When times are good and peaceful and happy, when life is engaging and purposeful seeming, yet simple, it is often the case that there is just less to write about. Spending lots of time agonizing over the why’s and wherefore’s of life is tied to Fear, the sickness unto death. It’s been said by others before, but times of peace are not usually times I write, historically.
I’ve also spent a lot of my life diving from one brain-wracking anxiety to the next, trying to manage various traumas such as have been inflicted on me and ones which I have inflicted upon others. The last few months have not resembled this pattern and my first response to that was to simply soak it up and love it and live. It is a beautiful thing to have by your side someone who you trust, who you can speak easily to of anything and in turn hear anything of; to have such company and be on a long and motiveless adventure across unfamiliar lands is the Sky Gate. For me at least, it amounts to a long hike across Bifrost and it has been pure good to see what can be next, what is distant, what is empty and silent and vast and raised far above and beyond human affairs. I know what Good is, all over again.
It is time for me to get to Work again and happily. We will see what comes now from working upward, not just digging myself out maybe for once. There is a fair amount of backtracking to be done to catch up on how I arrived here in Portland, Oregon and what it was that drove me here. Today I’ll just sum up: I fell in love with somebody who makes everyone around her feel alive and excited, which reminded me how not in love and alive I let myself become in attempts to fulfill a promise of commitment. That went well and madly, it was a summer of black whirlwind last year.
My perennial home in Maine was bought and is now slated to be bulldozed and replaced with a convention center, hotels and a sports stadium. Attempts to find another, at length, were a failure: I refuse to pay rent and not be at least able to play the music I live to play, full volume, at any time; no such place was to be found, for rent or purchase.
Summer’s end was exhausting and trying for me and for Joanna. I became desperate, lonely and sad, got drunk and did something incredibly stupid and out of character. It hurt everyone involved, the days got shorter, darker, colder and everything drifted apart. I lived without heat and without warmth, realizing how deeply influenced I am by those I love (and this is not cause to be solitary, but cause to be stronger, honest and really a bit more careful with myself and my body). I bought up half of Joanna’s awesome truck Charlie and she used some of that money with other money to start a long and awesome adventure. I prepared myself to fly to Arizona, rendezvous with my best friend who was having a hellish time and was sorely missed at home, then do a quick tour of the Southwest and end in Texas for the somewhat ill-fated / ill-planned 4 day metal festival, Rites of Darkness III.
I found my buddy almost inconsolable, but the frigid and barren desert to be fucking medicinal. I stared out a long and blue window across many roads and smoked many cigarettes while we wound our way through frozen sands, snow and creosote to jagged vagrant spires and concealed hot springs. We made our slow way and much Norwegian metal was absorbed across many miles. The festival was magical for me… I went there with a disgust for the things that I had once loved in my heart, really a loathing for myself and my own weaknesses. I came away remade and bathed in a pure desire to just do it again. A pure desire… to make song and share it, which is as unstoppable as any pure desire.
I left my friend, to fly home and return to work and to tell my friends there that I would be leaving in spring for a new home out west, on the edge of a cliff. We talked, I said what I thought was right and tried to help, but I didn’t know if I’d be getting to see him alive again and I’m not sure if he knew either. The night I flew home was the worst flight of my life… I fucking hate flying to begin with, but I was anxious and the black wind dropped us in huge breathless and shearing stops, turbulence wracked the frame, the trip was a misery and I caught the last bus to Maine, pulling in around 3am to walk the 1000 feet back from the bus terminal so I could crawl into my freezing truck bed and curl up on my camp pad to stay warm. Home. I got a phone call about 2 minutes after my head hit the pillow, from Tim Walker. I was not about to answer that… but that was it. Martin had taken his own life that day right around the time I took off from Moss’s house for the Austin airport.
Everything stopped. People, the community I had become a part of at Local Sprouts, was heartbreakingly tender and helpful. The Smith family showed me what a family is supposed to be, something I honestly never knew from my own experience. I was not as close to Martin as many who had worked there, but he was my friend and I loved him. I helped by covering shifts and just being there. 7 days in a row I would work, hang out before or after my shift, close up, drink beer at the bar alone and then sleep on the couch in the dining room. The winter solstice was the day picked for the memorial. I drove up to Turner the night before to help Sherwin and Carina ready for my favorite holiday, the Winter Solstice party up at their rehabilitated farm house. Really all I did was chop, boil and mix potatoes and get drunk while bathing in the warm glow of sad memories and holiday spirit channeled admirably by my always surprising and kind friends.
I sunk deep into the deep sinky colorless green-brown couch in their livingroom and dived gladly into oblivion.
It was raining when I awoke, rather late for my plans, around 10:15. Carina was quietly preparing breakfast, I said a goodbye, but she didn’t quite hear me and I didn’t have much of a voice that morning, so I spoke up and said it again. She turned around, a bit surprised to see me up and I said “Seeya later, I am going to Martin’s memorial in Windham. See you tonight.” “Yeah, see you tonight. Take care.” she replied, if I remember right. As Charlie was warming up, I made the decision to take the back way. Rather than drive down into Lewiston, then west through Minot / Mechanic Falls on 11 to connect with 26 (which is the normal way, which roads I had many times been down during the summer), I chose the rural 117-124 to 26 way. It was a ridiculously windy road and I got stuck behind a truck carrying a huge load of hay, going about 25.
It made me late and impatient, especially with Amon Amarth’s With Odin On Our Sides coming out of my speakers. I missed the right in Mechanic Falls and came across a road block. Apparently there had just been some epic 3-car wreck, so I turned around and went back the way I was supposed to anyways, now free of the hay truck. In front of me was some Prius type thing and we were cruising about 35. The speed limit outside M. Falls is 50 and as far as I could discern, it was still just raining, dumping buckets. This winter was not giving up snow, never really did this year, so it seemed to me that the driver ahead of me was being overcautious.
We got at last to a long, downhill straightaway with a broken line and I moved into the left lane. Charlie was a 94 F-150 with the sexy straight 6 engine, so she could pass people lickity-split from even low speeds. I accelerated to 50 and moved right up alongside them and heard a sound like very loud wind as I put my right blinker on to let them know I was moving back into their lane. My perspective imperceptibly shifted in some weird sickening way for a second. I really had no clue what was happening, but as the rotation increased in speed I realized I was spinning on the road surface.
Instantly I was sideways and falling at 50 mph downward at the black road and the culvert next to it and the utility pole beyond that. In the same instant I was crushing into the ground and upside-down. I remember having time to think, “Fuck, are you fucking serious?” and also a moment to tuck up into a ball as I felt the beginnings of pressure from the roof on the back of my neck and in my hair. I cleared the car and managed to drive the frame really hard into the hillside, stopping me well before the telephone pole. ‘Cry of the Black Birds’ was still coming out of the radio at full volume and the engine was still running. It took me a second to realize what had happened and the first thing I did was turn the volume down, while still upside down. It took me a bit longer to figure out how to work the seatbelt. I fell onto the ceiling, my head dragging in the glass. A man came over and started saying something I couldn’t hear. I figured out he wanted to break the window to get me out.
That made sense, the door was utterly crushed in. I moved beneath the stick and put my head down, facing the passenger side, he broke the glass and I crawled out.
There’s more, it’s a blur and I have to go to work.
But Max Alex came and got me in her Jeep, we made a magic solstice spell and then drove around the United States in that Jeep, and now I am living in Portland, Oregon and today she left to go back to Maine for the summer. Today is also the most full solar eclipse visible here in the states, especially here in the Pacific NW, since 1994, the year Charlie was built. Solar spells.
