November 13, 2010 · 6:17 pm

D.I.Y. or DIE


We were paper birds afloat in the strong southerly wind during a perpetual Fall that we never wanted to see the end of, and five towns later we can still see the yellow leaves as we smoke our cigarettes from the side of our van which we call the Rescue Chopper with it’s black trailer weighed down by the world’s first portable paper making studio.

Every time we load our lives into the van I am taken for a minute by the extremities that we have gone to just to keep the good times alive, patriots to a land long lost and completely forgotten.

We are lost in the land of the free.

I have a few mementos of the last weeks to pass and these are the only proof of that time that I can find. They are the only items which add to the legitimacy of the overwhelming feeling of something indefinably bitter sweet happening inside of me.

My hands are stained black from a weeks worth of ink and cleaning solvents, meticulously layered on when I couldn’t control my impulses to make.

We unloaded our studio in a few minutes like professionals do into a beautiful studio the likes of which I never thought I’d see. The walls were lined with squeegees, inks, brayers, printing boards, silk-screens, and cleaning supplies. Ah, to see evidence of my beloved screen-printing again, that love of mine which was taken from me when the D.I.Y. was slain at the hands of Our Lady Commerce during the summer that I was trying to get right with the financial world. But the D.I.Y. never dies.

I abandoned my post as a paper maker post haste, deciding instead to spend most  of my time in the screen burning room talking to inanimate objects about secret plans that I had for them. I prepared a half dozen screens and waited for my fellow paper makers to leave for the night to go back to stay with the Maddy and E, the doting old people who were housing our absurd road show for the week.

I had prepared an image that I had been piecing together in my mind for years. I’d been hunting for the space to make this a reality since I’d first thought of it when I was hustling around Europe recovering from a month of over disclosure. It was what I really wanted to say about “that place” but could never seem to explain right.

I stayed late into the night. I finished the job.

“Did you ever see any torture?”

It tortured my sense of pride in humanity to see how simply we had reduced the most horrible thing I had seen in my life into doctrine. Since I first laid eyes on the book I’ve wanted to destroy it. It’s words provide a graceless veneer to the horrors of our actions and the tangled confusion of ethical labyrinths that we’ve built for ourselves. I think these words which hurt me so much to read say it better than I ever could.

This is what I saw. Every day. And we did it for you, America.

John, the director of the print program of the school we were at, had been hard with me. He is a printer of the Show, Don’t Tell class. I resolved myself to impress him. This piece earned me enough space with him so that he would show me how to do the litho plates that he had his students using.

These are really amazing things these plates. They allow a printer to access the same aesthetic as an offset printer without committing to thousands upon thousands of dollars of machinery. You are simply printing directly off of the same kind of plate.

I’d decided to make a  gift for our host E who was aboard a battleship during Vietnam as a token of thanks. John showed me how to get the job done and a few hours later I’d finished this job too.

My Grandpa had been on a ship as well and I’d always kept his fondness of that experience in my heart. There is something about that affiliation which will never pass from a man’s mind for long. I was happy with my results, concluding that this is by far the most printerly piece that I’d made. It was an edition of ten two color prints which were all pretty well registered, most of them perfectly so.

Donna (another CPP member) and I busted out some cards that she’d had on her mind since our last stop when she’d gotten to print an image of a female marine that she loved very much.  She could barely restrain herself from nagging at me while I completed her job and I was growing more curt by the print. I finally showed her how to print them herself to spare myself a freak out. I can’t stand being nitpicked while I work, especially when it is for free.

The prints turned our very well. She is a natural.

I am zeroing in on finding the DADA in my work. Next week we’ll be working with traditional style text reformatting and zine making which is at the heart of my passion.

It has become  clear to me that I need to get myself to a studio where I could have full access to a print lab. I’m so close to figuring myself out as an artist I can feel it and I think that the only thing holding me back right now is access. Maybe I should go to school.

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October 29, 2010 · 8:21 pm

Oh, Mother DADA…


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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October 28, 2010 · 6:11 pm

In Our Hearts We Heard Beautiful Music That We Could Not Reproduce…


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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October 21, 2010 · 6:05 pm

A Sense of Agency


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

This problem is a problem of agency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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October 21, 2010 · 3:57 am

The Flight of the Hubris


Who would have guessed that when left to our own devices we would lose our minds. I can name a few dozen right off the top of my head.

The lights are flickering off and on and off and on and off again. They’ve been like this for years. A person gets used to stop motion movement. This is a lesson that you learn quickly in this kind of environment. There are others that come with more time and often pain.

I left the laboratory to visit the window today. Your fingerprints are still there. I stared out for a long while into the nothing. God damn it. What the fuck did you see out there? To me there is only frozen metal spinning around what is left of this miserable place where I am stuck without you.

How long has it been here since I’ve been lost inside of myself? We thought that things would be better in space but there aren’t even clocks now and there is no sun and the stars are too far away. I sit inside of my lab all day tending to the tube. It is a beautiful thing when you really think about it. All of the life inside of that space, even smaller than the space that I inhabit alone now and it is all living much more peacefully than me. It will continue to live without anyone doing anything to it for the rest of time. In this way watching the tube calms me, but it also makes me jealous. All of those microbes have company. Millions of friends to share their lives with and because they mate individually there are no lost lovers for them. God bless the micro-organisms. Each and every one.

Every day I try to rebuild our lives. I try to rebuild the life of our world. Organizing the memories that I have left in this way is comforting.

I get stuck often on memories that I can rebuild constantly as time washes what I build away again.

You. It is always you or you are always there. You. Sometimes I say this word to myself and I wonder if I am addressing you or God or this spaceship or me or nobody in particular. It is the only word that I can remember saying in years. Has it been years?

I remember when we decided to take this opportunity. We were sitting in your room. Sad music was playing. We’d just made love. We were drunk. I told you that the military had made me an offer. Every time I think of your face at that moment it makes me wince to think that I could have ignore the horror on your face. I knew you would do it. I should have never asked you. The war made an awful person out of me and I didn’t want to be on the planet anymore. The lights were low. You smoked a cigarette furiously not saying a word until I grabbed your arm and told you the same thing I always say in situations like these.

“Its all going to be ok. I promise.” Hubris. Every word of it. I should have seen it coming like you did but I wouldn’t let myself see it at the time. I promise you that this morning or whatever it was while I was staring out the window I saw it. Its almost like you knew this is where we would be. Stranded and alone, cold and losing our minds inside of an unnatural and repulsive place. I can’t remember whether it was romance or apathy that made me think this would ever be a good idea. I am so sorry for whatever it was.

You wanted to know what the offer was. I told you that I didn’t know the details. You gave me the look that lets me know I’m being “typical.” Then I told you that we could go to space so that we could be away from everything. We could populate a new planet. We had a golden ticket to start it all over and do it right. Then you asked me to leave. So I did. I left and I got a bottle of whiskey and I spent the whole night drinking and swearing at you out loud. How could you want to stay there amongst those insane creatures. I saw this as a ticket out of Hell. You knew the truth. Space is Hell. I just wouldn’t let myself see it.

I think now that it really should have seemed more ridiculous to me, this whole idea. To consider sending a sparsely manned rocket into space with one giant tube of organic life to act as a seed inside of a metal shell. Maybe it would make sense to send the tube with all of its goop, but did we really have to come? We were selected as prime mating material with good biological and genetic resources to draw upon but now look what we’ve become. You’re frozen in space outside of the window of the laboratory and I walk up and down these halls every day doing my best to not lose my mind while nursing every memory that my mind has left to fondle. A real good fit for the job.

There are so many ifs. If we had stayed. If the other people on this ship hadn’t gone mad. If the engines had held out a little longer. If our love was a little stronger. If I had paid more attention to you when you were obviously wanting it. If we’d never fucked up our planet in the first place. Too many ifs.

The lights flicker off then on then off again and they stay like that for a long while so I just sit here wincing away the impact of all of these memories and folding and unfolding the letter that you left me here at the desk which I have never gathered the strength to read.

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October 20, 2010 · 4:22 pm

Monoprinting


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

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

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

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

Jim and Margie get the party started...

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

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


"and then they came for me."

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

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

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

Mineral spirits make the difference...

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

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

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

 

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October 20, 2010 · 2:28 am

Before the Winter Comes


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t judge me. I’m still functional.

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

We’ve arrived at Tom’s place.

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

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

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October 17, 2010 · 7:30 pm

whiskey for breakfast


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

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

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

Let the tour begin.

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

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

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

 

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October 16, 2010 · 8:58 pm

Reporting for Duty


Life on the road happens so fast that sometimes it seems like you’re never really where you are at all.

I’m on the Megabus heading out of Philly with everything I own crammed into the back by a young man who seems to take pride in his lack of professionalism. I have a fair share of obstacles standing  between me and the completion of the task at hand which is to rendezvous with Combat Paper in some printing shop in Boston. My phone was cancelled promptly on the minute that my plan expired. I don’t believe there are such things as payphones anymore. Anxiety has left me feeling nauseated to the degree that I feel like a stomachless goblin who feeds on tension and stress. Coffee has made me jittery with a one inch fuse on my bladder. My shoulders feel broken and my back is bent from the weight of my duffel. I have a good distance to walk when I get into a city I’ve never been to before tonight.

If I do happen to make it to the university where Drew will be consuming drugs and printing I have the rare pleasure of a lucid printing experience that will likely go into the early hours of the morning with the master of unconventional print sciences, the one and only mad scientist of the CPP, Drew Matott. I am very excited to see him again.

Over the course of the summer he has sent me a number of post cards advertising a life that I thought that I was free of. I was living, or trying to make a living, in a college town in Michigan that I used to bum around in with my intellectual friends as we discussed the finer details of our ethical philosophies and personal drives for a life filled at the time with talk of art even though we never quite knew what that art would be. We all fancied ourselves writers. Anyways, during the summer I was living in a bedroom flop with a very anal older guy who had too many rules to be comfortable. I was working long hours down in a screen printing shop that wasn’t quite up to code. I was also making paper in a local paper making studio. His postcards would come in the mail like long distance hauntings making me regret my desire to live something like a normal life.

It had been years before this summer that I had lived in any one place or loved just one girl for longer than a month. I thought that since I had made it for three that I was finally out of the mess. It was not so. All of that fell apart due mostly to my drug usage and paranoia and I found myself wandering pointlessly through Chicago again wondering what I was going to do with myself now that I was realizing that I hadn’t exactly set myself up for success.

Then I remembered Drew’s postcards and soon after that he sent me an email asking me to join them again. And so I did, or at least that is what I am trying to do on this bus which took up the last of my money.

I have made a lot of promises to people over the last week about things that I want to do. They all looked skeptical because my friends have come to distrust me when I tell them things. Even simple, hard to fuck up things. I have a bad track record on follow through. I guess I am more of an “idea man.” As it turns out, activism is too full of idea men. It needs more people who are willing to be dedicated. I am hoping that I didn’t bite off more than I can chew.

One of the obligations I picked up is to revive our organization’s news letter which we all know fondly as SitRep which stands for Situational Report. It is a term, or a practice, in the military meant to give awareness to troops coming into a situation as to what that situation might look like. It is the report of the scouts or the advance party. This publication has lain dormant for far too long. It’s former editor became frazzled by the seemingly pointless black hole of personal energy that doing the kind of work we do invites into your mind and your soul. I do not blame him. This work is destructive.

All of the other functions which I hope to bring into or back into our organization are all in the field of writing, printing, and publication which are all things that I wish to focus on in my own life. I feel confident about being able to carry through this once because I’ve finally found a means to bridge my desire to work for positive social change and my desire to focus on my own talents and passions in a way that could be productive for our entire organization. This transition feels natural so I’m trying to foster it while it is in its primitive state.

There is a rather crushing deadline as our entire organization has just launched a campaign which has a pretty fast paced year ahead of it, all the while I will be traveling with CPP making paper and doing my thing with the gang.

I have my doubts that anyone is still reading all of this garbage which has been leaving my head to make a home amongst all the other self centered gibberish that narcissists fill the internet with. I wouldn’t read it. It doesn’t matter. If a person wants to be a writer they have to write. This is my only real goal over the coming year. Become a better writer. I feel like I am on my way, but my shortcomings are very embarrassing at this early juncture in my “career.” With any luck I’ll have these kinks worked out in the next three decades.

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October 8, 2010 · 2:43 am

OPERATION RECOVERY


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

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

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

STOP DEPLOYING TRAUMATIZED SOLDIERS!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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October 4, 2010 · 2:56 am

One Nation, Indivisified


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOBS!JOBS!JOBS!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Government Officials,

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

Love,

The Unemployed Masses

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

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

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September 30, 2010 · 10:30 pm

the reality crisis


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

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

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

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

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

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

“PTSD man.”

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

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

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

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

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

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September 28, 2010 · 7:48 pm

independence day


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our hostel was smelly and again overly crowded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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September 28, 2010 · 6:34 pm

when we were kings


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.

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September 28, 2010 · 5:23 am

take a lesson jesse brown


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.

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September 27, 2010 · 7:53 pm

the artist’s canon


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.

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September 26, 2010 · 10:30 pm

the boys are back in town


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.

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September 26, 2010 · 12:56 am

the Individual War on Terror (or I.W.o.T.)


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.

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Filed under Provisional Relationships

September 25, 2010 · 11:31 pm

Artist In Residence


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.

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Filed under Provisional Relationships

September 23, 2010 · 8:52 pm

Chapter Four – Ex Patriot


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.

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