Tramp
August 16, 2010 at 11:29 pm (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit
There was a cigarette dangling out of my mouth every minute of the trip west, my nervous hands flicking inside and outside of Ruck’s new car. He was asleep in the back.
I drove, without a license, through silent black of Nebraska on a moonless night with only my paranoia to keep me company as the boys dozed peacefully around me. I turned the radio to surreal and phased out of existence, reminded only of my spatial reality by a slow progression of numbers. In that kind of darkness it was as if I were driving through the two-dimensional plane of the Flatland universe. I wanted to talk to the line.
When Sergio woke up we were halfway across the country and I was a raving psychotic, armed with coffee and nicotine, boiling at the blood. He relieved me from my duties on the grounds that I was no longer sane.
We ate breakfast at a hotel for free a la Ruck’s fail safe survivalists knowledge.
Sergio is a character of special import to my story.
He is of Ukranian descent with no shortage of an accent. He is built like a brick shit house, as they say, a testament to the Marine Corps training regime. His energy is explosive to the degree of being nuclear. In bad times he is the best of company, and in bar fight situations there is not another person on this whole planet that I would rather have around. In his eyes is a kind of fire that I have never seen the likes of before, and in them you can see the shadows of his beasts roaming, dark and scary memories which one can only guess at. He was a sniper in Iraq. My guesses as to the nature of those beastial memories are traumatizing enough. I have never asked him for details in all of the years that I have known him and he has only given me a few hints.
Once, on another trip in a different time he told me about the importance of the number thirteen in his life with a grim look and posture and I could only guess the implication.
Sergio drove most of that day. I do not remember what we talked about or did. I was thinking about other things. I was thinking about Portland. I was thinking about love. I was thinking most, though, about where the fuck I was going to get enough money to survive this trip that seemed absolutely outlandish to me at this juncture.
That night we reached Idaho and stopped to sleep in a small park. We had picked up a bundle of wood and a case of beer and some liquor. We stayed up most of the night burning the wood and drinking the booze. We stayed silent for the most part, soaking in the tongues of flame which licked at our cold bodies, stale from over exertion and the intensity of time.
I woke the next morning to a boot softly digging into my ribs. The boot was on the foot of a park attendant who wanted to inform me that we had not paid the fee and that we were obligated to do so or he would call the cops. Sergio was already packing up the things into the car with the speed of a high speed Marine. Dave was PMCSing the vehicle. I told the ranger that we’d be over to the booth in five minutes to pay him the fee.
I tried to hand him two dollars as we drove by his booth at 50 miles an hour, but we were simply moving too fast. Fucking bandits.
After the dead northern planes the rolling hills of the Northwest were an absolute delight. The colors were sharp and unreal, elevated in stature by the drugs in our bodies.
We were drawing near to our destination. We stopped on a dam a few hundred miles away from Portland and I made a call to my friend Patrick.
August 16, 2010 at 11:59 pm (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit
I had met Patrick the year prior when, after a season long fit of hysteria descended on my head that was so fierce that every morning I woke to the screaming of my mind which didn’t stop its screaming until I went to sleep only to dream of more screaming, I decided that I needed to make a change in my life.
My friend Jan had set me up with a job in the Willamette Valley working as a harvest intern for the crush season at a vineyard. When August came around that year I packed my bags and left my girlfriend Jamie at Union Station due west for Portland.
I didn’t know anyone in Portland. Jan had given me the number of a guy she said she had gone out drinking with a few times by the name of Patrick. I had written it on a napkin.
As the train approached Portland I called the number. A scraggly voice answered the phone. It was 11 Am. The man who answered confirmed that he was indeed Patrick Bruce and he told me that he had been expecting me. He told me the whereabouts of his home and said, cryptically, that they were still up.
Still up?
I promptly got very lost upon exiting the train and spent a very tiring two hours wandering around downtown entirely off track. In the end I had to hail a cab and spend my last few dollars on fare out to his place which was in the north east side of town.
The door to his apartment was wide open. I peered inside of it before I knocked on the door. The place was a bachelors pad galore complete with guitars of all shapes and sizes and wires running every which way to his many media devices strewn about without a piece of furniture in sight save for a bar stool in the center of the room.
A short Irish looking man with sandy blond hair and a red face came to the door with a smile that went from one ear to the next. He told me his name was Patrick and he invited me inside of his house.
He got to work cutting off a line of blow for me on the table after which he poured me a 16 oz glass of whiskey with a few icecubes and began packing a bowl. He informed me that he had been playing music with the tall, skinny, silent fellow who was currently fooling around with the wah wah peddle and a very nice guitar.
I did the coke and drank the whiskey and smoked the grass and said thank you for all of it. I really wanted to go see Portland and I felt like I was in the perfect mood to do so now. Patrick happily sent me off saying that it was bedtime. He gave me a key. And so I wandered off.
I stayed with him until the harvest season began which was more than two weeks away. I had been overexcited in my desire to escape the city.
He took me out several times for amazing dinners at top notch restaurants where he knew everybody. He would wear sweat pants and baseball hats while drinking the finest wine as if it were water and devouring fish cooked in the French style. He is one of the most amazingly generous people that has ever walked this fair Earth.
I told him about my plans and he became one of my biggest supporters. He made me promise him that I would become a writer, telling me that if my words came out like my talking did that the world needed to hear what I had to say. I felt as if this might have been slightly hyperbolic, but it is certainly nice to hear.
One of my favorite pasttimes with Patrick was to go to the strip club with him and his friend Kenny who is the manager for Tom Morello’s solo act. Not only are Portland strip clubs some of the finest establishments in this who goddamn U S of A, but it is a rare pleasure to watch those boys throw bills around in clouds with smiles on their faces. It was the best of times.
Eventually Patrick’s lifestyle began to give me reason for concern. His all night coke parties were hard to endure, even though I was an impoverished floor crasher (as I said, there was no furniture to speak of, and one cannot sleep on a bar stool) I found it difficult to keep up with the pace of conversation that people on the drug prefer to keep and after my first day I discontinued usage because amphetamines have taken a heavy toll in my family and I have danced with that dragon before and understand its nearly elemental control over the fundamental properties of my genetic makeup.
I was worried about him in a very serious way. I was wondering what he was trying to fill and I saw in him the same kind of continuous destruction of the value of any moment in the pursuit of a greater high that I recognized in myself and I was genuinely afraid.
It is not that I did not want to become like him because he is a wonderful person about whom nobody could say a bad word without one of his friends cutting them from stem to sternum. It was more that I wanted to be able to enjoy himself as much as everyone else did, does, without thinking that he had to be lit up like a Christmas parade to entertain people that probably weren’t worth his time.
If you are out there Patrick, I am doing what you asked of me and I think about you every day and I make prayers of my own kind that you will find peace some day.
August 18, 2010 at 5:39 am (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit
We took one last breath of fresh, slow air at the bottom of the waterfall outside of Portland. We peacefully loaded into the car and descended into madness.
Patrick welcomed us into his home with a child’s joy because making new friends is his favorite thing in the world. Him and Sergio bonded instantaneously. Patrick had to go to work. He left us an assortment of drugs and told us to enjoy ourselves. So we did.
I called Katie.
I met her on my 21st birthday, three months removed from my deployment. She was a strong and proud Michigan feminist who wasn’t going to take any shit and she hated men as much as I did. We spent a cold winter being cute in the snow sometimes, but at other times we were as angry and sad as we could be and we took it out on each other in a big way.
She had moved to Portland as she always said she would. We ran into each other again in Stumptown the year before when I was in town to make wine for the first time.
I was anxious to hang out with her again because I was already pining for familiarity and she carried within her past a substantial truth about who I was that led into who I had become and I wanted that truth from her.
Rucks, Sergio, Katie and I end up down in the riverside park drinking PBR out of cans. Katie wandered off to go to the bathroom.
We’d been smoking grass the entire evening and I currently had the bag sitting right next to me because I am a very irresponsible person. All of a sudden there is a bike cop standing next to us with his little light shining down on us.
I had the weed underneath my shoe now. When the officer walked around the light we saw that he was a little, white haired man with a very pleasant demeanor. He saw our cans, obviously, and in the nicest way ever began to write us a warning for drinking in the park, informing us that we would be expelled for thirty days, apologizing for the inconvenience, explaining that he felt really bad about it but he had to. He even told us that we could continue to hang out in the park for the night if we wanted to as long as we threw our beer out. Then he rode off into the night.
On my first night in Portland I was kicked out of my favorite place.
Then time dilates and we wake up on the floor three days later in a cigarette smoke gas chamber and piles of empty beer bottles. We’re as strewn about the floor as the assorted trash of the evenings that passed… the afternoons too. Guitars everywhere. Sergio lifts off the floor and looks at Rucks and me as serious as could be and he says “I’m going to India.”
That was that. We went down to Powell’s and he bought himself some books on Indian culture and three days later he was on a plane to India that he had purchased with his VA disability money.
Gone, just like that. That’s how these crazy veterans operate sometimes. They get some mission in their heads and they just have to go.
August 20, 2010 at 5:28 am (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit
The Rucks and I were left without a barbarian to hobo as we pleased without being yelled at about discipline and our fundamental lack of this virtue. We chose to spend our time busking.
Rucks got himself a washboard and I had my banjo (the M-16) and we made a sign for ourselves. We labored over making a sign. It was a good sign. We didn’t make any money to speak of (over the course of several days we made seven dollars which we spent on pizza) but we were given one giant joint by an elderly woman, however.
We smoked our joint in the cemetery before heading over to an open mic in the Hawthorne neighborhood.
The open mic was littered with jobless vagabonds new and old to the city trading tips on good dumpsters and ideal places to sleep outdoors. Though it was comforting to be amongst “our people” we were both slightly weary of the hippy demographic we had so thoroughly indoctrinated ourselves into.
Rucks began to swoon for a space-cadet by the name of Tabitha who seemed to have no interest in anything at all other than playing long, crooning songs about that subject which has always seemed so appealing to hippies and singer/songwriter types: love.
After playing our set, a few off tempo and poorly constructs songs made out of old cadences we couldn’t remember properly, Rucks wandered off with Tabitha to talk to her friends who were sitting outside of the special-ed bus that had been converted into a home of sorts.
The bus had a name, of course, and that name was Gloria. Gloria was a foul smelling cesspool of rotting organic waste, haphazardly filled to the brim with things that looked like the things that people needed to live: a full mattress, crates full of cooking equipment, glass jars etc etc… but none of these things were in any order to actually use.
Somehow a crazy plan was concocted. It was decided that we would leave with this crew to drive up to Olympia to spend a few days. The hearts exploding over Rucks’ head were enough to convince me that, like always, any plan was better than no plan, and in a matter of hours we were heading north out of the city to a whole new city with a group of people we had not known that afternoon.
The hippies that owned and operate Gloria went by the name of Moonflower and Kale (Dave immediately renamed him Seaweed) and they began to proudly tell us about the tenements of being a Freegan.
Freeganism is a lonely, irrational road, it would seem. These two were so unlikable and so lost in the sauce of idealism that they made me want to be a banker. To hear them talking about a life where nobody would pay for food made all of the ideals that I held dear seem poisonously unbelievable to me. They were both emaciated so horribly that one would believe that they should have been crippled to look at them. Their faces were hollow and incapable of registering any emotion beyond confusion.
Seaweed told us that he was going to move out to the woods in Alaska to trap small animals. Why not? That lifestyle had proven wildly successful for the young man that had recently been the subject of the movie “Into the Wild” which had charmed audiences across the states. Moonflower was more practical, adhering to a religion of dumpstered goods.
They bickered between each other incessantly. Seaweed seemed to have already driven Moonflower crazy, or maybe it was the lack of proper vitamins.
When we stopped for gas I stole a bag of peanuts and when I tried to share my peanuts I was told that I was going to go to hell. That is when I noticed, for the first time, that Gloria was covered from wall to wall, inside and out, with crosses and bible versus and assorted hippy-isms about the grace of God. What in the fuck was I thinking?
Half-way up to Olympia I realized that there was another person sleeping in the back of the bus on the side of the mattress which stood on its sides. Moonflower told me that we were delivering her to a resort on the way.
That night we slept on the side of the road in a small recessed area that was only a few feet from where the large semi-trucks hauling logs were blowing past, flinging rocks at our unguarded bodies. I did not sleep well that night.
We started the next day off with rotten apples.
We dropped our quiet little package off at her resort and went to a general store in the town, picking up eggs and pancake mix so that we could make breakfast in the mountain’s glorious park. Dave stole some cheese. He was equally berated for his thievery and when it was done I elbowed his ribs and asked him why the fuck he told them he had stolen it after I had been so thoroughly chastised the night before. He seemed dopishly innocent. He had no idea that the exact same scene had played itself out a few hours prior.
We pulled our misfit bus into the park and it only took us two hours to get a horrible breakfast out of the pan. More than half of that time was spent arguing with Moonflower who was at first mad because I wanted to cook the breakfast. She said it was “patriarchal.” Then, when she started to cook she threw a tantrum because to make a woman cook is misogynist.
What a bitch.
Tabitha was off on some super secret space mission on a distant star with her white guitar with guilded golden crosses on it making dischordant hippy sounds from a felled tree not too far away. Moonflower walked into the woods and was not seen again for hours. Seaweed fell asleep in the dirt next to the bus.
I went down to the river to take a bath. It was secluded so I decided to masturbate for the first time in days and it was a holy experience, standing there in the river.
When I came back up to the bus Rucks and I unloaded the entire bus and reorganized the whole thing, laying the bed down where it ought to be, cleaning all of the disgusting dishes and organizing the many crates of silly bullshit these people carried with them in a reasonable way. When we were finishing Moonflower emerged from the shrubbery looking like some crazed John the Baptist. She immediately crawled into the bed and went to sleep. Tabitha, much to Rucks’ disappointment, crawled into bed with her and embraced her in a lovers way and everything made more sense then. We could not wake Seaweed up. We assumed that he was dead so we lifted him into the bed as well and began to drive towards Seattle.
Rucks was waiting for a call from a winemaker that Patrick had connected him to where he might be able to get a job during the harvest season. He was very impatient to get to a place where he could get reception on his phone.
It turns out that Gloria handled just like a humvee. I thought that it might have been broken because the ride had been sickening while Moonflower drove. I guess she was just a horrible driver. Maybe it was her uterus and ovaries which made it so difficult. One simply had to imagine that the wheel was like the wheel of a pirate ship, you just had to constantly counter steer. Easy. I still didn’t have a license.
The hippies woke up once along the road to tell us that occasionally Gloria catches fire. We laughed the laugh of insanity, both of us dreaming up a scene of a flaming Christian bus rolling down the road as we jumped out leaving these freaks to whatever destiny their God had planned for them.
Along the course of the trip they had made frequent usage of the term “manifested.” Any time that something happened which seemed out of the ordinary they said that God had manifested the scenario, when really it was just a bunch of stoners making silly decisions on the fly. It reminded us of Greg who had said that everything, including picking us up off the side of the road, was “ordained.”
People love to put responsibility on anybody but themselves. Especially God.
After a brief and desperately unsuccessful attempt to dumpster some pizza we made it to Olympia where we left the hippies in a parking lot, running in the opposite direction while waving and laughing, telling them that we really had to be going. They were too dazed to understand what was happening. We didn’t stop until we could no longer hear Tabitha’s awful crooning.
We sat in a park and laughed and laughed while smoking some weed. I was on the phone with another member of the IVAW named Josh who lived in Olympia. I explained our situation to him and he invited us to stay at his place.
That night we ate ramen with him in his apartment that smelled like cat pee, the walls covered in 80′s X-Men comics which I promptly “got a boner” for as the kids say these days.
Josh is a hyper-intellectual of the anarchist bent who is studying some kind of political philosophy at Evergreen. He had been in the intelligence branch of the Army before going AWOL after a deployment. He told us that he had been living off the radar since then in fear of being hassled by the military.
He was gone in the morning after we woke up. I made another call to another member who told us that we should head to Vashan Island where he was staying in a place that was “totally off the radar,” which he said as if he were insinuating something radical. I hoped that it was a pot farm. We cleaned the dishes and walked for the bus station.
We passed a fancy brunch cafe on our way. A few of the tables had just lifted and left half full cups of coffee and pancakes on the tables. Rucks and I bussed that shit up with a quickness, walking away in a few moments with our hands and mouths full of sticky deliciousness while the servers stared at us as if we’d just held the joint up. Strike fast and take no prisoners.
We were on a bus headed to Tacoma where we would catch a ferry to the island within an hour.
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August 20, 2010 at 7:07 am (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit
The wind swept across us as we were ferried over the bay to the island soaking in a view that I had only dreamed of from the trailer I grew up in as a young dreamer, predicting before their time the sunsets that I would someday see.
The ferry settled in at shore and we disgorged and walked to the road only to find that it went two ways, neither of them the way that we wanted to go.
The veteran that had invited us to stay with him goes by the name of Mike. I had met him first at the RNC. He was a slender fellow who sported a mustached just this side of dapper. He exuded a artistic cunning that made him seem an alien from the rest of the pragmatic political types. When I had talked to him on the phone he told me that we needed to get to the center of the island.
The two roads we were presented with seemed to want to skirt around the island. Not desirable.
I called him again from atop a hill. He picked up at the last minute. He told us that we would need to get to the hostel. He informed me that we should take the road that veered to the left, follow it until it came to a “T” and then turn right and we would arrive at the hostel. His last words to me were “keep your wits about you on this mission…” and then he hung up the phone with the sound of a girl giggling in the background.
We started to follow his directions.
Several hours later, long after the sun had set, a serious question began to plague our minds: do bears live here?
The night was black as coal and there was no sign of life. This was good when one is thinking about bears, but where were all the humans?
We found ourselves at the bottom of a stop sign. I was staring up at the names of the roads, then down again at Rucks’ cellphone which had not had service since we left the hill. And repeat.
A woman pulled up in an SUV. She stared at us. We stared at her. It went on like this for quite some time. Eventually she rolled down her window and asked us what it was that we thought we were doing.
After telling her about our needs she invited us into her car. She drove us to the hostel, but the route she took was nothing like the route that Mike had told us of. There were many turns, some of them rights, some of them lefts, and the trip was nothing short of twenty miles.
When we got to the hostel we thanked her and walked off. Our only means of contacting Mike was to yell. Surprisingly he responded to us very quickly and soon we were on the front porch of a tiny shack, rickety and splintered.
There was a girl there who refused to tell us her name. She grabbed my banjo from me and began to play it telling us that she had never played before. She played the most eerie notes for the rest of the evening.
We ate and we smoked and we laughed all night. All four of us passed out in the only bed which occupied at least a third of the entire house. I could get water from the sink from my position in the bed.
We woke up the next morning and dispersed to meditate individually. I walked away from the house and eventually found a clearing in the woods where I did a few yoga moves that I could remember and a brief calisthenics routine that I had held on to from those informative mornings during Basic.
We sat around getting splinters on the porch talking about daddy issues which we all had, go figure.
Banjo, or so we had named her, took off on her bike to catch the ferry back to Seattle where she and Mike really lived. Mike was only house sitting for a friend. We hung around for a few more lingering moments drinking coffee and then we too set off for the ferry to Seattle because it seemed a reasonable enough place to be.
We caught a ride with a woman in a truck who had a raft in the bed. We sat inside the raft and acted like we were piloting it as she drove us the few miles to the island’s other ferry.
When we arrived we met up with Banjo again. The ferry came. We all got on.
We dined on peanut butter sandwhiches with honey and instant coffee (a specialty that I am proud to have created) as we moped our way toward the cranes that heralded a whole new town with all of its promise and potential.
Banjo took off as soon as we landed and Rucks and I went the other way to the market where we found a dumpster full of flowers. Rucks picked out armloads of them so we laid them around us while we busked by the pier until the security guards told us that we were being a nuisance and asked us to leave. We walked up the hill into the first of the many streets lined with fancy, large buildings.
A wise old hobo gave me a hand selected piece of cardboard to make our sign on when I walked up to the dumpster that he was the sentry to.
This ordained sign proved of no use to us. We put a message on it that read “please buy two homeless vets an ice cream cone” but nobody seemed particularly ready to support the troops that day. I got pissed and said a few things and eventually we were asked to leave that area too.
We started the long walk up a very steep hill and both of us were wondering why people ever went down to the bottom of it, no matter how beautiful the ocean might be.
August 20, 2010 at 5:57 pm (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit
The hill, it turns out, was Capital Hill, from whose lofty top the fixed gear army of hipsters rode around as they do in every city.
We positioned ourselves outside of a coffee shop and began to play music with no hope of making any money. It wasn’t long before a monster of a man wearing fishing boots and overalls walked up to us. In one ham fist he held an accordian and in the other a brown bagged bottle of whiskey. His voice was raspy and he smelled of the sea and booze. He told us that he was a vet as well. He had been a tanker.
To imagine his massive frame filling out the incredibly small space of an Abrams was hilariously tragic. He must have been the most unliked man on the gun line. If those things are built anything like a Howitzer then they are not built to accommodate the larger of our species.
He told us that he had been working on a fishing ship off the coast for the last season and now he was living out of his truck which had been converted into a home and heading down the west coast to San Diego where he would work the squid harvest. He showed us his mobile home. It was a tin shack screwed into the bed of a small truck. It was the kind of thing that only someone who had lived inside of a tank could live in.
He played us fisherman’s songs until our friend Chanan from IVAW called the phone and invited us out for a drink.
Chanan was/is a gay, socialist, ex-seaman who had been attached to the Marines as a medic. Some people are so good at being part of marginalized demographics. He wined us and dined us all evening before taking us to his apartment where we were to spend the night.
We casually avoided the subject of my political fiasco in St. Paul for a majority of the evening, but eventually it came to the front.
Chanan rolls deep with the ISO and has for a very long time. I knew that he knew about what I had said. He was the first to breach the silence. I thought that he would kick us out.
I explained to him in great detail that I had not meant to isolate the ISO and I had said nothing to do so, but rather that my words were inappropriately used to out an age old debate and now everybody wanted to either praise or condemn me for having done so. It took a lot of fancy foot work but eventually he saw where I was coming from and he promised that he would do what he could to set the record straight with all of his socialist buddies.
The night wound down to a close and when the morning came it was time to move on, find a new place to drop our bags and collect stories with other veterans.
My friend from Chicago gave me the number of a veteran who had helped form the IVAW though he was no longer active with the organization. His name was Josh.
Josh lived a few miles outside of the city. We started roadmarching towards his home after eating some tuna fish sandwiches.
Unfortunately those sandwiches didn’t sit well with Rucks and a few minutes after consuming them we were standing on the side of the road while he vomited. It was hard not to laugh because he was laughing. He really has always been the best in hard times.
After fifteen minutes of purging his demons we charged on, occasionally stopping for him to mini-puke. He was spitting out “stuff” the entire trip.
We finally made it to Josh’s place and settled in for the night.
Josh was that kind of gung ho super trooper that one does not expect to find in an organization like ours. He had been in the infantry in the Army. He was squared away NCO material. He objected to the war because it meant that his buddies, his soldiers, would die, were dieing, and he was smart enough to know that it was for no reason.
He was a mans man. A sports loving, hard working no bullshit type. He was a breath of fresh air in the midst of all of the hippy philanthropists we’d spent so much time with.
He made us an awesome dinner and then we kicked it on the porch with some beer and shot the shit about why the IVAW wasn’t working. This is one of my favorite discussions that I find myself having with people often. It seems that people feel open to talk about these kind of things with me. I do not understand why.
That night Dave and I went out dancing with Banjo and she ended up coming back to Josh’s place with us. I got my first taste of love on the run in Josh’s bathroom (classically obscene) and when I woke up in the morning she was gone and Josh had that “what was all that noise about last night?” look on his face, but he had lived in barracks before so he only smiled coyly.
Rucks was less easy to please. He was a little hurt that I could do this to Mike even though I protested that she had told me that her and Mike were not a thing. Rucks just looked at me like I was a criminal and I knew that thing or not the way that Mike looked at her had left no room for this kid of behavior. Just like that my fun was over. Once again my desires had gotten the best of me and I’d fucked another friend over. I wish that this were the last story of this kind that you will eventually read about here, reader, but it has only just begun.
We walked down to the bus station.
While we waited for the bus to Tacoma we were witness to a scene that I could not believe.
There was a homeless shelter across the street as usual. A bum walked out of the door with his bags in hand and he was yelling about three towels that he felt belonged to him. A woman stumbled out after him. He was yelling about these towels and banging on the glass windows. She was yelling at him that the cops would be coming soon. The woman next to us had her hands over her child’s ears. The bum continued to bang on the glass, cussing up a fit about these towels. His woman bolted around the corner.
A man came out of the shelter, I assume he was the security guard. They exchanged words. Then the security guard was laying a whoopin on this bum which ended with the bum being thrown against the sheet glass window of the shelter which I was sure would explode. It did not. The security guard walked back inside, the bum laid on the ground for a long time.
Eventually he got up, furious. There were some thugs standing on the sidewalk by him. The bum walked up to the thugs and spit on them. They were just about ready to kill him by bludgeoning when the cops, and our bus, pulled up at the same time.
I shivered a deep, spinal shiver. This was just one more violent fight that I should have broken up but did nothing instead. Just like Cuba when I was a little boy with a tape recorder watching all of that hatred being exerted in a way that was well beyond the standard operating proceedure and I knew that I should say something but I never did and now I can barely stand the sight of my own face in the mirror.
Just like Cuba.
August 21, 2010 at 6:30 pm (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit
I had never seen a bum fight before. I had a fairly long bus ride to think about it. When we got to Tacoma we walked up front to tell the bus driver that we didn’t have money for the fare but it seemed like he heard that kind of thing all the time. He just let us get off.
We were standing on the corner waiting for Seth (another veteran) to pick us up when we heard a commotion.
Two girls were arguing in the street. Then one girl was laying an open handed beat down on the other girl. Then she was smashing her face into the street. Then she was leaving.
The crumpled body of the girl was still in the middle of an intersection. There was a yuppy woman screaming from her car. She insisted that somebody needed to do something so I looked into her window and said “look you yuppy bitch, why don’t YOU do something like call the fucking police!” so she shut up and did that while Rucks and I tried to drag this knocked out girl to the sidewalk.
She was actually pretty OK which came as a surprise to me.
Seth showed up before the cops so we fled the scene.
Seth works in a pay by the week squat hotel for miscreants and never-do-wells. He was the nighttime security guard. He walked us around the premises fingering the place where is gun usually is but he hadn’t brought it along tonight. He told us stories of hookers who had to suck seven dicks a day just to earn enough to support their heroin habits and crack dealers with murder raps. In the dark night amidst all of that seediness Seth seemed to be some kind of modern Batman who was less ashamed of his own identity.
He opened a room to us but we both felt uncomfortable touching anything inside of the room so we spent the whole night drinking whiskey with Seth on the curb across the street where he could watch the building from the outside as if he only needed to bother himself if the entire place was being destroyed.
When his shift was over he took us outside of Tacoma and dropped us off along the highway where we thought we would be able to hitch in the morning.
We walked off into a construction area looking for a place to sleep. We came to some weeds and we just kept walking through them. The ground was soggy under our feet. I looked over once and Rucks was there smiling, but when I looked back again he was nowhere to be seen, and then when I looked back a third time there was a mud monster that had probably consumed Rucks while I wasn’t paying attention.
As things turned out it wasn’t a mud monster. It was Rucks covered in mud. He had fallen into some kind of swamp. Again I laughed at him but this time he didn’t find the situation any kind of funny.
We passed out in a clearing on top of our tarps. We woke up the next day to the sound of a bulldozer which was all of ten feet away from us and we quickly realized that we were two well camouflaged freaks in some weeds that were fixin to get bulldozed so we took off with all of the speed that our bodies would allow us.
There was a hotel nearby so we did our little breakfast thing, smoked the rest of our grass and picked blackberries from the bushes that surrounded the area.
We often found ourselves in the wooded areas around the commercial areas where auto drivers frequent. These places had become our home. Many of them, especially up here, had blackberry bushes packed densely inside of them. We had grow hobo fat off these berries that summer.
That area was a total bust for hitching.
We got on a bus that would take us to the furthest outpost of the whole Seattle/Tacoma/Olympia tri-city area.
We caught a ride with a hippy coming back from the same trade fair that the owner/operators of Gloria had gone to. He drove us all the way to Portland.
That night was our last night as a traveling duo. Rucks was off to work in the vineyards South of town and I was going to work in a winery in town.
We smoked as much as we could and laughed about the good old times. We were both so tired from the road, so exhausted by the rapid pace of stories that was assaulting us on a daily basis. We were ready to be alone, I think, and to have some structure to our lives.
Rucks took one more solo trip up to his Grandparent’s place where he was going to drop some acid while walking on the ocean shore and I settled in to trying to make Portland work for me in a way that was more substantial than just drifting through town on my friends’ couches.
August 22, 2010 at 5:36 am (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit
So I didn’t have a plan. At least not a sustainable one. What I had was more like a dream. There wasn’t much about it that was all that realistic.
I was sleeping on Patrick’s floor again, mooching off his generosity. The money was gone. The nights were getting colder. Patrick was getting more and more worn out by my chit chat and random hours and addictions that he knew he’d have to cover. The answer to this was more simple than it seemed. I needed a j-o-b because money doesn’t grow on trees.
It was harvest season in the Northwest and the greyhound could take me anywhere I needed to be and I had my bags all packed and a Cricket that Patrick bought me and a phone book with every winemaker in town and out… but I didn’t need to go that far because Telina was looking out for my silly ass, waiting for the ball to drop.
Telina was a friend of Jan’s who had become a friend of mine over the course of many stories which will be told at different times. She and Dan were tramps, skipping from town to town in an RV they had purchased. They were friends of Patrick’s as well. They were Chicago satelittes, tethered to but away from that city so prolific.
She had it all covered. She had a job lined up for me at an avant garde winery opening up in the industrial neighborhood called Boedecker Cellars which is the product of Athena and Stuart. I reported to work on a bicycle. I introduced myself and I was pointed towards the work so I began to work.
Starting a harvest season is a thing that you have to break into fast because you don’t really want to think about all of the work that you are going to have to do. When those grapes start coming down the line it is as if they will never stop and your eyes grow so tired of the colorful nuances of pinot noir grapes… infinite grapes forever… in your dreams: grapes and then you’re awake but it is still grapes… hoses…nozzles.. water. citric acid. caustic. ozone. Because there can be no contaminants. They will ruin the wine.
Wine had made a tramp out of me the year before when I had come out looking to get my mind off of things… like the Army. Back when I skipped town on those last three drills because in my heart and in my mind I was so done and needed to be free so I went out there looking for freedom. I thought I’d found it when Danielle and I were driving out there listening to the Mountain Goats and relishing those last few moments of a beautiful story that was about to drive away East the next day but that car never went any further East than the winery she got a job at a few miles on the other side of town after she moved in to the little farmhouse on the vineyard with its perfect golden sun and sorrowful tree swing and the door that hangs open all day that led into the kitchen where we danced to some music that said it all best. The banjo was something we shared, like the books and the bed and the silence that never stops. And then the grapes came… and then my girlfriend came to town. And then my web of deceit got me tangled up so that there was no freedom except that kind that I could find staring into the grapes all day.
Boedecker was a whole different kind of vineyard though.
Unlike Yamhill Valley Vineyards which produced a yield of 350 tons of grapes the year that I worked there, Boedecker processed much less much more meticulously. We were expecting 50 tons I think.
The first order of business was to clean all of the bins that would store the wine while it fermented. Bins are giant, heavy duty Tupeware containers. There is no way to clean these silly things that will not lead to utter wetness. Better yet: chemical wetness. This process takes days. We had something like 100 at Yamhill along with 8-10 very large steel silos. At Boedecker there were 50 bins and that was it.
When you’re dealing with this much water irrigation becomes your biggest concern. Boedecker cellars was operating out of a brand new commercial space in an industrial area. When I started working the electricians were still putting in the wiring while I sprayed the hose around. The floor drains formed hills which only recessed in some areas. The topography of that floor became far too familiar to me as I measured it like a prisoner squeegeeing the floor.
During these pre-grape cleaning days I was living at a hostel that Patrick was paying for so that he could have some space until I got my first check. I felt super bad about the whole thing but I was getting my act together and taking as many hours as I could get and I was putting my ass into it.
So was another intern, my only other coworker who was also named Danielle who worked much harder than I did or could. Her and I split the shifts like Stuart and Athena did so that there would be nearly continuous surveillance of our babies when they came in.
Athena fronted me a check and I went out looking for a more permanent place to stay. I looked around on the internet.
And that is how I came to live in Fang House.
August 24, 2010 at 7:06 pm (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit
Fang House was the unofficial working title for a house in the Southwest corner of town where the members of a local punk band called White Fang lived with a varying host of their friends and a few non-native drifters. It existed in a state of constant disrepair and untidyness as best suits the mood for people of our demographical bracket.
I pulled an old, dusty mattress down from the attic where it had been stationed to be the sex bed for everybody who did not have a room of their own. After beating out some of the dust I positioned it in the art room against the wall, surrounded it with my bags and assorted hobo things and began making an emo nest of dirty clothes and half finished drawings.
The location of my nest was fairly central to where the socializing happened, but everything seemed central to the socializing. I would drag myself back to this bed after long days in the winery to pass out to the sound of ten-fifty late-teens getting uproariously fucked up around me, sometimes deciding to jump off the roof or have non-stop jam sessions ten feet from my head. I didn’t mind one little bit. I had a roof!
One day while I was downtown eating five dollar Thai food at the “Roach Coaches” I heard a British guy talking about how he was trapped in the same hostel I had stayed in. He was talking about a West Coast bike ride that he had started but his leg had gone bum so now he was stuck here. He was talking with another hostel resident. I finished my food and then walked over to where they were sitting. I told the British guy about Fang House and I invited him to come over with me after my shift at the winery.
After work that day I called him and we walked over to Fang House. He told me that he had traveled in Thailand and India, spending six months on the beach in Thailand learning how to administer Thai style tattoos. In my head I was overjoyed at what a serendipitous find this was for both of us. His name was Danny and he fit in with Fang House perfectly.
After spending a few days investigating the local printing scene I found the Independent Printing Resource Center. I walked downtown to look into it, hoping to find a safe haven where I could pursue my long lost love, that trade which is no more, printing.
The IPRC didn’t have the offset presses I had hoped for, or Screen Printing equipment. What they did have were two giant copy machines, guillatine cutters, binding equipment, a letterpress studio and a small army of well equipped computers. I talked my way into a membership and began working on a zine that day.
I had never made a zine before, but I needed a project to put my hands to in the idle hours between the grapes, something that I could ferment and share. I had all the fixings: sketches I’d drawn and a story worth sharing.
I called it Paper Birds:Styrofoam Flowers. I doted over it as obsessively as I now dote over the telling of this story.
When you live inside of a head like mine productivity and creativity are not hobbies, they are a means to an end. If I am not doing something then my mind busies itself with its many emotional and existential crises.
The zine was not enough, though. Nothing is ever enough.
Brother Bird had secured for me a thousand dollar grant from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and although this money only came with the expectation that I write for them one article, I felt a deeper debt to them than that. Brother Bird had given me the number of a friend of his who he had worked with in the past to formulate a kind of creative meeting grounds for veterans and civilians. I called that number late one night while I was walking back from the bar. The guy’s name was Sam.
Sam and I met a few times over the course of the next couple of weeks. He helped me gather my thoughts on how to make a productive chapter of the IVAW here in Portland which would have art as its premises. I rambled out my thoughts and Sam sat back in many cafe and bar chairs helping me to clear the rubble and build something useful.
After a few days I had gathered enough momentum to call together a meeting of the few veterans who lived in the area. The meeting took place on the cement slab behind my house.
Benji Lewis showed up at the door in a bathrobe, Mike Ortiz came with armloads of cookies and Chris came with his bike. Danny also sat in.
The boys were all about making a chapter, so that was that. We were now a team. An anti-war veteran team. I had finally made my own.
I’d been brought into the game by Brother Bird and Roberto in Chicago and I had learned everything I could from them even though we always seemed to differ on some very critical points. Brother Bird had built the Chicago chapter with raw intensity and a gravity of importance. I had always looked up to him for this and I had greatly aspired to build something like this myself, to create a chapter and to bring a crew of people into it and to give to them what it was that Brother Bird had given to me: a community and a voice.
Chris and Danny bonded on building freak bikes. Danny had quickly found a Portland nitche for himself with the bike builders after attending a weekly festivity called the ZooBomb where dozens of the local bike nerds take the lift to zoo at the top of a giant hill so they could ride their weird bikes down it as fast as they could. A few days after Danny moved into the house he showed up with a few small bikes, then a few days later he showed up with one bike that was composed of those smaller bikes all welded together. It was a long, dangerous looking thing that hugged the ground. It looked like a low riding motorcycle and upon it he looked like a total badass. Chris got to work building his bike immediately.
Mike made a website for us to use to share news about local activity. I started to use it as a blog.
Benji was a one man activist show who was operating out of another town to the south.
Between days at the winery, evenings at the IPRC, mandatory whiskey hour at the bar with the cute waitress and all the phone chatter associated with activism work I quickly found myself with no time left in my day and in this way I finally felt like I was actually putting that money that had been so generously awarded me to use.
August 24, 2010 at 8:49 pm (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit
The grapes finally arrived by the truckload. It started with one truck in the foggy, wet October morning. Then they just never stopped coming.
We mounted the elevated conveyor belt from whose heights we would sort these fifty tons of grapes. Stuart hit the power switch and the entire thing started to shake. It shook so vividly that after a few hours my bones were completely disassociated from one another, my brain was bruised and my eyes, when I finally stepped off this brutal device, could not focus.
The Pinot Noir grape snake slithered eternally before my eyes while I picked from its skin leaves and other debris. Silverfish crawled around and over and through my body as if I were a corpse being consumed. At the end of the line the snake piled into the bins which were now spotless and those bins spread out and filled the warehouse floor.
When we were done sorting the grapes every day the wine had to be “punched down”. Punch Downs are process of pushing the grapes which rise to the top during the fermentation process back down to the bottom of the bin so that the flavors can seep in to the wine. The grapes form a rock hard surface on the top during the first few days of the process because all of the reactions happening inside are so dramatic, but slowly this surface becomes easier to push down. When that is done the wine must be pumped from the bottom to the top so that it is properly circulated. This work takes hours. It is very difficult.
Every day I would walk home from work smoking a little weed and allowing my mind time to unravel its nefarious plot against itself. This is time that my mind demands and it will not take no for an answer. Halfway through the walk I would stop in at a small whiskey bar to get myself a glass of that sweet poison and flirt with the cute bartender.
On one such evening I was writing at the bar when I felt something on my neck. I moved my hand to the location of the issue only to find another earwig. I had something akin to a freak out and threw the bug across the room telling it loudly to keep itself and its friends away from me while I was off the clock. The bartender was staring at me as if I had asked her to hand over the till. She asked me to leave. I started to explain myself but I was stammering and sounding more crazy than ever. I resigned, kicked back the rest of the whiskey and left all huffy never to return.
I was acutely defensive of my mental illness which seemed to be growing out of control like an unweeded garden. There was the disappointment in finding myself doing work I’d made promises to my self and my friends that I would never do again. There was also living in a city that had no real interest to me.
Portland is a fine place to be as a twenty something in the modern age. Pretty people abound to your left and your right and everyone seems more than happy to dedicate themselves to having a good time. The nights are drunken and spent in company of people who are all proudly well to the left of center, so much so that it seems that Portland has politics all figured out.
This lackadaisical attitude seemed unjust to me, however. The people of Portland were all white and they lived in a kind of dystopia. For many of them it took a regimen of high powered pharmaceuticals to stave off the reality that war, poverty, hunger and sickness still thrived just outside of the city limits. It was just easier to ignore these issues while swathed in the blissful easiness of this town.
People didn’t want to talk about the war here because none of them had voted for Bush. They all considered themselves green to the extent that even the electronic doors of the Starbucks had low-energy signs on them despite the fact that it would be even less energy to just push the door open with your muscles, leaving the job off the electric grid which still relied on coal and oil. Nobody considered themselves racist because they were all beyond it even though there were only a very few black people who were all very poor and living in a highly segregated neighborhood to the North.
I still believed firmly that the spending of money was the only true vote that an American citizen could cast. This is, after all, a capitalist society and no matter who our president might be we are all, without a shadow of a doubt, firmly under the control of the handful of corporations which own our mediated lives be it through media, gas consumption, food, banking or the distribution of appliances which even the lefties fill their houses with.
People still spend money like capitalists in Portland. They buy cases of beer and handles of whiskey, many of them still drive, they like fancy food and living lives of excess. To think that they were not participating in the system seemed European of them. They blamed all of the wrongs of the Western world on the “others” from whom they were estranged and allowed themselves the freedom to think that their lofty opinions purchased a get out of guilt free card. To me it did not.
In this way Portlanders are more confused than your average Middle American citizen. At least the trailer park residents and American flag fliers with the big trucks own what it is that they do and they don’t try to hide that they are what they are. To see the seedy intellectualism of an over-educated and underemployed population hard at work dismissing any responsibility for the evils of the world made my skin crawl.
I could not work in this environment. There was nothing I could tell these hipsters that they didn’t already know. When I told them about my work affirming the sickness of Guantanamo Bay and the rest of the rotten Global War on Terror they gave me that $100,000 dollar in tuition “I know” look. Why would I bother to convince them that there were nuances that they didn’t know, and if they knew it all so damn well why weren’t they out in the rest of the world trying to share what they knew with people who didn’t know instead of surrounding themselves with other people who had it all figured out?
My romance with Portland was over, needless to say, and the calender became yet another obstacle between me and being somewhere where I felt like I could belong again.
My bags were already packed in the metaphorical sense and I had one metaphorical foot out of the door. It was just a matter of finishing what it was I had come to do.
August 29, 2010 at 3:28 am (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit
I was all sour grapes and rotten moods. The grey clouds had moved in over head and even the bus reminded me that I wasn’t sane, my neurosis so loud to me that even in the silence of the streets when I was alone at night too afraid of the people on the bus, my mind snapped at itself with virulent disappointment.
My heart crooned for my friends and a room of my own and money that I had earned to spend. In Portland I was an island of me trapped with the broken pieces of the shitty plane I had flown in on that was carrying my preposterous dream.
At times I thought that Katy was right when she said that I was only privileged, excersizing my privilege to play out of the fantasy of being a homeless veteran. That’s how it seemed at the time. If only she knew how things would work out for me then maybe she would have been a little kinder.
I wasn’t really homeless because I could still work. I was a tramp. Incapable of staying in any one place for too long, hustling from job to job because I could still work. Not every homeless vet is a bum. But people don’t have time for these kind of semantics in today’s market.
Stuart and Athena probably would have fired me if the season had been any longer. I was a complete mess, spread so thin between a dozen different things I wasn’t doing well, one of them their precious baby business. Attempting to work a harvest while being surrounded in the hustle and bustle of a city is completely impossible for a boy like me. When I should be home sleeping and eating well I am out galavanting about with as many weirdos as I can find living on city time. Setting up meetings and printing out zines and all of the walking in between. It starts to add up after a while.
But then the grapes stopped coming and the skies cleared and there were a few beautiful fall days when all I had to do were a few punchdowns while we were waiting for our wine to be done with this stage. The few days pass and its time to suck all the juice out of the bins so that we can put the wine into barrels and store it. We press the old skins and dump them all out in the trash and wash out all of the bins so that they are fairly clean for next fall and then it was just over and there was peace. As fast as it had started.
There was a party at the winery to celebrate the completion of the harvest. We all walked around stunned. I walked out back to the train tracks that I balanced on every day while I smoked my cigarettes and talked to myself. I smoked a spliff by myself in the back, breathing in the cold air of the night and accepting that I had done it again. Davey Rucksacks showed up because his season was over too.
We got super drunk on all of the wine we had been given, smoking grass like it was nothing because we were harvest time rich and we traded our best falling in the bins stories. Rucks contracted Danny to do a tattoo of the Zigarat of Ur on his back under his tattoo of the sun. Danny agreed and got to work drawing it out.
Back when his name was Mann he had stood in the sand and watched with amazement as his peers desecrated this supposed birthplace of Abraham with cigarette butts and filthy jokes, tearing the bricks apart without even the slightest glimmer of awareness that we had marched in a Christian horde and now we defile those places that ought to be sacred to us. The sun burned this scene into his eyes and in a way it explained everything about what that war did to him and why now he was getting that memory engraved on his back forever. The Zigarat was to be whole again, not the ruins that we left behind us, but the way it was meant to be before we came and destroyed our own sand castle.
When the time came to commit his skin to this idea he was smiling as always. Danny laid out his beautiful rendering of this place under the sun that Rucks already had on his back and then he got to work. A few minutes into this proceedure there was a knock at the door. It turned out to be two, young Mormon missionaries, called to the scene by some divine fate.
Rucks’ face lit up and he looked to me with a child’s delight and he exclaimed: “Its Ordained!” and he laughed.
The mormons came in and sat down and Rucks got down and dirty with the quiz, seeing if these young men had been properly indoctrinated by the Mormon faith as he had been something of an eager young go getter from a good Mormon family when he was growing up. The whole time he’s talking to these kids Danny is still just silently tapping away, almost forgotten in the moment. The poor guys seemed completely uncomfortable. Maybe it was the obnoxious pile of weed that we’d all purchased with our harvest money or maybe it was the futon style tattoo session or possibly just the sheer energy of Fang House that was getting to them, but they were taking it all in stride.
By the time they left they knew that none of us would ever be a Mormon, again in one case, but we knew damn well that they would never join the Army. It’ll make a freak out of you.
The tattoo was finished and Rucks’ mission was accomplished. He loaded himself up with the kitten he’d picked up out at the vineyard and drove home for the first time in a long time to lay his bags down and go back to being David Mann. Let Davey Rucksacks retire. He drove off the next morning and I didn’t know when I’d see him again. I became very sad. We had shared a lot of beautiful memories and he had taught me everything I needed to know to travel and survive. He prepared me for Europe by telling me tales of his travels there and he passed the baton to my shaky hands so that I could keep the life alive for a few more beautiful moments.
I drew Danny a simple picture of a brontosaurus with wings and a halo. He fixed it to make it right. A few nights later we were upstairs in my room and he was tattooing this angel brontosaurus onto my forearm, lit up like trailer parks in christmas time. Danny waited until he was almost done to ask me what it meant. I had to think about it for a while… it had come as a whim like all of my tattoos.
I decided finally that it seemed like it pointed both to the eternal awesomeness of the dinosaurs which are now extinct and also the death of my childhood which had happened some time ago. But it was more than all of that too… it was this story, this time, this tour. It is a mile-marker on my skin from a time when there was something that I didn’t want to forget.
It is on the war arm with the others: the two love birds together in the cockpit of a rocket bird, a man who is falling, a robot who is playing a bass guitar next to a stack of books and the broken heart with a crown (I’d gotten these when I came home on leave) then later the big bad wolf blowing down the little pigs wooden house (an ode to self destruction that I found in Craig Thompson’s “Blankets” which had given me something to fall into while I was deployed.) There was the Brer Rabbit who was born and raised in the briar patch and an angel with pretty hair. I do not often explain what they mean because they all mean different things and to me they remind me of moments that I wouldn’t know how to begin to share because they were so filled with my own brand of sentimentality.
Now there was the outline of the Sentimental Brontosaurus. Coming back from war: an ode to time and the adventurers spirit.
August 10, 2010 at 7:16 pm (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit
(This was written in the Record Book while I was living in Fang House)
I have been waiting impatiently for revolutions.
Tides of incomprehendable changes which I dream of overcoming me and everybody else in it.
It is as if I have been standing on a train platform my whole life staring at the point where I can’t tell the difference in the two sides of the railroad tracks. And my train never comes so that my reality is an unsatisfactory waiting period, and it is only the perpetual revolutions of time which pass, yet are never noticed.
Many things have changed. I have woken up in many different rooms in many different cities. I have woken up with different women and different stacks of books at my feet, defining eras in my personal history. There have been different clothes on my floor and different bikes in the livingrooms of my different apartments. Different thoughts, emotions, addictions, jobs, friends, commitments and memories, but there has never been a different me.
My habits of thought and perception have consistently plagued me, leaving me wondering if I was ever truly seeing things properly. Seeing things as they really were. Does that effect the truths that I have accumulated to tether myself to the now?
I can look back on my history and see through a nostalgic for to ways in which my beliefs had led me astray, towards making decisions that irrevocably altered my future. I can see mistakes, like a carpenter sees cracks in the foundations of old houses; indications of inevitable future failures. But I can’t even know if these are true. So I am forced to disavow my paranoia.
Paranoia, anxiety, depression, fear. I’ve woken to the chimes of these bells on so many grey afternoons that I have become very graceful in my means of dealing with them. I can dismiss or dismantle, evaluate and discourage even the most poisonous episodes. I am to these undesirable traits a professional athlete. But I don’t mean to brag.
It is just that the very act of being, the continuous endurance of wakeups and conciousness is such a rigorous and gruelling never-ending thing that one must either learn to ride the daily revolutions or lose their mind. Because this art of existing is hard.
And it is an art form which takes admirable grace to weather the fundamental turbulence of existence. At least to do so beautifully.
To learn to play ones life like an instrument, experimentally and bizarre, exploring the nuances while still understanding the whole, the movement, that to me is the goal. But by setting the goal I find an inherent dichotomy: that of freedom and control.
I do not wish to control my life as I expressed earlier because I know that it is foolish to believe that I can control any aspect of the universe which in its momentum is so much more capable of control than I and certainly has its hand on the ball currently. I know that life plays my body like an instrument, expressing itself through the organism that I call myself, but it is impossible for me to not at least wrestle for the reigns. To for a few moments express something in my very being which is not property of the magnificent everythingness of our universe. Maybe only out of a spirit of rebellion do I try to control myself. I ‘m so lost in this thought that I might never return.
A resolution, perhaps, to this ridiculous cunundrum. Life and I resolve to live together in holy matrimony. I am left to celebrate autonomy with individualistic exhaltations and the universe will be the donor of the spectacle, all its parts and pieces. Agreed, if only to finally move on.
I suppose, realistically, I must admit to a certain level of control over my life and its circumstances though I could argue against it. The perpetual forward motion of my body through time has forced out of me choices, statements, exclamations, actions. Deeds. I do not deny that I am solely responsible for them and have exclusive rights to be proud for those things or to feel guilt. If life is to be a court, which many other nervous monkies seem to think it ought to be, so that we are individually suspended before our misdeeds in judgement for the duration of our existences. I would beg of these confused sould to be kind to their own plea. Navigation of this vessel without proper training for long periods of time is bound to result in choices that should have been chosen differently, actions that had undesirable reprecussions or a statement uttered that is proven untrue by time.
We can only choose to live beautifully. To discourage disharmonious action because of its aesthetic unpleasantness to ourselves and continue on with our spectacle of endurance through the surreal passage of our lives.
I do not know what is right and wrong. I can only see that which I find attractive and that which I find repulsive.
Why am I writing this? Why do I choose this discourse? I feel like I am caught in a limbo between feeling a necessity to explain myself and my frustration at my obsession with my own head.
To answer my own question, me, you’re/we’re/I’m writing this because you/we/I wanted to write. I assume that is because you/we/I were feeling a little crazy and this always seems to help. So relax.
Ahem. Maybe I should go on about how good at dealing with crazy bits again.
Sometimes it feels like I’m becoming more skilled at emotion management but at others it seems as if the swings are getting longer and more intense and I’m just getting more tired. So even in this there is some dichotomization of pride and humbleness.
To be honest I am only now realizing that I have been at war with myself for so long now that I can not even remember what time was like before the conflict, if there was a time before. standing in the no-mans-land of my mind my whole life between my two polar halves squaring off with one another while I beg for peace. Sometimes I am placated by vacations in the violence, but I am always eventually reminded of the realities of my war.
In this am I not just acting out in my introspective fashion the same war that all humans have been waging for time immemorial? The war of hubris and hope. And we’re all just binding our fingers waiting for our nemesis.
Or less metaphorically our never ending psychotic physical violence against ourselves in our obviously insane ritual of armed combat. Or the equally psychotic and equally intrinsic lack of balance in power and class abuse, slavery and rebellion.
Should I find it more or less comforting to see these fears exhibited so loudly through our collective past, a universal characteristic of the overly-intelligent monkey who freaks itself out? At the very least this realization allows me to feel free of any judgement for inner turmoil. Nobody seems to have found the solution for it, so I can take some relief in our collective floundering. Whew.
I don’t know how this began and it certainly never had any point, but I do feel much better. It was a long day inside of my mind which didn’t stop while I was sleeping which isn’t fair but is usually the case. It is always hardest at night. In the hours before bed while I gradually give up on reasons to stay awake for longer and it never seems that I get any positive work done when I am like that. I just stare at walls and assure myself that there really is nothing I would rather be doing. And the really fucked up shit is that I know it is true so I just shut my eyes and my brain goes into that place where a confusing babble of current events tangles itself into my visual and linguistic centers which rambles out some bizarre animation of all of my neglected anxieties which stack on top of one another like legos until I have plastic fortresses of madness in my sleep. But it is better than being awake where I’m worried that nobody loves me, which I know isn’t true, but leads into the understanding that people do love me but I don’t love myself so I can’t accept that and just be happy. Instead I become a black hole of affection, preying on the love of others in an unfulfilling quest for fulfillment which I know I will never reach until I overcome my way of thinking but I don’t know how to do that so I feel stuck and frustrated and although there is progress there is also degeneration and the progress doesn’t seem to be happening fast enough.
I am both glad and terrified that I am not in a relationship right now, and I’m not certain I’m going to to be mentally secure in one for quite some time but I am extraordinarily lonesome.
All in all, I’m still, apparently, just waiting for revolutions.
Oh, note to future self who might be morbidly looking back on old writings to judge how much worst you’ve gotten: this is how you write when you are stoned. FYI.
August 29, 2010 at 4:34 am (Piecing the Story Together -Portland, Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle (September-December 2008)) · Edit
The end of this portion of my tour was drawing near.
The zine was nearly done, the harvest over, November was well on its way. I had only the zine release party at Igloo and an interview to do.
One morning a woman showed up at the front door of Fang House. She was let in and she found me sleeping in my emo pile. I was kicked awake and introduced to Justine Sharrock. Justine was a writer who lived in San Francisco was was writing a book about the effect that the war had had on the lives of four people who had worked inside of the detentions system during its glory days. She was traveling up here for a week to do an interview with me about what I had seen and take in a kind of snapshot about how my life was going.
We spent a lot of time sitting in the back yard while I smoked and answered her questions which never seemed to stop. This went on for days. Sometimes she followed me to the IPRC and sometimes out to the bar, like the night that her and Danny and I went way up north on our bikes to meet this girl named Amy that I had a date with. Later that night we went to the bar after Justine left and a guy came up to us and asked us if we believed in magic. Then he put his cigarette out in his hand.
I was in a pretty dismal place and I didn’t paint a very pretty picture of myself. I didn’t want to paint a pretty picture of myself. None of us did anything pretty down there. I was sick of people feeling sorry for me because I had seen some gross things. I wanted to be put down on record as the self-centered lazy person that I knew that I had been that allowed and even participated in more than one totally uncalled for circus of violence. I treated her like my personal therapist, telling her every rotten detail of the few things that I could remember.
She stayed an extra week. I met her friends, all of them artists, all of them very sorted out people.
She left the morning after she hung out with Katy and I while we gave both sides of the story of how we had happened and what had happened to us while we were staring daggers at each other in a loving way.
Then one night I went out dancing with this beautiful, tall, nerdy girl named Sara whom I had met at the IPRC. She came back to Fang House with me. When we woke up in the morning the world was covered in snow. It was beautiful and clean. The perfect kind of snow to hold hands in. We joked about how many one night stands had turned into love affairs with the coming of this unprecedented phenomenon that ground the city to a halt. We walked through the virgin snow to the grocery store a mile or so away and bought groceries with my new food stamp card and walked back. Somewhere in that walk I think we fell in love with each other.
While we were eating lunch one day at the Sushi go-round she suggested that she could buy a ticket so that she could come with me on this trip to help document the stories. I agreed making her promise that she understood that I couldn’t help her with the money at all. In this way we made a totally insane plan.
She would meet me in London.
We stayed in love for the next few days. There was a lot of cooking and cozy hanging out with her roomates. Then she left for California and the next time I would see her would be across the ocean.
The zine release and screen printing party finally came around. I had a greyhound ticket for the very next morning. I covered the walls with my assorted sketches and random writings, paper birds made out of combat paper and old Sears Robbuck advertisements. One corner of the room was designated as the paper-bird folding party. The screen printing was a disaster because I had no idea what I was doing and I had come completely underprepared but people were gracious and forgiving and everybody talked amongst themselves and it was very nice to see people pulled together under the auspices of art and war talking about projects that could happen. People were reading the zines. I had hand produced about 150 of them at a cost of something like one hundred dollars and by the end of the night I had about thirty of them left with only one lonely dollar in the ammo can I had bought to keep the funds in. They weren’t supposed to be free.
I walked away that night with a huge sore on my lip because I had an infection in my mouth. I walked through the snow all the way back to Fang House with the screens I had borrowed. When I got back I finished packing my bags and saying goodbye to the things I would not be taking and I went to bed.
The next morning I woke up early, gathered my things, said goodbye to Danny who was up and drinking coffee and I left the house. I took the bus down to the Greyhound station. There was a long line of people waiting to get out of Portland and they were looking very grumpy. i had a feeling in my stomach. Somebody told me the busses were not running until the mountain passes were clear.
Those busses didn’t move for eight more days. I spent Christmas day at Patrick’s place, drunk by noon while this guy Jim took some photos of me that he’d been begging for for a long time. Dinner was chili but I was still a vegetarian. I was so sick and exhausted and ready to be gone but it just wouldn’t end.
Then finally the snow cleared and I got on that bus in the morning and by the 28th, after 60 hours of being in those damned seats, we finally pulled into that iron monstrosity that I could never get out of my mind. Fucking Chicago.
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