2-22-08 Bloomington, IN
Now is loud instrumental music from some local Bloomington band in Bear's Place- a wholesome, everybody knows each other's name joint.
We sat and played cards- first war, between jon and i, then poker with patrick and charlie. A girl forcing herself to appear attractive comes around to offer us free whiskey. She is wearing little clothing, and i find her totally offensive and repulsive. {now the band is actually ripping, duel solo riffs and people are pumped} She lingers around us, partly because we are near the fire, and partly for her own reasons i suppose. I'm surprised at how well i am able to ignore her, how i don't feel any need to be polite, and how little i think about the whole situation in general.
I'm just writing because i'm feeling a ticking to do something, and it's freezing cold icy hell outside. I came in here to talk to the kids in the other bands when the show started.
One more thing: a beautiful moment, after we pulled off the highway, coming to our first traffic light after after all day of 75mph: how the slowing to a stop at a red light can make you feel at home anywhere in the world.
2-27-08
I don't know what's going on- i can't follow much this time around. I don't know where we stayed last night- we drove a bit outside minneapolis, and i fell asleep and just stumbled into a hotel when they woke me up.
I listened to Radiolab and it took my mind to amazing corners and pockets. Something that is sticking with me: the idea that scientists make human beings small, insignificant, not special. And it seems to be the job of the artist to turn that around- to say "no, hey- we are spectacular and fascinating and at the center of everything."
All the world's timeline on a single human hair...
Charlie is asking about primary results, and i get that palpable feeling of history and everything around me takes on significance.
I forgot about the bartender- a few nights ago in milwaukee. Maybe mid 40s, but still very good-looking for her age (she- the perfect candidate, falling into this job because it is exactly what suites her- because she was born beautiful and she's used to the attention and her beauty defining her). She got drunk and was crazy.
2-29-08
Denver. Friday night. I drove in the bleak kansas night looking for a hotel, which finally popped up around 4am. Then, we were up and on the road fairly early. I am exhausted, going against all that should embody a friday night. All i've been doing is sitting down in the green room on a familiar vintage couch- rough green stitches of cushions and detailed wooded arms- reading and getting lost in the book, or sometimes lost in my own thoughts.
And, as always, reading a good book inevitably leads to me wanting to write more. Also, im just bombarded with thought and stimuli, being in this position of a "touring musician." There is lots to communicate- like how i instantly assimilate to this green room- it has become my living room, and im comfortable and thoughtless of it's dimensions, contents, history. And when i get up from the couch and walk up the stairs to the club, it's the most natural gesture, as if i've been doing it my whole life.
But once i write about it, it all seems like nothing. And like im missing all the really good stuff. And partly, i realize that whatever i do write is to just jog the memory- to get it to where it needs to be to start hallucinating and recalling these visions and memories stored (today: sleeping all across kansas; how i look for places i've been to before and why revisiting a place has become this weird validation or measurement for progress in my life; the way patrick looked at me when he came down here and adjusted his pants and examined himself in the mirror; the way kids in a gas station hold their gaze on you just long enough for you to feel a senseless pang of disbelief at the vast differences in your lives at the present moment; etc etc)
3-1-08
I'm too excited. Do you know what it's like to drive through Wyoming on Route 80? It's insane! Things happen in the sky, and with the sun and its relationship to the ground and its surfaces- and they are just unreal. You feel like anything can happen. Last time we did this drive, out of nowhere, an invisible alchemist's mix must have sent the sky into a crazy reaction- there was this instant transformation of color. And you were just basked in the most unusual, eerie light. It lasted about one minute and forty seconds, i'd say, and just faded away in a heartbeat like it was no big deal.
So now i'm reading, but the blood in my brain tingles with anticipation of what might happen. And- it's just hard to keep from looking up from the book and out onto that vast landscape. It looks stippled, with snow cover diminishing and almost gone. The round little pokes of bushes and shrubs that are everywhere are now highlighted, having the ground all around them completely erased in a sense.
We stopped at Anong's in Rawlins again. I like when you're in a place where you can't feel or sense the air, but then you catch something that gives it away: this small piece of dust that hung out about an inch from behind this large painting on the wall. It waved back and forth in an erratic rhythm that personified it, made it cute, or what my friend's sister would refer to as "little" (like "look at that little piece of dust!") because things which are endearing, no matter what their size, she will put the word little in front of.
So this piece of dust waved and wiggled at me, and i thought of all these moments I've shared with little things caught in a magical sway and giving away some mystery of the world. And i thought of werner herzog, because he gets these things, too.
Also, i wondered if the dust were making minute erosions on the wall, akin to the plants and shrubs you see dangling over concrete walls on highways, which etch patterns of their range of motion when they are blown in the relentless wind whipped into existence by the eternal strand of cars rushing to and fro. Or like yucca plants in the white sands of New Mexico, etc
You know what i'm talking about?
3-2-08
Sometimes i feel a quiet stand off between myself and the earth. It's like i can sense the cynical inner thoughts of the earth's brain, and its knowledge that humans and our inventions are the lop-offable top of the pyramid of existence.
And it's like looking at some predator- a hippo, maybe, submerged up to its eyes, which glare back at you in an almost-but-not-quite hideous way. This is what i feel as we roll down highways and catch fragmented glimpses of the earth and sky and hills from my backseat-sleeping vantage point.
I also picture this one day when the earth gives a giant shudder and just simply rids itself of all human evidence- like a dog shaking itself when dripping wet.
