21 Days/ Day 9

I’ve been lost before. I’ve been deep in redwoods, gawking, awestruck, and gotten completely turned around. Took me hours to get out. I’ve been hopelessly confused in Springfield, Missouri, in Montreal, and in my own Hill Country.

One time, in Copenhagen, no kidding — well, I still don’t know how I found my way back to the venue.

You see things, when you get lost. People that stay only on the map, that always bring a compass, that remain positioned via satelite see less, but feel they know more.

And maybe they do.  It’s hard to argue with their logic, isn’t it. I see them, jogging with their carefully planned babies, conceived at just the perfect moment in their careers, tucked in humvee strollers, inexorably running towards some mansion, as sharp and clear to them as it is blurry to me.

Thus tragedy is reduced to any variation from the template, and the absurd rot and oblivion that awaits them as surely as it does you or me are simply to be denied until that very last moment, when, god willing, smacked into a pharma trance, they’ll even miss that one last chance to wander, lost, in those dark woods.

I’ve wandered all these years, looking at people inside the warm glow of their homes, enveloped in illusions as powerful as mine, but more reassuring, more comforting.

I don’t think we get to choose whether we’re the lost ones or not. If we did, would we not choose order over chaos? Certainty over doubt?

Love over knowledge?

I remember the choice as a child, offered me over and over again. I tried to grasp the ring, so bright, so shiny, and let it lift me out of the wilderness, but for all the love and comfort it presented,  I never could bring myself to reach for it

And so I live my life — getting lost, finding my way to some unexpected place, over and over again, and I understand, now, finally: that is who I am, and that is who I’ll always be, until that day when I am simply unable to find my way out.

21 Days/ Day 5

GREAT MOMENTS IN ALCOHOL

I told you about a band I was in in the 80’s for a good while by way of remembering Bo Diddley — in a later incarnation, that same band had grown to 6 pieces, and begun to take on an entirely different aspect. Funkier,  stranger, steering a careful course towards the waterfall and the sharp rocks below.

One Tuesday night, in Tucson, we’d played a killer set before a small but appreciative crowd, and the novice club owner had actually paid us 5oo bucks or something. We were rich.

This particular band almost exclusively toured out west, and we almost exclusively camped out after shows. Weeks went by in that band without seeing a hotel room. It’s hard to express what freaks we really were. These days I see a few “green” bands touring around, and I wonder…

…anyway, we’d experienced a payday, and feeling flush, checked into some low-rent motel by the freeway.

I guess we all drank a little. We were into other things. But one of us drank a lot.

William  Blake was a full-on alcoholic. His maintenence dose would leave him pretty placid, but you could count on it: a few nights on every tour we were going to endure some truly crazy fucking shit. Motherfucker was directly responsible for my beloved Fender getting ripped off, for example — one night, right here in Austin, he so pissed off about 75 drunken fratfucks that I believe to this day I saved him from at least serious harm by hustling him and his guitar shit away from a gig, tout motherfucking suite.

When I came back to get my bass, it was gone. So yeah, it was my fault.

BUT IT WAS HIS FUCKING FAULT, TOO

Sorry.

Anyway, that night in Tuscon, he’d achieved his dose pretty early, and answering whatever demons were calling him that night, he just kept on. We were so…  organic… tribal, even, by then, that we literally communicated with hand signals, and the band organism detected individual failure, and we hustled right outta there.

And ahhhh – into luxurious Days Inn comfort.

All six of us, in one room. It sounds oppressive, maybe, but we’re talking refrigerated air and a shower.

Just sitting here thinking about it, I am amazed. What can I say? — the pull of the music was strong.

So Blake was completely drunk. He was one of those kinda funny, sharp but not mean drunks, uh, Churchill, not Bukowski, if you get my drift. By the time we got checked and snuck in, he was just as pliant as a rag doll (and as capable of caring for himself), so by drunken default he got one of the beds. I don’t remember who got the other bed — we all were so used to rolling out our bags that it really didn’t matter —  but before long, by maybe 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, we were all asleep. We had to get up  soon, and drive  some impossibly long ways.

Sometime later — it was still dark — I woke up to a blood-curdling shriek. We couldn’t find a light, and in the heavy-curtained motel darkness we could hear a counterpoint of animal growling and confused muttering. Finally one of us found the light switch, and there was  William Blake, dick in hand, standing over Yorgi, who was zipped up in his sleeping bag, still wearing a sleep mask  and earplugs as was his wont, unable , in his rage, to escape his confines and rip drunken Blake’s throat out.

For Blake had gotten up in the middle of the night, probably staggered the route to his bathroom at home in Austin, and relieved himself of a couple of six packs of beer.

All over Yorgi in his sleeping bag.

(I just got home from a bike ride. On my way across an airport tarmac in 100 degree heat, I was experiencing a pretty strong feeling for beer, and for the first time since I started these 21 days I experienced something very like a jonesin. Not a gee that would be tasty thing, more like a taste, smell, feel thing. I was glad to feel it, happy to dig in, push hard on my bike, feel the texture of the Texas heat envelope me, and ride it out.)

21 days/ Day 2

Sure enough, no sleep last night – I went to bed at midnight, clonk, asleep, but then I woke up at 1:30. I tried counting backwards from a hundred, then a thousand, deep breathing, Richard’s opening monologue… finally I turned on the light and started reading. By the time the sky started moving into that indigo shade, I was almost through with this biography of FDR I’ve been unenthusiastically reading for awhile now. Now I wish I’d gotten up and started playing or writing — but it seems likely I’ll have more chances as I move through these 21 days.

Earlier, I was practicing, first guitar, then the visiting upright bass, then an hour of scales on the piano, finally to El Siete, and on little breaks I’d go into the kitchen for a bite, or a glass of tea or whatever, and I’d feel this lift in my step, I could feel my body sort of happily anticipating hop love.

We’re habituated, body and me.

My tendency to habituation has often been useful – as a kid doing martial arts, as a musician trying to keep growing and learning, as a person trying to transform himself into a writer, my loopiness gives me a certain capacity for getting through the hard parts to the rewards. As a child this was something a little… quirky about me. As an adult, it both lets me accomplish huge tasks and  oppresses the shit out of me.

So I told body, sorry body, no ale for you – and body said, eh, whatever…

…but you ain’t gonna get any sleep.

extra hours

6 2 * Schoenberg always complained that his American pupils didn’t do enough work. There was one girl in the class in particular who, it is true, did almost no work at all. He asked her one day why she didn’t accomplish more. She said, “I don’t have any time.” He said, “How many hours are there in the day?” She said, “Twenty-four.” He said, “Nonsense: there are as many hours in a day as you put into it.”

John Cage — Indeterminacy

Turns out you can add hours of sleep to whatever limited-ass sleep-deprived regime you might have decided to try and subsist on because perhaps you’ve decided you can, oh, I dunno, master guitar, piano, keep on bassin’, get a little drumming technique, write, work, immerse yourself in politics, and occasionally talk to other humans (you probably don’t do that much; you probably should). And be in several bands. And have a job or two or three. Oh, and walk your dog.

I don’t know what kind of psychopath would take all that on, but if I did, I’d be happy to tell him what I learned, exhausted, last night: you can emerge into semi-consciousness, peer at the clock, will it backwards to an earlier time, and go back to sleep. This incredibly valuable technique (oh, I wish I’d discovered it sooner!) allowed me something like 20 hours of sleep in the narrow-ass 4 hour window I allotted myself… once I figured this out, I kept working the clock backwards, and this morning, at 5:15, I arose, refreshed, recuperated, and rejuvenated.

Beware

Beware the terrible simplifiers.

- Jacob Burckhardt

Truth

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.

– Oscar Wilde