Answer #175 - Someone with a box full of clouds

It's a new year. It's actually February of a new year.

January blew by in a hail of hail, ice, snow and a short trip through Nebraska.

Nebraska? In January? Yep. Driving snow 6 hours there. Driving snow 12 hours back. We can never be accused of lack of dedication. Besides, we love Nebraska. The sky is huge, the people are an amazing combination of fierce independence and, despite their unquestionable ability to probably outlast all the rest of us in times of war, famine, or drought, unassuming humility.  Is this because the weather on the Great Plains is truly humbling? Maybe half the nation's problem is that half the nation doesn't get this idea? That, despite our red, white, and blueness, we really aren't the biggest, baddest entities on the planet. Ice storms are. And don't get me started on tornadoes...

I wanted a concise overview of the year. To try to draw the conclusions I'd hoped to draw at the end of touring a new album, spending days and weeks on end on the road, and, in general, making a living at music.

But I don't have them, really. The industry shifts every five minutes, not unlike my myspace and facebook pages, and I find myself charting a new course along with it. Daily. Sometimes hourly, as a friend once said.

This year, I'll finish the play, Jane. I've got a new album rolling, but it won't stick its head above the dark water for quite a while. Instead, I'll finally start the book. I've wanted to forever. It kicks at me, and tickles my ears sometimes.. it starts with Robert setting a box of clouds next to a stove pipe.

And I don't know why.
But who am I to ask?

The world in Indiana is iced today. I like the idea of a box of clouds by a warm stove pipe... anything could rise out of the mist.

Anything could rise out of 2011. I'll keep you posted.

It's good to be back.

Answer #174 - Yes. And for the space of 3 hours, I had the whole catastrophe figured out

Smoke pours from a stack to the South. It's a coal plant or a nuclear cooling tower.  Earlier in the day, smoke poured from a burning van to the North.  A day punctuated by smoke.

I'm surrounded by big rigs hauling freight East on Highway 70. A day punctuated by trucks.

I'll be in St. Louis in an hour. A day punctuated by departure points.

Three days traveling no less than 8 hours per. A run punctuated by ticks on a calendar.

People keep asking where I played and with whom and when. A tour punctuated with question marks.

I've just booked Alaska in December. This will not be predictable. An album release punctuated by extremes. The first in the deep South. The last in the frozen far NorthWest.

I don't know. I don't remember where I played and with whom or when. My existence, these last months, is a dotted white line, punctuated by sound checks.

And stops at Subway. And Starbucks. And though I refuse to speak Starbucks Orwellian Italian hybrid, I still drink their stupid coffee.  It's predictable.  I need predictable on the road. A life punctuated by the familiar.

Alaska, in the winter, will not be familiar, but I can't think on that. I've got St. Louis tonight. And I'm lucky. I'm working. And tonight, I'll punctuate the weekend, back in my own bed, because I'll drive 4 hours through the night to do it.

Was it always like this, all this space between punctuations?

Answer #173 - Then We Saw the Flames

His leg, just brushing mine, is bouncing, in an episodic, rhythmic way. On this airline, there are no seat assignments. We were late. Dave's across the aisle, and both of us in middle seats, snuggled between strangers. One of my strangers is twitchy.

He's a college student, maybe. From Purdue, by his whoops and hollers when the stand-up comic flight attendant asks for fans to make themselves known. This airline offers energy drinks for $3. I'm hoping he doesn't opt for what would, I assume, be his second Monster for the day - the first having been consumed upon waking on the couch of the resort he must have stayed in, skiing with frat buddies here in Denver. He smells like a frat boy on ski weekend and is making up for the lost time by reading a text on the Civil War now, while his leg bounces and he chews on his pencil.

I'm reading Then We Saw the Flames, a collection of short stories by Daniel Hoyt, a literature professor I met while doing a show at Kansas State. He's brilliant. I'm unsettled by it, and spinning a little in the possibility of one mind opening another. I find inspiration in other minds more often than not. I wonder what this says about me, that I'm not consulting the raw firmament. Maybe I am, in some ridiculous and ineffable way. Or the firmament is too vast for me, maybe, so I troll for other minds to draw from - at least there's an implication of a far-reaching finite. I've seen all the rounded corners of my own fish-bowl brain, and, though I'm occasionally startled by an unfamiliar corridor, half the time something in it is trying to kill me.  Yes, it's best to wander other minds, I think.

They're handing out bright yellow packets of plane-shaped crackers. I like that plane-shaped crackers exist, though I won't eat them just now. I have a compulsion to hoard things that are given away, for free. I have a collection of hotel shampoos, lotions, and small soaps that is spilling off the shelves Dave has built for them. I don't want to use them, because they were free, and some of them are Aveda or even fruffier Euro brands of this or that. The collection is becoming a little unwieldy lately. Every once in a while I put a couple of the lower-end bottles in the upstairs shower to make room for new acquisitions from 4-star hotels. No one ever uses them. Similarly, I have a collection of plane snacks in a plastic tub in the cupboard. They could if they wanted, but no one ever eats them.

His elbow has crossed past the arm rest and into my personal space. This is egregious on a plane, but how do I explain this to monster drink-snorting bouncy college boy? I'm less charitable than I might be, because I just don't like him. I don't mean not to like him, but he hasn't bothered with eye-contact or acknowledgment of we, the other two Supremes, and thus, he's a poster child for everything that's wrong with the world. In my rock tumbler of a brain today, I can't help but see in him a young George Bush; smaller, silver-plated spoon, and energy drink instead of blow, but all of the hubris and none of the substance, and a sense of entitlement that allows him to extend his twitch into what little privacy I might have in this stranger sandwich.  Just here, I'm an Iraqi farmer. Just here, he is inviting he and his Monsanto buddies to the dinner my wife cooked me, and every dinner after. So you see, I have cause for disdain. It's not disproportionate.

Nice lady from Indianapolis to my right is delicately munching plane-shaped crackers and reading something by someone named Aaron Elkins - Where there's a Will.  I don't know him or his work, but she is very careful and she is very neat, and I think to myself there are probably body parts and messy crime scenes between those pages.  Just a hunch.

But me, just now, I'm feeling the grind and jitter and shackling of no escape. Just now, I'm in day 19, at least, of less than 5 hours of sleep on any given night. I'm tuned to the sub-woofers and sluggish frequencies of the weary, I'm swatting at flying crackers, and Daniel Hoyt is whispering in Latin. I spoke at Stanford this weekend, and I'm no lit. professor. I have no Beckett Compendium, I don't know why Lorca loved Dali so - I love Lorca and I don't particularly love Dali, and I have no language to tell you why.  But Daniel Hoyt could, as he whispers in Latin, and I'll ride the cadence of it through the air above the Great Plains, where he sits below, I imagine, munching red wine grapes and spitting out the seeds.

The mission overflows with false angels and the sting of broken teeth. Our missing parts yell at us. My molar aches from a distant landfill and the angels we never believed in tug at our sleeves, stare us down, and keep us on a trajectory we did not choose. I imagine voices from the clouds. They sing and beg me to join in on the chorus. - Daniel Hoyt

Answer #172 - Banished to eternal brimstone

It's October in New England.

Every other yard on the way in to nearly every borough and township sports a ghoulish display of bones and the Undead.

And not the silly, cartoonish inflatable ghosts and pumpkins -   these yards and porches are meant to scare trick-or-treaters.  To actually SCARE them.  This is not a holiday for the sheepish, after all, here in the land of the witch hunts.

Out of balance in the Western World.  We live out of balance.

Koyaanisqatsi, eh? where did the balance go?

We banaished all things dark or mysterious (or unknown, strange) to the land of the brimstone and eternal suffering, and by doing so, banished a part of ourselves to silence...

It's the silent part that speaks best on Halloween.. through the mask of a ghoul, a devil, a corpse, ghost, monster or other wild thing; the silent, wild part that speaks the anxious uncertainty of the animal kingdom that we Stewards have so long brutalized.  It speaks the silence of the last acre of land that still lies in true dark on a moonless night, and speaks in moans and howls with fangs and horns while wars are waged for shiny rocks to throw at glass houses.

I want to go home and make ghouls out of old clothes and dried corn stalks and animal bones.. and the antler and skull that showed up out of nowhere five years ago at the edge of the woods, in the biting, ragged grass -   bits of skin and fur still on it.  I want to put them everywhere, everywhere, everywhere in the world.  And howl.. maybe like Ginsberg, because he heard it out there, too.. in the quiet, at the edge of a dark wood

Maybe like my dog, who says everything while saying nothing at all, but who howls when he hears the coyote calls that I never will.

However it happens, I'm tired of the silence.  I want to wake up the wild part and look it in the teeth and then howl a ragged, bleached-bone lifetime at the sliver of a Halloween moon.

Five days from now I'll cut the first dried stalks and dig up the bones the dog buries behind the barn...

Howl.

Answer #171 - Fried Pies and Serial Killers

As seen from The Road:

As we pass the Fried Pies, Exit 51 sign on Hwy 35S in Oklahoma, a black leather-clad cowboy is hitch-hiking.  He is striking in the vest that shines and the hat tilted just so.  He's a hitch-hiker.  It's incongruous.  I think maybe he's out of gas - a shiny black Cadillac on the highway somewhere north of our entry, bone dry and oxidizing minute-by-minute in the punishing Oklahoma sun.

I think maybe he's a serial killer.  On the off-chance that he's a serial killer, I won't stop.  Though I entertain the morbid notion that a narrow escape from the clutches of a cowboy serial killer would make a great story, and maybe then a song.  But even I'm not reckless or foolhardy enough to risk it.

So I drive on.

This is in contrast to the last side-of-the-road oddity I saw in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  On the way to the Porcupine Mountains Music Fest, a pair of boots - standing upright in the graveled shoulder of the road.  No one around.  Just the boots.

What is that?  I ask the passengers, as I rubber-neck while we drive by.

I'm awe-struck.  Who leaves their boots?  Who walks away and why?

Is this some sort of art installation?  That Christo person, maybe?  Will there be standing boots now every few feet along this road?    A friend once proposed picking up pianos from people who were giving them away and placing them randomly in wooded areas.. just so people could stumble upon them.  And maybe play them.  And maybe wake up a bit from the hypnotic routine that is civilization.

Is it like that?

About a mile up - we see him.  Stocking-footed and walking in the gravel.  He looks dejected.  He has a backpack.  He has a hunter's cap with ear flaps.

That's him, right?  Should we stop?  Do you think he's okay?

Do we really want to stop for someone who has walked out of his boots for no apparent reason?, asks the scientist bass player.

Hell yes, I think.  But I don't say anything.

I suppose he could be a serial killer.  And yet.. what a story that'd make, huh?
What a story...

Answer #170 - Car Talk

What's more fun than Rush Limbaugh?

In a car with friends Tim Grimm, Scott Russell Sanders & Ruth Sanders, The 'car talk' is an education.

In three short hours we've broached:

1) Tribal legacy and the genetic advantages of offering your daughters for overnight excursions with visiting hunter-types

2) The devastating loss of top soil on the Earth, what this will mean to future generations if we don't stop the Agri-Borg, and how this 'loss of top soil' can equate to what Clear Channel has managed to do to the whole of music in the U.S.

3) The legend that the Welsh may have been in North America centuries before any other European culture, and the possibility that, along with their cultural artifacts & blue-eyed genes, they brought the Baby Jesus who ran into Joseph Smith along the way at
a ski resort in Utah.


4) The contribution of the internet / technology to the over-use of mind-altering chemicals in the human population. Tim's contention that the Human animal is not wired for constant awareness of the deaths per second that are occurring on a constant and unrelenting basis.  I, agree. However, I feel compelled to both blog the conversation and consult the GPS (which we've dubbed 'The Oracle') whenever determining the next turn on the road of my life.


Tim and Scott consider me now part of the larger problem. Though Rush Limbaugh is a bigger, fatter part of the problem.

Miles to go until Cobden, Illinois... we've just passed a sign that says 'Final Phase Next Exit.'

Ruth says, 'Let's not exit.  I'm not quite ready.'

Me neither.

Answer #169 - Digging into the loam

I'll be in Salina Kansas this weekend, at the Prairie Festival, sponsored by Wes Jackson's Land Institute.
 
Humbled by the work they're doing.  Trying to save the world and all.

Perennial polycultural is the method of sustainable agriculture Jackson's developed, by studying the prairie for the past 30 years or so.
                
Life Magazine called him one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century.

In celebration of its 35th anniversary, Smithsonian counted him as one of 35 people who have made a difference. 

Humbled.

My job? To write him a song. And sing it to him.  So I've written it... will bring it to my friend Malcolm Dalglish, and we'll snap it together - maybe duet it - like Sonny & Cher, or probably more like Carole King and Neil Sedaka...Or the Bergmans... nah... knowing us, it'll be Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers...

Anyway...
Humbled.
We'll play for and honor both Wendell Berry and Scott Russell Sanders as well.

Further humbled.  Because cleverness as achievement is hubris... while these men stand up, determine the direction of the wind, and offer shelter by way of solution.  No cleverness.  No bravado.  No hubris.
 
We walk in with our songs and stories, and we, all of us, leave - returning to our 'expanded tribe' with the hope of ideas of great minds to carry us forth into the uncertain future. 

"The binge is almost over," Jackson says.  "It's time to go home."

Humbled.

And immensely grateful for the existence of people like these.