February 3, 2010
Santa broke his fist off my face for Christmas. In the rum bloodbath I think I lost the hat I was wearing. It was the only Christmas present I had received after turning Jewish for a few weeks and then in the middle of Chanukkah turning back into nothing. I knew it was time to get started on some new shit.
I had to stop hanging out with me, get back to work. And then Jake gave me a killer photograph of a man with a flare in the night by the ferry terminal, and the story of a dear friend being deported and drowning in legal fees. Just write a story. Find the correlation. I fell back in to drinking. Burning the days away. I took a vacation that I could not afford and went to LA. Ell AY! Inside jokes. Most pleasant week in recent memory. No joking. Paradigm shift in my thinking: always envisioned LA as plastic/cement Mordor. I picked a prickly pear in Runyon Canyon, but I forgot to use the claw. Christine picked the prickly pear pricks from my hand. The sun was low. We sat and had the most delirious fruits of conversation. Maybe Mordor, if you go there with the right Orc, is a really nice place afterall.
Vacation can't last forever. Back to Seattle. Use the telephone. Build a grill, name it Rasta. Rename it Harmonica. Nice pose. Keep the inside jokes, dissect the vacation week, find every modicum of repose that made it so pleasant. Try to recreate it in Seattle like a science experiment. I fell back in to drinking, but not as deep. Burning the days away, and all-nighters with coconut oil skin, my drunk harmonica piercing the dark windows, echoing through the streets. I am not self-conscious.
Some good stuff happens and some bad stuff happens: I contribute a three-pronged performance to my friend Bryan's art show reading party to a hungry audience; I get pulled over by the cops because I failed to transfer the title for my truck into my name after the purchase and they discover that my license is expired. For legal and financial reasons, I am off the road. I am back on my bicycle, and my greasy Fish Fry shoes. I sing, I design, I grill, I write.
The chronology here is wobbly. Can only 100% determine which events are before LA, and which are after. Also 100% certainty: pre-scar and In the year of the Scar. Jake has really gotten this organized now. We have a meeting at his house. He and I, Gerardo, Miles and Mandy. Nice to meet everyone, pass around the talking stick, drink beer and tell stories. These are all good people. We work out the logistics of rallying around one common goal. Time to get cracking. Mandy is the only one not smoking cigarettes. She must be a health nut.
Have I started working on that story? The one based on the photograph and what's going on with immigration. Any progress?
Haven't put pen to paper, having difficulty finding suitable correlation. I have actually taken some notes, but the notebook is in my bag, which I forgot at the Canterbury the other night. But I want to get to work on a poster for the show. And ask if we can set up the grill on the night of the show. When's it going to be? March 14, last day of daylight-savings. Perfect! Does anyone make plans for the last day of daylight-savings way in advance? No, not really. Wonderful. Maybe we can burn a tiny effigy of a fish as it is the astrological wunderkind of March 14.
I have a few days off in a row. I put elbow grease and genuine Adderall enthusiasm into cleaning the apartment. This has not been attempted in months. I've got to get organized. Move the laptop from the bed to the desk to alleviate the constant pain in my neck from my attempts to type while horizontal. Move the desk chair over to the desk so that the desk can be used as a desk instead of an island for clean laundry to live on. Separate the big box of important shit into several smaller boxes of like items. Put a trash bag in the trash can. Bleach a whole bathtub of dirty dishes. Combine all the little bits of shampoo into one ultimate 10-in-1 shampoo. Change the dirty Internet sheets. I find the hat that I thought I lost in Oregon! Fuck you, Santa and Jesus! Real humans win again! I build a table out of an old bicycle, a board, some cardboard boxes and one of my paintings. It doesn't look trashy, but maybe I'm just high all the time. Now it's stacked with clean folded laundry. I don't like to have my clothing in drawers, because things get lost in drawers. Dressers, to me, are just tall tables with walls. When I find the expensive stylus to my Wacom tablet, I tie a string around it and fasten it to the tablet's cord. This defeats the idea behind having a wireless stylus, but it is a system that I cannot afford to live without, being a chronically absent minded thief and loser. I steal things from myself without noticing, then smuggle the items out into the world and lose them where no one will ever find them. When I get my bag back from the Canterbury the bartender asks me if it has any special markings. Well a couple of notebooks inside, and it's brown. Yeah, that's it in your hand. And HA! Yep. There's a pan lid attached to the strap! Hahaha! I laugh with the bartender, I go to 12th Avenue Iron to get the two major pieces of my grill welded to one another.
This is my closest encounter with deportation ever. I've met him, shared food with him. He is so generous. He is a better neighbor than me. Deportation. What do I know about it? When I was in England for a summer college program, a security guard at Sainsbury's grocery store threatened to deport me for attempting to shoplift three bottles of wine. He scared the crap out of me and let me go. I was a reformed man. This is a whole nother thing, though. He has been in America for about twenty something years. From what I had heard, and from how he carried himself at our first meeting, it is clearly my opinion that America is attempting to deport an American. That is the correlation in the photograph. Looking for justice in America by the light of an emergency flare.
Jake just met with a dude named AJ who is letting us set up shop for the event at the Cherry Street Coffee House around Pioneer Square somewhere. I was supposed to get up early and go with him this morning, but I lost my phone sometime in the revelry last night. Instead I wake up late with bad breath. I drink the second half of a 46 oz. can of V8. I worry about botulism. I listen to "I'm a man" by the Spencer Davis Group three or four times in a row. I am hooked. I dance. I worry about bedbugs. My scar hurts. My phone is hanging from the charging cord. That's where I lost it last night. That's where I hung it when I was drunk. That's ok. I'm writing.
I call Jake, I make myself a peanut butter sandwich, I take a poopy, I look around for cigarettes but I smoked them all last night (?), I look in my marijuana spot for marijuana and then I smoke marijuana. I'm doing it again. Burning away the days. Jake says that everything's clever with AJ, and jokes that I'm fired for sleeping through the appointment. He's gonna type up the notes from that meeting and send it to all of us as a pdf. I should go over there and hang out when the writing dries up.
I want to grill tonight. Have people over and make them the best hobo-grill food they ever ate. There must be a test night for the grill firing at full capacity before the show night. All of the artists involved have chosen a food item they wanted grilled. Jake wants Grilled Alfredo Cheese Sandwiches, Dilla says Banana and something else Cheese Sandwiches, Gerardo wants chorizo, and what did Miles say? Yep. Some of that sounds weird. But aren't we still hanging ten on the waves of the weird revolution? I'm gonna grill grapefruit.
I can only hope that they do not deport my new friend. I'm just getting to know the guy. Wait, no. I can do more than only hope. This show is gonna be sick and multifaceted. Jake's taking pictures, Miles is making movies, Mandilla's probably a genius, I don't know exactly what Gerardo has up his sleeve, but I know we all would like longer than a stressed-out month to get it all together. And we're all gonna donate a buck. Everyone's gonna donate a buck even though it could be spent to buy four lollipops or one cigarette from a stranger. I'm not made of money. Every dollar that I have a chance to earn is already spoken for by collections, parking services, and now this 550 dollar fucker that came bundled up with an invitation for a court date. Yet, I'm still hoping to sell a bunch of art and grilled cheese at this show and figure out what percentage I can donate to my new buddy's cause. Maybe I can get someone to donate bread and cheese. I've already got the pickles. Banana and Pickle Grilled Cheeses. That's what Mandy was on about.
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