friday the thirteenth

cape vincent, friday the thirteenth.

we pulled in to town later than expected, darius and i, in his van, finding the streets blocked off in the little town for the french festival the next day. we arrived to meet up with our friend jacob, who had been living out there over the summer, doing colonial house restoration and building rifles from the revolutionary war era. his friend tony owns some businesses in town, and we're to meet jacob at a bar, where darius has promised me that we'll be well taken care of. pulling in around 11 or so, darius is trying to regain his bearings in the little town, with the streets blocked off. but it's a little town, without a lot of ways to go around, so we find our way into a parking lot behind a bar, i'm not sure where we're supposed to go, i'm just following, don't know if we gotta walk all the way down these streets or anything. but no, we're right next to the place, and step inside, looking around for our friend. he's sitting by the door, we miss him and walk right by. here he is grinning at us, and i'm the first to notice him. he stands up and embraces me, pats me on the back and shakes my hand, and darius too.

the three of us have been on the road together before, running around new york, to baltimore, and generally just all over the area, a few years ago, the first time i came in to NYC. and we're going to do it again, go down to the city in a couple days. just a short trip, not too long, darius wants to get back up to potsdam, and i'm sort of just along for the ride.

jacob is introducing us to the bartender women, and all the pretty girls - he seems to know all the pretty girls darius is saying to me, and we go outside, and he introduces us to the menfolk as well, and they all seem to be in with him too. he is well liked. he introduces us to tony who owns the bar, and tony makes us feel at home, gets us big cups of beer, and people are standing around outside of the bar, smoking cigarettes drinking their beers, and it's like new orleans or something, you can walk around with your beer, must be the only town in new york state. don't know if it's just for this festival this weekend or what.

jacob explains to me that the festival, called "french festival" or something, happens every year, and is actually in reference to the feact that napoleon bonaparte was once going to move out to this town, cape vincent, and that his brother was already out there, that's why napoleon was going to come. so every year they have a parade and marching bands, and all these people come across the ferry over the st lawrence from kingston and elsewhere from canada and come down to cape vincent and hang out for the weekend. and get wasted too, i guess.

we spend the night drinking, and BSing, and having a generally merry time, until it's late, and we go back to jacob's parents house, with a few extra beers, and i spend the night on a fold out bed, after eating some bread and meat, and cheese.

---

saturday, july 14th

we wake up late, like 2 in the afternoon, i was having weird dreams about zombies and airplanes, and darius was feeling under the weather. we'd missed the morning parade, missed the opportunity to take pictures of the parade, thats what darius does, taking pictures with his big telephoto lens all the time, but we went out back to the bar/restaurant anyway, to soak up the scene and witness the strangeness. lots of people milling about, marching bands and bagpipes guys everywhere, vendors on the sides of streets. i was concerned with trying to write journals about the days before in potsdam, so i spent some time doing that in the day, and hiding outside of a cafe that jacob had worked on restoring, he'd hand painted the welcome sign in a calligraphy style with no guides, all free hand, and everyone was amazed they said, well the cafe was selling stuff thru the front door but they had it blocked off with a table so you couldn't go in, so i hid in the bar, and sat on a stool, banging the keys trying to get caught up with our trip. darius was feeling ill and laid down in some grass. jacob and i talked to tony about it, said perhaps we should get some food in us, and tony put in some orders for us at his restaurant, very kind. we ate a free lunch, and afterwards dar started to feel better and he went around taking some pictures. jacob went to find an ATM and one of the only ones in town was totally out of cash. the other one had mysteriously stopped working. so tony did a cash back charge for him on the card machine in the bar.

i walked around and took some pictures of funny signs, and looked at strange north country people. a drum line group of sailors in training for her royal majesty's service paraded, beating their instruments. then bag pipers, and steel drummers, and more, and finally all the bag pipers collided together, marching around, and everyone close in around them to listen to amazing grace and so forth. the announcer, over the loudspeaker feedbacking bagpipe noise, closed the ceremonies and many of those marching band peoples went home for the night.

the rest of us went to the bar, and i helped tony and some other guys do things like, relocate a portipotty, and wall off the smoking/21+ section for the outside of the bar, with orange plastic roll up fencing. there was supposed to be a band playing on a trailer set up outside, but the rain had started to pick up and scared everyone in. the band van showed up and started hauling their equipment in. a pressurized keg beer stand truck was opened up, and manned by tony's cousins. i stood around with dar and jacob and we watched the people filter in and out, small town, having a good time.

i made the most half hearted attempts to talk to women. they were all married or whatever. i talked to a couple, a woman in a pirate shirt (with a gold tooth painted on the front) and her husband, an army guy who flew helicopters, and used to manage a space camp for kids, they were nice. she worked for tony at one of his businesses and was talking about how she didn't understand where he had the energy, watching him fly around dealing with situations as they developed, setting up his outside bar. i told them about how i was a traveling poet. they called me on it, and asked me to prove it. so i read them something, a piece i wrote a while ago on an airplane, from san francisco to minneapolis. they were impressed, and she bought a book of poems off of me to demonstrate it. told me about how they were from the south, how i should go be a starving artist down there, the rent is cheaper. told me about a native girl in tennessee that they knew who was really beautiful, trying to hook me up. go find her, you'll love her they said. we were all hiding under the awning, from the rain, and i was kicking myself that i'd forgotten my umbrella, lost somewhere back in jill's house in potsdam.

i thought about jill too, back in potsdam, and how she was setting up her art table next to the cross walk sign, across the street from the theater, during the potsdam city's little summer festival. and how me and darius, bouncing from small upstate new york town to another, taking in these tiny festivals. i should do this all the time, i though. there's a captive market of people walking around.

some dorky kids, in cool clothes, future hipsters, all ready too cool for their small town, were wandering around asking drunks to sign this inflatable animal that they had, pool toy, duck of some sort if i remember. "sign my duck!" the one in the guns and roses jacket was saying. they were cute kids, young teens, and i told them that they were the future and that they were awesome. some drunks, were bothered by them, offended by their obnoxiousness. misunderstood youth of nowhereville, rising up to cause trouble, wholesome really. giving me hope.

it was getting dark and the bar party, despite being rained on, was in full swing. rumor mongers came around, telling everyone the fireworks were canceled from rain. terrible loss, tragedy. but then the rain broke for a while. and booming starts happening. everyone runs around the corner to check it out. i'm thinking, "yeah they might as well detonate all those gunpowder monstrosities that they have because they spent probably a lot of money on them" and some guy is echoing my thoughts, talking about how that money could have been better spent on building wind farms, wind power is a big debate around here right now. we're watching the fireworks, and i'm chanting "USA!" again, like was at the fireworks we just saw in potsdam.

darius and i are getting hungry again and tony smuggles us some old pizza from one of his shops. dar and i eat graciously, and hide in the shadow,s watching the street action. a giant 300 pound man, pushes over a portapotty in the park across the street. and later some police come by and wake up a drunk guy passed out on some business's front steps. dar and i talk to nice girls, who invite us to come with them tomorrow on a big boat, and he's really into the idea even though i'm pretty sure we won't have time for it since we're leaving for new york. but the attention from nice women is gratifying, until some crazy guy walks up and starts scaring them away. he engages us all in friendly banter, asks about our deals and stuff. i tell him i'm a traveling poet, he asks me if i like kerouac. i say, you know, of course i do, and he says to me that he is "BETTER THAN KEROUAC" because he's a musician and he just got back from florida, syphoning gas out of people's tanks the whole way. we talk for awhile and i look for some polite way to extract myself from the conversation, after the women take off.

i have lots of conversations with different people, over plastic cups of beer, and walk back and forth to cars to partake of private smoking sessions. meet traveling landscaping hippies, and small town musicians who promise to rain hellfire down on your city, and fratty guys who are pretty chill and just like to have a good time. darius, sober from feeling sick all day and not drinking, is capable of driving us out of the town for the evening, after the bar is closing, and the girls working are kicking everyone out, and i'm staring at the girl in the bright red coat, and all of the most beautiful women are married to the friends of our friends of friends, and we're feeling like its time to leave.

i'm trying to goad the guys into hitting the road for the big city tonight, even though it's almost 3, but dar is smart and he's saying, no way, we'll sleep get some rest, eat some food, talk with jacob's father for a while, he's really interesting, you'll like him... i can't argue with these guys. so we're back at jacobs house again, with a few beers, in the basement, have a cig or two, soak up some stories from jacob about his doings. hit the bed again, out like a light but the sun is coming up.

****************

sunday the 15th

the guys get up earlier than me, i get a shower in, and repack my stuff. they go out to pick up dar's car, which we left out in town, and came home in jacob's little two door sports thing. we're going to drive to new york in this tiny car, and dar will save money on gas, and leave his van up at jacob's parents house.

i'm stealing wireless from the neighbors, and looking at some videos that just got posted onto youtube, from this festival i went to in may, that i hosted a stage at for a few hours, and also did poetry. i'm never on the official booking of the show but they let me come and perform, and i end up in the promotional videos. it's called telemagica, out in the desert outside of san diego. i'm sorting thru the different videos looking for myself, narcissist. looking at the videos, and condensing down the two bags i brought to just one backpack, don't need that much stuff, for a short stay in NYC.

darius and i talk for a while with jacob's father, who is sitting on his porch, telling us stories about the revolutionary war and the architecture of the buildings we're spying on, thru a telescope, across the river. he's got these rifles that take months to make, hand carving them, staining them with home made linseed oil. real interesting guy. loves history. revolutionary war, probably his favorite war. he talks about indians, and canada, and lots of great things, that i wish i would have wrote about 9 days ago when this all actually happened. but now my memory is hazy, so i'm giving you the abbreviated version.

so hey, we have great talks with the dad, and we get all packed up, and i'm crushed in this back seat of this tiny car, with my backpack between my legs, trunk is smashed, a big imac box with computer inside of it right next to my left. and we're flying, hitting the road again. i haven't had phone service all weekend, roaming. jacob says he pays for his phone bill and can't even use it in this town. rents a place in manhattan but lives up here, got a bank account up here because there's better perks, changed his car insurance to out here to get out of city taxes. the living is slower up here, but cheaper, and the terrain is gorgeous. and i'm saying, "lets come back to french fest every year!" we can do it right after potsdam days or whatever it's called.

once we're out of town i get service again, we're listening to old country songs on the radio. i send in a new txt message to my webpage, updating my location as "headed to NYC from cape vincent, ny...."

still alive

just a quick note to let you know that i'm still alive. i'm in the process of whipping up some new journals of all the stuff that went down in the past 10 days. been falling behind, hard. no good. we've gone left potsdam, gone to new york, and come back already. so here i am. will post some more stuff soon!


oh yeah, a friend of mine from albuquerque just sent me this great thing, a transcript of a conversation we had that she taped a long time ago, some months. i thought i'd post it here for you to read, because i think it's kind of funny.

here's the note that i got from her, with the transcript, i blocked out all the names though, to protect the wicked.

*******************

Howdy friend.....
I transcribed our conversation from when we were sitting on my kitchen at 3:30 a.m. by the fridge. The few people who've read it said it was the greatest conversation ever.

Here's our conversation:

Me: I said that you must be one of the A.D.D. angels cause you were talking about how your mind was reeling from the defeat us (da fetus) thing, and how it works on so many levels and how your brain was attacking it from these different angles so it made me think about how when you’re being A.D.D. or whatever and they try to sit you down in the classroom and draw stuff on this chalkboard and you have to sit there and look at it and you don’t want to just sit there and look at it. You wanna get up and get around it and get on top of it and stuff and like look at it from these different angles. And you would actually learn better in a different environment. So it’s just like, that you’re not actually deficient or something, you’re just, like…

Her: …too efficient for the first dimension.

Me: You’re, like, really good at doing something, but you’re just in the wrong environment.

Her: And then you said...

Me: And then I said 'oh, I’m getting sentimental because there’s honey at the bottom of my coffee.'

Her: You said weepy and sentimental.

Me: Did I?

Her: Yes

Me: No I didn’t, you made that up

Her: I did not! That’s why I laughed… I remember thinking of a weeping willow tree.

Me: I’m getting all weepy and sentimental because there’s honey at the bottom of my coffee.

Her: And so how does that make you weepy and sentimental?

Me: It doesn’t. It’s just like when I was hanging out with A. earlier and like I was saying I hope that M. isn’t all sauced when she shows up here in her car to come pick me up because I was complicit to her drunk driving or whatever. And he’s like ‘Oh, man, that’s really not good.” And I was like ‘Well, whatever, that’s why I’m wearing this tie.” And then I was like, which actually doesn’t have anything to do with anything, and he was like “Oh, I was just thinking, how does that help?” you know. It just sounds like funny to just be like because there’s honey at the bottom of my coffee.

Her: Right, right, right, right, right. And sometimes instead ofr saying because you can say so and that sounds good. You can say I was getting all weepy and sentimental, so there was honey at the bottom of my cup. Like you change the reason into this sub or post-reason. Does this make any sense?

Me: Maybe. That sounds good. Let’s try that sometimes

Her: Let’s try it all o’ the time.

Me: Let’s always be trying.

Her: Trying is just unexerted effort.

Me: Yeah, you keep saying that, what’s that from? Is that in your motivation that you’re writing or whatever? That’s the title of the book. It’s called “Trying is Unexerted Effort!”

Her: The best way to grow from a self-help book is to write your own self-help book, because everyone fucking knows what to do. You know like to helpo yourself lose weight and not be an obese fat rad…

Me: …like me

Her: Yeah, like us. You do certain things. You don’t have to read about.

Me: You know about the old cliché about writing self help books is that if you’re really successful at it you wouldn’t be able to write a sequel. But in fact that’s not true, because if you are successful at it you could turn it into a whole franchise. But, so, it kind of defies logic actually. It’s kind of a conundrum.

Her: (Laughing hysterically) All of the best self help books defy logic.

Me: Who moved my cheese? Have you ever read who moved my cheese? It’s all about the metaphor of dealing with new situations in life and it’s like about…you’re these lab rats in this maze and you’re used to getting your cheese from a certain place and then one day you show up to the spot and there’s no cheese there and you’re like Who moved my cheese?? So that’s the whole thing and there’s all these rules like you can’t sit and wait for the old cheese to come back or whatever forever. You’re eventually going to have to find a new place to get some cheese. So it’s better to look for new cheese somewhere else then just, like, wait there and starve. All this weird stuff but…

Her: God, I feel so inspired right now!

Me: It’s like business metaphor, like self help, like business success manuals and stuff that kind of shit. The richest man in Babylon, y’know.

Her: The richest man in Babylon.

Me: Or, like, rich dad, poor dad, on PBS.

Her: Is that a show?

Me: It’s like this guy and he talks to you about what the rich dad would do and the poor dad does and money-management tips.

Her: You look like you’re dancing when you talk! You’re, like, gyrating around…

Me: This is to suggest that like, there’s more stuff going on in what I’m saying than what’s actually…

Her: So your tremors are, like, extra information from the great beyond?!

Me: Yeah, it’s like, you know, what poor dads would do, it’s jujst to suggest additional stuff going on. It’s like shorthard for me going “he’s going on a chalkboard” or whatever he’s doing, he’s talking to you about it, he’s waving his hands around, cause that’s what you do when you’re one of those animated motivational speakers. “I’m going to show you how to turn $200 into three new houses for your second generation’s family.” Or whatever, and you’re like “What is he…?” And he’s just like “Starts from within! No more red meat!”

Her: Good Lord, all day.

Both: (musical breakdown, beating on floor, singing bleacher songs from sports games)

Me: Yeah that part’s dope… Do you write like a bleacher song so you make millions off of the licensing deals when it’s a hit and they use it for sports things?

Her: No, I think you’re just trying promote your funky teeth. And so you try to pick all the words in which your teeth will be bared to the bleachers. And coincidentally, you can bleach your teeth.

Me: You eventually do bleach your teeth.

Her: He eventually bleached his teeth and that’s why he died, really.

Me: I know.

Her: No, he swallowed bleach trying to whiten his teeth.

Me: Oh god! …Bleachers.

Her: No, that’s not true.

Me: You just made that up. You’re confusing me.

Her: I’m Confucius.

Me: Man who fight with wife before bed get not peace (piece).

Her: Get no piece! Peace as in both words.

Me: Yeah, it’s like the stereotypical Confucian wisdom joke.

Her: Oh is it? You didn’t make that up?

Me: They’re always a double entendre about some kind of sexually explicit act being performed on Confucius…or something.

Her: Do you think, uh…

Me: No…

Her: Do you think when white trash weird folk hillbillies, aside from those who don’t know the word entendre, do you think they say “En-tender?”

Me: Entender??

Her: That’s like a double entender! That’s like Nintendo 3! It’s like when Mario comes…

Me: No, that’s Mario Cars. That’s a double entender.

Her: I didn’t intend it! I can’t pretend it.

Me: Unintentional entendre.

Her: Ah, that’s the name of my band…we’re the Intentional Entendres.

Me: Hahahaha, it’s art rock.

Her: Yo, listen, so I tried to cross the main plaza on UNM today and it was all blocked off by these caution ropes and all the police were walking around I was like ‘Oh my god, what’s going on?” and this guy was like ‘Oh, there’s this suspicious package”. It was the bomb squad. And I was like “Oh, my GOD, I can’t believe this. It’s probably a box of cookies.” And he, this… student, looked at me as if…I was totally NOT taking this seriously enough. God, I was like ‘ you fucking schmuck.’

Me: Haha, he was like “that’s really disrespectful. You hurt my feelings!”

Her: And then this girl said “It’s an art bomb! I think it’s a sculpture that an art student forgot to tell them they put their sculpture there. Art bomb!:

Me: I made this sculpture called the Info Bomb, but it was like, you know those real estate signs that have the plastic tubes with the red pencaps…

(leaves room for awhile, indecipherable)

So I stole one of those tubes and I took it off of a real estate sign and I took it back to the dirty punk house I was living at, that Coal Place kind of reminds me of. The place was called the Ministry of Information. While we were there, I had the info tube cause that’s what it said on the side of it. What I’d like to do is I would go into the disgusting carpet and I would pick up little rocks and little bits of garbage and little pieces of hair and pop tabs from beer and O.C.D, like, make little piles of it and I started putting all the piles in the tube and then my glasses broke and I shoved those in there and people would get into it and put random bits of garbage in there and it was really disgusting inside the info tube, it was all this weird mold and stuff growing in there, I don’t know. But eventually, I was carrying around, when I left town, I had this old typewriter, we destroyed this typewriter, we shoved all the old keys into it and smashed up the frame and then took all the wiring and stuff from it and took the mount for the paper jam spinning thing and all the metal and stuff and put the info tube on it, and it was full of all these old typewriter keys and garbage from the floor and then I wrapped all the wiring around it and…from the thing, and then I was going to California to go to this festival from Minneapolis on a Greyhound bus and I wrapped it in a towel and put it in this kind of tarp kind of thing that I had sort of tied to the bottom of my backpack cause I was trying to carry all this stuff with me.

Her: Wow! So you had, like, this weird conceptual metal tail?!

Me: Kind of, yeah. And when they searched all my stuff on the Greyhound bus, I showed it to them and I was like, well, it’s a sculpture, and they were like “Well, it’s kind of like a bomb!”

Her: Like a BOMB!?!?! (Laughing)

Me: And I was like “Well, I’m going to this art festival.” And I was trying to explain about how it represented like the planned obsolescence of technology, just making up all this stuff. But they let me take it there and I nailed it to a wall in a little town that the festival takes place at. And when we left I didn’t bother to take it down or anything, I just made a little placard with my post office box on it, and I was like “$50” but that post office box didn’t even work, but I don’t know, maybe somebody bought it.

Her: …probably not, they probably took it. Or left it there.

Me: Or threw it away.

Her: Or they were like “Jesus, that’s probably a bomb” and they ran away.

Me: Yeah, I had a lot of weird stuff with me. I carried around a lot of crap. I want to pair it down to…. Minimalism is so cool, y’know.

Her: It sounded like you were saying parrot down, like Black Hawk Down, like…

Me: I wanna parrot down like black hawk down

Her: I wanna black bear it down pillow….like, oh what is in this pillow? It’s so soft. And you can be like ‘Oh, that’s black parrot feather down.”

Me: That’s black parrot down pillow feather

Her: Down

Me: But it’s really kind of extraneous, I’m trying to pair it down to the bare essential.

Her: Oooh, to the naked essentials. To the naked bear’s essentials. What are the essentials of a naked bear?

Me: I was talking to AG..….do you know A.G.? She’s like this weird little raver girl

Her: Is she the one with the white dreadlocks?

Me: No. But I was telling her, can I call you Threadbare? And she was like Fred Bear? No! Theadbare! No, like bare into the threads. And she was like “Sure, but I have to come up with a name for you but I can’t think of anything right now.” And I was like well, call me back when you fuckin come up with something! And I don’t know what I thought Threadbare was a good-sounding phrase.

Her: It’s not, really.

Me: It’s not good?

Her: I mean, it doesn’t have that flow. Maybe it will after I hear it for awhile, maybe it’s something that catches on, like it’s an acquired name.

Me: You never know.

Her: I don’t, obviously, know anything.

Me: Oh God. That’s a good position to take.

Her: I…am an Idiot. That’s a great position to… No, there’s a difference between being an idiot and not knowing anything, right?

Me: You can be smart and not know anything.

Her: Really?

Me: Sure.

Her: Well, that’s what I was saying.

Me: Idiots can know a lot of stuff.

Her: Yeah, I know some people like that.

Me: Contrary to popular belief. I don’t know, it all depends on what you’re gaging, what your standard of measurement is for intelligence or whatever. Whatever paradigm or whatever crap you’re looking at. I believe every individual is uniquely suited to do something really well. To excel in something.

Her: Yeah, like the Giver? That book the Giver.

Me: I never read that.

Her: That’s a shame. That’s a damn shame, and you should read it tomorrow.

Me: I’ll understand my weird high school girlfriend better if I read that book. She had this whole complex about it.

Her: Oh, she was probably awesome.

Me: Mm-hmm. She was so awesome and I was so fuckin dweeby and lame. It was just really bad. It was one of those “open relationships” that are one-sided.

Her: Like, she was open?

Me: No, like I was open the whole time. I didn’t really know that I wanted to be in open relationships in the first place, so I just lied to her about it the whole time, but then she would always find out about it anyway.

Her: And she still loved you.

Me: Yeah, and it was really bad. We would get into these weird fights with each other and do drugs together and have bad trips and stuff and all this weird shit. I’ve got all these amazing great stories from all these experiences from that that I tell people. I don’t write about that stuff, I just talk. Cause I don’t want to divulge anything personal about myself for some reason.

Her: No divulging. Cause, if you’ve got too much divulging, it’s bulging. Like, took at that divulge bulge.

Me: Well, I think about kind of like how a person is almost defined more by what you don’t know about them then what you do know about them.

Her: I don’t know what that means. What does that mean?

Me: It’s like if you’re a magician or something, your power is that the person doesn’t know how you do the trick. It’s a secret. SO it’s kind of like as a performer or as an artist, it’s like the source of what you have is like the strength in it and if you divulge too much of it then you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Her: Oooh, and you become this formula from what you do?

Me: I don’t know, I haven’t gotten a lot of perspectives on this opinion of mine.

Her: You should go around with a clipboard, like, so I have this idea, tell me what you think! And you can have a little check box with, like, agree…

Me: …happy face, middle face…

Her: …confused face, vomit face…

Me: No, but it’s just like a scale of happy face to sad face, circle which one this one makes you feel. And it’s like, Sad Face…oh god! I get a bunch of sad faces. Yeah! That’s dope. No, I need to like get together focus groups…

Her: Listen to my idea! Please listen to my idea! I think it’s great.

Me: OK.

Her: You know how Lucy Van Pelt from Peanuts had that Doctor is In thing and Charlie Brown would come over and weep into her…

Me: This freeMe street psychologist or whatever…

Her: Yeah! But listen, I was thinking it would be cool to set up in a crowded area this set like that but it’s called Advice or something and people would come up and write, there’d be a paper with, like the President, Old People, category, Drug Addicts, students, whatever and people would write advice for these different genres of people, yeah? And then you have some thing and you put it all up and show stuff, and you can have some shitty snapshot and put it by them, I don’t know, but it’s all local, and you know these people, it’s such a small town, I mean it’s big but everyone knows each other anyway, it’s bizarre, it’s that paradox, but it wouldn’t have to be advice, it could be surreal experiences, it could be anything.

Me: So you’d just gather opinions about various genres of characters of people

Her: No, For them, FOR them, advice FOR them, it makes people think of people outside themselves, like what are these people like and what do I have to offer them?

Me: Can we be the specialists administering the….

Her: Oh, we’re TOTALLY specialists.

Me: And can we be in doctor costumes

Her: Yeah, goggles??

Me: And I want to have a nametag or something that says Dr. Fraud

Her: HAHAHAHA! Instead of Dr. Freud!!

Me: And we have another one that’s Dr. Con.

Her: Like conning….

Me: And then we could have another one that’s called Dr. Awkward cause it…

Her: …sounds cool

Me: …is a palindrome

Her: …No it’s not.

Me: Yeah, D R awkward is a palindrome.

Her: Oh! That’s really, really cool.

Me: Yeah, this guy N. told me that once. A guy named N. that I know, he was a professional clown. He did this whole routine where he had this woman with him ahnd they traveled around Europe and he’d perform on the streets and he’d be in this hobo clown outfit throwing around oversized dollar bills and his tie would turn into a sledge hammer and he’d lay on a bed of spikes and the girl with him would break a cinderblock over his chest…

Her: Jesus

Me: Yeah, he’s way cool. He’s some crazy San Francisco dude or something. And he had this thing on his, one of his pictures on a Web page, one of those social profile things, it was a picture of him with a light saber and under him it said Metaphors Be With You.

Her: Um….so why does he have to hate on the similes?

Me: Cause it sounds like May the force be with you, like form Star Wars.

Her: Met-a-phors be…

Me: Metaphors be with you.

Her: ……Metaphors be with you!! OH MY GOD!!! WHAT A GENIUS! I LOVE HIM!
Jesus, do you think he made that up?

Me: I don’t know, maybe. But I’m going to propagate it because it’s so cool . I almost said steal it but I changed it to propagate.

Her: Propagate on , brother.

Me: But stealing is fun too. I mean, they say site you sources or whatever but…

Her: I say STEAL your sources

Me: Steal you sources! And then laugh about it later.

Her: I say ignite your sources.

Me: Yeah, ignite your sources.

Her: I say spread an inferno, a town-wide source inferno. ….Jesus…, it’s almost 4 in the morning.

Me: Uh-oh.

Her: What?

Me: Four in the morning.

Her: Do you know what happens at four?

Me: You turn into a werewolf?

Her: I mean, have you heard the stories? They’re terrifying. I don’t even remember them, cause I lose my mind.

Me: We never remember whatever happens at four in the morning! Oh God. It’s like one of those horror movies where everybody blanks out in these weird psychotic states they don’t remember and then they wake up and there’s all these dead bodies everywhere or whatever and they’re like “What happened?” and then it’s like the whole movie takes place within a flashback of a flashback.

Her: Yeah, and it’s also like what happens at 4 a.m. stays at 4 a.m.

Me: Oh god, like Vegas?

Her: Like it.

Me: (singing) Vegas will make us or break us

(Fridge begins to hum)

Me: (strokes fridge)Good machine, excellent

Her: Haha, he’s humming along to your song

Me: Do you want to be a technologist? Oh yeah! Oh Holy Stopwright! Thank you for granting me access!

Her: I’d like to thank… I’d like to thank, the U.S. Army for this line, this fat line that I’m about to do on the light bulb.

Me: Oh yeah! Where did that come from? What were we talking about?

Her: Something about you sleeping in. No, no, no, I was like if you were a soldier of the U.S. army, you would have been up 5 hours ago, it was, like, 11 o’ clock. We were talking about how they made it possible that you could sleep in.

Me: Oh yeah! Then I was like, I gotta thank those guys for defending my freedom to let me sleep in!

Her: Yeah, that’s exactly what you said!

Me: And then I woke up and was all like “Yeah, every time I do a fat line I’m going to be like ‘Thanks a lot U.S. Army!’”

Her: (Laughing with tears in eyes)

Me: Cause they come back and they’re all like “I didn’t serve in ‘Nam so you damn hippie kids could fuck each other and snort lines off of lightbulbs asses!!” and whatever.

Her: (still laughing)

Me: That’s what they say. You go to the protest or whatever and the veteran guys are there and they’re like Well, when I was your age, and I’m like We’re living in the 50’s now and, you know, Tokyo is about to explode!

…….

Me: I mean, their consumer product cycle is three times as fast as ours or something. They have like new models of stuff all the time. It’s INSANE!

Her: You’re insane.

Me: Yes. I got the Internet when I was, like, 14 years old or something.

Her: Oh yeah, and then you read about the anarchist cookbook and making bombs and shit. You did, didn’t you? You memorized the anarchist cookbook. Remember the one about like burning the toothbrush to get change out of the phone machines? You burn the bristles and put it in there and it like forms and molds and…

Me: Oh cool. And then you can , like, …I watched B. do this thing where he just opens up a whole newspaper box, he just walks up to those things and he’s just like KHOOM! and grabs, like, ten newspapers and he’s just like “Here, it’s Sunday, here’s the classifieds, go get a job!” That’s what he said to me.

Her: I love his accent.

Me: He has this whole routine, he’s always like, Why don’t you chill out for a while and stay in Albuquerque and get a job? Work a shitty job for a couple months then save up some money THEN travel around.

Her: Jesus, you do that so well! You sound just like him!

Me: No I don’t.

Her: Jesus, yes you do. That’s crazy.

Me: Yeah, you get really good at mimicry when you start practicing the whole way of becoming fast friends with people and adapting to your environemt. It’s a survival mechanism, you have to adapt to your environment.

Her: Do I have an imitatable voice?

Me: (Imitating) Do I have an imitatable voice? I mean, everybody has an imitatable voice.

Her: Try more. Just go on a rant about painting.

Me: Ok, painting…

Her: About how everybody today sucks…

Me: No, I can’t, it’s too contrived…

Her: OK, go on a rant about salamanders. Go. You’re on the spot.

Me: YOU go on a rant about some random topic. You probably could, you’re good at stuff. I don’t claim to be good at being randomy randable randabalot randall brot set like the fractal Warshack Test.

Her: I was just thinking that.

Me: The Warshack Test?

Her: No, the whole thing. That whole messy R slur.

Me: Really?

Her: Yeah. I’ve been there brother. I’ve been there and I almost never came back.

Me: Yeah, we go around and write this weird poetry and sometimes you get this one long really good drugged out rant or something and then you go out and read it at open mics and stuff and weird literary dudes are like No, I relate, I was there on every one of those lines and you’re just like that’s crazy cause I was all fucked up…

…..

Me: They’re inextricably intertangled.

Her: Drug culture and sub culture? That’s cause you gotta keep drugs on the down low so you gotta keep the culture on the downlow.

Me: Or is just that every culture has it’s drugs or something?

Her: Yeah, well, I mean, high class they use coke, they just don’t talk about it. That’s the rich kids….

Me: The sanctioned drugs of the official culture.

Her: Yeah, like beer.

Me: So you would say there’s the national drug and the state drug, it’s like that isn’t it?

Her: Yeah, I like that.

Me: Yeah, the state flower is, like, the hummingbird and the state drug is Zoloft or whatever.

Her: HAHAHA! The state flower is the hummingbird?? HAHAHAHA! Can the state French fry sauce be shoe polish?

Me: I guess. There’s a lot of weird things that you could do with shoe polish.

Her: You can use it as a lubricant when you’re raping a shoe!! (laughing)

Me: Yeah, OH YEAH, You’re like size 4!

Her: What did shoe do today?

Me: I went home.

Her: I raped a size 4 Oxford.

Me: Oh God. That’s what shoe salesmen do when no ones looking.

Her: Oh yeah, that’s why they’re so shiny!

Me: The shoe salesmen?

Her: HAHA NO, the SHOES!

Me: Oh OK.

Her: No, everything, it’s like a really shiny store, they come out and wax it with everything, it’s sparkling glass, the people the shoes , the floor, the office phone keeps ringing and nobody picks it up. Why do they do that? Jesus!

Me: They’re like I don’t get paid to answer the phone. It’s that bitch’s job!

Her: Even the boss says that.

Me: Yeah, he’s like I’m not getting paid to be here! Why are we here? It’s a volunteer store, a volunteer shoe store. I don’t get paid to answer the phones or sell used shoes. You buy your own shoes; just leave some money over there. That would be cool. What about, you know how they have free stores? Have you ever heard of the free store?

Her: No, no, no, no I haven’t.

Me: It’s like a store where it looks like a astore but everythin’s free.

Her: So people just drop off shit there?

Me: Yeah, and then they put it out..

Her: That’s amazing.

Me: Yeah, it’s like for homeless people and stuff. They had this great showspace that was in the back of this punk bike co-op place and it was down the street from, like, a cop shop…

Her: Wait, can I shape your beard with clippers?

Me: Oh God, Shave it?

Her: No, shape it.

Me: Oh, shape it.

Her: We’ll shave part of it.

Me: Yeah.

Her: Really?

Me: Yeah. What are you going to do, make it look diabolical or something?

Her: Can I have free creative reign on your beard?

Me: Oh god.

Her: No, I’m not going to make you look stupid, it’ll hardly change.

Me: Ok, fine.

potsdam days

right about now i'm thinking about how much, if you were in love with me, you would not want to read about me flirting with the girls. i am thinking about how, if you were my family, you would not want to read about me drinking the beers, smoking reefer and cigarettes. i think about how i've spent years of my life afraid to write about it, because of imaginary censors living in my head, not wanting to self incriminate and document the craziness that i'm going thru, for the sake of a few people. at the expense of many, potentially many readers. so dear reader, i feel i owe it to myself, and others, to preserve some kind of record of this madness, because if i don't do it i'll feel stupid later, parents and lost loves be damned. little brothers, shield your eyes. children, go to bed early. broken hearted widows of the traveling poet who lives and dies a new life in a new town every other week, avert thy gaze. yours is a love that i need, that i want certainly, but i won't stop this typing because you live in my head. i live in yours too, if that's any comfort.

it's been more than a few days since we last spoke. i wrote my last entry on tuesday, after a strange evening previous. a girl living with jill and jack in the cabin, we'll call her annie, annie had a visit from a lover of hers, a woman who arrived late at night on monday. around the same time, another girl showed up, a poet, going to grad school for education, and asked jill if she could spend half a week with us. then even later than that, a fierce and amazing scary woman, tall and attractive, into pills and partially strung out, showed up and i heard whispers in our group about the destruction that was caused in various intervals of the life in this north west, over these years, while these people have been living and knowing each other and much stories that i don't know about, while i was staking out turf in california perhaps.

there is a self portrait of her in the guest room, with snake-like green hair, like medusa. medusa used to live here last summer, leo is telling me. and she would cook man, she would cook. he's telling me about how he'd wake up and she's say, "what do you want for breakfast?" and she'd make it. i can't imagine what sort of insanity went down in those days, but everything is slightly more low key now.

darius and myself tend to the firepit in the dark, in that night, earlier this week, when the three women showed up. i'd made something of a joke of it the whole time i was in potsdam, saying, "country maidens! we need country maidens! bring us country madiens!" and now jill was poking me in the ribs, telling me look around, aren't you happy now, you got your wish, for these three girls have arrived. only problem is, she's saying, is that one's practically married and the others are lesbians. you gotta be more specific next time, she's saying to me. say, "i want SINGLE country maidens!"

well i just laugh and say, "yeah, that's okay, i mean, i really rather enjoy the company of women, regardless of their marital status you know, i just like to be around them, i've always related to them better than men, ever since i was growing up...." and we sit around the fire and drink many cheep beers, loathing/loving it.

all the menfolk, save for myself, have retired. the grad student poet woman, has to be up early for school at 8 am. that leaves me and jill, now trashed, and the lesbian and her girlfriend, and medusa, to entertain ourselves. dar left to go sleep, confident that the fire would burn out on it's own, and everything is so wet outside that nothing is going to burn down anyway, what with the amount of trouble we took just to get these wet logs going in the first place.

it's been raining a lot up here, wacky weather according to the locals, maybe. global warming kinda stuff.

so we drunkenly drive jill's truck (on jill's own property) down the path to the camp by the river now, because the girls have somehow become obsessed with hula-hooping and all the hoops are down there by the camp. blasting the radio, jill behind the wheel, medusa between us, putting her legs over mine to stay clear of the stick shifter. it was some cheap ploy, on my part, i told her, to get close to her. flirting. we made it down to the camp site with annie and her part time girlfriend riding on the tail gate, bumping away, god knows how they didn't fall off or get whipped in the face by snapping branches, we made it down to the camp site and the radio is blaring 80's rock and the girls are hooping now, hula hooping away and the lovebirds are checking out a tent, nesting, setting up their love nest for the evening so they can get their special time in, the whole reason why she came out in the first place to see her girl, beautiful thing really and i'm very jealous. after watching the girls hoop for a while, and all of us taking our turns urinating in the forest, me against a tree and the girls leaning against the truck, me and jill and medusa decide to leave the women lovers in the tent in the forest, under the pretense that we left the tobacco up there, back at the house, after we all ran out of cigarettes and we're down to that last pack of bugler that medusa brought with her from wherever she's from, coming from a couple hours away at least, to see us and visit.

earlier in the day, when i wrote my last blog entry at the coffeeshop, i'd received a myspace message from the woman that this medusa figure is photographed with, living with, in love with probably i'm sure, practically married to and i should probably stay away, that kind of stuff. i'd received a note from her telling me that hey, it's crazy that you're in potsdam, wish i could be there, could you ask leo to call us later after 9 pm? and there was a phone number. i saved it on my computer to pass it along later. then that night i told leo and he said, "okay i'm on it" and thats when i began hearing these whispers about these girls, and what path of havoc they've left, or something, you know, about how great they are but how they're in a weird place right now, and the situation has to be handled deftly, lightly. kids gloves. and jill is saying, "oh yeah, lance likes drugs, he should meet this one..." and leo is saying, "no, bad influence on him!" which of course piques my interest. i'm thinking, "i want to go on a crazy adventure, and get into fucked up shit with cool girls!" but leo is protective and sort of like, "not yet buddy."

then later on that night the 3 different girls showed up, and jill and i ended up talking to medusa all night long. she and jill used to live together a while back, in terrible tiny small upstate new york towns full of prostitutes and crack addicts, and i heard them recount incredible stories of how the neighbors used to just kick in their door, and walk into their kitchen and start eating all their food, or how medusa got trapped by a crazy girl in their bathroom, who made her smoke crack and tried to stick her tongue down her throat, or the night that jill was wearing a see thru dress and nobody told her all evening, except to say that they liked her dress and the next day she goes "no wonder why everybody liked my dress" or the time that they kicked a big hole in the wall, gave themselves permission, but then everybody had to move out just a week or two later and jill was all by herself moving 3 peoples stuff into a storage van and her parents are still wondering what they're going to do with all that stuff.

jill and medusa keep going back and forth to her car, to grab cds to listen to, and reminisce i assume, about other things, and i'm sitting alone on the couch. they come back, and then jill says, "hey you know drugs can you identify these pills i have?" and pulls out this bag, full of orange polygons, and blue and green circles, and medusa tells her the oranges are muscle relaxers and the others are valiums, and then she promptly grabs a few, and eats them, not before handing me one. jill is upset by that, on some "i can't even trust you to not steal my valium" trip. rightfully so i guess, with the history that they have together, and jill saying that medusa is looking so much healthier than when she saw her last.

but in the drunken haze all is forgotten and forgiven. and after a few minutes i start feeling spacey, and good. euphoric. in little private moments, i succeed in talking to this medusa woman character, tall and fast talking, attitude, all talking about beating and branding rapists, and scoring heroin, reminding me of insane fast living girls i remember from portland, old friends i want to see again, reminding me of my dead exgirlfriend, friend and compatriot who OD"d on heroin in new york a couple years ago almost now come this halloween. reminding me of great people and i ask her, if she'll kidnap me, and steal me away for a while, and she's receptive, yeah she'd do that she says. i like the idea because i know that leo will be mad, and everyone will be worried, and that would be hilarious, and after all i am supposed to be on this crazy adventure right? and shouldn't strange wild things be happening to me? it's a good idea i think, and for a minute while we are alone, i get to hug and hold this woman, on a couch, and press my face against her neck (but that is all, dear reader. please don't be jealous).

but for hard up for it poets that's a major victory. hooray! lance got to hold someone for 3 minutes!

medusa and jill go back outside, to go to her car again, and its morning now and the sun is out, and jill's poet friend is waking up to go to school, asking me where every one is and didn't she just hear jill's voice earlier? and i say yeah, they're up at the car i think, but she's just trying to figure out how to use the shower, and she manages to accomplish that without any help after all.

in my beer/valium/up all night stupor, i pass out, on the couch, before being able to get kidnapped by medusa, who has to leave before 10 am to handle family business and get back to her girlfriend. while i'm sleeping, leo is telling her that she can't take me, and she's saying that she should and it would be fun, but i am not awake to sneak off with her, and when i do wake up she's already gone.




********

new day, tuesday, open mic day at a different coffee shop. when i wake up, and medusa is gone and everyone is buzzing and stirring and i'm like the last guy to wake up all day, there's a friend from in town visiting annie, we'll call her cherish, cherish lives in a neat big house divided up into a bunch of apartments and has her paintings all around her house, we hung out on her porch the other day, me and jack and annie and dari us, well cherish is going back into town soon, like right now, and i see the opportunity to move so i said can i come with you? and would you take me to the internet cafe... and she says sure, but i gotta go, and i say okay let me grab my things. scrambling to put my computer in my bag, and collect myself, and she comes back inside and says, "i really have to meet someone for a business thing, it's important..." and leo says "hurry up slacker she's gotta go!" and we jump in the car and take off.

i'm talking to her about my whole deal, and how it's good for me to get out on the town myself without these people that i already know, how i always need to be meeting new people all the time, and explaining how i need to write journals and stay in touch and update my webpage and use the internet. well no promises of a ride back home from her, but i told her that i didn't need one anyway because i'm going to walk to the open mic later tonight and meet everyone there anyway.

i wrote my last blog update at that coffee shop. i didn't really try to talk about what was happening, just jotted down more diary entry type thoughts. i just finished the novel i was reading, and was feeling inspired by the poetic prose style of tom robins. "another roadside attraction" ending with a fantastic debate on the history and moral merits of christianity, and speculation about the evolution of a new religion of mankind. finishing a good book gives you all this energy, and as someone who claims to enjoy writing i was feeling all ready to start a new whirlwind of literary creation.

i decided to get some smokes, and get off the computer for a while, and get something to eat. it was raining again. i saw a license plate that started with "DXM" so i decided to take it as a sign that i should pick up a bottle of vicks formula 44.

jill came to pick me up from the coffee shop. it was raining, i bought an umbrella from down the street, a small collapsable one that was really slick, from a walgreens a couple stores away. she took me to the library, where leo had been doing internetly things on the public terminals. i read computer magazines. jill and leo wanted to go back home before we were supposed to go out to an open mic down the street. they let me walk to the coffee shop where it was to be taking place and said they would meet me later.

in the coffee shop, not really prepared for an open mic, there was hardly anyone there. when i arrived there was nothing going on, so i asked the barista if i could plug in the PA and microphones, and check them out and say, "check one two, this is lance robotson, welcome to tuesday night open mic..." i asked if i could be the host and she said sure, if you want. a couple musicians showed up to be playing too, and they clued me in to the fact that there isn't ever a host on this night, and it's sort of a free for all.

annie and radius and jack were there, and we decided that we had time to step out for a minute before things were going to get started, so we left the coffee shop for a short while to gather the troops, pick up cherish at her house, not before sitting on porches, getting stoned. i told the guitarists at the coffee shop that we'd be right back, that we were leaving to "get inspired" and he says, "i've been there before i know what you're talking about." like in a sort of "when i was your age" kind of way.

after our safety meeting on friend porches we return to the open mic and leo and jill are there now and the guitarists are still the only other act to have signed up on the free for all, so after they break in their set, i step up to the mic, without any notes, and nervously run thru a few different poems, remember 75 percent of each one, making mistakes in each of them, not having it so well memorized that it'll all just come out perfectly. maybe it was being stoned, that made me fumble with my words. maybe it was all those friends of mine, a low turn out and my close personal friends made me that much more self conscious. it's easier to do it in from of a stranger. all casual like in front of all my friends, threw me off, lots of pressure, you wouldn't think so but it was. the guitarist guy who was playing before me was eager to hear my stuff, "you got any more?" he'd say and i'd do some more. i'd make some stuff up when i couldn't remember the words right and then when i would give up on the poem and say that i couldn't remember it he'd say, "you could have some notes, to refer to..." and then i says, "oh yes, my notes, i've forgotten my notes..."

it was hot as hell in that coffee shop. no AC. humid. i stepped off the stage sweating, to get some fresh air and cool down, and smoke cigarettes, which is what i always do after a poetry reading. i made an effort to sort of stand in the door way and listen to the other guy play, but it just got too hot. couldn't do it anymore. when i stood outside leo came out and said, "you fail!" and laughed, and i him and darius about how them being there made me nervous, and he says "why!" incredulously. i asked them if they were going to decide the fate of my career based on this performance, like american idol, and we talked about how it would be funny to stage our own american idol show, put it on youtube, him and darius would be the mean judges and jill could be the nice girl who likes everything. they thought that i had everything memorized all slick, which is my fault because i told them that i did, but i was unprepared for the situation and i faltered.

later on, when some more people showed up, i read some more poems, this time with the aid of the notebooks and papers that they were written and printed out on. it went well, i even ran over the pieces i did earlier but messed up, because some of the new comers didn't hear them. some other musicians, stepped up to play some songs, a guy played the house piano while a girl sang, and later they told me that they were going to be doing a show here on friday and would i like to come do some poetry with them that day, do i like reading with music, can i jam with a band, and i'm saying yes of course that's my favorite thing to do. so i had a decent reading, not a big turn out, but got an invitation to read further again some time, so consider it a success. the guy who invited me told me that he liked my delivery, that he liked my steady flow as he put it, and that it was refreshing because he didn't see much of that.

everyone mulling about in the front of the shop and we're all going to make our way home eventually. i'm seeing this flyer for another open mic the next day, taking place in a park, under a gazebo, with an open call for artists of all sorts, and that is exciting and exactly the kind of scene we're looking for and seeking to create.

people that jill knows are coming and going, a girl comes up to say hi to her, and starts introducing herself to everybody. very assertive, professional. rheann, i'll call her. we're just down the street from the movie theater, and i'm talking about how i saw die hard, and rheann is standing there, young and blonde, well spoken, and she's saying how the last thing she would want to do would be to pay money to watch a movie like die hard. in fact, she was saying, "in fact, i would pay seven dollars to NOT see die hard."

i can appreciate the sentiment of somebody saying that they like good films more than hollywood pop entertainment popcorn movie chewing gum for the eyes candy, but at the same time, i took issue with what she was saying. to me it reeked of this sort of elitist intellectual posturing, stuffy and academic, and what sort of person who, even if they appreciate good high art, can't get down here and low brow with us here in the gutter every now and then? i talked to her about this, employing this line of reasoning. she was nice, and smart, and i was drawn to her and i thought it was sort of funny that i was trying to win her over with an argument as an introduction. probably i was being just as snobby trying to argue with her about how she shouldn't be an art snob, probably i was being a hypocrite but i thought it was sort of amusing to be that hypocrite so i continued, about how it was like people who looked down on you for watching TV, and how much i enjoyed watching TV when i got the chance because i didn't own one and that there's nothing wrong with it. she said she liked "films" rather than "movies" and i said i loved a good pop movie, i even liked "videos" i said, and finally i basically had to just leave it at "there's no accounting for taste." she told me that it came down to your upbringing, and i mentioned something about how i'd met this girl once whose parents only ever played her 50's music and now that was pretty much all that she listened to. or like christian music kids who never listened to secular music. we were able to agree about that point and move on with our lives.

leo made a motion to start heading toward the gazebo in the park across the street, where we could hang out, and check out the scene of the open mic event tomorrow, a preview, told me i could practice, and i said we could do the american idol bit, and a whole little crew of people were there with us, myself, darius and leo and jill and jack, annie, rheann, and the graduate student poet girl who i'll call carrie because i'm tired of typing out "graduate student poet girl." carrie and rheann sat and talked with each other about their eduations, and the rest of us clustered in little sets of people having seperate conversations. eventually we all started to move back to the cars, carrie had one, and darius was driving his van, and annie had her car too, so we all broke out, and i chatted with rheann and it seemed that she was going to come back with us tonight, which made me happy and excited (still pining for country maidens), her and jill went with carrie who drove rheann to her house so she could grab some creature comforts for the evening, while darius pulled the van around and idled in a dangerous no parking area behind a parked car, right off of a curved road where people turned right onto the street, having to weave around the van. a police car drove by. someone honked. i ran and jumped in, and we made our get away clean.

back at the house, all of the sudden it was like a big party, sort of, a couple other guys from town drove in, carrying cheap cases of beer and drinking and laughing. this one guy introduced himself by saying, "merry christmas" and i said, "everyday is christmas!" and he basically said, "hell yeah!" and i talked about every day being a holiday, every day being saturday, every day being your birthday. very merry unbirthday. the rest of us shared wine from a half gallon jug, conservatively drinking small glasses. rheann drank from a little juice jar, which was mostly spherical, and she was talking about how a sphere is the most efficient shape for holding volume with a minimum of materials.

while people drank and listened to music inside and out, i sat and worked on laying out a poem, scheming on the idea of printing two booklets in one set of doublesided pages, cutting them in two and having two separate nonstandard sized booklets, a small one to give away, and a larger one to work into a cd case booklet to sell. rheann asked me what i was doing, so i told her i was laying out the poetry for a new book, and she said are you writing? and i said well i'm just worried about the page-ation of how this poem is going to work now, and she says, "you mean pagination?" and i said yeah, whatever, you know, the effect of the text extending over multiple pages. i talked to her a bit about my thinking process for how i want the text to be displayed in the book, and she suggested that it should just be on a scroll, get rid of that nasty multiple pages problem, "yeah like kerouac and on the road" i said, and then i said that a stock ticker tape sort of roll would be even better because i love the long line and use it a lot in my poems, some pieces are sort of like just one long line. she asked to read the poem and i said well i'm still breaking up where the page breaks are gonna be, but she didn't mind and she read the peice, probably a 6 minute chunk of text the way i would read it, and she commented on things where i'd make a ridiculous series of puns (she liked puns) and where i'd spelled things ambiguously to convey multiple mixed meanings and did you mean it that way or this way? and i said, "i just spell it that way to make you think about what i meant" and she said, well i did so it worked. i was very greatful that she took the time to look over my work, i like sharing it with people during the development process of making things, it keeps me interested. and of course a megalomaniac like myself, i'm always pleased when someone takes interest in something that i do.

we talked about a lot of things that night. she talked about how in sicko, michael moore goes to a british pharmacy and asks if he can buy toilet paper and shampoo and things, and the pharmacist says no, and moore keeps asking him all these silly things about what can i get at the pharmacy, like in america like walgreens or duane reede or CVS or what have you, and he says, "no i didn't go to school for 8 years to sell shampoo." we talked about our models and theories of relationships, she told me she didn't like the idea of monogamous relationships and i told her about how, when i first started dating i was sure that i had to fit in to the normal way of doing things, and how i was no good at it, a terrible womanizer and cheat, and that i was talking to my aunt about it, and she basically said to me, "you know, the relationships that are advertised in the magazines and movies and tv and stuff, that doesn't necessarily work for everyone." and i talked to rheann about how that conversation wtih an adult in my life that i respected, something of an authority figure in my life, how that gave me permission to experiment with different models, things i'd read about when i was a newbie teenager just getting on the internet, reading strange articles about anarchy and polyamory and various other alternative belief systems, information i'd gained earlier but was never able to put into practice. she told me other things too, i think of them sometimes when people remind me, she told me about how people evolved to like kissing because early humans used to chew up food for their babies and pass it thru their mouths. she also told me that it takes 28 days of making yourself do something every day to start a new habit, and it takes 8 days of going without doing it to break it.

i drank my formula 44, and ambled around the crowd vibing on everyone sitting on the porch, girls hula hooping, everyone having a good time. rheann worked it out that she would stay the night, she'd brought a sleeping bag, had to go in to work at 8 am in town but she could get a ride with carrie who would be going to school. carrie was talking about playing rugby, and the stereotype of the lesbian women's rugby player, but really she was into it because the guys who played rugby were so hot, and how she wasn't ashamed to say it. it was funny.

after everyone settled down a bit, and most of the people had gone to sleep, me and jack and jill and rheann were still up, talking, and she said she was going to go to bed. i was feeling pretty awake from everything i'd injested that evening, and i sort of waited for a moment and walked in to go interface with her. i wanted to tell her about my notion of "multple long term friends with benefits" which doesn't work for everyone, but seems to be appropriate for some weirdos, like me. she got up again, and sat on the couch, and jack and jill came in and moved the table in the living room area into the kitchen to make a bed on the floor, and i layed down there on the floor with them, with jill between jack and i, and rheann on the couch next to me on the floor. we put on a movie, watched mission impossible three, which in my state was entirely riveting and thrilling. i was the only one who stayed awake thru the whole thing.

carrie woke up and got ready to go to school. i asked her if i could go into town with her and rheann, i asked rheann to, if i could tag along, and she said i could wait in her living room while she took a shower before she went to work. we got into town early, and had some time to kill, so she took me around her neighborhood, told me about the local potsdam lore and history of different buildings we walked by, about how potsdam is kind of nervous since they'd had two suicides and two murders in the last 6 months and how that was a big deal in a small town. she told me about how the funeral home family got started out a long time ago, real old now, but the man didn't have a lot of money and the wife said, "i love you but you need to figure out how to support our children, i don't want them to be poor" and they were driving thru a town and the first sign he saw was for a funeral home, and he said, "we're starting a funeral home!" and they're probably the happiest most satisfied people she'd ever met.

she advised me to try to discover the mysteries of potsdam on that day, and when she went to work, i went out on to the town to explore on my own. i had goals, i wanted to print out some more cd covers on cardstock at the copy shop, use the internet, and so forth. i had to wait for the library to open to print out the designs which i uploaded to the internet from my laptop, then used their computers to do the printing. then the copy shop staff was friendly, i made enough prints to put together seven books, because i already had some copies of the inside booklet ready to go from my last print job, extras that i never made covers for. jack called me while i was making the copies and i hooked up with him and annie at the library. they sat around using the internet, and i took a nap on the couch, still tired from the last night.

we went back home and i got to take a nap. i didn't bother assembling my new booklets because i still had a few older ones left. when i woke up again, it was time to go to the gazebo open mic. we brought wine, and cups, for ourselves, that jack bought for us that day. i drank, we stood around in the park, waiting for the function to start. all these local kids that my friends who'd been here before knew stood around and talked with each other, and i ran from crowd to crowd watching. the host of the event played a few songs on guitar, and a poet read a speech on tolerance he'd delivered at some kind of college ceremony, and he read a couple poems. he had an angry slam poet cadence. after he was done the host asked who wanted to go next, and i said, "have we got time and patience for more poetry?" and everyone said, "yeah! we need more of that around here." i read a couple pieces that i hadn't done at the other open mic the day before, and was very well received. i sold a book to an older guy who farmed, and had pedal push powered boats, he called me "neobeatnik" which i thought was great because thats what i call myself in one of my books, and said he liked how i talked about modern technology in my work. the host also bought a book, gave me an extra tip and i gave him a package with a cd and a booklet, and a print of one of my robotson icon robots holding a spear, that a girl from minneapolis made out of one of my pictures of a drawing i'd done. an original archival quality print that an artist friend of mine had made, and given me a few of. my friends that i'd come with told me i did a good job, guess i redeemed myself. some more musicians played, and as it was getting dark someone closed out the night by reading an old famous speach about being in nazi germany and watching the changes, crying out against the common tyranny in man, not saying anything about the evil you witness.

we got another jug of wine, i chipped in on it for once, feeling good having made some money. another jug of wine for the home. we were leaving. i wanted rheann (who'd played flute at the open mic, she's going to school for music) to come with us, she was leaving to go see her cousin who just got into town, hadn't seen him in years, i understood. she said she might call me later, asked me if i knew how to drive, said she was going out to her camp later that night, which was close to our little cabin village in the woods, maybe she'd need someone to drive a car for her. gave me her numher and i called hers so she'd have it. i felt excited about that, the thought that she might call later.

after the open mic we went over to a house we'd partied at before, local friends of the crew. darius sat on the front porch, smoking the whole time. the open mic host showed up later, and we talked about our various road life experiences. he was living in his car, telling me he was going to get a place in the winter and do the art show open mic out of there, and try to get traveling artists to come and do paid shows and stuff, he'd been on the road doing music for 14 months when he was 18, older now, but still traveling a lot, he had a lot of good ideas for supporting the kind of community that encourages people like us. he's good stuff. jill went home with jack, and some other people, got a ride from friends. me and darius and leo stayed later, i tried to not get drunk in case rheann called, but i'd already been having wine, and was getting late, so after a while i broke down and started having beers.

we left after a while, darius keeping the van in between the lines on the road, inadvertently stranding annie there, we thought she'd already left with jack and jill. she was fine though, friends with those people and welcome to crash, get a ride out later. when we got back there was a movie on, jack and jill were in the couch together. it was late. we all turned in. i took a mattress in a middle room.

slept in again, for thursday. we'd been talking about it for a while, and today we were determined to go see transformers. leo asked me before when i told him i saw die hard on my layover in syracuse on the way up here, "why didn't you see transformers?' and i said because i wanted to see it with all you guys! and he thought that was a good reason. all these kids around town had been telling us it was good.

it was also the start of some kind of in town festival, summer days, or something. i call it potsdam days. there was a big fireman brass band playing on the main stage set up in the middle of a blocked off main street USA kind of scene. vendors, cotton candy, burgers, fried bread, hot dogs. leo took me into an alley with some graffiti that he'd liked, i took some pictures. jack and annie had been riding around on bicycles all day. jill and darius and leo and myself, we wandered around together. it rained a lot and was sort of miserable. darius didn't want to watch transformers with us, he drove us home so he could sit it out. jill needed to get some cash because the theater didn't take cards, so we went to a dollar store in her truck,, where they would let her get cash back. i got myself a giant bag of sunflower seeds, and a pair of socks.

jack met us at the theater, me and jill and leo. we got our tickets, and watched another hollywood pop fest. after it let out, we rolled cigarettes, and discussed what we liked and disliked about the movie, jack went to a house down the street to pedal his bike home, the rest of us piled into the front of jill's pickup.


put on a chinese movie, due back the next day to the rental store. everyone fell asleep, but leo and i watched most of it. it was neat, called "travelers and magicians," about a goverment officer in a little village in china trying to make his way down the road to get into a town and take a rare opportunity to immigrate to america. he's all modern, with a boombox, resentful of the boring village life, gets stuck listening to a monk tell him stories, travelers telling stories about travelers to each other. leo and i talk about how i eat so many sunflower seeds, says, "you live on these?" and i tell him that deshelling them takes time, makes you feel like you're eating for a longer period of time, keeps you busy, occupied. "eating seeds is a past time activity." leo fell asleep on the couch before the movie finished. i turned off the TV. took the mattress. everyone sleeps.

on friday darius and i were to leave the village of potsdam, to make our way to the villiage of cape vincent. there we would meet up with a guy we'd traveled around with before, the three of us, the first time i'd come to new york a few years ago. he was in this town of cape vincent, darius promised it would be fun, there was a festival going on called "french fest", we'd be well taken care of by friends out there, free drinks, a guy who owns a bar that our friend was close with. the works. after the weekend we'd drive down to new york city for a few days, and come back up before the next weekend.

i sat in the cabin in potsdam and spent the afternoon assembling poetry cd booklets, cutting and folding, and glueing, and binding with needle and dental floss for lack of a long arm stapler, and burning cds. i'd made seven copies of my latest cd booklet. packed up my things, into the back of the van, darius had been packing, and cleaning it out. i gathered all my things, except my umbrella. couldn't find my umbrella. i hope they found it after i left. save it for me! i love my umbrella. "it might not rain at all when you're in new york" leo said to me. everyone helped me look but to no avail. we were pushing it if we wanted to catch this local band that was playing in town, and i got tired of looking so we took off, jill and leo with us, but me and darius ready to not come back for a week or so.

in town, the videographers, darius and leo, taped the band playing. a bunch of the guys we'd been hanging out with in town were on the main stage, a big ensemble, i was happy to see rheann up there playing the flute. at the open mic on tuesday i'd got invited to the coffee shop again to do poetry with a jazz group playing there tonight at seven. darius was eager to get on the road, i told him we should stay so i could do poetry, and try to sell more books. i did manage to sell a few books, to some strangers, and a couple people who'd seen me around and saw me read. it was a pretty fun day. i drank whisky out of a gatorade bottle that the gazebo open mic host passed me. we watched bands in town, saw a photo show in a gallery in town, and went to another art show in a gallery on the campus. ate some free food there. smoked cigarettes outside in the rain, missing my umbrella.

after 7 we got back to the coffee shop, and the band was setting up, and when they got started they shouted out the members, and people in the house that they would call up to jam with, and included me in there! a few sets in, they asked me to read, so i pulled out some print outs of strange san francisco poetry i'd written a while ago, couple years now i think, been a while, but fresh for these people, hadn't read it in town yet. the band leader asked me if the tempo's good, if there's any breaks in the stuff, tells me give them some space to play some solos between verses so i read one that sort of has breaks in it. i'm good at delivery over random music, and it was well received, everyone enjoyed it, people told me that i did a great job. made me feel like a real beatnik. i said my goodbyes to people, told them we'd come back in a week,

darius and i took off for cape vincent. i played music in the tape deck thru my laptop hooked up with tape adapter until it ran out of apple juice.

another roadside attraction

when you don't think anything is going to happen, and you resign yourself to it and are content, to just help build a fire, and sit around talking with friends, sipping on cold ones, next thing you know all hell breaks loose.

we've been living in this little shack cabin for days, it was build by jill's uncle she revealed to me last night. movie junkies, bringing home fresh rentals from the mom and pop video shop in town, we sit around the light box, shooting photons at our eyes, mesmerized.

we listen to music. the stereo has speakers inside the house and out. you can turn one set off or the other, having them both on halves the power being sent to all. then you crank up the volume, and listen to break beats and drum and bass and tribal chanting reverberate on thru the forrest.

i am sitting in a coffee shop in potsdam new york. upstate. the coffee shop is called scoopachinos. i've been doing this project of trying to document my latest adventure, from albuquerque to new york to got knows where, over the rest of this summer, in the fine year of our lord, 2007.

the seventh day of the seventh month of that year, 07/07/07, came and went by us to little fan fare. we remembered it only later, after the day had already transpired. i had somehow expected the wall calendar to register, "jackpot!" and spout out a collection of euros and dollar coins, and arcade machine tokens to redeem for food stamp cards and tobacco. but no avail. we're all running out of money holed up here in potsdamn, and the first of the month has come and gone so hopefully the food stamps will hold up for a little bit longer.

i am enjoying the comforts of a leather love seat sofa. i ate a donut, and drank a large cup of coffee. came out to under a couple bucks. looks like a movie is starting on the television in the café, "daredevil" i'm thinking. it's a nice background distraction but really not of my interest right now.

i've been reading the same book, "another roadside attraction," for a long while now, because i've fallen out of the habit of reading books and it's taken me forever to follow up on it, dedicating only a few minutes every week or so to it didn't get me very far. i started in march. by may i was starting to get into the middle of a slim 350 pages, by june i was identifying with the protagonist. the book was recommended and lent to me by a girl in albuquerque, a young woman, blonde, gorgeous. free spirited. alcoholic. at times, a fast paced party girl. tendencies that drew me in and repulsed me after a little while. on my bus trip from albuquerque to potsdam i thought of her, and her cousin in crime, the gypsy dancer girl who managed to wedge her way into the hearts of myself and two other men that i was involved in a warehouse adventure with, in which we helped artists show their work, and threw some kick ass parties, and made a good run at holding it together. before things fell apart and my role became limited. the core party members reduced to 2 from the four of us, my male peers and the woman who we all harbored an attraction. she introduced me to the other girl, the blonde intellectual 21 year old in the white bridal leather cowboy skirt, who gave me this book, tom robin's first novel. Another Roadside Attraction.

i thought of those girls, on my long bus trip, and remembered the good times and felt fondly, and also the treacherous times of loose moral conviction and powdery substances, and my heart hurt a little bit. i could have wept, but i was too tired. i wanted to be with people who loved me unconditionally, and wouldn't hurt me deliberately. that was another reason to be on this bus, going to reunite with my heroes, my friends, the people who believe in me as an artist, and put my songs on mix cds for their friends and evangelize what i'm doing, and introduce me to new people as "robotson, the famous traveling poet." of course i want to be around people that do that. i need as many people like that in my life as possible.

it's a festive time in potsdam for us, a time of reunions and new connections, where we talk each other up, and joke about how we will take over the world, or alternately how we will survive the apocalypse. either way for me, it involves a lot of traveling around and having a good time, trying to neck with country maidens, and the deliberate derangement of the senses to induce a breakthrough of consciousness. my grandma back home told me that i had learned everything i can from drugs. there is truth in that, though i don't believe in the entire truth of anything. but in practicality, the most common pleasures have all already coaxed their mysteries to me. now i am anxious to run headlong into new mysteries, or just be swept along in the grander mystery of this life in this place, the world, the universe, america, new york, the northeast, potsdam. it doesn't matter where exactly. moreso important is the caliber of relationships you have with other humans. so here i am because this is where my friends are. later i'll go elsewhere because there will be other friends, who i haven't seen in as long a time, and i will circulate around like that, for as long as i can.

and if i can make enough friends, i am confident i can do it forever.

the perfect parner (in crime) - MP3

here's the song i was talking about having remastered today, in the last post.

download link to mp3 here

and lyrics follow:

dig this. shut up.
relax. take off your pants.
keeping watch on the hightower
and crashing out above the theater
on the roof you get an overview
and dreamt of sleeping underneath the stars.
whatever you do just make sure you don't burn down anyone's house
and if you're gonna black out
make sure it's around people who love you
otherwise subconscious aggression could get you stuck
progressive loops in time
perhaps life became too easy to understand
point A
a straight line to point B
exhibit evidence exhibitionism
at the point you finally thought you had it all worked out
will you demonstrate a willingness to destroy everything you know and start over?
stay tuned.
i guess we'll all find out when the time comes...

if jesus showed up in the van and said
"okay now's your chance to run!"
would you be ready or would you go back inside to grab your shoes -
nobody said this was going to be comfortable.
when everything falls apart i'll say see you later -
maybe some day on top of eiffel tower -
you never know how small life will get
or what will be coming down the road
so pack your bags and unload the excess packaging -
i'll take a bus all week if i have to
just scraping by.
there is no rule book for what i'm doing and very little advice -
making it up as you go along is more exciting than sticking to the plan
plans are for fools!
no point in panicking when the picnic is rained out
just go forth boldly.

brazen barren landscapes approach the vanishing advantages
but when the sun rose
and when it does shine
i feel like saying hi to every stranger walking by
wondering how you could ignore the humanity of a hardluck bum on the street
it's important.
we should be feeding each other grapes -
i want to be loved at all times and have real conversations
and wash your feet in sea salts and host my own late night show...
but i'm still looking for the perfect partner in crime
who would sleep with the judge to get me out of jail if necessary
'cause like a roman army regiment
if you're on my back you've got my back and there's no time to waste.
so much to do and get excited because the old manifesto still applies -
it's not that difficult

you need to be inspired by your surroundings
and wrap it all up into a story you can travel with
to keep your interest level high and tell the people -
hopefully that will provoke a reaction worthy of another trip to make the memory
and you can creatively cycle back in to yourself
in a positive feed back loop that becomes self generating -
once you've got that covered the only thing left to do is prostitute charm
and cherish insanity in so far as i've been careful what i fish for
it's catchy cumbersome components get discarded
by a feasible avoidance of work
to carry out the good word
where we reappropriate scripture and bind the hands and feet
of our favorite effigy
in pyrotechnic cord changes

i broke my staff and cut my hair
and rejected my own power long enough
so now the only question is knowing what's worth dreaming for -
good thing i relinquished control early on -
now Don't Get In The Way is the only consolation -
everyday nothing is the same -
isn't that encouraging?
turning the corner came in to full view -
back in that mode -
after the whole thing collapsed we could laugh about it all
40 years down the line in our strange artful secret cabal -
a conspiratorial group of plotters and intriguers -
and i'm not trying to make things worse
by being cliché and defying convention
and absolutely leading in to pure corruption
it's just that going mad seemed like more fun
so now i'm taking it one day at a time
and you play witness

born into the world
when it was the most exciting time to be alive -
at any given -
everything granted grateful -
gorgeous enormous admiration
adorable adhesive love and tiny music
piloting the temple weaponry toward reiteration
need to clear a couple pages out of your head
before you get to the proper synthesis
and step back into automatic action
not to be interrupted by some hightower preaching
lust con bandit visitor screaming:
DIG THIS!
SHUT UP!
RELAX!
TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS!
i'm not making this up
i'm making reference to something that only a few would understand
and presenting it in a context of no context
like the rest of the whole damn world.

anti-epilepsy

there's lots of ice cream shops in potsdam. a sign on the way in says, "potsdam - educational and cultural capital of northern new york."

it was saturday night. the marine, and the polish beatboxing death metal guitar playing DJ guy went back to brooklyn earlier in the afternoon, spooked by car trouble and the prospect of losing their jobs. potsdam was celebrating the fourth of july this weekend, and we went out down to the lake, someone our hosts knew had a house with a dock right on the lake, close to the beach where the fireworks would be going off. there was a barbecue earlier that we missed, i picked at chips, and ate the last hotdogs. "gotta get as much free calories at other people's houses and possible!" i told my friends.

when the fireworks went off and everyone was saying ohh and ahh, i tried to get people to sing the national anthem, or i would say, "U-S-A! U-S-A!" and, omitting the first syllable to be enunciated, would shout "-MERICA!" i said, "viva la mexico!" and a couple in front of me laughed, they were probably thinking "who is this guy?" and said as much. my rasta friend, who i'll call Leo henceforth, tried to introduce me to a girl, and wouldn't tell me what her deal was except that she was weird, but she never came back out. my polish photographer brooklyn friend, who i'll call Darious now, he was talking to the man of the house, who was in a motorized chair, they were talking about photography, i guess the guy in the chair was a high speed photographer, but started out on a journalism beat, trying to beat the cops to the scene of an event he said, to get the picture, and later doing sports stunt photography with his wife. and a stint doing what he called "grins and grips" which i guess is like shaking hands and kissing babies kinda stuff, honorifics and political speeches and so forth. he was enthused, to be talking about his work with some young outsiders, and made vulgar comments about how attractive his wife was.

we left the party as it was dying down. we went back to the house of the painter girl we were staying with, who i'll call jill now. jill's got a boyfriend that i'll conveniently call jack, and jack's cousin was coming over to meet up with us for the evening. she showed up with another guy, and they brought beer and were glad to get out of the car, it was already late. we went over to a party at a collegey sort of house where they had a neon nintendo logo sign in the living room, and a big cardboard cut out of mario from super mario brothers. tom goes to the mayor, an adult swim cartoon from cartoon network, was playing on DVD when we got there. not a lot of people around at the moment, the few that were, they were playing a drinking game that involves trying to throw quarters in your opponents' cups of beer. we put the TV on the video game machine, nintendo wii, and i got to play some virtual bowling with the wireless motion sensing controller. i signed up for the beer quarters game tournament because i'd never tried it before but i guess you're supposed to furnish your own beer for it, and we didn't have any, so we had to walk down to the convenience store to get some. me and jill and leo and jack's cousin's traveling partner walked down, and the other guy and jill bought some packs of beer, and i got a pack of pall mall cigarettes, and a couple slices of pizza because leo told me that it was the best in town, it was gas station convenience store pizza, but he swore by it i guess. he liked to take the new yorkers up here from the city and bring them to this place and make them try the pizza. he's spent a lot of time up here off and on, i guess they've been coming up to jill's cabin for something like a couple years now maybe. the other guy who bought yelled at me for not buying any when he saw that i had money in my wallet, after i said i didn't have any, (which was a lie i guess) and i told him i needed all i got for my trip. "i'm on a months long road trip!" i told him, but i guess the notion of needing to make due with less for a longer trip that most would undergo was lost on him, drunkenly. i walked outside with leo and stood in the rain, we ate our pizza. went back to the party and got to play the drinking game with the throwing of quarters. i lost badly.

half of our crew was already passed out in darrius's van so we made our way home. it'd been raining off and on all weekend. everybody went to sleep in their different places, i read some more of Another Roadside Attraction and got some sleep.

the next day, sunday, we watched movies, and jill cooked for us. jambalaya, it was good. we went out into the town in the van, went to different coffeeshops to use wireless internet. i wrote email to my brother back in albuquerque. we went to go see a girl we know that they call ginger cause she's a red head, who was working at a coffee shop down the street from the movie theater in town, she was alone in the store, and said she'd make us smoothies if we helped her close the place, so i grabbed a brown and swept out the front of the store. she made us drinks and we sat around looking for wireless signals on the streets, in the alleys.

we went back home that night, last night, fairly early. i played music earlier in the day, from my collection of mp3s that i like, and later that night too, for hours. making playlists. an older guy that these friends of mine knew came over and commiserated over the state of his life and 50, his pessimism was a great inspiration to me. i love seeing older people who are cynical, and neurotic, it gives me hope that being a cynic doesn't have to kill you when you're young, like i am.

it was a lazy sunday, but i did get to talk to my friends in pittsburgh and set a date for me to meet up with them in new york city, later this month, over the last weekend. i just had to make sure, with my friends that i'm up here upstate with, that we're going to be getting down there in the first place. i also discovered that there were a couple open mics coming up this week in town, one on tuesday at the coffee shop and one on wednesday under a gazebo in a park.

everyone went to sleep pretty early, i stayed up and talked with dar and leo the rasta lion. we watched a bit of a dvd burn of the final fantasy video game series movie adaptation "advent children" but it kept freezing because the disc was dirty and finally everyone went to bed.

i woke up on the couch this morning. other people were buzzing, i went into a bed to get some more rest, around noon thirty everyone was up, i'd been having weird dreams about children trying to kill me and doing public relations for evil space aliens. jack and jill were cooking big fat pancakes for everyone.

jack had cut his hand something awful at the nintendo house we'd went to on saturday night, bouncing on a trampoline. he hit his hand against a sharp corner on the roof and his thumb has a huge cut in it now. still he nimbly managed to repair a bike tire and cook the breakfast and do lots of things, which speaks to how handy he is when he isn't injured.

after breakfast, bacon and eggs and the pancakes, i spent time remastering the vocals in one of my songs, "the perfect parner (in crime)" - the song i've been selling in cd/book zine format, the one i want to print more copies out of for these open mics i've been working on. i evened out the levels on the vocals and brought them up in the mix so they don't sound all drowned out. i'll post it to the webpage here when i post this entry.

i played it, after i finished it, on the stereo, and jack liked it, said he'd listen to it on repeat all the time in his car, and was singing the chorus as we walked down the path to the river to take a swim. he lent me some trunks. when we got down there, dar and leo were just getting out of the water to have a smoke break, and were eagerly encouraging me to step in. it was shallow, the river bed was made of giant slabs of rock slippery with algae. and it was really cold. it was getting hot out, the sun was warming everything up more than the whole time i'd been here. but the water was cold, and i didn't want to submerge myself. i screamed like a girl when i went in. the girls walking from the house down the path heard me screaming like a girl. i went in a couple times and that was enough for me. earlier dar had thrown me and leo and his own clothes into the washing machine, no dryer, and i was thinking about them, and getting hungry, when i told everyone i was going back up to get a sandwich and put the clothes on the line. it might rain but whatever, jill says "it'll be like that fresh rain scent stuff they put in the air fresheners" or something to that effect.

everyone comes back to the house, talking about what to do about dinner, thinking maybe making some pizza at home. jack has this massive prescription bottle of pills they found and he wants to know if they're muscle relaxants so he can take them for his messed up hand and i said we could look them up online if we get in to town, so we go, and get coffees together, with our laptops, so we could look up the pills, and i could check my email and write this update to my webpage. the pills turned out to be the no fun kind, anti epilepsy meds that make you nauseous.

new robotson mobile phone booth journal #5

Gabcast! new robotson mobile phone booth journal #5




hello listeners, hello readers. hello everyone who cares to check up on me again. it's been more than 24 hours hasn't it? i'm sorry, i've been living with these strange people, having rabid discussions about diverting rivers and buying giant houses to run our villiage out of.

when we last checked in i was sitting in a mall in syracuse new york. i was about to go see a movie, typing on my laptop leaching wireless internet off of the food court. i played a flying game in an arcade that moved the chair you sat in around while you were pulling the flight stick. i went to go see my movie, by myself, laughing at parts noone else laughed at. when it was over i walked back out into the mall, hid in a bathroom and washed myself a bit. i hadn't washed myself in a number of days and was feeling itchy and irritated on my bus trip. in the middle of my last layover to nowhere felling pretty good, within range of my friends. i had time to kill and explored the giant mall. found a post office and shipped off a t-shirt and a zine, and a couple cds, in a priority mail envelope, off to a friend in milwalkee as promised. the woman at the counter was having a long day and kept pressing the wrong buttons. i offered to go get her some tea which made the pretty lady waiting in line behind me smile, but she declined and i went on my way. got some fast food and walked with a burger in my hand, pack on my back, soda in the other fist, pretending to laugh maniacally at nothing, who ha ha ha ha. i'd walk past a sign and read it aloud and laugh, or just laugh at nothing while i walked past some people, who ha ha ha ha. all the way back to the bus station, who ha ha haha.

i'm stranded in syracuse, what's your excuse? that's what i said to the locals, and other travelers. a guy from chicago, i told him my deal, told me where he was from since i said i was from the midwest. i waited for my bus and stared at the passengers lining up, nice looking older people, hip younger girls reading novels, dorky looking young guys huddled in little packs with baseball caps. there was a dude in a t-shirt that read "i love my family" and i liked that a lot. i asked him if i could take his picture, and he said, "why?" and i said, "because it's so honest and unironic and unashamed, it runs counter to everything in this culture." and he said, "no thanks, i don't think i want you to take my picture." and i said, "fine, it'll just be burned into my memory forever." and he said, "good to know." he was a jerk, who loved his family i guess. go figure. i also saw a couple amish guys, one with a hook for a hand, and it reminded me of something the girl on the bus i sat next to from cleveland to buffalo had said to me, telling me about all the weird stuff that had happened to her on greyhounds, about how she'd sat in front of a amish guy with a hook for a hand who had caught her hair snagged in his hook when he got up to go to the bathroom. i wondered, could it be the same hook hand amish guy?

then getting in line for the bus i remarked to a middle aged woman behind me that everybody was so friendly and calm, and orderly, at this stop. she said, "what do you expect?" and i talked a bit about how in hot crowded all night layovers in small dirty stations people get tense, and yell at the staff and everything. of course this wasn't a very busy station she pointed out, and then i went into my routine about how people in this quadrent of the country's greyhound stations are generally more attractive than in other places, thinking about the fat ugly white people everywhere around the south. all the weirdos on the bus, me included, cheapest way to get around a lot of the time, what do you expect?

a pleasant ride up to potsdam on a nice clean coach. newer, different company, sparsely populated. comfortable, for the most part. i slept, and woke up when some guys were getting out of the bus in from of a university in potsdam, i grabbed my things and jumped out, called the house again to see if anyone was coming to pick me up. it was almost 9 pm. i got my metaphysical comic book reading rasta friend on the phone, told him i saw diehard. he said, "you didn't see transformers?" a friend of mine in minneapolis txted me pretty much the same thing earlier. geeks. so i'm telling him i'm in front of this university, and he says they're going to the bus stop to get me, look for a blue car. about now i'm realizing that i got off the bus too early. so i ask some guy who's biking by from the other direction where the bus station is, and he says the bus is down there now, over the bridge, so i start walking. he was friendly. i asked another guy for more specific directions, he was jogging with his huskie dog, told me he thought it was to the right past the pizza hut, over the bridge, asked me my name and told me his, grant i think it was. i kept walking. it's lush and green out here, it was misty. going over a river. a train was passing, making loud train horn noises and clanking. i walked up the street after the bridge looking around for some sign of port of entry. people i saw up the street were too far away to ask. then i saw a familiar face in a blue car, in the driver's seat, parked in an alley. in the passenger another face i recognized, took me a while to pin it down, a photographer from brooklyn who was friends with the guy who bought me the bus ticket. and the driver, she's the one who's got the place, she's a painter girl who lives in a cabin out in the woods, the local host. i found them! they had gotten some beer, and we retreated to the hide away.

when i arrived, there were a bunch of people i hadn't seen in a long time, and even a friend from LA was out there too, i hadn't expected her to be there, i knew she was in town but i thought she was leaving before i got in, from what i had heard. that was amazing. i excitedly greeted new friends and embraced old ones, and we pretty much just pick up where we left off and jump right back into things again. that is the way of these sorts of occasions. i took a shower and changed into some clean clothes, needed that, days on the bus. we sat in a living room and smoked and drank, and laughed and talked, and hiked down a path to the water, where there was a camp fire and tents, and a stereo, and later people sitting around the fire playing guitars, singing, drinking, talking. a whole crew of people who had been here for a couple days was going back to the city tonight, had to go back to jobs in town, or to jersey to see their families before going back to LA, and so forth. we talked a bit about how we were feeling divided about running out on our families to be with our friends, and i stated that i was no longer going to be halfway about anything, and choosing one or the other for real this time, really leaving, and really coming back.

getting caught up with people around a fire, and later a car full of people, some that i would get to see soon, and some not till later, took off for new york city and we wished them well. some of us went back to the fire and stayed up till sunrise, with beer and conversation, and the rest went to sleep in the house. in the morning me and a guy who was in the marines went back to the house and watched last exit to brooklyn on VHS, based on a henry sibley jr. book, like requiem for a dream. i fell sleep before it ended, but it was great.

when i awoke later in the day, on the floor, using my coat as a pillow, they told me a bed was open so i slept some more in a guest room. then i got up again, and some of the others were going into town. i watched them leave, stayed for a little while with the rest until we ventured in later. before we left i had noticed that my doctor's hang bag, which had been run off the zipper track somewhere on the bus trip, had been fixed by someone while i had slept. i had tried to fix it earlier in the previous night to no success, and someone magically fixed it while i was out. amazing. i think they were already gone though because nobody who was around owned up to it.

we went into town and went to a icecream shop bakery coffee shop place, to use the wireless internet, and i got some cheap fast food across the street with my camera weilding brooklyn friend who came over from poland a long time ago when he was younger. whenever i've gone to new york the last couple times i stayed with him mostly, graciously he housed me, and his mother always fed us good home cooked meals. we caught up and ate, and made observations on the town, and i went back to the coffee shop, and got a milkshake, and checked my email. i intended to update the webpage, but got caught up writing replies. the girl on the bus who i said i would come visit some day found my webpage and posted a comment on one of the entries, updating me about her plight. that was neat, i didn't expect her to get back to me so soon.

my brother in albuquerque sent me an angry email about me not helping the family economy, running around the country doing what ever i want, and i responded with a long thought out response arguing for my right to live how i see fit. it made me think a lot about things though, and that's not bad.

we visited some people around the town and made our way back to meet up with the rest of the group, the boys were practicing sparing with wooden swords, and doing thai chi, and we plotted and made plans, and i read zines by people that we knew all over the place, and i showed people some of my booklets, and there were photographs of our friends in different places on the wall, and they have one of my poems on the fridge and another one in the bathroom. we talked about diverting rivers and playing god and how insane it all is, and ranted through the day, until we finally decided to go back into town and go to a party at a fratty sort of house where a lot of the local friends of our hosts hang out. there were kids playing drinking games with quarters and plastic cups of beers, and i said weird things to all the people who introduced themselves to me.

when it was time to go, the mini guru metaphysician friend from new york who i'd met in LA, and who played a big part in bringing me into this group of people, told me that i had to say, spend the night with this party of people, and i felt shy about it and didn't want to stay, but he said it was my turn and they'd pick me up in the morning. i think he was trying to say that it was good for me to be around being crazy around these people, that it would be good for both of us, but i didn't feel particularly drawn to them so i sheepishly climbed into the van with everyone else and we went back to the homestead.

we put on a cheesy CGI animated GI JOE movie that was a crass marketing ploy to sell toys. just to see how