Author (#23)September 2005 Archives

I can't forget this.
A blazing day in the Midwest, swampy and suffocating. I left my pillow at the Motel 6 that morning, that was disturbing because I looked long at it before I walked off without it. Pink geranium pillowcase. We were eating at Quiznos when I realized I forgot it. I think it was Wyoming. I can't remember the states at all. I called Jamie and Caralee but they did not answer so no rescue. I lost my heirloom sweater days before in Arizona. Before I lost it I said it would be a curse if I ever lost it. I think this strange man stole it. When I first started talking to him I thought he was 60 but then I realized he was 18. He was very dirty. He took off his shoes and his socks were crusted and his eyes were dim but he was not crazy. I started shouting at him when he asked me too many times to sing a song. He sang me several songs while I tried to read Robert Anton Wilson's "Ishtar Rising." I carried that book around for a month but did not read it. He acted like a sociopath until I shouted at him to leave me alone, but still he clung to me whispering or trying to ruin painting art or I guess, stealing my sweater. It disappeared and he seemed like a character written into my tour to steal my sweater, so Phoenix in August is the best moment to shed the Zombie sweater. I promised Chris Rapucci that I would return that sweater, but I've worn it every day for a year and a half instead. My Louis Vuitton white knockoff is also a casualty, two cheap handles amputated. I didn't even get a bruise and I think once a screendoor surprised me and hit me in the cheek. I drank 8 cups of herbs a day and was my herbs were examined at the Canadian border when they searched our van and also questioned us about Satanic DVDs.

I almost forgot about when I had to buy a new pillow at Walmart and the sun was punishment and near the carts were baby kittens on the pavement. These Girl Scout-types were trying to unload kittens. They looked just tragic wilting on the unbearable pavement, but they were toddling and smiling. I tried to shield them from the sun and I considered getting one. A lady was standing there calling her Grandma to tell her that she was getting a kitten and the lady looked OK. I walked into Walmart and made putrid faces. A lot of parents were being mean to their kids and it was the whole Back to School vomit. I slept with my Nedelle Tshirt on the pillow for a week until I found a pillow case in Oberlin Ohio. I found it in a Thrift Store, which was actually just a junky house where a junkhound husband and wife were eating lunch. They had a lot of Bill Cosby records. The store had a clothing section jammed in the back, which was oddly outfitted with really ugly shabby 80s mom dresses and then a couple of extremely good conditioned ugly 50s dresses. I found my pillowcase there, it looks yellow and maybe kitschy Dutch.

On our way into Canada we were well rested. We spent time in Vermont. We visited Pete's aunt, who makes lace. Her middle name is Viking. Her husband works at a mental hospital and has books about its history. They used to keep sheep and had a barn. Then we played a very small very expensive college in an elegant barn with spooky vacant rooms. We have pictures. I had a private moment in one of the music buildings bathrooms. The music building was wide open, eerie and quiet. There was a beautiful entrance with wooden carvings and filtered water and cups. We slept at a sterile student co-op and I slept under the stairs because the living room was a snoring chamber. The next day we drove for a while and stopped at rest stop and stretched and I left a bag in the bathroom that said ACID, MUSHROOMS, POT BROWNIE. We crossed the border and our inspection agent was some kind of mining enthusiast, going to Colorado for gems. When I was in Colorado I walked with a bum for 15 minutes while he tried to convince me that Central Park is bigger than Denver. The customs agent loved Gabe and after they combed my every belonging and ignored everything else but a couple of Satan kitsch DVDs, they let us through and we played a great show at La Sala Rosa in Montreal. I danced all night. Pete sadly slept in the car right after the performance because he hadn't felt good since he puked an entire bottle of Gatorade into a plastic bag just as we rolled into Montreal. Somebody told me that when I dance I look like a baby raccoon. I drank Ricard all night and I liked purring "merCI!" back and forth with the bartender.

We were eating chimichangas in Dever at about 8:30 pm, with margaritas and cooks who were ready for the restaurant to close, and a coyote galloped past the outdoor dining. We ran into the band Battleship in a low moment at 10 am in Fargo. We were cranky and about to start a 20 hour drive. I was giving the silent treatment but nobody noticed. I was going on a hunger strike because the faux health food restaurant I considered eating at had Christian slogans on their menus and it smelled vile. It's prickly to feel this strongly about Christians. We walked out of this coffeshop and in a big surprise the band Battleship suddenly jumped out of their battered van, at the end of their 20 hour drive. We played at a microbrewery with beer so strong that David and I got in trouble for trying to get into the clocktower as Tupac played on the jukebox. We thought we had permission. There were two rooms for shows at opposite ends of the brewery and Yellow Swans were nauseatingly loud on one side of the building and a honky tonk band playing a three-hour set including "Happy Birthday."

I'm going to work at Emily tomorrow. I'm in Oakland. I wrote this during White Rice dance practice at Huffin House. We had Josh Ploeg dinner, there was cashews and apricots and celery. I'm going farming in a couple of days. I had another inedible burrito in San Francisco. In Minneapolis a Rwandan man with dry lips lured me into conversation and I walked into a dollar store where a group of Entriean women were shouting at the man behind the counter and then a man in a wheelchair told me he liked my walk. I have to write that or else I'll forget.

Isn't the moon rusty these days and isn't the sun, as it sets, a soup of marigold and orange cat? Today all of the life in the valleys of Ohio were filmy with invisible water. The Amish people filled their somber carriages with pregnant striped watermelons. The pigs snouted out fresh breath, in an avalanche of flesh in a truck trailor, on their way to get cut. We are playing a couple of rural college dates in the Midwest, and it's all self-conscious blondes and yogurt. We are meeting college kids at their integral moment, when their cawly fawn legs first step. They are charmingly nervous. Today, in the bathroom at Oberlin College, I changed my clothes and knotted my hair for evening. A teenage girl came into the bathroom and nervously joined me before the mirror, but in her stutter and titter, walked into one of the stall doors on the way out, letting out a mortified chortle.

I guess I can write again. Good. Wow. For a couple of days, I just drowned in the details. Nothing was memorable. It started to feel looped, wrinkled in time. Now, I know I will be in Portland a week from tomorrow. I should have kissed that red head last night, it was a kiss made by four years and I did not make it!

I am so happy to be prancing again. Last night David and I did an interpretative dance to Xiu Xiu with a broom and a dust pan. Last night Eliot and I drank Chimay and Framboise on the porch in Bloomington. The witchy days are coming, friends. The days when the moon bares its biggest breast for the picking of the pumpkin. The days when the fields rejoice because they are ripe with death. The monarchs are flying from Ohio to Mexico. One wrapped around the grill of our minivan and is now in my journal. I will take it close to Mexico, to California. I am ambling.

I'm in Muncie, Indiana.

I dreamed last night that I was resting on a rock in a remote country, and some cowboys arrived with horses and ponies. They gave me a horse and encouraged me to ride into this field of sunflowers. The sunflowers were adult, and their heads were starting to bow. I was about to ride into the field and get my face licked by the petals, but I guess I woke up then. At 9:30 am, when I needed far far more sleep. Instead I walked to a coffeeshop and asked this guy where the health food store was and he said, "What's that?"

I haven't been writing at all on this tour. My energy has been a bare trickle, I even have to almost force myself to jump and laugh at the shows. It's always worth it, but its strange not to have the magical calorie. I left Portland full of jubilee, with a glaze of sunshine on my skin, capable of climbing any mountain to lick the snow cap, but now I feel the tour vampire at my jugular. Pale from day after day in the craft ambling on the interstate, achy from inertia, sleep deprived, cranky from the friction of the most twisted repitition. I am in a waking coma, one loud dream. The details are flaking away. Let me remember this: In Columbus, in between two gas stations whose gallons were 30 cents priced different, a blind man stuttered his body on a 5 lane street until a lame-livered police man meekly rescued him. Maybe it's because I am hungry, maybe it's because I am in a room full of people having another conversation, but I can't really remember anything else. Montreal is great. New York was strong. We had the best pizza in the world, prepared by hand by a man who uses his arthritic hands to pluck the herbs from his windowsill and his bare palm even cradles the food straight from the oven. Olives from Sicily, dough mixed with water from an Italian tap. Really great. But I really desire is a meal with friends from a Portland farmers market. On this tour, we actually have stipends to spend at health food restaurants around the country, but even in that decadence, my body misses the little splendidness of routine. Oatmeal in the morning. Also, I am desperate to not speak for 24 hours.

Also in New York: Xiu Xiu sold out the Bowery Ballroom. I stood backstage behind Jamie and Caralee while they played this song in which Caralee gets the dark wheeze going on the harmonium and Jamie abuses a snare while breathlessly and sickly describing how he would rape George Bush to death. Jamie's intensity on the drum was so powerful that the snare just hopped off the stand. I looked at the audience, they were rapt, he continued a capella.

We are always driving and practicing constant and unintentional tardiness. Playing all-ages shows at big clubs means you have to arrive for soundchecks at around 5 or 6 pm. If you have a drive over 4 hours, that means sleep deprivation and rush and hustle. It is difficult.

I wrote this as we were rushing out of Toronto. I was very sour about it, we couldn't even eat our breakfast at the cafe. Of course we could, I was angry! Why couldn't we just enjoy our leisure for even 20 minutes in the early morning, just over a baguette? We left very very early and were still late! These are my thoughts as we departed:

At 8 am, all the pretty girls are waiting for buses or thudding like barelegged ponies down the sidewalks of the big cities. I wonder at that hour why there are so many of the prettiest girls, with pert nipples visible under rayon, with the erect calf muscles hoofing with grace in pumps, at that hour, when I think they all should be putting their lids into pillows of soft linens until at least 11. But I realize that not all the pretty girls are rich girls, though most of them act like it. What a perversion of nature and the fault of flu-like culture, when those endowed with the comely special symmetry to become taxidermied dummy of royalty, doing their shopping smugly. But the single beauties of the late nights are the account reps of the early mornings----the Visa bill becomes a guillotine when a ticket to see Coldplay costs $70 and brand-new, non-used Diesel jeans do cost a lot of money, and fuck frock bills from Forever 21 will add up, and up and up when your sculpted-polyester dresses are rubbish after an accident with a pomegranite martini or stubborn pesto or a simple blemish from a Marlboro Ultralightest.

Forgive my vinegar! GOOD NIGHT.