that I turned out to  be such a leaver in the end. Hard not to reflect on these things. Everything seems so coincidental and divine when you’re hitching. Strange times.

Lady walks up and gives me 20 dollars just for sitting there with my banjo. Wasn’t even playing it. I played her a little part of a song that Bruce had taught me before I’d left about how I’d stab a man for sleeping with my woman which is supposed to be a funny song because I’m not the stabbing type. That lady looked so happy.

Bought a pack of cigarettes and a can of beans.

Started eating my beans on the side of the road with the boys. We were discussing how nobody was going to pick up three hitchers. No way. We’d ripped the “TWO” portion of our sign which had read “TWO VETERANS HEADING WEST” so that we could float Drew under the vet card.

Just when we were about ready to split into groups a silver semi pulls up at our feet and the door pops open.

Didn’t even get a look at the guy when I was trying to get all of my shit into his cab it was such a commotion. Finally I looked up front and I saw this little man bobbling up and down on his hydraulic chair and smiling with these giant yellow teeth. I sat up front first shift. I caught the brunt of Nebraska. What a horrible place Nebraska is.

His name was Sandy. He asked me questions like wether or not I had forgiven my truck driving dad or if I thought his daughter really loved him. He told me about how he had been in the Navy but could never seem to get the rules right. He ended up falling in love and driving truck.

His wife had died a few years ago from cancer of some kind. Sandy told me not to be a smoker.

He dropped us off at exit 102 in Nebraska. Drew stayed on for the long haul out to the West Coast where Sandy was delivering pharmaceuticals that had been manufactured in Michigan and shipped out there because the West Coast Dream was broken or intolerable to enough people to fill a semi truck once a week,

So it was just Dave and I again. We made a little camp in some hardcore brambles and smoked and shot the shit until we both heard this loud sound that sounded exactly like a cop on a bullhorn saying “WE GOT YOU SURROUNDED!” So Rucksacks and me are all like fuck you coppers and we ditch all of our grass in my bag and throw that under some brush and then get down into the low crawl and inch up to the woodline.

There wasn’t anybody there. I guess we just had the same delusion.

Well I didn’t sleep a wink that night. I wished I had the next day.

We were gonna walk to exit 107 so that we could pick up 76 which would be a more straight shot to Denver and we’d only need to get one more ride. So we shouldered our rucks and we marched that fucking five miles like troopers, hopping fences and climbing over this huge mountain of coal and staring down some cows until we finally got a break and got to walk in a dirt two track with about a million grasshoppers.

When we finally made it to our crossroads we realized, much too late, that these cars were all traveling at speeds of at least 60 miles an hour. There was no way that they would stop for us.

That was the first and only time I’ve ever seen Dave lose his cool.

We just walked on the side of the highway back. We stopped frequently. I cooked a grasshopper with my lighter and ate it. On one of our stops I got the last phone call I would ever get on the phone that I had. It was somebody who wanted to buy some grass. I laughed and hung up on them.

When we finally crawled back into our oasis I bought a loaf of bread and a tub of butter and ate the whole goddamn thing. I stared at people coming into the station as if I’d been severely traumatized.

A Christian guy named Greg picked us up next and spent the night telling me about the coming of the anti-Christ and how it had been “ordained” that he pick us up while Dave slept in the back seat like a baby. By the time that we made it to Wyoming I had Greg convinced that Dave actually was the anti-Christ. Then Greg got a ticket for picking up hitchers. He let us off in Cheyenne more than a little disappointed with what God had told him to do.

Everything is a trial, Greg, and God knows all.

We slept on the hill besides the McDonald’s and woke up soaking with dew and third in the line to hitch out of that post. That gave us plenty of time for Dave to steal us a load of breakfast from the hotel which was why Dave was my fucking guide man. That is some smart shit.

We finally got up to the stand and got picked up while we were smoking a joint by a construction worker driving back down to Denver.

He smoked us out the whole way while I got to see mountains for the first time in my life. When dude dropped us off in Denver I could have married that shower. Jesus, nothing has felt better than that fucking shower.

Recreate 68!

We had come this far to protest the DNC. Why? Our newer, blacker candidate was saying all the things we wanted him to say with that toothy, snake oil selling grin. He even promised to close down my little nightmare. And to be honest, the only thing I seemed to be protesting effectively was sobriety.

We were camped in a serious way in Eli’s mom’s basement. It was Rucksacks, Fancy Pants, the Gloominator, Vinny, Pinky, Robynn, and our full time film crew of one staying down there, occasionally migrating outside in smaller groups to smoke cigarettes. We were playing a lot of the “I wonder what kind of fantastic weoponry we will see come Wednesday?” game.

My personal favorite was the laser gun that was supposed to make you feel like your skin was melting. I don’t get paid enough/anything to go up against guns that simulate the feeling of burning flesh. I am still not even sure if I believe in anything that strongly.

We walked around Denver a lot that week soaking in the fantastic view into some kind of hyper fascist wonderland in which cops covered in fancy, sparkling doodads of all sorts were bustling into and out of all kinds of troop carrying vehicles. Once we saw a group of about six of them just holding on to the side of an SUV as it drove around.

All of the cops looked so miserable and we were so stoned and happy.

Some of the sharper eyed members of our gang spotted a number of snipers on the roofs. I wonder where they learned how to do that?

Most of the rest of the crew, the drinkers and the straights, were pigeonholed into this unconverted office space in a hellish wasteland somewhere in the city. We visited them rarely.

We were Alpha Squad. We were the best of the best. We had better things to do than sit around in meetings and when we did sit in meetings we all ended up outside again smoking cigarettes. Its as if we are allergic to any kind of organizational work. We just have other priorities.

I spent the week stoned, watching the few bills I had left fly out of my pocket. I can barely remember how it feels now, that paranoid money sickness. It has been so long since I’ve had a bad case of it.

The days drew nearer to our protest. I found myself getting more and more antsy. I’d never done anything like this before. We were going to be in front of a lot of people and the talk on the streets was that people expected us to blow the lid off this thing real violent like. Lots of the vets were talking about beating up cops.

I don’t want to beat up cops. I’ve seen and participated in enough beatings of people to last me for my whole life. All of this revolutionary talk was turning my stomach. I’d heard people pride and preen themselves about the violence they were capable of. You can never believe talk when it comes to things like this. I’ve learned that by experience. There is something violent inside of a person or not and when the moment comes you are put to the test and you are part of that group or you are not part of that group.

I, happily, have never been a part of that group.

i just wanted to smoke weed all day and be around my friends having fun stories and possibly talk to a few veterans so I stayed with my kind and we were always engaged in some kind of protest.

The day of our confrontation with the law finally came and we were all dressed to impress. We had two platoons of veterans wearing all kinds of combinations of uniforms which made Drew and I wince. So much paper could be made out of these ridiculous suits.

I was sporting a pair of camoflaughed pants which I’d sewn a heart unto and an old Army under shirt that I’d hand painted “Iraq Veterans Against the War” on.

The concert was at eleven. Sure as shit Rage Against the Machine walked on the stage. They saluted us in our secluded little section and proceeded to play the best show I have ever seen.

After that the thousands of people who attended the show flowed out of the building we were staged in and into a long column on the asphalt in the sweltering sun.

For the next eight hours we slowly crawled behind a police car with a sign that happily invited us to follow it blinking rapidly. We made frequent stops to soapbox on the microphone because everybody loves attention. We walked seperately in front of the whole march. I was just kind of wandering through our lines offering people waters and lip balm.

I laughed to see Vinny so serious in his old man veteran hat with all of his pins and doodads attached and shining. He was in his element. Gloomy Bear was plodding along behind the whole thing pessimistically ranting about the inadequacies of street protests.

We were marched into a chain-link fence trap ironically called the freedom cage into which we stupidly wandered behind the cops until we were at a dead end with a big fence and a whole lot of cops to our front, 5000 dehydrated punks to our rear and fence to our left and right.

I fucking hate fences.

We managed to do something I have never seen even a small military unit do properly: we countercolumned. 5000 people countercolumned.

We quicktimed it to a weak spot in the police line and managed to get as close as we could get to the building that Obama was going to give his speech in. We had a letter for him that pleaded with him to end the war for the sake of the soldiers and the civilians. The cops finally stopped us and threatened us with tear gas.

We stopped. We waited.

Eventually a suited man came out and talked to us. He was Obama’s Veterans Affairs Officer or something. He took our letter and read it. He said he would like to meet with us.

Success? Did we accomplish something? We had a goal to hand this letter off. Nobody thought we could do it. Was this it being done? Could it be?

I was so glad that I didn’t get my eye shot out by a pepper gas ball or something equally vulgar.

That night we bullshitted with the cops in the park about how hot uniforms are and how annoying chains of command could be while Food Not Bombs brought us a bunch of buckets of rabbit food.

We slept well that night.

the badlands…

The day after the march in Denver we were driving across the planes with a few hits of acid burning holes in our pockets with sugar plum dreams of dropping that acid to the tune of the sun setting over the Badlands. Due to several unfortunate and mostly stupid stops along the way we did not make our deadline to watch the sun fall with our heads melting amidst those ghostly ashen spires.

We went to sleep with warnings of blackfooted ferrets and rattlesnakes posted over our heads and when the sun came up all of our hurt feelings were washed away.

FancyPants, Rucksacks and I were in Ruck’s car. At the first sign of confusion we split the scene. We’d been talking to Bad Larry the whole ride and we’d gotten ourselves all worked up to stop at Wall Drug where we had been promised five cent coffee and dinosaurs from signs spread across the land for hundreds of miles.

Dinosaurs have always occupied a soft spot in my heart.

We sat like freaks inside the diner, eyes twisted, rag tag military regalia covering our dirty and high strung bodies. There were two young Asian women working in the diner. We made absurd and loud plans to free them from this place on stolen motorcycles. I was going to ride the dinosaur out of town.

This dinosaur, however, turned out to be an unfortunate rendition of the majestic T-Rex and I found myself frowning a frown of connoisseurs disappointment. I had seen better animatronic dinosaurs. Maybe I’m just spoiled.

We left the Asian girls to bus the tables and walked out with pockets full of stolen goods to eat up the last few hundred miles of planes and windmill farms between us and the Twin Cities where we were to attend our own organization’s convention to be followed by yet another protest of the Republican National Convention (RNC).

We made one more short stop at the Corn Palace and left cussing and laughing at how un-exciting it was.

i am not, nor have i ever been a…

The convention was a disaster from the word go that hot summer.

My money was all but gone and the tornado-esque passage of time had left me emotionally jet lagged.

We pulled into the Holiday Inn which would host our festivities as the sun was going down. Our friends were darting around the open spaces of the hotel with lost looks on their faces. Groups of males were breaking off to go downtown to find women. This is a classical military move: a large pack of boys goes out thinking that they will be able to chat girls up but quickly realize that they will all be coming home together except maybe one or two lucky ones so they get rowdy drunk and fight instead.

I quickly located an old Vietnam vet that I called the Muskrat knowing that he would have his finger on the pulse of the green treasure. After putting on a good buzz I proceeded to wander the perimeter alone.

We were sharing the hotel with the Republicans who were in town to attend the convention. They seemed to not understand how to take our radical brand of smelly punk combined with the dogtags and related ephemera of military service. Their tightly shaved heads seemed to blink back and forth between disapproval and gratitude.

The cops in the Twin Cities were a much more utilitarian breed than their Denver peers. They were big, burly men who didn’t need all of the plastic coating to look hard. We had no end of trouble from this bunch.

Our convention was scheduled to be a tightly packed schedule of workshops to be followed by the election of our board members.

I skipped all of the workshops in order to continue relaxing in the hotel’s hot tub while making occasional calls upon the Muskrat. Whenever the workshops would get out the halls would be filled with unhappy activists venting off the steam accrued during two hours of listening to more silly talk about how nobody treated anybody fairly and how all boys are rapists.

Then came the time for the elections.

There had been a pink elephant in the middle of our organization for a long time. We knew it particularly well in Chicago.

IVAW was pretty fairly split at the time between people who had radicalized towards two separate poles: Anarchist or Socialist.

The anarchists were split into hundreds of different sub-projects but were loosely affiliated under the red and black flag. The Socialists came, by a vast majority, from an organization called the International Socialist Organization, or ISO, which was a student group which had inducted a lot of our organizations membership in on college campuses.

We had worked with the ISO before in Chicago. That city is their headquarters and home to some of the groups biggest movers and shakers. It seemed that we could not hold an event without their presence being known.

I did not personally care for them. They are always the first people to talk about what is best for working class people who have jobs in manual labor, though most of the people I had met from the group do not have any desire to actual do any manual labor themselves and did not come from a background of manual labor. I saw them as a group that carried a banner for another group of people that they found easy to simplify but could probably not actually talk to in any productive manner. In this way I saw them as just another politicians bureau.

I come from a long long line of truck drivers and factory workers and I wear that point with pride. I do not take kindly to watching my people, my family, being used to sell hyperbolic calls for violent revolution in the form of poorly put together weekly magazines by which I am referring to Workers Weekly.

Though I did have a personal opinion I did not think that that opinion should by any means be reflected in who ran the board. I simply desired competence and restrained egos, two things any soldier should have fairly under control.

While the board nominees were giving their speeches I was sitting in the back with the other fiends who fell under no particular flag except that of excessive drug usage and hedonism. We were talking amongst ourselves and we realized that many of the people standing in front of us had direct responsibilities for other organizations. Now, when you are asking to lead a group that many of us had poured our lives into without asking for anything in return it seems only fair that you dedicate one hundred percent of your energy into it, but when you come to the table with obligations to other groups with other agendas you raise flags for me. Can you do this job without fucking us over for some other group? How can your attention be so divided. One of the nominees is actually on the board of another organization.

The time came for questions and answers, so I wandered up to the podium and I asked: “Do any of you have any commitments to other organizations?” A simple question. The entire line-up said no. Well, Otis Mixon will not be lied to. I returned to the podium angry as a hornet and exploded into the microphone “that is just not true. I know as a fact that a few of you just lied to all of us in the audience and I would like to give you a chance to revoke these lies and give us the truth.”

The pink elephant was released. The crowd erupted. It was immediately assumed that I was calling out one of the members who was involved with the ISO though I had never said her name or the name of the ISO. People started clamoring that I was a “red baiter.” It was an upheaval. The anarchists formed a tight circle around me and we crept out of the room to the sound of complete chaos.

We went outside to smoke cigarettes and talk amongst ourselves. There were many congratulations from my friends. I had a deep sense of confusion and pride. Roberto, my very close friend from the Windy City walked up to me and said “DAMN SON! Breaking they fuckin knees with a BASEBALL BAT! You fucking wrecked’em son!” Right after these powerful words the doors opened and a tide of angry Socialists was unleashed upon us. It seemed that we may have had a fight on our hands.

A giant pair of golden hoop earrings with a girl attached was yelling in my face that I had no right to make such accusations and accused me of trying to round up the Socialists like a Nazi. I calmly smoked my cigarette and blew it in her face, on the verge of punching her teeth out. Nobody calls me a Nazi. I won’t stand for it.

The screaming went on for hours. I don’t remember how it subsided. I was evacuated from the site for personal safety reasons. The convention was over, the votes cast. The Socialists got into office anyway.

So much drama in so few days. So much more to go.

all fun and no play

August 16, 2010 at 10:01 pm (Home Free – Chicaco, Denver, St. Paul, Minneapolis – August-September 2008)) · Edit

And so our convention came to a close and we all mosied on over to the other twin to settle in to our new sleeping quarters: the floors of a liberally minded church that had donated itself to our cause.

It is hard to discuss the kind of debauchery that happened on the grounds of that church that week because much of the goings ons are damning, both socially and spiritually, to many of us who believe in things like damnation.

Luckily I do not prescribe to such notions, so I feel relatively guilt free.

I made my bed at the pulpit of the church so that I could wake up in the light of the stained glass. Other people seemed to think that this was especially sacrilegious so I had the run of the place to myself.

There was a large group of people who were intent on recreating the fever of the DNC up here in the north, and then there was also a large contingent of people, myself included, who were only interested in getting as fucked up as we could inside of this church before this activists vacation came to a close.

Fancy Pants, Rucks and I were sick of sobriety and stress, so we got to work immediately on consuming the acid that had been screaming our names. We were hoping that it would either cleanse us of the wicked vibes that were going around or make us so socially unpalatable that we would completely twist the entire event up.

I had almost forgotten that I had dropped the hit until it made itself known while I was rummaging through our stores of rabbit food in the fridge. I walked outside, eyes gaping, a hunk of cheddar cheese smashed in my hands. Fancy Pants and Rucks were playing with some wet burritos on a plate. It had arrived.

I grabbed my banjo up and began to play a Mountain Goats cover of No Children but I abandoned the cause almost immediately when people began to flock towards our magnetic drug pulse. I nervously, yet professionally, stated that I was simply tripping too hard to finish the job that I had started and wandered off.

The scene was far too tense for us with our heads so sensitive to the vibes of others. They were all so angry that it felt as if we were pieces of meat inside a crocodile cage. They wanted to tear us apart. This was not supposed to be fun time. The aire of judgement was heavy.

We decided to flee into the confusion of streets surrounding us where we could have our own party. We wandered down the median of a major road, laughing and touching trees and making car sounds. I recorded the whole thing but upon listening to it again it is nonsense… just three friends laughing so much at visual cues which did not record on my device.

We all fell in love with one giant tree and for a short time we worshiped it but then there were cops near and we realized with a distinct gravity that we were in a very vulnerable way here, so we snapped into military mode and retraced our steps back to the church like three special forces operatives cutting through the brush to complete a very obscure mission.

When we arrived back at the church the scene was absolute pandemonium. Vinny and Sergio were posted up like gang leaders with the rest of the degenerates on the side of the church smoking dope and cigarettes and talking loud and mad shit. Carlos was passed out against the church sign with an empty bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand. Nate Louis, in an attempt to sit on one of the ornamental benches had somehow completely dismantled it, one more piece falling off every time that he touched it. The drunks were surly, the stoners completely mad. I was shirtless and I still had my cheese in my hand.

Somehow I was on a bicycle. It was the most beautiful bike I had ever ridden and it made a series of beautiful sounds in a perfect rhythm. I rode the bike in circles around the church ignoring the fact that people were staring at me in disbelief. I assumed that they hated my joy.

The cops kept driving by all night, but what were they to do? We’d heard that they had raided some of the other squat houses, and surely they were aware of us, but it seemed very impractical for the cops to raid a church to oust a group of war veterans no matter how much we broke the sound law. Or public intoxication for that matter.

To ward off the police our tripping crew plus Vinny and Sergio stayed up all night.

I woke up the next morning in some bushes against the side of the church, cheese still in my hand and partially smeared over my naked body. Carlos was still passed out against the sign. Lars was screwing the bench back together. When he was finished it was a Frankenstein version of its former self.

A former marine was walking around banging a trash can, screaming that it was time to wake up in a very frank way. I told him that if he hit the trash can again I would kill him and at that time I very well might have. I do not appreciate waking up to a trash can alarm and I certainly was not going to have it with a head full of acid.

The part of the group that participates went down to the march while the rest of us lazed about. Rucksacks and I were ready to go.

Fancy Pants had always run deep with the Socialists and they had come in the morning to tell him that he couldn’t be my friend anymore. I was disgusted. We were not on speaking terms. All three of us were emotionally destroyed.

Before people got back from the march Rucks and me loaded into the car ready to go to Portland. Sergio made a snap decision to come with us. We left before sunset. I would not see many of these people again until my tour was over or even longer. I said no goodbyes… I didn’t even really care. It was as if I were lost in a dream and I wanted desperately to wake up.

It was such a grey day that day.