good mournin’ campers

July 08, 2009

i often go to blogging in my head upon waking, and i usually never do it, but this morning i reached over and grabbed my mac, it was within arms reach.

morning head: i like this head, when everything is clear and new and things things things start filtering in one by one. first the magic, then the mundane.

i treated myself to this hotel room in portland after lots of relative bed-and-couch crashing.

i move my legs around in the king-size bed, feeling very lucky to exist at all, not knowing anything yet.

left leg works, rubs against sheet.
right leg works, rubs against sheet.
whole body stretches out and feels gloriously enveloped.
things, facts.
i’m in portland.
i don’t have anything to do today but catch up.
i’ll drink coffee.
i love coffee.
the coffee here is good coffee.
this pillow is soft.
i love neil.
his voice sent me off to bed, i remember now.
i remember how.
construction sounds outside.
the blinds are open.
what time is it?
this pillow is soft.
maybe i’ll blog about this.
maybe i’ll sit all day in powell’s bookstore and not work.
maybe i’ll go back to sleep.
because i can.
this pillow is wonderful.
should get a pillow like this.
soft soft pillow.
what would i do with it?
i can’t carry around a pillow like this everywhere.
i live out of a suitcase.
and
that’s the evil moment: that’s when the truth caves things in.

mornings are amazing alone, like this. mornings are also amazing together. there’s that wonderful thing that happens when you’re in love and you wake up next to Them and your brain hasn’t clicked into it’s Self yet and you just become a vessel, a thing that pours love. my instinct, upon waking, to love something. but mornings are amazing alone – the body and the mind can snake around improvisational, making weird things in silence.

then the day comes, the realities materialize, and mundane takes over. the magic might only last twenty seconds, sometimes even less.

used to be when i was home in boston, especially in summer with the sun blazing through the vines in my window, i’d often have this 20 seconds of “i’m going to change my whole existence today” upon waking on an off day where i had nothing planned. i’d lie there in bed: ahhhhhh holy shit, i have nothing to do today…maybe i’ll drive to maine. pick blueberries. see ships. maybe i’ll sit in the boston public library all day and look at 17th century art. maybe i’ll go to harvard and see what it would take to enroll. maybe i’ll learn to play piano. maybe i’ll go work in a soup kitchen.

Etc.

these things would never happen.

i would go to yoga, i would read the paper, and i would spend hours and hours catching up on email and talking on the phone. that is My Life.

this is probably what i will do today.

it’s fine.

i’ve been feeling strange and weird and alive lately, very alive, but also totally unhinged.

i remember looking around at my life less a year ago and commenting to my best friend that all the players in the cast of my everyday life had changed: new manager, new boyfriend, new touring crew….the faces that i see everyday are totally different.

it’s happened again. i feel more grounded this time, but i wonder how abnormal that is. i almost never see the same people every day. even the things that are constants, the people who keep me tethered….they’re constants through the telephone, through emails, through not-being-there. i cried backstage and onstage the other night at jason’s show, listening to the reverend peyton, and then my own voice, talk to the crowd about how jason has become family.

this is what we do on the road and in this kind of life….we decide with our creative minds who we want our family to be and we go out, hunt them down, capture them and then nourish them with all our mights. maybe this is something that artists are especially good at. we think things into reality, we don’t accept that things have to be Any Way at all.

jason’s eleventh anniversary (marking the release of his first record) was at town hall and made of love…i felt so proud and happy to be a part of something so beautiful. there were lots of songs and tomatoes and balloons and sharing.

someone put this wonderful collage of three photos from jason & me singing “electric blanket” together:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ohnobody/3686827068/

and here’s a shot of the whole mob that night:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/elijuicyjones/3693838436/

jason had flown four of his closest collaboarators in for the show…me, the reverend peyton, andru bemis and michael mcquilken – jason’s drummer, my recent ex.

what could have been awkward ended up being healing. we’ve barely talked since things fell apart over the fall tour. we finally pieced our friendship back together again – though it was a weird kind of torture to be around him. my every instinct was to act like his loving girlfriend again – those impulses don’t die in me, the impulse to stroke a cheek, to hold a hand. michael knows this: i’ve had some brutal partings, with a variety of lovers. for years i’ve been standing there in the shock of a break-up moment with my hand outstretched saying “but let’s be friends and go eat a blueberry scone together and chat and maybe even have some nice goodbye kissing” as they’re frantically thumbing through yellow pages to hire sky-writing jet planes that don’t mind leaving FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING CUNT I’M NEVER TALKING TO YOU AGAIN TAKE THAT FUCKING BLUEBERRY SCONE AND SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS in a nice swirl of white against a cloudless sky.

usually this sentiment diminishes. but sometimes it takes years.

i’ve been told i infuriate with my cavalierness.

with michael, this wasn’t true. this is part of why i love him so much, still. it’s hard, i suppose it will always be hard.

jason was the one who connected us in the first pace, it felt symbolic to be sitting back around the scone table with the two of them.

and playing music together helped – michael and i decided to throw two songs together very-last-minute (we did “missed me” and “runs in the family” together and we didn’t suck too much for only having practiced about 30 minutes). he’s a damn fine drummer.

i also decided a few days ago not to go back to boston, thus driving another symbolic nail into where Home really is. Home is not my apartment anymore, i don’t feel it.

Home has become where i feel drawn, in the moment. i opted instead to take an impulsive trip to boulder where my cousin is in a jam. i haven’t seen him in a while. and then to neil’s, where i was headed anyway, because we have to sign books books books, which are finally – praise cthulhu – going to be sent to everybody, including the signed ones to the people who ordered them LAST AUGUST.

i’m sorry guys. i know i keep saying it. but i am. you’ve been waiting a long time.

portland was a good place to stop in between, i had a meeting, caught up with eric my down-boy who’s tour managed the dolls…and got an almost-3-hour acupuncture and shiatsu treatment from eric’s boyfriend grant who is still in acupuncture school. i melted into oblivion. i traded them a bottle of wine.

i’m staying in a hotel near the strip club (mary’s club all nude revue!, which is portland’s first, i believe) where i penned a lot of the onion cellar script (not that that script ever got used, but o well).

portland is fertile ground for me….i also wrote “astronaut” here backstage at a dolls show at the crystal ballroom (due only to the fact that the subject of the song was coming to our show that night).

maybe there’s something in the voodoo doughnuts. like robitussin, though i’ve heard the FDA stopped them from doing that anymore.

i might do a twitter gathering in the strip joint tonight. i’m dead serious. buy me drinks.

by the way, if you’re still a twitter-cynic, i’d like you to read THIS. it’s the most beautiful article about twitter and why it’s real, wonderful and good.
and ephemeral (i believe that wholeheartedly, it can’t last very long).

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/paul-constant-reviews-twitter/Content?oid=1774875

if you still don’t believe, here is more proof that twitter makes insanely beautiful things happen…
these photos are from the last ninja-beach gathering in LA.
we ended up also shooting an impromptu cat stevens video with everyone standing frozen on the shore.

danna, who shot it out of nowhere, is still working on editing it and adding some text, will keep you informed.
the day was a magic day.

photos by the amazing lindsey byrnes.

kirstin vangsness, who looked me up out of the blue and who turns out to be a classy fucking art dame – by day she’s an actress on a show called “criminal minds”, which i’d never seen before – came and lent a hand.

we’d already bonded over sushi and life and she’s a fucking keeper, i recommend checking out her play KILL ME DEADLY at Theater of Note in LA, runs til the 1st: http://www.theatreofnote.com/

robert, my 82-year-old cousin who was the impetus for the gatherings in the first place, FINALLY was persuaded to whip out his ukulele and play us a song,

check it: