Gone from here

For the next week I will be in Arkansas, land of limited internet access. You can find my progress updated frequently on my mob. I'll try to update the blog official once in Arkansas but I won't be back in gear until the 14th. If you want to e-mail me I'd suggest my phone-checkable e-mail: rockselaborate@yahoo.com. Until then, Peace.

When doing means not trying.

Through the window of the bus, it is all clean blue sky and very small birds. From the highest point in my neighborhood, I can follow the small birds in flight. The celebrated simple life was never this simple inside my skull. But what do I do when I am not a watcher of birds, a night runner, a passenger on the bus, a sober bar time driver, or an overfed furniture store clerk? I don't try. Inside my skull I am never any of these things in large part: they are the clapboard house, anchored on the Lee Shore, surrendering to the sky and sea of an Edward Hopper afternoon. They are me, but not very me. But now is different.

Sometime shortly after the floor gave out under the weight of my own personal anchor I moved home. It was financial, it was the easiest thing to do, and it was apart from everything that had begun to press upon me. There is no sense in trying to pretend that this is not, in some small part, a story about my long-since given up ghost. In terms already discussed, she is the clapboard house and I am the blue sea and sky.

In the larger picture moving home was an excuse. It was for Chris and it was for me too. But for me it was a pathetic one. Not because we are supposed to swear off the homestead once we start having sex and smoking but because I was doing it as an excuse to stop being me dealing with my problems. At home I was reinvented as a robot, I became the child of soulless labor and gluttonous rest. I was a battery refreshed periodically by the occurrence of social lightning: the Junker's, a visit from a far-flung friend, a kiss, or a handshake and a beer.

My new life as a battery wasn't so bad. In fact, for many weeks it seemed that the thunderstorms might never cease. It was all flash and glamour and sugary energy shaking my teeth. It was Chicago, Milwaukee, and Madison like The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost and being home was a church. A church of beer and stolen cigarettes, but a church nonetheless. And then the skies cleared and the car battery began to fail. The driver's door broke and the passenger's door served as entry for both pilot and co-pilot. Most everyone left in a huff and I began to see myself as a person with the person drained out of him. Inside my skull was an echo chamber of serious debate: stay or go, stay working or go hungry, stay awake or go to bed. I was Joe Strummer and deciding to break up just happened to come to me in song that was playing on the radio. But I stayed and they went. And after they had been gone for a while I still stayed. I have spent more time than I can count in this bedroom and I think that needs changing.

Change should never have to look like Arkansas but sometimes it just might. I'm not leaving for Arkansas to live there forever nor am I seriously considering doing so but it can be a risky proposition to bet against what I am not seriously considering doing; I might just do it by accident. Fuck have I done a lot of stupid things in 24 years; many of them I've done by accident, neglect, or inaction. I've made a lot of semi-corrections and done a good deal of sorting out after making so many accidental decisions, but not since moving home. At home everything is cause without effect. In my skull I am seeing causes but not effects and I keep thinking: At least when I was spitting into the wind I knew that something was there. So it's time to hunt up some wind.

This means some things are going to get broken and that some old broken things will need repairing. But that's moving for you: you break a candy dish but you discover the phone number of an old girlfriend you thought you'd lost. Checks and balances are not cause and effect but sometimes karma is like fate and sometimes you might not care which is which just so long as you are looking at a new room or city. I think tonight I begin the search in earnest for one or the other.

Until then, I'm two days from a vacation. And what does life look like two days removed from a vacation? Nice. Like an Edward Hopper painting.

STOP IT NOW

Seriously, stop it.