Side B

Last night reminded me of Detroit July, when it is so hot that even the parents are restless past midnight. Minutes slime by with palsy. I remember being 12 years old and spending summer nights on my trundle bed staring into my cat’s face. My dad threw baseballs at beehives. My sisters galloped with boys in fields of Queens Anne’s lace and made games with forklifts and avalanches with sytrofoam insulation. Our backyard was the yard for my dad’s construction business and it was a delight boys paradise. We had pyramids of brick, forklifts, big trucks, an Army dumptruck.
I remembered the other day the first time I rode a bike. As I gained speed I lost control and nosed into a tree, pedaling into the trunk, yelling, “I can’t stop!”

My first car accident was kind of like that, but it also involved a drunk driver who climbed into the backseat and took me and my boyfriend hostage. The other driver was a 40-year-old construction guy. He bullied me into fleeing the scene and driving him to his parents’ house. He was very drunk and locked us out of the house. I rang the doorbell and his mother answered. We called the police together. The police came and laughed at me in my ripped tights and my boyfriend, who had a mohawk so exuberant that he could not drive a car because his hair penetrated the foam ceiling.

I went to the river yesterday and sunned on the silverest rock, in a bowl of fierce water. A duo of high school boys were riding the rapids over and over. I dipped into the water and got stuck in the quick and fought a strength, gripping onto slick rocks to avoid being washed away. One of the boys came down the rapids and got stuck too and I said, “You are so crazy, you will do anything!” because those boys were just not afraid of skull disruption or any kind of lung oppression when springing into this fierce water. The boy had “Amanda” tattooed right above his nipple in a tender cursive.

Nick helped me mix side B of Inca Ore. It is 18 minute vocals. I was so pleased with it that I clapped. Nick fell asleep, which is the highest compliment, like he said. While we listened, I had a memory of when I was 18, working as a newspaper reporter. It was damp and hot, August. I visited a woman in a suburb for future chemotherapy recipients. She was an advocate for disabled children. Her child was very disabled, in a way I can’t remember. I visited her in her antiseptic kitchen, in an enviornment so bland that there was not even a climate surprise. She was locked in with children at noon, in rooms dead with cheap newness. Where I grew up, all of the houses were brand new, the schools filled and then overfilled with new people in new houses, living in barren settlements with chem grasses and infant trees. I grew up in an old neighborhood, surrounded by little blueberry U-pick places and apple orchards, in an old house my dad sculpted into a strange palace over the years. (He would say, “Hmmm, maybe we should extend the house right here.” And the next day, men would wake us at dawn, chipping away at the brick.)

There were many little forests and rickety farms, where my grandparents were raised, but they were all shaved. The roads were blood-stained from all of the creatures kicking the bucket on the asphalt. The skeletal barns were collapsed and all character was swept and subdivisions sprouted. There were no more sheep, but many more friends, who lived in those permanently windy settlements that smelled like paint. These houses had no ghosts or ancestors. These kids were nihilists who dug their own graves on acid.

So, mixing my music and having this chill of memory, of this very unhappy woman toiling in the dwellings that my home region is now paved with, was a reward, and a remembrance of why I am so far away from every one of all of them. In this perspective, ahhh, I have made the right decisions. But the daily prayers continue: please no bicycle accident, please no future root canals, please no theives, please let me have a tourniquet for when the vampires open the blood vessels.

The new Boredoms album is amazing, it’s like back scratching.

I am playing a couple of shows this week:
Tuesday 1 pm at Anthem Records 828 SE 34th (free)
with Fursaxa and Traveling Bell
Tuesday evening at Holocene in a collaboration with World, also with Daniel Menche, Jean Paul, Reno, GOD, GEESE
Wednesday night at Dunes, as a duo with Eric Crespo’s guitar sounds, also with Tunnels, Malamute and Sisprum Vish (free)
Friday at Holocene with Mark Evan Burden, DJ ASSCLAPP, Sex With Girls, Pocket Parade, Redbird (free)
Friday will be very special because my 21-year-old sister Lauren will be in town and my favorites from Oakland will be visiting: Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon and Rob Enbom. Jackie is the keeper of my favorite cat, Gregory. I am only here for two more weeks before I depart for Oakland and then go on tour with Yellow Swans and Xiu Xiu and Nedelle.