Dumb Nostalgia

traveling sideways

2009-11-15T10:39:00.000-08:00

Thanks to some amazing folks, some amazing times, and a pretty incredible new house, I'll be moving down to LA at the end of the month. I'll be adopting, borrowing or kidnapping a dog, stretching out under an orange tree and receiving visitors and well-wishers bearing house warming gifts of gold and silver, or more likely booze and food. Until then it'll be cardboard city in the old apartment and back to some u haul-racing, good-time moving madness.
Sit. Stay.

days at rocky creek

2009-11-15T10:23:00.000-08:00

I feel good now, on my first night in the cabin. I had a sickly sad feeling of uncertainty wash over me on the long drive down the rocky dirt road tonight, but now, here I feel alright. There was the idea of putting all this off, of working here during the day, of whipping this old cabin into living shape, slaving in the sun, cleaning, bleaching, killing mice, and then shutting it up and driving the long way back into Monterrey to wash my clothes, take a hot shower and sleep in a soft bed. Now, it seems, I've stuck my foot into the bear trap, and I'm here, if only for the night, for good. I'm into a mug of dirty bourbon and these cigars that my grandfather used to smoke make the night seem less lonely. I'm feeling a little wild and alone, but generally alright for once in what seems like a very long time. I've taken several steps back from rock shows and crowds and airports and buses, and now all I can hear in a low hum of tinnitus and the paced rush of the creek below. I can make out the faint splashing of animals down for a drink. Dead leaves falling on the porch still make me jump a little, and I'll bet that those four-legged demon bastards will run this place ragged tonight. I'll lay out more snap traps and ammonia in the morning, and hopefully crush a few tiny faces in a mighty spring. The nights, I think, will be the hardest here. Once the sun goes down, and without the measured distractions that electricity can offer I'm alone with my thoughts. Words like purpose and direction mean very little in the woods here. I plan on hiking my days away, and seeing what I can of this amazing place on foot. I'll wear myself out so that sleep comes easy. Hopefully I'll write like I write now with a hand detached from a head, moving along on its own. Here's to solitude. Here's to turning 30 with no place in the world. Here's to Big Sur.

-from sometime in early October.....

Sur

2009-11-07T21:41:00.000-08:00

Often, when following the trail which meanders over the hills, I pull myself up in an effort to encompass the glory and the grandeur which envelops the whole horizon. Often, when the clouds pile up in the north and the sea is churned with white caps, I say to myself: 'This is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked out on from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look.'

-Henry Miller
Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

days long gone and forgotten

2009-11-02T11:13:00.001-08:00

I feel like I'm sunk in the summer doldrums here today. The weather has finally gone warm and clear in San Francisco, but my skin feels both hot and cold here. It is a weird between seasons, between phases time. Everything seems muted in this big city, and even old songs seem to have lost their meaning to me. The birds outside my window have gone from vibrant to unfamiliar and vaguely threatening. My time here is brief. A new home beckons, wherever it may be.
The other day I went to a friend's Halloween wedding dressed as a slim, bubba ho-tep Elvis with a pompadour that struck out a good half foot from the front of my face, and a pair of gold, wrap-around sunglasses that brought me to the verge of vomiting after wearing them for a few hours. This all was a coup in a life lived lately of stringent international deadlines and heady, red-eye travel. I've missed so many important dates, weddings, funerals, births and deaths that I'm amazed folks still keep in touch with me, and consider me a friend. I've been gone and separate from that world for several months now, and it feels pretty ok. I guess I'm not really sure how to get back into this thing here. All of this dirty interneting. All of this airing of my digital laundry. A few months back I had decided that if I continued my current pace, and careless lifestyle, that I would be a rather unhappy guy. I decided, with my 30th birthday rapidly approaching, that I would quit my job, move out of my apartment and find somewhere obscure, remote and wild to live for a few months, and maybe set myself right. I had, on a lead from a friend in Portland, investigated the Oregon Forestry Service's disused fire watch towers that they occasionally rent out to those pure of heart, but determined that while wild and remote, a fire watch tower might not suit my less than responsible with fire, less than law-abiding needs at the time. I settled on Big Sur as a place to escape. It just seems to be what you do here. I packed up a box with some canned food, a coleman stove, some books, a radio and some warm clothes, and lamped out to an old cabin with no electricity or plumbing, no pipes or wires. It was a tangle and fight for most of it, but I came out alright, and am feeling like a new man. I'm hoping, in the next few days, to piece together most of a journal that I kept with some pictures and post them here. Thank you for your concern, but I am quite well, and no, there are no bears in the mountains.

behind the wall of sleep

2009-10-07T11:19:00.000-07:00

and this tide is coming in

2009-09-14T23:41:00.001-07:00

It's all been a bit strange, so I'm off to the woods for a while. Maybe Big Sur will ease my troubled mind, soothe my weary bones, and let me slip comfortably into my 30th year. Until then....

later

2009-09-09T18:10:00.000-07:00

where are you now?

2009-09-08T22:49:00.000-07:00

i was always fond of you

2009-09-08T14:48:00.000-07:00

that right ain't shit

2009-09-07T23:33:00.001-07:00

Seriously though, in the last 2 weeks I have quit a job, had a car break down, sold said car, bought a new car, had a computer give up the ghost, had it resuscitated, found a place to disappear to for a while, and now I think that I might just sit down for a few days because everything hurts.

I will sleep right through you

2009-08-27T12:16:00.001-07:00

Once again.

Let's go get lost

2009-08-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

The Lost Coast, where the 1 and 101 highways pull away from the California coast is where some of the world's best camping is hidden away. Between rolling pot fields stashed beneath giant redwoods, and connected by near-impassable fire roads it's a rather clandestine spot tucked away in the northwest. We spent a few days searching around for the quiet spot,and after a rather harrowing experience nearly tipping the old camper van into a ravine and dragging it through the mud along a jeep trail we were rewarded by this sunset. We were also rewarded by a park ranger's hearty laughter when we told him where we had just tried to navigate the old vanagon. Laugh it up Smokey.

The place we found was pretty out there. Wild Elk roamed freely through out campsite, and there was, later on, plenty of local flavor as some locals made their way to the beach to tear ass out of the pristine dunes on their four wheelers, and light fireworks off to the pulsing beat of what could only be described as some combination of the soundtrack from 'A Clockwork Orange' and that last Shellac record. Weirdness abound. I prefer the Elk, though they could have gutted me like a fish in a second if they had chosen to.

Look at how happy he is.

We ended up leaving the locals be and settled for a grove of Eucalyptus trees,

A long-dormant harbor,

A desolate, black sand beach.

And a little bit of peace and quiet just up the road.

We spent a few nights nestled next to the comfort that the nearest person was several miles away. It was quiet, and bar a few bastard raccoons and an owl or two, remarkably serene.The fog rolled in quickly the next day though, and left us in the cold.

We headed inland the next day and swam in the river just for a bit of balance. It was an excellent, and restorative trip all around. Tomorrow I fly to Belfast with the smell of campfire on my clothes, and a clear vision of the wild in my my head. Hopefully it won't be my undoing. One more week of this, and then it's the end. See you there.

Campfire Blues

2009-08-22T00:47:00.000-07:00

It's been a rather spectacular dereliction of duties over here. I've been off stumbling through the woods of Northern California and Oregon for the past two weeks, and before that I clawed through the misery of a job that I should have let go and walked away from a long time ago, and a hundred other things that I've let get me down for a hundred reasons that don't seem so important right now. I'm having a cloudy moment of clarity. A momentary sense of reason. I'll offer these few things as a means of a possible explanation. My sister and I drove up to Portland a few weeks ago. It was our first trip together as near-adults, and the most amount of time that we had spent together in years. It was an awesome union. We saw some Mexican wrestling, had Japanese barbecue, and I reveled in the fact that she has four webbed toes, and a gold tooth lodged into the same spot where I have one.

We camped a few nights beneath the massive California Redwoods. A shelter from the storm, of sorts.

We cooked all kinds of fantastic crap on a campfire. That's actually a secret family recipe right there involving macaroni and cheese with baked beans. Actually those are the only two ingredients and it's not much of a secret, but it's a hell of a dinner when you find yourself in the woods.

Then we drove through a tree, because you can (and because it's called a drive-through tree), and it's what's expected of you when you're in the land of big trees and backwoods opportunism. We made it up to Eugene for a few hours, and then up to Portland where I tooled around town for a bit. Jamie had just come off of a tour, and we spent a few days getting the camper together for a drive back down to SF. He ended up with enough complimentary food and booze from the tour caterers to choke a rhino. Magic. We did some minor repairs (like fixing the headlights) jumped into the camper van, and headed to the coast.

It's hard not to love a VW camper, packed until it pukes with High Life and cookies.

We camped out at Cape Lookout for a night. I jumped into the ocean, and dried out in time to watch the sun burn itself out in the Pacific.

I stayed up most of the night staring at the stars, and watching the remnants of the Perseid meteor shower.

And then we headed South to evade the law in Arcata, and get lost on The Lost Coast.

Days Measured in Doses

2009-08-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

Sturm und Drang

2009-08-03T16:05:00.000-07:00

Where you're at is where you are...

2009-07-27T19:36:00.000-07:00

500 miles of elbow room

2009-07-21T15:55:00.001-07:00

I'm back home after a rather disastrous Canadian vacation that I'm not fully prepared to discuss yet.

fleeting

2009-07-16T18:50:00.000-07:00

Everything was easy, everything was good

2009-07-13T13:28:00.000-07:00

dirty rainbows

2009-07-13T11:43:00.001-07:00

Dublin flashed me a little rainbow before I flew home yesterday. I guess it hated to see me go.

Current Membership

2009-07-09T04:55:00.001-07:00

Euro mouth

2009-07-09T04:08:00.000-07:00

I've got a wicked bad case of Euro mouth today. That's when, after spending the best part of two weeks in the company of folks who understand every third word out of your mouth, you spew vulgarity so freely that it would make ODB blush. As is often the case, I roll into a country (like Scotland, for example) where people understand me quite clearly, and it takes serious restraint to control myself. Either that or I get knifed in Starbucks for saying 'can I get an espresso, or are you going to be a dick about it?' All's fair in love and festival season though. In Switzerland our bus was parked directly next to an active sewage treatment plant for 14 straight hours. Really?

I suppose it could have been (slightly) worse.

Wait, what? The Swiss are devastated.

At this open-air freak fest in St. Gallen the organizers decided that rather than simply feed traveling bands and crews a few solid meals in a cafeteria-style catering setup, that it would be a gas to print up tickets bearing varying denominations of Swiss Francs, and issue an arbitrary number to each person, so that everyone has to do the impossible math of ordering chicken fingers from a Swiss waitress while counting little pieces of paper. All rather frustrating until a few of us stumble upon a stash of tickets at the end of the night, and the catering staff, rather begrudgingly, fork over three bottles of champagne and two bottles of top shelf wine because we had roughly $17,000 in fake currency. Take that.

Dear god, make me a bird so I can fly far, far away from here.

The few winners of the festival season so far. Mogwai, Grace Jones (who is solidly out of her mind, but it's an amazing show in spite of/because of it)....

...and Nick Cave (who has an ever-evolving case of Euro mouth, evidenced by the off kilter remarks about his own genitalia made to a Belgian audience).

And then some of it has just gone sideways.

In other news I won the last round of 'wallet chain buckeroo' the other day with a soup ladle trump card.

Yesterday our merch guy, Zeke, told me that the British once hung a chimpanzee in a public square because they thought it was a french man. How's that for European cultural relations? Also, don't ever drink with anyone named Zeke in Prague. Several of us got laid out by what was only described later as 'the green ferret.' Sort of like the green fairy, but a bit nastier, and with more fur. The following day was pretty unpleasant, as our bus driver can attest. He was cursing as he vacuumed up broken glass and glitter from the carpet in the back lounge. That said, it is always best to ease yourself into Germany with a screaming headache and a short temper. Send it on.

Days Measured in Doses

2009-07-06T12:39:00.000-07:00

Home in one week.

Great British Cooking

2009-07-06T12:34:00.000-07:00

There is absolutely no such thing. May I state the following examples of gastronomic torment:

Danger of Collapse

2009-07-06T12:00:00.001-07:00