It’s been a long fucking week but I go up to Turner anyways for Game Night on Saturday. This is mid-May, I am soon to be moved in so I’m trying to be there mentally. We play some trivia card game and then I force some Ker-Plunk and it’s awesome and has mad trash talking, which is what I like best.
The night devolves into drunken internet scouring and I am shown Drunk History. Nikola Tesla with Crispin Glover makes me laugh in convulsive fits and Linsey stops the video until I finish while Joanna and Sherwin laugh at me laughing. Some top-3-best-ever sex happens in the delirium of 3am after I get up to piss, we kill each other and I slide across the grey hum of sunrise in a liminal tone wall. Buzzing consciousness.
5:40 comes, I put on pants and climb in Diane and drive. Just north of Auburn I see a swath of roadkill on 4, I decide to turn around. It’s a raccoon and two porcupine, I cut the tail from the raccoon and throw her down the embankment to become dirt instead of get pulverized into the pavement.
I drive and I work my busy as fuck Sunday brunch. I finish tottering; perforce I take a 30 minute nap in Diane behind the loading dock before I can even drive the mile home. Justin and the old lords are having a talk in the parking lot. Leif, Jon, Gary. Justin hears my tale and wants to go for the rest of the carcass. It’s Mother’s Day, I got nothing else going on, so I agree if he drives.
Portland is being eaten by a fog wall to the east. This is how May/June usually goes, sunny all day with a massive fog mountain off-shore, which moves in by mid-afternoon to devour the Hill and then blanket the city in beautifully numbing grey. Kids playing basketball in the park, momentum. I doze. We stop in Yarmouth to check the old Highway Dept. roadkill dump, a mire of old death. They have stopped using it since I moved away. You used to see evaporating flesh, ribcages and sexy bent legs dripping with putrefaction rising from the black water. Gone.
I get three ticks from that stretch of woods, I find them all before I go to bed that night. Fuckers.
We find the bodies, drive to Shaw’s and trash bags, gloves, then scoop them up and bag them.
Then we eat cheeseburgers at Ray’s All-Steak Burgers. Our ‘friends’ are in the back and they are reeking pretty strong
by the time we finish eating and get back in the car. We drive to Brown Jct. to tag cars in a northbound string. Little has
changed,but not nothing. Even out here time moves.
We eat and sneak, our friends chill in the back. Spare bridges over icy spring floes, self-referential iron signs hang on the humming air in a wilderness blind to them, Justin feels at home. We tag.
I fade in and out the ride home, blue rushing, glaring haze in the fog.
That night we string them up from a tree on our abandoned walk in the swamp by home. We already have a tree that Justin has strung with bones and rotting deer legs, a doorway. We walk beneath the drying, pale fruit out an old earth jetty in the brackish wash to a further arbor. I pull myself up to a limb and we bind their paws together and string them and they reek with death even whole.
I can’t recall what the night consists of. I don’t sleep enough. Early we are up and we take our knives and gloves and go down into the swamp and begin emptying them of dead guts and organs. Makes your head spin, but they are gone, these are just the shells they once inhabited. Some hours are spent at this, I separate all of the racoon’s skin from her body and lay it out to scrape the fat off. 3 weeks later and I still haven’t finished, I might have fucked it up and the 10 days of rain certainly didn’t help me do it in a timely fashion.
Soon after Rodney comes with his dog to visit, another friend caught in the coincidental wave of break-ups and endings, he’s looking for company. We all sleep in the concrete cell, we sleep on the floor and on a couch in a bare stone cube, it’s beautiful, this is how we sleep. Rotting concrete.
The Altar
I buy my Ampeg v-4 and can finally play the music much closer to the way I want to hear it. I buy some distortion, a Brown Rabbit from Freakshow, fuck with it, things are sounding good and I am trying to move forward as quickly as possible into recording the EP. I get a nice condenser mic shortly after, it’s going to happen on my time.
I bring my things to Turner. I have this week where I play a show at midnight on a Wednesday and never go to bed, take a 5am bus to Boston, a T to Worcester and meet Owen. We shoot pictures for the graphic novel and talk a lot, we go to where my Mom lives and then I get home and then I drive to Lewiston to be with Joey. We slay each other and I die in sleep.
In the morning we pick dandelions and roam through the swamps and see fiddleheads and a tree whose bark was peeled in a long rind, in a spiral, from its top 60 feet above us, all the way to the base, perfect raw spiral, no explanation, we puzzle on it. We pick dandelions and eat chives out of the ground like cattle. We go to get Thai food and we swipe our own credit card because the english speaking son has left on delivery and the owner lady is trying to help us explain how we want to pay. She invites Jo behind the counter and she swipes her card and I pay cash and we try to come to an understanding and then the son comes back anyways.
I am late to work.
Something else keeps me up, the whole week is a fucking wash of work and exhaustion, I pick up a 5th shift, I take 55 hours, I move everything I own to Turner and party down with Sherwin, who finishes at Flatbread and then rips it open with a truth everyone agrees on but no one will admit to. I barely sleep still.
Finally it ends, I kick a door in and have to buy new knobs, second time in 3 months, I buy locks, I buy hinges, I go to the old place and try to clean up but she has barely packed. Can’t be around me right now. 5 years crashes down between us and we can’t hear each other in the din, I go away while she finds the strength to finish doing the goddamn job and packs up and goes.
I work one more night and come at 11:30 to clean. Out by 1:30, sleep 4 hours, back in the morning to finish off, go down to DHS to get food money, get food, bank, gas, drive out. Jo is sick, I stay with her and we talk about what we have to and it is beautiful and great and my life just gets more involved and I love it more for all its impossible contradiction and conflict of interest.
I finally come up to the farm for days off.
First night, up til 2 playing New Tetris. You go your whole life thinking you are decent and then you meet this amazing beautiful person and they crush you, like by 100 lines, in a marathon game of Tetris. Fucked. Not giving up, such a good problem to have.
This drafting table is a perfect thing. It is made of 9 planks, a board, 6 screws, 6 nuts, two clamps, two bars, 2 hinges and two fitted tab-and-slot braces. Everything about it can be made or replaced with simple hand tools, it doesn’t even really need to have metal but all the metal parts can be fabricated with the simplest shop operations.
I spend all day packing and reorganizing the grid of tools and gear I own. It is a measure of success in my life that everything I have fit inside and on my drafting table, in crates like so. I have made a few exceptions over the last few years as I make new things, but I try hard to stick to it, especially where hand tools are concerned. The bikes, my guitar gear, big tools or instruments I’ve made, they can be exempted, but all the clothes and paper and paint and chisels and knives and hammers and sleeping bags and stoves should fit in this monolith. I make it so. I soak the now over-dried raccoon pelt in acidic water, hoping to soften it up again. I unpack the dried seagull feet from January’s Martha’s Vineyard, clay cliffs with another Justin. I perform the necessary rituals.
I finish and nap for two hours, I am still exhausted in deep, at the bone, and need to recover for weeks.
I awake and make a drink of lime and orange and tequila and go trample out a circle in the meadow and I watch the liquid smoking rainclouds flow over the dark green country hills in a fluid elegy to the ground of Grails. What a rarified time… music from a polished metal stone with crystal screen and rare magnet slices, sinews of deep distant mountains, cleaned and stripped and concentrated.
Why do we do any of this? How can we gain control of our passage through the world and why do wicked people with money and power shape so much of it? How do we know ourselves, or more, forget ourselves and become consumed by the full living lungs of the Earth around us? There is a hole in clouds to a ripping austere pale far above, searing with empty peach light that strikes nothing so how could I know it’s there, how could I know it’s peach? The release is called Skygate.
