Answer #33 - I use my Spidey Sense

Well, after all the hullaballoo (?), maybe 3 inches of snow, and all of it in my yard.  None in Wisconsin, hardly any in Illinois... strange...  Adventure Boy wins this battle (oh, but not the war..)

On these road trips, Adventure Boy does most of the driving because my sense of direction is desperately inaccurate.  This is because I have the ability to convince myself of the truth of a thing, despite much evidence to the contrary.

So how does someone with no sense of direction get anywhere driving?  Ever? 

I once drove 10 miles on a road at nearing 5:00pm in the mid-Autumn, with the sun directly to my left above the tree line, convinced I was going South.  Despite the fact that the sun was on my left.  So I clearly couldn't be going South.  But, well, I knew I was because I had a clear memory that my destination was to the south and on this particular road, and, proceeded to drive 10 miles, and of course said destination was not there, where I had driven - 10 miles to the NORTH - and there is much of me that remains enigmatic.  To me, I mean. 

Anyway - this Western & Northern trip included two good shows -  Nice people... my favorite part of the whole thing - the cool people along the way.  This time one of them a Philosophy Professor at Southern Illinois - edited a series of funny books: 'South Park and Philosophy,' 'Bruce Springsteen and Philosophy', 'The Wizard of Oz and Philosophy,'  'The Grateful Dead and Philosophy' - you get the idea.  An academic press that's encouraging ordinarily stuffy intellectuals to have a little pop culture fun.  Gotta like that.

Tried to listen to an episode of This American Life in replace of crap pulp fiction today - and it's a great show - don't get me wrong - but this particular episode involved an 80-year-old Italian immigrant man whose neighborhood had succumbed to economic fall-out some years ago, and who had, by a series of small, badly miscalculated steps, become relegated to a cramped room in his own home - a place that has since been taken over by junkies, rats (actual rats) prostitutes, buckets of human waste, pimps and dealers.  He was articulate, he was stoic - he was lucid.  He hadn't been to the 2nd story of his own home since 1992.  I couldn't bear it.  I wanted to turn the car to the East and go get him out of there.  Get them all out of there.  Even the rats.  I hear they make good pets.

Yeah, I know - you're wondering would I use my Spidey Sense to defy the GPS, in the sure knowledge that my instincts would lead me in the direction of EAST?

Probably.

But I needed to get home, so, you know, I had to put the crap pulp fiction back on. 

For a while.  And then I turned it off and just drove.  South.  Like the GPS said I should.

In the end, Adventure Boy didn't even need to shovel the driveway.

Answer #32 - Because Great Balls of Fire Exploded Out of his Chest

The snow wasn't bad driving.  Yes, Adventure Boy pulled out the big guns of 'wussball' and 'chicken' so I got in the car and drove to Illinois.  Pride is a dangerous thing, but I got it in spades.

Now I'll get in the car in 1/2 an hour and drive to Mukwanago, somewhere between Madison and Milwaukee.  This will be maybe 7 hours and to the accompaniment of some fairly crappy pulp fiction book on CD.


Why would anyone listen to crappy pulp fiction for 7 hours?

That's just how we roll.

Yesterday's was 'Tail Spin' by Catherine Coulter.  There was a plane, a strapping FBI agent, a rich family and their bastard daughter, the bastard daughter and the FBI agent meeting as the plane plummeted because of a bomb aboard and the bastard daughter happening to drive by the field in which said plane was smouldering in time to save said strapping agent - of course, a handful of dead bodies along the way, leading, inevitably to the engagement of the FBI agent and the bastard daughter who inherited all the money somehow.

It was, it was.. it defied description.  It was beyond reckoning, it was.. the dialogue was..  the reader and her bizarre and earnest attempt at southern accent was.. it..  there were cellphones that all, every one of them, every character in the book carried a cell phone that rang, incessantly a random popular tune, which the author felt compelled to tell us about.  Every time.  No ring ring, always a pop song.  For everyone.  Even the nuclear physicists.  Implausible, you say?  Yes, I say.

Examples:

"Sherlock's pocket rang 'Like a Virgin'"
"'She Loves You' screamed from the buzzing phone on the commissioner's desk"
"'Three Times a Lady' let Rachel know that Laurel had tracked her down"
(this went on for hours and endless hours...)

But the pinnacle, the screaming masterpiece of all of the cellphone ring descriptions:

Bastard daughter and FBI Agent are finally locked in an embrace.
For some reason she licks his neck and then apologizes. (not kidding)
He smiles, reassuringly as he holds her close, her face in his hands

And then (wait for it)
"Great Balls of Fire exploded out of his chest"

His cell phone was ringing.

I spit my coffee all over the dashboard and we laughed ourselves into town.

Ah, good times.  Snow storms.  Pulp fiction...  coffee-covered dashboard.

The road.
'

Answer #31 - Because Adventure Boy Likes Adventure

Adventure Boy says, 'I'm not worried about it!'  (cape billowing in the breeze)

But Adventure Boy ALWAYS says this.  This is the problem with being Adventure Boy.  Not enough of the peptide receptors that recognize fear as a means by which to stay alive.  Like regular humans do.

'It's a freaking snow storm!', I say. 
'Even the schools are closed.  And you know how Governor Mitch hates paying teachers anyway - but ESPECIALLY for days they're not working!  This is the real deal!'

'The Prius is great in the snow!'  (cape still billowing.  outstretched arm pointing to the west.  our destination)

'What?'  Now I'm baffled.  'Why the hell would a Prius be GREAT in the snow?  It's like a VW, only lower to the ground!'

Not that I'm complaining about my Prius.  Even with all the recalls, its the bitchinest car ever.  Great mileage, roomy, nice drive, you can sneak up on people in grocery store parking lots and scare them for fun, and just being in it feels both futuristic (cause of the cool display that tells you everything you ever wanted to know) and smugly earthy, because - you know - I care about the planet and carbon emissions, and you don't.  I know someone's got to do something about it and that someone is me.  We're in a club.  Us Prius owners.  The rest of you aren't in the club and don't care as much as we do.  Probably shop at Wal-Mart, even.  That's how much you care.

So anyway...  I'll call the venue (which is South of St. Louis) and I'll ask them how they'd feel if I'd opt NOT to drive in a snow storm. 

And then, if they say, 'Well, no we wouldn't want you to risk your lives to come and play the show we've busted our asses to put together for you, and pulled in all the favors and extortions we could to guarantee you a great audience like your agent said we had to or he'd break our knuckles, and got you that radio show and everything by telling 'em about your agent and knuckles and all, no, don't worry about it.  We'll watch 'Idol' and call it a night' - IF they say that - then before he's awake, I'll probably completely LIE and tell him they called me and cancelled the show. 

Because, you see, only one person can handle Adventure Boy. 

Teacherously Devious Girl.  (smirks evilly while coffee cup steams gently on the desk, next to blue prints of future treacheries)

Answer # 30 - The Window had Closed

There are some windows that open briefly, something or other flies in - maybe a butterfly, maybe a bee - and the interior is altered.  Briefly.  Or maybe forever.  Maybe the window gets stuck open and a swarm fills the room and sets up shop in a brown drippy blob on a lamp shade, and forever after, at Christmas and birthdays, the tale is told of the day the bees came.

I was a kid, in my backyard in southern California, watching a swarm of swirling bees - both my dogs chasing the thing, barking and yipping - my brother and I standing at the sliding glass door, terrified to open it, but cracking it anyway, just in case we might get the opportunity to slam it shut and run, screaming.

The day the bees came.

Windows open.  Butterflies flap their wings... windows close.  Dogs yip.  Shirtless teenage boys with sideways caps walk down the streets in search of open doorways filled with silhouettes of winking (one eye shut, one eye open), long-legged girls, while smaller children stand at sliding glass doors watching bees swirl and then land on the garage roof in back of the house - all together, in a blob the color of dark honey, bees dripping off the gutter..

Why did this happen?

Now I know they were following a queen who'd gone willingly, or who'd been forced to leave her hive.  The bees, I mean.  They gathered all around her on the roof, not knowing what else to do.  Then, I didn't know that a window had closed.

For a dear friend of mine, a window closed yesterday.  And another won't open for a while.

Dogs will yip.  The snow will swirl.  It's coming tomorrow, and we'll have to drive straight into it, due West.  And my friend is due East.  And the snow will roar over us, as we drive, gather strength and head straight for him and his house on the hill where the windows will all be closed. And I don't know why, but all I can think of are bees in the backyard, tapping on the sliding glass door.

Answer #29 - In a Boat, Obviously

We had this idea that we'd raise chickens last Spring.  We have an old, defunct wooden sailboat in the front yard with a gang plank coming out the side of it, and of course, I thought, Let's put the chickens in the boat! A boat house for a hen house! Then every morning, I open up the gang plank, and chickens walk down it, all in a row.

My own little Fellini movie.  Every morning. 

This seemed like a great way to start the day.  Especially if I could talk a couple of them into wearing little top hats or riding a little chicken-sized unicycle or something.  Or just standing perfectly still on one foot, once every hour or whenever a frat boy rode by on his Cannondale.

The idea was squashed by someone else's practicality.  There are health hazards, apparently, with the by-products of live chickens in a boat, and 'who's going to clean up the mess every week?' and 'they need to have a practical hen house that's accessible..'

No, they need their own boat.

Last time I was in Key West there were chickens everywhere... at the airport, walking around the table and pecking the dust while I was eating at that groovy restaurant.. hanging out on the corners with fancy blue tufts and such.  These were exotic chickens from all over the Caribbean and beyond.  Walking paintings, walking metaphor, kinetic poetry... by products...

But what of Chickens and Tropical Storms?  What would be the best way for a forward-thinking chicken to ride out these watery Smitings?
 
Think on it.  They'd have fared much better these past years, what with the storms and all the flooding if they'd had their own boats.  And then, when the calm returned, they could open up the little gang planks and stroll back to the beach.  And every hour or so, stand perfectly still on one foot.

Yes.

Answer #28 - Rhinoceri love beans

Well, perspective is a thing, huh?  You think she's in love, but she's maybe just tolerating.  This is an easier state to pull off than many of us would like to admit.  Looks like love but it's really just tolerance.

20 more pages in, that's where we are.  In the farthest wilds of Iceland, in cities whose names can't be pronounced by those of us without the ability to find the umlat on the keyboard, Eileen Myles is slightly annoyed.  Still wide-open fascinated, in as much as her scruffy black cool will allow, but irked.  It's been raining.  Alot.  No busses.  Her eloquence is jacking with me, happily.. rough and tumble, stuff of bright light...   

"Most likely we travel to exist in an analogue to our life's dilemmas.  It's like a spaceship.  The work for the traveler is making the effort to understand that the place you are moving through is real and the solution to your increasingly absent problems is forgetting.  To see them in a burst as you are vanishing into the world.  Travel is not transcendence.  It's immanence.  It's trying to be here."

No, this blog is not a book review.  I lack both the qualifications and commitment - but for reference, it's The Importance of Being Iceland, and I have a strong desire to spend the rest of the day reading it - followed by the poetry of his Icelandic travels by my friend Duke Lang.  My own writing brain is in serious need of a jolt of sorts- possibly a couple of car batteries and some well-placed clamps.

I'm a traveling musician.  She's captured my own analogue, though I couldn't have conceived of it in these terms. But immanence is what we're all reaching for - those of us on the road, I think.  Trying to be here.  It's never as easy when I'm home, pacing from room to room, scratching my head, thinking 'I should write,' while the phone rings and the cat glowers and the thud thud thud from the studio shivers the joists.

I've picked up 5 shows since Friday.  This is a good thing if immanence is what I'm striving for.  I'll get it in spades, as the shows stretch from Belfast to Wisconsin to Victoria BC.  If you're ever passing through - the year's tour schedule is on Myspace.  It's a long list.  A measure of success?  Hm..

I started this blog keeping points - points of progress in this music business.  Step ups and set backs.  But a friend pointed out that reducing my life to a series of daily points on some grizzly ladder of success was the equivalent of selling my cow to Monsanto.  In return for magical, genetically-altered and non-proliferating beans.

Little did she know that magic beans are what I've always wanted.

Just not from the Monsanto death squads (with the happy Hallmarky Farm Family commercials.  The farm family 'actors' are actually played by zombies, just so you know).

So is it immanence? Or what's the point?

In reality, things are going pretty well.  Some people are interested that hadn't been prior, and I feel a fairly strong compulsion to plow through a handful of brick walls like a rhinoceros - to get to the shiny bean of folk music success.  Um, beans.  Shiny.  Immanence? Transcendence?  snort.

Answer #27 - Reykjavik

40 pages in to The Importance of Being Iceland, and I'm hooked...  An American essayist steeped in what appears to be the coolest (and possibly contentedly drunkest, but like I said 40 pages in) culture ever. Although the author is an alcoholic poet that doesn't drink at this point and so might be more, er, sensitive to such things than, say, others...   I may have to emigrate to there - it looks to be a perfect combination of heaven, hell - ice and fire... and, despite melting glaciers, an expanse of beauty that is beyond breathtaking.

And, from the country that spawned Bjork, the most untouchably cool performance artist of the generation, art seems to ooze from every crag and cobble.  And that's just the natural world - the geysers, glaciers and volcanic leavings.  "Lava is everywhere here.  Like an ominous clock that has stopped.  Iceland's dark grey sweater is everywhere covered with bright green lichen.  These landscapes folding all over the country (I almost said planet) say what's churning underground, what's running things.  Unsteadiness is the country's deepest force."  The human art component appears to have permeated the whole of the culture as well, in an unbounded and flowing mess of call and response.  This is a world where snake-handling and church might mix nicely... Wild, dangerous, darkly beautiful...

If you've ever read or listened to anything I've ever written, I think you can see clearly the appeal that unsteadiness as a country's physical foundation might have for me.  Everything else is illusion.  I could really get behind a place that deals a bit more in reality than we Americans like to.  We have nearly hysterical machinations that the flag itself could float us out of any great flood...  maybe not so much in Iceland.  No such certainty.

I'll have to go there at some point not too long from now.  The Icelandic economy is in tatters, but whose isn't?  I'll have to go because I'm pretty sure this writer, Eileen Myles, is my lesbian soulmate, and if she loves it this much, I'm bound to.  Didn't previously know I had a lesbian soulmate, but now I do.  I should have known who she is for all of my adult life, but, well, as the Yin to her Yang, I'm oblivious to cultural cool.  She seems to define it. Yin and Yang.  For example, in as much as I tend to overuse of comma and punctuation (dorky), she nearly utterly neglects it (which is cool).  Despite the run-on and runaway stream-of-consciousness of some of her writings, it's an adventure I'm utterly unwilling to miss and is strikingly similar to my own leaps and distractions when conveying ideas.  So I'll, just, throw, in extra commas, to make up, for, her, lack.  Because, like I said, I think she's my soulmate.

So, Where can I get the best Putrified Shark Fin in the World?

On the downside, I've read previously that putrified shark fin is a common dish consumed in Iceland, accompanied by an extraordinarily strong liquor.

This gives me pause, but I've eaten sugared, dried squid in Seoul accompanied by Soju in kool-aid.  So I'll do what I have to do.  For both of us.  And I'll keep you posted.