Author (#23)October 2005 Archives

Little horses of the sea
wetting their cowlicks on the holiday Friday
falling asleep in the sun’s crescendo
capturing the orange coral and young thunder

We went to the beach in San Clemente on Friday morning. I wore the yellow dress into the ocean, thank you Meghan. The beach was almost all children, there were few parents. I saw a baby shark dwelling in a shallow area. I jumped and wanted to swim very bad, but I didn’t have anything suitable for the water. I wet my skin with the ocean wash and licked it off my arm. The waves lapped a little higher and the teens folded into the waves and the yellow dress was soaked on the bottom. I wore my new sunglasses. I bought them the night before on Hollywood Boulevard before we played the Knitting Factory, right when Nick heard a Michael Jackson impersonator tell somebody to shut up. In Williams, Arizona, I walked down the Motel 6 hallway and walked past a devious 8 year old girl, who grinned with all her teeth and reached up to the payphone and jammed the 7 button a couple of times with indescribable intention and a powerful focus on me.
Improvised music is not easy, it is difficult. The rewards are the pulp of ecstacy. As players, we are getting to know each other. I am on tour right now with Jackie O Motherfucker. I am singing. Our first two dates were with The Dirty Three at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco and the Knitting Factory in Los Angeles. We played a show on Friday in San Diego and now we are headed to Dallas for a show on Wednesday. On Saturday in San Diego, I got very stoned and spun a spook weave for these kids I met at a party, entertaining them with vittles of apocalyptic predictions until their faces puckered with sadness. I felt like Karl, as passionate and as devistating! Then, so sadly and mysteriously that night, I lost the keys to the van. This is the twin disappointment to my other loss at the end of the Yellow Swans tour. At the Portland show, I lost some of the merch money, which itched me, you know. I feel this San Diego key mystery is still unsolved, I think it will show up. Luckily, we had another key, but I lost the lock clicker. The kids I was predicting suffering to at that party ended up giving me a ride home and strangely, they couldn’t find their keys as we were trying to leave. The boy looked and looked and I suggested he just check around the periphery of his car; maybe he dropped them. We went to the car and voila, they were on the sidewalk next to the car. Please, let me have the same happy ending, I can’t stand to lose something, I hate invisible baggage.

You are Theo.
I am Napoleon.
She is Chandelier.
Pretty valley in secret country, grafts of blonde and black-green trees. See the red cross from the chopper, see the sleepy bosses and the breakfast cereal. The pretty forest dotted with mezcal pissings and lizards and puppies. There is a sleeping German shepherd near me, a whole circle of barbers, men are acting in a grotesque florescence, the Benji puppy is looking at me. The German shepherd is sleeping and I can see the red of its eyes.
Nearby, a blemish turns into a town and it makes its dough from tofu in the summer and autumn. I am talking in curlicues so just read me.
Nice glittering morning under a curtain of laughs and light, disguised from federal agencies.

Good morning.

We have the umbilicle here in Secrecy, we have a wire that goes down the road past the gates and it feeds into the mouths of the California capillaries and voila my voice has the amp and you can see what I say.

A bird songed into my ear and I woke up but went back to bed. I had a dream that I was at a demure party in the daytime and a typewriter floated up to me in the swimming pool. It had a message that I did not read, but I knew that it meant terrorism. I started running as the house exhaled delicate sprouts of flame. Then the dream steered toward the same room I have been visiting lately while sleeping, with the same person.

Yesterday we drove through Willits California and we saw a metal parking lot show. METAL SHOW $10 MOSH AT YOURE OWN RISK. It was 5 pm and the kids were already lining the tarp, with their heavy pants and cumbersome hair. On tour I saw Wolf Eyes and Black Dice in Cleveland. The show was blanketed with shifty boys, cold and quiet until I incited them to trampoline during Wolf Eyes and our jumping really saved the day because that performance just refused to climax. Anyway, this kid was passing out flyers between the bands' sets and he had a devilock that was basically a disability. It bisected his vision and made him look really sinister. He was another one of those noise boys that can't make eye contact, but his heart was sweet and the flyers were for a show honoring his friend who died when he innocently mixed a sleeping pill with a couple of beers. RIP.

On tour at 2 am in St. Louis, two teenage kids interviewed me for their zine. We were drinking gin and 7UP. Their first question: "What do you love the most?" In Montana, near a rest stop I saw a facial tattoo man emerge from a carpet of pine, unknown, but I saw him.